Part 4

One reads that men who have been condemned for long years to solitary imprisonment go mad. But I think that even that sad gift from Omnipotent Fate would not be mine. As I figure the world to myself, Fate is terrible only to those who surrender to her. If I surrendered, to the extent of living to go to prison, then assuredly the future must be uniformly heavy, uniformly doomed, in my eyes. For I would as soon be mad as anything else I can think of. But I should not go mad. Men go mad because of the opportunities they miss: because the world changes outside their prison walls, or because their children starve. But I have no opportunities to miss or take: the changes of the world to me are nothing, and there is no soul between whom and starvation I could stand.

Whilst I am about making this final disposition of my properties--let me tell you finally what I have done in regard to your husband himself. It is a fact--and this I have been keeping up my sleeve as a final surprise for you--that he is almost cured....

But I have just received an incomprehensible note from Edward Burden. He asks me for some particulars as to his confounded estate and whether I can lend him some thousands of pounds at short notice. Heaven knows what new scrape this is that he’s in. Of course this may precipitate my crash. But whatever happens, I shall find time to write my final words to you--and nothing else really matters....

VII

I haven’t yet discovered what Edward Burden is doing. I have found him a good round sum upon mortgage--the irony of the position being that the money is actually his whilst the mortgage does not actually exist. He says that what he is doing with the money will please me. I suppose that means that he’s embarking upon some sort of speculation which he imagines that I would favour. It is odd that he should think that I find gratification in his imitating myself.

But why should I concern myself with this thing at all? Nothing in the world can ever please or displease me any more. For I have taken my resolve: this is my last night upon earth. When I lay down this pen again, I shall never take up any pen more. For I have said all that I can say to you. I am utterly tired out. To-night I shall make up into a parcel all these letters--I must sit through the night because it is only to-morrow morning that I shall be able to register the parcel to you--and registering it will be my last act upon the habitable globe. For biting through the glass in the ring will be not an action, but the commencement of a new train of thought. Or perhaps only my final action will come to an end when you read these words in Rome. Or will that be only thought--the part of me that lives--pleading to you to give your thoughts for company. I feel too tired to think the matter out!

Let me, then, finish with this earth: I told you, when I finished writing last night, that Robert is almost cured. I would not have told you this for the sake of arrogating to myself the position of a saviour. But I imagine that you would like the cure to go on and, in the case of some accident after my death, it might go all to pieces once more. Quite simply then: I have been doing two things. In the first place I have persuaded your chemists to reduce very gradually the strength of chloral, so that the bottles contain nearly half water. And Robert perceives no difference. Now of course it is very important that he shall not know of the trick that is being so beneficently played on him--so that, in case he should go away or for one reason or another change his chemists, it must be carefully seen to that instead of pure chloral he obtains the exactly diluted mixture. In this way he may be brought gradually to drinking almost pure water.

But that alone would hardly be satisfactory: a comparatively involuntary cure is of little value in comparison with an effort of the will. You may, conceivably, expel nature with a fork, but nothing but a passion will expel a passion. The only point to be proved is whether there exists in your husband any other passion for the sake of which he might abandon his passion for the clearness of vision which he always says his chloral gives him. He has not, of course, the incentives usual to men: you cannot, in fact, “get” him along ordinary lines.... But apart from his physical craving for the drug he _has_ that passion for clearness of intellect that he says the drug gives him--and it is through that, that at last, I have managed to hit his pride.

For I have put it to him very strongly that one view of life is just as good as another--no better, no worse, but just the same. And I have put it to him that his use of chloral simply limits for him the number of views of life that he might conceivably have. And, when you come to think of all the rhapsodies of his that we have listened to, I think that that piece of special pleading is sufficiently justified. I do indeed honestly believe that, for what it is worth, he is on the road to salvation. He means to make a struggle--to attempt the great feat of once more seeing life with the eyes that Fate originally gave to him.

This is my legacy to _you_: if you ask me why I have presented you with this man’s new identity--since it _will_ mean a new identity--I must answer that I simply don’t know. Why have we kept him alive all these years? I have done it no doubt because I had nothing to give you. But you? If you have loved me you must have wished him--I won’t say dead--but no more there. Yet you have tried too--and I suppose this answer to the riddle is simply the answer to the whole riddle of our life. We have tried to play a supremely difficult game simply because it sanctified our love. For, after all, sanctification arises from difficulties. Well, we have made our way very strait and we have so narrowed the door of entrance that it has vanished altogether. We have never had _any_ hope of a solution that could have satisfied us. If we had cared to break the rules of the game, I suppose we could have done it easily enough--and we could have done it the more easily since neither you nor I ever subscribed to those rules. If we have not it was, I think, simply because we sought the difficulty which sanctifies.... Has it been a very imbecile proceeding? I am most uncertain. For it is not a thing to be very proud of--to be able to say that for a whole lifetime, one has abstained from that which one most desired. On the other hand, we have won a curious and difficult game. Well--there it is--and there is your legacy. I do not think that there is anything else for me to write about. You will see that, in my will, I have left everything I possess to--Edward Burden. This is not because I wish to make him reparation, and it’s not because I wish to avoid scandal: it is simply because it may show him--one very simple thing. It will show him how very nearly I might have made things come right. I have been balancing my accounts very carefully, and I find that, reckoning things reasonably against myself, Edward Burden will have a five-pound note with which to buy himself a mourning-ring.

The being forced to attend to my accounts will make him gasp a good deal. It will certainly shake his belief in all accepted reputations--for he will look on the faces of many men each “as solid as the Bank of England,” and he will think: “I wonder if you are like----?” His whole world will crumble--not because I have been dishonest, since he is coldblooded enough to believe that all men may be dishonest. But he will tremble because I have been able to be so wildly dishonest and yet to be so successfully respectable. He won’t even dare to “expose” me, since, if he did that, half of the shares which he will inherit from me would suffer an eclipse of disreputability, would tumble to nothingness in value--and would damage his poor pocket. He will have to have my estate set down at a high figure; he will have to be congratulated on his fortunate inheritance, and he will have, sedulously, to compound my felony.

You will wonder how I can be capable of this final cruelty--the most cruel thing that, perhaps, ever one man did to another. I will tell you why it is: it is because I hate all the Edward Burdens of the world--because, being the eternal Haves of the world, they have made their idiotic rules of the game. And you and I suffer: you and I, the eternal Have Nots. And we suffer, not because their rules bind us, but because, being the finer spirits, we are forced to set ourselves rules that are still more strict in order that, in all things, we may be the truly gallant.

But why do I write: “You will wonder how I can be capable of this.” You will have understood--you who understand everything.

_Eight in the morning._--Well: now we part. I am going to register the parcel containing all these letters to you. We part: and it is as if you were dropping back--the lost Eurydice of the world--into an utter blackness. For, in a minute, you will be no more than part of my past. Well then: good-night.

VIII

You will have got the telegram I sent you long before you got the parcel of letters: you will have got the note I wrote you by the same post as the letters themselves. If I have taken these three days to myself before again writing to you it has been because I have needed to recover my power of thinking. Now, in a way, I have recovered it--and it is only fair to say that I have devoted all my thoughts to how the new situation affects you--and you in your relations to me.

It places me in your hands--let that be written first and foremost. You have to decree my life or my death. For I take it that now we can never get back again into our old position: I have spoken, you have heard me speak. The singular unity, the silence of our old life is done with for good. There is perhaps no reason why this should not be so: silence is no necessary part of our relationship. But it has seemed to make a rather exquisite bond between us.

It must, if I am to continue to live--it must be replaced by some other bond. In our silence we have seemed to speak in all sorts of strange ways: we have perhaps read each other’s thoughts. I have seen words form themselves upon your lips. But now you must--there is no way out of it--you _must_ write to me. You must write to me fully: all your thoughts. You must, as I have done, find the means of speech--or I can no longer live....

I am reprieved!

I don’t know if, in my note to you, I explained exactly what had happened. It was in this way. I was anxious to be done with my world very early and, as soon as eight o’clock struck, I set out for the post-office at the corner to register that parcel of letters for you. Till the task was accomplished--the last I was to perform on earth--I noticed nothing: I was simply in a hurry. But, having given the little fagot into the hands of a sleepy girl, I said to myself suddenly: “Now I _am_ dead!” I began suddenly as they say of young children, to “notice.” A weight that I had never felt before seemed to fall away from me. I noticed, precisely, that the girl clerk was sleepy, that, as she reached up one hand to take the parcel over the brass caging, she placed the other over her mouth to hide a yawn.

And out on the pavement it was most curious what had befallen the world. It had lost all interest: but it had become fascinating, vivid. I had not, you see, any senses left, but my eyesight and hearing. Vivid: that is the word. I watched a newsboy throw his papers down an area, and it appeared wonderfully interesting to discover that _that_ was how one’s papers got into the house. I watched a milkman go up some doorsteps to put a can of milk beside a boot-scraper and I was wonderfully interested to see a black cat follow him. They were the clearest moments I have ever spent upon the earth--those when I was dead. They were so clear because nothing else weighed on my attention but just those little things. It was an extraordinary, a luxuriant feeling. That, I imagine, must have been how Adam and Eve felt before they had eaten of the fruit of knowledge.

Supposing I had tacitly arranged with myself that I would die in the street, I think I should still have walked home simply to dally longer with that delightful feeling of sheer curiosity. For it was sheer curiosity to see how this world, which I had never looked at, really performed before utterly unbiassed eyes.

That was why, when I got home, I sent away the messenger that brought to me Edward Burden’s letter; there was to be no answer. Whatever Burden’s query might be I was not going to commit myself to any other act. My last was that of sending off the parcel to you.

My opening Burden’s letter when the messenger had gone was simply a part of my general curiosity. I wanted to see how a Burden letter would look when it no longer had any bearings at all for me. It was as if I were going to read a letter from that dear Edward to a man I did not know upon a subject of which I had never heard.

And then I was reprieved!

The good Edward, imagining that I was seriously hurt at his having proposed to allow his wife’s solicitors to superintend my stewardship--the good Edward in his concern had positively insisted that all the deeds should be returned to me absolutely unchecked. He said that he had had a hard fight for it and that the few thousands he had borrowed from me had represented his settlement, which he had thus paid in specie....

It chimed in wonderfully with his character, when I come to think of it. Of course he was disciplining Miss Averies’ representatives just as he had disciplined herself in the matter of China tea of which I have written to you. And he had imagined that I was seriously hurt! Can you figure to yourself such an imbecile?

But, if you permit me to continue to live, you will be saving the poor fool from the great shock I had prepared for him--the avalanche of discovery, the earthquake of uncertainty. For he says in that so kind way of his that, having thus shown his entire confidence in me--in the fact, that is, that Providence is on the side of all Burdens--he will choose a time in the future, convenient for me, when he will go thoroughly with me into his accounts. And inasmuch as his wedding-tour will take him all round the world I have at least a year in which to set things straight. And of course I can put off his scrutiny indefinitely or deceive him for ever.

I did not think all these things at once. In fact, when I had read his letter, so strong within me was the feeling that it was only a mental phenomenon, a thing that had no relation with me--the feeling of finality was so strong upon me that I actually found myself sitting in that chair before I realized what had occurred.

What had occurred was that I had become utterly and for good your property.

In that sense only am I reprieved. As far as Edward Burden is concerned I am entirely saved. I stand before you and ask you to turn your thumb up or down. For, having spoken as I have to you, I have given you a right over me. Now that the pressing necessity for my death is over I have to ask you whether I shall plunge into new adventures that will lead me to death or whether I am to find some medium in which we may lead a life of our own, in some way together. I was about to take my life to avoid prison: now prison is no more a part of my scheme of existence. But I must now have some means of working towards you or I must run some new and wild risk to push you out of my thoughts. I don’t, as you know, ask you to be my secret mistress, I don’t ask you to elope with me. But I say that you _must_ belong to me as much in thought as I have, in this parcel of letters, been revealed and given over to you. Otherwise, I must once more gamble--and having tasted of gambling in the shadow of death, I must gamble for ever in that way. I must, I mean, feel that I am coming towards you or committing crimes that I may forget you.

My dear, I am a very tired man. If you know what it was to long for you as I have longed for you all these years, you would wonder that I did not, sitting in that chair, put the ring up to my teeth, in spite of Burden’s letter, and end it. I have an irresistible longing for rest--or perhaps it is only your support. To think that I must face for ever--or for as long as it lasts--this troublesome excitement of avoiding thoughts of you--that was almost unbearable. I resisted because I had written these letters to you. I love you and I know you love me--yet without them I would have inflicted upon you the wound of my death. Having written them I cannot face the cruelty to you. I mean that, if I had died without your knowing why, it would have been only a death grievous to you--still it is the duty of humanity and of you with humanity to bear and to forget deaths. But now that you must know, I could not face the cruelty of filling you with the pain of unmerited remorse. For I know that you would have felt remorse, and it would have been unmerited since I gave you no chance or any time to stretch out your hands to me. Now I give it you and wait for your verdict.

For the definite alternatives are these: I will put Burden’s estate absolutely clear within the year and work out, in order to make safe money, the new and comparatively sober scheme of which I have written to you: that I will do if you will consent to be mine to the extent of sharing our thoughts alone. Or, if you will not, I will continue to gamble more wildly than ever with the Burden money. And that in the end means death and a refuge from you.

So then, I stand reprieved--and the final verdict is in your hands.

APPENDIX

A Note on “Romance”

Writing to his Collaborator in a letter published in the _Transatlantic Review_ for January, 1924, Mr. Conrad makes the following ascription of passages in the work above named:

First Part, yours; Second Part, mainly yours, with a little by me on points of seamanship and suchlike small matters; Third Part, about 60 percent mine with important touches by you; Fourth Part, mine with here and there an important sentence by you; Fifth Part practically all yours, including the famous sentence at which we both exclaimed: “This is Genius,” (Do you remember what it is?) with perhaps half a dozen lines by me....

Mr. Conrad’s recollections--except for the generosity of his two “importants”--tally well enough with those of his Collaborator if conception alone is concerned. When it comes however to the writing the truth is that Parts One, Two, Three and Five are a singular mosaic of passages written alternately by one or other of the collaborators. The matchless Fourth Part is both in conception and writing entirely the work of Mr. Conrad.

Below will be found the analysis of “Romance.” Any student of literature with an ear for prose will hardly need these underlinings, for Mr. Conrad’s definitenesses of statement stand out amongst his Collaborator’s more English keyings down so that when one of his half sentences bursts into the no doubt suaver prose of the other it is as if the page comes to life and speaks.

Every collaboration is a contest of temperaments if it be at all thoroughly carried out; and this collaboration was carried out so thoroughly that, even when the book came to the proof stage, the original publishers, half way through the printing, sent the MS. back to the authors. They were still making innumerable corrections.

Originally conceived, in the attempt to convey realistically a real story of adventure recorded in a State Trial, as the thin tale of a very old man--and this before the question of collaboration arose--the book contains of its first version only the two opening sentences--and the single other sentence: “And, looking back, we see Romance!” In between lay to say the least of it almost unbelievable labours--a contest of attrition lasting over several years. For insofar as this collaboration was a contest of wills it was a very friendly one; yet it was the continual attempt on the part of the one collaborator to key up and of the other to key down. And so exhausting was the contest that in the course of the years two definite breakdowns occurred. In the first the robuster writer let the book called “The Inheritors” just go and it remains a monument as it were of silverpoint, delicacies and allusiveness. The second breakdown is recorded in the Fourth Part of “Romance,” sketches for which were written over and over--and then over--again, until the weaker brother, in absolute exhaustion, in turn let it go at that. So, to mark those breaking points, you have the silverpoint of “The Inheritors” set against the, let us say, oil-painting of this matchless Fourth Part.

“The Nature of a Crime” should have become a novel treating of the eternal subject of the undetected criminal--a theme which every writer for once or twice in his life at least contemplates in a world in which the fortunate are so very often the merely not found out. The courage of few writers carries them even beyond the contemplation; in this case the joint courages of the authors went as far as what you may read.

The passage from the Fifth Part of “Romance” printed below contains the “famous sentence” as to which Mr. Conrad writes: “We both exclaimed: ‘This is genius’.”

Joseph Conrad in Italics; F. M. Hueffer in Roman type.

_Part One: Chapter One._

_To yesterday and to-day I say my polite “vaya usted con dios.” What are these days to me?_ But that far-off day of my romance, when from between _the blue and white bales in Don Ramon’s darkened storeroom, at Kingston_, I saw the door open before the figure of _an old man with the tired, long, white face_, that day I am not likely to forget. I remember _the chilly smell of the typical West Indian store_, the indescribable _smell of damp gloom, of locos, of pimento, of olive oil, of new sugar, of new rum; the glassy double sheen of Ramon’s great spectacles, the piercing eyes in the mahogany face_, while the tap, tap, tap of a cane on the flags went on behind the inner door; _the click of the latch; the stream of light_. The door, petulantly thrust inwards, struck against some barrels. I remember the rattling of the bolts on that door, and _the tall figure_ that appeared there, _snuff-box in hand. In that land of white clothes that precise, ancient, Castilian in black was something to remember. The black cane that had made the tap, tap, tap dangled by a silken cord from the hand whose delicate blue-veined, wrinkled wrist ran back into a foam of lawn ruffles._ The other hand paused in the act of conveying a pinch of snuff to the nostrils of the _hooked nose that had, on the skin stretched tight over the bridge, the polish of old ivory; the elbow pressing the black cocked hat against the side; the legs, one bent, the other bowing a little back_--this was the attitude of Seraphina’s father.

Having imperiously thrust the door of the inner room open, he remained immovable, with no intention of entering, and called in a harsh, aged voice: “Señor Ramon! Señor Ramon!” and then twice: “Seraphina--Seraphina!” turning his head back.

_Then for the first time I saw Seraphina, looking over her father’s shoulder._ I remember her face of that day; _her eyes were grey--the grey of black, not of blue. For a moment they looked me straight in the face, reflectively, unconcerned, and then travelled to the spectacles of old Ramon._

This glance--remember I was young on that day--had been enough to set me wondering what they were thinking of me; what they could have seen of me.

“But there he is your Señor Ramon,” she said to her father, _as if she were chiding him for a petulance in calling_; “your sight is not very good, my poor little father--there he is, your Ramon.”