THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES OF JOSEPH CONRAD. Джозеф Конрад

tone.

      A deep-chested veteran shouted across the café:

      "Some new villainy of the government, general?"

      "The villainies of these scoundrels," thundered General Feraud, "are innumerable. One more, one less!..." He lowered his tone. "But I will set good order to one of them at least."

      He looked all round the faces. "There's a pomaded curled staff officer, the darling of some of the marshals who sold their father for a handful of English gold. He will find out presently that I am alive yet," he declared in a dogmatic tone.... "However, this is a private affair. An old affair of honour. Bah! Our honour does not matter. Here we are driven off with a split ear like a lot of cast troop horses—good only for a knacker's yard. Who cares for our honour now? But it would be like striking a blow for the emperor.... Messieurs, I require the assistance of two of you."

      Every man moved forward. General Feraud, deeply touched by this demonstration, called with visible emotion upon the one-eyed veteran cuirassier and the officer of the Chasseurs à cheval, who had left the tip of his nose in Russia. He excused his choice to the others.

      "A cavalry affair this—you know."

      He was answered with a varied chorus of "Parfaitement mon Général... C'est juste... Parbleu c'est connu..." Everybody was satisfied. The three left the café together, followed by cries of "Bonne chance."

      Outside they linked arms, the general in the middle. The three rusty cocked hats worn en bataille, with a sinister forward slant, barred the narrow street nearly right across. The overheated little town of gray stones and red tiles was drowsing away its provincial afternoon under a blue sky. Far off the loud blows of some coopers hooping a cask, reverberated regularly between the houses. The general dragged his left foot a little in the shade of the walls.

      "That damned winter of 1813 got into my bones for good. Never mind. We must take pistols, that's all. A little lumbago. We must have pistols. He's sure game for my bag. My eyes are as keen as ever. Always were. You should have seen me picking off the dodging Cossacks with a beastly old infantry musket. I have a natural gift for firearms."

      In this strain General Feraud ran on, holding up his head with owlish eyes and rapacious beak. A mere fighter all his life, a cavalry man, a sabreur, he conceived war with the utmost simplicity as in the main a massed lot of personal contests, a sort of gregarious duelling. And here he had on hand a war of his own. He revived. The shadow of peace had passed away from him like the shadow of death. It was a marvellous resurrection of the named Feraud, Gabriel Florian, engagé volontaire of 1793, general of 1814, buried without ceremony by means of a service order signed by the War Minister of the Second Restoration.

      IV

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      No man succeeds in everything he undertakes. In that sense we are all failures. The great point is not to fail in ordering and sustaining the effort of our life. In this matter vanity is what leads us astray. It is our vanity which hurries us into situations from which we must come out damaged. Whereas pride is our safeguard by the reserve it imposes on the choice of our endeavour, as much as by the virtue of its sustaining power.

      General D'Hubert was proud and reserved. He had not been damaged by casual love affairs successful or otherwise. In his war-scarred body his heart at forty remained unscratched. Entering with reserve into his sister's matrimonial plans, he felt himself falling irremediably in love as one falls off a roof. He was too proud to be frightened. Indeed, the sensation was too delightful to be alarming.

      The inexperience of a man of forty is a much more serious thing than the inexperience of a youth of twenty, for it is not helped out by the rashness of hot blood. The girl was mysterious, as all young girls are, by the mere effect of their guarded ingenuity; and to him the mysteriousness of that young girl appeared exceptional and fascinating. But there was nothing mysterious about the arrangements of the match which Madame Léonie had arranged. There was nothing peculiar, either. It was a very appropriate match, commending itself extremely to the young lady's mother (her father was dead) and tolerable to the young lady's uncle—an old émigré, lately returned from Germany, and pervading cane in hand like a lean ghost of the ancien régime in a long-skirted brown coat and powdered hair, the garden walks of the young lady's ancestral home.

      General D'Hubert was not the man to be satisfied merely with the girl and the fortune—when it came to the point. His pride—and pride aims always at true success—would be satisfied with nothing short of love. But as pride excludes vanity, he could not imagine any reason why this mysterious creature, with deep and candid eyes of a violet colour, should have any feeling for him warmer than indifference. The young lady (her name was Adèle) baffled every attempt at a clear understanding on that point. It is true that the attempts were clumsy and timidly made, because by then General D'Hubert had become acutely aware of the number of his years, of his wounds, of his many moral imperfections, of his secret unworthiness—and had incidentally learned by experience the meaning of the word funk. As far as he could make it out she seemed to imply that with a perfect confidence in her mother's affection and sagacity she had no pronounced antipathy for the person of General D'Hubert; and that this was quite sufficient for a well-brought-up dutiful young lady to begin married life upon. This view hurt and tormented the pride of General D'Hubert. And yet, he asked himself with a sort of sweet despair, What more could he expect? She had a quiet and luminous forehead; her violet eyes laughed while the lines of her lips and chin remained composed in an admirable gravity. All this was set off by such a glorious mass of fair hair, by a complexion so marvellous, by such a grace of expression, that General D'Hubert really never found the opportunity to examine, with sufficient detachment, the lofty exigencies of his pride. In fact, he became shy of that line of inquiry, since it had led once or twice to a crisis of solitary passion in which it was borne upon him that he loved her enough to kill her rather than lose her. From such passages, not unknown to men of forty, he would come out broken, exhausted, remorseful, a little dismayed. He derived, however, considerable comfort from the quietist practice of sitting up now and then half the night by an open window, and meditating upon the wonder of her existence, like a believer lost in the mystic contemplation of his faith.

      It must not be supposed that all these variations of his inward state were made manifest to the world. General D'Hubert found no difficulty in appearing wreathed in smiles: because, in fact, he was very happy. He followed the established rules of his condition, sending over flowers (from his sister's garden and hothouses) early every morning, and a little later following himself to have lunch with his intended, her mother, and her émigré uncle. The middle of the day was spent in strolling or sitting in the shade. A watchful deferential gallantry trembling on the verge of tenderness, was the note of their intercourse on his side—with a playful turn of the phrase concealing the profound trouble of his whole being caused by her inaccessible nearness. Late in the afternoon General D'Hubert walked home between the fields of vines, sometimes intensely miserable, sometimes supremely happy, sometimes pensively sad, but always feeling a special intensity of existence: that elation common to artists, poets, and lovers, to men haunted by a great passion, by a noble thought or a new vision of plastic beauty.

      The outward world at that time did not exist with any special distinctness for General D'Hubert. One evening, however, crossing a ridge from which he could see both houses, General D'Hubert became aware of two figures far down the road. The day had been divine. The festal decoration of the inflamed sky cast a gentle glow on the sober tints of the southern land. The gray rocks, the brown fields, the purple undulating distances harmonised in luminous accord, exhaled already the scents of the evening. The two figures down the road presented themselves like two rigid and wooden silhouettes all black on the ribbon of white dust. General D'Hubert made out the long, straight-cut military capotes, buttoned closely right up to the black stocks, the cocked hats, the lean carven brown countenances—old soldiers—vieilles moustaches! The taller of the two had a black patch over one eye; the other's hard, dry countenance presented some bizarre disquieting peculiarity which, on nearer