Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated)

by Joseph Conrad

  He asked himself what could have happened to Cos- mo? Did the fellows arrest him on suspicion? That was not very likely, and at worst it would not mean more than a short detention. They would not dare to search him, surely. But even if they found the packet Cosmo would declare it his own property and object to its being opened. He had a complete confidence in Cosmo’s loyalty and, what was more, in that young Englishman’s power to have his own way. He had the manner for that and the face for that. The face and bearing of a man with whom it was lucky to be associated in anything.

  The galley being just then at the other end of her beat, Attilio saw his way clear to slip into the harbour. The state of perfect quietness over the whole extent of the harbour encouraged his native audacity. He began by pulling to the east side where the gendarmerie office was near the quay. Everything was quiet there. He made his men lay their oars amongst the shadows of the anchored shipping and waited. Sleep, breathless sleep, reigned on shore and afloat. Attilio began to think that Cosmo could not have been discovered. If so, then he must be nearing Cantelucci’s inn by this time. He resolved then to board one of the empty coasters moored to the quay, wait for the morning there, and then go himself to the inn, where he could remain concealed till another departure could be arranged. He told his men to pull gently to the darkest part of the quay. And then he heard Cosmo’s mighty shout. He was nearly as confounded by it as the sbirri in the boat. That voice bursting out on the profound stillness seemed loud enough to wake up every sleeper in the town, to bring the stones rolling down the hillsides. And almost at once he thought, “What luck!” The luck of the Englishman’s amazing impudence; for what other man would have thought of doing that thing? He told his rowers to lay their oars in quietly and get hold of the boat-stretchers. The extremely feeble pulling of the old boatman gave the time for these preparations. He whispered his instructions: “We’ve got to get a foreign signore out of that boat. The others in her will be sbirri. Hit them hard.” Just before the boats came into contact he recognized Cosmo’s form standing up. It was then that he pronounced the words, “the man in the hat,” which were heard by Cosmo. Attilio ascribed it all to luck that attended those who had anything to do with that Englishman. Even the very escape unseen from the harbour he ascribed, not to Cosmo’s extra oar, but to Cosmo’s peculiar personality.

  Without departing from his immobility he broke silence by a “signore,” pronounced in a distinct but restrained voice. Cosmo was glad to learn the story before the moment came for them to part. But the theory of luck which Attilio tacked on to the facts did not seem to him convincing. He remarked that if Attilio had not come for him at all he would have been far on the way in his mysterious affairs, whereas now he was only in another trap.

  For all answer the other murmured, “Si, but I wonder if it would have been the same. Signore, isn’t it strange that we should have been drawn together from the first moment you put foot in Genoa?”

  “It is,” said Cosmo, with an emphasis that encouraged the other to continue, but with a less assured voice.

  “Some people of old believed that stars have something to do with meetings and partings by their disposition and that some if not all men have each a star allotted to them.”

  “Perhaps,” said Cosmo in the same subdued voice.

  “But I believe there is a man greater than you or I who believes he has a star of his own.”

  “Napoleon, perhaps.”

  “So I have heard,” said Cosmo, and thought, “Here he is, whenever two men meet he is a third, one can’t get rid of him.”

  “I wonder where it is,” said Attilio, as if to himself, looking up at the sky. “Or yours, or mine,” he added in a still lower tone. “They must be pretty close together.”

  Cosmo humoured the superstitious strain absently, for he felt a secret sympathy for that man. “Yes, it looks as if yours and mine had been fated to draw together.”

  “No, I mean all three together.”

  “Do you? Then you must know more than I do. Though indeed as a matter of fact he is not very far from us where we sit. But don’t you think, my friend, that there are men and women, too, whose stars mark them for loneliness no man can approach?”

  “You mean because they are great.”

  “Because they are incomparable,” said Cosmo after a short pause, in which Attilio seemed to ponder.

  “I like that what you said,” Attilio was heard at last. “Their stars may be lonely. Look how still they are. But men are more like ships that come suddenly upon each other without a warning. And yet they, too, are guided by the stars. I can’t get over the wonder of our meeting to-night.”

  “If you hadn’t been so long in saying good-bye we wouldn’t have met,” said Cosmo, looking at the two men dozing on the thwarts, the whisperers of the tower. They were not at all like what he had imagined them to be.

  Attilio gazed at his Englishman for a time closely. He seemed to see a smile on Cosmo’s lips. Wonder at his omniscience prevented him from making a reply. He preferred not to ask, and yet he was incapable of forming a guess, for there are certain kinds of obviousness that escape speculation.

  “You may be right,” he said. “It’s the first time in my life that I found it hard to say good-bye. I begin to believe,” he went on murmuring, “that there are people it would be better for one not to know. There are women ...”

  “Yes,” said Cosmo, very low and as if unconscious of what he was saying. “I have seen your faces very close together.”

  The other made a slight movement away from Cosmo and then bent towards him. “You have seen,” he said slowly and stopped short. He was thinking of something that had happened only two hours before. “Oh well,” he said with composure, “you know everything, you see everything that happens. Do you know what will happen to us two?”

  -”It’s very likely that when we part we will never see each other again,” Cosmo said, resting his elbows on his knees and taking his head between his hands. He did not look like a man preparing to go ashore.

  There were no material difficulties absolutely to prevent him from landing. The foot of the tower with the narrow strip of ground which a boat could approach was not sixty yards off, and all this was in the shadow of its own reflection, the high side of the breakwater, the bulk of the tower, making the glassy water dark in that corner of the shore. And besides, the water in which the boat floated was so shallow that Cosmo could have got to land by wading from where the boat lay without wetting himself much above the knees, should

  Attilio refuse to come out from under the shelter of the rock. But probably Attilio would not have objected. The difficulty was not there.

  Attilio must have been thinking on the same subject, as became evident when he asked Cosmo whether those sbirri knew where he lived. After some reflection Cosmo said that he was quite certain they knew nothing about it. The sbirri had put no questions to him. They had not, he said, displayed any particular curiosity about what he was. “But why do you ask?”

  “Don’t you know?” said Attilio, with only half-affected surprise. “There might have been a dozen of them waiting for you in the neighbourhood on the chance of your returning, and you have no other place to go to.”

  “No, I haven’t,” said Cosmo in a tone as though he regretted that circumstance. He thought, however, that there might have been some of them out between the port and the town, and he knew only one way and that not very well, he added.

  As a matter of fact that danger was altogether imaginary, because Barbone, who certainly was in the pay of the police for work of that sort, was not imaginative enough to do things without orders, and after sending his prisoner off left the rest of the gendarmes and went home to bed, while his young acolyte went about his own affairs. The other two sbirri were being medically attended to, one of them especially being very nearly half killed by an unlucky blow on the temple. All the other sbirro could say in a feeble voice was that there were four in the boat, that they were attacked by an inexp
licable murderous gang, and that he imagined that the other two, the prisoner and the boatman, were now dead and very likely at the bottom of the harbour. The brigadier of the gendarmerie could not get any more out of him, and, knowing absolutely nothing of the affair, thought it would be time to make his report to the superior authorities in the morning. All he did was to go round to the places where the boats were chained, which were under his particular charge, and count the boats. Not one was wanting. His responsibility was not engaged.

  Thus there was nothing between Cosmo and Cante-lucci’s inn except his own distaste. There was a strange tameness in that proceeding, a lack of finality, something almost degrading. He imagined himself slinking like a criminal at the back of the beastly guardhouse, starting at shadows, creeping under the colonnade, getting lost in those dreadful deep lanes between palaces, with the constant dread of having suddenly the paws of those vile fellows laid on him and being dragged to some police post with an absurd tale on his lips and without a hat on his head and what for? Simply to get back to that abominable bedroom. However, he would have to go through it.

  “Pity you don’t know the town,” Attilio’s cautious voice was heard again, “or else I could tell you of a place where you could spend the remainder of the night and send word to your servant to-morrow. But you could not find it by yourself. And that’s a pity. I assure Your Excellency that she is a real good woman. To have a secret place is not such a bad thing. One never knows what one may need, and she is a creature to be trusted. She has an Italian heart and she is a giardiniera too. What more could I tell you?”

  Cosmo thought to himself vaguely that the girl he had seen in Cantelucci’s kitchen did not look like a woman gardener, though of course if Attilio had a love affair it would be naturally amongst people of that sort. But it occurred to him that perhaps it was some other woman Attilio was talking about. He made no movement. Attilio’s murmurs took on a tone of resignation. “Your luck, signore, will depart with you, and perhaps ours will follow after.” Cosmo protested against that unreasonable assumption, which was of course an absurdity but nevertheless touched him in one of those sensitive spots which are like a dSfaut d’armure in the battle-harness of various conceits which one wears against one’s kind. He considered luck less in a sudden overwhelming conviction of it, in the manner of a man who had crossed the path of a radiating influence, or who had awakened a sleeping and destructive power which would now pursue him to the end of his life. He was young, farouche, mistrustful and austere, not like a stoic, but in the more human way like a man who has been born fastidious. In a sense altogether unworldly. Attilio emitted an audible sigh.

  “You won’t call it your luck,” he pursued. “Well, let us leave it without a name. It is something in you. Your carelessness in following your fantasy, signore, as when you forced your presence on me only two days ago,” he insisted, as if carelessness and fantasy were the compelling instruments of success. His voice was at its lowest as he added: “Your genius makes you true to your will.”

  No human being could have been insensible to such words uttered unexpectedly in a tone of secret earnestness. But Cosmo’s inward response was a feeling of profound despondency. He was crushed by their appalling unfitness. For the last twenty-four hours he had been asking himself whether he had a will of his own, and it had seemed to him that he had lost the notion of the real nature of courage. At that very moment while listening to the mysteriously low pitch of Attilio’s voice the thought flashed through his mind that there was something within him that made of him a predestined victim of remorse.

  “You can’t possibly know anything about me, Attilio,” he said, “and whatever you like to imagine about me, you will have to put me on shore presently. I can’t stay here till the morning, and neither can you,” he added. “What are you thinking of doing? What can you do?”

  “Is it possible that it is of any interest to the signore? Only the other evening I could not induce you to leave me to myself, and now you are impatient to leave me to my fate. What can I do? I can always take a desperate chance,” he paused, and added through his clenched teeth, “and when I think what little I need to make it almost safe ...” The piously uttered exclamation, “Ah, Dio/” was accompanied by a shake of a clenched fist apparently addressed to the universe, but made as it were discreetly, in keeping with the low and forcible tones.

  “And what is that?” asked Cosmo, raising his head.

  “Two pairs of stout arms, nothing more. With four oars and this boat and using a little judgment in getting away I would defy that fellow there.” He jerked his head towards the galley which in this tideless sea had not shifted her position a yard. “Yes,” he went on, “I could even hope to remain unseen on account of a quick dash.”

  And he explained to Cosmo further that in an hour or so a little nearer the break of day, when men get heavy and sleepy, the watchfulness of those customhouse people would be relaxed and give him a better chance. But if he was seen then he could still hope to out-row them, though he would have preferred it the ‘*her way because with a boat making for the open sea they would very soon guess that there must be some vessel waiting for her, and by telling the tale on shore, that government xebee lying in the harbour would soon be out in chase. She was fast, and in twenty-four hours she would soon manage to overhaul all the craft she would sight between this and the place he was going to.

  “And where is that?” asked Cosmo, letting his head rest on his hands again.

  “In the direction of Livorno,” said the other, and checked himself. “But perhaps I had better not tell you, for should you happen to be interrogated by all those magistrates, or perhaps by the Austrians, you would of course want to speak the truth as becomes a gentleman — a nobilissimo signore — unless you manage to forget what I have already told you or perchance elect to come with us.”

  “Come with you,” repeated Cosmo, before something peculiar in the tone made him sit up and face Attilio. “I believe you are capable of carrying me off.”

  “Dio ne voglio,” was Attilio’s answer, “God forbid. The noise you would make would bring no end of trouble. But for that perhaps it would have been better for me,” he added reflectively. “Whereas I have made up my mind that there should be nothing but good from our association. Yet, signore, you very nearly went away with us without any question at all, for our head pointed to seaward and you could have had no idea that I was coming in here. Confess, signore, you didn’t think of return then. I had only to hold the tiller straight another five minutes and I would have had you in my power.”

  “You were afraid of the dogana galley, my friend,” said Cosmo as if arguing a point.

  “Signore, this minute,” said Attilio with the utmost seriousness. “Wake up there,” he said in a raised undertone to his two men. “Take an oar, Pietro, and pull the boat to the foot of the tower.”

  “There is also that old boatman,” said Cosmo.

  “Hold,” said Attilio. “Him I will not land. They will be at his place in the morning, and then he tells his tale . . . unless he is dead. See forward there.”

  A very subdued murmur arose in the bows and Attilio muttered, “Pietro would not talk to a dead man.”

  “He is extremely feeble,” said Cosmo.

  It appeared on Attilio’s enquiry that this encumbrance as he called him was just strong enough to be helped over the thwarts. Presently, sustained under the elbows, he joined Cosmo in the stern sheets, where they made him sit between them. He let his big hands lie in his lap. From time to time he shivered patiently.

  “That wretch Barbone knows no pity,” observed Cosmo.

  “I suppose he was the nearest he could get. What tyranny! The helpless are at the mercy of those fellows He saved himself the trouble of going three doors farther.”

  They both looked at the ancient frame that age had not shrivelled.

  “ A fine man once,” said Attilio in a low voice. “ Can you hear me, vecchio?”

  “Si, and see you t
oo, but I don’t know your voice,” was the answer in a voice stronger than either of them expected, but betraying no sort of interest.

  “ They will certainly throw him into prison.” And to Cosmo’s indignant exclamation Attilio pointed out that the old man would be the only person they would be able to get hold of and he would have to pay for all the rest.

  Cosmo expressed the opinion that he would not stay there long.

  “Better for him to die under the open sky than in prison,” murmured Attilio in a gloomy voice. “Listen, old man, could you keep the boat straight at a star if I were to point you one?”

  “I was at home in a boat before I could speak plainly,” was the answer, while the boatman raised his arm and let it rest on the tiller as if to prove that he had strength enough for that at least.

  “I have my boat’s crew, signore. Let him do something for all Italy if it is with his last breath, that old Genoese. And now if you were only to take that bow oar you have been using so well only a few moments ago, I will pull stroke and we will make this boat fly.”

  Cosmo felt the subdued vibration of this appeal without having paid any attention to the words. They required no answer. Attilio pressed him as though he had been arguing against objections. Surely he was no friend of tyranny or of Austrian oppressors and he wouldn’t refuse to serve a man whom some hidden power had thrown in his way. He, Attilio, had not sought him. He would have been content never to have seen him. He surely had nothing that could call him back on shore this very night, since he had not been more than three days in Genoa. No time for him to have affairs. The words poured out of his lips into Cosmo’s ear while the white-headed boatman sat still above the torrent of whispered speech, appearing to listen like a venerable judge. What could stand in the way of him lending his luck and the strength of his arm? Surely it couldn’t be love, since he was travelling alone.

  “Enough,” said Cosmo, as if the word had been extorted from him by pain, but Attilio felt that his cause had been gained, though he hastened to apologize for the impropriety of the argument, and assure the milord