FICTION: SHORT STORIES

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J.-K. Huysmans: 17 – Cornélius Béga (Le Drageoir aux épices)

Joris-Karl Huysmans

(1849-1907)

Le Drageoir aux épices (1874)

XVII. Cornélius Béga

Dans les premiers jours du mois de février 1620, naquit à Haarlem, du mariage de Cornélius Bégyn, sculpteur sur bois, et de Marie Cornélisz, sa femme, un enfant du sexe masculin qui reçut le prénom de Cornélius.

Je ne vous dirai point si le dit enfant piaula de lamentable façon, s’il fut turbulent ou calme, je l’ignore; peu vous importe d’ailleurs et à moi aussi; tout ce que je sais, c’est qu’à l’âge de dix-huit ans, il témoigna d’un goût immodéré pour les arts, les femmes grasses et la bière double.

Le vieux Bégyn et le père de sa femme, le célèbre peintre Cornélisz Van Haarlem, encouragèrent le premier de ces penchants et combattirent vainement les deux autres.

Marie Cornélisz, qui était femme pieuse et versée dans la société des abbés et des moines, essaya, par l’intermédiaire de ces révérends personnages, de ramener son fils dans une voie meilleure. Ce fut peine perdue. Cornélius était plus apte à crier: Tope et masse! à moi, compagnons, buvons ce piot, ha! Guillemette la rousse, montrez vos blancs tétins! qu’à marmotter d’une voix papelarde des patenôtres ou des oraisons.

Menaces, coups, prières, rien n’y fit. Dès qu’il apercevait la cotte d’une paillarde, se moulant en beaux plis serrés le long de fortes hanches, il perdait la tête et courait après la paillarde, laissant là pinceau et palette, pot de grès et broc d’étain. Encore qu’il fût passionné pour la peinture et la beuverie et qu’il admirât plus qu’aucun les chefs-d’oeuvre de Rembrandt et de Hals, et la magnifique ordonnance de tonneaux et de muids bien ventrus, il était plus énamouré encore de lèvres soyeuses et roses, d’épaules charnues et blanches comme les nivéoles qui fleurissent au printemps.

Enfin, quoi qu’il en fût, espérant que la raison viendrait avec l’âge et que l’amour de l’art maîtriserait ces déplorables passions, son père le fit admettre dans l’atelier des Van Ostade. Cornélius ne pouvait trouver un meilleur maître, mais il ne pouvait trouver aussi des camarades plus disposés à courir au four banal et à boire avec les galloises et autres mauvaises filles, folles de leur corps, que ses compagnons d’études, Dusart, Goebauw, Musscher et les autres.

Sa gaieté et ses franches allures leur plurent tout d’abord, et ils se livrèrent, pour célébrer sa bienvenue, à de telles ripailles que la ville entière en fut scandalisée.

Furieux de voir traîner son nom dans les lieux les plus mal famés de Haarlem, le vieux Bégyn défendit à son fils de le porter, et le chassa de chez lui.

Cornélius resta quelques instants pantois et déconcerté, puis il enfonça d’un coup de poing son feutre sur sa tête et s’en fut à la taverne du Houx-Vert où se réunissait la joyeuse confrérie des buveurs.

—Ce qui est fait est fait, clama de sa voix de galoubet aigu le peintre Dusart, lorsqu’il apprit la mésaventure de son ami; puisque ton père te défend de porter son nom, nous allons te baptiser. Veux-tu t’appeler Béga?

—Soit, dit le jeune homme; aussi bien je veux illustrer ce nom; à partir d’aujourd’hui je renonce aux tripots et aux franches repues, je travaille. Un immense éclat de rire emplit le cabaret. «Tu déraisonnes, crièrent ses amis. Est-ce qu’Ostade ne boit pas? est-ce que le grand Hals n’est pas un ivrogne fieffé? est-ce que Brauwer ne fait pas tous les soirs topazes sur l’ongle avec des pintes de bière? cela l’empêche-t-il d’avoir du génie? Non! eh bien! fais comme eux: travaille, mais bois.»

—Ores ça, et moi, dit Marion la grosse, qui se planta vis-à-vis de Cornélius, est-ce qu’on n’embrassera plus les bonnes joues de sa Marion?

—Eh, vrai Dieu! si, je le voudrai toujours! répliqua le jeune homme, qui baisa les grands yeux orange de sa maîtresse et oublia ses belles résolutions aussi vite qu’il les avait prises.

—Ça, qu’on le baptise! criait le peintre Musscher, juché sur un tonneau. Hôtelier, apporte ta bière la plus forte, ton genièvre le plus épicé, que nous arrosions, non point la tête, mais, comme il convient à d’honnêtes biberons, le gosier du néophyte.

L’hôtelier ne se le fit pas dire deux fois; il charria, avec l’aide de ses garçons, une grande barrique de bière, et Béga, flanqué d’un coté de son parrain Dusart, de l’autre de sa marraine Marion la grosse, s’avança du fond de la salle jusqu’aux fonts baptismaux, c’est-à-dire jusqu’à la cuve, où l’attendait l’hôtelier, faisant fonctions de grand prêtre.

Planté sur ses petites jambes massives, roulant de gros yeux verdâtres comme du jade, frottant avec sa manche son petit nez loupeux qui luisait comme bosse de cuivre, balayant de sa large langue ses grosses lèvres humides, cet honorable personnage se lança sans hésiter dans les spirales d’un long discours qui ne tendait rien moins qu’à démontrer l’influence heureuse de la bière et du skidam sur le cerveau des artistes en général et sur celui des peintres en particulier. De longs applaudissements scandèrent les périodes de l’orateur et, après une chaude allocution de la marraine qui scanda elle-même, par de retentissants baisers, appliqués sur les joues de Cornélius, et par des points d’orgue hasardeux, les phrases enrubannées de son discours, le défilé commença aux accents harmonieux d’un violon pleurard et d’une vielle grinçante.

Une année durant, Béga continua à mener joyeuse vie avec ses compagnons; le malheur, c’est qu’il n’avait pas le tempérament de Brauwer, dont le lumineux génie résista aux plus folles débauches. L’impuissance vint vite; quoi qu’il fît, quoi qu’il s’ingéniât à produire, c’était de la piquette d’Ostade; il trempait d’eau la forte bière du vieux maître.

Il en brisa ses pinceaux de rage. Revenu de tout, dégoûté de ses amis, méprisant les filles, reconnaissant enfin qu’une maîtresse est une ennemie et que, plus on fait de sacrifices pour elle, moins elle vous en a de reconnaissance, il s’isola de toutes et de tous et vécut dans la plus complète solitude.

Sa mélancolie s’en accrut encore, et, un soir, plus triste et plus harassé que de coutume, il résolut d’en finir et se dirigea vers la rivière. Il longeait la berge et regardait, en frissonnant, l’eau qui bouillonnait sous les arches du pont. Il allait prendre son élan et sauter, quand il entendit derrière lui un profond soupir et, se retournant, se trouva face à face avec une jeune fille qui pleurait. Il lui demanda la cause de ses larmes et, sur ses instances et ses prières, elle finit par lui avouer que, lasse de supporter les brutalités de sa famille, elle était venue à la rivière avec l’intention de s’y jeter.

Leur commune détresse rapprocha ces deux malheureux, qui s’aimèrent et se consolèrent l’un l’autre. Béga n’était plus reconnaissable. Cet homme qui, un mois auparavant, était la proie de lancinantes angoisses, d’inexorables remords, se prit enfin à goûter les tranquilles délices d’une vie calme. Pour comble de bonheur, son talent se réveilla en même temps que sa jeunesse, et c’est de cette époque que sont datées ses meilleures toiles.

Tout souriait au jeune ménage, honneurs et argent se décidaient enfin à venir, quand soudain la peste éclata dans Haarlem.

La pauvre fille en fut atteinte. Béga s’installa à son chevet et ne la quitta plus. La mort était proche. Il voulut se jeter dans les bras de sa bien-aimée, la serrer contre sa poitrine, respirer l’haleine de sa bouche, mourir sur son sein: ses amis l’en empêchèrent. «Je veux mourir avec elle, criait-il, je veux mourir!» Il supplia ceux qui le retenaient de lui rendre sa liberté. «Je vous jure, dit-il, que je ne l’approcherai point.» Il prit alors un bâton, en posa une des extrémités sur la bouche de la mourante et la supplia de l’embrasser. Elle sourit tristement et lui obéit; par trois fois elle effleura le bâton de ses lèvres; alors il le porta vivement aux siennes et les colla furieusement à la place qu’elle avait baisée.

Honbraken, qui rapporte ce fait, ajoute que, frappé de douleur, Béga fut lui même atteint de la peste, et qu’il expira quelques jours après.

kempis.nl poetry magazine

More in: -Le Drageoir aux épices, Huysmans, J.-K.

Virginia Woolf: Together and Apart

Virginia Woolf

(1882-1941)

Together and Apart

Mrs. Dalloway introduced them, saying you will like him. The conversation began some minutes before anything was said, for both Mr. Serle and Miss Arming looked at the sky and in both of their minds the sky went on pouring its meaning though very differently, until the presence of Mr. Serle by her side became so distinct to Miss Anning that she could not see the sky, simply, itself, any more, but the sky shored up by the tall body, dark eyes, grey hair, clasped hands, the stern melancholy (but she had been told “falsely melancholy”) face of Roderick Serle, and, knowing how foolish it was, she yet felt impelled to say:

“What a beautiful night!”

Foolish! Idiotically foolish! But if one mayn’t be foolish at the age of forty in the presence of the sky, which makes the wisest imbecile—mere wisps of straw—she and Mr. Serle atoms, motes, standing there at Mrs. Dalloway’s window, and their lives, seen by moonlight, as long as an insect’s and no more important.

“Well!” said Miss Anning, patting the sofa cushion emphatically. And down he sat beside her. Was he “falsely melancholy,” as they said? Prompted by the sky, which seemed to make it all a little futile—what they said, what they did—she said something perfectly commonplace again:

“There was a Miss Serle who lived at Canterbury when I was a girl there.”

With the sky in his mind, all the tombs of his ancestors immediately appeared to Mr. Serle in a blue romantic light, and his eyes expanding and darkening, he said: “Yes.

“We are originally a Norman family, who came over with the Conqueror. That is a Richard Serle buried in the Cathedral. He was a knight of the garter.”

Miss Arming felt that she had struck accidentally the true man, upon whom the false man was built. Under the influence of the moon (the moon which symbolized man to her, she could see it through a chink of the curtain, and she took dips of the moon) she was capable of saying almost anything and she settled in to disinter the true man who was buried under the false, saying to herself: “On, Stanley, on”—which was a watchword of hers, a secret spur, or scourge such as middle–aged people often make to flagellate some inveterate vice, hers being a deplorable timidity, or rather indolence, for it was not so much that she lacked courage, but lacked energy, especially in talking to men, who frightened her rather, and so often her talks petered out into dull commonplaces, and she had very few men friends—very few intimate friends at all, she thought, but after all, did she want them? No. She had Sarah, Arthur, the cottage, the chow and, of course THAT, she thought, dipping herself, sousing herself, even as she sat on the sofa beside Mr. Serle, in THAT, in the sense she had coming home of something collected there, a cluster of miracles, which she could not believe other people had (since it was she only who had Arthur, Sarah, the cottage, and the chow), but she soused herself again in the deep satisfactory possession, feeling that what with this and the moon (music that was, the moon), she could afford to leave this man and that pride of his in the Serles buried. No! That was the danger—she must not sink into torpidity—not at her age. “On, Stanley, on,” she said to herself, and asked him:

“Do you know Canterbury yourself?”

Did he know Canterbury! Mr. Serle smiled, thinking how absurd a question it was—how little she knew, this nice quiet woman who played some instrument and seemed intelligent and had good eyes, and was wearing a very nice old necklace—knew what it meant. To be asked if he knew Canterbury. When the best years of his life, all his memories, things he had never been able to tell anybody, but had tried to write—ah, had tried to write (and he sighed) all had centred in Canterbury; it made him laugh.

His sigh and then his laugh, his melancholy and his humour, made people like him, and he knew it, and vet being liked had not made up for the disappointment, and if he sponged on the liking people had for him (paying long calls on sympathetic ladies, long, long calls), it was half bitterly, for he had never done a tenth part of what he could have done, and had dreamed of doing, as a boy in Canterbury. With a stranger he felt a renewal of hope because they could not say that he had not done what he had promised, and yielding to his charm would give him a fresh startat fifty! She had touched the spring. Fields and flowers and grey buildings dripped down into his mind, formed silver drops on the gaunt, dark walls of his mind and dripped down. With such an image his poems often began. He felt the desire to make images now, sitting by this quiet woman.

“Yes, I know Canterbury,” he said reminiscently, sentimentally, inviting, Miss Anning felt, discreet questions, and that was what made him interesting to so many people, and it was this extraordinary facility and responsiveness to talk on his part that had been his undoing, so he thought often, taking his studs out and putting his keys and small change on the dressing–table after one of these parties (and he went out sometimes almost every night in the season), and, going down to breakfast, becoming quite different, grumpy, unpleasant at breakfast to his wife, who was an invalid, and never went out, but had old friends to see her sometimes, women friends for the most part, interested in Indian philosophy and different cures and different doctors, which Roderick Serle snubbed off by some caustic remark too clever for her to meet, except by gentle expostulations and a tear or two—he had failed, he often thought, because he could not cut himself off utterly from society and the company of women, which was so necessary to him, and write. He had involved himself too deep in life—and here he would cross his knees (all his movements were a little unconventional and distinguished) and not blame himself, but put the blame off upon the richness of his nature, which he compared favourably with Wordsworth’s, for example, and, since he had given so much to people, he felt, resting his head on his hands, they in their turn should help him, and this was the prelude, tremulous, fascinating, exciting, to talk; and images bubbled up in his mind.

“She’s like a fruit tree—like a flowering cherry tree,” he said, looking at a youngish woman with fine white hair. It was a nice sort of image, Ruth Anning thought—rather nice, yet she did not feel sure that she liked this distinguished, melancholy man with his gestures; and it’s odd, she thought, how one’s feelings are influenced. She did not like HIM, though she rather liked that comparison of his of a woman to a cherry tree. Fibres of her were floated capriciously this way and that, like the tentacles of a sea anemone, now thrilled, now snubbed, and her brain, miles away, cool and distant, up in the air, received messages which it would sum up in time so that, when people talked about Roderick Serle (and he was a bit of a figure) she would say unhesitatingly: “I like him,” or “I don’t like him,” and her opinion would be made up for ever. An odd thought; a solemn thought; throwing a green light on what human fellowship consisted of.

“It’s odd that you should know Canterbury,” said Mr. Serle. “It’s always a shock,” he went on (the white–haired lady having passed), “when one meets someone” (they had never met before), “by chance, as it were, who touches the fringe of what has meant a great deal to oneself, touches accidentally, for I suppose Canterbury was nothing but a nice old town to you. So you stayed there one summer with an aunt?” (That was all Ruth Anning was going to tell him about her visit to Canterbury.) “And you saw the sights and went away and never thought of it again.”

Let him think so; not liking him, she wanted him to run away with an absurd idea of her. For really, her three months in Canterbury had been amazing. She remembered to the last detail, though it was merely a chance visit, going to see Miss Charlotte Serle, an acquaintance of her aunt’s. Even now she could repeat Miss Serle’s very words about the thunder. “Whenever I wake, or hear thunder in the night, I think ‘Someone has been killed’.” And she could see the hard, hairy, diamond–patterned carpet, and the twinkling, suffused, brown eyes of the elderly lady, holding the teacup out unfilled, while she said that about the thunder. And always she saw Canterbury, all thundercloud and livid apple blossom, and the long grey backs of the buildings.

The thunder roused her from her plethoric middleaged swoon of indifference; “On, Stanley, on,” she said to herself; that is, this man shall not glide away from me, like everybody else, on this false assumption; I will tell him the truth.

“I loved Canterbury,” she said.

He kindled instantly. It was his gift, his fault, his destiny.

“Loved it,” he repeated. “I can see that you did.”

Her tentacles sent back the message that Roderick Serle was nice.

Their eyes met; collided rather, for each felt that behind the eyes the secluded being, who sits in darkness while his shallow agile companion does all the tumbling and beckoning, and keeps the show going, suddenly stood erect; flung off his cloak; confronted the other. It was alarming; it was terrific. They were elderly and burnished into a glowing smoothness, so that Roderick Serle would go, perhaps to a dozen parties in a season, and feel nothing out of the common, or only sentimental regrets, and the desire for pretty images—like this of the flowering cherry tree—and all the time there stagnated in him unstirred a sort of superiority to his company, a sense of untapped resources, which sent him back home dissatisfied with life, with himself, yawning, empty, capricious. But now, quite suddenly, like a white bolt in a mist (but this image forged itself with the inevitability of lightning and loomed up), there it had happened; the old ecstasy of life; its invincible assault; for it was unpleasant, at the same time that it rejoiced and rejuvenated and filled the veins and nerves with threads of ice and fire; it was terrifying. “Canterbury twenty years ago,” said Miss Anning, as one lays a shade over an intense light, or covers some burning peach with a green leaf, for it is too strong, too ripe, too full.

Sometimes she wished she had married. Sometimes the cool peace of middle life, with its automatic devices for shielding mind and body from bruises, seemed to her, compared with the thunder and the livid appleblossom of Canterbury, base. She could imagine something different, more like lightning, more intense. She could imagine some physical sensation. She could imagine——

And, strangely enough, for she had never seen him before, her senses, those tentacles which were thrilled and snubbed, now sent no more messages, now lay quiescent, as if she and Mr. Serle knew each other so perfectly, were, in fact, so closely united that they had only to float side by side down this stream.

Of all things, nothing is so strange as human intercourse, she thought, because of its changes, its extraordinary irrationality, her dislike being now nothing short of the most intense and rapturous love, but directly the word “love” occurred to her, she rejected it, thinking again how obscure the mind was, with its very few words for all these astonishing perceptions, these alternations of pain and pleasure. For how did one name this. That is what she felt now, the withdrawal of human affection, Serle’s disappearance, and the instant need they were both under to cover up what was so desolating and degrading to human nature that everyone tried to bury it decently from sight—this withdrawal, this violation of trust, and, seeking some decent acknowledged and accepted burial form, she said:

“Of course, whatever they may do, they can’t spoil Canterbury.”

He smiled; he accepted it; he crossed his knees the other way about. She did her part; he his. So things came to an end. And over them both came instantly that paralysing blankness of feeling, when nothing bursts from the mind, when its walls appear like slate; when vacancy almost hurts, and the eyes petrified and fixed see the same spot—a pattern, a coal scuttle—with an exactness which is terrifying, since no emotion, no idea, no impression of any kind comes to change it, to modify it, to embellish it, since the fountains of feeling seem sealed and as the mind turns rigid, so does the body; stark, statuesque, so that neither Mr. Serle nor Miss Anning could move or speak, and they felt as if an enchanter had freed them, and spring flushed every vein with streams of life, when Mira Cartwright, tapping Mr. Serle archly on the shoulder, said:

“I saw you at the Meistersinger, and you cut me. Villain,” said Miss Cartwright, “you don’t deserve that I should ever speak to you again.”

And they could separate.

Virginia Woolf: A Haunted House, and other short stories

kempis.nl poetry magazine

More in: Archive W-X, Archive W-X, Woolf, Virginia

J.-K. Huysmans: 16 – Adrien Brauwer (Le Drageoir aux épices)

Joris-Karl Huysmans

(1849-1907)

Le Drageoir aux épices (1874)

XVI. Adrien Brauwer

Deux compagnons, l’un maigre et élancé comme une cigogne, l’autre obèse et ventru comme un muid, galopent sur la route de Flandre, en pétunant dans de longues pipes. Leur mine est rien moins qu’honnête. Le grand a la figure régulière, mais ravagée par les orgies, l’air hautain et distingué; le gros a l’air commun, la face purpurée, le nez étincelant comme une braise et fleuri de pompettes écarlates. Quant à l’accoutrement des deux sires, il tombe en lambeaux. L’homme maigre est vêtu d’un pourpoint qui, jadis, a dû réjouir les belles par ses teintes incarnadines; mais la poussière et les libations l’ont revêtu de tons roux et fuligineux; ses grègues baissent le nez piteusement, ses souliers sont feuilletés et rient à semelles déployées. Le gros, vêtu de loques dont on ne saurait définir la nuance exacte, a pourtant des chausses dont la couleur primitive a dû être un jaune citrin agrémenté de rubans pers, mais elles sont si vieillies, si fourbues, si usées, que nous n’oserions assurer qu’elles aient eu ces teintes agréables dans leur jeunesse.

—C’est étonnant, dit le gros, comme la poussière vous sèche le gosier! qu’un broc de cervoise serait bienvenu! Hé! mon maître, invoquez le divin Gambrinus pour qu’il conduise nos pas à un cabaret.

—Eh! dit Brauwer, tu sais bien que les incomparables Kaatje et Barbara ont vidé nos poches à Anvers.

—Bah! tu peindras un tableau, et nous boirons à notre soif.

—Non, dit le maître, j’ai créé assez de chefs-d’oeuvre laissés dans les cabarets pour payer les breuvages. A ton tour, Kraesbeck, peins et paie l’écot.

—Hélas! tu sais bien que j’ai les bras encore endoloris des coups que j’ai reçus pour avoir voulu embrasser la jolie Betje.

—C’est vrai, dit Brauwer en riant, mais ne discutons pas davantage: voici un cabaret, buvons d’abord, nous verrons à payer ensuite.

Ils entrèrent. La salle était pleine et tellement enfumée qu’on aurait pu y saurer des harengs. Les jambes allongées, le feutre enfoncé jusqu’aux yeux, des personnages en guenilles fumaient à perdre haleine et buvaient en criant et se disputant. Une servante en train de guéer du linge dans la salle voisine rythmait à coups de palettes les chansons que nasillaient quelques-uns de ces marauds. Coutumiers de semblable spectacle, le maître et l’élève ne s’en étonnèrent pas et, pendant quelque temps, pétunèrent et vidèrent tant de pintes qu’ils conquirent l’admiration des malandrins qui peuplaient ce bouge; puis Kroesbeck poussa son maître du coude et lui dit: «S’il ne s’agissait que de boire, la terre serait un paradis; mais il faut payer. Voyons, fais un tableau.» Brauwer poussa un soupir et, prenant une petite toile, se mit à peindre vivement la tabagie.

Ce tableau, vous le connaissez. Il est au Louvre. Le personnage le plus saillant est un buveur assis sur une barrique renversée et nous tournant le dos. Le rustre a tant de fois pétuné et tant de fois vidé de larges vidrecomes qu’il a été choir, nez en avant, sur la table qui lui sert d’appui. Sa chemise a remonté et sort toute bouffante entre son haut-de-chausse jaune paille et son pourpoint gris fer; un autre maraud, plus intrépide, nous n’osons dire plus sobre, allume sa pipe à un brasier rougeâtre et semble absorbé par cette grave occupation. Un troisième nous présente son profil camard et souffle au plafond un nuage de fumée tourbillonnante. Enfin, apparaissent, dans la brume qui enveloppe la tabagie, quelques paysans causant avec une petite fille qui se laisse sans répugnance embrasser par l’un de ces truands.

—Parfait! s’écria Kroesbeck, en se posant devant le tableau. Ah! Adrien, tu as le don du génie. Hals, ton maître, n’était qu’un enfant auprès de toi. Hélas! jamais je ne t’égalerai. Et le pauvre Kroesbeck alla s’asseoir dans un coin, d’un air tout contrit.

Les buveurs étaient partis presque tous. La nuit était venue et l’on n’entendait que le crépitement de la pluie sur les vitres et le pétillement des fagots dans l’âtre. La porte s’ouvrit, et un homme de haute taille entra et vint s’asseoir au coin du feu. Au bout de quelques instants, il se leva et vint se placer derrière Brauwer. «Eh! bien maître, dit-il, comment vous portez-vous?» Notre peintre, qui, pour beaucoup de raisons, ne s’entendait jamais appeler sans effroi, regarda timidement son interlocuteur et reconnut M. de Vermandois, un riche seigneur qui, le premier, lui avait payé en reluisants ducatons un de ses petits chefs-d’oeuvre, alors qu’il fuyait la maison de son maître. «Il est charmant, ce tableau! reprit le gentilhomme; je l’achète; le prix que vous fixerez sera le mien, apportez-le-moi demain matin.» Puis, comme la pluie avait cessé, il sortit, faisant de la main à Brauwer un geste amical.

Tout joyeux de cette aubaine, le peintre fit frémir d’un coup de poing les brocs et les verres qui couvraient la table et redemanda de la bière. «Hé! que dis-tu de cela, Joseph? s’écria-t-il, nous sommes riches, livrons-nous a de francs soulas, buvons papaliter.» Mais Kroesbeck avait disparu. «Où diable est-il?» murmura notre héros, qui se leva en chancelant; mais il buta du pied contre une masse énorme qui, le nez aplati contre le plancher, les bras étendus, les jambes écartées, ronflait mélodieusement; c’était le digne Joseph qui avait roulé sous là table et venait d’ajouter sans doute un nouveau rubis aux innombrables fleurons qui décoraient son nez. Brauwer le regarda avec attendrissement et, bredouillant et dodelinant la tête, alla choir sur un escabeau où il s’endormit.

II
—…A propos de Van Dyck, dit M. de Vermandois, j’ai vu son maître dernièrement. Il regrette, non moins vivement que moi, que vous ayez quitté son palais pour aller, à l’aventure, courir les cabarets et les auberges.

—C’est vrai, dit Brauwer; Rubens s’est conduit avec moi comme un véritable ami, comme un grand artiste; mais ses disciples vêtus de soie et de velours m’intimidaient. Aurais-je pu peindre, dans ce somptueux atelier, ces trognes grimaçantes, ces haillons bizarres, ces postures si grotesques et si naturelles de l’ivrogne qu’elles vous font involontairement sourire; aurais-je pu rendre avec autant de verve cette réalité pittoresque que vous admirez? Que voulez-vous! l’inspiration me désertait sous les lambris, elle me hantait dans les tripots.

A ce moment, la porte s’ouvrit, et une jeune fille parut et fit mine de se retirer en voyant son père causer avec un inconnu.

Sur un signe de M. de Vermandois, elle entra. Brauwer fut ébloui; lui qui n’avait jamais fréquenté que des filles de joie, il resta muet d’admiration devant cette charmante jeune fille. Encadrez un ovale d’une pureté raphaélesque de grandes tresses mordorées, imaginez de grands yeux bleu turquoise, une bouche rouge comme l’aile du flamant, vous n’aurez qu’un faible aperçu de la jolie Jenny.

Le peintre comprit qu’on pouvait être heureux sans vivre dans les bordeaux et faire carrousse avec de joyeux vauriens. Il se promit de quitter sa vie aventureuse et peut-être, pensait-il, parviendrai-je, grâce à mon génie, à ne point lui déplaire. Il quitta cette maison, les larmes aux yeux, et loua une mansarde où, pendant trois jours, il s’enferma. Le troisième jour, malgré quelques regrets, il résista au désir d’aller retrouver son compagnon, l’ex-boulanger Kroesbeck. Il se mit à la fenêtre, alluma sa pipe et regarda dans la rue. Son gîte était mal choisi: un cabaret faisait face à la chambre qu’il habitait, regorgeant de buveurs et d’éhontés tortillons. Au milieu d’eux, un homme à l’encolure puissante, au bedon piriforme, au nez tout emperlé, lançait d’épaisses bouffées et suçait avec de doux vagissements les goulots d’une énorme guédousle. Sa grosse figure rayonnait d’aise. «Tiens, se dit Brauwer, Kroesbeck est ici! Il s’est donc décidé à peindre et à payer l’écot?» Puis il le regarda boire et un sourire d’envie passa sur ses lèvres. Il s’éloigna de la fenêtre et voulut se remettre a travailler. Il n’y put tenir, il regarda de nouveau dans la rue. Son élève l’aperçut.

—Oh! oh! oh! dit-il sur trois tons différents; et, poussant un cri Joyeux, il l’appela. Pour le coup, c’était trop. Brauwer descendit quatre à quatre, et, saisissant un broc, il le vida, la face épanouie, l’oeil pétillant. Une heure après, il dormait dans un coin, complètement ivre.

Le réveil fut moins gai. Il fit silencieusement un paquet de ses hardes et quitta la ville le soir même.

Quinze jours après, il était de retour à Anvers et mourait à l’hôpital. Cet homme de génie fut enterré dans le cimetière des pestiférés, sur une couche de chaux vive.

Joris-Karl Huysmans: Le Drageoir aux épices

kempis.nl poetry magazine

More in: -Le Drageoir aux épices, Huysmans, J.-K.

Mark Twain: Saint Joan of Arc

Mark Twain

(1835-1910)

Saint Joan of Arc

The evidence furnished at the Trials and Rehabilitation sets forth Joan of Arc’s strange and beautiful history in clear and minute detail. Among all the multitude of biographies that freight the shelves of the world’s libraries, this is the only one whose validity is confirmed to us by oath. It gives us a vivid picture of a career and a personality of so extraordinary a character that we are helped to accept them as actualities by the very fact that both are beyond the inventive reach of fiction. The public part of the career occupied only a mere breath of time—it covered but two years; but what a career it was! The personality which made it possible is one to be reverently studied, loved, and marvelled at, but not to be wholly understood and accounted for by even the most searching analysis.

Note.—The Official Record of the Trials and Rehabilitation of Joan of Arc is the most remarkable history that exists in any language; yet there are few people in the world who can say they have read it: in England and America it has hardly been heard of.

Three hundred years ago Shakespeare did not know the true story of Joan of Arc; in his day it was unknown even in France. For four hundred years it existed rather as a vaguely defined romance than as definite and authentic history. The true story remained buried in the official archives of France from the Rehabilitation of 1456 until Quicherat dug it out and gave it to the world two generations ago, in lucid and understandable modern French. It is a deeply fascinating story. But only in the Official Trials and Rehabilitation can it be found in its entirety.—M. T.

In Joan of Arc at the age of sixteen there was no promise of a romance. She lived in a dull little village on the frontiers of civilization; she had been nowhere and had seen nothing; she knew none but simple shepherd folk; she had never seen a person of note; she hardly knew what a soldier looked like; she had never ridden a horse, nor had a warlike weapon in her hand; she could neither read nor write: she could spin and sew; she knew her catechism and her prayers and the fabulous histories of the saints, and this was all her learning. That was Joan at sixteen. What did she know of law? of evidence? of courts? of the attorney’s trade? of legal procedure? Nothing. Less than nothing. Thus exhaustively equipped with ignorance, she went before the court at Toul to contest a false charge of breach of promise of marriage; she conducted her cause herself, without any one’s help or advice or any one’s friendly sympathy, and won it. She called no witnesses of her own, but vanquished the prosecution by using with deadly effectiveness its own testimony. The astonished judge threw the case out of court, and spoke of her as “this marvellous child.”

She went to the veteran Commandant of Vaucouleurs and demanded an escort of soldiers, saying she must march to the help of the King of France, since she was commissioned of God to win back his lost kingdom for him and set the crown upon his head. The Commandant said, “What, you? you are only a child.” And he advised that she be taken back to her village and have her ears boxed. But she said she must obey God, and would come again, and again, and yet again, and finally she would get the soldiers. She said truly. In time he yielded, after months of delay and refusal, and gave her the soldiers; and took off his sword and gave her that, and said, “Go—and let come what may.” She made her long and perilous journey through the enemy’s country, and spoke with the King, and convinced him. Then she was summoned before the University of Poitiers to prove that she was commissioned of God and not of Satan, and daily during three weeks she sat before that learned congress unafraid, and capably answered their deep questions out of her ignorant but able head and her simple and honest heart; and again she won her case, and with it the wondering admiration of all that august company.

And now, aged seventeen, she was made Commander-in-Chief, with a prince of the royal house and the veteran generals of France for subordinates; and at the head of the first army she had ever seen, she marched to Orleans, carried the commanding fortresses of the enemy by storm in three desperate assaults, and in ten days raised a siege which had defied the might of France for seven months.

After a tedious and insane delay caused by the King’s instability of character and the treacherous counsels of his ministers, she got permission to take the field again. She took Jargeau by storm; then Meung; she forced Beaugency to surrender; then—in the open field—she won the memorable victory of Patay against Talbot, “the English lion,” and broke the back of the Hundred Years’ War. It was a campaign which cost but seven weeks of time; yet the political results would have been cheap if the time expended had been fifty years. Patay, that unsung and now long-forgotten battle, was the Moscow of the English power in France; from the blow struck that day it was destined never to recover. It was the beginning of the end of an alien dominion which had ridden France intermittently for three hundred years.

Then followed the great campaign of the Loire, the capture of Troyes by assault, and the triumphal march past surrendering towns and fortresses to Rheims, where Joan put the crown upon her King’s head in the Cathedral, amid wild public rejoicings, and with her old peasant father there to see these things and believe his eyes if he could. She had restored the crown and the lost sovereignty; the King was grateful for once in his shabby poor life, and asked her to name her reward and have it. She asked for nothing for herself, but begged that the taxes of her native village might be remitted forever. The prayer was granted, and the promise kept for three hundred and sixty years. Then it was broken, and remains broken to-day. France was very poor then, she is very rich now; but she has been collecting those taxes for more than a hundred years.

Joan asked one other favor: that now that her mission was fulfilled she might be allowed to go back to her village and take up her humble life again with her mother and the friends of her childhood; for she had no pleasure in the cruelties of war, and the sight of blood and suffering wrung her heart. Sometimes in battle she did not draw her sword, lest in the splendid madness of the onset she might forget herself and take an enemy’s life with it. In the Rouen Trials, one of her quaintest speeches—coming from the gentle and girlish source it did—was her naive remark that she had “never killed any one.” Her prayer for leave to go back to the rest and peace of her village home was not granted.

Then she wanted to march at once upon Paris, take it, and drive the English out of France. She was hampered in all the ways that treachery and the King’s vacillation could devise, but she forced her way to Paris at last, and fell badly wounded in a successful assault upon one of the gates. Of course her men lost heart at once—she was the only heart they had. They fell back. She begged to be allowed to remain at the front, saying victory was sure. “I will take Paris now or die!” she said. But she was removed from the field by force; the King ordered a retreat, and actually disbanded his army. In accordance with a beautiful old military custom Joan devoted her silver armor and hung it up in the Cathedral of St. Denis. Its great days were over.

Then, by command, she followed the King and his frivolous court and endured a gilded captivity for a time, as well as her free spirit could; and whenever inaction became unbearable she gathered some men together and rode away and assaulted a stronghold and captured it.

At last in a sortie against the enemy, from Compiègne, on the 24th of May (when she was turned eighteen), she was herself captured, after a gallant fight. It was her last battle. She was to follow the drums no more.

Thus ended the briefest epoch-making military career known to history. It lasted only a year and a month, but it found France an English province, and furnishes the reason that France is France today and not an English province still. Thirteen months! It was, indeed, a short career; but in the centuries that have since elapsed five hundred millions of Frenchmen have lived and died blest by the benefactions it conferred; and so long as France shall endure, the mighty debt must grow. And France is grateful; we often hear her say it. Also thrifty: she collects the Domrémy taxes.

Joan was fated to spend the rest of her life behind bolts and bars. She was a prisoner of war, not a criminal, therefore hers was recognized as an honorable captivity. By the rules of war she must be held to ransom, and a fair price could not be refused it offered. John of Luxembourg paid her the just compliment of requiring a prince’s ransom for her. In that day that phrase represented a definite sum—61,125 francs. It was, of course, supposable that either the King or grateful France, or both, would fly with the money and set their fair young benefactor free. But this did not happen. In five and a half months neither King nor country stirred a hand nor offered a penny. Twice Joan tried to escape. Once by a trick she succeeded for a moment, and locked her jailer in behind her, but she was discovered and caught; in the other case she let herself down from a tower sixty feet high, but her rope was too short, and she got a fall that disabled her and she could not get away.

Finally, Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, paid the money and bought Joan—ostensibly for the Church, to be tried for wearing male attire and for other impieties, but really for the English, the enemy into whose hands the poor girl was so piteously anxious not to fall. She was now shut up in the dungeons of the Castle of Rouen and kept in an iron cage, with her hands and feet and neck chained to a pillar; and from that time forth during all the months of her imprisonment, till the end, several rough English soldiers stood guard over her night and day—and not outside her room, but in it. It was a dreary and hideous captivity, but it did not conquer her: nothing could break that invincible spirit. From first to last she was a prisoner a year; and she spent the last three months of it on trial for her life before a formidable array of ecclesiastical judges, and disputing the ground with them foot by foot and inch by inch with brilliant generalship and dauntless pluck. The spectacle of that solitary girl, forlorn and friendless, without advocate or adviser, and without the help and guidance of any copy of the charges brought against her or rescript of the complex and voluminous daily proceedings of the court to modify the crushing strain upon her astonishing memory, fighting that long battle serene and undismayed against these colossal odds, stands alone in its pathos and its sublimity; it has nowhere its mate, either in the annals of fact or in the inventions of fiction.

And how fine and great were the things she daily said, how fresh and crisp—and she so worn in body, so starved, and tired, and harried! They run through the whole gamut of feeling and expression—from scorn and defiance, uttered with soldierly fire and frankness, all down the scale to wounded dignity clothed in words of noble pathos; as, when her patience was exhausted by the pestering delvings and gropings and searchings of her persecutors to find out what kind of devil’s witchcraft she had employed to rouse the war spirit in her timid soldiers, she burst out with, “What I said was, ‘Ride these English down’—and I did it myself!” and as, when insultingly asked why it was that her standard had place at the crowning of the King in the Cathedral of Rheims rather than the standards of the other captains, she uttered that touching speech, “It had borne the burden, it had earned the honor”—a phrase which fell from her lips without premeditation, yet whose moving beauty and simple grace it would bankrupt the arts of language to surpass.

Although she was on trial for her life, she was the only witness called on either side; the only witness summoned to testify before a packed jury commissioned with a definite task: to find her guilty, whether she was guilty or not. She must be convicted out of her own mouth, there being no other way to accomplish it. Every advantage that learning has over ignorance, age over youth, experience over inexperience, chicane over artlessness, every trick and trap and gin devisable by malice and the cunning of sharp intellects practised in setting snares for the unwary—all these were employed against her without shame; and when these arts were one by one defeated by the marvellous intuitions of her alert and penetrating mind, Bishop Cauchon stooped to a final baseness which it degrades human speech to describe: a priest who pretended to come from the region of her own home and to be a pitying friend and anxious to help her in her sore need was smuggled into her cell, and he misused his sacred office to steal her confidence; she confided to him the things sealed from revealment by her Voices, and which her prosecutors had tried so long in vain to trick her into betraying. A concealed confederate set it all down and delivered it to Cauchon, who used Joan’s secrets, thus obtained, for her ruin.

Throughout the Trials, whatever the foredoomed witness said was twisted from its true meaning when possible, and made to tell against her; and whenever an answer of hers was beyond the reach of twisting it was not allowed to go upon the record. It was upon one of these latter occasions that she uttered that pathetic reproach—to Cauchon: “Ah, you set down everything that is against me, but you will not set down what is for me.”

That this untrained young creature’s genius for war was wonderful, and her generalship worthy to rank with the ripe products of a tried and trained military experience, we have the sworn testimony of two of her veteran subordinates—one, the Duc d’Alençon, the other the greatest of the French generals of the time, Dunois, Bastard of Orleans; that her genius was as great—possibly even greater—in the subtle warfare of the forum we have for witness the records of the Rouen Trials, that protracted exhibition of intellectual fence maintained with credit against the master-minds of France; that her moral greatness was peer to her intellect we call the Rouen Trials again to witness, with their testimony to a fortitude which patiently and steadfastly endured during twelve weeks the wasting forces of captivity, chains, loneliness, sickness, darkness, hunger, thirst, cold, shame, insult, abuse, broken sleep, treachery, ingratitude, exhausting sieges of cross-examination, the threat of torture, with the rack before her and the executioner standing ready: yet never surrendering, never asking quarter, the frail wreck of her as unconquerable the last day as was her invincible spirit the first.

Great as she was in so many ways, she was perhaps even greatest of all in the lofty things just named—her patient endurance, her steadfastness, her granite fortitude. We may not hope to easily find her mate and twin in these majestic qualities; where we lift our eyes highest we find only a strange and curious contrast—there in the captive eagle beating his broken wings on the Rock of St. Helena.

III

The Trials ended with her condemnation. But as she had conceded nothing, confessed nothing, this was victory for her, defeat for Cauchon. But his evil resources were not yet exhausted. She was persuaded to agree to sign a paper of slight import, then by treachery a paper was substituted which contained a recantation and a detailed confession of everything which had been charged against her during the Trials and denied and repudiated by her persistently during the three months; and this false paper she ignorantly signed. This was a victory for Cauchon. He followed it eagerly and pitilessly up by at once setting a trap for her which she could not escape. When she realized this she gave up the long struggle, denounced the treason which had been practised against her, repudiated the false confession, reasserted the truth of the testimony which she had given in the Trials, and went to her martyrdom with the peace of God in her tired heart, and on her lips endearing words and loving prayers for the cur she had crowned and the nation of ingrates she had saved.

When the fires rose about her and she begged for a cross for her dying lips to kiss, it was not a friend but an enemy, not a Frenchman but an alien, not a comrade in arms but an English soldier, that answered that pathetic prayer. He broke a stick across his knee, bound the pieces together in the form of the symbol she so loved, and gave it her; and his gentle deed is not forgotten, nor will be.

Twenty-Five years afterwards the Process of Rehabilitation was instituted, there being a growing doubt as to the validity of a sovereignty that had been rescued and set upon its feet by a person who had been proven by the Church to be a witch and a familiar of evil spirits. Joan’s old generals, her secretary, several aged relations and other villagers of Domrémy, surviving judges and secretaries of the Rouen and Poitiers Processes—a cloud of witnesses, some of whom had been her enemies and persecutors,—came and made oath and testified; and what they said was written down. In that sworn testimony the moving and beautiful history of Joan of Arc is laid bare, from her childhood to her martyrdom. From the verdict she rises stainlessly pure, in mind and heart, in speech and deed and spirit, and will so endure to the end of time.

She is the Wonder of the Ages. And when we consider her origin, her early circumstances, her sex, and that she did all the things upon which her renown rests while she was still a young girl, we recognize that while our race continues she will be also the Riddle of the Ages. When we set about accounting for a Napoleon or a Shakespeare or a Raphael or a Wagner or an Edison or other extraordinary person, we understand that the measure of his talent will not explain the whole result, nor even the largest part of it; no, it is the atmosphere in which the talent was cradled that explains; it is the training which it received while it grew, the nurture it got from reading, study, example, the encouragement it gathered from self- recognition and recognition from the outside at each stage of its development: when we know all these details, then we know why the man was ready when his opportunity came. We should expect Edison’s surroundings and atmosphere to have the largest share in discovering him to himself and to the world; and we should expect him to live and die undiscovered in a land where an inventor could find no comradeship, no sympathy, no ambition-rousing atmosphere of recognition and applause—Dahomey, for instance. Dahomey could not find an Edison out; in Dahomey an Edison could not find himself out. Broadly speaking, genius is not born with sight, but blind; and it is not itself that opens its eyes, but the subtle influences of a myriad of stimulating exterior circumstances.

We all know this to be not a guess, but a mere commonplace fact, a truism. Lorraine was Joan of Arc’s Dahomey. And there the Riddle confronts us. We can understand how she could be born with military genius, with leonine courage, with incomparable fortitude, with a mind which was in several particulars a prodigy—a mind which included among its specialties the lawyer’s gift of detecting traps laid by the adversary in cunning and treacherous arrangements of seemingly innocent words, the orator’s gift of eloquence, the advocate’s gift of presenting a case in clear and compact form, the judge’s gift of sorting and weighing evidence, and finally, something recognizable as more than a mere trace of the states- man’s gift of understanding a political situation and how to make profitable use of such opportunities as it offers; we can comprehend how she could be born with these great qualities, but we cannot comprehend how they became immediately usable and effective without the developing forces of a sympathetic atmosphere and the training which comes of teaching, study, practice—years of practice,—and the crowning and perfecting help of a thousand mistakes. We can understand how the possibilities of the future perfect peach are all lying hid in the humble bitter-almond, but we cannot conceive of the peach springing directly from the almond without the intervening long seasons of patient cultivation and development. Out of a cattle-pasturing peasant village lost in the remotenesses of an unvisited wilderness and atrophied with ages of stupefaction and ignorance we cannot see a Joan of Arc issue equipped to the last detail for her amazing career and hope to be able to explain the riddle of it, labor at it as we may.

It is beyond us. All the rules fail in this girl’s case. In the world’s history she stands alone—quite alone. Others have been great in their first public exhibitions of generalship, valor, legal talent, diplomacy, fortitude; but always their previous years and associations had been in a larger or smaller degree a preparation for these things. There have been no exceptions to the rule. But Joan was competent in a law case at sixteen without ever having seen a law book or a court-house before; she had no training in soldiership and no associations with it, yet she was a competent general in her first campaign; she was brave in her first battle, yet her courage had had no education—not even the education which a boy’s courage gets from never-ceasing reminders that it is not permissible in a boy to be a coward, but only in a girl; friendless, alone, ignorant, in the blossom of her youth, she sat week after week, a prisoner in chains, before her assemblage of judges, enemies hunting her to her death, the ablest minds in France, and answered them out of an untaught wisdom which overmatched their learning, baffled their tricks and treacheries with a native sagacity which compelled their wonder, and scored every day a victory against these incredible odds and camped unchallenged on the field. In the history of the human intellect, untrained, inexperienced, and using only its birthright equipment of untried capacities, there is nothing which approaches this. Joan of Arc stands alone, and must continue to stand alone, by reason of the unfellowed fact that in the things wherein she was great she was so without shade or suggestion of help from preparatory teaching, practice, environment, or experience. There is no one to compare her with, none to measure her by; for all others among the illustrious grew towards their high place in an atmosphere and surroundings which discovered their gift to them and nourished it and promoted it, intentionally or unconsciously. There have been other young generals, but they were not girls; young generals, but they had been soldiers before they were generals: she began as a general; she commanded the first army she ever saw; she led it from victory to victory, and never lost a battle with it; there have been young commanders-in-chief, but none so young as she: she is the only soldier in history who has held the supreme command of a nation’s armies at the age of seventeen.

Her history has still another feature which sets her apart and leaves her without fellow or competitor: there have been many uninspired prophets, but she was the only one who ever ventured the daring detail of naming, along with a foretold event, the event’s precise nature, the special time-limit within which it would occur, and the place—and scored fulfilment. At Vaucouleurs she said she must go to the King and be made his general, and break the English power, and crown her sovereign—“at Rheims.” It all happened. It was all to happen “next year”—and it did. She foretold her first wound and its character and date a month in advance, and the prophecy was recorded in a public record-book three weeks in advance. She repeated it the morning of the date named, and it was fulfilled before night. At Tours she foretold the limit of her military career—saying it would end in one year from the time of its utterance—and she was right. She foretold her martyrdom—using that word, and naming a time three months away—and again she was right. At a time when France seemed hopelessly and permanently in the hands of the English she twice asserted in her prison before her judges that within seven years the English would meet with a mightier disaster than had been the fall of Orleans: it happened within five—the fall of Paris. Other prophecies of hers came true, both as to the event named and the time-limit prescribed.

She was deeply religious, and believed that she had daily speech with angels; that she saw them face to face, and that they counselled her, comforted and heartened her, and brought commands to her direct from God. She had a childlike faith in the heavenly origin of her apparitions and her Voices, and not any threat of any form of death was able to frighten it out of her loyal heart. She was a beautiful and simple and lovable character. In the records of the Trials this comes out in clear and shining detail. She was gentle and winning and affectionate; she loved her home and friends and her village life; she was miserable in the presence of pain and suffering; she was full of compassion: on the field of her most splendid victory she forgot her triumphs to hold in her lap the head of a dying enemy and comfort his passing spirit with pitying words; in an age when it was common to slaughter prisoners she stood dauntless between hers and harm, and saved them alive; she was forgiving, generous, unselfish, magnanimous; she was pure from all spot or stain of baseness. And always she was a girl; and dear and worshipful, as is meet for that estate: when she fell wounded, the first time, she was frightened, and cried when she saw her blood gushing from her breast; but she was Joan of Arc! and when presently she found that her generals were sounding the retreat, she staggered to her feet and led the assault again and took that place by storm.

There is no blemish in that rounded and beautiful character.

How strange it is!—that almost invariably the artist remembers only one detail—one minor and meaningless detail of the personality of Joan of Arc: to wit, that she was a peasant girl—and forgets all the rest; and so he paints her as a strapping middle-aged fishwoman, with costume to match, and in her face the spirituality of a ham. He is slave to his one idea, and forgets to observe that the supremely great souls are never lodged in gross bodies. No brawn, no muscle, could endure the work that their bodies must do; they do their miracles by the spirit, which has fifty times the strength and staying power of brawn and muscle. The Napoleons are little, not big; and they work twenty hours in the twenty-four, and come up fresh, while the big soldiers with the little hearts faint around them with fatigue. We know what Joan of Arc was like, without asking—merely by what she did. The artist should paint her spirit—then he could not fail to paint her body aright. She would rise before us, then, a vision to win us, not repel: a lithe young slender figure, instinct with “the unbought grace of youth,” dear and bonny and lovable, the face beautiful, and transfigured with the light of that lustrous intellect and the fires of that unquenchable spirit.

Taking into account, as I have suggested before, all the circumstances—her origin, youth, sex, illiteracy, early environment, and the obstructing conditions under which she exploited her high gifts and made her conquests in the field and before the courts that tried her for her life,—she is easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced.

Mark Twain short stories

kempis.nl poetry magazine

Multatuli: Idee Nr. 41

Multatuli

(1820-1887)

Ideën (7 delen, 1862-1877)

Idee Nr. 41

Ik leg me toe op ‘t schryven van levend Hollands. Maar ik heb schoolgegaan.

kempis.nl poetry magazine

More in: DICTIONARY OF IDEAS, Multatuli, Multatuli

J.-K. Huysmans: 15 – A maïtre François Villon (Le Drageoir aux épices)

Joris-Karl Huysmans

(1849-1907)

Le Drageoir aux épices (1874)

XV. A maïtre François Villon

Je me figure, ô vieux maître, ton visage exsangue, coiffé d’un galeux bicoquet; je me figure ton ventre vague, tes longs bras osseux, tes jambes héronnières enroulées de bas d’un rose louche, étoilés de déchirures, papelonnés d’écailles de boue.

Je crois te voir, ô Villon, l’hiver, alors que le glas fourre d’hermine les toits des maisons, errer dans les rues de Paris, famélique, hagard, grelottant, en arrêt devant les marchands de beuverie, caressant, de convoiteux regards, la panse monacale des bouteilles.

Je crois te voir, exténué de fatigue, las de misère, te tapir dans un des repaires de la cour des Miracles, pour échapper aux archers du guet, et là, seul dans un coin, ouvrir, loin de tous, le merveilleux écrin de ton génie.

Quel magique ruissellement de pierres! Quel étrange fourmillement de feux! Quelles étonnantes cassures d’étoffes rudes et rousses! Quelles folles striures de couleurs vives et mornes! Et quand ton oeuvre était finie, quand ta ballade était tissée et se déroulait, irisée de tons éclatants, sertie de diamants et de trivials cailloux, qui en faisaient mieux ressortir encore la limpidité sereine, tu te sentais grand, incomparable, l’égal d’un dieu, et puis tu retombais à néant, la faim te tordait les entrailles, et tu devenais le vulgaire tire-laine, l’ignominieux amant de la grosse Margot!

Tu détroussais le passant, on te jetait dans un cul de basse-fosse, et, là-bas, enterré, plié en deux, crevant de faim, tu criais grâce, pitié! tu appelais à l’aide tes compaings de galles, les francs-gaultiers, les ribleurs, les coquillarts, les marmonneux, les cagnardiers!

Le laisserez là, le povre Villon! Allons, madones d’amour qu’il a chantées, hahay! Margot, Rose, Jehanne la Saulcissière, hahay! Guillemette, Marion la Peau-tarde, hahay! la petite Macée, hahay! toute la folle quenaille des ribaudes, des truandes, des grivoises, des raillardes, des villotières! Excitez les hommes, réveillez les biberons, entraînez-les au secours de leur chef, le poète Villon!

Las! Les fossés sont profonds, les tours sont hautes, les piques des haquebutiers sont aiguës, le vin coule, la cervoise pétille, le feu flambe, les filles sont gorgées de hideuses saouleries: ô pauvre Villon, personne ne bouge!

Claque des dents, meurtris tes mains, guermente-toi, pleure d’angoisseux gémissements, tes amis ne t’écoutent pas; ils sont à la taverne, sous les tresteaux, ivres d’hypocras, crevés de mangeailles, inertes, débraillés, fétides, couchés les uns sur les autres, Frémin l’Etourdi sur le bon Jehan Cotard qui se rigole encore et remue les badigoinces, Michault Cul d’Oue sur ce gros lippu de Beaulde. Tes maîtresses se moquent bien de toi! elles sont dans les bouges de la Cité qui s’ébattent avec les escoliers et les soudards. Le cerveau atteint du mal de pique, le nez grafiné de horions, elles frottent leur rouge museau sur les joues des buveurs et se rincent galantement la fale!

Oh! tu es seul et bien seul! Meurs donc, larron; crève donc dans ta fosse, souteneur de gouges; tu n’en seras pas moins immortel, poète grandiosement fangeux, ciseleur inimitable du vers, joaillier non pareil de la ballade!

kempis.nl poetry magazine

More in: -Le Drageoir aux épices, Huysmans, J.-K.

Mark Twain: A Helpless Situation

Mark Twain
(1835-1910)

A Helpless Situation

Once or twice a year I get a letter of a certain pattern, a pattern that never materially changes, in form and substance, yet I cannot get used to that letter—it always astonishes me. It affects me as the locomotive always affects me: I say to myself, “I have seen you a thousand times, you always look the same way, yet you are always a wonder, and you are always impossible; to contrive you is clearly beyond human genius—you can’t exist, you don’t exist, yet here you are!”

I have a letter of that kind by me, a very old one. I yearn to print it, and where is the harm? The writer of it is dead years ago, no doubt, and if I conceal her name and address—her this-world address—I am sure her shade will not mind. And with it I wish to print the answer which I wrote at the time but probably did not send. If it went—which is not likely—it went in the form of a copy, for I find the original still here, pigeon-holed with the said letter. To that kind of letters we all write answers which we do not send, fearing to hurt where we have no desire to hurt; I have done it many a time, and this is doubtless a case of the sort.

The Letter

X——., California, June 3, 1879.

Mr. S. L. Clemens, Hartford, Conn.:

Dear Sir,—You will doubtless be surprised to know who has presumed to write and ask a favor of you. Let your memory go back to your days in the Humboldt mines—’62-’63. You will remember, you and Clagett and Oliver and the old blacksmith Tillou lived in a lean-to which was half-way up the gulch, and there were six log cabins in the camp—strung pretty well separated up the gulch from its mouth at the desert to where the last claim was, at the divide. The lean-to you lived in was the one with a canvas roof that the cow fell down through one night, as told about by you in Roughing It—my uncle Simmons remembers it very well. He lived in the principal cabin, half-way up the divide, along with Dixon and Parker and Smith. It had two rooms, one for kitchen and the other for bunks, and was the only one that had. You and your party were there on the great night, the time they had dried-apple-pie, Uncle Simmons often speaks of it. It seems curious that dried-apple-pie should have seemed such a great thing, but it was, and it shows how far Humboldt was out of the world and difficult to get to, and how slim the regular bill of fare was. Sixteen years ago—it is a long time. I was a little girl then, only fourteen. I never saw you, I lived in Washoe. But Uncle Simmons ran across you every now and then, all during those weeks that you and party were there working your claim which was like the rest. The camp played out long and long ago, there wasn’t silver enough in it to make a button. You never saw my husband, but he was there after you left, and lived in that very lean-to, a bachelor then but married to me now. He often wishes there had been a photographer there in those days, he would have taken the lean-to. He got hurt in the old Hal Clayton claim that was abandoned like the others, putting in a blast and not climbing out quick enough, though he scrambled the best he could. It landed him clear down on the trail and hit a Piute. For weeks they thought he would not get over it but he did, and is all right, now. Has been ever since. This is a long introduction but it is the only way I can make myself known. The favor I ask I feel assured your generous heart will grant: Give me some advice about a book I have written. I do not claim anything for it only it is mostly true and as interesting as most of the books of the times. I am unknown in the literary world and you know what that means unless one has some one of influence (like yourself) to help you by speaking a good word for you. I would like to place the book on royalty basis plan with any one you would suggest.

This is a secret from my husband and family. I intend it as a surprise in case I get it published.

Feeling you will take an interest in this and if possible write me a letter to some publisher, or, better still, if you could see them for me and then let me hear.

I appeal to you to grant me this favor. With deepest gratitude I thank you for your attention.
One knows, without inquiring, that the twin of that embarrassing letter is forever and ever flying in this and that and the other direction across the continent in the mails, daily, nightly, hourly, unceasingly, unrestingly. It goes to every well-known merchant, and railway official, and manufacturer, and capitalist, and Mayor, and Congressman, and Governor, and editor, and publisher, and author, and broker, and banker—in a word, to every person who is supposed to have “influence.” It always follows the one pattern: “You do not know me, but you once knew a relative of mine,” etc., etc. We should all like to help the applicants, we should all be glad to do it, we should all like to return the sort of answer that is desired, but—Well, there is not a thing we can do that would be a help, for not in any instance does that letter ever come from any one who can be helped. The struggler whom you could help does his own helping; it would not occur to him to apply to you, a stranger. He has talent and knows it, and he goes into his fight eagerly and with energy and determination—all alone, preferring to be alone. That pathetic letter which comes to you from the incapable, the unhelpable—how do you who are familiar with it answer it? What do you find to say? You do not want to inflict a wound; you hunt ways to avoid that. What do you find? How do you get out of your hard place with a contented conscience? Do you try to explain? The old reply of mine to such a letter shows that I tried that once. Was I satisfied with the result? Possibly; and possibly not; probably not; almost certainly not. I have long ago forgotten all about it. But, anyway, I append my effort:

The Reply

I know Mr. H., and I will go to him, dear madam, if upon reflection you find you still desire it. There will be a conversation. I know the form it will take. It will be like this:

Mr. H. How do her books strike you?

Mr. Clemens. I am not acquainted with them.

H. Who has been her publisher?

C. I don’t know.

H. She has one, I suppose?

C. I—I think not.

H. Ah. You think this is her first book?

C. Yes—I suppose so. I think so.

H. What is it about? What is the character of it?

C. I believe I do not know.

H. Have you seen it?

C. Well—no, I haven’t.

H. Ah-h. How long have you known her?

C. I don’t know her.

H. Don’t know her?

C. No.

H. Ah-h. How did you come to be interested in her book, then?

C. Well, she—she wrote and asked me to find a publisher for her, and mentioned you.

H. Why should she apply to you instead of to me?

C. She wished me to use my influence.

H. Dear me, what has influence to do with such a matter?

C. Well, I think she thought you would be more likely to examine her book if you were influenced.

H. Why, what we are here for is to examine books—anybody’s book that comes along. It’s our business. Why should we turn away a book unexamined because it’s a stranger’s? It would be foolish. No publisher does it. On what ground did she request your influence, since you do not know her? She must have thought you knew her literature and could speak for it. Is that it?

C. No; she knew I didn’t.

H. Well, what then? She had a reason of some sort for believing you competent to recommend her literature, and also under obligations to do it?

C. Yes, I—I knew her uncle.

H. Knew her uncle?

C. Yes.

H. Upon my word! So, you knew her uncle; her uncle knows her literature; he endorses it to you; the chain is complete, nothing further needed; you are satisfied, and therefore—

C. No, that isn’t all, there are other ties. I knew the cabin her uncle lived in, in the mines; I knew his partners, too; also I came near knowing her husband before she married him, and I did know the abandoned shaft where a premature blast went off and he went flying through the air and clear down to the trail and hit an Indian in the back with almost fatal consequences.

H. To him, or to the Indian?

C. She didn’t say which it was.

H. (With a sigh.) It certainly beats the band! You don’t know her, you don’t know her literature, you don’t know who got hurt when the blast went off, you don’t know a single thing for us to build an estimate of her book upon, so far as I—

C. I knew her uncle. You are forgetting her uncle.

H. Oh, what use is he? Did you know him long? How long was it?

C. Well, I don’t know that I really knew him, but I must have met him, anyway. I think it was that way; you can’t tell about these things, you know, except when they are recent.

H. Recent? When was all this?

C. Sixteen years ago.

H. What a basis to judge a book upon! At first you said you knew him, and now you don’t know whether you did or not.

C. Oh yes, I knew him; anyway, I think I thought I did; I’m perfectly certain of it.

H. What makes you think you thought you knew him?

C. Why, she says I did, herself.

H. She says so!

C. Yes, she does, and I did know him, too, though I don’t remember it now.

H. Come—how can you know it when you don’t remember it.

C. I don’t know. That is, I don’t know the process, but I do know lots of things that I don’t remember, and remember lots of things that I don’t know. It’s so with every educated person.

H. (After a pause.) Is your time valuable?

C. No—well, not very.

H. Mine is.

So I came away then, because he was looking tired. Overwork, I reckon; I never do that; I have seen the evil effects of it. My mother was always afraid I would overwork myself, but I never did.

Dear madam, you see how it would happen if I went there. He would ask me those questions, and I would try to answer them to suit him, and he would hunt me here and there and yonder and get me embarrassed more and more all the time, and at last he would look tired on account of overwork, and there it would end and nothing done. I wish I could be useful to you, but, you see, they do not care for uncles or any of those things; it doesn’t move them, it doesn’t have the least effect, they don’t care for anything but the literature itself, and they as good as despise influence. But they do care for books, and are eager to get them and examine them, no matter whence they come, nor from whose pen. If you will send yours to a publisher—any publisher—he will certainly examine it, I can assure you of that.

Mark Twain short stories
kempis.nl poetry magazine

Ton van Reen gedicht: Benzine

Ton van Reen

BENZINE

Een lucht van benzine hangt over het dorp
de dreiging zit dik in de kelen van de mensen
zomaar een enkele vonk van haat
kan een ontploffing veroorzaken
en het vuur over de daken laten dansen

Oproer stinkt altijd naar benzine
die ontploft, door klappende handen
of door de kreet van een kind

In de haard van de angst
ruikt het altijd naar benzine
die als een giftige slang over straat vloeit
wachtend op die ene vonk van haat
die de vlammen als een leger ratten
over de daken van het dorp laat rennen

Geweld ruikt altijd naar benzine

Ton van Reen: De naam van het mes. Afrikaanse gedichten
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J.-K. Huysmans: 14 – La rive gauche (Le Drageoir aux épices)

Joris-Karl Huysmans

(1849-1907)

Le Drageoir aux épices (1874)

XIV. La rive gauche

Las du bruissement des foules, dégoûté des criailleries des histrionnes d’amour, je vais me promener sur le boulevard Montparnasse; je gagne la rue de la Santé, la rue du Pot-au-Lait et les chemins vagues qui longent la Bièvre. Cette petite rivière, si bleue à Buc, est d’un noir de suie à Paris. Quelquefois même elle exhale des relents de bourbe et de vieux cuir, mais elle est presque toujours bordée de deux bandes de hauts peupliers et encadrée d’aspects bizarrement tristes qui évoquent en moi comme de lointains souvenirs, ou comme les rythmes désolés de la musique de Schubert. Quelle rue étrange que cette rue du Pot-au-Lait! déserte, étranglée, descendant par une pente rapide dans une grande voie inhabitée, aux pavés enchâssés dans la boue; le ruisseau court au milieu de la rue et charrie dans ses petites cascades des îlots d’épluchures de légumes qui tigrent de vert les eaux noirâtres. Les maisons qui la bordent s’appuient et se serrent les unes contre les autres. Les volets sont fermés; les portes closes sont émaillées de gros clous, et parfois un peuple de petits galopins, au nez sale, aux cheveux frisés, se traînent sur les genoux, malgré les observations de leurs mères et jouent une longue partie de billes. Il faut les voir, accroupis, montrant leur petite culotte rapiécée, du fond de laquelle s’échappe un drapeau blanc, s’appuyant de la main gauche à terre et lançant dans un gros trou une petite bille. Ils se relèvent, sautillent, poussent des cris de joie, tandis que le partner, un petit bambin aussi mal accoutré, fait une mine boudeuse et observe avec inquiétude l’adresse de son adversaire. Une lanterne, suspendue en l’air par des cordes accrochées à deux maisons qui se font face, éclaire la rue, le soir. Il y a quelque temps, ces cordes se rompirent et le réverbère fut rattaché par mille petites ficelles qui aidèrent les grosses cordes à en soutenir le poids. On eût dit de la lanterne, au milieu de ce treillis de cordelettes, une gigantesque araignée tissant sa toile. Une fois engagé dans la longue route qui rejoint cette ruelle, vous arrivez, après quelques minutes de marche, près d’un petit étang, moiré de follicules vertes. On croirait être devant un étrange gazon, si parfois des grenouilles ne sautaient des herbes et ne faisaient clapoter et rejaillir sur le feuillage des gouttelettes d’eau brune.

La vue est bornée. D’un côté, la Bièvre et une rangée d’ormes et de peupliers; de l’autre, les remparts. Des linges bariolés qui sèchent sur lune corde, un âne qui remue les oreilles et se bat les flancs de sa queue pour chasser les mouches; un peu plus loin, une hutte de sauvage, bâtie avec quelques lattes, crépie de mortier, coiffée d’un bonnet de chaume, percée d’un tuyau pour laisser échapper la fumée: c’est tout. C’est navrant, et pourtant cette solitude ne manque pas de charme. Ce n’est pas la campagne des environs de Paris, polluée par les ébats des courtauds de boutique, ces bois qui regorgent de monde, le dimanche, et dont les taillis sont semés de papiers gras et de culs de bouteilles; ce n’est pas la vraie campagne, si verte, si rieuse au clair soleil; c’est un monde à part, triste, aride, mais par cela même solitaire et charmant. Quelques ouvriers ou quelques femmes qui passent, un panier au bras, à la main un enfant qui se fait traîner et traîne lui-même un petit chariot en bois, peint en bleu, avec des roues jaunes, rompent seuls la monotonie de la route. Parfois, le dimanche, devant un petit cabaret dont l’auvent est festonné de pampres d’un vert cru et de gros raisins bleus, une famille de jongleurs vient donner des représentations en face des buveurs attablés en dehors. J’en vis une fois trois, tous jeunes, et une fille, au teint couleur d’ambre, aux grands yeux effarés, noirs comme des obsidiennes. Ils avaient établi une corde frottée de craie, reposant sur deux poteaux en forme d’X. Un drôle, à la face lamentablement laide, tournait pendant ce temps la bobinette d’un orgue. De tous côtés je voyais courir des enfants; ils arrivaient tout en sueur, se rangeaient en cercle et attendaient avec une visible impatience le commencement des exercices. Les saltimbanques furent bientôt prêts : ils se ceignirent le front d’une bandelette rose, lamée de papillons de cuivre, firent craquer leurs jointures et s’élancèrent sur la corde.

Ils débutaient dans le métier et, après quelques tordions, ils s’épatèrent sur les pavés au risque de se rompre les os. La foule s’esbaudit. Un pauvre petit diable qui était tombé se releva avec peine, en se frottant le râble. Il souffrait atrocement et, malgré d’héroïques efforts, deux grosses larmes lui jaillirent des yeux et coulèrent sur ses joues. Ses frères le rebutèrent et sa soeur se mit a rire et lui tourna le dos.

Soudain, un grand vieillard, que j’aurais à peine entrevu et que j’appris être le père de cette lignée, s’avança tenant à la main un gobelet d’étain et fit la quête, qu’il versa sur un lambeau de tapis. Son tour allait venir. Son fils aîné étendit un chiffon sur le pavé; le vieux se posa debout, les bras en l’air, et attendit ainsi quelques secondes. J’eus alors tout loisir pour l’examiner. C’était un homme âgé d’une cinquantaine d’années environ. Ses bras nus étaient entourés, comme de menottes, de bracelets de fourrure, et un léger caleçon, en imitation de peau de tigre, jaspé de paillettes d’acier, enveloppait ses reins et le haut de ses cuisses. La peau de son crâne était fendillée comme une terre trop cuite et ses sourcils épais retombaient sur ses yeux, meurtris d’auréoles de bistre. Ses fils apportèrent des poids que l’on présenta aux assistants. Ils n’étaient point en carton saupoudré de limaille, mais bien en fer. On les posa devant ses pieds, il se courba et les saisit. Les muscles de son cou s’enflaient et sillonnaient sa chair comme de grosses cordes. Il se redressa et jongla avec ces masses comme avec des balles de son, les recevant, tantôt sur le biceps, tantôt sur le dos, entre les deux épaules. Cet athlète avait l’air morne de ces vieilles rosses qui tournent, toute la journée, une meule. Quelques tours d’adresse, quelques sauts périlleux terminèrent la séance, et la troupe entra au cabaret et se fit servir à boire.

Il était tard. Le soleil se couchait et les nuages qui l’entouraient semblaient éclaboussés de gouttelettes de sang; il était temps de dîner, j’entrai dans le cabaret et m’attablai à côté d’un gros chat que je caressai et qui me râpa la main avec sa langue. On me servit un dîner mangeable, et, arrivé au moment où l’on roule une cigarette, en prenant son café, je regardai les buveurs qui peuplaient ce bouge.

Les bateleurs étaient assis à gauche; le vieux ronflait, le nez dans son verre; la fille chantait et vidait des rouges bords, et en face d’eux un ivrogne qui s’était chauffé l’armet jusqu’au rouge cerise se racontait à lui-même des histoires si drôles qu’il en riait à se tordre. Je payai mon écot et m’en allai le long de la route, tout doucement. J’atteignis bientôt la rue de la Gaîté. Je sortais de chemins peu fréquentés, et je tombais dans une des rues les plus bruyantes. Des refrains de quadrilles s’échappaient des croisées ouvertes; de grandes affiches, placées à la porte d’un café-concert, annonçaient les débuts de Mme Adèle, chanteuse de genre, et la rentrée de M. Adolphe, comique excentrique; plus loin, à la montre d’un marchand de vins, se dressaient des édifices d’escargots, aux chairs blondes persillées de vert; enfin, ça et là, des pâtissiers étalaient à leurs vitrines des multitudes de gâteaux, les uns en forme de dôme, les autres aplatis et coiffés d’une gelée rosâtre et tremblotante, ceux-ci striés de rayures brunes, ceux-là éventrés et montrant des chairs épaisses d’un jaune soufre. Cette rue justifiait bien son joyeux nom. Tandis que je regardais de tous mes yeux et me demandais si j’allais entrer dans un bal ou dans un concert, je me sens frapper sur l’épaule et j’aperçois un mien ami, un peintre, à la recherche de types fantasques. Enchantés de nous retrouver, nous voguons de conserve, remontons la rue et entrons dans un bal. Quel singulier assemblage que ces bals d’ouvriers! Un mélange de petites ouvrières et de nymphes saturniennes, soûles pour la plupart et battant les murs; des mères de famille avec de petits bébés qui rient et sautent de joie, de braves ouvriers qui s’amusent pour leur argent, et de vils proxénètes. Les filles dansaient et les papas et les mamans buvaient du vin chaud dans les saladiers en porcelaine épaisse. Les enfants se hissaient sur les tables, battaient des mains, riaient, jappaient, appelaient leur grande soeur qui leur souriait et venait les embrasser dès que la ritournelle était finie.

Mais l’heure s’avançait et nous voulions aller au concert; nous sortîmes et entrâmes dans une allée éclairée au gaz et terminée par une porte en velours pisseux. La salle était grande, ornée en haut de masques grimaçants d’un rouge brique avec des cheveux d’un vert criard. Ces masques avaient évidemment la fatuité de représenter les emblèmes de la comédie. La scène était haute et spacieuse, l’orchestre se composait d’une dizaine de musiciens. Chut! silence! la toile se lève, les violons entament un air plaintif, entremêlé de coups de cymbales et de trémolos de flûtes, et un monsieur en habit noir, orné de gants presque propres, l’air fatal, le teint livide, la bouche légèrement dépouillée de ses dents, paraît. Des applaudissements éclatent à la galerie d’en haut, assez mal composée, nous devons le dire. Nous sommes en face d’un premier ténor, Diantre! recueillons-nous. Je ne sais trop, a vrai dire, ce qu’il chante: il brame certains mots et avale les autres. De temps en temps, il jette d’une voix stridente le mot: l’Alsace! On applaudit et il semble convaincu qu’il chante de la musique. Cinq couplets défilent à la suite, puis il fait un profond salut, le bras gauche ballant, la main droite posée sur la poitrine, arrive à la porte du fond, se retourne, fait un nouveau salut et se retire. Des applaudissements frénétiques éclatent de tous côtés, on crie: bis, on frappe des pieds, l’orchestre rejoue les premières mesures de la chanson, et le ténor reparaît, s’incline et dégouzille, de son fausset le plus aigu, le couplet de la chanson le plus poivré de chauvinisme; puis il s’incline de nouveau et se sauve poursuivi par de bruyantes acclamations. Les cris s’éteignent peu à peu, les musiciens causent et s’essuient les mains, et moi j’admire, posée devant moi sur un corps de déjeté, la figure enluminée d’un vieil ivrogne. Quelle richesse de ton! quel superbe coloris! Cet homme appartenait évidemment à l’aristocratie des biberons, car il écartelait de gueules sur champ de sable, et ce n’était assurément pas avec du vermillon et du noir de pêche qu’il s’était blasonné le mufle, mais bien avec la fine fleur du vin et le pur hâle de la crasse.

Je suis distrait, hélas! de ma contemplation par un éclat de cymbales et un roulement de grosse caisse. La porte du fond s’ouvre à deux battants et une femme obèse, au corsage largement échancré, s’avance jusqu’au trou du souffleur, se dandine et braille, en gesticulant:

Ah! rendez-moi mon militaire!

Cette chanson est idiote et canaille; eh bien! à tout prendre, j’aime encore mieux cette ineptie que ces désolantes chansons où le petit oiseau fait la cour à la mousse et où «ton oeil plein de larmes» se bat dans des simulacres de vers avec une rime tristement maladive. Il était onze heures quand nous sortîmes. —Eh bien! dit mon ami, puisque nous avons tant fait que de visiter ce quartier, allons jusqu’au bout, allons chez le marchand de vins; qui sait? ce sera peut-être drôle. Nous étions justement en face de celui à la vitrine duquel se prélassaient des bataillons d’escargots. La boutique était pleine; nous nous faufilons et gagnons une petite salle, au fond, où nous trouvons deux places, entre un charbonnier étonnamment laid et deux petites filles également laides qui dévorent à belles dents des plats d’escargots. Soudain, tous les consommateurs se lèvent et livrent passage a un petit homme, porteur d’une mandoline.

Nous étions, ainsi que je l’appris plus tard, en face de Charles, le fameux chanteur populaire.

Je dessine sa figure en toute hâte. Imaginez une tête falote, un front très haut, velu et gras; un nez retroussé, malin, fureteur, s’agitant par saccades; une moustache en brosse, une bouche lippue, couleur d’aubergine, et des oreilles énormes, plaquées sur les tempes, comme des oreilles d’Indou; un teint fantastique, vert pomme par endroits, jaune safran par d’autres; une voix étonnante, descendant jusqu’aux notes les plus basses, nasillant dans les tons ordinaires. Il était vêtu d’un paletot pointillé de noir et de brun, roide au collet, déchiqueté aux poches, et d’un pantalon aux teintes de bitume. Il tenait à la main gauche une grande mandoline, appuyait son menton près des cordes et chatouillait de la main droite le ventre de l’instrument qui gémissait de larmoyante façon. Il se cambrait et regardait autour de lui avec fierté. Il chanta de sa plus forte voix le Chant de la Canaille, recueillit les plus précieux suffrages, avala un verre de vin que je lui présentai et se disposait à sortir quand il fut rappelé et instamment prié de régaler les assistants de: Châteaudun. Il chantait les couplets et tout le monde reprenait en choeur le refrain:

Les canons vomissaient la foudre

Sur Châteaudun… Qu’importe à ce pays!

Il préfère se voir en poudre

Que de se rendre aux Prussiens ennemis!

Sa chanson terminée, il sortit. —Nous en fîmes autant et allâmes nous coucher.

kempis.nl poetry magazine

More in: -Le Drageoir aux épices, Huysmans, J.-K.

Edgar Allan Poe: Eleonora

Edgar Allan Poe

(1809-1849)

Eleonora

I am come of a race noted for vigor of fancy and ardor of passion. Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence — whether much that is glorious- whether all that is profound — does not spring from disease of thought — from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in awakening, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret. In snatches, they learn something of the wisdom which is of good, and more of the mere knowledge which is of evil. They penetrate, however, rudderless or compassless into the vast ocean of the “light ineffable,” and again, like the adventures of the Nubian geographer, “agressi sunt mare tenebrarum, quid in eo esset exploraturi.”

We will say, then, that I am mad. I grant, at least, that there are two distinct conditions of my mental existence — the condition of a lucid reason, not to be disputed, and belonging to the memory of events forming the first epoch of my life — and a condition of shadow and doubt, appertaining to the present, and to the recollection of what constitutes the second great era of my being. Therefore, what I shall tell of the earlier period, believe; and to what I may relate of the later time, give only such credit as may seem due, or doubt it altogether, or, if doubt it ye cannot, then play unto its riddle the Oedipus.

She whom I loved in youth, and of whom I now pen calmly and distinctly these remembrances, was the sole daughter of the only sister of my mother long departed. Eleonora was the name of my cousin. We had always dwelled together, beneath a tropical sun, in the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass. No unguided footstep ever came upon that vale; for it lay away up among a range of giant hills that hung beetling around about it, shutting out the sunlight from its sweetest recesses. No path was trodden in its vicinity; and, to reach our happy home, there was need of putting back, with force, the foliage of many thousands of forest trees, and of crushing to death the glories of many millions of fragrant flowers. Thus it was that we lived all alone, knowing nothing of the world without the valley — I, and my cousin, and her mother.

From the dim regions beyond the mountains at the upper end of our encircled domain, there crept out a narrow and deep river, brighter than all save the eyes of Eleonora; and, winding stealthily about in mazy courses, it passed away, at length, through a shadowy gorge, among hills still dimmer than those whence it had issued. We called it the “River of Silence”; for there seemed to be a hushing influence in its flow. No murmur arose from its bed, and so gently it wandered along, that the pearly pebbles upon which we loved to gaze, far down within its bosom, stirred not at all, but lay in a motionless content, each in its own old station, shining on gloriously forever.

The margin of the river, and of the many dazzling rivulets that glided through devious ways into its channel, as well as the spaces that extended from the margins away down into the depths of the streams until they reached the bed of pebbles at the bottom, — these spots, not less than the whole surface of the valley, from the river to the mountains that girdled it in, were carpeted all by a soft green grass, thick, short, perfectly even, and vanilla-perfumed, but so besprinkled throughout with the yellow buttercup, the white daisy, the purple violet, and the ruby-red asphodel, that its exceeding beauty spoke to our hearts in loud tones, of the love and of the glory of God.

And, here and there, in groves about this grass, like wildernesses of dreams, sprang up fantastic trees, whose tall slender stems stood not upright, but slanted gracefully toward the light that peered at noon-day into the centre of the valley. Their mark was speckled with the vivid alternate splendor of ebony and silver, and was smoother than all save the cheeks of Eleonora; so that, but for the brilliant green of the huge leaves that spread from their summits in long, tremulous lines, dallying with the Zephyrs, one might have fancied them giant serpents of Syria doing homage to their sovereign the Sun.

Hand in hand about this valley, for fifteen years, roamed I with Eleonora before Love entered within our hearts. It was one evening at the close of the third lustrum of her life, and of the fourth of my own, that we sat, locked in each other’s embrace, beneath the serpent-like trees, and looked down within the water of the River of Silence at our images therein. We spoke no words during the rest of that sweet day, and our words even upon the morrow were tremulous and few. We had drawn the God Eros from that wave, and now we felt that he had enkindled within us the fiery souls of our forefathers. The passions which had for centuries distinguished our race, came thronging with the fancies for which they had been equally noted, and together breathed a delirious bliss over the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass. A change fell upon all things. Strange, brilliant flowers, star-shaped, burn out upon the trees where no flowers had been known before. The tints of the green carpet deepened; and when, one by one, the white daisies shrank away, there sprang up in place of them, ten by ten of the ruby-red asphodel. And life arose in our paths; for the tall flamingo, hitherto unseen, with all gay glowing birds, flaunted his scarlet plumage before us. The golden and silver fish haunted the river, out of the bosom of which issued, little by little, a murmur that swelled, at length, into a lulling melody more divine than that of the harp of Aeolus-sweeter than all save the voice of Eleonora. And now, too, a voluminous cloud, which we had long watched in the regions of Hesper, floated out thence, all gorgeous in crimson and gold, and settling in peace above us, sank, day by day, lower and lower, until its edges rested upon the tops of the mountains, turning all their dimness into magnificence, and shutting us up, as if forever, within a magic prison-house of grandeur and of glory.

The loveliness of Eleonora was that of the Seraphim; but she was a maiden artless and innocent as the brief life she had led among the flowers. No guile disguised the fervor of love which animated her heart, and she examined with me its inmost recesses as we walked together in the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass, and discoursed of the mighty changes which had lately taken place therein.

At length, having spoken one day, in tears, of the last sad change which must befall Humanity, she thenceforward dwelt only upon this one sorrowful theme, interweaving it into all our converse, as, in the songs of the bard of Schiraz, the same images are found occurring, again and again, in every impressive variation of phrase.

She had seen that the finger of Death was upon her bosom — that, like the ephemeron, she had been made perfect in loveliness only to die; but the terrors of the grave to her lay solely in a consideration which she revealed to me, one evening at twilight, by the banks of the River of Silence. She grieved to think that, having entombed her in the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass, I would quit forever its happy recesses, transferring the love which now was so passionately her own to some maiden of the outer and everyday world. And, then and there, I threw myself hurriedly at the feet of Eleonora, and offered up a vow, to herself and to Heaven, that I would never bind myself in marriage to any daughter of Earth — that I would in no manner prove recreant to her dear memory, or to the memory of the devout affection with which she had blessed me. And I called the Mighty Ruler of the Universe to witness the pious solemnity of my vow. And the curse which I invoked of Him and of her, a saint in Helusion should I prove traitorous to that promise, involved a penalty the exceeding great horror of which will not permit me to make record of it here. And the bright eyes of Eleonora grew brighter at my words; and she sighed as if a deadly burthen had been taken from her breast; and she trembled and very bitterly wept; but she made acceptance of the vow, (for what was she but a child?) and it made easy to her the bed of her death. And she said to me, not many days afterward, tranquilly dying, that, because of what I had done for the comfort of her spirit she would watch over me in that spirit when departed, and, if so it were permitted her return to me visibly in the watches of the night; but, if this thing were, indeed, beyond the power of the souls in Paradise, that she would, at least, give me frequent indications of her presence, sighing upon me in the evening winds, or filling the air which I breathed with perfume from the censers of the angels. And, with these words upon her lips, she yielded up her innocent life, putting an end to the first epoch of my own.

Thus far I have faithfully said. But as I pass the barrier in Times path, formed by the death of my beloved, and proceed with the second era of my existence, I feel that a shadow gathers over my brain, and I mistrust the perfect sanity of the record. But let me on. — Years dragged themselves along heavily, and still I dwelled within the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass; but a second change had come upon all things. The star-shaped flowers shrank into the stems of the trees, and appeared no more. The tints of the green carpet faded; and, one by one, the ruby-red asphodels withered away; and there sprang up, in place of them, ten by ten, dark, eye-like violets, that writhed uneasily and were ever encumbered with dew. And Life departed from our paths; for the tall flamingo flaunted no longer his scarlet plumage before us, but flew sadly from the vale into the hills, with all the gay glowing birds that had arrived in his company. And the golden and silver fish swam down through the gorge at the lower end of our domain and bedecked the sweet river never again. And the lulling melody that had been softer than the wind-harp of Aeolus, and more divine than all save the voice of Eleonora, it died little by little away, in murmurs growing lower and lower, until the stream returned, at length, utterly, into the solemnity of its original silence. And then, lastly, the voluminous cloud uprose, and, abandoning the tops of the mountains to the dimness of old, fell back into the regions of Hesper, and took away all its manifold golden and gorgeous glories from the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass.

Yet the promises of Eleonora were not forgotten; for I heard the sounds of the swinging of the censers of the angels; and streams of a holy perfume floated ever and ever about the valley; and at lone hours, when my heart beat heavily, the winds that bathed my brow came unto me laden with soft sighs; and indistinct murmurs filled often the night air, and once — oh, but once only! I was awakened from a slumber, like the slumber of death, by the pressing of spiritual lips upon my own.

But the void within my heart refused, even thus, to be filled. I longed for the love which had before filled it to overflowing. At length the valley pained me through its memories of Eleonora, and I left it for ever for the vanities and the turbulent triumphs of the world.

I found myself within a strange city, where all things might have served to blot from recollection the sweet dreams I had dreamed so long in the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass. The pomps and pageantries of a stately court, and the mad clangor of arms, and the radiant loveliness of women, bewildered and intoxicated my brain. But as yet my soul had proved true to its vows, and the indications of the presence of Eleonora were still given me in the silent hours of the night. Suddenly these manifestations they ceased, and the world grew dark before mine eyes, and I stood aghast at the burning thoughts which possessed, at the terrible temptations which beset me; for there came from some far, far distant and unknown land, into the gay court of the king I served, a maiden to whose beauty my whole recreant heart yielded at once — at whose footstool I bowed down without a struggle, in the most ardent, in the most abject worship of love. What, indeed, was my passion for the young girl of the valley in comparison with the fervor, and the delirium, and the spirit-lifting ecstasy of adoration with which I poured out my whole soul in tears at the feet of the ethereal Ermengarde? — Oh, bright was the seraph Ermengarde! and in that knowledge I had room for none other. — Oh, divine was the angel Ermengarde! and as I looked down into the depths of her memorial eyes, I thought only of them — and of her.

I wedded; — nor dreaded the curse I had invoked; and its bitterness was not visited upon me. And once — but once again in the silence of the night; there came through my lattice the soft sighs which had forsaken me; and they modelled themselves into familiar and sweet voice, saying:

“Sleep in peace! — for the Spirit of Love reigneth and ruleth, and, in taking to thy passionate heart her who is Ermengarde, thou art absolved, for reasons which shall be made known to thee in Heaven, of thy vows unto Eleonora.”

Edgar Allan Poe: Eleonora

kempis.nl poetry magazine

More in: Archive O-P, Edgar Allan Poe, Poe, Edgar Allan

Joseph Conrad: The Secret Sharer

Joseph Conrad
(1857-1924)

The Secret Sharer

On my right hand there were lines of fishing stakes resembling a mysterious system of half-submerged bamboo fences, incomprehensible in its division of the domain of tropical fishes, and crazy of aspect as if abandoned forever by some nomad tribe of fishermen now gone to the other end of the ocean; for there was no sign of human habitation as far as the eye could reach. To the left a group of barren islets, suggesting ruins of stone walls, towers, and blockhouses, had its foundations set in a blue sea that itself looked solid, so still and stable did it lie below my feet; even the track of light from the westering sun shone smoothly, without that animated glitter which tells of an imperceptible ripple. And when I turned my head to take a parting glance at the tug which had just left us anchored outside the bar, I saw the straight line of the flat shore joined to the stable sea, edge to edge, with a perfect and unmarked closeness, in one leveled floor half brown, half blue under the enormous dome of the sky. Corresponding in their insignificance to the islets of the sea, two small clumps of trees, one on each side of the only fault in the impeccable joint, marked the mouth of the river Meinam we had just left on the first preparatory stage of our homeward journey; and, far back on the inland level, a larger and loftier mass, the grove surrounding the great Paknam pagoda, was the only thing on which the eye could rest from the vain task of exploring the monotonous sweep of the horizon. Here and there gleams as of a few scattered pieces of silver marked the windings of the great river; and on the nearest of them, just within the bar, the tug steaming right into the land became lost to my sight, hull and funnel and masts, as though the impassive earth had swallowed her up without an effort, without a tremor. My eye followed the light cloud of her smoke, now here, now there, above the plain, according to the devious curves of the stream, but always fainter and farther away, till I lost it at last behind the miter-shaped hill of the great pagoda. And then I was left alone with my ship, anchored at the head of the Gulf of Siam. She floated at the starting point of a long journey, very still in an immense stillness, the shadows of her spars flung far to the eastward by the setting sun. At that moment I was alone on her decks. There was not a sound in her – and around us nothing moved, nothing lived, not a canoe on the water, not a bird in the air, not a cloud in the sky. In this breathless pause at the threshold of a long passage we seemed to be measuring our fitness for a long and arduous enterprise, the appointed task of both our existences to be carried out, far from all human eyes, with only sky and sea for spectators and for judges.

There must have been some glare in the air to interfere with one’s sight, because it was only just before the sun left us that my roaming eyes made out beyond the highest ridges of the principal islet of the group something which did away with the solemnity of perfect solitude. The tide of darkness flowed on swiftly; and with tropical suddenness a swarm of stars came out above the shadowy earth, while I lingered yet, my hand resting lightly on my ship’s rail as if on the shoulder of a trusted friend. But, with all that multitude of celestial bodies staring down at one, the comfort of quiet communion with her was gone for good. And there were also disturbing sounds by this time – voices, footsteps forward; the steward flitted along the main-deck, a busily ministering spirit; a hand bell tinkled urgently under the poop deck. …

I found my two officers waiting for me near the supper table, in the lighted cuddy. We sat down at once, and as I helped the chief mate, I said:

“Are you aware that there is a ship anchored inside the islands? I saw her mastheads above the ridge as the sun went down.”

He raised sharply his simple face, overcharged by a terrible growth of whisker, and emitted his usual ejaculations: “Bless my soul, sir! You don’t say so!”

My second mate was a round-cheeked, silent young man, grave beyond his years, I thought; but as our eyes happened to meet I detected a slight quiver on his lips. I looked down at once. It was not my part to encourage sneering on board my ship. It must be said, too, that I knew very little of my officers. In consequence of certain events of no particular significance, except to myself, I had been appointed to the command only a fortnight before. Neither did I know much of the hands forward. All these people had been together for eighteen months or so, and my position was that of the only stranger on board. I mention this because it has some bearing on what is to follow. But what I felt most was my being a stranger to the ship; and if all the truth must be told, I was somewhat of a stranger to myself. The youngest man on board (barring the second mate), and untried as yet by a position of the fullest responsibility, I was willing to take the adequacy of the others for granted. They had simply to be equal to their tasks; but I wondered how far I should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one’s own personality every man sets up for himself secretly.

Meantime the chief mate, with an almost visible effect of collaboration on the part of his round eyes and frightful whiskers, was trying to evolve a theory of the anchored ship. His dominant trait was to take all things into earnest consideration. He was of a painstaking turn of mind. As he used to say, he “liked to account to himself” for practically everything that came in his way, down to a miserable scorpion he had found in his cabin a week before. The why and the wherefore of that scorpion – how it got on board and came to select his room rather than the pantry (which was a dark place and more what a scorpion would be partial to), and how on earth it managed to drown itself in the inkwell of his writing desk – had exercised him infinitely. The ship within the islands was much more easily accounted for; and just as we were about to rise from table he made his pronouncement. She was, he doubted not, a ship from home lately arrived. Probably she drew too much water to cross the bar except at the top of spring tides. Therefore she went into that natural harbor to wait for a few days in preference to remaining in an open roadstead.

“That’s so,” confirmed the second mate, suddenly, in his slightly hoarse voice. “She draws over twenty feet. She’s the Liverpool ship Sephora with a cargo of coal. Hundred and twenty-three days from Cardiff.”

We looked at him in surprise.

“The tugboat skipper told me when he came on board for your letters, sir,” explained the young man. “He expects to take her up the river the day after tomorrow.”

After thus overwhelming us with the extent of his information he slipped out of the cabin. The mate observed regretfully that he “could not account for that young fellow’s whims.” What prevented him telling us all about it at once, he wanted to know.

I detained him as he was making a move. For the last two days the crew had had plenty of hard work, and the night before they had very little sleep. I felt painfully that I – a stranger – was doing something unusual when I directed him to let all hands turn in without setting an anchor watch. I proposed to keep on deck myself till one o’clock or thereabouts. I would get the second mate to relieve me at that hour.

“He will turn out the cook and the steward at four,” I concluded, “and then give you a call. Of course at the slightest sign of any sort of wind we’ll have the hands up and make a start at once.”

He concealed his astonishment. “Very well, sir.” Outside the cuddy he put his head in the second mate’s door to inform him of my unheard-of caprice to take a five hours’ anchor watch on myself. I heard the other raise his voice incredulously – “What? The Captain himself?” Then a few more murmurs, a door closed, then another. A few moments later I went on deck.

My strangeness, which had made me sleepless, had prompted that unconventional arrangement, as if I had expected in those solitary hours of the night to get on terms with the ship of which I knew nothing, manned by men of whom I knew very little more. Fast alongside a wharf, littered like any ship in port with a tangle of unrelated things, invaded by unrelated shore people, I had hardly seen her yet properly. Now, as she lay cleared for sea, the stretch of her main-deck seemed to me very find under the stars. Very fine, very roomy for her size, and very inviting. I descended the poop and paced the waist, my mind picturing to myself the coming passage through the Malay Archipelago, down the Indian Ocean, and up the Atlantic. All its phases were familiar enough to me, every characteristic, all the alternatives which were likely to face me on the high seas – everything! … except the novel responsibility of command. But I took heart from the reasonable thought that the ship was like other ships, the men like other men, and that the sea was not likely to keep any special surprises expressly for my discomfiture.

Arrived at that comforting conclusion, I bethought myself of a cigar and went below to get it. All was still down there. Everybody at the after end of the ship was sleeping profoundly. I came out again on the quarter-deck, agreeably at ease in my sleeping suit on that warm breathless night, barefooted, a glowing cigar in my teeth, and, going forward, I was met by the profound silence of the fore end of the ship. Only as I passed the door of the forecastle, I heard a deep, quiet, trustful sigh of some sleeper inside. And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose.

The riding light in the forerigging burned with a clear, untroubled, as if symbolic, flame, confident and bright in the mysterious shades of the night. Passing on my way aft along the other side of the ship, I observed that the rope side ladder, put over, no doubt, for the master of the tug when he came to fetch away our letters, had not been hauled in as it should have been. I became annoyed at this, for exactitude in some small matters is the very soul of discipline. Then I reflected that I had myself peremptorily dismissed my officers from duty, and by my own act had prevented the anchor watch being formally set and things properly attended to. I asked myself whether it was wise ever to interfere with the established routine of duties even from the kindest of motives. My action might have made me appear eccentric. Goodness only knew how that absurdly whiskered mate would “account” for my conduct, and what the whole ship thought of that informality of their new captain. I was vexed with myself.

Not from compunction certainly, but, as it were mechanically, I proceeded to get the ladder in myself. Now a side ladder of that sort is a light affair and comes in easily, yet my vigorous tug, which should have brought it flying on board, merely recoiled upon my body in a totally unexpected jerk. What the devil! … I was so astounded by the immovableness of that ladder that I remained stockstill, trying to account for it to myself like that imbecile mate of mine. In the end, of course, I put my head over the rail.

The side of the ship made an opaque belt of shadow on the darkling glassy shimmer of the sea. But I saw at once something elongated and pale floating very close to the ladder. Before I could form a guess a faint flash of phosphorescent light, which seemed to issue suddenly from the naked body of a man, flickered in the sleeping water with the elusive, silent play of summer lightning in a night sky. With a gasp I saw revealed to my stare a pair of feet, the long legs, a broad livid back immersed right up to the neck in a greenish cadaverous glow. One hand, awash, clutched the bottom rung of the ladder. He was complete but for the head. A headless corpse! The cigar dropped out of my gaping mouth with a tiny plop and a short hiss quite audible in the absolute stillness of all things under heaven. At that I suppose he raised up his face, a dimly pale oval in the shadow of the ship’s side. But even then I could only barely make out down there the shape of his black-haired head. However, it was enough for the horrid, frost-bound sensation which had gripped me about the chest to pass off. The moment of vain exclamations was past, too. I only climbed on the spare spar and leaned over the rail as far as I could, to bring my eyes nearer to that mystery floating alongside.

As he hung by the ladder, like a resting swimmer, the sea lightning played about his limbs at every stir; and he appeared in it ghastly, silvery, fishlike. He remained as mute as a fish, too. He made no motion to get out of the water, either. It was inconceivable that he should not attempt to come on board, and strangely troubling to suspect that perhaps he did not want to. And my first words were prompted by just that troubled incertitude.

“What’s the matter?” I asked in my ordinary tone, speaking down to the face upturned exactly under mine.

“Cramp,” it answered, no louder. Then slightly anxious, “I say, no need to call anyone.”

“I was not going to,” I said.

“Are you alone on deck?”

“Yes.”

I had somehow the impression that he was on the point of letting go the ladder to swim away beyond my ken – mysterious as he came. But, for the moment, this being appearing as if he had risen from the bottom of the sea (it was certainly the nearest land to the ship) wanted only to know the time. I told him. And he, down there, tentatively:

“I suppose your captain’s turned in?”

“I am sure he isn’t,” I said.

He seemed to struggle with himself, for I heard something like the low, bitter murmur of doubt. “What’s the good?” His next words came out with a hesitating effort.

“Look here, my man. Could you call him out quietly?”

I thought the time Had come to declare myself.

“I am the captain.”

I heard a “By Jove!” whispered at the level of the water. The phosphorescence flashed in the swirl of the water all about his limbs, his other hand seized the ladder.

“My name’s Leggatt.”

The voice was calm and resolute. A good voice. The self-possession of that man had somehow induced a corresponding state in myself. It was very quietly that I remarked:

“You must be a good swimmer.”

“Yes. I’ve been in the water practically since nine o’clock. The question for me now is whether I am to let go this ladder and go on swimming till I sink from exhaustion, or – to come on board here.”

I felt this was no mere formula of desperate speech, but a real alternative in the view of a strong soul. I should have gathered from this that he was young; indeed, it is only the young who are ever confronted by such clear issues. But at the time it was pure intuition on my part. A mysterious communication was established already between us two – in the face of that silent, darkened tropical sea. I was young, too; young enough to make no comment. The man in the water began suddenly to climb up the ladder, and I hastened away from the rail to fetch some clothes.

Before entering the cabin I stood still, listening in the lobby at the foot of the stairs. A faint snore came through the closed door of the chief mate’s room. The second mate’s door was on the hook, but the darkness in there was absolutely soundless. He, too, was young and could sleep like a stone. Remained the steward, but he was not likely to wake up before he was called. I got a sleeping suit out of my room and, coming back on deck, saw the naked man from the sea sitting on the main hatch, glimmering white in the darkness, his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. In a moment he had concealed his damp body in a sleeping suit of the same gray-stripe pattern as the one I was wearing and followed me like my double on the poop. Together we moved right aft, barefooted, silent.

“What is it?” I asked in a deadened voice, taking the lighted lamp out of the binnacle, and raising it to his face.

“An ugly business.”

He had rather regular features; a good mouth; light eyes under somewhat heavy, dark eyebrows; a smooth, square forehead; no growth on his cheeks; a small, brown mustache, and a well-shaped, round chin. His expression was concentrated, meditative, under the inspecting light of the lamp I held up to his face; such as a man thinking hard in solitude might wear. My sleeping suit was just right for his size. A well-knit young fellow of twenty-five at most. He caught his lower lip with the edge of white, even teeth.

“Yes,” I said, replacing the lamp in the binnacle. The warm, heavy tropical night closed upon his head again.

“There’s a ship over there,” he murmured.

“Yes, I know. The Sephora. Did you know of us?”

“Hadn’t the slightest idea. I am the mate of her – ” He paused and corrected himself. “I should say I was.”

“Aha! Something wrong?”

“Yes. Very wrong indeed. I’ve killed a man.”

“What do you mean? Just now?”

“No, on the passage. Weeks ago. Thirty-nine south. When I say a man – ”

“Fit of temper,” I suggested, confidently.

The shadowy, dark head, like mine, seemed to nod imperceptibly above the ghostly gray of my sleeping suit. It was, in the night, as though I had been faced by my own reflection in the depths of a somber and immense mirror.

“A pretty thing to have to own up to for a Conway boy,” murmured my double, distinctly.

“You’re a Conway boy?”

“I am,” he said, as if startled. Then, slowly … “Perhaps you too – ”

It was so; but being a couple of years older I had left before he joined. After a quick interchange of dates a silence fell; and I thought suddenly of my absurd mate with his terrific whiskers and the “Bless my soul – you don’t say so” type of intellect. My double gave me an inkling of his thoughts by saying: “My father’s a parson in Norfolk. Do you see me before a judge and jury on that charge? For myself I can’t see the necessity. There are fellows that an angel from heaven – And I am not that. He was one of those creatures that are just simmering all the time with a silly sort of wickedness. Miserable devils that have no business to live at all. He wouldn’t do his duty and wouldn’t let anybody else do theirs. But what’s the good of talking! You know well enough the sort of ill-conditioned snarling cur – ”

He appealed to me as if our experiences had been as identical as our clothes. And I knew well enough the pestiferous danger of such a character where there are no means of legal repression. And I knew well enough also that my double there was no homicidal ruffian. I did not think of asking him for details, and he told me the story roughly in brusque, disconnected sentences. I needed no more. I saw it all going on as though I were myself inside that other sleeping suit.

“It happened while we were setting a reefed foresail, at dusk. Reefed foresail! You understand the sort of weather. The only sail we had left to keep the ship running; so you may guess what it had been like for days. Anxious sort of job, that. He gave me some of his cursed insolence at the sheet. I tell you I was overdone with this terrific weather that seemed to have no end to it. Terrific, I tell you – and a deep ship. I believe the fellow himself was half crazed with funk. It was no time for gentlemanly reproof, so I turned round and felled him like an ox. He up and at me. We closed just as an awful sea made for the ship. All hands saw it coming and took to the rigging, but I had him by the throat, and went on shaking him like a rat, the men above us yelling, ‘Look out! look out!’ Then a crash as if the sky had fallen on my head. They say that for over ten minutes hardly anything was to be seen of the ship – just the three masts and a bit of the forecastle head and of the poop all awash driving along in a smother of foam. It was a miracle that they found us, jammed together behind the forebitts. It’s clear that I meant business, because I was holding him by the throat still when they picked us up. He was black in the face. It was too much for them. It seems they rushed us aft together, gripped as we were, screaming ‘Murder!’ like a lot of lunatics, and broke into the cuddy. And the ship running for her life, touch and go all the time, any minute her last in a sea fit to turn your hair gray only a-looking at it. I understand that the skipper, too, started raving like the rest of them. The man had been deprived of sleep for more than a week, and to have this sprung on him at the height of a furious gale nearly drove him out of his mind. I wonder they didn’t fling me overboard after getting the carcass of their precious shipmate out of my fingers. They had rather a job to separate us, I’ve been told. A sufficiently fierce story to make an old judge and a respectable jury sit up a bit. The first thing I heard when I came to myself was the maddening howling of that endless gale, and on that the voice of the old man. He was hanging on to my bunk, staring into my face out of his sou’wester.

“‘Mr. Leggatt, you have killed a man. You can act no longer as chief mate of this ship.'”

His care to subdue his voice made it sound monotonous. He rested a hand on the end of the skylight to steady himself with, and all that time did not stir a limb, so far as I could see. “Nice little tale for a quiet tea party,” he concluded in the same tone.

One of my hands, too, rested on the end of the skylight; neither did I stir a limb, so far as I knew. We stood less than a foot from each other. It occurred to me that if old “Bless my soul – you don’t say so” were to put his head up the companion and catch sight of us, he would think he was seeing double, or imagine himself come upon a scene of weird witchcraft; the strange captain having a quiet confabulation by the wheel with his own gray ghost. I became very much concerned to prevent anything of the sort. I heard the other’s soothing undertone.

“My father’s a parson in Norfolk,” it said. Evidently he had forgotten he had told me this important fact before. Truly a nice little tale.

“You had better slip down into my stateroom now,” I said, moving off stealthily. My double followed my movements; our bare feet made no sound; I let him in, closed the door with care, and, after giving a call to the second mate, returned on deck for my relief.

“Not much sign of any wind yet,” I remarked when he approached.

“No, sir. Not much,” he assented, sleepily, in his hoarse voice, with just enough deference, no more, and barely suppressing a yawn.

“Well, that’s all you have to look out for. You have got your orders.”

“Yes, sir.”

I paced a turn or two on the poop and saw him take up his position face forward with his elbow in the ratlines of the mizzen rigging before I went below. The mate’s faint snoring was still going on peacefully. The cuddy lamp was burning over the table on which stood a vase with flowers, a polite attention from the ship’s provision merchant – the last flowers we should see for the next three months at the very least. Two bunches of bananas hung from the beam symmetrically, one on each side of the rudder casing. Everything was as before in the ship – except that two of her captain’s sleeping suits were simultaneously in use, one motionless in the cuddy, the other keeping very still in the captain’s stateroom.

It must be explained here that my cabin had the form of the capital letter L, the door being within the angle and opening into the short part of the letter. A couch was to the left, the bed place to the right; my writing desk and the chronometers’ table faced the door. But anyone opening it, unless he stepped right inside, had no view of what I call the long (or vertical) part of the letter. It contained some lockers surmounted by a bookcase; and a few clothes, a thick jacket or two, caps, oilskin coat, and such like, hung on hooks. There was at the bottom of that part a door opening into my bathroom, which could be entered also directly from the saloon. But that way was never used.

The mysterious arrival had discovered the advantage of this particular shape. Entering my room, lighted strongly by a big bulkhead lamp swung on gimbals above my writing desk, I did not see him anywhere till he stepped out quietly from behind the coats hung in the recessed part.

“I heard somebody moving about, and went in there at once,” he whispered.

I, too, spoke under my breath.

“Nobody is likely to come in here without knocking and getting permission.”

He nodded. His face was thin and the sunburn faded, as though he had been ill. And no wonder. He had been, I heard presently, kept under arrest in his cabin for nearly seven weeks. But there was nothing sickly in his eyes or in his expression. He was not a bit like me, really; yet, as we stood leaning over my bed place, whispering side by side, with our dark heads together and our backs to the door, anybody bold enough to open it stealthily would have been treated to the uncanny sight of a double captain busy talking in whispers with his other self.

“But all this doesn’t tell me how you came to hang on to our side ladder,” I inquired, in the hardly audible murmurs we used, after he had told me something more of the proceedings on board the Sephora once the bad weather was over.

“When we sighted Java Head I had had time to think all those matters out several times over. I had six weeks of doing nothing else, and with only an hour or so every evening for a tramp on the quarter-deck.”

He whispered, his arms folded on the side of my bed place, staring through the open port. And I could imagine perfectly the manner of this thinking out – a stubborn if not a steadfast operation; something of which I should have been perfectly incapable.

“I reckoned it would be dark before we closed with the land,” he continued, so low that I had to strain my hearing near as we were to each other, shoulder touching shoulder almost. “So I asked to speak to the old man. He always seemed very sick when he came to see me – as if he could not look me in the face. You know, that foresail saved the ship. She was too deep to have run long under bare poles. And it was I that managed to set it for him. Anyway, he came. When I had him in my cabin – he stood by the door looking at me as if I had the halter round my neck already – I asked him right away to leave my cabin door unlocked at night while the ship was going through Sunda Straits. There would be the Java coast within two or three miles, off Angier Point. I wanted nothing more. I’ve had a prize for swimming my second year in the Conway.”

“I can believe it,” I breathed out.

“God only knows why they locked me in every night. To see some of their faces you’d have thought they were afraid I’d go about at night strangling people. Am I a murdering brute? Do I look it? By Jove! If I had been he wouldn’t have trusted himself like that into my room. You’ll say I might have chucked him aside and bolted out, there and then – it was dark already. Well, no. And for the same reason I wouldn’t think of trying to smash the door. There would have been a rush to stop me at the noise, and I did not mean to get into a confounded scrimmage. Somebody else might have got killed – for I would not have broken out only to get chucked back, and I did not want any more of that work. He refused, looking more sick than ever. He was afraid of the men, and also of that old second mate of his who had been sailing with him for years – a gray-headed old humbug; and his steward, too, had been with him devil knows how long – seventeen years or more – a dogmatic sort of loafer who hated me like poison, just because I was the chief mate. No chief mate ever made more than one voyage in the Sephora, you know. Those two old chaps ran the ship. Devil only knows what the skipper wasn’t afraid of (all his nerve went to pieces altogether in that hellish spell of bad weather we had) – of what the law would do to him – of his wife, perhaps. Oh, yes! she’s on board. Though I don’t think she would have meddled. She would have been only too glad to have me out of the ship in any way. The ‘brand of Cain’ business, don’t you see. That’s all right. I was ready enough to go off wandering on the face of the earth – and that was price enough to pay for an Abel of that sort. Anyhow, he wouldn’t listen to me. ‘This thing must take its course. I represent the law here.’ He was shaking like a leaf. ‘So you won’t?’ ‘No!’ ‘Then I hope you will be able to sleep on that,’ I said, and turned my back on him. ‘I wonder that you can,’ cries he, and locks the door.

“Well after that, I couldn’t. Not very well. That was three weeks ago. We have had a slow passage through the Java Sea; drifted about Carimata for ten days. When we anchored here they thought, I suppose, it was all right. The nearest land (and that’s five miles) is the ship’s destination; the consul would soon set about catching me; and there would have been no object in bolding to these islets there. I don’t suppose there’s a drop of water on them. I don’t know how it was, but tonight that steward, after bringing me my supper, went out to let me eat it, and left the door unlocked. And I ate it – all there was, too. After I had finished I strolled out on the quarter-deck. I don’t know that I meant to do anything. A breath of fresh air was all I wanted, I believe. Then a sudden temptation came over me. I kicked off my slippers and was in the water before I had made up my mind fairly. Somebody heard the splash and they raised an awful hullabaloo. ‘He’s gone! Lower the boats! He’s committed suicide! No, he’s swimming.’ Certainly I was swimming. It’s not so easy for a swimmer like me to commit suicide by drowning. I landed on the nearest islet before the boat left the ship’s side. I heard them pulling about in the dark, hailing, and so on, but after a bit they gave up. Everything quieted down and the anchorage became still as death. I sat down on a stone and began to think. I felt certain they would start searching for me at daylight. There was no place to hide on those stony things – and if there had been, what would have been the good? But now I was clear of that ship, I was not going back. So after a while I took off all my clothes, tied them up in a bundle with a stone inside, and dropped them in the deep water on the outer side of that islet. That was suicide enough for me. Let them think what they liked, but I didn’t mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank – but that’s not the same thing. I struck out for another of these little islands, and it was from that one that I first saw your riding light. Something to swim for. I went on easily, and on the way I came upon a flat rock a foot or two above water. In the daytime, I dare say, you might make it out with a glass from your poop. I scrambled up on it and rested myself for a bit. Then I made another start. That last spell must have been over a mile.”

His whisper was getting fainter and fainter, and all the time he stared straight out through the porthole, in which there was not even a star to be seen. I had not interrupted him. There was something that made comment impossible in his narrative, or perhaps in himself; a sort of feeling, a quality, which I can’t find a name for. And when he ceased, all I found was a futile whisper: “So you swam for our light?”

“Yes – straight for it. It was something to swim for. I couldn’t see any stars low down because the coast was in the way, and I couldn’t see the land, either. The water was like glass. One might have been swimming in a confounded thousand-feet deep cistern with no place for scrambling out anywhere; but what I didn’t like was the notion of swimming round and round like a crazed bullock before I gave out; and as I didn’t mean to go back. . . No. Do you see me being hauled back, stark naked, off one of these little islands by the scruff of the neck and fighting like a wild beast? Somebody would have got killed for certain, and I did not want any of that. So I went on. Then your ladder – ”

“Why didn’t you hail the ship?” I asked, a little louder.

He touched my shoulder lightly. Lazy footsteps came right over our heads and stopped. The second mate had crossed from the other side of the poop and might have been hanging over the rail for all we knew.

“He couldn’t hear us talking – could he?” My double breathed into my very ear, anxiously.

His anxiety was in answer, a sufficient answer, to the question I had put to him. An answer containing all the difficulty of that situation. I closed the porthole quietly, to make sure. A louder word might have been overheard.

“Who’s that?” he whispered then.

“My second mate. But I don’t know much more of the fellow than you do.”

And I told him a little about myself. I had been appointed to take charge while I least expected anything of the sort, not quite a fortnight ago. I didn’t know either the ship or the people. Hadn’t had the time in port to look about me or size anybody up. And as to the crew, all they knew was that I was appointed to take the ship home. For the rest, I was almost as much of a stranger on board as himself, I said. And at the moment I felt it most acutely. I felt that it would take very little to make me a suspect person in the eyes of the ship’s company.

He had turned about meantime; and we, the two strangers in the ship, faced each other in identical attitudes.

“Your ladder – ” he murmured, after a silence. “Who’d have thought of finding a ladder hanging over at night in a ship anchored out here! I felt just then a very unpleasant faintness. After the life I’ve been leading for nine weeks, anybody would have got out of condition. I wasn’t capable of swimming round as far as your rudder chains. And, lo and behold! there was a ladder to get hold of. After I gripped it I said to myself, ‘What’s the good?’ When I saw a man’s head looking over I thought I would swim away presently and leave him shouting – in whatever language it was. I didn’t mind being looked at. I – I liked it. And then you speaking to me so quietly – as if you had expected me – made me hold on a little longer. It had been a confounded lonely time – I don’t mean while swimming. I was glad to talk a little to somebody that didn’t belong to the Sephora. As to asking for the captain, that was a mere impulse. It could have been no use, with all the ship knowing about me and the other people pretty certain to be round here in the morning. I don’t know – I wanted to be seen, to talk with somebody, before I went on. I don’t know what I would have said. … ‘Fine night, isn’t it?’ or something of the sort.”

“Do you think they will be round here presently?” I asked with some incredulity.

“Quite likely,” he said, faintly.

“He looked extremely haggard all of a sudden. His head rolled on his shoulders.

“H’m. We shall see then. Meantime get into that bed,” I whispered. “Want help? There.”

It was a rather high bed place with a set of drawers underneath. This amazing swimmer really needed the lift I gave him by seizing his leg. He tumbled in, rolled over on his back, and flung one arm across his eyes. And then, with his face nearly hidden, he must have looked exactly as I used to look in that bed. I gazed upon my other self for a while before drawing across carefully the two green serge curtains which ran on a brass rod. I thought for a moment of pinning them together for greater safety, but I sat down on the couch, and once there I felt unwilling to rise and hunt for a pin. I would do it in a moment. I was extremely tired, in a peculiarly intimate way, by the strain of stealthiness, by the effort of whispering and the general secrecy of this excitement. It was three o’clock by now and I had been on my feet since nine, but I was not sleepy; I could not have gone to sleep. I sat there, fagged out, looking at the curtains, trying to clear my mind of the confused sensation of being in two places at once, and greatly bothered by an exasperating knocking in my head. It was a relief to discover suddenly that it was not in my head at all, but on the outside of the door. Before I could collect myself the words “Come in” were out of my mouth, and the steward entered with a tray, bringing in my morning coffee. I had slept, after all, and I was so frightened that I shouted, “This way! I am here, steward,” as though he had been miles away. He put down the tray on the table next the couch and only then said, very quietly, “I can see you are here, sir.” I felt him give me a keen look, but I dared not meet his eyes just then. He must have wondered why I had drawn the curtains of my bed before going to sleep on the couch. He went out, hooking the door open as usual.

I heard the crew washing decks above me. I knew I would have been told at once if there had been any wind. Calm, I thought, and I was doubly vexed. Indeed, I felt dual more than ever. The steward reappeared suddenly in the doorway. I jumped up from the couch so quickly that he gave a start.

“What do you want here?”

“Close your port, sir – they are washing decks.”

“It is closed,” I said, reddening.

“Very well, sir.” But he did not move from the doorway and returned my stare in an extraordinary, equivocal manner for a time. Then his eyes wavered, all his expression changed, and in a voice unusually gentle, almost coaxingly:

“May I come in to take the empty cup away, sir?”

“Of course!” I turned my back on him while he popped in and out. Then I unhooked and closed the door and even pushed the bolt. This sort of thing could not go on very long. The cabin was as hot as an oven, too. I took a peep at my double, and discovered that he had not moved, his arm was still over his eyes; but his chest heaved; his hair was wet; his chin glistened with perspiration. I reached over him and opened the port.

“I must show myself on deck,” I reflected.

Of course, theoretically, I could do what I liked, with no one to say nay to me within the whole circle of the horizon; but to lock my cabin door and take the key away I did not dare. Directly I put my head out of the companion I saw the group of my two officers, the second mate barefooted, the chief mate in long India-rubber boots, near the break of the poop, and the steward halfway down the poop ladder talking to them eagerly. He happened to catch sight of me and dived, the second ran down on the main-deck shouting some order or other, and the chief mate came to meet me, touching his cap.

There was a sort of curiosity in his eye that I did not like. I don’t know whether the steward had told them that I was “queer” only, or downright drunk, but I know the man meant to have a good look at me. I watched him coming with a smile which, as he got into point-blank range, took effect and froze his very whiskers. I did not give him time to open his lips.

“Square the yards by lifts and braces before the hands go to breakfast.”

It was the first particular order I had given on board that ship; and I stayed on deck to see it executed, too. I had felt the need of asserting myself without loss of time. That sneering young cub got taken down a peg or two on that occasion, and I also seized the opportunity of having a good look at the face of every foremast man as they filed past me to go to the after braces. At breakfast time, eating nothing myself, I presided with such frigid dignity that the two mates were only too glad to escape from the cabin as soon as decency permitted; and all the time the dual working of my mind distracted me almost to the point of insanity. I was constantly watching myself, my secret self, as dependent on my actions as my own personality, sleeping in that bed, behind that door which faced me as I sat at the head of the table. It was very much like being mad, only it was worse because one was aware of it.

I had to shake him for a solid minute, but when at last he opened his eyes it was in the full possession of his senses, with an inquiring look.

“All’s well so far,” I whispered. “Now you must vanish into the bathroom.”

He did so, as noiseless as a ghost, and then I rang for the steward, and facing him boldly, directed him to tidy up my stateroom while I was having my bath – “and be quick about it.” As my tone admitted of no excuses, he said, “Yes, sir,” and ran off to fetch his dustpan and brushes. I took a bath and did most of my dressing, splashing, and whistling softly for the steward’s edification, while the secret sharer of my life stood drawn up bolt upright in that little space, his face looking very sunken in daylight, his eyelids lowered under the stern, dark line of his eyebrows drawn together by a slight frown.

When I left him there to go back to my room the steward was finishing dusting. I sent for the mate and engaged him in some insignificant conversation. It was, as it were, trifling with the terrific character of his whiskers; but my object was to give him an opportunity for a good look at my cabin. And then I could at last shut, with a clear conscience, the door of my stateroom and get my double back into the recessed part. There was nothing else for it. He had to sit still on a small folding stool, half smothered by the heavy coats hanging there. We listened to the steward going into the bathroom out of the saloon, filling the water bottles there, scrubbing the bath, setting things to rights, whisk, bang, clatter – out again into the saloon – turn the key – click. Such was my scheme for keeping my second self invisible. Nothing better could be contrived under the circumstances. And there we sat; I at my writing desk ready to appear busy with some papers, he behind me out of sight of the door. It would not have been prudent to talk in daytime; and I could not have stood the excitement of that queer sense of whispering to myself. Now and then, glancing over my shoulder, I saw him far back there, sitting rigidly on the low stool, his bare feet close together, his arms folded, his head hanging on his breast – and perfectly still. Anybody would have taken him for me.

I was fascinated by it myself. Every moment I had to glance over my shoulder. I was looking at him when a voice outside the door said:

“Beg pardon, sir.”

“Well! … I kept my eyes on him, and so when the voice outside the door announced, “There’s a ship’s boat coming our way, sir,” I saw him give a start – the first movement he had made for hours. But he did not raise his bowed head.

“All right. Get the ladder over.”

I hesitated. Should I whisper something to him? But what? His immobility seemed to have been never disturbed. What could I tell him he did not know already? … Finally I went on deck.

The skipper of the Sephora had a thin red whisker all round his face, and the sort of complexion that goes with hair of that color; also the particular, rather smeary shade of blue in the eyes. He was not exactly a showy figure; his shoulders were high, his stature but middling – one leg slightly more bandy than the other. He shook hands, looking vaguely around. A spiritless tenacity was his main characteristic, I judged. I behaved with a politeness which seemed to disconcert him. Perhaps he was shy. He mumbled to me as if he were ashamed of what he was saying; gave his name (it was something like Archbold – but at this distance of years I hardly am sure), his ship’s name, and a few other particulars of that sort, in the manner of a criminal making a reluctant and doleful confession. He had had terrible weather on the passage out – terrible – terrible – wife aboard, too.

By this time we were seated in the cabin and the steward brought in a tray with a bottle and glasses. “Thanks! No.” Never took liquor. Would have some water, though. He drank two tumblerfuls. Terrible thirsty work. Ever since daylight had been exploring the islands round his ship.

“What was that for – fun?” I asked, with an appearance of polite interest.

“No!” He sighed. “Painful duty.”

As he persisted in his mumbling and I wanted my double to hear every word, I hit upon the notion of informing him that I regretted to say I was hard of hearing.

“Such a young man, too!” he nodded, keeping his smeary blue, unintelligent eyes fastened upon me. “What was the cause of it – some disease?” he inquired, without the least sympathy and as if he thought that, if so, I’d got no more than I deserved.

“Yes; disease,” I admitted in a cheerful tone which seemed to shock him. But my point was gained, because he had to raise his voice to give me his tale. It is not worth while to record his version. It was just over two months since all this had happened, and he had thought so much about it that he seemed completely muddled as to its bearings, but still immensely impressed.

“What would you think of such a thing happening on board your own ship? I’ve had the Sephora for these fifteen years. I am a well-known shipmaster.”

He was densely distressed – and perhaps I should have sympathized with him if I had been able to detach my mental vision from the unsuspected sharer of my cabin as though he were my second self. There he was on the other side of the bulkhead, four or five feet from us, no more, as we sat in the saloon. I looked politely at Captain Archbold (if that was his name), but it was the other I saw, in a gray sleeping suit, seated on a low stool, his bare feet close together, his arms folded, and every word said between us falling into the ears of his dark head bowed on his chest.

“I have been at sea now, man and boy, for seven-and-thirty years, and I’ve never heard of such a thing happening in an English ship. And that it should be my ship. Wife on board, too.”

I was hardly listening to him.

“Don’t you think,” I said, “that the heavy sea which, you told me, came aboard just then might have killed the man? I have seen the sheer weight of a sea kill a man very neatly, by simply breaking his neck.”

“Good God!” he uttered, impressively, fixing his smeary blue eyes on me. “The sea! No man killed by the sea ever looked like that.” He seemed positively scandalized at my suggestion. And as I gazed at him certainly not prepared for anything original on his part, he advanced his head close to mine and thrust his tongue out at me so suddenly that I couldn’t help starting back.

After scoring over my calmness in this graphic way he nodded wisely. If I had seen the sight, he assured me, I would never forget it as long as I lived. The weather was too bad to give the corpse a proper sea burial. So next day at dawn they took it up on the poop, covering its face with a bit of bunting; he read a short prayer, and then, just as it was, in its oilskins and long boots, they launched it amongst those mountainous seas that seemed ready every moment to swallow up the ship herself and the terrified lives on board of her.

“That reefed foresail saved you,” I threw in.

“Under God – it did,” he exclaimed fervently. “It was by a special mercy, I firmly believe, that it stood some of those hurricane squalls.”

“It was the setting of that sail which – ” I began.

“God’s own hand in it,” he interrupted me. “Nothing less could have done it. I don’t mind telling you that I hardly dared give the order. It seemed impossible that we could touch anything without losing it, and then our last hope would have been gone.”

The terror of that gale was on him yet. I let him go on for a bit, then said, casually – as if returning to a minor subject:

“You were very anxious to give up your mate to the shore people, I believe?”

He was. To the law. His obscure tenacity on that point had in it something incomprehensible and a little awful; something, as it were, mystical, quite apart from his anxiety that he should not be suspected of “countenancing any doings of that sort.” Seven-and-thirty virtuous years at sea, of which over twenty of immaculate command, and the last fifteen in the Sephora, seemed to have laid him under some pitiless obligation.

“And you know,” he went on, groping shame-facedly amongst his feelings, “I did not engage that young fellow. His people had some interest with my owners. I was in a way forced to take him on. He looked very smart, very gentlemanly, and all that. But do you know – I never liked him, somehow. I am a plain man. You see, he wasn’t exactly the sort for the chief mate of a ship like the Sephora.”

I had become so connected in thoughts and impressions with the secret sharer of my cabin that I felt as if I, personally, were being given to understand that I, too, was not the sort that would have done for the chief mate of a ship like the Sephora. I had no doubt of it in my mind.

“Not at all the style of man. You understand,” he insisted, superfluously, looking hard at me.

I smiled urbanely. He seemed at a loss for a while.

“I suppose I must report a suicide.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Suicide! That’s what I’ll have to write to my owners directly I get in.”

“Unless you manage to recover him before tomorrow,” I assented, dispassionately. … “I mean, alive.”

He mumbled something which I really did not catch, and I turned my ear to him in a puzzled manner. He fairly bawled:

“The land – I say, the mainland is at least seven miles off my anchorage.”

“About that.”

My lack of excitement, of curiosity, of surprise, of any sort of pronounced interest, began to arouse his distrust. But except for the felicitous pretense of deafness I had not tried to pretend anything. I had felt utterly incapable of playing the part of ignorance properly, and therefore was afraid to try. It is also certain that he had brought some ready-made suspicions with him, and that he viewed my politeness as a strange and unnatural phenomenon. And yet how else could I have received him? Not heartily! That was impossible for psychological reasons, which I need not state here. My only object was to keep off his inquiries. Surlily? Yes, but surliness might have provoked a point-blank question. From its novelty to him and from its nature, punctilious courtesy was the manner best calculated to restrain the man. But there was the danger of his breaking through my defense bluntly. I could not, I think, have met him by a direct lie, also for psychological (not moral) reasons. If he had only known how afraid I was of his putting my feeling of identity with the other to the test! But, strangely enough – (I thought of it only afterwards) – I believe that he was not a little disconcerted by the reverse side of that weird situation, by something in me that reminded him of the man he was seeking – suggested a mysterious similitude to the young fellow he had distrusted and disliked from the first.

However that might have been, the silence was not very prolonged. He took another oblique step.

“I reckon I had no more than a two-mile pull to your ship. Not a bit more.”

“And quite enough, too, in this awful heat,” I said.

Another pause full of mistrust followed. Necessity, they say, is mother of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions. And I was afraid he would ask me point-blank for news of my other self.

“Nice little saloon, isn’t it?” I remarked, as if noticing for the first time the way his eyes roamed from one closed door to the other. “And very well fitted out, too. Here, for instance,” I continued, reaching over the back of my seat negligently and flinging the door open, “is my bathroom.”

He made an eager movement, but hardly gave it a glance. I got up, shut the door of the bathroom, and invited him to have a look round, as if I were very proud of my accomodation. He had to rise and be shown round, but he went through the business without any raptures whatever.

“And now we’ll have a look at my stateroom,” I declared, in a voice as loud as I dared to make it, crossing the cabin to the starboard side with purposely heavy steps.

He followed me in and gazed around. My intelligent double had vanished. I played my part.

“Very convenient – isn’t it?”

“Very nice. Very comf …” He didn’t finish and went out brusquely as if to escape from some unrighteous wiles of mine. But it was not to be. I had been too frightened not to feel vengeful; I felt I had him on the run, and I meant to keep him on the run. My polite insistence must have had something menacing in it, because he gave in suddenly. And I did not let him off a single item; mate’s room, pantry, storerooms, the very sail locker which was also under the poop – he had to look into them all. When at last I showed him out on the quarter-deck he drew a long, spiritless sigh, and mumbled dismally that he must really be going back to his ship now. I desired my mate, who had joined us, to see to the captain’s boat.

The man of whiskers gave a blast on the whistle which he used to wear hanging round his neck, and yelled, “Sephora’s away!” My double down there in my cabin must have heard, and certainly could not feel more relieved than I. Four fellows came running out from somewhere forward and went over the side, while my own men, appearing on deck too, lined the rail. I escorted my visitor to the gangway ceremoniously, and nearly overdid it. He was a tenacious beast. On the very ladder he lingered, and in that unique, guiltily conscientious manner of sticking to the point:

“I say … you … you don’t think that – ”

I covered his voice loudly:

“Certainly not. … I am delighted. Good-by.”

I had an idea of what he meant to say, and just saved myself by the privilege of defective hearing. He was too shaken generally to insist, but my mate, close witness of that parting, looked mystified and his face took on a thoughtful cast. As I did not want to appear as if I wished to avoid all communication with my officers, he had the opportunity to address me.

“Seems a very nice man. His boat’s crew told our chaps a very extraordinary story, if what I am told by the steward is true. I suppose you had it from the captain, sir?”

“Yes. I had a story from the captain.”

“A very horrible affair – isn’t it, sir?”

“It is.”

“Beats all these tales we hear about murders in Yankee ships.”

“I don’t think it beats them. I don’t think it resembles them in the least.”

“Bless my soul – you don’t say so! But of course I’ve no acquaintance whatever with American ships, not I so I couldn’t go against your knowledge. It’s horrible enough for me. … But the queerest part is that those fellows seemed to have some idea the man was hidden aboard here. They had really. Did you ever hear of such a thing?”

“Preposterous – isn’t it?”

We were walking to and fro athwart the quarter-deck. No one of the crew forward could be seen (the day was Sunday), and the mate pursued:

“There was some little dispute about it. Our chaps took offense. ‘As if we would harbor a thing like that,’ they said. ‘Wouldn’t you like to look for him in our coal-hole?’ Quite a tiff. But they made it up in the end. I suppose he did drown himself. Don’t you, sir?”

“I don’t suppose anything.”

“You have no doubt in the matter, sir?”

“None whatever.”

I left him suddenly. I felt I was producing a bad impression, but with my double down there it was most trying to be on deck. And it was almost as trying to be below. Altogether a nerve-trying situation. But on the whole I felt less torn in two when I was with him. There was no one in the whole ship whom I dared take into my confidence. Since the hands had got to know his story, it would have been impossible to pass him off for anyone else, and an accidental discovery was to be dreaded now more than ever. …

The steward being engaged in laying the table for dinner, we could talk only with our eyes when I first went down. Later in the afternoon we had a cautious try at whispering. The Sunday quietness of the ship was against us; the stillness of air and water around her was against us; the elements, the men were against us – everything was against us in our secret partnership; time itself – for this could not go on forever. The very trust in Providence was, I suppose, denied to his guilt. Shall I confess that this thought cast me down very much? And as to the chapter of accidents which counts for so much in the book of success, I could only hope that it was closed. For what favorable accident could be expected?

“Did you hear everything?” were my first words as soon as we took up our position side by side, leaning over my bed place.

He had. And the proof of it was his earnest whisper, “The man told you he hardly dared to give the order.”

I understood the reference to be to that saving foresail.

“Yes. He was afraid of it being lost in the setting.”

“I assure you he never gave the order. He may think he did, but he never gave it. He stood there with me on the break of the poop after the main topsail blew away, and whimpered about our last hope – positively whimpered about it and nothing else – and the night coming on! To hear one’s skipper go on like that in such weather was enough to drive any fellow out of his mind. It worked me up into a sort of desperation. I just took it into my own hands and went away from him, boiling, and – But what’s the use telling you? You know! … Do you think that if I had not been pretty fierce with them I should have got the men to do anything? Not It! The bo’s’n perhaps? Perhaps! It wasn’t a heavy sea – it was a sea gone mad! I suppose the end of the world will be something like that; and a man may have the heart to see it coming once and be done with it – but to have to face it day after day – I don’t blame anybody. I was precious little better than the rest. Only – I was an officer of that old coal wagon, anyhow – ”

“I quite understand,” I conveyed that sincere assurance into his ear. He was out of breath with whispering; I could hear him pant slightly. It was all very simple. The same strung-up force which had given twenty-four men a chance, at least, for their lives, had, in a sort of recoil, crushed an unworthy mutinous existence.

But I had no leisure to weigh the merits of the matter – footsteps in the saloon, a heavy knock. “There’s enough wind to get under way with, sir.” Here was the call of a new claim upon my thoughts and even upon my feelings.

“Turn the hands up,” I cried through the door. “I’ll be on deck directly.”

I was going out to make the acquaintance of my ship. Before I left the cabin our eyes met – the eyes of the only two strangers on board. I pointed to the recessed part where the little campstool awaited him and laid my finger on my lips. He made a gesture – somewhat vague – a little mysterious, accompanied by a faint smile, as if of regret.

This is not the place to enlarge upon the sensations of a man who feels for the first time a ship move under his feet to his own independent word. In my case they were not unalloyed. I was not wholly alone with my command; for there was that stranger in my cabin. Or rather, I was not completely and wholly with her. Part of me was absent. That mental feeling of being in two places at once affected me physically as if the mood of secrecy had penetrated my very soul. Before an hour had elapsed since the ship had begun to move, having occasion to ask the mate (he stood by my side) to take a compass bearing of the pagoda, I caught myself reaching up to his ear in whispers. I say I caught myself, but enough had escaped to startle the man. I can’t describe it otherwise than by saying that he shied. A grave, preoccupied manner, as though he were in possession of some perplexing intelligence, did not leave him henceforth. A little later I moved away from the rail to look at the compass with such a stealthy gait that the helmsman noticed it – and I could not help noticing the unusual roundness of his eyes. These are trifling instances, though it’s to no commander’s advantage to be suspected of ludicrous eccentricities. But I was also more seriously affected. There are to a seaman certain words, gestures, that should in given conditions come as naturally, as instinctively as the winking of a menaced eye. A certain order should spring on to his lips without thinking; a certain sign should get itself made, so to speak, without reflection. But all unconscious alertness had abandoned me. I had to make an effort of will to recall myself back (from the cabin) to the conditions of the moment. I felt that I was appearing an irresolute commander to those people who were watching me more or less critically.

And, besides, there were the scares. On the second day out, for instance, coming off the deck in the afternoon (I had straw slippers on my bare feet) I stopped at the open pantry door and spoke to the steward. He was doing something there with his back to me. At the sound of my voice he nearly jumped out of his skin, as the saying is, and incidentally broke a cup.

“What on earth’s the matter with you?” I asked, astonished.

He was extremely confused. “Beg your pardon, sir. I made sure you were in your cabin.”

“You see I wasn’t.”

“No, sir. I could have sworn I had heard you moving in there not a moment ago. It’s most extraordinary … very sorry, sir.”

I passed on with an inward shudder. I was so identified with my secret double that I did not even mention the fact in those scanty, fearful whispers we exchanged. I suppose he had made some slight noise of some kind or other. It would have been miraculous if he hadn’t at one time or another. And yet, haggard as he appeared, he looked always perfectly self-controlled, more than calm – almost invulnerable. On my suggestion he remained almost entirely in the bathroom, which, upon the whole, was the safest place. There could be really no shadow of an excuse for anyone ever wanting to go in there, once the steward had done with it. It was a very tiny place. Sometimes he reclined on the floor, his legs bent, his head sustained on one elbow. At others I would find him on the campstool, sitting in his gray sleeping suit and with his cropped dark hair like a patient, unmoved convict. At night I would smuggle him into my bed place, and we would whisper together, with the regular footfalls of the officer of the watch passing and repassing over our heads. It was an infinitely miserable time. It was lucky that some tins of fine preserves were stowed in a locker in my stateroom; hard bread I could always get hold of; and so he lived on stewed chicken, PATE DE FOIE GRAS, asparagus, cooked oysters, sardines – on all sorts of abominable sham delicacies out of tins. My early-morning coffee he always drank; and it was all I dared do for him in that respect.

Every day there was the horrible maneuvering to go through so that my room and then the bathroom should be done in the usual way. I came to hate the sight of the steward, to abhor the voice of that harmless man. I felt that it was he who would bring on the disaster of discovery. It hung like a sword over our heads.

The fourth day out, I think (we were then working down the east side of the Gulf of Siam, tack for tack, in light winds and smooth water) – the fourth day, I say, of this miserable juggling with the unavoidable, as we sat at our evening meal, that man, whose slightest movement I dreaded, after putting down the dishes ran up on deck busily. This could not be dangerous. Presently he came down again; and then it appeared that he had remembered a coat of mine which I had thrown over a rail to dry after having been wetted in a shower which had passed over the ship in the afternoon. Sitting stolidly at the head of the table I became terrified at the sight of the garment on his arm. Of course he made for my door. There was no time to lose.

“Steward,” I thundered. My nerves were so shaken that I could not govern my voice and conceal my agitation. This was the sort of thing that made my terrifically whiskered mate tap his forehead with his forefinger. I had detected him using that gesture while talking on deck with a confidential air to the carpenter. It was too far to hear a word, but I had no doubt that this pantomime could only refer to the strange new captain.

“Yes, sir,” the pale-faced steward turned resignedly to me. It was this maddening course of being shouted at, checked without rhyme or reason, arbitrarily chased out of my cabin, suddenly called into it, sent flying out of his pantry on incomprehensible errands, that accounted for the growing wretchedness of his expression.

“Where are you going with that coat?”

“To your room, sir.”

“Is there another shower coming?”

“I’m sure I don’t know, sir. Shall I go up again and see, sir?”

“No! never mind.”

My object was attained, as of course my other self in there would have heard everything that passed. During this interlude my two officers never raised their eyes off their respective plates; but the lip of that confounded cub, the second mate, quivered visibly.

I expected the steward to hook my coat on and come out at once. He was very slow about it; but I dominated my nervousness sufficiently not to shout after him. Suddenly I became aware (it could be heard plainly enough) that the fellow for some reason or other was opening the door of the bathroom. It was the end. The place was literally not big enough to swing a cat in. My voice died in my throat and I went stony all over. I expected to hear a yell of surprise and terror, and made a movement, but had not the strength to get on my legs. Everything remained still. Had my second self taken the poor wretch by the throat? I don’t know what I could have done next moment if I had not seen the steward come out of my room, close the door, and then stand quietly by the sideboard.

“Saved,” I thought. “But, no! Lost! Gone! He was gone!”

I laid my knife and fork down and leaned back in my chair. My head swam. After a while, when sufficiently recovered to speak in a steady voice, I instructed my mate to put the ship round at eight o’clock himself.

“I won’t come on deck,” I went on. “I think I’ll turn in, and unless the wind shifts I don’t want to be disturbed before midnight. I feel a bit seedy.”

“You did look middling bad a little while ago,” the chief mate remarked without showing any great concern.

They both went out, and I stared at the steward clearing the table. There was nothing to be read on that wretched man’s face. But why did he avoid my eyes, I asked myself. Then I thought I should like to hear the sound of his voice.

“Steward!”

“Sir!” Startled as usual.

“Where did you hang up that coat?”

“In the bathroom, sir.” The usual anxious tone. “It’s not quite dry yet, sir.”

For some time longer I sat in the cuddy. Had my double vanished as he had come? But of his coming there was an explanation, whereas his disappearance would be inexplicable. … I went slowly into my dark room, shut the door, lighted the lamp, and for a time dared not turn round. When at last I did I saw him standing bolt-upright in the narrow recessed part. It would not be true to say I had a shock, but an irresistible doubt of his bodily existence flitted through my mind. Can it be, I asked myself, that he is not visible to other eyes than mine? It was like being haunted. Motionless, with a grave face, he raised his hands slightly at me in a gesture which meant clearly, “Heavens! what a narrow escape!” Narrow indeed. I think I had come creeping quietly as near insanity as any man who has not actually gone over the border. That gesture restrained me, so to speak.

The mate with the terrific whiskers was now putting the ship on the other tack. In the moment of profound silence which follows upon the hands going to their stations I heard on the poop his raised voice: “Hard alee!” and the distant shout of the order repeated on the main-deck. The sails, in that light breeze, made but a faint fluttering noise. It ceased. The ship was coming round slowly: I held my breath in the renewed stillness of expectation; one wouldn’t have thought that there was a single living soul on her decks. A sudden brisk shout, “Mainsail haul!” broke the spell, and in the noisy cries and rush overhead of the men running away with the main brace we two, down in my cabin, came together in our usual position by the bed place.

He did not wait for my question. “I heard him fumbling here and just managed to squat myself down in the bath,” he whispered to me. “The fellow only opened the door and put his arm in to hang the coat up. All the same – ”

“I never thought of that,” I whispered back, even more appalled than before at the closeness of the shave, and marveling at that something unyielding in his character which was carrying him through so finely. There was no agitation in his whisper. Whoever was being driven distracted, it was not he. He was sane. And the proof of his sanity was continued when he took up the whispering again.

“It would never do for me to come to life again.”

It was something that a ghost might have said. But what he was alluding to was his old captain’s reluctant admission of the theory of suicide. It would obviously serve his turn – if I had understood at all the view which seemed to govern the unalterable purpose of his action.

“You must maroon me as soon as ever you can get amongst these islands off the Cambodge shore,” he went on.

“Maroon you! We are not living in a boy’s adventure tale,” I protested. His scornful whispering took me up.

“We aren’t indeed! There’s nothing of a boy’s tale in this. But there’s nothing else for it. I want no more. You don’t suppose I am afraid of what can be done to me? Prison or gallows or whatever they may please. But you don’t see me coming back to explain such things to an old fellow in a wig and twelve respectable tradesmen, do you? What can they know whether I am guilty or not – or of WHAT I am guilty, either? That’s my affair. What does the Bible say? ‘Driven off the face of the earth.’ Very well, I am off the face of the earth now. As I came at night so I shall go.”

“Impossible!” I murmured. “You can’t.”

“Can’t? … Not naked like a soul on the Day of Judgment. I shall freeze on to this sleeping suit. The Last Day is not yet – and … you have understood thoroughly. Didn’t you?”

I felt suddenly ashamed of myself. I may say truly that I understood – and my hesitation in letting that man swim away from my ship’s side had been a mere sham sentiment, a sort of cowardice.

“It can’t be done now till next night,” I breathed out. “The ship is on the off-shore tack and the wind may fail us.”

“As long as I know that you understand,” he whispered. “But of course you do. It’s a great satisfaction to have got somebody to understand. You seem to have been there on purpose.” And in the same whisper, as if we two whenever we talked had to say things to each other which were not fit for the world to hear, he added, “It’s very wonderful.”

We remained side by side talking in our secret way – but sometimes silent or just exchanging a whispered word or two at long intervals. And as usual he stared through the port. A breath of wind came now and again into our faces. The ship might have been moored in dock, so gently and on an even keel she slipped through the water, that did not murmur even at our passage, shadowy and silent like a phantom sea.

At midnight I went on deck, and to my mate’s great surprise put the ship round on the other tack. His terrible whiskers flitted round me in silent criticism. I certainly should not have done it if it had been only a question of getting out of that sleepy gulf as quickly as possible. I believe he told the second mate, who relieved him, that it was a great want of judgment. The other only yawned. That intolerable cub shuffled about so sleepily and lolled against the rails in such a slack, improper fashion that I came down on him sharply.

“Aren’t you properly awake yet?”

“Yes, sir! I am awake.”

“Well, then, be good enough to hold yourself as if you were. And keep a lookout. If there’s any current we’ll be closing with some islands before daylight.”

The east side of the gulf is fringed with islands, some solitary, others in groups. One the blue background of the high coast they seem to float on silvery patches of calm water, arid and gray, or dark green and rounded like clumps of evergreen bushes, with the larger ones, a mile or two long, showing the outlines of ridges, ribs of gray rock under the dark mantle of matted leafage. Unknown to trade, to travel, almost to geography, the manner of life they harbor is an unsolved secret. There must be villages – settlements of fishermen at least – on the largest of them, and some communication with the world is probably kept up by native craft. But all that forenoon, as we headed for them, fanned along by the faintest of breezes, I saw no sign of man or canoe in the field of the telescope I kept on pointing at the scattered group.

At noon I have no orders for a change of course, and the mate’s whiskers became much concerned and seemed to be offering themselves unduly to my notice. At last I said:

“I am going to stand right in. Quite in – as far as I can take her.”

The stare of extreme surprise imparted an air of ferocity also to his eyes, and he looked truly terrific for a moment.

“We’re not doing well in the middle of the gulf,” I continued, casually. “I am going to look for the land breezes tonight.”

“Bless my soul! Do you mean, sir, in the dark amongst the lot of all them islands and reefs and shoals?”

“Well – if there are any regular land breezes at all on this coast one must get close inshore to find them, mustn’t one?”

“Bless my soul!” he exclaimed again under his breath. All that afternoon he wore a dreamy, contemplative appearance which in him was a mark of perplexity. After dinner I went into my stateroom as if I meant to take some rest. There we two bent our dark heads over a half-unrolled chart lying on my bed.

“There,” I said. “It’s got to be Koh-ring. I’ve been looking at it ever since sunrise. It has got two hills and a low point. It must be inhabited. And on the coast opposite there is what looks like the mouth of a biggish river – with some towns, no doubt, not far up. It’s the best chance for you that I can see.”

“Anything. Koh-ring let it be.”

He looked thoughtfully at the chart as if surveying chances and distances from a lofty height – and following with his eyes his own figure wandering on the blank land of Cochin-China, and then passing off that piece of paper clean out of sight into uncharted regions. And it was as if the ship had two captains to plan her course for her. I had been so worried and restless running up and down that I had not had the patience to dress that day. I had remained in my sleeping suit, with straw slippers and a soft floppy hat. The closeness of the heat in the gulf had been most oppressive, and the crew were used to seeing me wandering in that airy attire.

“She will clear the south point as she heads now,” I whispered into his ear. “Goodness only knows when, though, but certainly after dark. I’ll edge her in to half a mile, as far as I may be able to judge in the dark – ”

“Be careful,” he murmured, warningly – and I realized suddenly that all my future, the only future for which I was fit, would perhaps go irretrievably to pieces in any mishap to my first command.

I could not stop a moment longer in the room. I motioned him to get out of sight and made my way on the poop. That unplayful cub had the watch. I walked up and down for a while thinking things out, then beckoned him over.

“Send a couple of hands to open the two quarter-deck ports,” I said, mildly.

He actually had the impudence, or else so forgot himself in his wonder at such an incomprehensible order, as to repeat:

“Open the quarter-deck ports! What for, sir?”

“The only reason you need concern yourself about is because I tell you to do so. Have them open wide and fastened properly.”

He reddened and went off, but I believe made some jeering remark to the carpenter as to the sensible practice of ventilating a ship’s quarter-deck. I know he popped into the mate’s cabin to impart the fact to him because the whiskers came on deck, as it were by chance, and stole glances at me from below – for signs of lunacy or drunkenness, I suppose.

A little before supper, feeling more restless than ever, I rejoined, for a moment, my second self. And to find him sitting so quietly was surprising, like something against nature, inhuman.

I developed my plan in a hurried whisper.

“I shall stand in as close as I dare and then put her round. I will presently find means to smuggle you out of here into the sail locker, which communicates with the lobby. But there is an opening, a sort of square for hauling the sails out, which gives straight on the quarter-deck and which is never closed in fine weather, so as to give air to the sails. When the ship’s way is deadened in stays and all the hands are aft at the main braces you will have a clear road to slip out and get overboard through the open quarter-deck port. I’ve had them both fastened up. Use a rope’s end to lower yourself into the water so as to avoid a splash – you know. It could be heard and cause some beastly complication.”

He kept silent for a while, then whispered, “I understand.”

“I won’t be there to see you go,” I began with an effort. “The rest … I only hope I have understood, too.”

“You have. From first to last” – and for the first time there seemed to be a faltering, something strained in his whisper. He caught hold of my arm, but the ringing of the supper bell made me start. He didn’t though; he only released his grip.

After supper I didn’t come below again till well past eight o’clock. The faint, steady breeze was loaded with dew; and the wet, darkened sails held all there was of propelling power in it. The night, clear and starry, sparkled darkly, and the opaque, lightless patches shifting slowly against the low stars were the drifting islets. On the port bow there was a big one more distant and shadowily imposing by the great space of sky it eclipsed.

On opening the door I had a back view of my very own self looking at a chart. He had come out of the recess and was standing near the table.

“Quite dark enough,” I whispered.

He stepped back and leaned against my bed with a level, quiet glance. I sat on the couch. We had nothing to say to each other. Over our heads the officer of the watch moved here and there. Then I heard him move quickly. I knew what that meant. He was making for the companion; and presently his voice was outside my door.

“We are drawing in pretty fast, sir. Land looks rather close.”

“Very well,” I answered. “I am coming on deck directly.”

I waited till he was gone out of the cuddy, then rose. My double moved too. The time had come to exchange our last whispers, for neither of us was ever to hear each other’s natural voice.

“Look here!” I opened a drawer and took out three sovereigns. “Take this anyhow. I’ve got six and I’d give you the lot, only I must keep a little money to buy some fruit and vegetables for the crew from native boats as we go through Sunda Straits.”

He shook his head.

“Take it,” I urged him, whispering desperately. “No one can tell what – ”

He smiled and slapped meaningly the only pocket of the sleeping jacket. It was not safe, certainly. But I produced a large old silk handkerchief of mine, and tying the three pieces of gold in a corner, pressed it on him. He was touched, I supposed, because he took it at last and tied it quickly round his waist under the jacket, on his bare skin.

Our eyes met; several seconds elapsed, till, our glances still mingled, I extended my hand and turned the lamp out. Then I passed through the cuddy, leaving the door of my room wide open. … “Steward!”

He was still lingering in the pantry in the greatness of his zeal, giving a rub-up to a plated cruet stand the last thing before going to bed. Being careful not to wake up the mate, whose room was opposite, I spoke in an undertone.

He looked round anxiously. “Sir!”

“Can you get me a little hot water from the galley?”

“I am afraid, sir, the galley fire’s been out for some time now.”

“Go and see.”

He flew up the stairs.

“Now,” I whispered, loudly, into the saloon – too loudly, perhaps, but I was afraid I couldn’t make a sound. He was by my side in an instant – the double captain slipped past the stairs – through a tiny dark passage … a sliding door. We were in the sail locker, scrambling on our knees over the sails. A sudden thought struck me. I saw myself wandering barefooted, bareheaded, the sun beating on my dark poll. I snatched off my floppy hat and tried hurriedly in the dark to ram it on my other self. He dodged and fended off silently. I wonder what he thought had come to me before he understood and suddenly desisted. Our hands met gropingly, lingered united in a steady, motionless clasp for a second. … No word was breathed by either of us when they separated.

I was standing quietly by the pantry door when the steward returned.

“Sorry, sir. Kettle barely warm. Shall I light the spirit lamp?”

“Never mind.”

I came out on deck slowly. It was now a matter of conscience to shave the land as close as possible – for now he must go overboard whenever the ship was put in stays. Must! There could be no going back for him. After a moment I walked over to leeward and my heart flew into my mouth at the nearness of the land on the bow. Under any other circumstances I would not have held on a minute longer. The second mate had followed me anxiously.

I looked on till I felt I could command my voice.

“She will weather,” I said then in a quiet tone.

“Are you going to try that, sir?” he stammered out incredulously.

I took no notice of him and raised my tone just enough to be heard by the helmsman.

“Keep her good full.”

“Good full, sir.”

The wind fanned my cheek, the sails slept, the world was silent. The strain of watching the dark loom of the land grow bigger and denser was too much for me. I had shut my eyes – because the ship must go closer. She must! The stillness was intolerable. Were we standing still?

When I opened my eyes the second view started my heart with a thump. The black southern hill of Koh-ring seemed to hang right over the ship like a towering fragment of everlasting night. On that enormous mass of blackness there was not a gleam to be seen, not a sound to be heard. It was gliding irresistibly towards us and yet seemed already within reach of the hand. I saw the vague figures of the watch grouped in the waist, gazing in awed silence.

“Are you going on, sir?” inquired an unsteady voice at my elbow.

I ignored it. I had to go on.

“Keep her full. Don’t check her way. That won’t do now,” I said warningly.

“I can’t see the sails very well,” the helmsman answered me, in strange, quavering tones.

Was she close enough? Already she was, I won’t say in the shadow of the land, but in the very blackness of it, already swallowed up as it were, gone too close to be recalled, gone from me altogether.

“Give the mate a call,” I said to the young man who stood at my elbow as still as death. “And turn all hands up.”

My tone had a borrowed loudness reverberated from the height of the land. Several voices cried out together: “We are all on deck, sir.”

Then stillness again, with the great shadow gliding closer, towering higher, without a light, without a sound. Such a hush had fallen on the ship that she might have been a bark of the dead floating in slowly under the very gate of Erebus.

“My God! Where are we?”

It was the mate moaning at my elbow. He was thunderstruck, and as it were deprived of the moral support of his whiskers. He clapped his hands and absolutely cried out, “Lost!”

“Be quiet,” I said, sternly.

He lowered his tone, but I saw the shadowy gesture of his despair. “What are we doing here?”

“Looking for the land wind.”

He made as if to tear his hair, and addressed me recklessly.

“She will never get out. You have done it, sir. I knew it’d end in something like this. She will never weather, and you are too close now to stay. She’ll drift ashore before she’s round. O my God!”

I caught his arm as he was raising it to batter his poor devoted head, and shook it violently.

“She’s ashore already,” he wailed, trying to tear himself away.

“Is she? … Keep good full there!”

“Good full, sir,” cried the helmsman in a frightened, thin, childlike voice.

I hadn’t let go the mate’s arm and went on shaking it. “Ready about, do you hear? You go forward” – shake – “and stop there” – shake – “and hold your noise” – shake – ” and see these head-sheets properly overhauled” – shake, shake – shake.

And all the time I dared not look towards the land lest my heart should fail me. I released my grip at last and he ran forward as if fleeing for dear life.

I wondered what my double there in the sail locker thought of this commotion. He was able to hear everything – and perhaps he was able to understand why, on my conscience, it had to be thus close – no less. My first order “Hard alee!” re-echoed ominously under the towering shadow of Koh-ring as if I had shouted in a mountain gorge. And then I watched the land intently. In that smooth water and light wind it was impossible to feel the ship coming-to. No! I could not feel her. And my second self was making now ready to ship out and lower himself overboard. Perhaps he was gone already … ?

The great black mass brooding over our very mastheads began to pivot away from the ship’s side silently. And now I forgot the secret stranger ready to depart, and remembered only that I was a total stranger to the ship. I did not know her. Would she do it? How was she to be handled?

I swung the mainyard and waited helplessly. She was perhaps stopped, and her very fate hung in the balance, with the black mass of Koh-ring like the gate of the everlasting night towering over her taffrail. What would she do now? Had she way on her yet? I stepped to the side swiftly, and on the shadowy water I could see nothing except a faint phosphorescent flash revealing the glassy smoothness of the sleeping surface. It was impossible to tell – and I had not learned yet the feel of my ship. Was she moving? What I needed was something easily seen, a piece of paper, which I could throw overboard and watch. I had nothing on me. To run down for it I didn’t dare. There was no time. All at once my strained, yearning stare distinguished a white object floating within a yard of the ship’s side. White on the black water. A phosphorescent flash passed under it. What was that thing? … I recognized my own floppy hat. It must have fallen off his head … and he didn’t bother. Now I had what I wanted – the saving mark for my eyes. But I hardly thought of my other self, now gone from the ship, to be hidden forever from all friendly faces, to be a fugitive and a vagabond on the earth, with no brand of the curse on his sane forehead to stay a slaying hand … too proud to explain.

And I watched the hat – the expression of my sudden pity for his mere flesh. It had been meant to save his homeless head from the dangers of the sun. And now – behold – it was saving the ship, by serving me for a mark to help out the ignorance of my strangeness. Ha! It was drifting forward, warning me just in time that the ship had gathered sternaway.

“Shift the helm,” I said in a low voice to the seaman standing still like a statue.

The man’s eyes glistened wildly in the binnacle light as he jumped round to the other side and spun round the wheel.

I walked to the break of the poop. On the over-shadowed deck all hands stood by the forebraces waiting for my order. The stars ahead seemed to be gliding from right to left. And all was so still in the world that I heard the quiet remark, “She’s round,” passed in a tone of intense relief between two seamen.

“Let go and haul.”

The foreyards ran round with a great noise, amidst cheery cries. And now the frightful whiskers made themselves heard giving various orders. Already the ship was drawing ahead. And I was alone with her. Nothing! no one in the world should stand now between us, throwing a shadow on the way of silent knowledge and mute affection, the perfect communion of a seaman with his first command.

Walking to the taffrail, I was in time to make out, on the very edge of a darkness thrown by a towering black mass like the very gateway of Erebus – yes, I was in time to catch an evanescent glimpse of my white hat left behind to mark the spot where the secret sharer of my cabin and of my thoughts, as though he were my second self, had lowered himself into the water to take his punishment: a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny.

Joseph Conrad: The Secret Sharer
fleursdumal.nl magazine

More in: Archive C-D, Conrad, Joseph, Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad: The Return

Joseph Conrad

(1857-1924)

The Return

The inner circle train from the City rushed impetuously out of a black
hole and pulled up with a discordant, grinding racket in the smirched
twilight of a West-End station. A line of doors flew open and a lot of
men stepped out headlong. They had high hats, healthy pale faces,
dark overcoats and shiny boots; they held in their gloved hands thin
umbrellas and hastily folded evening papers that resembled stiff, dirty
rags of greenish, pinkish, or whitish colour. Alvan Hervey stepped out
with the rest, a smouldering cigar between his teeth. A disregarded
little woman in rusty black, with both arms full of parcels, ran along
in distress, bolted suddenly into a third-class compartment and the
train went on. The slamming of carriage doors burst out sharp and
spiteful like a fusillade; an icy draught mingled with acrid fumes swept
the whole length of the platform and made a tottering old man, wrapped
up to his ears in a woollen comforter, stop short in the moving throng
to cough violently over his stick. No one spared him a glance.

Alvan Hervey passed through the ticket gate. Between the bare walls of
a sordid staircase men clambered rapidly; their backs appeared
alike–almost as if they had been wearing a uniform; their indifferent
faces were varied but somehow suggested kinship, like the faces of a
band of brothers who through prudence, dignity, disgust, or foresight
would resolutely ignore each other; and their eyes, quick or slow; their
eyes gazing up the dusty steps; their eyes brown, black, gray, blue, had
all the same stare, concentrated and empty, satisfied and unthinking.

Outside the big doorway of the street they scattered in all directions,
walking away fast from one another with the hurried air of men fleeing
from something compromising; from familiarity or confidences; from
something suspected and concealed–like truth or pestilence. Alvan
Hervey hesitated, standing alone in the doorway for a moment; then
decided to walk home.

He strode firmly. A misty rain settled like silvery dust on clothes,
on moustaches; wetted the faces, varnished the flagstones, darkened the
walls, dripped from umbrellas. And he moved on in the rain with careless
serenity, with the tranquil ease of someone successful and disdainful,
very sure of himself–a man with lots of money and friends. He was tall,
well set-up, good-looking and healthy; and his clear pale face had under
its commonplace refinement that slight tinge of overbearing
brutality which is given by the possession of only partly difficult
accomplishments; by excelling in games, or in the art of making money;
by the easy mastery over animals and over needy men.

He was going home much earlier than usual, straight from the City and
without calling at his club. He considered himself well connected, well
educated and intelligent. Who doesn’t? But his connections, education
and intelligence were strictly on a par with those of the men with whom
he did business or amused himself. He had married five years ago. At the
time all his acquaintances had said he was very much in love; and he had
said so himself, frankly, because it is very well understood that every
man falls in love once in his life–unless his wife dies, when it may
be quite praiseworthy to fall in love again. The girl was healthy,
tall, fair, and in his opinion was well connected, well educated and
intelligent. She was also intensely bored with her home where, as
if packed in a tight box, her individuality–of which she was very
conscious–had no play. She strode like a grenadier, was strong and
upright like an obelisk, had a beautiful face, a candid brow, pure eyes,
and not a thought of her own in her head. He surrendered quickly to all
those charms, and she appeared to him so unquestionably of the right
sort that he did not hesitate for a moment to declare himself in love.
Under the cover of that sacred and poetical fiction he desired her
masterfully, for various reasons; but principally for the satisfaction
of having his own way. He was very dull and solemn about it–for no
earthly reason, unless to conceal his feelings–which is an eminently
proper thing to do. Nobody, however, would have been shocked had
he neglected that duty, for the feeling he experienced really was a
longing–a longing stronger and a little more complex no doubt, but no
more reprehensible in its nature than a hungry man’s appetite for his
dinner.

After their marriage they busied themselves, with marked success, in
enlarging the circle of their acquaintance. Thirty people knew them
by sight; twenty more with smiling demonstrations tolerated their
occasional presence within hospitable thresholds; at least fifty others
became aware of their existence. They moved in their enlarged world
amongst perfectly delightful men and women who feared emotion,
enthusiasm, or failure, more than fire, war, or mortal disease; who
tolerated only the commonest formulas of commonest thoughts, and
recognized only profitable facts. It was an extremely charming sphere,
the abode of all the virtues, where nothing is realized and where
all joys and sorrows are cautiously toned down into pleasures and
annoyances. In that serene region, then, where noble sentiments are
cultivated in sufficient profusion to conceal the pitiless materialism
of thoughts and aspirations Alvan Hervey and his wife spent five years
of prudent bliss unclouded by any doubt as to the moral propriety of
their existence. She, to give her individuality fair play, took up all
manner of philanthropic work and became a member of various rescuing and
reforming societies patronized or presided over by ladies of title. He
took an active interest in politics; and having met quite by chance a
literary man–who nevertheless was related to an earl–he was induced
to finance a moribund society paper. It was a semi-political, and wholly
scandalous publication, redeemed by excessive dulness; and as it was
utterly faithless, as it contained no new thought, as it never by any
chance had a flash of wit, satire, or indignation in its pages, he
judged it respectable enough, at first sight. Afterwards, when it paid,
he promptly perceived that upon the whole it was a virtuous undertaking.
It paved the way of his ambition; and he enjoyed also the special kind
of importance he derived from this connection with what he imagined to
be literature.

This connection still further enlarged their world. Men who wrote or
drew prettily for the public came at times to their house, and his
editor came very often. He thought him rather an ass because he had such
big front teeth (the proper thing is to have small, even teeth) and
wore his hair a trifle longer than most men do. However, some dukes wear
their hair long, and the fellow indubitably knew his business. The worst
was that his gravity, though perfectly portentous, could not be trusted.
He sat, elegant and bulky, in the drawing-room, the head of his
stick hovering in front of his big teeth, and talked for hours with
a thick-lipped smile (he said nothing that could be considered
objectionable and not quite the thing) talked in an unusual manner–not
obviously irritatingly. His forehead was too lofty–unusually so–and
under it there was a straight nose, lost between the hairless cheeks,
that in a smooth curve ran into a chin shaped like the end of a
snow-shoe. And in this face that resembled the face of a fat and
fiendishly knowing baby there glittered a pair of clever, peering,
unbelieving black eyes. He wrote verses too. Rather an ass. But the band
of men who trailed at the skirts of his monumental frock-coat seemed to
perceive wonderful things in what he said. Alvan Hervey put it down
to affectation. Those artist chaps, upon the whole, were so affected.
Still, all this was highly proper–very useful to him–and his wife
seemed to like it–as if she also had derived some distinct and secret
advantage from this intellectual connection. She received her mixed and
decorous guests with a kind of tall, ponderous grace, peculiarly her own
and which awakened in the mind of intimidated strangers incongruous and
improper reminiscences of an elephant, a giraffe, a gazelle; of a gothic
tower–of an overgrown angel. Her Thursdays were becoming famous in
their world; and their world grew steadily, annexing street after
street. It included also Somebody’s Gardens, a Crescent–a couple of
Squares.

Thus Alvan Hervey and his wife for five prosperous years lived by the
side of one another. In time they came to know each other sufficiently
well for all the practical purposes of such an existence, but they were
no more capable of real intimacy than two animals feeding at the same
manger, under the same roof, in a luxurious stable. His longing was
appeased and became a habit; and she had her desire–the desire to get
away from under the paternal roof, to assert her individuality, to move
in her own set (so much smarter than the parental one); to have a
home of her own, and her own share of the world’s respect, envy, and
applause. They understood each other warily, tacitly, like a pair of
cautious conspirators in a profitable plot; because they were both
unable to look at a fact, a sentiment, a principle, or a belief
otherwise than in the light of their own dignity, of their own
glorification, of their own advantage. They skimmed over the surface
of life hand in hand, in a pure and frosty atmosphere–like two
skilful skaters cutting figures on thick ice for the admiration of
the beholders, and disdainfully ignoring the hidden stream, the stream
restless and dark; the stream of life, profound and unfrozen.

Alvan Hervey turned twice to the left, once to the right, walked along
two sides of a square, in the middle of which groups of tame-looking
trees stood in respectable captivity behind iron railings, and rang at
his door. A parlour-maid opened. A fad of his wife’s, this, to have only
women servants. That girl, while she took his hat and overcoat, said
something which made him look at his watch. It was five o’clock, and his
wife not at home. There was nothing unusual in that. He said, “No; no
tea,” and went upstairs.

He ascended without footfalls. Brass rods glimmered all up the red
carpet. On the first-floor landing a marble woman, decently covered from
neck to instep with stone draperies, advanced a row of lifeless toes
to the edge of the pedestal, and thrust out blindly a rigid white arm
holding a cluster of lights. He had artistic tastes–at home. Heavy
curtains caught back, half concealed dark corners. On the rich, stamped
paper of the walls hung sketches, water-colours, engravings. His tastes
were distinctly artistic. Old church towers peeped above green masses
of foliage; the hills were purple, the sands yellow, the seas sunny, the
skies blue. A young lady sprawled with dreamy eyes in a moored boat, in
company of a lunch basket, a champagne bottle, and an enamoured man in
a blazer. Bare-legged boys flirted sweetly with ragged maidens, slept
on stone steps, gambolled with dogs. A pathetically lean girl flattened
against a blank wall, turned up expiring eyes and tendered a flower for
sale; while, near by, the large photographs of some famous and mutilated
bas-reliefs seemed to represent a massacre turned into stone.

He looked, of course, at nothing, ascended another flight of stairs and
went straight into the dressing room. A bronze dragon nailed by the tail
to a bracket writhed away from the wall in calm convolutions, and
held, between the conventional fury of its jaws, a crude gas flame that
resembled a butterfly. The room was empty, of course; but, as he stepped
in, it became filled all at once with a stir of many people; because
the strips of glass on the doors of wardrobes and his wife’s large
pier-glass reflected him from head to foot, and multiplied his image
into a crowd of gentlemanly and slavish imitators, who were dressed
exactly like himself; had the same restrained and rare gestures; who
moved when he moved, stood still with him in an obsequious immobility,
and had just such appearances of life and feeling as he thought it
dignified and safe for any man to manifest. And like real people who are
slaves of common thoughts, that are not even their own, they affected a
shadowy independence by the superficial variety of their movements. They
moved together with him; but they either advanced to meet him, or walked
away from him; they appeared, disappeared; they seemed to dodge behind
walnut furniture, to be seen again, far within the polished panes,
stepping about distinct and unreal in the convincing illusion of a
room. And like the men he respected they could be trusted to do nothing
individual, original, or startling–nothing unforeseen and nothing
improper.

He moved for a time aimlessly in that good company, humming a popular
but refined tune, and thinking vaguely of a business letter from abroad,
which had to be answered on the morrow with cautious prevarication.
Then, as he walked towards a wardrobe, he saw appearing at his back, in
the high mirror, the corner of his wife’s dressing-table, and amongst
the glitter of silver-mounted objects on it, the square white patch of
an envelope. It was such an unusual thing to be seen there that he spun
round almost before he realized his surprise; and all the sham men
about him pivoted on their heels; all appeared surprised; and all moved
rapidly towards envelopes on dressing-tables.

He recognized his wife’s handwriting and saw that the envelope was
addressed to himself. He muttered, “How very odd,” and felt annoyed.
Apart from any odd action being essentially an indecent thing in itself,
the fact of his wife indulging in it made it doubly offensive. That she
should write to him at all, when she knew he would be home for dinner,
was perfectly ridiculous; but that she should leave it like this–in
evidence for chance discovery–struck him as so outrageous that,
thinking of it, he experienced suddenly a staggering sense of
insecurity, an absurd and bizarre flash of a notion that the house had
moved a little under his feet. He tore the envelope open, glanced at the
letter, and sat down in a chair near by.

He held the paper before his eyes and looked at half a dozen lines
scrawled on the page, while he was stunned by a noise meaningless
and violent, like the clash of gongs or the beating of drums; a great
aimless uproar that, in a manner, prevented him from hearing himself
think and made his mind an absolute blank. This absurd and distracting
tumult seemed to ooze out of the written words, to issue from between
his very fingers that trembled, holding the paper. And suddenly he
dropped the letter as though it had been something hot, or venomous, or
filthy; and rushing to the window with the unreflecting precipitation
of a man anxious to raise an alarm of fire or murder, he threw it up and
put his head out.

A chill gust of wind, wandering through the damp and sooty obscurity
over the waste of roofs and chimney-pots, touched his face with a clammy
flick. He saw an illimitable darkness, in which stood a black jumble of
walls, and, between them, the many rows of gaslights stretched far away
in long lines, like strung-up beads of fire. A sinister loom as of a
hidden conflagration lit up faintly from below the mist, falling upon
a billowy and motionless sea of tiles and bricks. At the rattle of the
opened window the world seemed to leap out of the night and confront
him, while floating up to his ears there came a sound vast and faint;
the deep mutter of something immense and alive. It penetrated him with
a feeling of dismay and he gasped silently. From the cab-stand in the
square came distinct hoarse voices and a jeering laugh which sounded
ominously harsh and cruel. It sounded threatening. He drew his head in,
as if before an aimed blow, and flung the window down quickly. He made
a few steps, stumbled against a chair, and with a great effort, pulled
himself together to lay hold of a certain thought that was whizzing
about loose in his head.

He got it at last, after more exertion than he expected; he was flushed
and puffed a little as though he had been catching it with his hands,
but his mental hold on it was weak, so weak that he judged it necessary
to repeat it aloud–to hear it spoken firmly–in order to insure a
perfect measure of possession. But he was unwilling to hear his own
voice–to hear any sound whatever–owing to a vague belief, shaping
itself slowly within him, that solitude and silence are the greatest
felicities of mankind. The next moment it dawned upon him that they are
perfectly unattainable–that faces must be seen, words spoken, thoughts
heard. All the words–all the thoughts!

He said very distinctly, and looking at the carpet, “She’s gone.”

It was terrible–not the fact but the words; the words charged with the
shadowy might of a meaning, that seemed to possess the tremendous power
to call Fate down upon the earth, like those strange and appalling words
that sometimes are heard in sleep. They vibrated round him in a metallic
atmosphere, in a space that had the hardness of iron and the resonance
of a bell of bronze. Looking down between the toes of his boots he
seemed to listen thoughtfully to the receding wave of sound; to the
wave spreading out in a widening circle, embracing streets, roofs,
church-steeples, fields–and travelling away, widening endlessly,
far, very far, where he could not hear–where he could not imagine
anything–where . . .

“And–with that . . . ass,” he said again without stirring in the least.
And there was nothing but humiliation. Nothing else. He could derive no
moral solace from any aspect of the situation, which radiated pain only
on every side. Pain. What kind of pain? It occurred to him that he ought
to be heart-broken; but in an exceedingly short moment he perceived that
his suffering was nothing of so trifling and dignified a kind. It was
altogether a more serious matter, and partook rather of the nature
of those subtle and cruel feelings which are awakened by a kick or a
horse-whipping.

He felt very sick–physically sick–as though he had bitten through
something nauseous. Life, that to a well-ordered mind should be a
matter of congratulation, appeared to him, for a second or so, perfectly
intolerable. He picked up the paper at his feet, and sat down with the
wish to think it out, to understand why his wife–his wife!–should
leave him, should throw away respect, comfort, peace, decency, position
throw away everything for nothing! He set himself to think out the
hidden logic of her action–a mental undertaking fit for the leisure
hours of a madhouse, though he couldn’t see it. And he thought of his
wife in every relation except the only fundamental one. He thought
of her as a well-bred girl, as a wife, as a cultured person, as the
mistress of a house, as a lady; but he never for a moment thought of her
simply as a woman.

Then a fresh wave, a raging wave of humiliation, swept through his mind,
and left nothing there but a personal sense of undeserved abasement. Why
should he be mixed up with such a horrid exposure! It annihilated all
the advantages of his well-ordered past, by a truth effective and unjust
like a calumny–and the past was wasted. Its failure was disclosed–a
distinct failure, on his part, to see, to guard, to understand. It could
not be denied; it could not be explained away, hustled out of sight. He
could not sit on it and look solemn. Now–if she had only died!

If she had only died! He was driven to envy such a respectable
bereavement, and one so perfectly free from any taint of misfortune that
even his best friend or his best enemy would not have felt the slightest
thrill of exultation. No one would have cared. He sought comfort in
clinging to the contemplation of the only fact of life that the resolute
efforts of mankind had never failed to disguise in the clatter and
glamour of phrases. And nothing lends itself more to lies than death.
If she had only died! Certain words would have been said to him in a
sad tone, and he, with proper fortitude, would have made appropriate
answers. There were precedents for such an occasion. And no one would
have cared. If she had only died! The promises, the terrors, the hopes
of eternity, are the concern of the corrupt dead; but the obvious
sweetness of life belongs to living, healthy men. And life was his
concern: that sane and gratifying existence untroubled by too much love
or by too much regret. She had interfered with it; she had defaced it.
And suddenly it occurred to him he must have been mad to marry. It was
too much in the nature of giving yourself away, of wearing–if for
a moment–your heart on your sleeve. But every one married. Was all
mankind mad!

In the shock of that startling thought he looked up, and saw to the
left, to the right, in front, men sitting far off in chairs and looking
at him with wild eyes–emissaries of a distracted mankind intruding to
spy upon his pain and his humiliation. It was not to be borne. He rose
quickly, and the others jumped up, too, on all sides. He stood still in
the middle of the room as if discouraged by their vigilance. No escape!
He felt something akin to despair. Everybody must know. The servants
must know to-night. He ground his teeth . . . And he had never noticed,
never guessed anything. Every one will know. He thought: “The woman’s a
monster, but everybody will think me a fool”; and standing still in the
midst of severe walnut-wood furniture, he felt such a tempest of anguish
within him that he seemed to see himself rolling on the carpet, beating
his head against the wall. He was disgusted with himself, with the
loathsome rush of emotion breaking through all the reserves that guarded
his manhood. Something unknown, withering and poisonous, had entered
his life, passed near him, touched him, and he was deteriorating. He was
appalled. What was it? She was gone. Why? His head was ready to burst
with the endeavour to understand her act and his subtle horror of it.
Everything was changed. Why? Only a woman gone, after all; and yet he
had a vision, a vision quick and distinct as a dream: the vision of
everything he had thought indestructible and safe in the world crashing
down about him, like solid walls do before the fierce breath of
a hurricane. He stared, shaking in every limb, while he felt the
destructive breath, the mysterious breath, the breath of passion, stir
the profound peace of the house. He looked round in fear. Yes. Crime may
be forgiven; uncalculating sacrifice, blind trust, burning faith, other
follies, may be turned to account; suffering, death itself, may with a
grin or a frown be explained away; but passion is the unpardonable and
secret infamy of our hearts, a thing to curse, to hide and to deny; a
shameless and forlorn thing that tramples upon the smiling promises,
that tears off the placid mask, that strips the body of life. And it had
come to him! It had laid its unclean hand upon the spotless draperies
of his existence, and he had to face it alone with all the world looking
on. All the world! And he thought that even the bare suspicion of
such an adversary within his house carried with it a taint and a
condemnation. He put both his hands out as if to ward off the reproach
of a defiling truth; and, instantly, the appalled conclave of unreal
men, standing about mutely beyond the clear lustre of mirrors, made at
him the same gesture of rejection and horror.

He glanced vainly here and there, like a man looking in desperation
for a weapon or for a hiding place, and understood at last that he was
disarmed and cornered by the enemy that, without any squeamishness,
would strike so as to lay open his heart. He could get help nowhere,
or even take counsel with himself, because in the sudden shock of her
desertion the sentiments which he knew that in fidelity to his bringing
up, to his prejudices and his surroundings, he ought to experience, were
so mixed up with the novelty of real feelings, of fundamental feelings
that know nothing of creed, class, or education, that he was unable to
distinguish clearly between what is and what ought to be; between the
inexcusable truth and the valid pretences. And he knew instinctively
that truth would be of no use to him. Some kind of concealment seemed a
necessity because one cannot explain. Of course not! Who would listen?
One had simply to be without stain and without reproach to keep one’s
place in the forefront of life.

He said to himself, “I must get over it the best I can,” and began to
walk up and down the room. What next? What ought to be done? He thought:
“I will travel–no I won’t. I shall face it out.” And after that resolve
he was greatly cheered by the reflection that it would be a mute and an
easy part to play, for no one would be likely to converse with him about
the abominable conduct of–that woman. He argued to himself that
decent people–and he knew no others–did not care to talk about such
indelicate affairs. She had gone off–with that unhealthy, fat ass of a
journalist. Why? He had been all a husband ought to be. He had given her
a good position–she shared his prospects–he had treated her invariably
with great consideration. He reviewed his conduct with a kind of dismal
pride. It had been irreproachable. Then, why? For love? Profanation!
There could be no love there. A shameful impulse of passion. Yes,
passion. His own wife! Good God! . . . And the indelicate aspect of his
domestic misfortune struck him with such shame that, next moment, he
caught himself in the act of pondering absurdly over the notion whether
it would not be more dignified for him to induce a general belief that
he had been in the habit of beating his wife. Some fellows do . . . and
anything would be better than the filthy fact; for it was clear he
had lived with the root of it for five years–and it was too shameful.
Anything! Anything! Brutality . . . But he gave it up directly, and
began to think of the Divorce Court. It did not present itself to him,
notwithstanding his respect for law and usage, as a proper refuge for
dignified grief. It appeared rather as an unclean and sinister cavern
where men and women are haled by adverse fate to writhe ridiculously
in the presence of uncompromising truth. It should not be allowed. That
woman! Five . . . years . . . married five years . . . and never to see
anything. Not to the very last day . . . not till she coolly went off.
And he pictured to himself all the people he knew engaged in speculating
as to whether all that time he had been blind, foolish, or infatuated.
What a woman! Blind! . . . Not at all. Could a clean-minded man imagine
such depravity? Evidently not. He drew a free breath. That was the
attitude to take; it was dignified enough; it gave him the advantage,
and he could not help perceiving that it was moral. He yearned
unaffectedly to see morality (in his person) triumphant before the
world. As to her she would be forgotten. Let her be forgotten–buried in
oblivion–lost! No one would allude . . . Refined people–and every man
and woman he knew could be so described–had, of course, a horror of
such topics. Had they? Oh, yes. No one would allude to her . . . in his
hearing. He stamped his foot, tore the letter across, then again and
again. The thought of sympathizing friends excited in him a fury
of mistrust. He flung down the small bits of paper. They settled,
fluttering at his feet, and looked very white on the dark carpet, like a
scattered handful of snow-flakes.

This fit of hot anger was succeeded by a sudden sadness, by the
darkening passage of a thought that ran over the scorched surface of his
heart, like upon a barren plain, and after a fiercer assault of sunrays,
the melancholy and cooling shadow of a cloud. He realized that he had
had a shock–not a violent or rending blow, that can be seen, resisted,
returned, forgotten, but a thrust, insidious and penetrating, that had
stirred all those feelings, concealed and cruel, which the arts of the
devil, the fears of mankind–God’s infinite compassion, perhaps–keep
chained deep down in the inscrutable twilight of our breasts. A dark
curtain seemed to rise before him, and for less than a second he looked
upon the mysterious universe of moral suffering. As a landscape is seen
complete, and vast, and vivid, under a flash of lightning, so he
could see disclosed in a moment all the immensity of pain that can be
contained in one short moment of human thought. Then the curtain fell
again, but his rapid vision left in Alvan Hervey’s mind a trail of
invincible sadness, a sense of loss and bitter solitude, as though he
had been robbed and exiled. For a moment he ceased to be a member of
society with a position, a career, and a name attached to all this, like
a descriptive label of some complicated compound. He was a simple human
being removed from the delightful world of crescents and squares. He
stood alone, naked and afraid, like the first man on the first day of
evil. There are in life events, contacts, glimpses, that seem brutally
to bring all the past to a close. There is a shock and a crash, as of
a gate flung to behind one by the perfidious hand of fate. Go and seek
another paradise, fool or sage. There is a moment of dumb dismay, and
the wanderings must begin again; the painful explaining away of facts,
the feverish raking up of illusions, the cultivation of a fresh crop
of lies in the sweat of one’s brow, to sustain life, to make it
supportable, to make it fair, so as to hand intact to another generation
of blind wanderers the charming legend of a heartless country, of a
promised land, all flowers and blessings . . .

He came to himself with a slight start, and became aware of an
oppressive, crushing desolation. It was only a feeling, it is true,
but it produced on him a physical effect, as though his chest had
been squeezed in a vice. He perceived himself so extremely forlorn
and lamentable, and was moved so deeply by the oppressive sorrow, that
another turn of the screw, he felt, would bring tears out of his eyes.
He was deteriorating. Five years of life in common had appeased his
longing. Yes, long-time ago. The first five months did that–but . . .
There was the habit–the habit of her person, of her smile, of her
gestures, of her voice, of her silence. She had a pure brow and
good hair. How utterly wretched all this was. Good hair and fine
eyes–remarkably fine. He was surprised by the number of details that
intruded upon his unwilling memory. He could not help remembering her
footsteps, the rustle of her dress, her way of holding her head, her
decisive manner of saying “Alvan,” the quiver of her nostrils when she
was annoyed. All that had been so much his property, so intimately and
specially his! He raged in a mournful, silent way, as he took stock
of his losses. He was like a man counting the cost of an unlucky
speculation–irritated, depressed–exasperated with himself and with
others, with the fortunate, with the indifferent, with the callous; yet
the wrong done him appeared so cruel that he would perhaps have dropped
a tear over that spoliation if it had not been for his conviction
that men do not weep. Foreigners do; they also kill sometimes in such
circumstances. And to his horror he felt himself driven to regret almost
that the usages of a society ready to forgive the shooting of a burglar
forbade him, under the circumstances, even as much as a thought of
murder. Nevertheless, he clenched his fists and set his teeth hard.
And he was afraid at the same time. He was afraid with that penetrating
faltering fear that seems, in the very middle of a beat, to turn one’s
heart into a handful of dust. The contamination of her crime spread out,
tainted the universe, tainted himself; woke up all the dormant infamies
of the world; caused a ghastly kind of clairvoyance in which he could
see the towns and fields of the earth, its sacred places, its temples
and its houses, peopled by monsters–by monsters of duplicity, lust, and
murder. She was a monster–he himself was thinking monstrous thoughts
. . . and yet he was like other people. How many men and women at this
very moment were plunged in abominations–meditated crimes. It was
frightful to think of. He remembered all the streets–the well-to-do
streets he had passed on his way home; all the innumerable houses with
closed doors and curtained windows. Each seemed now an abode of anguish
and folly. And his thought, as if appalled, stood still, recalling with
dismay the decorous and frightful silence that was like a conspiracy;
the grim, impenetrable silence of miles of walls concealing passions,
misery, thoughts of crime. Surely he was not the only man; his was not
the only house . . . and yet no one knew–no one guessed. But he knew.
He knew with unerring certitude that could not be deceived by the
correct silence of walls, of closed doors, of curtained windows. He was
beside himself with a despairing agitation, like a man informed of
a deadly secret–the secret of a calamity threatening the safety of
mankind–the sacredness, the peace of life.

He caught sight of himself in one of the looking-glasses. It was a
relief. The anguish of his feeling had been so powerful that he more
than half expected to see some distorted wild face there, and he was
pleasantly surprised to see nothing of the kind. His aspect, at any
rate, would let no one into the secret of his pain. He examined himself
with attention. His trousers were turned up, and his boots a little
muddy, but he looked very much as usual. Only his hair was slightly
ruffled, and that disorder, somehow, was so suggestive of trouble
that he went quickly to the table, and began to use the brushes, in an
anxious desire to obliterate the compromising trace, that only vestige
of his emotion. He brushed with care, watching the effect of his
smoothing; and another face, slightly pale and more tense than was
perhaps desirable, peered back at him from the toilet glass. He laid the
brushes down, and was not satisfied. He took them up again and brushed,
brushed mechanically–forgot himself in that occupation. The tumult of
his thoughts ended in a sluggish flow of reflection, such as, after the
outburst of a volcano, the almost imperceptible progress of a stream
of lava, creeping languidly over a convulsed land and pitilessly
obliterating any landmark left by the shock of the earthquake. It is
a destructive but, by comparison, it is a peaceful phenomenon. Alvan
Hervey was almost soothed by the deliberate pace of his thoughts. His
moral landmarks were going one by one, consumed in the fire of his
experience, buried in hot mud, in ashes. He was cooling–on the surface;
but there was enough heat left somewhere to make him slap the brushes on
the table, and turning away, say in a fierce whisper: “I wish him joy
. . . Damn the woman.”

He felt himself utterly corrupted by her wickedness, and the most
significant symptom of his moral downfall was the bitter, acrid
satisfaction with which he recognized it. He, deliberately, swore in his
thoughts; he meditated sneers; he shaped in profound silence words of
cynical unbelief, and his most cherished convictions stood revealed
finally as the narrow prejudices of fools. A crowd of shapeless, unclean
thoughts crossed his mind in a stealthy rush, like a band of veiled
malefactors hastening to a crime. He put his hands deep into his
pockets. He heard a faint ringing somewhere, and muttered to himself:
“I am not the only one . . . not the only one.” There was another ring.
Front door!

His heart leaped up into his throat, and forthwith descended as low as
his boots. A call! Who? Why? He wanted to rush out on the landing and
shout to the servant: “Not at home! Gone away abroad!” . . . Any excuse.
He could not face a visitor. Not this evening. No. To-morrow. . . .
Before he could break out of the numbness that enveloped him like a
sheet of lead, he heard far below, as if in the entrails of the earth,
a door close heavily. The house vibrated to it more than to a clap of
thunder. He stood still, wishing himself invisible. The room was very
chilly. He did not think he would ever feel like that. But people must
be met–they must be faced–talked to–smiled at. He heard another door,
much nearer–the door of the drawing-room–being opened and flung to
again. He imagined for a moment he would faint. How absurd! That kind
of thing had to be gone through. A voice spoke. He could not catch the
words. Then the voice spoke again, and footsteps were heard on the
first floor landing. Hang it all! Was he to hear that voice and those
footsteps whenever any one spoke or moved? He thought: “This is like
being haunted–I suppose it will last for a week or so, at least. Till
I forget. Forget! Forget!” Someone was coming up the second flight of
stairs. Servant? He listened, then, suddenly, as though an incredible,
frightful revelation had been shouted to him from a distance, he
bellowed out in the empty room: “What! What!” in such a fiendish tone
as to astonish himself. The footsteps stopped outside the door. He stood
openmouthed, maddened and still, as if in the midst of a catastrophe.
The door-handle rattled lightly. It seemed to him that the walls were
coming apart, that the furniture swayed at him; the ceiling slanted
queerly for a moment, a tall wardrobe tried to topple over. He caught
hold of something and it was the back of a chair. So he had reeled
against a chair! Oh! Confound it! He gripped hard.

The flaming butterfly poised between the jaws of the bronze dragon
radiated a glare, a glare that seemed to leap up all at once into a
crude, blinding fierceness, and made it difficult for him to distinguish
plainly the figure of his wife standing upright with her back to the
closed door. He looked at her and could not detect her breathing. The
harsh and violent light was beating on her, and he was amazed to see her
preserve so well the composure of her upright attitude in that scorching
brilliance which, to his eyes, enveloped her like a hot and consuming
mist. He would not have been surprised if she had vanished in it as
suddenly as she had appeared. He stared and listened; listened for some
sound, but the silence round him was absolute–as though he had in
a moment grown completely deaf as well as dim-eyed. Then his hearing
returned, preternaturally sharp. He heard the patter of a rain-shower on
the window panes behind the lowered blinds, and below, far below, in
the artificial abyss of the square, the deadened roll of wheels and the
splashy trotting of a horse. He heard a groan also–very distinct–in
the room–close to his ear.

He thought with alarm: “I must have made that noise myself;” and at the
same instant the woman left the door, stepped firmly across the floor
before him, and sat down in a chair. He knew that step. There was no
doubt about it. She had come back! And he very nearly said aloud
“Of course!”–such was his sudden and masterful perception of the
indestructible character of her being. Nothing could destroy her–and
nothing but his own destruction could keep her away. She was the
incarnation of all the short moments which every man spares out of his
life for dreams, for precious dreams that concrete the most cherished,
the most profitable of his illusions. He peered at her with inward
trepidation. She was mysterious, significant, full of obscure meaning
–like a symbol. He peered, bending forward, as though he had been
discovering about her things he had never seen before. Unconsciously
he made a step towards her–then another. He saw her arm make an ample,
decided movement and he stopped. She had lifted her veil. It was like
the lifting of a vizor.

The spell was broken. He experienced a shock as though he had been
called out of a trance by the sudden noise of an explosion. It was even
more startling and more distinct; it was an infinitely more intimate
change, for he had the sensation of having come into this room only that
very moment; of having returned from very far; he was made aware that
some essential part of himself had in a flash returned into his
body, returned finally from a fierce and lamentable region, from the
dwelling-place of unveiled hearts. He woke up to an amazing infinity of
contempt, to a droll bitterness of wonder, to a disenchanted conviction
of safety. He had a glimpse of the irresistible force, and he saw also
the barrenness of his convictions–of her convictions. It seemed to him
that he could never make a mistake as long as he lived. It was morally
impossible to go wrong. He was not elated by that certitude; he was
dimly uneasy about its price; there was a chill as of death in this
triumph of sound principles, in this victory snatched under the very
shadow of disaster.

The last trace of his previous state of mind vanished, as the
instantaneous and elusive trail of a bursting meteor vanishes on the
profound blackness of the sky; it was the faint flicker of a painful
thought, gone as soon as perceived, that nothing but her presence–after
all–had the power to recall him to himself. He stared at her. She sat
with her hands on her lap, looking down; and he noticed that her boots
were dirty, her skirts wet and splashed, as though she had been driven
back there by a blind fear through a waste of mud. He was indignant,
amazed and shocked, but in a natural, healthy way now; so that he
could control those unprofitable sentiments by the dictates of cautious
self-restraint. The light in the room had no unusual brilliance now; it
was a good light in which he could easily observe the expression of her
face. It was that of dull fatigue. And the silence that surrounded them
was the normal silence of any quiet house, hardly disturbed by the faint
noises of a respectable quarter of the town. He was very cool–and it
was quite coolly that he thought how much better it would be if neither
of them ever spoke again. She sat with closed lips, with an air of
lassitude in the stony forgetfulness of her pose, but after a moment she
lifted her drooping eyelids and met his tense and inquisitive stare by
a look that had all the formless eloquence of a cry. It penetrated, it
stirred without informing; it was the very essence of anguish stripped
of words that can be smiled at, argued away, shouted down, disdained.
It was anguish naked and unashamed, the bare pain of existence let loose
upon the world in the fleeting unreserve of a look that had in it an
immensity of fatigue, the scornful sincerity, the black impudence of an
extorted confession. Alvan Hervey was seized with wonder, as though he
had seen something inconceivable; and some obscure part of his being
was ready to exclaim with him: “I would never have believed it!” but
an instantaneous revulsion of wounded susceptibilities checked the
unfinished thought.

He felt full of rancorous indignation against the woman who could look
like this at one. This look probed him; it tampered with him. It was
dangerous to one as would be a hint of unbelief whispered by a priest in
the august decorum of a temple; and at the same time it was impure,
it was disturbing, like a cynical consolation muttered in the dark,
tainting the sorrow, corroding the thought, poisoning the heart. He
wanted to ask her furiously: “Who do you take me for? How dare you look
at me like this?” He felt himself helpless before the hidden meaning of
that look; he resented it with pained and futile violence as an injury
so secret that it could never, never be redressed. His wish was to crush
her by a single sentence. He was stainless. Opinion was on his side;
morality, men and gods were on his side; law, conscience–all the world!
She had nothing but that look. And he could only say:

“How long do you intend to stay here?”

Her eyes did not waver, her lips remained closed; and for any effect
of his words he might have spoken to a dead woman, only that this one
breathed quickly. He was profoundly disappointed by what he had said.
It was a great deception, something in the nature of treason. He had
deceived himself. It should have been altogether different–other
words–another sensation. And before his eyes, so fixed that at times
they saw nothing, she sat apparently as unconscious as though she had
been alone, sending that look of brazen confession straight at him–with
an air of staring into empty space. He said significantly:

“Must I go then?” And he knew he meant nothing of what he implied.

One of her hands on her lap moved slightly as though his words had
fallen there and she had thrown them off on the floor. But her silence
encouraged him. Possibly it meant remorse–perhaps fear. Was she
thunderstruck by his attitude? . . . Her eyelids dropped. He seemed to
understand ever so much–everything! Very well–but she must be made to
suffer. It was due to him. He understood everything, yet he judged it
indispensable to say with an obvious affectation of civility:

“I don’t understand–be so good as to . . .”

She stood up. For a second he believed she intended to go away, and
it was as though someone had jerked a string attached to his heart. It
hurt. He remained open-mouthed and silent. But she made an irresolute
step towards him, and instinctively he moved aside. They stood before
one another, and the fragments of the torn letter lay between them–at
their feet–like an insurmountable obstacle, like a sign of eternal
separation! Around them three other couples stood still and face to
face, as if waiting for a signal to begin some action–a struggle, a
dispute, or a dance.

She said: “Don’t–Alvan!” and there was something that resembled a
warning in the pain of her tone. He narrowed his eyes as if trying to
pierce her with his gaze. Her voice touched him. He had aspirations
after magnanimity, generosity, superiority–interrupted, however, by
flashes of indignation and anxiety–frightful anxiety to know how far
she had gone. She looked down at the torn paper. Then she looked up, and
their eyes met again, remained fastened together, like an unbreakable
bond, like a clasp of eternal complicity; and the decorous silence, the
pervading quietude of the house which enveloped this meeting of their
glances became for a moment inexpressibly vile, for he was afraid she
would say too much and make magnanimity impossible, while behind the
profound mournfulness of her face there was a regret–a regret of things
done–the regret of delay–the thought that if she had only turned back
a week sooner–a day sooner–only an hour sooner. . . . They were afraid
to hear again the sound of their voices; they did not know what they
might say–perhaps something that could not be recalled; and words are
more terrible than facts. But the tricky fatality that lurks in obscure
impulses spoke through Alvan Hervey’s lips suddenly; and he heard
his own voice with the excited and sceptical curiosity with which one
listens to actors’ voices speaking on the stage in the strain of a
poignant situation.

“If you have forgotten anything . . . of course . . . I . . .”

Her eyes blazed at him for an instant; her lips trembled–and then she
also became the mouth-piece of the mysterious force forever hovering
near us; of that perverse inspiration, wandering capricious and
uncontrollable, like a gust of wind.

“What is the good of this, Alvan? . . . You know why I came back. . . .
You know that I could not . . .”

He interrupted her with irritation.

“Then! what’s this?” he asked, pointing downwards at the torn letter.

“That’s a mistake,” she said hurriedly, in a muffled voice.

This answer amazed him. He remained speechless, staring at her. He had
half a mind to burst into a laugh. It ended in a smile as involuntary as
a grimace of pain.

“A mistake . . .” he began, slowly, and then found himself unable to say
another word.

“Yes . . . it was honest,” she said very low, as if speaking to the
memory of a feeling in a remote past.

He exploded.

“Curse your honesty! . . . Is there any honesty in all this! . . . When
did you begin to be honest? Why are you here? What are you now? . . .
Still honest? . . .”

He walked at her, raging, as if blind; during these three quick strides
he lost touch of the material world and was whirled interminably through
a kind of empty universe made up of nothing but fury and anguish, till
he came suddenly upon her face–very close to his. He stopped short, and
all at once seemed to remember something heard ages ago.

“You don’t know the meaning of the word,” he shouted.

She did not flinch. He perceived with fear that everything around him
was still. She did not move a hair’s breadth; his own body did not stir.
An imperturbable calm enveloped their two motionless figures, the house,
the town, all the world–and the trifling tempest of his feelings. The
violence of the short tumult within him had been such as could well have
shattered all creation; and yet nothing was changed. He faced his wife
in the familiar room in his own house. It had not fallen. And right and
left all the innumerable dwellings, standing shoulder to shoulder,
had resisted the shock of his passion, had presented, unmoved, to the
loneliness of his trouble, the grim silence of walls, the impenetrable
and polished discretion of closed doors and curtained windows.
Immobility and silence pressed on him, assailed him, like two
accomplices of the immovable and mute woman before his eyes. He was
suddenly vanquished. He was shown his impotence. He was soothed by the
breath of a corrupt resignation coming to him through the subtle irony
of the surrounding peace.

He said with villainous composure:

“At any rate it isn’t enough for me. I want to know more–if you’re
going to stay.”

“There is nothing more to tell,” she answered, sadly.

It struck him as so very true that he did not say anything. She went on:

“You wouldn’t understand. . . .”

“No?” he said, quietly. He held himself tight not to burst into howls
and imprecations.

“I tried to be faithful . . .” she began again.

“And this?” he exclaimed, pointing at the fragments of her letter.

“This–this is a failure,” she said.

“I should think so,” he muttered, bitterly.

“I tried to be faithful to myself–Alvan–and . . . and honest to
you. . . .”

“If you had tried to be faithful to me it would have been more to the
purpose,” he interrupted, angrily. “I’ve been faithful to you and you
have spoiled my life–both our lives . . .” Then after a pause the
unconquerable preoccupation of self came out, and he raised his voice to
ask resentfully, “And, pray, for how long have you been making a fool of
me?”

She seemed horribly shocked by that question. He did not wait for an
answer, but went on moving about all the time; now and then coming up to
her, then wandering off restlessly to the other end of the room.

“I want to know. Everybody knows, I suppose, but myself–and that’s your
honesty!”

“I have told you there is nothing to know,” she said, speaking
unsteadily as if in pain. “Nothing of what you suppose. You don’t
understand me. This letter is the beginning–and the end.”

“The end–this thing has no end,” he clamoured, unexpectedly. “Can’t you
understand that? I can . . . The beginning . . .”

He stopped and looked into her eyes with concentrated intensity, with
a desire to see, to penetrate, to understand, that made him positively
hold his breath till he gasped.

“By Heavens!” he said, standing perfectly still in a peering attitude
and within less than a foot from her.

“By Heavens!” he repeated, slowly, and in a tone whose involuntary
strangeness was a complete mystery to himself. “By Heavens–I could
believe you–I could believe anything–now!”

He turned short on his heel and began to walk up and down the room with
an air of having disburdened himself of the final pronouncement of his
life–of having said something on which he would not go back, even if
he could. She remained as if rooted to the carpet. Her eyes followed
the restless movements of the man, who avoided looking at her. Her wide
stare clung to him, inquiring, wondering and doubtful.

“But the fellow was forever sticking in here,” he burst out,
distractedly. “He made love to you, I suppose–and, and . . .” He
lowered his voice. “And–you let him.”

“And I let him,” she murmured, catching his intonation, so that her
voice sounded unconscious, sounded far off and slavish, like an echo.

He said twice, “You! You!” violently, then calmed down. “What could you
see in the fellow?” he asked, with unaffected wonder. “An effeminate,
fat ass. What could you . . . Weren’t you happy? Didn’t you have all you
wanted? Now–frankly; did I deceive your expectations in any way? Were
you disappointed with our position–or with our prospects–perhaps? You
know you couldn’t be–they are much better than you could hope for when
you married me. . . .”

He forgot himself so far as to gesticulate a little while he went on
with animation:

“What could you expect from such a fellow? He’s an outsider–a rank
outsider. . . . If it hadn’t been for my money . . . do you hear? . . .
for my money, he wouldn’t know where to turn. His people won’t have
anything to do with him. The fellow’s no class–no class at all.
He’s useful, certainly, that’s why I . . . I thought you had enough
intelligence to see it. . . . And you . . . No! It’s incredible!
What did he tell you? Do you care for no one’s opinion–is there no
restraining influence in the world for you–women? Did you ever give me
a thought? I tried to be a good husband. Did I fail? Tell me–what have
I done?”

Carried away by his feelings he took his head in both his hands and
repeated wildly:

“What have I done? . . . Tell me! What? . . .”

“Nothing,” she said.

“Ah! You see . . . you can’t . . .” he began, triumphantly, walking
away; then suddenly, as though he had been flung back at her by
something invisible he had met, he spun round and shouted with
exasperation:

“What on earth did you expect me to do?”

Without a word she moved slowly towards the table, and, sitting down,
leaned on her elbow, shading her eyes with her hand. All that time he
glared at her watchfully as if expecting every moment to find in her
deliberate movements an answer to his question. But he could not read
anything, he could gather no hint of her thought. He tried to suppress
his desire to shout, and after waiting awhile, said with incisive scorn:

“Did you want me to write absurd verses; to sit and look at you for
hours–to talk to you about your soul? You ought to have known I wasn’t
that sort. . . . I had something better to do. But if you think I was
totally blind . . .”

He perceived in a flash that he could remember an infinity of
enlightening occurrences. He could recall ever so many distinct
occasions when he came upon them; he remembered the absurdly interrupted
gesture of his fat, white hand, the rapt expression of her face, the
glitter of unbelieving eyes; snatches of incomprehensible conversations
not worth listening to, silences that had meant nothing at the time
and seemed now illuminating like a burst of sunshine. He remembered all
that. He had not been blind. Oh! No! And to know this was an exquisite
relief: it brought back all his composure.

“I thought it beneath me to suspect you,” he said, loftily.

The sound of that sentence evidently possessed some magical power,
because, as soon as he had spoken, he felt wonderfully at ease; and
directly afterwards he experienced a flash of joyful amazement at
the discovery that he could be inspired to such noble and truthful
utterance. He watched the effect of his words. They caused her to glance
to him quickly over her shoulder. He caught a glimpse of wet eyelashes,
of a red cheek with a tear running down swiftly; and then she turned
away again and sat as before, covering her face with her hands.

“You ought to be perfectly frank with me,” he said, slowly.

“You know everything,” she answered, indistinctly, through her fingers.

“This letter. . . . Yes . . . but . . .”

“And I came back,” she exclaimed in a stifled voice; “you know
everything.”

“I am glad of it–for your sake,” he said with impressive gravity. He
listened to himself with solemn emotion. It seemed to him that something
inexpressibly momentous was in progress within the room, that every
word and every gesture had the importance of events preordained from
the beginning of all things, and summing up in their finality the whole
purpose of creation.

“For your sake,” he repeated.

Her shoulders shook as though she had been sobbing, and he forgot
himself in the contemplation of her hair. Suddenly he gave a start, as
if waking up, and asked very gently and not much above a whisper–

“Have you been meeting him often?”

“Never!” she cried into the palms of her hands.

This answer seemed for a moment to take from him the power of speech.
His lips moved for some time before any sound came.

“You preferred to make love here–under my very nose,” he said,
furiously. He calmed down instantly, and felt regretfully uneasy, as
though he had let himself down in her estimation by that outburst. She
rose, and with her hand on the back of the chair confronted him with
eyes that were perfectly dry now. There was a red spot on each of her
cheeks.

“When I made up my mind to go to him–I wrote,” she said.

“But you didn’t go to him,” he took up in the same tone. “How far did
you go? What made you come back?”

“I didn’t know myself,” she murmured. Nothing of her moved but her lips.
He fixed her sternly.

“Did he expect this? Was he waiting for you?” he asked.

She answered him by an almost imperceptible nod, and he continued to
look at her for a good while without making a sound. Then, at last–

“And I suppose he is waiting yet?” he asked, quickly.

Again she seemed to nod at him. For some reason he felt he must know the
time. He consulted his watch gloomily. Half-past seven.

“Is he?” he muttered, putting the watch in his pocket. He looked up at
her, and, as if suddenly overcome by a sense of sinister fun, gave a
short, harsh laugh, directly repressed.

“No! It’s the most unheard! . . .” he mumbled while she stood before him
biting her lower lip, as if plunged in deep thought. He laughed again
in one low burst that was as spiteful as an imprecation. He did not know
why he felt such an overpowering and sudden distaste for the facts of
existence–for facts in general–such an immense disgust at the thought
of all the many days already lived through. He was wearied. Thinking
seemed a labour beyond his strength. He said–

“You deceived me–now you make a fool of him . . . It’s awful! Why?”

“I deceived myself!” she exclaimed.

“Oh! Nonsense!” he said, impatiently.

“I am ready to go if you wish it,” she went on, quickly. “It was due to
you–to be told–to know. No! I could not!” she cried, and stood still
wringing her hands stealthily.

“I am glad you repented before it was too late,” he said in a dull
tone and looking at his boots. “I am glad . . . some spark of better
feeling,” he muttered, as if to himself. He lifted up his head after a
moment of brooding silence. “I am glad to see that there is some sense
of decency left in you,” he added a little louder. Looking at her he
appeared to hesitate, as if estimating the possible consequences of what
he wished to say, and at last blurted out–

“After all, I loved you. . . .”

“I did not know,” she whispered.

“Good God!” he cried. “Why do you imagine I married you?”

The indelicacy of his obtuseness angered her.

“Ah–why?” she said through her teeth.

He appeared overcome with horror, and watched her lips intently as
though in fear.

“I imagined many things,” she said, slowly, and paused. He watched,
holding his breath. At last she went on musingly, as if thinking aloud,
“I tried to understand. I tried honestly. . . . Why? . . . To do the
usual thing–I suppose. . . . To please yourself.”

He walked away smartly, and when he came back, close to her, he had a
flushed face.

“You seemed pretty well pleased, too–at the time,” he hissed, with
scathing fury. “I needn’t ask whether you loved me.”

“I know now I was perfectly incapable of such a thing,” she said,
calmly, “If I had, perhaps you would not have married me.”

“It’s very clear I would not have done it if I had known you–as I know
you now.”

He seemed to see himself proposing to her–ages ago. They were strolling
up the slope of a lawn. Groups of people were scattered in sunshine.
The shadows of leafy boughs lay still on the short grass. The coloured
sunshades far off, passing between trees, resembled deliberate and
brilliant butterflies moving without a flutter. Men smiling amiably,
or else very grave, within the impeccable shelter of their black coats,
stood by the side of women who, clustered in clear summer toilettes,
recalled all the fabulous tales of enchanted gardens where animated
flowers smile at bewitched knights. There was a sumptuous serenity in
it all, a thin, vibrating excitement, the perfect security, as of an
invincible ignorance, that evoked within him a transcendent belief in
felicity as the lot of all mankind, a recklessly picturesque desire to
get promptly something for himself only, out of that splendour unmarred
by any shadow of a thought. The girl walked by his side across an open
space; no one was near, and suddenly he stood still, as if inspired, and
spoke. He remembered looking at her pure eyes, at her candid brow; he
remembered glancing about quickly to see if they were being observed,
and thinking that nothing could go wrong in a world of so much charm,
purity, and distinction. He was proud of it. He was one of its makers,
of its possessors, of its guardians, of its extollers. He wanted to
grasp it solidly, to get as much gratification as he could out of it;
and in view of its incomparable quality, of its unstained atmosphere,
of its nearness to the heaven of its choice, this gust of brutal desire
seemed the most noble of aspirations. In a second he lived again through
all these moments, and then all the pathos of his failure presented
itself to him with such vividness that there was a suspicion of tears in
his tone when he said almost unthinkingly, “My God! I did love you!”

She seemed touched by the emotion of his voice. Her lips quivered a
little, and she made one faltering step towards him, putting out her
hands in a beseeching gesture, when she perceived, just in time, that
being absorbed by the tragedy of his life he had absolutely forgotten
her very existence. She stopped, and her outstretched arms fell slowly.
He, with his features distorted by the bitterness of his thought, saw
neither her movement nor her gesture. He stamped his foot in vexation,
rubbed his head–then exploded.

“What the devil am I to do now?”

He was still again. She seemed to understand, and moved to the door
firmly.

“It’s very simple–I’m going,” she said aloud.

At the sound of her voice he gave a start of surprise, looked at her
wildly, and asked in a piercing tone–

“You. . . . Where? To him?”

“No–alone–good-bye.”

The door-handle rattled under her groping hand as though she had been
trying to get out of some dark place.

“No–stay!” he cried.

She heard him faintly. He saw her shoulder touch the lintel of the door.
She swayed as if dazed. There was less than a second of suspense while
they both felt as if poised on the very edge of moral annihilation,
ready to fall into some devouring nowhere. Then, almost simultaneously,
he shouted, “Come back!” and she let go the handle of the door. She
turned round in peaceful desperation like one who deliberately has
thrown away the last chance of life; and, for a moment, the room she
faced appeared terrible, and dark, and safe–like a grave.

He said, very hoarse and abrupt: “It can’t end like this. . . . Sit
down;” and while she crossed the room again to the low-backed chair
before the dressing-table, he opened the door and put his head out to
look and listen. The house was quiet. He came back pacified, and asked–

“Do you speak the truth?”

She nodded.

“You have lived a lie, though,” he said, suspiciously.

“Ah! You made it so easy,” she answered.

“You reproach me–me!”

“How could I?” she said; “I would have you no other–now.”

“What do you mean by . . .” he began, then checked himself, and without
waiting for an answer went on, “I won’t ask any questions. Is this
letter the worst of it?”

She had a nervous movement of her hands.

“I must have a plain answer,” he said, hotly.

“Then, no! The worst is my coming back.”

There followed a period of dead silence, during which they exchanged
searching glances.

He said authoritatively–

“You don’t know what you are saying. Your mind is unhinged. You are
beside yourself, or you would not say such things. You can’t control
yourself. Even in your remorse . . .” He paused a moment, then said with
a doctoral air: “Self-restraint is everything in life, you know. It’s
happiness, it’s dignity . . . it’s everything.”

She was pulling nervously at her handkerchief while he went on watching
anxiously to see the effect of his words. Nothing satisfactory happened.
Only, as he began to speak again, she covered her face with both her
hands.

“You see where the want of self-restraint leads to.
Pain–humiliation–loss of respect–of friends, of everything that
ennobles life, that . . . All kinds of horrors,” he concluded, abruptly.

She made no stir. He looked at her pensively for some time as though he
had been concentrating the melancholy thoughts evoked by the sight of
that abased woman. His eyes became fixed and dull. He was profoundly
penetrated by the solemnity of the moment; he felt deeply the greatness
of the occasion. And more than ever the walls of his house seemed
to enclose the sacredness of ideals to which he was about to offer a
magnificent sacrifice. He was the high priest of that temple, the severe
guardian of formulas, of rites, of the pure ceremonial concealing the
black doubts of life. And he was not alone. Other men, too–the best of
them–kept watch and ward by the hearthstones that were the altars of
that profitable persuasion. He understood confusedly that he was part
of an immense and beneficent power, which had a reward ready for every
discretion. He dwelt within the invincible wisdom of silence; he was
protected by an indestructible faith that would last forever, that would
withstand unshaken all the assaults–the loud execrations of apostates,
and the secret weariness of its confessors! He was in league with a
universe of untold advantages. He represented the moral strength of a
beautiful reticence that could vanquish all the deplorable crudities of
life–fear, disaster, sin–even death itself. It seemed to him he was
on the point of sweeping triumphantly away all the illusory mysteries of
existence. It was simplicity itself.

“I hope you see now the folly–the utter folly of wickedness,” he began
in a dull, solemn manner. “You must respect the conditions of your life
or lose all it can give you. All! Everything!”

He waved his arm once, and three exact replicas of his face, of his
clothes, of his dull severity, of his solemn grief, repeated the wide
gesture that in its comprehensive sweep indicated an infinity of moral
sweetness, embraced the walls, the hangings, the whole house, all the
crowd of houses outside, all the flimsy and inscrutable graves of the
living, with their doors numbered like the doors of prison-cells, and as
impenetrable as the granite of tombstones.

“Yes! Restraint, duty, fidelity–unswerving fidelity to what is expected
of you. This–only this–secures the reward, the peace. Everything else
we should labour to subdue–to destroy. It’s misfortune; it’s disease.
It is terrible–terrible. We must not know anything about it–we
needn’t. It is our duty to ourselves–to others. You do not live all
alone in the world–and if you have no respect for the dignity of life,
others have. Life is a serious matter. If you don’t conform to the
highest standards you are no one–it’s a kind of death. Didn’t this
occur to you? You’ve only to look round you to see the truth of what I
am saying. Did you live without noticing anything, without understanding
anything? From a child you had examples before your eyes–you could see
daily the beauty, the blessings of morality, of principles. . . .”

His voice rose and fell pompously in a strange chant. His eyes were
still, his stare exalted and sullen; his face was set, was hard, was
woodenly exulting over the grim inspiration that secretly possessed him,
seethed within him, lifted him up into a stealthy frenzy of belief. Now
and then he would stretch out his right arm over her head, as it were,
and he spoke down at that sinner from a height, and with a sense of
avenging virtue, with a profound and pure joy as though he could
from his steep pinnacle see every weighty word strike and hurt like a
punishing stone.

“Rigid principles–adherence to what is right,” he finished after a
pause.

“What is right?” she said, distinctly, without uncovering her face.

“Your mind is diseased!” he cried, upright and austere. “Such a question
is rot–utter rot. Look round you–there’s your answer, if you only care
to see. Nothing that outrages the received beliefs can be right. Your
conscience tells you that. They are the received beliefs because they
are the best, the noblest, the only possible. They survive. . . .”

He could not help noticing with pleasure the philosophic breadth of his
view, but he could not pause to enjoy it, for his inspiration, the call
of august truth, carried him on.

“You must respect the moral foundations of a society that has made
you what you are. Be true to it. That’s duty–that’s honour–that’s
honesty.”

He felt a great glow within him, as though he had swallowed something
hot. He made a step nearer. She sat up and looked at him with an ardour
of expectation that stimulated his sense of the supreme importance of
that moment. And as if forgetting himself he raised his voice very much.

“‘What’s right?’ you ask me. Think only. What would you have been if
you had gone off with that infernal vagabond? . . . What would you have
been? . . . You! My wife! . . .”

He caught sight of himself in the pier glass, drawn up to his full
height, and with a face so white that his eyes, at the distance,
resembled the black cavities in a skull. He saw himself as if about to
launch imprecations, with arms uplifted above her bowed head. He was
ashamed of that unseemly posture, and put his hands in his pockets
hurriedly. She murmured faintly, as if to herself–

“Ah! What am I now?”

“As it happens you are still Mrs. Alvan Hervey–uncommonly lucky for
you, let me tell you,” he said in a conversational tone. He walked up to
the furthest corner of the room, and, turning back, saw her sitting very
upright, her hands clasped on her lap, and with a lost, unswerving gaze
of her eyes which stared unwinking like the eyes of the blind, at the
crude gas flame, blazing and still, between the jaws of the bronze
dragon.

He came up quite close to her, and straddling his legs a little, stood
looking down at her face for some time without taking his hands out of
his pockets. He seemed to be turning over in his mind a heap of words,
piecing his next speech out of an overpowering abundance of thoughts.

“You’ve tried me to the utmost,” he said at last; and as soon as he said
these words he lost his moral footing, and felt himself swept away from
his pinnacle by a flood of passionate resentment against the bungling
creature that had come so near to spoiling his life. “Yes; I’ve
been tried more than any man ought to be,” he went on with righteous
bitterness. “It was unfair. What possessed you to? . . . What possessed
you? . . . Write such a . . . After five years of perfect happiness!
‘Pon my word, no one would believe. . . . Didn’t you feel you couldn’t?
Because you couldn’t . . . it was impossible–you know. Wasn’t it?
Think. Wasn’t it?”

“It was impossible,” she whispered, obediently.

This submissive assent given with such readiness did not soothe him,
did not elate him; it gave him, inexplicably, that sense of terror
we experience when in the midst of conditions we had learned to think
absolutely safe we discover all at once the presence of a near and
unsuspected danger. It was impossible, of course! He knew it. She knew
it. She confessed it. It was impossible! That man knew it, too–as well
as any one; couldn’t help knowing it. And yet those two had been engaged
in a conspiracy against his peace–in a criminal enterprise for which
there could be no sanction of belief within themselves. There could not
be! There could not be! And yet how near to . . . With a short thrill
he saw himself an exiled forlorn figure in a realm of ungovernable,
of unrestrained folly. Nothing could be foreseen, foretold–guarded
against. And the sensation was intolerable, had something of the
withering horror that may be conceived as following upon the utter
extinction of all hope. In the flash of thought the dishonouring
episode seemed to disengage itself from everything actual, from
earthly conditions, and even from earthly suffering; it became purely a
terrifying knowledge, an annihilating knowledge of a blind and infernal
force. Something desperate and vague, a flicker of an insane desire to
abase himself before the mysterious impulses of evil, to ask for mercy
in some way, passed through his mind; and then came the idea, the
persuasion, the certitude, that the evil must be forgotten–must be
resolutely ignored to make life possible; that the knowledge must be
kept out of mind, out of sight, like the knowledge of certain death is
kept out of the daily existence of men. He stiffened himself inwardly
for the effort, and next moment it appeared very easy, amazingly
feasible, if one only kept strictly to facts, gave one’s mind to their
perplexities and not to their meaning. Becoming conscious of a long
silence, he cleared his throat warningly, and said in a steady voice–

“I am glad you feel this . . . uncommonly glad . . . you felt this in
time. For, don’t you see . . .” Unexpectedly he hesitated.

“Yes . . . I see,” she murmured.

“Of course you would,” he said, looking at the carpet and speaking
like one who thinks of something else. He lifted his head. “I
cannot believe–even after this–even after this–that you are
altogether–altogether . . . other than what I thought you. It seems
impossible–to me.”

“And to me,” she breathed out.

“Now–yes,” he said, “but this morning? And to-morrow? . . . This is
what . . .”

He started at the drift of his words and broke off abruptly. Every train
of thought seemed to lead into the hopeless realm of ungovernable folly,
to recall the knowledge and the terror of forces that must be ignored.
He said rapidly–

“My position is very painful–difficult . . . I feel . . .”

He looked at her fixedly with a pained air, as though frightfully
oppressed by a sudden inability to express his pent-up ideas.

“I am ready to go,” she said very low. “I have forfeited everything
. . . to learn . . . to learn . . .”

Her chin fell on her breast; her voice died out in a sigh. He made a
slight gesture of impatient assent.

“Yes! Yes! It’s all very well . . . of course. Forfeited–ah! Morally
forfeited–only morally forfeited . . . if I am to believe you . . .”

She startled him by jumping up.

“Oh! I believe, I believe,” he said, hastily, and she sat down as
suddenly as she had got up. He went on gloomily–

“I’ve suffered–I suffer now. You can’t understand how much. So much
that when you propose a parting I almost think. . . . But no. There is
duty. You’ve forgotten it; I never did. Before heaven, I never did. But
in a horrid exposure like this the judgment of mankind goes astray–at
least for a time. You see, you and I–at least I feel that–you and I
are one before the world. It is as it should be. The world is right–in
the main–or else it couldn’t be–couldn’t be–what it is. And we are
part of it. We have our duty to–to our fellow beings who don’t want to
. . . to . . . er.”

He stammered. She looked up at him with wide eyes, and her lips were
slightly parted. He went on mumbling–

“. . . Pain. . . . Indignation. . . . Sure to misunderstand. I’ve
suffered enough. And if there has been nothing irreparable–as you
assure me . . . then . . .”

“Alvan!” she cried.

“What?” he said, morosely. He gazed down at her for a moment with a
sombre stare, as one looks at ruins, at the devastation of some natural
disaster.

“Then,” he continued after a short pause, “the best thing is . . .
the best for us . . . for every one. . . . Yes . . . least pain–most
unselfish. . . .” His voice faltered, and she heard only detached words.
“. . . Duty. . . . Burden. . . . Ourselves. . . . Silence.”

A moment of perfect stillness ensued.

“This is an appeal I am making to your conscience,” he said, suddenly,
in an explanatory tone, “not to add to the wretchedness of all this:
to try loyally and help me to live it down somehow. Without any
reservations–you know. Loyally! You can’t deny I’ve been cruelly
wronged and–after all–my affection deserves . . .” He paused with
evident anxiety to hear her speak.

“I make no reservations,” she said, mournfully. “How could I? I found
myself out and came back to . . .” her eyes flashed scornfully for an
instant “. . . to what–to what you propose. You see . . . I . . . I can
be trusted . . . now.”

He listened to every word with profound attention, and when she ceased
seemed to wait for more.

“Is that all you’ve got to say?” he asked.

She was startled by his tone, and said faintly–

“I spoke the truth. What more can I say?”

“Confound it! You might say something human,” he burst out. “It isn’t
being truthful; it’s being brazen–if you want to know. Not a word
to show you feel your position, and–and mine. Not a single word of
acknowledgment, or regret–or remorse . . . or . . . something.”

“Words!” she whispered in a tone that irritated him. He stamped his
foot.

“This is awful!” he exclaimed. “Words? Yes, words. Words mean
something–yes–they do–for all this infernal affectation. They mean
something to me–to everybody–to you. What the devil did you use to
express those sentiments–sentiments–pah!–which made you forget me,
duty, shame!” . . . He foamed at the mouth while she stared at him,
appalled by this sudden fury. “Did you two talk only with your eyes?” he
spluttered savagely. She rose.

“I can’t bear this,” she said, trembling from head to foot. “I am
going.”

They stood facing one another for a moment.

“Not you,” he said, with conscious roughness, and began to walk up
and down the room. She remained very still with an air of listening
anxiously to her own heart-beats, then sank down on the chair slowly,
and sighed, as if giving up a task beyond her strength.

“You misunderstand everything I say,” he began quietly, “but I prefer
to think that–just now–you are not accountable for your actions.”
He stopped again before her. “Your mind is unhinged,” he said, with
unction. “To go now would be adding crime–yes, crime–to folly. I’ll
have no scandal in my life, no matter what’s the cost. And why? You are
sure to misunderstand me–but I’ll tell you. As a matter of duty. Yes.
But you’re sure to misunderstand me–recklessly. Women always do–they
are too–too narrow-minded.”

He waited for a while, but she made no sound, didn’t even look at
him; he felt uneasy, painfully uneasy, like a man who suspects he
is unreasonably mistrusted. To combat that exasperating sensation
he recommenced talking very fast. The sound of his words excited his
thoughts, and in the play of darting thoughts he had glimpses now and
then of the inexpugnable rock of his convictions, towering in solitary
grandeur above the unprofitable waste of errors and passions.

“For it is self-evident,” he went on with anxious vivacity, “it is
self-evident that, on the highest ground we haven’t the right–no, we
haven’t the right to intrude our miseries upon those who–who naturally
expect better things from us. Every one wishes his own life and the life
around him to be beautiful and pure. Now, a scandal amongst people of
our position is disastrous for the morality–a fatal influence–don’t
you see–upon the general tone of the class–very important–the
most important, I verily believe, in–in the community. I feel
this–profoundly. This is the broad view. In time you’ll give me . . .
when you become again the woman I loved–and trusted. . . .”

He stopped short, as though unexpectedly suffocated, then in a
completely changed voice said, “For I did love and trust you”–and again
was silent for a moment. She put her handkerchief to her eyes.

“You’ll give me credit for–for–my motives. It’s mainly loyalty to–to
the larger conditions of our life–where you–you! of all women–failed.
One doesn’t usually talk like this–of course–but in this case you’ll
admit . . . And consider–the innocent suffer with the guilty. The world
is pitiless in its judgments. Unfortunately there are always those in
it who are only too eager to misunderstand. Before you and before my
conscience I am guiltless, but any–any disclosure would impair my
usefulness in the sphere–in the larger sphere in which I hope soon to
. . . I believe you fully shared my views in that matter–I don’t want
to say any more . . . on–on that point–but, believe me, true
unselfishness is to bear one’s burdens in–in silence. The ideal
must–must be preserved–for others, at least. It’s clear as daylight.
If I’ve a–a loathsome sore, to gratuitously display it would be
abominable–abominable! And often in life–in the highest conception
of life–outspokenness in certain circumstances is nothing less than
criminal. Temptation, you know, excuses no one. There is no such thing
really if one looks steadily to one’s welfare–which is grounded in
duty. But there are the weak.” . . . His tone became ferocious for an
instant . . . “And there are the fools and the envious–especially for
people in our position. I am guiltless of this terrible–terrible . . .
estrangement; but if there has been nothing irreparable.” . . .
Something gloomy, like a deep shadow passed over his face. . . .
“Nothing irreparable–you see even now I am ready to trust you
implicitly–then our duty is clear.”

He looked down. A change came over his expression and straightway
from the outward impetus of his loquacity he passed into the dull
contemplation of all the appeasing truths that, not without some wonder,
he had so recently been able to discover within himself. During this
profound and soothing communion with his innermost beliefs he remained
staring at the carpet, with a portentously solemn face and with a dull
vacuity of eyes that seemed to gaze into the blankness of an empty hole.
Then, without stirring in the least, he continued:

“Yes. Perfectly clear. I’ve been tried to the utmost, and I can’t
pretend that, for a time, the old feelings–the old feelings are not.
. . .” He sighed. . . . “But I forgive you. . . .”

She made a slight movement without uncovering her eyes. In his profound
scrutiny of the carpet he noticed nothing. And there was silence,
silence within and silence without, as though his words had stilled the
beat and tremor of all the surrounding life, and the house had stood
alone–the only dwelling upon a deserted earth.

He lifted his head and repeated solemnly:

“I forgive you . . . from a sense of duty–and in the hope . . .”

He heard a laugh, and it not only interrupted his words but also
destroyed the peace of his self-absorption with the vile pain of a
reality intruding upon the beauty of a dream. He couldn’t understand
whence the sound came. He could see, foreshortened, the tear-stained,
dolorous face of the woman stretched out, and with her head thrown over
the back of the seat. He thought the piercing noise was a delusion.
But another shrill peal followed by a deep sob and succeeded by another
shriek of mirth positively seemed to tear him out from where he stood.
He bounded to the door. It was closed. He turned the key and thought:
that’s no good. . . . “Stop this!” he cried, and perceived with alarm
that he could hardly hear his own voice in the midst of her screaming.
He darted back with the idea of stifling that unbearable noise with his
hands, but stood still distracted, finding himself as unable to touch
her as though she had been on fire. He shouted, “Enough of this!” like
men shout in the tumult of a riot, with a red face and starting eyes;
then, as if swept away before another burst of laughter, he disappeared
in a flash out of three looking-glasses, vanished suddenly from before
her. For a time the woman gasped and laughed at no one in the luminous
stillness of the empty room.

He reappeared, striding at her, and with a tumbler of water in his hand.
He stammered: “Hysterics–Stop–They will hear–Drink this.” She laughed
at the ceiling. “Stop this!” he cried. “Ah!”

He flung the water in her face, putting into the action all the secret
brutality of his spite, yet still felt that it would have been
perfectly excusable–in any one–to send the tumbler after the water. He
restrained himself, but at the same time was so convinced nothing could
stop the horror of those mad shrieks that, when the first sensation of
relief came, it did not even occur to him to doubt the impression of
having become suddenly deaf. When, next moment, he became sure that she
was sitting up, and really very quiet, it was as though everything–men,
things, sensations, had come to a rest. He was prepared to be grateful.
He could not take his eyes off her, fearing, yet unwilling to admit,
the possibility of her beginning again; for, the experience, however
contemptuously he tried to think of it, had left the bewilderment of a
mysterious terror. Her face was streaming with water and tears; there
was a wisp of hair on her forehead, another stuck to her cheek; her hat
was on one side, undecorously tilted; her soaked veil resembled a sordid
rag festooning her forehead. There was an utter unreserve in her aspect,
an abandonment of safeguards, that ugliness of truth which can only be
kept out of daily life by unremitting care for appearances. He did not
know why, looking at her, he thought suddenly of to-morrow, and why
the thought called out a deep feeling of unutterable, discouraged
weariness–a fear of facing the succession of days. To-morrow! It was as
far as yesterday. Ages elapsed between sunrises–sometimes. He scanned
her features like one looks at a forgotten country. They were not
distorted–he recognized landmarks, so to speak; but it was only a
resemblance that he could see, not the woman of yesterday–or was
it, perhaps, more than the woman of yesterday? Who could tell? Was
it something new? A new expression–or a new shade of expression?
or something deep–an old truth unveiled, a fundamental and hidden
truth–some unnecessary, accursed certitude? He became aware that he was
trembling very much, that he had an empty tumbler in his hand–that time
was passing. Still looking at her with lingering mistrust he reached
towards the table to put the glass down and was startled to feel it
apparently go through the wood. He had missed the edge. The surprise,
the slight jingling noise of the accident annoyed him beyond expression.
He turned to her irritated.

“What’s the meaning of this?” he asked, grimly.

She passed her hand over her face and made an attempt to get up.

“You’re not going to be absurd again,” he said. “‘Pon my soul, I did not
know you could forget yourself to that extent.” He didn’t try to conceal
his physical disgust, because he believed it to be a purely moral
reprobation of every unreserve, of anything in the nature of a scene.
“I assure you–it was revolting,” he went on. He stared for a moment at
her. “Positively degrading,” he added with insistence.

She stood up quickly as if moved by a spring and tottered. He started
forward instinctively. She caught hold of the back of the chair
and steadied herself. This arrested him, and they faced each other
wide-eyed, uncertain, and yet coming back slowly to the reality of
things with relief and wonder, as though just awakened after tossing
through a long night of fevered dreams.

“Pray, don’t begin again,” he said, hurriedly, seeing her open her lips.
“I deserve some little consideration–and such unaccountable behaviour
is painful to me. I expect better things. . . . I have the right. . . .”

She pressed both her hands to her temples.

“Oh, nonsense!” he said, sharply. “You are perfectly capable of coming
down to dinner. No one should even suspect; not even the servants. No
one! No one! . . . I am sure you can.”

She dropped her arms; her face twitched. She looked straight into his
eyes and seemed incapable of pronouncing a word. He frowned at her.

“I–wish–it,” he said, tyrannically. “For your own sake also. . . .”
He meant to carry that point without any pity. Why didn’t she speak?
He feared passive resistance. She must. . . . Make her come. His frown
deepened, and he began to think of some effectual violence, when most
unexpectedly she said in a firm voice, “Yes, I can,” and clutched the
chair-back again. He was relieved, and all at once her attitude ceased
to interest him. The important thing was that their life would
begin again with an every-day act–with something that could not be
misunderstood, that, thank God, had no moral meaning, no perplexity–and
yet was symbolic of their uninterrupted communion in the past–in all
the future. That morning, at that table, they had breakfast together;
and now they would dine. It was all over! What had happened between
could be forgotten–must be forgotten, like things that can only happen
once–death for instance.

“I will wait for you,” he said, going to the door. He had some
difficulty with it, for he did not remember he had turned the key. He
hated that delay, and his checked impatience to be gone out of the
room made him feel quite ill as, with the consciousness of her presence
behind his back, he fumbled at the lock. He managed it at last; then in
the doorway he glanced over his shoulder to say, “It’s rather late–you
know–” and saw her standing where he had left her, with a face white as
alabaster and perfectly still, like a woman in a trance.

He was afraid she would keep him waiting, but without any breathing
time, he hardly knew how, he found himself sitting at table with her.
He had made up his mind to eat, to talk, to be natural. It seemed to
him necessary that deception should begin at home. The servants must not
know–must not suspect. This intense desire of secrecy; of secrecy dark,
destroying, profound, discreet like a grave, possessed him with the
strength of a hallucination–seemed to spread itself to inanimate
objects that had been the daily companions of his life, affected with a
taint of enmity every single thing within the faithful walls that would
stand forever between the shamelessness of facts and the indignation of
mankind. Even when–as it happened once or twice–both the servants left
the room together he remained carefully natural, industriously hungry,
laboriously at his ease, as though he had wanted to cheat the black oak
sideboard, the heavy curtains, the stiff-backed chairs, into the
belief of an unstained happiness. He was mistrustful of his wife’s
self-control, unwilling to look at her and reluctant to speak, for it
seemed to him inconceivable that she should not betray herself by the
slightest movement, by the very first word spoken. Then he thought
the silence in the room was becoming dangerous, and so excessive as to
produce the effect of an intolerable uproar. He wanted to end it, as one
is anxious to interrupt an indiscreet confession; but with the memory of
that laugh upstairs he dared not give her an occasion to open her lips.
Presently he heard her voice pronouncing in a calm tone some unimportant
remark. He detached his eyes from the centre of his plate and felt
excited as if on the point of looking at a wonder. And nothing could be
more wonderful than her composure. He was looking at the candid eyes,
at the pure brow, at what he had seen every evening for years in that
place; he listened to the voice that for five years he had heard every
day. Perhaps she was a little pale–but a healthy pallor had always
been for him one of her chief attractions. Perhaps her face was rigidly
set–but that marmoreal impassiveness, that magnificent stolidity, as of
a wonderful statue by some great sculptor working under the curse of the
gods; that imposing, unthinking stillness of her features, had till then
mirrored for him the tranquil dignity of a soul of which he had thought
himself–as a matter of course–the inexpugnable possessor. Those were
the outward signs of her difference from the ignoble herd that feels,
suffers, fails, errs–but has no distinct value in the world except as a
moral contrast to the prosperity of the elect. He had been proud of her
appearance. It had the perfectly proper frankness of perfection–and
now he was shocked to see it unchanged. She looked like this, spoke like
this, exactly like this, a year ago, a month ago–only yesterday when
she. . . . What went on within made no difference. What did she think?
What meant the pallor, the placid face, the candid brow, the pure
eyes? What did she think during all these years? What did she think
yesterday–to-day; what would she think to-morrow? He must find out.
. . . And yet how could he get to know? She had been false to him, to that
man, to herself; she was ready to be false–for him. Always false. She
looked lies, breathed lies, lived lies–would tell lies–always–to the
end of life! And he would never know what she meant. Never! Never! No
one could. Impossible to know.

He dropped his knife and fork, brusquely, as though by the virtue of a
sudden illumination he had been made aware of poison in his plate, and
became positive in his mind that he could never swallow another morsel
of food as long as he lived. The dinner went on in a room that had been
steadily growing, from some cause, hotter than a furnace. He had to
drink. He drank time after time, and, at last, recollecting himself,
was frightened at the quantity, till he perceived that what he had
been drinking was water–out of two different wine glasses; and the
discovered unconsciousness of his actions affected him painfully. He was
disturbed to find himself in such an unhealthy state of mind. Excess of
feeling–excess of feeling; and it was part of his creed that any excess
of feeling was unhealthy–morally unprofitable; a taint on practical
manhood. Her fault. Entirely her fault. Her sinful self-forgetfulness
was contagious. It made him think thoughts he had never had before;
thoughts disintegrating, tormenting, sapping to the very core of
life–like mortal disease; thoughts that bred the fear of air, of
sunshine, of men–like the whispered news of a pestilence.

The maids served without noise; and to avoid looking at his wife and
looking within himself, he followed with his eyes first one and then
the other without being able to distinguish between them. They moved
silently about, without one being able to see by what means, for
their skirts touched the carpet all round; they glided here and there,
receded, approached, rigid in black and white, with precise gestures,
and no life in their faces, like a pair of marionettes in mourning;
and their air of wooden unconcern struck him as unnatural, suspicious,
irremediably hostile. That such people’s feelings or judgment could
affect one in any way, had never occurred to him before. He understood
they had no prospects, no principles–no refinement and no power. But
now he had become so debased that he could not even attempt to disguise
from himself his yearning to know the secret thoughts of his servants.
Several times he looked up covertly at the faces of those girls.
Impossible to know. They changed his plates and utterly ignored his
existence. What impenetrable duplicity. Women–nothing but women round
him. Impossible to know. He experienced that heart-probing, fiery
sense of dangerous loneliness, which sometimes assails the courage of
a solitary adventurer in an unexplored country. The sight of a man’s
face–he felt–of any man’s face, would have been a profound relief. One
would know then–something–could understand. . . . He would engage a
butler as soon as possible. And then the end of that dinner–which
had seemed to have been going on for hours–the end came, taking him
violently by surprise, as though he had expected in the natural course
of events to sit at that table for ever and ever.

But upstairs in the drawing-room he became the victim of a restless
fate, that would, on no account, permit him to sit down. She had sunk
on a low easy-chair, and taking up from a small table at her elbow a
fan with ivory leaves, shaded her face from the fire. The coals glowed
without a flame; and upon the red glow the vertical bars of the grate
stood out at her feet, black and curved, like the charred ribs of a
consumed sacrifice. Far off, a lamp perched on a slim brass rod, burned
under a wide shade of crimson silk: the centre, within the shadows of
the large room, of a fiery twilight that had in the warm quality of its
tint something delicate, refined and infernal. His soft footfalls and
the subdued beat of the clock on the high mantel-piece answered each
other regularly–as if time and himself, engaged in a measured contest,
had been pacing together through the infernal delicacy of twilight
towards a mysterious goal.

He walked from one end of the room to the other without a pause, like a
traveller who, at night, hastens doggedly upon an interminable journey.
Now and then he glanced at her. Impossible to know. The gross precision
of that thought expressed to his practical mind something illimitable
and infinitely profound, the all-embracing subtlety of a feeling, the
eternal origin of his pain. This woman had accepted him, had abandoned
him–had returned to him. And of all this he would never know the truth.
Never. Not till death–not after–not on judgment day when all shall be
disclosed, thoughts and deeds, rewards and punishments, but the secret
of hearts alone shall return, forever unknown, to the Inscrutable
Creator of good and evil, to the Master of doubts and impulses.

He stood still to look at her. Thrown back and with her face turned away
from him, she did not stir–as if asleep. What did she think? What
did she feel? And in the presence of her perfect stillness, in the
breathless silence, he felt himself insignificant and powerless before
her, like a prisoner in chains. The fury of his impotence called out
sinister images, that faculty of tormenting vision, which in a moment
of anguishing sense of wrong induces a man to mutter threats or make
a menacing gesture in the solitude of an empty room. But the gust of
passion passed at once, left him trembling a little, with the wondering,
reflective fear of a man who has paused on the very verge of suicide.
The serenity of truth and the peace of death can be only secured through
a largeness of contempt embracing all the profitable servitudes of life.
He found he did not want to know. Better not. It was all over. It was
as if it hadn’t been. And it was very necessary for both of them, it was
morally right, that nobody should know.

He spoke suddenly, as if concluding a discussion.

“The best thing for us is to forget all this.”

She started a little and shut the fan with a click.

“Yes, forgive–and forget,” he repeated, as if to himself.

“I’ll never forget,” she said in a vibrating voice. “And I’ll never
forgive myself. . . .”

“But I, who have nothing to reproach myself . . .” He began, making a
step towards her. She jumped up.

“I did not come back for your forgiveness,” she exclaimed, passionately,
as if clamouring against an unjust aspersion.

He only said “oh!” and became silent. He could not understand this
unprovoked aggressiveness of her attitude, and certainly was very
far from thinking that an unpremeditated hint of something resembling
emotion in the tone of his last words had caused that uncontrollable
burst of sincerity. It completed his bewilderment, but he was not at
all angry now. He was as if benumbed by the fascination of the
incomprehensible. She stood before him, tall and indistinct, like a
black phantom in the red twilight. At last poignantly uncertain as to
what would happen if he opened his lips, he muttered:

“But if my love is strong enough . . .” and hesitated.

He heard something snap loudly in the fiery stillness. She had broken
her fan. Two thin pieces of ivory fell, one after another, without a
sound, on the thick carpet, and instinctively he stooped to pick them
up. While he groped at her feet it occurred to him that the woman there
had in her hands an indispensable gift which nothing else on earth could
give; and when he stood up he was penetrated by an irresistible belief
in an enigma, by the conviction that within his reach and passing away
from him was the very secret of existence–its certitude, immaterial and
precious! She moved to the door, and he followed at her elbow, casting
about for a magic word that would make the enigma clear, that would
compel the surrender of the gift. And there is no such word! The enigma
is only made clear by sacrifice, and the gift of heaven is in the hands
of every man. But they had lived in a world that abhors enigmas, and
cares for no gifts but such as can be obtained in the street. She was
nearing the door. He said hurriedly:

“‘Pon my word, I loved you–I love you now.”

She stopped for an almost imperceptible moment to give him an indignant
glance, and then moved on. That feminine penetration–so clever and
so tainted by the eternal instinct of self-defence, so ready to see an
obvious evil in everything it cannot understand–filled her with bitter
resentment against both the men who could offer to the spiritual and
tragic strife of her feelings nothing but the coarseness of their
abominable materialism. In her anger against her own ineffectual
self-deception she found hate enough for them both. What did they want?
What more did this one want? And as her husband faced her again,
with his hand on the door-handle, she asked herself whether he was
unpardonably stupid, or simply ignoble.

She said nervously, and very fast:

“You are deceiving yourself. You never loved me. You wanted a wife–some
woman–any woman that would think, speak, and behave in a certain
way–in a way you approved. You loved yourself.”

“You won’t believe me?” he asked, slowly.

“If I had believed you loved me,” she began, passionately, then drew in
a long breath; and during that pause he heard the steady beat of blood
in his ears. “If I had believed it . . . I would never have come back,”
she finished, recklessly.

He stood looking down as though he had not heard. She waited. After a
moment he opened the door, and, on the landing, the sightless woman of
marble appeared, draped to the chin, thrusting blindly at them a cluster
of lights.

He seemed to have forgotten himself in a meditation so deep that on the
point of going out she stopped to look at him in surprise. While she
had been speaking he had wandered on the track of the enigma, out of the
world of senses into the region of feeling. What did it matter what she
had done, what she had said, if through the pain of her acts and words
he had obtained the word of the enigma! There can be no life without
faith and love–faith in a human heart, love of a human being! That
touch of grace, whose help once in life is the privilege of the
most undeserving, flung open for him the portals of beyond, and in
contemplating there the certitude immaterial and precious he forgot
all the meaningless accidents of existence: the bliss of getting, the
delight of enjoying; all the protean and enticing forms of the cupidity
that rules a material world of foolish joys, of contemptible sorrows.
Faith!–Love!–the undoubting, clear faith in the truth of a soul–the
great tenderness, deep as the ocean, serene and eternal, like the
infinite peace of space above the short tempests of the earth. It was
what he had wanted all his life–but he understood it only then for the
first time. It was through the pain of losing her that the knowledge had
come. She had the gift! She had the gift! And in all the world she was
the only human being that could surrender it to his immense desire.
He made a step forward, putting his arms out, as if to take her to
his breast, and, lifting his head, was met by such a look of blank
consternation that his arms fell as though they had been struck down by
a blow. She started away from him, stumbled over the threshold, and
once on the landing turned, swift and crouching. The train of her gown
swished as it flew round her feet. It was an undisguised panic. She
panted, showing her teeth, and the hate of strength, the disdain of
weakness, the eternal preoccupation of sex came out like a toy demon out
of a box.

“This is odious,” she screamed.

He did not stir; but her look, her agitated movements, the sound of her
voice were like a mist of facts thickening between him and the vision
of love and faith. It vanished; and looking at that face triumphant and
scornful, at that white face, stealthy and unexpected, as if discovered
staring from an ambush, he was coming back slowly to the world of
senses. His first clear thought was: I am married to that woman; and the
next: she will give nothing but what I see. He felt the need not to see.
But the memory of the vision, the memory that abides forever within the
seer made him say to her with the naive austerity of a convert awed by
the touch of a new creed, “You haven’t the gift.” He turned his back
on her, leaving her completely mystified. And she went upstairs slowly,
struggling with a distasteful suspicion of having been confronted by
something more subtle than herself–more profound than the misunderstood
and tragic contest of her feelings.

He shut the door of the drawing-room and moved at hazard, alone amongst
the heavy shadows and in the fiery twilight as of an elegant place of
perdition. She hadn’t the gift–no one had. . . . He stepped on a book
that had fallen off one of the crowded little tables. He picked up the
slender volume, and holding it, approached the crimson-shaded lamp. The
fiery tint deepened on the cover, and contorted gold letters sprawling
all over it in an intricate maze, came out, gleaming redly. “Thorns
and Arabesques.” He read it twice, “Thorns and Ar . . . . . . . .” The
other’s book of verses. He dropped it at his feet, but did not feel the
slightest pang of jealousy or indignation. What did he know? . . . What?
. . . The mass of hot coals tumbled down in the grate, and he turned to
look at them . . . Ah! That one was ready to give up everything he had
for that woman–who did not come–who had not the faith, the love, the
courage to come. What did that man expect, what did he hope, what did
he want? The woman–or the certitude immaterial and precious! The first
unselfish thought he had ever given to any human being was for that
man who had tried to do him a terrible wrong. He was not angry. He was
saddened by an impersonal sorrow, by a vast melancholy as of all mankind
longing for what cannot be attained. He felt his fellowship with every
man–even with that man–especially with that man. What did he think
now? Had he ceased to wait–and hope? Would he ever cease to wait and
hope? Would he understand that the woman, who had no courage, had not
the gift–had not the gift!

The clock began to strike, and the deep-toned vibration filled the
room as though with the sound of an enormous bell tolling far away. He
counted the strokes. Twelve. Another day had begun. To-morrow had come;
the mysterious and lying to-morrow that lures men, disdainful of love
and faith, on and on through the poignant futilities of life to the
fitting reward of a grave. He counted the strokes, and gazing at the
grate seemed to wait for more. Then, as if called out, left the room,
walking firmly.

When outside he heard footsteps in the hall and stood still. A bolt was
shot–then another. They were locking up–shutting out his desire and
his deception from the indignant criticism of a world full of noble
gifts for those who proclaim themselves without stain and without
reproach. He was safe; and on all sides of his dwelling servile
fears and servile hopes slept, dreaming of success, behind the severe
discretion of doors as impenetrable to the truth within as the granite
of tombstones. A lock snapped–a short chain rattled. Nobody shall know!

Why was this assurance of safety heavier than a burden of fear, and why
the day that began presented itself obstinately like the last day of
all–like a to-day without a to-morrow? Yet nothing was changed, for
nobody would know; and all would go on as before–the getting, the
enjoying, the blessing of hunger that is appeased every day; the noble
incentives of unappeasable ambitions. All–all the blessings of life.
All–but the certitude immaterial and precious–the certitude of love
and faith. He believed the shadow of it had been with him as long as he
could remember; that invisible presence had ruled his life. And now the
shadow had appeared and faded he could not extinguish his longing for
the truth of its substance. His desire of it was naive; it was masterful
like the material aspirations that are the groundwork of existence, but,
unlike these, it was unconquerable. It was the subtle despotism of
an idea that suffers no rivals, that is lonely, inconsolable, and
dangerous. He went slowly up the stairs. Nobody shall know. The days
would go on and he would go far–very far. If the idea could not be
mastered, fortune could be, man could be–the whole world. He was
dazzled by the greatness of the prospect; the brutality of a practical
instinct shouted to him that only that which could be had was worth
having. He lingered on the steps. The lights were out in the hall, and
a small yellow flame flitted about down there. He felt a sudden contempt
for himself which braced him up. He went on, but at the door of their
room and with his arm advanced to open it, he faltered. On the flight of
stairs below the head of the girl who had been locking up appeared. His
arm fell. He thought, “I’ll wait till she is gone”–and stepped back
within the perpendicular folds of a portiere.

He saw her come up gradually, as if ascending from a well. At every step
the feeble flame of the candle swayed before her tired, young face, and
the darkness of the hall seemed to cling to her black skirt, followed
her, rising like a silent flood, as though the great night of the world
had broken through the discreet reserve of walls, of closed doors, of
curtained windows. It rose over the steps, it leaped up the walls like
an angry wave, it flowed over the blue skies, over the yellow sands,
over the sunshine of landscapes, and over the pretty pathos of ragged
innocence and of meek starvation. It swallowed up the delicious idyll
in a boat and the mutilated immortality of famous bas-reliefs. It flowed
from outside–it rose higher, in a destructive silence. And, above it,
the woman of marble, composed and blind on the high pedestal, seemed to
ward off the devouring night with a cluster of lights.

He watched the rising tide of impenetrable gloom with impatience, as if
anxious for the coming of a darkness black enough to conceal a shameful
surrender. It came nearer. The cluster of lights went out. The girl
ascended facing him. Behind her the shadow of a colossal woman danced
lightly on the wall. He held his breath while she passed by, noiseless
and with heavy eyelids. And on her track the flowing tide of a tenebrous
sea filled the house, seemed to swirl about his feet, and rising
unchecked, closed silently above his head.

The time had come but he did not open the door. All was still; and
instead of surrendering to the reasonable exigencies of life he stepped
out, with a rebelling heart, into the darkness of the house. It was the
abode of an impenetrable night; as though indeed the last day had come
and gone, leaving him alone in a darkness that has no to-morrow. And
looming vaguely below the woman of marble, livid and still like a
patient phantom, held out in the night a cluster of extinguished lights.

His obedient thought traced for him the image of an uninterrupted life,
the dignity and the advantages of an uninterrupted success; while his
rebellious heart beat violently within his breast, as if maddened by the
desire of a certitude immaterial and precious–the certitude of love and
faith. What of the night within his dwelling if outside he could find
the sunshine in which men sow, in which men reap! Nobody would know. The
days, the years would pass, and . . . He remembered that he had loved
her. The years would pass . . . And then he thought of her as we think
of the dead–in a tender immensity of regret, in a passionate longing
for the return of idealized perfections. He had loved her–he had loved
her–and he never knew the truth . . . The years would pass in the
anguish of doubt . . . He remembered her smile, her eyes, her voice, her
silence, as though he had lost her forever. The years would pass and
he would always mistrust her smile, suspect her eyes; he would always
misbelieve her voice, he would never have faith in her silence. She had
no gift–she had no gift! What was she? Who was she? . . . The years
would pass; the memory of this hour would grow faint–and she would
share the material serenity of an unblemished life. She had no love and
no faith for any one. To give her your thought, your belief, was like
whispering your confession over the edge of the world. Nothing came
back–not even an echo.

In the pain of that thought was born his conscience; not that fear of
remorse which grows slowly, and slowly decays amongst the complicated
facts of life, but a Divine wisdom springing full-grown, armed and
severe out of a tried heart, to combat the secret baseness of motives.
It came to him in a flash that morality is not a method of happiness.
The revelation was terrible. He saw at once that nothing of what he knew
mattered in the least. The acts of men and women, success, humiliation,
dignity, failure–nothing mattered. It was not a question of more or
less pain, of this joy, of that sorrow. It was a question of truth or
falsehood–it was a question of life or death.

He stood in the revealing night–in the darkness that tries the hearts,
in the night useless for the work of men, but in which their gaze,
undazzled by the sunshine of covetous days, wanders sometimes as far as
the stars. The perfect stillness around him had something solemn in it,
but he felt it was the lying solemnity of a temple devoted to the rites
of a debasing persuasion. The silence within the discreet walls was
eloquent of safety but it appeared to him exciting and sinister, like
the discretion of a profitable infamy; it was the prudent peace of a
den of coiners–of a house of ill-fame! The years would pass–and nobody
would know. Never! Not till death–not after . . .

“Never!” he said aloud to the revealing night.

And he hesitated. The secret of hearts, too terrible for the timid eyes
of men, shall return, veiled forever, to the Inscrutable Creator of
good and evil, to the Master of doubts and impulses. His conscience
was born–he heard its voice, and he hesitated, ignoring the strength
within, the fateful power, the secret of his heart! It was an awful
sacrifice to cast all one’s life into the flame of a new belief. He
wanted help against himself, against the cruel decree of salvation. The
need of tacit complicity, where it had never failed him, the habit of
years affirmed itself. Perhaps she would help . . . He flung the door
open and rushed in like a fugitive.

He was in the middle of the room before he could see anything but the
dazzling brilliance of the light; and then, as if detached and floating
in it on the level of his eyes, appeared the head of a woman. She had
jumped up when he burst into the room.

For a moment they contemplated each other as if struck dumb with
amazement. Her hair streaming on her shoulders glinted like burnished
gold. He looked into the unfathomable candour of her eyes. Nothing
within–nothing–nothing.

He stammered distractedly.

“I want . . . I want . . . to . . . to . . . know . . .”

On the candid light of the eyes flitted shadows; shadows of doubt,
of suspicion, the ready suspicion of an unquenchable antagonism, the
pitiless mistrust of an eternal instinct of defence; the hate, the
profound, frightened hate of an incomprehensible–of an abominable
emotion intruding its coarse materialism upon the spiritual and tragic
contest of her feelings.

“Alvan . . . I won’t bear this . . .” She began to pant suddenly, “I’ve
a right–a right to–to–myself . . .”

He lifted one arm, and appeared so menacing that she stopped in a fright
and shrank back a little.

He stood with uplifted hand . . . The years would pass–and he would
have to live with that unfathomable candour where flit shadows of
suspicions and hate . . . The years would pass–and he would never
know–never trust . . . The years would pass without faith and
love. . . .

“Can you stand it?” he shouted, as though she could have heard all his
thoughts.

He looked menacing. She thought of violence, of danger–and, just for
an instant, she doubted whether there were splendours enough on earth to
pay the price of such a brutal experience. He cried again:

“Can you stand it?” and glared as if insane. Her eyes blazed, too. She
could not hear the appalling clamour of his thoughts. She suspected
in him a sudden regret, a fresh fit of jealousy, a dishonest desire of
evasion. She shouted back angrily–

“Yes!”

He was shaken where he stood as if by a struggle to break out of
invisible bonds. She trembled from head to foot.

“Well, I can’t!” He flung both his arms out, as if to push her away,
and strode from the room. The door swung to with a click. She made three
quick steps towards it and stood still, looking at the white and gold
panels. No sound came from beyond, not a whisper, not a sigh; not even
a footstep was heard outside on the thick carpet. It was as though no
sooner gone he had suddenly expired–as though he had died there and his
body had vanished on the instant together with his soul. She listened,
with parted lips and irresolute eyes. Then below, far below her, as
if in the entrails of the earth, a door slammed heavily; and the quiet
house vibrated to it from roof to foundations, more than to a clap of
thunder.

He never returned.