One day, indeed, the matter was brought home to me by the receipt from Polehampton of bills instead of my usual cheques. I had a good deal of trouble in cashing the things; indeed, people seemed to look askance at them. I consulted my aunt on the subject, at breakfast. It was the sort of thing that interested the woman of business in her, and we were always short of topics of conversation.
We breakfasted in rather a small room, as rooms went there; my aunt sitting at the head of the table, with an early morning air of being en famille that she wore at no other time of day. It was not a matter of garments, for she was not the woman to wear a peignoir; but lay, I supposed, in her manner, which did not begin to assume frigidity until several watches of the day had passed.
I handed her Polehampton’s bills and explained that I was at a loss to turn them to account; that I even had only the very haziest of ideas as to their meaning. Holding the forlorn papers in her hand, she began to lecture me on the duty of acquiring the rudiments of what she called “business habits.”
“Of course you do not require to master details to any considerable extent,” she said, “but I always have held that it is one of the duties of a….”
She interrupted herself as my sister came into the room; looked at her, and then held out the papers in her hand. The things quivered a little; the hand must have quivered too.
“You are going to Halderschrodt’s?” she said, interrogatively. “You could get him to negotiate these for Etchingham?”
Miss Granger looked at the papers negligently.
“I am going this afternoon,” she answered. “Etchingham can come….” She suddenly turned to me: “So your friend is getting shaky,” she said.
“It means that?” I asked. “But I’ve heard that he has done the same sort of thing before.”
“He must have been shaky before,” she said, “but I daresay
Halderschrodt….”
“Oh, it’s hardly worth while bothering that personage about such a sum,” I interrupted. Halderschrodt, in those days, was a name that suggested no dealings in any sum less than a million.
“My dear Etchingham,” my aunt interrupted in a shocked tone, “it is quite worth his while to oblige us….”
“I didn’t know,” I said.
That afternoon we drove to Halderschrodt’s private office, a sumptuous — that is the mot juste — suite of rooms on the first floor of the house next to the Duc de Mersch’s Sans Souci. I sat on a plush-bottomed gilded chair, whilst my pseudo-sister transacted her business in an adjoining room — a room exactly corresponding with that within which de Mersch had lurked whilst the lady was warning me against him. A clerk came after awhile, carried me off into an enclosure, where my bill was discounted by another, and then reconducted me to my plush chair. I did not occupy it, as it happened. A meagre, very tall Alsatian was holding the door open for the exit of my sister. He said nothing at all, but stood slightly inclined as she passed him. I caught a glimpse of a red, long face, very tired eyes, and hair of almost startling whiteness — the white hair of a comparatively young man, without any lustre of any sort — a dead white, like that of snow. I remember that white hair with a feeling of horror, whilst I have almost forgotten the features of the great Baron de Halderschrodt.
I had still some of the feeling of having been in contact with a personality of the most colossal significance as we went down the red carpet of the broad white marble stairs. With one foot on the lowest step, the figure of a perfectly clothed, perfectly groomed man was standing looking upward at our descent. I had thought so little of him that the sight of the Duc de Mersch’s face hardly suggested any train of emotions. It lit up with an expression of pleasure.
“You,” he said.
She stood looking down upon him from the altitude of two steps, looking with intolerable passivity.
“So you use the common stairs,” she said, “one had the idea that you communicated with these people through a private door.” He laughed uneasily, looking askance at me.
“Oh, I …” he said.
She moved a little to one side to pass him in her descent.
“So things have arranged themselves — là bas,” she said, referring, I supposed, to the elective grand duchy.
“Oh, it was like a miracle,” he answered, “and I owed a great deal — a great deal — to your hints….”
“You must tell me all about it to-night,” she said.
De Mersch’s face had an extraordinary quality that I seemed to notice in all the faces around me — a quality of the flesh that seemed to lose all luminosity, of the eyes that seemed forever to have a tendency to seek the ground, to avoid the sight of the world. When he brightened to answer her it was as if with effort. It seemed as if a weight were on the mind of the whole world — a preoccupation that I shared without understanding. She herself, a certain absent-mindedness apart, seemed the only one that was entirely unaffected.
As we sat side by side in the little carriage, she said suddenly:
“They are coming to the end of their tether, you see.” I shrank away from her a little — but I did not see and did not want to see. I said so. It even seemed to me that de Mersch having got over the troubles là bas, was taking a new lease of life.
“I did think,” I said, “a little time ago that …”
The wheels of the coupe suddenly began to rattle abominably over the cobbles of a narrow street. It was impossible to talk, and I was thrown back upon myself. I found that I was in a temper — in an abominable temper. The sudden sight of that man, her method of greeting him, the intimacy that the scene revealed … the whole thing had upset me. Of late, for want of any alarms, in spite of groundlessness I had had the impression that I was the integral part of her life. It was not a logical idea, but strictly a habit of mind that had grown up in the desolation of my solitude.
We passed into one of the larger boulevards, and the thing ran silently.
“That de Mersch was crumbling up,” she suddenly completed my unfinished sentence; “oh, that was only a grumble — premonitory. But it won’t take long now. I have been putting on the screw. Halderschrodt will … I suppose he will commit suicide, in a day or two. And then the — the fun will begin.”
I didn’t answer. The thing made no impression — no mental impression at all.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
That afternoon we had a scene, and late that night another. The memory of the former is a little blotted out. Things began to move so quickly that, try as I will to arrange their sequence in my mind, I cannot. I cannot even very distinctly remember what she told me at that first explanation. I must have attacked her fiercely — on the score of de Mersch, in the old vein; must have told her that I would not in the interest of the name allow her to see the man again. She told me things, too, rather abominable things, about the way in which she had got Halderschrodt into her power and was pressing him down. Halderschrodt was de Mersch’s banker-in-chief; his fall would mean de Mersch’s, and so on. The “so on” in this case meant a great deal more. Halderschrodt, apparently, was the “somebody who was up to something” of the American paper — that is to say the allied firms that Halderschrodt represented. I can’t remember the details. They were too huge and too unfamiliar, and I was too agitated by my own share in the humanity of it. But, in sum, it seemed that the fall of Halderschrodt would mean a sort of incredibly vast Black Monday — a frightful thing in the existing state of public confidence, but one which did not mean much to me. I forget how she said she had been able to put the screw on him. Halderschrodt, as you must remember, was the third of his colossal name, a man without much genius and conscious of the lack, obsessed with the idea of operating some enormous coup, like the founder of his dynasty, something in which foresight in international occurrence played a chief part. That idea was his weakness, the defect of his mind, and she had played on that weakness. I forget, I say, the details, if I ever heard them; they concerned themselves with a dynastic revolution somewhere, a revolution t
hat was to cause a slump all over the world, and that had been engineered in our Salon. And she had burked the revolution — betrayed it, I suppose — and the consequences did not ensue, and Halderschrodt and all the rest of them were left high and dry.
The whole thing was a matter of under-currents that never came to the surface, a matter of shifting sands from which only those with the clearest heads could come forth.
“And we … we have clear heads,” she said. It was impossible to listen to her without shuddering. For me, if he stood for anything, Halderschrodt stood for stability; there was the tremendous name, and there was the person I had just seen, the person on whom a habit of mind approaching almost to the royal had conferred a presence that had some of the divinity that hedges a king. It seemed frightful merely to imagine his ignominious collapse; as frightful as if she had pointed out a splendid-limbed man and said: “That man will be dead in five minutes.” That, indeed, was what she said of Halderschrodt…. The man had saluted her, going to his death; the austere inclination that I had seen had been the salutation of such a man.
I was so moved by one thing and another that I hardly noticed that Gurnard had come into the room. I had not seen him since the night when he had dined with the Duc de Mersch at Churchill’s, but he seemed so part of the emotion, of the frame of mind, that he slid noiselessly into the scene and hardly surprised me. I was called out of the room — someone desired to see me, and I passed, without any transition of feeling, into the presence of an entire stranger — a man who remains a voice to me. He began to talk to me about the state of my aunt’s health. He said she was breaking up; that he begged respectfully to urge that I would use my influence to take her back to London to consult Sir James — I, perhaps, living in the house and not having known my aunt for very long, might not see; but he … He was my aunt’s solicitor. He was quite right; my aunt was breaking up, she had declined visibly in the few hours that I had been away from her. She had been doing business with this man, had altered her will, had seen Mr. Gurnard; and, in some way had received a shock that seemed to have deprived her of all volition. She sat with her head leaning back, her eyes closed, the lines of her face all seeming to run downward.
“It is obvious to me that arrangements ought to be made for your return to England,” the lawyer said, “whatever engagements Miss Granger or Mr. Etchingham Granger or even Mr. Gurnard may have made.”
I wondered vaguely what the devil Mr. Gurnard could have to say in the matter, and then Miss Granger herself came into the room.
“They want me,” my aunt said in a low voice, “they have been persuading me … to go back … to Etchingham, I think you said, Meredith.”
I became conscious that I wanted to return to England, wanted it very much, wanted to be out of this; to get somewhere where there was stability and things that one could understand. Everything here seemed to be in a mist, with the ground trembling underfoot.
“Why …” Miss Granger’s verdict came, “we can go when you like.
To-morrow.”
Things immediately began to shape themselves on these unexpected lines, a sort of bustle of departure to be in the air. I was employed to conduct the lawyer as far as the porter’s lodge, a longish traverse. He beguiled the way by excusing himself for hurrying back to London.
“I might have been of use; in these hurried departures there are generally things. But, you will understand, Mr. — Mr. Etchingham; at a time like this I could hardly spare the hours that it cost me to come over. You would be astonished what a deal of extra work it gives and how far-spreading the evil is. People seem to have gone mad. Even I have been astonished.”
“I had no idea,” I said.
“Of course not, of course not — no one had. But, unless I am much mistaken — much — there will have to be an enquiry, and people will be very lucky who have had nothing to do with it …”
I gathered that things were in a bad way, over there as over here; that there were scandals and a tremendous outcry for purification in the highest places. I saw the man get into his fiacre and took my way back across the court-yard rather slowly, pondering over the part I was to fill in the emigration, wondering how far events had conferred on me a partnership in the family affairs.
I found that my tacitly acknowledged function was that of supervising nurse-tender, the sort of thing that made for personal tenderness in the aridity of profuse hired help. I was expected to arrange a rug just a little more comfortably than the lady’s maid who would travel in the compartment — to give the finishing touches.
It was astonishing how well the thing was engineered; the removal, I mean. It gave me an even better idea of the woman my aunt had been than even the panic of her solicitor. The thing went as smoothly as the disappearance of a caravan of gypsies, camped for the night on a heath beside gorse bushes. We went to the ball that night as if from a household that had its roots deep in the solid rock, and in the morning we had disappeared.
The ball itself was a finishing touch — the finishing touch of my sister’s affairs and the end of my patience. I spent an interminable night, one of those nights that never end and that remain quivering and raw in the memory. I seemed to be in a blaze of light, watching, through a shifting screen of shimmering dresses — her and the Duc de Mersch. I don’t know whether the thing was really noticeable, but it seemed that everyone was — that everyone must be — remarking it. I thought I caught women making smile-punctuated remarks behind fans, men answering inaudibly with eyes discreetly on the ground. It was a mixed assembly, somebody’s liquidation of social obligations, and there was a sprinkling of the kind of people who do make remarks. It was not the noticeability for its own sake that I hated, but the fact that their relations by their noticeability made me impossible, whilst the notice itself confirmed my own fears. I hung, glowering in corners, noticeable enough myself, I suppose.
The thing reached a crisis late in the evening. There was a kind of winter-garden that one strolled in, a place of giant palms stretching up into a darkness of intense shadow. I was prowling about in the shadows of great metallic leaves, cursing under my breath, in a fury of nervous irritation; quivering like a horse martyrised by a stupidly merciless driver. I happened to stand back for a moment in the narrowest of paths, with the touch of spiky leaves on my hand and on my face. In front of me was the glaring perspective of one of the longer alleys, and, stepping into it, a great band of blue ribbon cutting across his chest, came de Mersch with her upon his arm. De Mersch himself hardly counted. He had a way of glowing, but he paled ineffectual fires beside her mænadic glow. There was something overpowering in the sight of her, in the fire of her eyes, in the glow of her coils of hair, in the poise of her head. She wore some kind of early nineteenth-century dress, sweeping low from the waist with a tenderness of fold that affected one with delicate pathos, that had a virgin quality of almost poignant intensity. And beneath it she stepped with the buoyancy — the long steps — of a triumphing Diana.
It was more than terrible for me to stand there longing with a black, baffled longing, with some of the base quality of an eavesdropper and all the baseness of the unsuccessful.
Then Gurnard loomed in the distance, moving insensibly down the long, glaring corridor, a sinister figure, suggesting in the silence of his oncoming the motionless flight of a vulture. Well within my field of sight he overtook them and, with a lack of preliminary greeting that suggested supreme intimacy, walked beside them. I stood for some moments — for some minutes, and then hastened after them. I was going to do something. After a time I found de Mersch and Gurnard standing facing each other in one of the doorways of the place — Gurnard, a small, dark, impassive column; de Mersch, bulky, overwhelming, florid, standing with his legs well apart and speaking vociferously with a good deal of gesture. I approached them from the side, standing rather insistently at his elbow.
“I want,” I said, “I would be extremely glad if you would give me a minute, monsieur.” I was conscious that I spoke with
a tremour of the voice, a sort of throaty eagerness. I was unaware of what course I was to pursue, but I was confident of calmness, of self-control — I was equal to that. They had a pause of surprised silence. Gurnard wheeled and fixed me critically with his eye-glass. I took de Mersch a little apart, into a solitude of palm branches, and began to speak before he had asked me my errand.
“You must understand that I would not interfere without a good deal of provocation,” I was saying, when he cut me short, speaking in a thick, jovial voice.
“Oh, we will understand that, my good Granger, and then …”
“It is about my sister,” I said — ”you — you go too far. I must ask you, as a gentleman, to cease persecuting her.”
He answered “The devil!” and then: “If I do not — — ?”
It was evident in his voice, in his manner, that the man was a little — well, gris. “If you do not,” I said, “I shall forbid her to see you and I shall …”
“Oh, oh!” he interjected with the intonation of a reveller at a farce. “We are at that — we are the excellent brother.” He paused, and then added: “Well, go to the devil, you and your forbidding.” He spoke with the greatest good humour.
“I am in earnest,” I said; “very much in earnest. The thing has gone too far, and even for your own sake, you had better …”
He said “Ah, ah!” in the tone of his “Oh, oh!”
Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) Page 116