The Inheritors. Joseph Conrad

      The Inheritors

      CHAPTER ONE

      "Ideas," she said. "Oh, as for ideas – "

      "Well?" I hazarded, "as for ideas – ?"

      We went through the old gateway and I cast a glance over my shoulder. The noon sun was shining over the masonry, over the little saints' effigies, over the little fretted canopies, the grime and the white streaks of bird-dropping.

      "There," I said, pointing toward it, "doesn't that suggest something to you?"

      She made a motion with her head – half negative, half contemptuous.

      "But," I stuttered, "the associations – the ideas – the historical ideas – "

      She said nothing.

      "You Americans," I began, but her smile stopped me. It was as if she were amused at the utterances of an old lady shocked by the habits of the daughters of the day. It was the smile of a person who is confident of superseding one fatally.

      In conversations of any length one of the parties assumes the superiority – superiority of rank, intellectual or social. In this conversation she, if she did not attain to tacitly acknowledged temperamental superiority, seemed at least to claim it, to have no doubt as to its ultimate according. I was unused to this. I was a talker, proud of my conversational powers.

      I had looked at her before; now I cast a sideways, critical glance at her. I came out of my moodiness to wonder what type this was. She had good hair, good eyes, and some charm. Yes. And something besides – a something – a something that was not an attribute of her beauty. The modelling of her face was so perfect and so delicate as to produce an effect of transparency, yet there was no suggestion of frailness; her glance had an extraordinary strength of life. Her hair was fair and gleaming, her cheeks coloured as if a warm light had fallen on them from somewhere. She was familiar till it occurred to you that she was strange.

      "Which way are you going?" she asked.

      "I am going to walk to Dover," I answered.

      "And I may come with you?"

      I looked at her – intent on divining her in that one glance. It was of course impossible. "There will be time for analysis," I thought.

      "The roads are free to all," I said. "You are not an American?"

      She shook her head. No. She was not an Australian either, she came from none of the British colonies.

      "You are not English," I affirmed. "You speak too well." I was piqued. She did not answer. She smiled again and I grew angry. In the cathedral she had smiled at the verger's commendation of particularly abominable restorations, and that smile had drawn me toward her, had emboldened me to offer deferential and condemnatory remarks as to the plaster-of-Paris mouldings. You know how one addresses a young lady who is obviously capable of taking care of herself. That was how I had come across her. She had smiled at the gabble of the cathedral guide as he showed the obsessed troop, of which we had formed units, the place of martyrdom of Blessed Thomas, and her smile had had just that quality of superseder's contempt. It had pleased me then; but, now that she smiled thus past me – it was not quite at me – in the crooked highways of the town, I was irritated. After all, I was somebody; I was not a cathedral verger. I had a fancy for myself in those days – a fancy that solitude and brooding had crystallised into a habit of mind. I was a writer with high – with the highest – ideals. I had withdrawn myself from the world, lived isolated, hidden in the countryside, lived as hermits do, on the hope of one day doing something – of putting greatness on paper. She suddenly fathomed my thoughts: "You write," she affirmed. I asked how she knew, wondered what she had read of mine – there was so little.

      "Are you a popular author?" she asked.

      "Alas, no!" I answered. "You must know that."

      "You would like to be?"

      "We should all of us like," I answered; "though it is true some of us protest that we aim for higher things."

      "I see," she said, musingly. As far as I could tell she was coming to some decision. With an instinctive dislike to any such proceeding as regarded myself, I tried to cut across her unknown thoughts.

      "But, really – " I said, "I am quite a commonplace topic. Let us talk about yourself. Where do you come from?"

      It occurred to me again that I was intensely unacquainted with her type.

      Here was the same smile – as far as I could see, exactly the same smile.

      There are fine shades in smiles as in laughs, as in tones of voice. I

      seemed unable to hold my tongue.

      "Where do you come from?" I asked. "You must belong to one of the new nations. You are a foreigner, I'll swear, because you have such a fine contempt for us. You irritate me so that you might almost be a Prussian. But it is obvious that you are of a new nation that is beginning to find itself."

      "Oh, we are to inherit the earth, if that is what you mean," she said.

      "The phrase is comprehensive," I said. I was determined not to give myself away. "Where in the world do you come from?" I repeated. The question, I was quite conscious, would have sufficed, but in the hope, I suppose, of establishing my intellectual superiority, I continued:

      "You know, fair play's a jewel. Now I'm quite willing to give you information as to myself. I have already told you the essentials – you ought to tell me something. It would only be fair play."

      "Why should there be any fair play?" she asked.

      "What have you to say against that?" I said. "Do you not number it among your national characteristics?"

      "You really wish to know where I come from?"

      I expressed light-hearted acquiescence.

      "Listen," she said, and uttered some sounds. I felt a kind of unholy emotion. It had come like a sudden, suddenly hushed, intense gust of wind through a breathless day. "What – what!" I cried.

      "I said I inhabit the Fourth Dimension."

      I recovered my equanimity with the thought that I had been visited by some stroke of an obscure and unimportant physical kind.

      "I think we must have been climbing the hill too fast for me," I said, "I have not been very well. I missed what you said." I was certainly out of breath.

      "I said I inhabit the Fourth Dimension," she repeated with admirable gravity.

      "Oh, come," I expostulated, "this is playing it rather low down. You walk a convalescent out of breath and then propound riddles to him."

      I was recovering my breath, and, with it, my inclination to expand. Instead, I looked at her. I was beginning to understand. It was obvious enough that she was a foreigner in a strange land, in a land that brought out her national characteristics. She must be of some race, perhaps Semitic, perhaps Sclav – of some incomprehensible race. I had never seen a Circassian, and there used to be a tradition that Circassian women were beautiful, were fair-skinned, and so on. What was repelling in her was accounted for by this difference in national point of view. One is, after all, not so very remote from the horse. What one does not understand one shies at – finds sinister, in fact. And she struck me as sinister.

      "You won't tell me who you are?" I said.

      "I have done so," she answered.

      "If you expect me to believe that you inhabit a mathematical monstrosity, you are mistaken. You are, really."

      She turned round and pointed at the city.

      "Look!" she said.

      We had climbed the western hill. Below our feet, beneath a sky that the wind had swept clean of clouds, was the valley; a broad bowl, shallow, filled with the purple of smoke-wreaths. And above the mass of red roofs there soared the golden stonework of the cathedral tower. It was a vision, the last word of a great art. I looked at her. I was moved, and I knew that the glory of it must have moved her.

      She was smiling. "Look!" she repeated. I looked.

      There was the purple and the red, and the golden tower,