“You very busy?” he asked.
The Editor making red marks on a long slip of printed paper threw the pencil down.
“No. I am done. Social paragraphs. This office is the place where everything is known about everybody — including even a great deal of nobodies. Queer fellows drift in and out of this room. Waifs and strays from home, from up-country, from the Pacific. And, by the way, last time you were here you picked up one of that sort for your assistant — didn’t you?”
“I engaged an assistant only to stop your preaching about the evils of solitude,” said Renouard hastily; and the pressman laughed at the half-resentful tone. His laugh was not very loud, but his plump person shook all over. He was aware that his younger friend’s deference to his advice was based only on an imperfect belief in his wisdom — or his sagacity. But it was he who had first helped Renouard in his plans of exploration: the five-years’ programme of scientific adventure, of work, of danger and endurance, carried out with such distinction and rewarded modestly with the lease of Malata island by the frugal colonial government. And this reward, too, had been due to the journalist’s advocacy with word and pen — for he was an influential man in the community. Doubting very much if Renouard really liked him, he was himself without great sympathy for a certain side of that man which he could not quite make out. He only felt it obscurely to be his real personality — the true — and, perhaps, the absurd. As, for instance, in that case of the assistant. Renouard had given way to the arguments of his friend and backer — the argument against the unwholesome effect of solitude, the argument for the safety of companionship even if quarrelsome. Very well. In this docility he was sensible and even likeable. But what did he do next? Instead of taking counsel as to the choice with his old backer and friend, and a man, besides, knowing everybody employed and unemployed on the pavements of the town, this extraordinary Renouard suddenly and almost surreptitiously picked up a fellow — God knows who — and sailed away with him back to Malata in a hurry; a proceeding obviously rash and at the same time not quite straight. That was the sort of thing. The secretly unforgiving journalist laughed a little longer and then ceased to shake all over.
“Oh, yes. About that assistant of yours. . . .”
“What about him,” said Renouard, after waiting a while, with a shadow of uneasiness on his face.
“Have you nothing to tell me of him?”
“Nothing except. . . .” Incipient grimness vanished out of Renouard’s aspect and his voice, while he hesitated as if reflecting seriously before he changed his mind. “No. Nothing whatever.”
“You haven’t brought him along with you by chance — for a change.”
The Planter of Malata stared, then shook his head, and finally murmured carelessly: “I think he’s very well where he is. But I wish you could tell me why young Dunster insisted so much on my dining with his uncle last night. Everybody knows I am not a society man.”
The Editor exclaimed at so much modesty. Didn’t his friend know that he was their one and only explorer — that he was the man experimenting with the silk plant. . . .
“Still, that doesn’t tell me why I was invited yesterday. For young Dunster never thought of this civility before. . . .”
“Our Willie,” said the popular journalist, “never does anything without a purpose, that’s a fact.”
“And to his uncle’s house too!”
“He lives there.”
“Yes. But he might have given me a feed somewhere else. The extraordinary part is that the old man did not seem to have anything special to say. He smiled kindly on me once or twice, and that was all. It was quite a party, sixteen people.”
The Editor then, after expressing his regret that he had not been able to come, wanted to know if the party had been entertaining.
Renouard regretted that his friend had not been there. Being a man whose business or at least whose profession was to know everything that went on in this part of the globe, he could probably have told him something of some people lately arrived from home, who were amongst the guests. Young Dunster (Willie), with his large shirt-front and streaks of white skin shining unpleasantly through the thin black hair plastered over the top of his head, bore down on him and introduced him to that party, as if he had been a trained dog or a child phenomenon. Decidedly, he said, he disliked Willie — one of these large oppressive men. . . .
A silence fell, and it was as if Renouard were not going to say anything more when, suddenly, he came out with the real object of his visit to the editorial room.
“They looked to me like people under a spell.”
The Editor gazed at him appreciatively, thinking that, whether the effect of solitude or not, this was a proof of a sensitive perception of the expression of faces.
“You omitted to tell me their name, but I can make a guess. You mean Professor Moorsom, his daughter and sister — don’t you?”
Renouard assented. Yes, a white-haired lady. But from his silence, with his eyes fixed, yet avoiding his friend, it was easy to guess that it was not in the white-haired lady that he was interested.
“Upon my word,” he said, recovering his usual bearing. “It looks to me as if I had been asked there only for the daughter to talk to me.”
He did not conceal that he had been greatly struck by her appearance. Nobody could have helped being impressed. She was different from everybody else in that house, and it was not only the effect of her London clothes. He did not take her down to dinner. Willie did that. It was afterwards, on the terrace. . . .
The evening was delightfully calm. He was sitting apart and alone, and wishing himself somewhere else — on board the schooner for choice, with the dinner-harness off. He hadn’t exchanged forty words altogether during the evening with the other guests. He saw her suddenly all by herself coming towards him along the dimly lighted terrace, quite from a distance.
She was tall and supple, carrying nobly on her straight body a head of a character which to him appeared peculiar, something — well — pagan, crowned with a great wealth of hair. He had been about to rise, but her decided approach caused him to remain on the seat. He had not looked much at her that evening. He had not that freedom of gaze acquired by the habit of society and the frequent meetings with strangers. It was not shyness, but the reserve of a man not used to the world and to the practice of covert staring, with careless curiosity. All he had captured by his first, keen, instantly lowered, glance was the impression that her hair was magnificently red and her eyes very black. It was a troubling effect, but it had been evanescent; he had forgotten it almost till very unexpectedly he saw her coming down the terrace slow and eager, as if she were restraining herself, and with a rhythmic upward undulation of her whole figure. The light from an open window fell across her path, and suddenly all that mass of arranged hair appeared incandescent, chiselled and fluid, with the daring suggestion of a helmet of burnished copper and the flowing lines of molten metal. It kindled in him an astonished admiration. But he said nothing of it to his friend the Editor. Neither did he tell him that her approach woke up in his brain the image of love’s infinite grace and the sense of the inexhaustible joy that lives in beauty. No! What he imparted to the Editor were no emotions, but mere facts conveyed in a deliberate voice and in uninspired words.
“That young lady came and sat down by me. She said: ‘Are you French, Mr. Renouard?’”
He had breathed a whiff of perfume of which he said nothing either — of some perfume he did not know. Her voice was low and distinct. Her shoulders and her bare arms gleamed with an extraordinary splendour, and when she advanced her head into the light he saw the admirable contour of the face, the straight fine nose with delicate nostrils, the exquisite crimson brushstroke of the lips on this oval without colour. The expression of the eyes was lost in a shadowy mysterious play of jet and silver, stirring under the red coppery gold of the hair as though she had been a being made of ivory and precious metals changed into living tissue.
“.
. . I told her my people were living in Canada, but that I was brought up in England before coming out here. I can’t imagine what interest she could have in my history.”
“And you complain of her interest?”
The accent of the all-knowing journalist seemed to jar on the Planter of Malata.
“No!” he said, in a deadened voice that was almost sullen. But after a short silence he went on. “Very extraordinary. I told her I came out to wander at large in the world when I was nineteen, almost directly after I left school. It seems that her late brother was in the same school a couple of years before me. She wanted me to tell her what I did at first when I came out here; what other men found to do when they came out — where they went, what was likely to happen to them — as if I could guess and foretell from my experience the fates of men who come out here with a hundred different projects, for hundreds of different reasons — for no reason but restlessness — who come, and go, and disappear! Preposterous. She seemed to want to hear their histories. I told her that most of them were not worth telling.”
The distinguished journalist leaning on his elbow, his head resting against the knuckles of his left hand, listened with great attention, but gave no sign of that surprise which Renouard, pausing, seemed to expect.
“You know something,” the latter said brusquely. The all-knowing man moved his head slightly and said, “Yes. But go on.”
“It’s just this. There is no more to it. I found myself talking to her of my adventures, of my early days. It couldn’t possibly have interested her. Really,” he cried, “this is most extraordinary. Those people have something on their minds. We sat in the light of the window, and her father prowled about the terrace, with his hands behind his back and his head drooping. The white-haired lady came to the dining-room window twice — to look at us I am certain. The other guests began to go away — and still we sat there. Apparently these people are staying with the Dunsters. It was old Mrs. Dunster who put an end to the thing. The father and the aunt circled about as if they were afraid of interfering with the girl. Then she got up all at once, gave me her hand, and said she hoped she would see me again.”
While he was speaking Renouard saw again the sway of her figure in a movement of grace and strength — felt the pressure of her hand — heard the last accents of the deep murmur that came from her throat so white in the light of the window, and remembered the black rays of her steady eyes passing off his face when she turned away. He remembered all this visually, and it was not exactly pleasurable. It was rather startling like the discovery of a new faculty in himself. There are faculties one would rather do without — such, for instance, as seeing through a stone wall or remembering a person with this uncanny vividness. And what about those two people belonging to her with their air of expectant solicitude! Really, those figures from home got in front of one. In fact, their persistence in getting between him and the solid forms of the everyday material world had driven Renouard to call on his friend at the office. He hoped that a little common, gossipy information would lay the ghost of that unexpected dinner-party. Of course the proper person to go to would have been young Dunster, but, he couldn’t stand Willie Dunster — not at any price.
In the pause the Editor had changed his attitude, faced his desk, and smiled a faint knowing smile.
“Striking girl — eh?” he said.
The incongruity of the word was enough to make one jump out of the chair. Striking! That girl striking! Stri . . .! But Renouard restrained his feelings. His friend was not a person to give oneself away to. And, after all, this sort of speech was what he had come there to hear. As, however, he had made a movement he re-settled himself comfortably and said, with very creditable indifference, that yes — she was, rather. Especially amongst a lot of over-dressed frumps. There wasn’t one woman under forty there.
“Is that the way to speak of the cream of our society; the ‘top of the basket,’ as the French say,” the Editor remonstrated with mock indignation. “You aren’t moderate in your expressions — you know.”
“I express myself very little,” interjected Renouard seriously.
“I will tell you what you are. You are a fellow that doesn’t count the cost. Of course you are safe with me, but will you never learn. . . .”
“What struck me most,” interrupted the other, “is that she should pick me out for such a long conversation.”
“That’s perhaps because you were the most remarkable of the men there.”
Renouard shook his head.
“This shot doesn’t seem to me to hit the mark,” he said calmly. “Try again.”
“Don’t you believe me? Oh, you modest creature. Well, let me assure you that under ordinary circumstances it would have been a good shot. You are sufficiently remarkable. But you seem a pretty acute customer too. The circumstances are extraordinary. By Jove they are!”
He mused. After a time the Planter of Malata dropped a negligent —
“And you know them.”
“And I know them,” assented the all-knowing Editor, soberly, as though the occasion were too special for a display of professional vanity; a vanity so well known to Renouard that its absence augmented his wonder and almost made him uneasy as if portending bad news of some sort.
“You have met those people?” he asked.
“No. I was to have met them last night, but I had to send an apology to Willie in the morning. It was then that he had the bright idea to invite you to fill the place, from a muddled notion that you could be of use. Willie is stupid sometimes. For it is clear that you are the last man able to help.”
“How on earth do I come to be mixed up in this — whatever it is?” Renouard’s voice was slightly altered by nervous irritation. “I only arrived here yesterday morning.”
CHAPTER II
His friend the Editor turned to him squarely. “Willie took me into consultation, and since he seems to have let you in I may just as well tell you what is up. I shall try to be as short as I can. But in confidence — mind!”
He waited. Renouard, his uneasiness growing on him unreasonably, assented by a nod, and the other lost no time in beginning. Professor Moorsom — physicist and philosopher — fine head of white hair, to judge from the photographs — plenty of brains in the head too — all these famous books — surely even Renouard would know. . . .
Renouard muttered moodily that it wasn’t his sort of reading, and his friend hastened to assure him earnestly that neither was it his sort — except as a matter of business and duty, for the literary page of that newspaper which was his property (and the pride of his life). The only literary newspaper in the Antipodes could not ignore the fashionable philosopher of the age. Not that anybody read Moorsom at the Antipodes, but everybody had heard of him — women, children, dock labourers, cabmen. The only person (besides himself) who had read Moorsom, as far as he knew, was old Dunster, who used to call himself a Moorsomian (or was it Moorsomite) years and years ago, long before Moorsom had worked himself up into the great swell he was now, in every way. . . Socially too. Quite the fashion in the highest world.
Renouard listened with profoundly concealed attention. “A charlatan,” he muttered languidly.
“Well — no. I should say not. I shouldn’t wonder though if most of his writing had been done with his tongue in his cheek. Of course. That’s to be expected. I tell you what: the only really honest writing is to be found in newspapers and nowhere else — and don’t you forget it.”
The Editor paused with a basilisk stare till Renouard had conceded a casual: “I dare say,” and only then went on to explain that old Dunster, during his European tour, had been made rather a lion of in London, where he stayed with the Moorsoms — he meant the father and the girl. The professor had been a widower for a long time.
“She doesn’t look just a girl,” muttered Renouard. The other agreed. Very likely not. Had been playing the London hostess to tip-top people ever since she put her hair up, probably.
“I don’t e
xpect to see any girlish bloom on her when I do have the privilege,” he continued. “Those people are staying with the Dunster’s incog., in a manner, you understand — something like royalties. They don’t deceive anybody, but they want to be left to themselves. We have even kept them out of the paper — to oblige old Dunster. But we shall put your arrival in — our local celebrity.”
“Heavens!”
“Yes. Mr. G. Renouard, the explorer, whose indomitable energy, etc., and who is now working for the prosperity of our country in another way on his Malata plantation . . . And, by the by, how’s the silk plant — flourishing?”
“Yes.”
“Did you bring any fibre?”
“Schooner-full.”
“I see. To be transhipped to Liverpool for experimental manufacture, eh? Eminent capitalists at home very much interested, aren’t they?”
“They are.”
A silence fell. Then the Editor uttered slowly — ”You will be a rich man some day.”
Renouard’s face did not betray his opinion of that confident prophecy. He didn’t say anything till his friend suggested in the same meditative voice —
“You ought to interest Moorsom in the affair too — since Willie has let you in.”
“A philosopher!”
“I suppose he isn’t above making a bit of money. And he may be clever at it for all you know. I have a notion that he’s a fairly practical old cove. . . . Anyhow,” and here the tone of the speaker took on a tinge of respect, “he has made philosophy pay.”
Renouard raised his eyes, repressed an impulse to jump up, and got out of the arm-chair slowly. “It isn’t perhaps a bad idea,” he said. “I’ll have to call there in any case.”
He wondered whether he had managed to keep his voice steady, its tone unconcerned enough; for his emotion was strong though it had nothing to do with the business aspect of this suggestion. He moved in the room in vague preparation for departure, when he heard a soft laugh. He spun about quickly with a frown, but the Editor was not laughing at him. He was chuckling across the big desk at the wall: a preliminary of some speech for which Renouard, recalled to himself, waited silent and mistrustful.
Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) Page 618
