CHAPTER ELEVEN
I couldn't get to sleep that night, but lay and tossed, lit my candleand read, and so on, for ever and ever--for an eternity. I wasconfoundedly excited; there were a hundred things to be thought about;clamouring to be thought about; out-clamouring the re-current chimes ofsome near clock. I began to read the article by Radet in the _RevueRouge_--the one I had bought of the old woman in the kiosque. It upsetme a good deal--that article. It gave away the whole Greenland show socompletely that the ecstatic bosh I had just despatched to the _Hour_seemed impossible. I suppose the good Radet had his axe to grind--justas I had had to grind the State Founder's, but Radet's axe didn't show.I was reading about an inland valley, a broad, shadowy, grey thing;immensely broad, immensely shadowy, winding away between immense,half-invisible mountains into the silence of an unknown country. Alittle band of men, microscopic figures in that immensity, in thosemists, crept slowly up it. A man among them was speaking; I seemed tohear his voice, low, monotonous, overpowered by the wan light and thesilence and the vastness.
And how well it was done--how the man could write; how skilfully he madehis points. There was no slosh about it, no sentiment. The touch waslight, in places even gay. He saw so well the romance of that dun bandthat had cast remorse behind; that had no return, no future, that spreaddesolation desolately. This was merely a review article--a thing that inEngland would have been unreadable; the narrative of a nomad of somegenius. I could never have written like that--I should have spoilt itsomehow. It set me tingling with desire, with the desire that transcendsthe sexual; the desire for the fine phrase, for the right word--for allthe other intangibles. And I had been wasting all this time; had beenwriting my inanities. I must go away; must get back, right back to theold road, must work. There was so little time. It was unpleasant, too,to have been mixed up in this affair, to have been trepanned into doingmy best to help it on its foul way. God knows I had little of thehumanitarian in me. If people must murder in the by-ways of an immenseworld they must do murder and pay the price. But that I should have beenmixed up in such was not what I had wanted. I must have done with itall; with all this sort of thing, must get back to my old self, must getback. I seemed to hear the slow words of the Duc de Mersch.
"We have increased exports by so much; the imports by so much. We haveprotected the natives, have kept their higher interests ever present inour minds. And through it all we have never forgotten the missionentrusted to us by Europe--to remove the evil of darkness from theearth--to root out barbarism with its nameless horrors, whose existencehas been a blot on our consciences. Men of good-will and self-sacrificeare doing it now--are laying down their priceless lives to root out ...to root our...."
Of course they _were_ rooting them out.
It didn't matter to me. One supposes that that sort of native exists forthat sort of thing--to be rooted out by men of good-will, with careersto make. The point was that that was what they were really doing outthere--rooting out the barbarians as well as the barbarism, and provingthemselves worthy of their hire. And I had been writing them up and wasno better than the farcical governor of a department who would write onthe morrow to protest that that was what they did not do. You see I hada sort of personal pride in those days; and preferred to think of myselfas a decent person. I knew that people would say the same sort of thingabout me that they said about all the rest of them. I couldn't very wellprotest. I _had_ been scratching the backs of all sorts of creatures;out of friendship, out of love--for all sorts of reasons. This was onlya sort of last straw--or perhaps it was the sight of her that had beenthe last straw. It seemed naively futile to have been wasting my timeover Mrs. Hartly and those she stood for, when there was something sodifferent in the world--something so like a current of east wind.
That vein of thought kept me awake, and a worse came to keep it company.The men from the next room came home--students, I suppose. They talkedgaily enough, their remarks interspersed by the thuds of falling bootsand the other incomprehensible noises of the night. Through the flimsypartition I caught half sentences in that sort of French intonation thatis so impossible to attain. It reminded me of the voices of the two menat the Opera. I began to wonder what they had been saying--what theycould have been saying that concerned me and affected the littlecorrespondent to interfere. Suddenly the thing dawned upon me with thestartling clearness of a figure in a complicated pattern--a clearnessfrom which one cannot take one's eyes.
It threw everything--the whole world--into more unpleasant relationswith me than even the Greenland affair. They had not been talking aboutmy aunt and her Salon, but about my ... my sister. She was De Mersch's"_Anglaise_." I did not believe it, but probably all Paris--the wholeworld--said she was. And to the whole world I was her brother! Those twomen who had looked at me over their shoulders had shrugged and said,"Oh, _he's_ ..." And the whole world wherever I went would whisper inasides, "Don't you know Granger? He's the brother. De Mersch employshim."
I began to understand everything; the woman in de Mersch's room withher "Eschingan-Grangeur-r-r"; the deference of the little Jew--the manwho knew. _He_ knew that I--that I, who patronised him, was a person tostand well with because of my--my sister's hold over de Mersch. Iwasn't, of course, but you can't understand how the whole thing maddenedme all the same. I hated the world--this world of people who whisperedand were whispered to, of men who knew and men who wanted to know--theshadowy world of people who didn't matter, but whose eyes and voiceswere all round one and did somehow matter. I knew well enough how it hadcome about. It was de Mersch--the State Founder, with his shamed faceand his pallid hands. She had been attracted by his air of greatness, byhis elective grand-dukedom, by his protestations. Women are like that.She had been attracted and didn't know what she was doing, didn't knowwhat the world was over here--how people talked. She had been excited bythe whirl and flutter of it, and perhaps she didn't care. The thing mustcome to an end, however. She had said that I should go to her on themorrow. Well, I would go, and I would put a stop to this. I hadsuddenly discovered how very much I was a Granger of Etchingham, afterall I _had_ family traditions and graves behind me. And for thesake of all these people whose one achievement had been the making ofa good name I _had_ to intervene now. After all--"_Bon sang ne_"--does not get itself talked about in _that_ way.
The early afternoon of the morrow found me in a great room--a faded,sombre salon of the house my aunt had taken in the Faubourg SaintGermain. Numbers of strong-featured people were talking in groups amongthe tables and chairs of a time before the Revolution. I rather forgethow I had got there, and what had gone before. I must have arisen lateand passed the intervening hours in a state of trepidation. I was goingto see her, and I was like a cub in love, with a man's place to fill. Itwas a preposterous state of things that set the solid world in a whirl.Once there, my eyes suddenly took in things.
I had a sense of her standing by my side. She had just introduced me tomy aunt--a heavy-featured, tired-eyed village tyrant. She was soobviously worn out, so obviously "not what she had been," that her facewould have been pitiful but for its immovable expression of class pride.The Grangers of Etchingham, you see, were so absolutely at the top oftheir own particular kind of tree that it was impossible for them tomeet anyone who was not an inferior. A man might be a cabinet minister,might even be a prince, but he couldn't be a Granger of Etchingham,couldn't have such an assortment of graves, each containing a Granger,behind his back. The expression didn't even lift for me who had. Itcouldn't, it was fixed there. One wondered what she was doing in this_galere_. It seemed impossible that she should interest herself in therestoration of the Bourbons--they were all very well, but they weren'teven English, let alone a county family. I figured it out that she musthave set her own village so much in order that there remained nothingbut the setting in order of the rest of the world. Her bored eyeswandered sleepily over the assemblage. They seemed to have nopreferences for any of them. They rested on the vacuously Bonaparteprince, on the moribund German Jesuit to w
hom he was listening, on thedarkly supple young Spanish priest, on the rosy-gilled EnglishPassionist, on Radet, the writer of that article in the _Revue Rouge_,who was talking to a compatriot in one of the tall windows. She seemedto accept the saturnine-looking men, the political women, who all spokea language not their own, with an accent and a fluency, and a dangerousfar-away smile and a display of questionable teeth all their own. Sheseemed to class the political with the pious, the obvious adventurerwith the seeming fanatic. It was amazing to me to see her there,standing with her county family self-possession in the midst of so muchthat was questionable. She offered me no explanation; I had to find onefor myself.
We stood and talked in the centre of the room. It did not seem a placein which one _could_ sit.
"Why have you never been to see me?" she asked languidly. "I might neverhave known of your existence if it had not been for your sister." Mysister was standing at my side, you must remember. I don't suppose thatI started, but I made my aunt no answer.
"Indeed," she went on, "I should never have known that you had a sister.Your father was so _very_ peculiar. From the day he married, my husbandnever heard a word from him."
"They were so very different," I said, listlessly.
"Ah, yes," she answered, "brothers so often are." She sighed, aproposof nothing. She continued to utter disjointed sentences from which Igathered a skeleton history of my _soi distant_ sister's introduction ofherself and of her pretensions. She had, it seemed, casually introducedherself at some garden-party or function of the sort, had representedherself as a sister of my own to whom a maternal uncle had left afabulous fortune. She herself had suggested her being sheltered under myaunt's roof as a singularly welcome "paying guest." She herself, too,had suggested the visit to Paris and had hired the house from adegenerate Duc de Luynes who preferred the delights of an _appartement_in the less lugubrious Avenue Marceau.
"We have tastes so much in common," my aunt explained, as she moved awayto welcome a new arrival. I was left alone with the woman who calledherself my sister.
We stood a little apart. Each little group of talkers in the vast roomseemed to stand just without earshot of the next. I had my back to thedoor, my face to her.
"And so you have come," she said, maliciously it seemed to me.
It was impossible to speak in _such_ a position; in such a place;impossible to hold a discussion on family affairs when a diminutiveIrishwoman with too mobile eyebrows, and a couple of gigantic,raw-boned, lugubrious Spaniards, were in a position to hear anythingthat one uttered above a whisper. One might want to raise one's voice.Besides, she was so--so terrible; there was no knowing what she mightnot say. She so obviously did not care what the Irish or the Spaniardsor the Jesuits heard or thought, that I was forced to the mortifyingconclusion that I did.
"Oh, I've come," I answered. I felt as outrageously out of it as onedoes at a suburban hop where one does not know one animal of themenagerie. I did not know what to do or what to say, or what to do withmy hands. I was pervaded by the unpleasant idea that all those furtiveeyes were upon me; gauging me because I was the brother of apersonality. I was concerned about the fit of my coat and my boots, andall the while I was in a furious temper; my errand was important.
She stood looking at me, a sinuous, brilliant thing, with a light in theeyes half challenging, half openly victorious.
"You have come," she said, "and ..."
I became singularly afraid of her; and wanted to stop her mouth. Shemight be going to say anything. She overpowered me so that I actuallydwindled--into the gawkiness of extreme youth. I became a goggle-eyed,splay-footed boy again and made a boy's desperate effort after arecovery at one stroke of an ideal standard of dignity.
"I must have a word with you," I said, remembering. She made a littlegesture with her hands, signifying "I am here." "But in private," Iadded.
"Oh, everything's in private here," she said. I was silent.
"I must," I added after a time.
"I can't retire with you," she said; "'it would look odd,' you'd say,wouldn't you?" I shrugged my shoulders in intense irritation. I didn'twant to be burlesqued. A flood of fresh people came into the room. Iheard a throaty "ahem" behind me. The Duc de Mersch was introducinghimself to notice. It was as I had thought--the man was an habitue, withhis well-cut clothes, his air of protestation, and his tremendous goldenpoll. He was the only sunlight that the gloomy place rejoiced in. Hebowed low over my oppressor's hand, smiled upon me, and began to utterplatitudes in English.
"Oh, you may speak French," she said carelessly.
"But your brother...." he answered.
"I understand French very well," I said. I was in no mood to spare himembarrassments; wanted to show him that I had a hold over him, and knewhe wasn't the proper person to talk to a young lady. He glared at mehaughtily.
"But yesterday ..." he began in a tone that burlesqued augustdispleasure. I was wondering what he had looked like on the other sideof the door--whilst that lady had been explaining his nature to me.
"Yesterday I wished to avoid embarrassments," I said; "I was torepresent your views about Greenland. I might have misunderstood you insome important matter."
"I see, I see," he said conciliatorily. "Yesterday we spoke English forthe benefit of the British public. When we speak French we are not inpublic, I hope." He had a semi-supplicating manner.
"Everything's rather too much in public here," I answered. My part as Iimagined it was that of a British brother defending his sister fromquestionable attentions--the person who "tries to show the man he isn'twanted." But de Mersch didn't see the matter in that light at all. Hecould not, of course. He was as much used to being purred to as my auntto looking down on non-county persons. He seemed to think I was makingan incomprehensible insular joke, and laughed non-committally. Itwouldn't have been possible to let him know he wasn't wanted.
"Oh, you needn't be afraid of my brother," she said suddenly. "He isquite harmless. He is even going to give up writing for the papersexcept when we want him."
The Duc turned from me to her, smiled and bowed. His smile was inane,but he bowed very well; he had been groomed into that sort of thing orhad it in the blood.
"We work together still?" he asked.
"Why not?" she answered.
A hubbub of angry voices raised itself behind my back. It was one of the_contretemps_ that made the Salon Grangeur famous throughout the city.
"You forced yourself upon me. Did I say anywhere that you wereresponsible? If it resembles your particular hell upon earth, what isthat to me? You do worse things; you, yourself, monsieur. Haven't I seen... haven't I seen it?"
The Duc de Mersch looked swiftly over his shoulder toward the window.
"They seem to be angry there," he said nervously. "Had not somethingbetter be done, Miss Granger?"
Miss Granger followed the direction of his eyes.
"Why," she said, "we're used to these differences of opinion. Besides,it's only Monsieur Radet; he's forever at war with someone or other."
"He ought to be shown the door," the Duc grumbled.
"Oh, as for that," she answered, "we couldn't. My aunt would bedesolated by such a necessity. He is very influential in certainquarters. My aunt wants to catch him for the--He's going to write anarticle."
"He writes too many articles," the Duc said, with heavy displeasure.
"Oh, he has written _one_ too many," she answered, "but that can betraversed...."
"But no one believes," the Duc objected ... Radet's voice intermittentlybroke in upon his _sotto-voce,_ coming to our ears in gusts.
"Haven't I seen you ... and then ... and you offer me the cross ... tobribe me to silence ... me...."
In the general turning of faces toward the window in which stood Radetand the other, mine turned too. Radet was a cadaverous, weatherworn,passion-worn individual, badger-grey, and worked up into a grotesquelyattitudinised fury of injured self-esteem. The other was adenationalised, shifty-eyed, sallow, grey-bearded governor of on
e of theprovinces of the Systeme Groenlandais; had a closely barbered head, abull neck, and a great belly. He cast furtive glances round him,uncertain whether to escape or to wait for his say. He looked at thering that encircled the window at a little distance, and his face, whichhad betrayed a half-apparent shame, hardened at sight of the cynicalmasks of the cosmopolitan conspirators. They were amused by the scene.The Holsteiner gained confidence, shrugged his shoulders.
"You have had the fever very badly since you came back," he said,showing a level row of white teeth. "You did not talk like that outthere."
"No--_pas si bete_--you would have hanged me, perhaps, as you did thatpoor devil of a Swiss. What was his name? Now you offer me the cross.Because I had the fever, _hein_?"
I had been watching the Duc's face; a first red flush had come creepingfrom under the roots of his beard, and had spread over the low foreheadand the sides of the neck. The eye-glass fell from the eye, a signal forthe colour to retreat. The full lips grew pallid, and began to mutterunspoken words. His eyes wandered appealingly from the woman beside himto me. _I_ didn't want to look him in the face. The man was a traffickerin human blood, an evil liver, and I hated him. He had to pay his price;would have to pay--but I didn't want to see him pay it. There was alimit.
I began to excuse myself, and slid out between the groups of excellentplotters. As I was going, she said to me:
"You may come to me to-morrow in the morning."