The Arrow Of Gold E-Book

Joseph Conrad

• Herausgeber: Greenbooks editore
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

The Arrow of Gold: A Story Between Two Notes. Reflecting Conrad's genius for narrative that focuses on the quest for inner truths, The Arrow of Gold is an exploration of the dangerous appetites of men and of human vulnerability, as well as a profound meditation on the emotional boundary between people.

Leseprobe

Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad

THE ARROW OF GOLD

ISBN 979-12-5971-666-8

Greenbooks editore

Digital edition

May 2021

www.greenbooks-editore.com

ISBN: 979-12-5971-666-8

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Index

I

II

I

PART ONE

CHAPTER I

Certain streets have an atmosphere of their own, a sort of universal fame and the particular affection of their citizens. One of such streets is the Cannebière, and the jest: “If Paris had a Cannebière it would be a little Marseilles” is the jocular expression of municipal pride. I, too, I have been under the spell. For me it has been a street leading into the unknown.

There was a part of it where one could see as many as five big cafés in a resplendent row. That evening I strolled into one of them. It was by no means full. It looked deserted, in fact, festal and overlighted, but cheerful. The wonderful street was distinctly cold (it was an evening of carnival), I was very idle, and I was feeling a little lonely. So I went in and sat down.

The carnival time was drawing to an end. Everybody, high and low, was anxious to have the last fling. Companies of masks with linked arms and whooping like red Indians swept the streets in crazy rushes while gusts of cold mistral swayed the gas lights as far as the eye could reach. There was a touch of bedlam in all this.

Perhaps it was that which made me feel lonely, since I was neither masked, nor disguised, nor yelling, nor in any other way in harmony with the bedlam element of life. But I was not sad. I was merely in a state of sobriety. I had just returned from my second West Indies voyage. My eyes were still full of tropical splendour, my memory of my experiences, lawful and lawless, which had their charm and their thrill; for they had startled me a little and had amused me considerably.

But they had left me untouched. Indeed they were other men’s adventures, not mine. Except for a little habit of responsibility which I had acquired they had not matured me. I was as young as before. Inconceivably young—still beautifully unthinking—infinitely receptive.

You may believe that I was not thinking of Don Carlos and his fight for a kingdom. Why should I? You don’t want to think of things which you meet every day in the newspapers and in conversation. I had paid some calls since my return and most of my acquaintance were legitimists and intensely interested in the events of the frontier of Spain, for political, religious, or romantic reasons.

But I was not interested. Apparently I was not romantic enough. Or was it that I was even more romantic than all those good people? The affair seemed to me

commonplace. That man was attending to his business of a Pretender.

On the front page of the illustrated paper I saw lying on a table near me, he looked picturesque enough, seated on a boulder, a big strong man with a square- cut beard, his hands resting on the hilt of a cavalry sabre—and all around him a landscape of savage mountains. He caught my eye on that spiritedly composed woodcut. (There were no inane snapshot-reproductions in those days.) It was the obvious romance for the use of royalists but it arrested my attention.

Just then some masks from outside invaded the café, dancing hand in hand in a single file led by a burly man with a cardboard nose. He gambolled in wildly and behind him twenty others perhaps, mostly Pierrots and Pierrettes holding each other by the hand and winding in and out between the chairs and tables: eyes shining in the holes of cardboard faces, breasts panting; but all preserving a mysterious silence.

They were people of the poorer sort (white calico with red spots, costumes), but amongst them there was a girl in a black dress sewn over with gold half moons, very high in the neck and very short in the skirt. Most of the ordinary clients of the café didn’t even look up from their games or papers. I, being alone and idle, stared abstractedly. The girl costumed as Night wore a small black velvet mask, what is called in French a “loup.” What made her daintiness join that obviously rough lot I can’t imagine. Her uncovered mouth and chin suggested refined prettiness.

They filed past my table; the Night noticed perhaps my fixed gaze and throwing her body forward out of the wriggling chain shot out at me a slender tongue like a pink dart. I was not prepared for this, not even to the extent of an appreciative “Très foli,” before she wriggled and hopped away. But having been thus distinguished I could do no less than follow her with my eyes to the door where the chain of hands being broken all the masks were trying to get out at once.

Two gentlemen coming in out of the street stood arrested in the crush. The Night (it must have been her idiosyncrasy) put her tongue out at them, too. The taller of the two (he was in evening clothes under a light wide-open overcoat) with great presence of mind chucked her under the chin, giving me the view at the same time of a flash of white teeth in his dark, lean face. The other man was very different; fair, with smooth, ruddy cheeks and burly shoulders. He was wearing a grey suit, obviously bought ready-made, for it seemed too tight for his powerful frame.

That man was not altogether a stranger to me. For the last week or so I had been rather on the look-out for him in all the public places where in a provincial town men may expect to meet each other. I saw him for the first time (wearing that

same grey ready-made suit) in a legitimist drawing-room where, clearly, he was an object of interest, especially to the women. I had caught his name as Monsieur Mills. The lady who had introduced me took the earliest opportunity to murmur into my ear: “A relation of Lord X.” (Un proche parent de Lord X.) And then she added, casting up her eyes: “A good friend of the King.” Meaning Don Carlos of course.

I looked at the proche parent; not on account of the parentage but marvelling at his air of ease in that cumbrous body and in such tight clothes, too. But presently the same lady informed me further: “He has come here amongst us un naufragé.”

I became then really interested. I had never seen a shipwrecked person before. All the boyishness in me was aroused. I considered a shipwreck as an unavoidable event sooner or later in my future.

Meantime the man thus distinguished in my eyes glanced quietly about and never spoke unless addressed directly by one of the ladies present. There were more than a dozen people in that drawing-room, mostly women eating fine pastry and talking passionately. It might have been a Carlist committee meeting of a particularly fatuous character. Even my youth and inexperience were aware of that. And I was by a long way the youngest person in the room. That quiet Monsieur Mills intimidated me a little by his age (I suppose he was thirty-five), his massive tranquillity, his clear, watchful eyes. But the temptation was too great— and I addressed him impulsively on the subject of that shipwreck.

He turned his big fair face towards me with surprise in his keen glance, which (as though he had seen through me in an instant and found nothing objectionable) changed subtly into friendliness. On the matter of the shipwreck he did not say much. He only told me that it had not occurred in the Mediterranean, but on the other side of Southern France—in the Bay of Biscay. “But this is hardly the place to enter on a story of that kind,” he observed, looking round at the room with a faint smile as attractive as the rest of his rustic but well-bred personality.

I expressed my regret. I should have liked to hear all about it. To this he said that it was not a secret and that perhaps next time we met. . .

“But where can we meet?” I cried. “I don’t come often to this house, you know.”

“Where? Why on the Cannebière to be sure. Everybody meets everybody else at least once a day on the pavement opposite the Bourse.”

This was absolutely true. But though I looked for him on each succeeding day he

was nowhere to be seen at the usual times. The companions of my idle hours (and all my hours were idle just then) noticed my preoccupation and chaffed me about it in a rather obvious way. They wanted to know whether she, whom I expected to see, was dark or fair; whether that fascination which kept me on tenterhooks of expectation was one of my aristocrats or one of my marine beauties: for they knew I had a footing in both these—shall we say circles? As to themselves they were the bohemian circle, not very wide—half a dozen of us led by a sculptor whom we called Prax for short. My own nick-name was “Young Ulysses.”

I liked it.

But chaff or no chaff they would have been surprised to see me leave them for the burly and sympathetic Mills. I was ready to drop any easy company of equals to approach that interesting man with every mental deference. It was not precisely because of that shipwreck. He attracted and interested me the more because he was not to be seen. The fear that he might have departed suddenly for England— (or for Spain)—caused me a sort of ridiculous depression as though I had missed a unique opportunity. And it was a joyful reaction which emboldened me to signal to him with a raised arm across that café.

I was abashed immediately afterwards, when I saw him advance towards my table with his friend. The latter was eminently elegant. He was exactly like one of those figures one can see of a fine May evening in the neighbourhood of the Opera-house in Paris. Very Parisian indeed. And yet he struck me as not so perfectly French as he ought to have been, as if one’s nationality were an accomplishment with varying degrees of excellence. As to Mills, he was perfectly insular. There could be no doubt about him. They were both smiling faintly at me. The burly Mills attended to the introduction: “Captain Blunt.”

We shook hands. The name didn’t tell me much. What surprised me was that Mills should have remembered mine so well. I don’t want to boast of my modesty but it seemed to me that two or three days was more than enough for a man like Mills to forget my very existence. As to the Captain, I was struck on closer view by the perfect correctness of his personality. Clothes, slight figure, clear-cut, thin, sun-tanned face, pose, all this was so good that it was saved from the danger of banality only by the mobile black eyes of a keenness that one doesn’t meet every day in the south of France and still less in Italy. Another thing was that, viewed as an officer in mufti, he did not look sufficiently professional. That imperfection was interesting, too.

You may think that I am subtilizing my impressions on purpose, but you may take it from a man who has lived a rough, a very rough life, that it is the

subtleties of personalities, and contacts, and events, that count for interest and memory—and pretty well nothing else. This—you see—is the last evening of that part of my life in which I did not know that woman. These are like the last hours of a previous existence. It isn’t my fault that they are associated with nothing better at the decisive moment than the banal splendours of a gilded café and the bedlamite yells of carnival in the street.

We three, however (almost complete strangers to each other), had assumed attitudes of serious amiability round our table. A waiter approached for orders and it was then, in relation to my order for coffee, that the absolutely first thing I learned of Captain Blunt was the fact that he was a sufferer from insomnia. In his immovable way Mills began charging his pipe. I felt extremely embarrassed all at once, but became positively annoyed when I saw our Prax enter the café in a sort of mediaeval costume very much like what Faust wears in the third act. I have no doubt it was meant for a purely operatic Faust. A light mantle floated from his shoulders. He strode theatrically up to our table and addressing me as “Young Ulysses” proposed I should go outside on the fields of asphalt and help him gather a few marguerites to decorate a truly infernal supper which was being organized across the road at the Maison Dorée—upstairs. With expostulatory shakes of the head and indignant glances I called his attention to the fact that I was not alone. He stepped back a pace as if astonished by the discovery, took off his plumed velvet toque with a low obeisance so that the feathers swept the floor, and swaggered off the stage with his left hand resting on the hilt of the property dagger at his belt.

Meantime the well-connected but rustic Mills had been busy lighting his briar and the distinguished Captain sat smiling to himself. I was horribly vexed and apologized for that intrusion, saying that the fellow was a future great sculptor and perfectly harmless; but he had been swallowing lots of night air which had got into his head apparently.

Mills peered at me with his friendly but awfully searching blue eyes through the cloud of smoke he had wreathed about his big head. The slim, dark Captain’s smile took on an amiable expression. Might he know why I was addressed as “Young Ulysses” by my friend? and immediately he added the remark with urbane playfulness that Ulysses was an astute person. Mills did not give me time for a reply. He struck in: “That old Greek was famed as a wanderer—the first historical seaman.” He waved his pipe vaguely at me.

“Ah! Vraiment!” The polite Captain seemed incredulous and as if weary. “Are you a seaman? In what sense, pray?” We were talking French and he used the term homme de mer.

Again Mills interfered quietly. “In the same sense in which you are a military man.” (Homme de guerre.)

It was then that I heard Captain Blunt produce one of his striking declarations. He had two of them, and this was the first.

“I live by my sword.”

It was said in an extraordinary dandified manner which in conjunction with the matter made me forget my tongue in my head. I could only stare at him. He added more naturally: “2nd Reg. Castille, Cavalry.” Then with marked stress in Spanish, “En las filas legitimas.”

Mills was heard, unmoved, like Jove in his cloud: “He’s on leave here.”

“Of course I don’t shout that fact on the housetops,” the Captain addressed me pointedly, “any more than our friend his shipwreck adventure. We must not strain the toleration of the French authorities too much! It wouldn’t be correct— and not very safe either.”

I became suddenly extremely delighted with my company. A man who “lived by his sword,” before my eyes, close at my elbow! So such people did exist in the world yet! I had not been born too late! And across the table with his air of watchful, unmoved benevolence, enough in itself to arouse one’s interest, there was the man with the story of a shipwreck that mustn’t be shouted on housetops. Why?

I understood very well why, when he told me that he had joined in the Clyde a small steamer chartered by a relative of his, “a very wealthy man,” he observed (probably Lord X, I thought), to carry arms and other supplies to the Carlist army. And it was not a shipwreck in the ordinary sense. Everything went perfectly well to the last moment when suddenly the Numancia (a Republican ironclad) had appeared and chased them ashore on the French coast below Bayonne. In a few words, but with evident appreciation of the adventure, Mills described to us how he swam to the beach clad simply in a money belt and a pair of trousers. Shells were falling all round till a tiny French gunboat came out of Bayonne and shooed the Numancia away out of territorial waters.

He was very amusing and I was fascinated by the mental picture of that tranquil man rolling in the surf and emerging breathless, in the costume you know, on the fair land of France, in the character of a smuggler of war material. However, they had never arrested or expelled him, since he was there before my eyes. But how and why did he get so far from the scene of his sea adventure was an interesting

question. And I put it to him with most naïve indiscretion which did not shock him visibly. He told me that the ship being only stranded, not sunk, the contraband cargo aboard was doubtless in good condition. The French custom- house men were guarding the wreck. If their vigilance could be—h’m—removed by some means, or even merely reduced, a lot of these rifles and cartridges could be taken off quietly at night by certain Spanish fishing boats. In fact, salved for the Carlists, after all. He thought it could be done. . . .

I said with professional gravity that given a few perfectly quiet nights (rare on that coast) it could certainly be done.

Mr. Mills was not afraid of the elements. It was the highly inconvenient zeal of the French custom-house people that had to be dealt with in some way.

“Heavens!” I cried, astonished. “You can’t bribe the French Customs. This isn’t a South-American republic.”

“Is it a republic?” he murmured, very absorbed in smoking his wooden pipe. “Well, isn’t it?”

He murmured again, “Oh, so little.” At this I laughed, and a faintly humorous expression passed over Mills’ face. No. Bribes were out of the question, he admitted. But there were many legitimist sympathies in Paris. A proper person could set them in motion and a mere hint from high quarters to the officials on the spot not to worry over-much about that wreck. . . .

What was most amusing was the cool, reasonable tone of this amazing project. Mr. Blunt sat by very detached, his eyes roamed here and there all over the café; and it was while looking upward at the pink foot of a fleshy and very much foreshortened goddess of some sort depicted on the ceiling in an enormous composition in the Italian style that he let fall casually the words, “She will manage it for you quite easily.”

“Every Carlist agent in Bayonne assured me of that,” said Mr. Mills. “I would have gone straight to Paris only I was told she had fled here for a rest; tired, discontented. Not a very encouraging report.”

“These flights are well known,” muttered Mr. Blunt. “You shall see her all right.” “Yes. They told me that you ”

I broke in: “You mean to say that you expect a woman to arrange that sort of

thing for you?”

“A trifle, for her,” Mr. Blunt remarked indifferently. “At that sort of thing women are best. They have less scruples.”

“More audacity,” interjected Mr. Mills almost in a whisper.

Mr. Blunt kept quiet for a moment, then: “You see,” he addressed me in a most refined tone, “a mere man may suddenly find himself being kicked down the stairs.”

I don’t know why I should have felt shocked by that statement. It could not be because it was untrue. The other did not give me time to offer any remark. He inquired with extreme politeness what did I know of South American republics? I confessed that I knew very little of them. Wandering about the Gulf of Mexico I had a look-in here and there; and amongst others I had a few days in Haiti which was of course unique, being a negro republic. On this Captain Blunt began to talk of negroes at large. He talked of them with knowledge, intelligence, and a sort of contemptuous affection. He generalized, he particularized about the blacks; he told anecdotes. I was interested, a little incredulous, and considerably surprised. What could this man with such a boulevardier exterior that he looked positively like, an exile in a provincial town, and with his drawing-room manner— what could he know of negroes?

Mills, sitting silent with his air of watchful intelligence, seemed to read my thoughts, waved his pipe slightly and explained: “The Captain is from South Carolina.”

“Oh,” I murmured, and then after the slightest of pauses I heard the second of Mr. J. K. Blunt’s declarations.

“Yes,” he said. “Je suis Américain, catholique et gentil-homme,” in a tone contrasting so strongly with the smile, which, as it were, underlined the uttered words, that I was at a loss whether to return the smile in kind or acknowledge the words with a grave little bow. Of course I did neither and there fell on us an odd, equivocal silence. It marked our final abandonment of the French language. I was the one to speak first, proposing that my companions should sup with me, not across the way, which would be riotous with more than one “infernal” supper, but in another much more select establishment in a side street away from the Cannebière. It flattered my vanity a little to be able to say that I had a corner table always reserved in the Salon des Palmiers, otherwise Salon Blanc, where the atmosphere was legitimist and extremely decorous besides—even in Carnival time. “Nine tenths of the people there,” I said, “would be of your political

opinions, if that’s an inducement. Come along. Let’s be festive,” I encouraged them.

I didn’t feel particularly festive. What I wanted was to remain in my company and break an inexplicable feeling of constraint of which I was aware. Mills looked at me steadily with a faint, kind smile.

“No,” said Blunt. “Why should we go there? They will be only turning us out in the small hours, to go home and face insomnia. Can you imagine anything more disgusting?”

He was smiling all the time, but his deep-set eyes did not lend themselves to the expression of whimsical politeness which he tried to achieve. He had another suggestion to offer. Why shouldn’t we adjourn to his rooms? He had there materials for a dish of his own invention for which he was famous all along the line of the Royal Cavalry outposts, and he would cook it for us. There were also a few bottles of some white wine, quite possible, which we could drink out of Venetian cut-glass goblets. A bivouac feast, in fact. And he wouldn’t turn us out in the small hours. Not he. He couldn’t sleep.

Need I say I was fascinated by the idea? Well, yes. But somehow I hesitated and looked towards Mills, so much my senior. He got up without a word. This was decisive; for no obscure premonition, and of something indefinite at that, could stand against the example of his tranquil personality.

CHAPTER II

The street in which Mr. Blunt lived presented itself to our eyes, narrow, silent, empty, and dark, but with enough gas-lamps in it to disclose its most striking feature: a quantity of flag-poles sticking out above many of its closed portals. It was the street of Consuls and I remarked to Mr. Blunt that coming out in the morning he could survey the flags of all nations almost—except his own. (The U.

S. consulate was on the other side of the town.) He mumbled through his teeth that he took good care to keep clear of his own consulate.

“Are you afraid of the consul’s dog?” I asked jocularly. The consul’s dog weighed about a pound and a half and was known to the whole town as exhibited on the consular fore-arm in all places, at all hours, but mainly at the hour of the fashionable promenade on the Prado.

But I felt my jest misplaced when Mills growled low in my ear: “They are all Yankees there.”

I murmured a confused “Of course.”

Books are nothing. I discovered that I had never been aware before that the Civil War in America was not printed matter but a fact only about ten years old. Of course. He was a South Carolinian gentleman. I was a little ashamed of my want of tact. Meantime, looking like the conventional conception of a fashionable reveller, with his opera-hat pushed off his forehead, Captain Blunt was having some slight difficulty with his latch-key; for the house before which we had stopped was not one of those many-storied houses that made up the greater part of the street. It had only one row of windows above the ground floor. Dead walls abutting on to it indicated that it had a garden. Its dark front presented no marked architectural character, and in the flickering light of a street lamp it looked a little as though it had gone down in the world. The greater then was my surprise to enter a hall paved in black and white marble and in its dimness appearing of palatial proportions. Mr. Blunt did not turn up the small solitary

gas-jet, but led the way across the black and white pavement past the end of the staircase, past a door of gleaming dark wood with a heavy bronze handle. It gave access to his rooms he said; but he took us straight on to the studio at the end of the passage.

It was rather a small place tacked on in the manner of a lean-to to the garden side of the house. A large lamp was burning brightly there. The floor was of mere flag-stones but the few rugs scattered about though extremely worn were very

costly. There was also there a beautiful sofa upholstered in pink figured silk, an enormous divan with many cushions, some splendid arm-chairs of various shapes (but all very shabby), a round table, and in the midst of these fine things a small common iron stove. Somebody must have been attending it lately, for the fire roared and the warmth of the place was very grateful after the bone-searching cold blasts of mistral outside.

Mills without a word flung himself on the divan and, propped on his arm, gazed thoughtfully at a distant corner where in the shadow of a monumental carved wardrobe an articulated dummy without head or hands but with beautifully shaped limbs composed in a shrinking attitude, seemed to be embarrassed by his stare.

As we sat enjoying the bivouac hospitality (the dish was really excellent and our host in a shabby grey jacket still looked the accomplished man-about-town) my eyes kept on straying towards that corner. Blunt noticed this and remarked that I seemed to be attracted by the Empress.

“It’s disagreeable,” I said. “It seems to lurk there like a shy skeleton at the feast. But why do you give the name of Empress to that dummy?”

“Because it sat for days and days in the robes of a Byzantine Empress to a painter. . . I wonder where he discovered these priceless stuffs. . . You knew him, I believe?”

Mills lowered his head slowly, then tossed down his throat some wine out of a Venetian goblet.

“This house is full of costly objects. So are all his other houses, so is his place in Paris—that mysterious Pavilion hidden away in Passy somewhere.”

Mills knew the Pavilion. The wine had, I suppose, loosened his tongue. Blunt, too, lost something of his reserve. From their talk I gathered the notion of an eccentric personality, a man of great wealth, not so much solitary as difficult of access, a collector of fine things, a painter known only to very few people and not at all to the public market. But as meantime I had been emptying my Venetian goblet with a certain regularity (the amount of heat given out by that iron stove was amazing; it parched one’s throat, and the straw-coloured wine didn’t seem much stronger than so much pleasantly flavoured water) the voices and the impressions they conveyed acquired something fantastic to my mind. Suddenly I perceived that Mills was sitting in his shirt-sleeves. I had not noticed him taking off his coat. Blunt had unbuttoned his shabby jacket, exposing a lot of starched shirt-front with the white tie under his dark shaved chin. He had a strange air of

insolence—or so it seemed to me. I addressed him much louder than I intended really.

“Did you know that extraordinary man?”

“To know him personally one had to be either very distinguished or very lucky. Mr. Mills here . . .”

“Yes, I have been lucky,” Mills struck in. “It was my cousin who was distinguished. That’s how I managed to enter his house in Paris—it was called the Pavilion—twice.”

“And saw Doña Rita twice, too?” asked Blunt with an indefinite smile and a marked emphasis. Mills was also emphatic in his reply but with a serious face.

“I am not an easy enthusiast where women are concerned, but she was without doubt the most admirable find of his amongst all the priceless items he had accumulated in that house—the most admirable. . . ”

“Ah! But, you see, of all the objects there she was the only one that was alive,” pointed out Blunt with the slightest possible flavour of sarcasm.

“Immensely so,” affirmed Mills. “Not because she was restless, indeed she hardly ever moved from that couch between the windows—you know.”

“No. I don’t know. I’ve never been in there,” announced Blunt with that flash of white teeth so strangely without any character of its own that it was merely disturbing.

“But she radiated life,” continued Mills. “She had plenty of it, and it had a quality. My cousin and Henry Allègre had a lot to say to each other and so I was free to talk to her. At the second visit we were like old friends, which was absurd considering that all the chances were that we would never meet again in this world or in the next. I am not meddling with theology but it seems to me that in the Elysian fields she’ll have her place in a very special company.”

All this in a sympathetic voice and in his unmoved manner. Blunt produced another disturbing white flash and muttered:

“I should say mixed.” Then louder: “As for instance . . . ”

“As for instance Cleopatra,” answered Mills quietly. He added after a pause: “Who was not exactly pretty.”

“I should have thought rather a La Vallière,” Blunt dropped with an indifference of which one did not know what to make. He may have begun to be bored with the subject. But it may have been put on, for the whole personality was not clearly definable. I, however, was not indifferent. A woman is always an interesting subject and I was thoroughly awake to that interest. Mills pondered for a while with a sort of dispassionate benevolence, at last:

“Yes, Doña Rita as far as I know her is so varied in her simplicity that even that is possible,” he said. “Yes. A romantic resigned La Vallière . . . who had a big mouth.”

I felt moved to make myself heard.

“Did you know La Vallière, too?” I asked impertinently.

Mills only smiled at me. “No. I am not quite so old as that,” he said. “But it’s not very difficult to know facts of that kind about a historical personage. There were some ribald verses made at the time, and Louis XIV was congratulated on the possession—I really don’t remember how it goes—on the possession of:

“. . . de ce bec amoureux Qui d’une oreille à l’autre va, Tra là là.

or something of the sort. It needn’t be from ear to ear, but it’s a fact that a big mouth is often a sign of a certain generosity of mind and feeling. Young man, beware of women with small mouths. Beware of the others, too, of course; but a small mouth is a fatal sign. Well, the royalist sympathizers can’t charge Doña Rita with any lack of generosity from what I hear. Why should I judge her? I have known her for, say, six hours altogether. It was enough to feel the seduction of her native intelligence and of her splendid physique. And all that was brought home to me so quickly,” he concluded, “because she had what some Frenchman has called the ‘terrible gift of familiarity’.”

Blunt had been listening moodily. He nodded assent.

“Yes!” Mills’ thoughts were still dwelling in the past. “And when saying good-bye she could put in an instant an immense distance between herself and you. A slight stiffening of that perfect figure, a change of the physiognomy: it was like being dismissed by a person born in the purple. Even if she did offer you her hand—as she did to me—it was as if across a broad river. Trick of manner or a bit of truth peeping out? Perhaps she’s really one of those inaccessible beings.

What do you think, Blunt?”

It was a direct question which for some reason (as if my range of sensitiveness had been increased already) displeased or rather disturbed me strangely. Blunt seemed not to have heard it. But after a while he turned to me.

“That thick man,” he said in a tone of perfect urbanity, “is as fine as a needle. All these statements about the seduction and then this final doubt expressed after only two visits which could not have included more than six hours altogether and this some three years ago! But it is Henry Allègre that you should ask this question, Mr. Mills.”

“I haven’t the secret of raising the dead,” answered Mills good humouredly. “And if I had I would hesitate. It would seem such a liberty to take with a person one had known so slightly in life.”

“And yet Henry Allègre is the only person to ask about her, after all this uninterrupted companionship of years, ever since he discovered her; all the time, every breathing moment of it, till, literally, his very last breath. I don’t mean to say she nursed him. He had his confidential man for that. He couldn’t bear women about his person. But then apparently he couldn’t bear this one out of his sight. She’s the only woman who ever sat to him, for he would never suffer a model inside his house. That’s why the ‘Girl in the Hat’ and the ‘Byzantine Empress’ have that family air, though neither of them is really a likeness of Doña Rita. . . You know my mother?”

Mills inclined his body slightly and a fugitive smile vanished from his lips. Blunt’s eyes were fastened on the very centre of his empty plate.

“Then perhaps you know my mother’s artistic and literary associations,” Blunt went on in a subtly changed tone. “My mother has been writing verse since she was a girl of fifteen. She’s still writing verse. She’s still fifteen—a spoiled girl of genius. So she requested one of her poet friends—no less than Versoy himself— to arrange for a visit to Henry Allègre’s house. At first he thought he hadn’t heard aright. You must know that for my mother a man that doesn’t jump out of his skin for any woman’s caprice is not chivalrous. But perhaps you do know? . . .”

Mills shook his head with an amused air. Blunt, who had raised his eyes from his plate to look at him, started afresh with great deliberation.

“She gives no peace to herself or her friends. My mother’s exquisitely absurd. You understand that all these painters, poets, art collectors (and dealers in bric- à-brac, he interjected through his teeth) of my mother are not in my way; but Versoy lives more like a man of the world. One day I met him at the fencing school. He was furious. He asked me to tell my mother that this was the last

effort of his chivalry. The jobs she gave him to do were too difficult. But I daresay he had been pleased enough to show the influence he had in that quarter. He knew my mother would tell the world’s wife all about it. He’s a spiteful, gingery little wretch. The top of his head shines like a billiard ball. I believe he polishes it every morning with a cloth. Of course they didn’t get further than the big drawing-room on the first floor, an enormous drawing-room with three pairs of columns in the middle. The double doors on the top of the staircase had been thrown wide open, as if for a visit from royalty. You can picture to yourself my mother, with her white hair done in some 18th century fashion and her sparkling black eyes, penetrating into those splendours attended by a sort of bald-headed, vexed squirrel—and Henry Allègre coming forward to meet them like a severe prince with the face of a tombstone Crusader, big white hands, muffled silken voice, half-shut eyes, as if looking down at them from a balcony. You remember that trick of his, Mills?”

Mills emitted an enormous cloud of smoke out of his distended cheeks.

“I daresay he was furious, too,” Blunt continued dispassionately. “But he was extremely civil. He showed her all the ‘treasures’ in the room, ivories, enamels, miniatures, all sorts of monstrosities from Japan, from India, from Timbuctoo . . . for all I know. . . He pushed his condescension so far as to have the ‘Girl in the Hat’ brought down into the drawing-room—half length, unframed. They put her on a chair for my mother to look at. The ‘Byzantine Empress’ was already there, hung on the end wall—full length, gold frame weighing half a ton. My mother first overwhelms the ‘Master’ with thanks, and then absorbs herself in the adoration of the ‘Girl in the Hat.’ Then she sighs out: ‘It should be called Diaphanéité, if there is such a word. Ah! This is the last expression of modernity!’ She puts up suddenly her face-à-main and looks towards the end wall. ‘And that—Byzantium itself! Who was she, this sullen and beautiful Empress?’

“‘The one I had in my mind was Theodosia!’ Allègre consented to answer. ‘Originally a slave girl—from somewhere.’

“My mother can be marvellously indiscreet when the whim takes her. She finds nothing better to do than to ask the ‘Master’ why he took his inspiration for those two faces from the same model. No doubt she was proud of her discerning eye. It was really clever of her. Allègre, however, looked on it as a colossal impertinence; but he answered in his silkiest tones:

“‘Perhaps it is because I saw in that woman something of the women of all time.’ “My mother might have guessed that she was on thin ice there. She is extremely

intelligent. Moreover, she ought to have known. But women can be miraculously dense sometimes. So she exclaims, ‘Then she is a wonder!’ And with some notion of being complimentary goes on to say that only the eyes of the discoverer of so many wonders of art could have discovered something so marvellous in life. I suppose Allègre lost his temper altogether then; or perhaps he only wanted to pay my mother out, for all these ‘Masters’ she had been throwing at his head for the last two hours. He insinuates with the utmost politeness:

“‘As you are honouring my poor collection with a visit you may like to judge for yourself as to the inspiration of these two pictures. She is upstairs changing her dress after our morning ride. But she wouldn’t be very long. She might be a little surprised at first to be called down like this, but with a few words of preparation and purely as a matter of art . . .’

“There were never two people more taken aback. Versoy himself confesses that he dropped his tall hat with a crash. I am a dutiful son, I hope, but I must say I should have liked to have seen the retreat down the great staircase. Ha! Ha!

Ha!”

He laughed most undutifully and then his face twitched grimly.

“That implacable brute Allègre followed them down ceremoniously and put my mother into the fiacre at the door with the greatest deference. He didn’t open his lips though, and made a great bow as the fiacre drove away. My mother didn’t recover from her consternation for three days. I lunch with her almost daily and I couldn’t imagine what was the matter. Then one day . . .”

He glanced round the table, jumped up and with a word of excuse left the studio by a small door in a corner. This startled me into the consciousness that I had been as if I had not existed for these two men. With his elbows propped on the table Mills had his hands in front of his face clasping the pipe from which he extracted now and then a puff of smoke, staring stolidly across the room.

I was moved to ask in a whisper:

“Do you know him well?”

“I don’t know what he is driving at,” he answered drily. “But as to his mother she is not as volatile as all that. I suspect it was business. It may have been a deep plot to get a picture out of Allègre for somebody. My cousin as likely as not. Or simply to discover what he had. The Blunts lost all their property and in Paris there are various ways of making a little money, without actually breaking anything. Not even the law. And Mrs. Blunt really had a position once—in the

days of the Second Empire—and so. . .”

I listened open-mouthed to these things into which my West-Indian experiences could not have given me an insight. But Mills checked himself and ended in a changed tone.

“It’s not easy to know what she would be at, either, in any given instance. For the rest, spotlessly honourable. A delightful, aristocratic old lady. Only poor.”

A bump at the door silenced him and immediately Mr. John Blunt, Captain of Cavalry in the Army of Legitimity, first-rate cook (as to one dish at least), and generous host, entered clutching the necks of four more bottles between the fingers of his hand.

“I stumbled and nearly smashed the lot,” he remarked casually. But even I, with all my innocence, never for a moment believed he had stumbled accidentally.

During the uncorking and the filling up of glasses a profound silence reigned; but neither of us took it seriously—any more than his stumble.

“One day,” he went on again in that curiously flavoured voice of his, “my mother took a heroic decision and made up her mind to get up in the middle of the night. You must understand my mother’s phraseology. It meant that she would be up and dressed by nine o’clock. This time it was not Versoy that was commanded for attendance, but I. You may imagine how delighted I was. ”

It was very plain to me that Blunt was addressing himself exclusively to Mills: Mills the mind, even more than Mills the man. It was as if Mills represented something initiated and to be reckoned with. I, of course, could have no such pretensions. If I represented anything it was a perfect freshness of sensations and a refreshing ignorance, not so much of what life may give one (as to that I had some ideas at least) but of what it really contains. I knew very well that I was utterly insignificant in these men’s eyes. Yet my attention was not checked by that knowledge. It’s true they were talking of a woman, but I was yet at the age when this subject by itself is not of overwhelming interest. My imagination would have been more stimulated probably by the adventures and fortunes of a man.

What kept my interest from flagging was Mr. Blunt himself. The play of the white gleams of his smile round the suspicion of grimness of his tone fascinated me like a moral incongruity.

So at the age when one sleeps well indeed but does feel sometimes as if the need of sleep were a mere weakness of a distant old age, I kept easily awake; and in my freshness I was kept amused by the contrast of personalities, of the disclosed facts and moral outlook with the rough initiations of my West-Indian experience.

And all these things were dominated by a feminine figure which to my imagination had only a floating outline, now invested with the grace of girlhood, now with the prestige of a woman; and indistinct in both these characters. For these two men had seen her, while to me she was only being “presented,” elusively, in vanishing words, in the shifting tones of an unfamiliar voice.

She was being presented to me now in the Bois de Boulogne at the early hour of the ultra-fashionable world (so I understood), on a light bay “bit of blood” attended on the off side by that Henry Allègre mounted on a dark brown powerful weight carrier; and on the other by one of Allègre’s acquaintances (the man had no real friends), distinguished frequenters of that mysterious Pavilion. And so that side of the frame in which that woman appeared to one down the perspective of the great Allée was not permanent. That morning when Mr. Blunt had to escort his mother there for the gratification of her irresistible curiosity (of which he highly disapproved) there appeared in succession, at that woman’s or girl’s bridle-hand, a cavalry general in red breeches, on whom she was smiling; a rising politician in a grey suit, who talked to her with great animation but left her side abruptly to join a personage in a red fez and mounted on a white horse; and then, some time afterwards, the vexed Mr. Blunt and his indiscreet mother (though I really couldn’t see where the harm was) had one more chance of a good stare.

The third party that time was the Royal Pretender (Allègre had been painting his portrait lately), whose hearty, sonorous laugh was heard long before the mounted trio came riding very slowly abreast of the Blunts. There was colour in the girl’s face. She was not laughing. Her expression was serious and her eyes thoughtfully downcast. Blunt admitted that on that occasion the charm, brilliance, and force of her personality was adequately framed between those magnificently mounted, paladin-like attendants, one older than the other but the two composing together admirably in the different stages of their manhood. Mr. Blunt had never before seen Henry Allègre so close. Allègre was riding nearest to the path on which Blunt was dutifully giving his arm to his mother (they had got out of their fiacre) and wondering if that confounded fellow would have the impudence to take off his hat. But he did not. Perhaps he didn’t notice. Allègre was not a man of wandering glances. There were silver hairs in his beard but he looked as solid as a statue. Less than three months afterwards he was gone.

“What was it?” asked Mills, who had not changed his pose for a very long time.

“Oh, an accident. But he lingered. They were on their way to Corsica. A yearly pilgrimage. Sentimental perhaps. It was to Corsica that he carried her off—I mean first of all.”

There was the slightest contraction of Mr. Blunt’s facial muscles. Very slight; but I, staring at the narrator after the manner of all simple souls, noticed it; the

twitch of a pain which surely must have been mental. There was also a suggestion of effort before he went on: “I suppose you know how he got hold of her?” in a tone of ease which was astonishingly ill-assumed for such a worldly, self-controlled, drawing-room person.

Mills changed his attitude to look at him fixedly for a moment. Then he leaned back in his chair and with interest—I don’t mean curiosity, I mean interest: “Does anybody know besides the two parties concerned?” he asked, with something as it were renewed (or was it refreshed?) in his unmoved quietness. “I ask because one has never heard any tales. I remember one evening in a restaurant seeing a man come in with a lady—a beautiful lady—very particularly beautiful, as though she had been stolen out of Mahomet’s paradise. With Doña Rita it can’t be anything as definite as that. But speaking of her in the same strain, I’ve always felt that she looked as though Allègre had caught her in the precincts of some temple . . . in the mountains.”

I was delighted. I had never heard before a woman spoken about in that way, a real live woman that is, not a woman in a book. For this was no poetry and yet it seemed to put her in the category of visions. And I would have lost myself in it if Mr. Blunt had not, most unexpectedly, addressed himself to me.

“I told you that man was as fine as a needle.”

And then to Mills: “Out of a temple? We know what that means.” His dark eyes flashed: “And must it be really in the mountains?” he added.

“Or in a desert,” conceded Mills, “if you prefer that. There have been temples in deserts, you know.”

Blunt had calmed down suddenly and assumed a nonchalant pose.

“As a matter of fact, Henry Allègre caught her very early one morning in his own old garden full of thrushes and other small birds. She was sitting on a stone, a fragment of some old balustrade, with her feet in the damp grass, and reading a tattered book of some kind. She had on a short, black, two-penny frock (une petite robe de deux sous) and there was a hole in one of her stockings. She raised her eyes and saw him looking down at her thoughtfully over that ambrosian beard of his, like Jove at a mortal. They exchanged a good long stare, for at first she was too startled to move; and then he murmured, “Restez donc.” She lowered her eyes again on her book and after a while heard him walk away on the path. Her heart thumped while she listened to the little birds filling the air with their noise. She was not frightened. I am telling you this positively because she has told me the tale herself. What better authority can you have . . .?” Blunt

paused.

“That’s true. She’s not the sort of person to lie about her own sensations,” murmured Mills above his clasped hands.

“Nothing can escape his penetration,” Blunt remarked to me with that equivocal urbanity which made me always feel uncomfortable on Mills’ account. “Positively nothing.” He turned to Mills again. “After some minutes of immobility—she told me—she arose from her stone and walked slowly on the track of that apparition. Allègre was nowhere to be seen by that time. Under the gateway of the extremely ugly tenement house, which hides the Pavilion and the garden from the street, the wife of the porter was waiting with her arms akimbo. At once she cried out to Rita: ‘You were caught by our gentleman.’

“As a matter of fact, that old woman, being a friend of Rita’s aunt, allowed the girl to come into the garden whenever Allègre was away. But Allègre’s goings and comings were sudden and unannounced; and that morning, Rita, crossing the narrow, thronged street, had slipped in through the gateway in ignorance of Allègre’s return and unseen by the porter’s wife.

“The child, she was but little more than that then, expressed her regret of having perhaps got the kind porter’s wife into trouble.

“The old woman said with a peculiar smile: ‘Your face is not of the sort that gets other people into trouble. My gentleman wasn’t angry. He says you may come in any morning you like.’

“Rita, without saying anything to this, crossed the street back again to the warehouse full of oranges where she spent most of her waking hours. Her dreaming, empty, idle, thoughtless, unperturbed hours, she calls them. She crossed the street with a hole in her stocking. She had a hole in her stocking not because her uncle and aunt were poor (they had around them never less than eight thousand oranges, mostly in cases) but because she was then careless and untidy and totally unconscious of her personal appearance. She told me herself that she was not even conscious then of her personal existence. She was a mere adjunct in the twilight life of her aunt, a Frenchwoman, and her uncle, the orange merchant, a Basque peasant, to whom her other uncle, the great man of the family, the priest of some parish in the hills near Tolosa, had sent her up at the age of thirteen or thereabouts for safe keeping. She is of peasant stock, you know. This is the true origin of the ‘Girl in the Hat’ and of the ‘Byzantine Empress’ which excited my dear mother so much; of the mysterious girl that the privileged personalities great in art, in letters, in politics, or simply in the world, could see on the big sofa during the gatherings in Allègre’s exclusive Pavilion: the

Doña Rita of their respectful addresses, manifest and mysterious, like an object of art from some unknown period; the Doña Rita of the initiated Paris. Doña Rita and nothing more—unique and indefinable.” He stopped with a disagreeable smile.

“And of peasant stock?” I exclaimed in the strangely conscious silence that fell between Mills and Blunt.

“Oh! All these Basques have been ennobled by Don Sanche II,” said Captain Blunt moodily. “You see coats of arms carved over the doorways of the most miserable caserios. As far as that goes she’s Doña Rita right enough whatever else she is or is not in herself or in the eyes of others. In your eyes, for instance, Mills. Eh?”

For a time Mills preserved that conscious silence.

“Why think about it at all?” he murmured coldly at last. “A strange bird is hatched sometimes in a nest in an unaccountable way and then the fate of such a bird is bound to be ill-defined, uncertain, questionable. And so that is how Henry Allègre saw her first? And what happened next?”

“What happened next?” repeated Mr. Blunt, with an affected surprise in his tone. “Is it necessary to ask that question? If you had asked how the next happened. .

. But as you may imagine she hasn’t told me anything about that. She didn’t,” he continued with polite sarcasm, “enlarge upon the facts. That confounded Allègre, with his impudent assumption of princely airs, must have (I shouldn’t wonder) made the fact of his notice appear as a sort of favour dropped from Olympus. I really can’t tell how the minds and the imaginations of such aunts and uncles are affected by such rare visitations. Mythology may give us a hint. There is the story of Danae, for instance.”

“There is,” remarked Mills calmly, “but I don’t remember any aunt or uncle in that connection.”

“And there are also certain stories of the discovery and acquisition of some unique objects of art. The sly approaches, the astute negotiations, the lying and the circumventing . . . for the love of beauty, you know.”