 CHAPTER II There were ten station men who had been left by the director, those fellows having engaged themselves to the company for six months, without having any idea of a month in particular, and only a very faint notion of time in general, had been serving the cause of progress for upwards of two years. Belonging to a tribe from a very distant part of the land of darkness and sorrow, they did not run away, naturally supposing, that as wandering strangers they would be killed by the inhabitants of the country in which they were right. They lived in straw huts on the slope of Aravin, overgrown with reedy grass, just behind the station buildings. They were not happy, regretting the festive incantations, the sorceries, the human sacrifices of their own land, where they also had parents, brothers, sisters, admired chiefs, respected magicians, loved friends, and other ties, supposed generally to be human. Besides, the rice-rations served out by the company did not agree with them, being a food unknown to their land, and to which they could not get used. Consequently they were unhealthy and miserable. Had they been of any other tribe, they would have made up their minds to die, for nothing is easier to certain savages than suicide. And so have escaped from the puzzling difficulties of existence. But belonging as they did, to a warlike tribe with filed teeth, they had more grit, and went on stupidly, living through disease and sorrow. They did very little work, and had lost their splendid physique. Carlier and Kayards doctored them assiduously, without being able to bring them back into condition again. They were mustered every morning, and told off to different tasks, grass-cutting, fence-building, tree-felling, etc., etc., which no power on earth could induce them to execute efficiently. The two whites had practically very little control over them. In the afternoon Makola came over to the big house, and found the Kayards watching three heavy columns of smoke, rising above the forests. What is that, asked Kayards. Some villages burn, answered Makola, who seemed to have regained his wits. Then he said abruptly, We have got very little ivory, bad six months trading. Do you like get a little more ivory? Yes, said Kayards eagerly. He sought of percentages, which were low. Those men who came yesterday are traders from Luanda, who have got more ivory than they can carry home. Shall I buy? I know their camp. Everybody said Kayards, who are those traders? Bad fellows, said Makola, indifferently. They fight with people, and catch women and children. They are bad men, and got guns. There is a great disturbance in the country. Do you want ivory? Yes, said Kayards. Makola said nothing for a while, then? Those workmen of ours are no good at all, he muttered, looking round. Station is very bad order, sir. The master will growl. Better get a fine lot of ivory than he say nothing. I can't help it. The men want work, said Kayards. When will you get that ivory? Very soon, said Makola, perhaps tonight. You leave it to me, and keep indoors, sir. I think you had better give some pollen vines to our men, to make a dance this evening. Enjoy themselves. Work better tomorrow. There's plenty pollen vines, gun a little sour. Makola said yes, and Makola with his own hands carried big calabashes to the door of his heart. They stood there until the evening, and Mrs. Makola looked into everyone. The men got them at sunset. When Kayards and Carlyer retired, a big bonfire was flaring before the men's hearts. They could hear their shouts and drumming. Some men from Gobila's village had joined the station hands, and the entertainment was a great success. In the middle of the night, Carlyer, waiting suddenly, heard a man shout loudly, then a shot was fired. Only one. Carlyer ran out and met Kayards on the veranda. They were both startled. As they went across the yard to call Makola, they saw shadows moving in the night. One of them cried, Don't shoot! It's me, Price. Then Makola appeared close to them. Go back, go back, please, he urged. You spoil all. There are strange men about, said Carlyer. Never mind, I know, said Makola. Then he whispered, All right, bring ivory, say nothing, I know my business. The two white men reluctantly went back to the house, but did not sleep. They heard footsteps, whispers, some groans. It seemed as if a lot of men came in, dumped heavy things on the ground, squabbled a long time, then went away. They lay on their hard beds and thought. This Makola is invaluable. In the morning Carlyer came out very sleepy, and pulled at the cord of the big bell. The station hands mustered every morning to the sound of the bell. That morning nobody came. Kayards turned out also, yawning. Across the yard they saw Makola come out of his hut, a thin basin of soapy water in his hand. Makola, a civilized nigger, was very neat in his person. He threw the sobsad skillfully over a wretched little yellow curr he had, then turning his face to the agent's house. He shouted from the distance, All the men gone last night. They heard him plainly, but in their surprise they both yelled out together, What? Then they stared at one another. We are in a proper fix now, growled Carlyer. It's incredible, muttered Kayards. I will go to the huts and see, said Carlyer, striding off. Makola coming up found Kayards standing alone. I can hardly believe it, said Kayards, tearfully. We took care of them as if they had been our children. They went with the ghost people, said Makola, after a moment of hesitation. What do I care with whom they went, the ungrateful brutes, exclaimed the other. Then with sudden suspicion and looking hard at Makola he added, What do you know about it? Makola moved his shoulders, looking down on the ground. What do I know? I think only. Will you come and look at the ivory I've got there? It's a fine lot, you never saw such. He moved towards the store. Kayards followed him mechanically, thinking about the incredible desertion of the men. On the ground before the door of the fetish lay six splendid tusks. What did you give for it? asked Kayards, after surveying the lot with satisfaction. No regular trade, said Makola. They brought the ivory and gave it to me. I told them to take what they most wanted in the station. It's a beautiful lot. No station can show such tusks. Those traders wanted Carriers badly, and our men were no good here. No trade, no entry in box, all correct. Kayards nearly burst with indignation. Why, he shouted, I believe you have sold our men for these tusks. Makola stood impassive and silent. I, I will, I, shuddered Kayards, you fiend, he yelled out. I did the best for you and the company, said Makola imperturbably. Why you shout so much? Look at this tusk. I dismiss you, I will report you, I won't look at the tusk. I forbid you to touch them, I order you to throw them into the river, you, you. You very right, Mr. Kayards. If you are so irritable in the sun, you will get fever and die, like the first chief, pronounced Makola impressively. They stood still, contemplating one another with intense eyes, as if they had been looking with effort across immense distances. Kayards shivered. Makola cut men no more than he said, but his words seemed to Kayards full of ominous menace. He turned sharply and went away to the house. Makola retired into the bosom of his family, and the tusks, left lying before the store, looked very large and valuable in the sunshine. Carlier came back on the veranda. They are all gone, hey? asked Kayards from the far end of the common room in muffled voice. You did not find anybody? Oh, yes, said Carlier. I found one of Gobila's people lying dead before the huts, shot through the body. We heard that shot last night. Kayards came out quickly. He found his companion staring grimly over the yard at the tusks, away by the store. They both sat in silence for a while. Then Kayards related his conversation with Makola. Carlier said nothing. At the midday meal they ate very little. They hardly exchanged a word that day. A great silence seemed to lie heavily over the station and press on their lips. Makola did not open the store. He spent the day playing with his children. He lay full length on a mat outside his door, and the youngsters sat on his chest and clambered all over him. It was a touching picture. Mrs. Makola was busy cooking all day, as usual. The white man made a somewhat better meal in the evening. Afterwards Carlier, smoking his pipe, strolled over to the store. He stood for a long time over the tusks, touched one or two with his foot, even tried to lift the largest one by its small end. He came back to his chief, who had not stirred from the veranda, threw himself into the chair, and said, I can see it. They were pounced upon while they slept heavily after drinking all that palm wine you've allowed Makola to give them. I put up job, see. The worst is, some of Gobila's people were there, and got carried off too, no doubt. The last drunk woke up and got shot from his sovereignty. This is a funny country. What will you do now? We can't touch it, of course, said Carlier. Of course not, ascended Carlier. Slavery is an awful thing, stammered out Carlier in an unsteady voice. Frightful, the sufferings, grunted Carlier with conviction. They believed their words. Everybody shows a respectful deference to certain sounds that he and his fellows can make. But about feelings people really know nothing. We talk with indignation or enthusiasm. We talk about oppression, cruelty, crime, devotion, self-sacrifice, virtue, and we know nothing real beyond the words. Nobody knows what suffering or sacrifice mean, except perhaps the victims of the mysterious purpose of these illusions. Next morning they saw Makola very busy, setting up in the yard the big scales used for weighing ivory. By and by Carlier said, What set forth his countrel up to, and launched out into the yard? Coyotes followed. They stood watching. Makola took no notice. When the balance was swung through, he tried to lift a tusk into the scale. It was too heavy. He looked up helplessly without a word, and for a minute they stood round that balance as mute and still as three statues. Finally Carlier said, Catch hold of the other end, Makola, you beast. And together they swung the tusk up. Coyote trembled in every limb. He muttered, I say, oh, I say. And putting his hand in his pocket, found there a dirty bit of paper and the stamp of a pencil. He turned his back on the others, as if about to do something tricky, and noted stealthily the weights which Carlier shouted out to him, with unnecessary loudness. When all was over, Makola whispered to himself, The sun's very strong here for the tusks. Carlier said to Coyote in a carol stone, I say, Chief, I might just as well give him a lift with this lot into the store. As they were going back to the house, Coyote observed with a sigh. It had to be done. And Carlier said, It's deplorable, but the men being company's men, the ivory is company's ivory. We must look after it. I will report to the director, of course, said Coyote's. Of course, let him decide, approved Carlier. At midday they made a hearty meal. Coyote sighed from time to time. Whenever they mentioned Makola's name, they always added to it an opprobious epithet. It eased their conscience. Makola gave himself a half-holiday and bathed his children in the river. No one from Gobilas villages came near the station that day. No one came the next day and the next, nor for a whole week. Gobilas people might have been dead and buried for any sign of life they gave. But they were only mourning for those they had lost by the witchcraft of white men who had brought wicked people into their country. The wicked people were gone, but fear remained. Fear always remains. A man may destroy everything within himself, love and hate and belief and even doubt. But as long as he clings to life he cannot destroy fear. The fear, supple, indestructible, and terrible, that pervades his being, that tinges his thoughts, that lurks in his heart, that watches on his lips the struggle of his last breath. In his fear the mild old Gobila offered extrahuman sacrifices to all the evil spirits that had taken possession of his white friends. His heart was heavy. Some warriors spoke about burning and killing, but the cautious old savage dissuaded them. Who could foresee the bow those mysterious creatures if irritated might bring? They should be left alone. Perhaps in times they would disappear into the earth as the first one had disappeared. His people must keep away from them, and hope for the best. Coyotes and Carlier did not disappear, but remained above on this earth, that somehow they fancied had become bigger and very empty. It was not the absolute and dumb solitude of the post that impressed them so much, as an inarticulate feeling that something from within them was gone, something that worked for their safety, and had kept the wilderness from interfering with their hearts. The images of home, the memory of people like them, of men that thought and felt as they used to sing and feel, receded into distances made indistinct by the glare of unclouded sunshine. And out of the great silence of the surrounding wilderness its very hopelessness and savagery seemed to approach them nearer, to draw them gently, to look upon them, to envelop them with a solitude irresistible, familiar and disgusting. Days lengthened into weeks, then into months. Gabila's people drummed and yelled to every new moon, as for your, but kept away from the station. Makola and Carlier tried once in a canoe to open communications, but were received with a shower of arrows, and had to fly back to the station for dear life. That attempt set the country up and down the river into an uproar that could be very distinctly heard for days. The steamer was late. At first they spoke of delay gentily, then anxiously, then gloomily. The matter was becoming serious. Stores were running short. Carlier cast his lines off the bank, but the river was low, and the fish kept out in the stream. They dared not stroll far away from the station to shoot. Moreover, there was no game in the impenetrable forest. Once Carlier shot a hippo in the river. They had no boat to secure it, and it sank. When it floated up, it drifted away, and Gabila's people secured the carcass. It was the occasion for a national holiday, but Carlier had a fit of rage over it, and talked about the necessity of exterminating all the niggers before the country could be made habitable. Coyards mooned about silently, spent hours looking at the portrait of his melee. It represented a little girl with long bleached tresses and a rather sore face. His legs were much swollen, and he could hardly walk. Carlier, undermined by fever, could not swagger any more, but kept tottering about, still with a devil-may-care hair, as became a man who remembered his crack regiment. He had become horse, sarcastic, and inclined to say unpleasant things. He called it being frank with you. They had long ago reckoned their percentages on trade, including in them that last deal of this infamous makola. They had also concluded not to say anything about it. Coyards hesitated at first, was afraid of the director. He has seen worth things done on the quiet, maintained Carlier with a horse-love. Trust him. He won't thank you if you'll blab. He is no better than you or me. Who will talk if we hold our tongues? There's nobody here. That was the root of the trouble. There was nobody there. And being left there alone with their weakness, they became daily more like a pair of accomplices than like a couple of devoted friends. They had heard nothing from home for eight months. Every evening they said, Tomorrow we shall see the steamer. But one of the company's steamers had been wrecked, and the director was busy with the other, reliving very distant and important stations on the main river. He thought that the useless station and the useless men could wait. Meantime Coyards and Carlier lived on rice boiled without salt, and cursed the company. All Africa and the day they were born. One must have lived on such diet to discover what ghastly trouble the necessity of swallowing one's food may become. There was literally nothing else in the station but rice and coffee. They drank the coffee without sugar. The last fifteen lumps Coyards had solemnly locked away in his box, together with a half-bottle of cognac, in case of sickness he explained. Carlier approved. When one is sick, he said, any little extra like that is cheering. They waited. Ranked grass began to sprout over the courtyard. The bale never rang now. Days passed, silent, exasperating, and slow. When the two men spoke, they snarled, and their silences were bitter, as if changed by the bitterness of their thoughts. One day after a lunch of boiled rice, Carlier put down his cup and tasted, and said, Long it all. Let's have a decent cup of coffee for once. Bring out that sugar, Coyards. For the sick muttered Coyards without looking up. For the sick mocked Carlier, Bosch, well, I am sick. You are no more sick than I am, and I go without that Coyards in a peaceful town. Come out with that sugar, you stingy old slave-dealer. Coyards looked up quickly. Carlier was smiling with marked insolence, and suddenly it seemed to Coyards that he had never seen that man before. Who was he? He knew nothing about him. What was he capable of? There was a surprising flash of violent emotion within him, as if in the presence of something undreamed of, dangerous and final. But he managed to pronounce his composure. That joke is in very bad taste. Don't repeat it. Joke, said Carlier, hitching himself forward on his seat. I am hungry. I am sick. I don't joke. I hate hypocrites. You are a hypocrite. You are a slave-dealer. I am a slave-dealer. There's nothing but slave-dealers in this cursed country. I mean to have sugar in my coffee today, anyhow. I forbid you to speak to me in that way, said Coyards, with a fair show of resolution. You? What? shouted Carlier, jumping up. Coyards stood up also. I'm your chief, he began, trying to master the shakiness of his voice. What yelled the other? Who's chief? There's no chief here. There's nothing here. There's nothing but you and I. Fetch the sugar, you pot-bellied ass. Hold your tongue. Go out of this room, screamed Coyards. I dismiss you, you scoundrel. Carlier swung a stool. All at once he looked dangerously in earnest. You, flabby, good for nothing civilian, take that, he howled. Coyards dropped under the table, and the stool struck the cross in the wall of the room. Then, as Carlier was trying to upset the table, Coyards in desperation made a blind rush, head low, like a cornered pig would do, and, overturning his friend, bolted along the veranda and into his room. He looked at the door, snatched his revolver, and stood panting. In less than a minute Carlier was kicking at the door furiously howling. If you don't bring out that sugar, I will shoot you at sight, like a dog. Now then, one, two, three. You won't? I will show you who's the master. Coyards thought the door would fall in, and scrambled through the square hole that served for a window in his room. There was then the whole breadth of the house between them. But the other was apparently not strong enough to break in the door, and Coyards heard him running round. Then he also began to run laboriously on his swollen legs. He ran as quickly as he could, grasping the revolver, and unable yet to understand what was happening to him. He saw in succession Macaulay's house, the store, the river, the ravine, and the low bushes, and he saw all those things again as he ran for the second time round the house. Then again they flashed past him. That morning he could not have walked a yard without a groan. And now he ran. He ran fast enough to keep out of sight of the other man. Then as weak and desperate he thought, Before I finish the next round I shall die. He heard the other man stumble heavily, then stop. He stopped also. He had the back and carlier the front of the house as before. He heard him drop into a chair cursing, and suddenly his own legs gave way, and he slid down into a sitting posture with his back to the wall. His mouth was as dry as a cinder, and his face was wet with perspiration and tears. What was it all about? He thought it must be a horrible illusion. He thought he was dreaming. He thought he was going mad. After a while he collected his senses. What did Saquarelle about? That sugar. How absurd! He would give it to him, didn't want it himself. And he began scrambling to his feet with a sudden feeling of security. But before he had fairly stood upright, a common sense reflection occurred to him, and draw him back into despair. He thought, if I give way now to that brute of a soldier, he will begin this horror again tomorrow, and the day after, every day, raise other pretensions, trample on me, torture me, make me his slave, and I will be lost, lost. The steamer may not come for days, may never come. He shook so that he had to sit down on the floor again. He shivered for lurnally. He felt he could not, would not move any more. He was completely distracted by the sudden perception, that the position was without issue, that death and life had in a moment become equally difficult and terrible. All at once he heard the other push his chair back, and he leaped to his feet with extreme facility. He listened and got confused, must run again, right or left. He heard footsteps. He darted to the left, grasping his revolver, and at the very same instant, as it seemed to him, they came into violent collision. Both shouted with surprise, allowed the explosion to place between them, a roar of red fire, thick smoke, unkind, deafened and blinded, rushed back thinking, I am hit, it's all over. He expected the other to come round, to gloat over his agony. He caught hold of an upright of the roof, all over. Then he heard a crashing fall on the other side of the house, as if somebody had tumbled headlong over a chair. Then silence. Nothing more happened. He did not die. Only his shoulder felt as if it had been badly wrenched, and he had lost his revolver. He was disarmed and helpless. He waited for his fate. The other man made no sound. It was a stratagem. He was stalking him now. Along what side? Perhaps he was taking aim this very minute. After few moments of an agony, frightful and absurd, he decided to go and meet his doom. He was prepared for every surrender. He turned the corner, steadying himself with one hand on the wall, made a few paces and nearly swooned. He had seen on the floor, protruding past the other corner, a pair of turned-up feet, a pair of white-naked feet in red slippers. He felt deadly sick and stood for a time in profound darkness. Then Makola appeared before him, saying quietly, Come along, Mr. Kayerts, he is dead. He burst into tears of gratitude, a loud, sobbing fit of crying. After a time he found himself sitting in a chair and looking at Carlier, who lay stretched on his back. Makola was kneeling over the body. Is this your revolver? asked Makola, getting up. Yes, said Kayerts. Then he added very quickly. He ran after me to shoot me. You saw. Yes, I saw, said Makola. There is only one revolver. Where is his? Don't know, whispered Kayerts in a voice that had become suddenly very faint. I will go and look for it, said the other gently. He made the round along the veranda, while Kayerts sat still and looked at the corpse. Makola came back empty-handed, stood in deep thought, then stepped quietly into the dead man's room, and came out directly with the revolver, which he held up before Kayerts. Kayerts shut his eyes. Everything was going round. He found life more terrible and difficult than death. He had shut an unarmed man. After meditating for a while, Makola said softly, pointing to the dead man who lays there, with his right eye blown out. He died of fever. Kayerts looked at him with a stony stare. Yes, repeated Makola thoughtfully, stepping over the corpse. I think he died of fever. Bury him to-moral. And he went away slowly, to see his expectant wife, leaving the two white men alone on the veranda. Night came, and Kayerts sat and moving on his chair. He sat quiet as if he had taken a dose of opium. The violence of the emotions he had passed through produced a feeling of exhausted serenity. He had plummeted in one short afternoon the depths of horror and despair, and now found repose in the conviction that life had no more secrets for him. Neither had death. He sat by the corpse thinking, thinking very actively, thinking very new thoughts. He seemed to have broken loose from himself altogether. His old thoughts, convictions, likes and dislikes, things he respected and things he abhorred, appeared in their true light at last, appeared contemptible and childish, false and ridiculous. He rebelled in his new wisdom while he sat by the man he had killed. He argued with himself about all things under heaven with that kind of wrong-headed lucidity which may be observed in some lunatics. Incidentally he reflected that the fellow dead there had been a noxious beast anyway, that men died every day in thousands, perhaps in hundreds of thousands, who could tell? And that in the number that one death could not possibly make any difference, couldn't have any importance, at least to a thinking creature. He, coyotes, was a thinking creature. He had been all his life, till that moment a believer in a lot of nonsense like the rest of mankind, who are fools, but now he thought, he knew, he was at peace, he was familiar with the highest wisdom. Then he tried to imagine himself dead, and Carlyer sitting in his chair watching him, and his attempt met with such unexpected success, that in a very few moments he became not at all sure who was dead and who was alive. This extraordinary achievement of his fancy startled him, however, and by a clever and timely effort of mind he saved himself just in time from becoming Carlyer. His heart summed and he felt hot all over at the thought of that danger. Carlyer, what a beastly thing, to compose his now disturbed nerves, and no wonder he tried to whistle a little. And suddenly he fell asleep, or thought he had slept, but at any rate there was a fog, and somebody had whistled in the fog. He stood up. The day had come, and a heavy mist had descended upon the land, the mist penetrating, enveloping, and silent, the morning mist of tropical lands, the mist that clings and kills, the mist white and deadly, immaculate and poisonous. He stood up, saw the body, and threw his arms above his head with a cry, like that of a man who, waking from a trance, finds himself immured forever in a tomb. Help, my God! A shriek inhuman, vibrating and sudden, pierced by a sharp dart the white shroud of that land of sorrow. Three short, impatient screeches hollowed, and then for a time the fog rise rolled on, and disturbed, through a formidable silence. Then many more shrieks, rapid and piercing, like the yells of some exasperated and ruthless creature, ran the air. Progress was calling to coyotes from the river, progress and civilization and all the virtues. Society was calling to its accomplished child to come, to be taken care of, to be instructed, to be judged, to be condemned. It called him to return to that rubbish heap, from which he had wandered away, so that justice could be done. Coyotes heard and understood. He stumbled out of the veranda, leaving the other man quite alone, for the first time since they had been thrown here together. He groped his way through the fog, calling in his ignorance upon the invisible heathen to undo his work. People flitted by in the mist, shouting as he ran. Steamer, steamer, they can't see. Their whistle for the station, I go ring the bell. Go down to the landing, sir, I ring. He disappeared. Coyote stood still. He looked upwards, the fog rolled low over his head. He looked round like a man who had lost his way. As he saw a dark smudge, a cross-shaped stain, upon the shifting purity of the mist. As he began to stumble towards it, the station bell rang in a tomato's peel its answer to the impatient clamour of the steamer. The managing director of the great civilising company, since we know that civilisation follows trade, landed first, and incontinentally lost sight of the steamer. The fog down by the river was exceedingly dense, above at the station, the bell rang and seizing and present. The director shouted lowly to the steamer, There is nobody down to meet us, there may be something wrong, though they are ringing, you had better come too. And he began to toil up the steep bank. The captain and the engine driver of the boat followed behind, as they scrambled up the fog thinned, and they could see their director a good way ahead. Suddenly they saw him start forward, calling to them over his shoulder, run, run to the house, I have found one of them, run, look for the other. He had found one of them, and even he, the man of varied and startling experience, was somewhat discomposed by the manner of this finding. He stood unfumbled in his pocket for a knife, while he faced the pirates, who was hanging by a leather strap from the cross. He had evidently climbed the grave, which was high and narrow, and after tying the end of the strap to the arm, had swung himself off. His toes were only a couple of inches above the ground. His arms hung stiffly down, he seemed to be standing rigidly at attention, but with one purple cheek playfully posed on the shoulder, and irreverently he was putting out a swollen tongue at his managing director. End of story. Section 12 of Tales of Unrest, first part of The Return. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Ray. Tales of Unrest by Joseph Conrad. The Return. The inner circle train from the city rushed impetuously out of a black hole and pulled up with a discordant, grinding racket in the smurged twilight of a western station. A line of doors flew open, and a lot of men stepped out headlong. They had high hats, healthy pale faces, dark overcoats, and shiny boots. They held in their gloved hands thin umbrellas and tastily folded evening papers that resembled stiff, dirty rags of greenish, pinkish, or whitish color. Alvin Hervey stepped out with the rest, a smoldering cigar between his teeth. A disregarded little woman in rusty black with both arms full of parcels ran along in distress, bolted suddenly into a third-class compartment, and the train went on. The slamming of carriage doors burst out sharp and spiteful like a fuselade. An icy draught mingled with acrid fumes swept the whole length of the platform, and made a tottering old man, wrapped up into his ears in a woollen comforter, stop short in the moving throng to cough violently over a stick. No one spared him a glance. Alvin Hervey passed through the ticket gate. Between the bare walls of a sordid staircase, men clambered rapidly. Their backs appeared alike, almost as if they had been wearing a uniform. Their indifferent faces were varied, but somehow suggested kinship, like the faces of a band of brothers who, through prudence, dignity, disgust, or foresight, would resolutely ignore each other. And their eyes, quick or slow, their eyes gazing up the dusty steps, their eyes brown, black, gray, blue, had all the same stare, concentrated and empty, satisfied and unthinking. Outside the big doorway of the street, they scattered in all directions, walking away fast from one another, with a hurried air of men fleeting from something compromising, from familiarity or confidences, from something suspected and concealed, like truth or pestilence. Alvin Hervey hesitated, standing alone in the doorway for a moment, then decided to walk home. He strode firmly. A misty rain settled like silvery dust on clothes, on mustaches, wetted the faces, varnished the flagstones, darkened the walls, dripped from umbrellas. And he moved on in the rain with careless serenity, with the tranquil ease of someone successful and disdainful, very sure of himself, a man with lots of money and friends. He was tall, well set up, good-looking and healthy, and his clear pale face had under its commonplace refinement that slight tinge of overbearing brutality which is given by the possession of only partly difficult accomplishments, by excelling in games or in the art of making money, by the easy mastery over animals and over needy men. He was going home much earlier than usual, straight from the city and without calling at his club. He considered himself well connected, well educated and intelligent, who doesn't? But his connections, education, and intelligence were strictly on a par with those of the men with whom he did business or amused himself. He had married five years ago. At the time, all his acquaintances had said he was very much in love. And he had said so himself, frankly, because it is very well understood that every man falls in love once in his life, unless his wife dies when it may be quite praiseworthy to fall in love again. The girl was healthy, tall, fair, and in his opinion was well connected, well educated, and intelligent. She was also intensely bored with her home-wear as of packed in a tight box, her individuality of which she was very conscious had no play. She strode like a Grenadier, or strong and upright like an obelisk, had a beautiful face, a candid brow, pure eyes, and not a thought of her own in her head. He surrendered quickly to all those charms, and she appeared to him so unquestionably of the right sort that he did not hesitate for a moment to declare himself in love. Under the cover of that sacred and poetical fiction he desired her amastifully, for various reasons, but principally for the satisfaction of having his own way. He was very dull and solemn about it, for no earthly reason unless to conceal his feelings, which is an eminently proper thing to do. Nobody, however, would have been shocked had he neglected that duty, for the feeling he experienced really was a longing, a longing stronger and a little more complex, no doubt, but no more reprehensible in its nature than a hungry man's appetite for his dinner. After their marriage they visit themselves, with marked success, in enlarging the circle of their acquaintance. Thirty people knew them by sight. Twenty more, with smiling demonstrations, tolerated their occasional presence within hospitable thresholds. At least fifty others became aware of their existence. They moved in their enlarged world amongst perfectly delightful men and women, who feared emotion, enthusiasm, or failure, more than fire, war, or mortal disease, who tolerated only the commonest formulas of commonest thoughts, and recognized only profitable facts. It was an extremely charming sphere, the abode of all virtues, where nothing is realized and where all joys and sorrows are cautiously toned down into pleasures and annoyances. In that serene region, then, where noboe's sentiments are cultivated in sufficient profusion to conceal the pitiless materialism of thoughts and aspirations, Alvin Hurvey and his wife spent five years of prudent bliss, unclouded by any doubt as to the moral propriety of their existence. She, to give her individuality fair play, took up all manner of philanthropic work, and became a member of various rescuing and reforming societies, patronized or presided over by ladies of title. He took an active interest in politics, and having met quite by chance a literary man, who nevertheless was related to an earl, he was induced to finance a moribund society paper. It was a semi-political and wholly scandalous publication, redeemed by excessive dullness, and as it was utterly faithless, as it contained no new thought, as it never by any chance had a flash of wit, shatire, or indignation in its pages, he judged it respectable enough at first sight. Afterwards when it paid, he promptly perceived that upon the whole it was a virtuous undertaking. It paid for the way of his ambition, and he enjoyed also the special kind of importance he derived from this connection with what he imagined to be literature. This connection still further enlarged their world. Men who wrote, or drew prettily for the public, came at times through their house, and as editor came very often. He thought him rather an ass, because he had such big front teeth, the proper thing is to have small, even teeth, and wore his hair a trifle longer than most men do. However, some dukes wear their hair long, and the fellow indubitably knew his business. The worst was that his gravity, though perfectly pretentious, could not be trusted. He sat, elegant, and bulky in the drawing-room, the head of his stick hovering in front of his big teeth, and talked for hours with a thick-lipped smile. He said nothing that could be considered objectionable, and not quite the thing, talked in an unusual manner, not obviously irritatingly. His forehead was too lofty, unusually so, and under it there was a straight nose, lost between the hairless cheeks, that in a smooth curve ran into a chin shaped like the end of a snowshoe. And in this face that resembled the face of a fat and fiendishly-knowing baby, there glittered a pair of clever, peering, unbelieving black eyes. He wrote verses too, rather an ass, but the band of men who trailed at the skirts of his monumental frockcoat seemed to perceive wonderful things in what he said. Alan Hervey put it down to affectation. Those artist's chaps upon the hall were so affected. Still, all this was highly proper, very useful to him, and his wife seemed to like it, as if she also had derived some distinct and secret advantage from this intellectual connection. She received a mixed and decherous gas with a kind of tall, ponderous grace, peculiarly her own in which awakened the mind of intimidated strangers in the congress and improper reminisces of an elephant, a giraffe, a gazelle, of a gothic tower, of an overgrown angel. Her Thursdays were becoming famous in their world, and their world grew steadily, annexing street after street. It included also somebody's gardens, a crescent, a couple of squares. Thus Alan Hervey and his wife for five prosperous years lived by the side of one another. In time they came to know each other sufficiently well for all the practical purposes of such an existence, but they were no more capable of real intimacy than two animals feeding at the same manger under the same roof in a luxurious stable. His longing was appeased and became a habit, and she had her desire, the desire to get away from under the paternal roof, to assert her individuality, to move in her own set so much smarter than the parental one, to have a home of her own and her own share of the world's respect, envy, and applause. They understood each other warily, tacitly, like a pair of cautious conspirators in a profitable plot, because they were both unable to look at a fact, a sentiment, a principle, or a belief otherwise than in the light of their own dignity, of their own glorification, of their own advantage. They skimmed over the surface of life hand in hand in a pure and frosty atmosphere, like two skillful skaters cutting figures on thick ice for the admiration of the beholders and disdainfully ignoring the hidden stream, the stream restless and dark, the stream of life profound and unfrozen. Ellen Hervey turned twice to the left, once to the right, walked along two sides of a square in the middle of which groups of tame-looking trees stood in respectable captivity behind iron railings and rang to store. A parlour-maid opened, a fad of his wife's, this to have only women servants. That girl, while she took his hat and overcoat, said something which made him look at his watch. It was five o'clock and his wife not at home. There was nothing unusual in that. He said, no, no tea, and went upstairs. He ascended without footfalls, brass rods glimmered all up the red carpet. On the first floor landing a marble woman, decently covered from neck to instep with stone draperies, advanced a row of lifeless toes to the edge of the pedestal, and thrust out blindly a rigid white arm holding a cluster of lights. He had artistic tastes at home. Heavy curtains caught back, half-concealed dark corners. On the rich, stamped paper of the walls hung sketches, watercolours and gravings. His tastes were distinctly artistic. Old church towers peeped above green masses of foliage. The hills were purple, the sands yellow, the seas sunny, the skies blue. A young lady sprawled with dreamy eyes in a moored boat, in company of a lunch basket, a champagne bottle, and an emerald man in a blazer. Bare-legged boys flirted sweetly with ragged maidens, slept on stone steps, gambled with dogs. A pathetically lean girl flattened against a blank wall, turned up expiring eyes and tended a flower for sale, while nearby the large photographs of some famous and mutilated bar relief seemed to represent a massacre turned into stone. He looked, of course, at nothing. Ascended another flight of stairs and went straight into the dressing room. A bronze dragon nailed by the tail to a bracket writhed away from the wall in calm convolutions and held, between the conventional fury of its jaws, a crude gas flame that resembled a butterfly. The room was empty, of course. But as he stepped in, it became filled all at once with a stir of many people. Because the strips of glass on the doors of waterubs and his wife's large pure glass reflected him from head to foot, and multiplied his image into a crowd of gentlemanly and slavish imitators who were dressed exactly like himself, had the same restrained and rare gestures, who moved when he moved, stood still with him in an obsequious immobility, and had just such appearances of life and feeling as he thought it dignified and safe for any man to manifest. And like real people who are slaves of common thoughts that are not even their own, they affected a shadowy independence by the superficial variety of their movements. They moved together with him, but they either advanced to meet him or walked away from him. They appeared, disappeared. They seemed to dodge behind walnut furniture, to be seen again, far within the polished panes, stepping about distinct and unreal in the convincing illusion of a room. And like the men he respected, they could be trusted to do nothing individual, original, or startling, nothing unforeseen, and nothing improper. He moved for a time aimlessly in that good company, humming a popular but refined tune, and thinking vaguely of a business letter from abroad, which had to be answered on the morrow with cautious prevarication. Then, as he walked towards a wardrobe, he saw appearing at his back in the high mirror, a corner of his wife's dressing table, and amongst the glitter of silver-mounted objects on it, the square white patch of an envelope. It was such an unusual thing to be seen there, that he spun around almost before he realized his surprise, and all the sham men about him pivoted on their heels, all appeared surprised, and all moved rapidly towards envelopes on dressing tables. He recognized his wife's handwriting, and saw that the envelope was addressed to himself. He muttered, however odd, and felt annoyed. Apart from an odd action being essentially an indecent thing in itself, the fact of his wife indulging in it made it doubly offensive, that she would write to him at all when she knew he would be home for dinner was perfectly ridiculous, but that she would leave it like this in evidence for chance discovery struck him as so outrageous that, thinking of it, he experienced suddenly a staggering sense of insecurity and absurd and bizarre flash of an ocean that the house had moved a litter under his feet. He tore the envelope open, glanced at the letter, and sat down in a chair nearby. He held the paper before his eyes, and looked at half a dozen lines scrawled on the page. While he was stunned by a noise meaningless and violent like the clash of gongs or the beating of drums, a great aimless abroar that, in a manner, prevented him from hearing himself think and made his mind an absolute blank. This absurd and distracting tumult seemed to ooze out of the written words to issue from between his fingers that trembled, holding the paper. And suddenly he dropped the letter as though it had been something hot or venomous or filthy, and rushing to the window with the unreflecting precipitation of a man anxious to raise an alarm of fire or murder, he threw it up and put his head out. A chill gust of wind, wandering through the damp and suity obscurity over the waist of roofs and chimney-pots, touched his face with a clammy flick. He saw an illimitable darkness, in which stood a black jumble of walls, and between them the many rows of gas lights stretched far away in long lines like strung-up beads of fire. A sinister loom as of a hidden conflagration lit up faintly from below the mist, falling upon a billowy and motionless sea of tiles and bricks. At the rattle of the opened window the world seemed to leap out of the night and confront him. While floating up to his ears there came a sound vast and faint, the deep mutter of something immense and alive. It penetrated him with a feeling of dismay and he gasped silently. From the cap stand in the square came distinct horse voices and a jeering laugh which sounded ominously harsh and cruel. It sounded threatening. He drew his head in, as if before an aimed blow and flung the window-ground quickly. He made a few steps, stumbled against a chair, and with a great effort pulled himself together to lay hold of a certain thought that was whizzing about loose in his head. He got it at last, after more exertion than he expected. He was flushed and puffed a little, as though he had been catching it with his hands, but his mental hold and it was weak, so weak that he judged it necessary to repeat it out loud, to hear it spoken firmly in order to ensure a perfect measure of possession. But he was unwilling to hear his own voice, to hear any sound whatever, owing to a vague belief shaping itself slowly within him that solitude and silence are the greatest felicities of mankind. The next moment adorned upon him that they are perfectly unattainable, that faces must be seen, words spoken, thoughts heard, all the words, all the thoughts he said very distinctly and looking at the carpet. She's gone. End of first part of the return. Recording by Ray. Section 13 of Tales of Unrest, second part of the return. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Ray. Tales of Unrest by Joseph Conrad. Second part of the return. It was terrible. Not the fact, but the words. The words charged with the shadowy might of a meaning that seemed to possess the tremendous power to call fate down upon the earth. Like those strange and appalling words that sometimes are heard in sleep. They vibrated around him in a metallic atmosphere, in a space that had the hardness of iron and the resonance of a bell of bronze. Looking down between the toes of his boots, he seemed to listen thoughtfully to the receding wave of sound, to the wave spreading out in a widening circle, embracing streets, roofs, church steeples, fields, and traveling away, widening endlessly, far, very far, where he could not hear, where he could not imagine anything, where, would that ass? He said again, without stirring in the least. And there was nothing but humiliation, nothing else. He could derive no moral solace from any aspect of the situation which radiated pain only on every side. Pain. What kind of pain? It occurred to him that he ought to be heartbroken, but in an exceedingly short moment, he perceived that his suffering was nothing of so trifling and dignified a kind. It was altogether a more serious matter, and partook rather of the nature of those subtle and cruel feelings which are awakened by a kick or a horse whipping. He felt very sick, physically sick, as though he had bitten through something nauseous. Life, that to a well-ordered mind should be a matter of congratulation, appeared to him for a second or so perfectly intolerable. He picked up the paper at his feet and sat down with a wish to think it out, to understand why his wife, his wife, should leave him, should throw away respect, comfort, peace, decency, position, throw away everything for nothing. He set himself to think out the hidden logic of her action, a mental undertaking fit for the leisure hours of a madhouse, though he couldn't see it. And he thought of his wife in every relation except the only fundamental one. He thought of her as a well-read girl, as a wife, as a cultured person, as the mistress of a house, as a lady. But he never for a moment thought of her simply as a woman. Then a fresh wave, a raging wave of humiliation swept through his mind and left nothing there but a personal sense of undeserved abasement. Why should he be mixed up with such a horrid exposure? It annihilated all the advantage of his well-ordered past, by a truth effective and unjust like a calamity, and the past was wasted. Its failure was disclosed, a distinct failure on his part, to see, to guard, to understand. It could not be denied. It could not be explained away, hustled out of sight. He could not sit on it and look solemn. Now if she had only died, if she had only died, he was driven to envy such a respectable bereavement and one so perfectly free from any taint of misfortune that even his best friend or his best enemy would not have felt the slightest thrill of exultation. No one would have cared. He sought comfort in clinging to the contemplation of the only fact of life that the resolute efforts of mankind had never failed to disguise in the clatter and glamour of phrases, and nothing lends itself more to lies than death if she had only died. Certain words would have been said to him in a sad tone, and he with proper fortitude would have made appropriate answers. There were presidents of such an occasion, and no one would have cared if she had only died. The promises, the terrors, the hopes of eternity are the concern of the corrupt dead, but the obvious sweetness of life belongs to living healthy men. And life was his concern, that sane and gratifying existence untroubled by too much love or by too much regret. She had interfered with it, she had to face it, and suddenly it occurred to him he must have been mad to marry. It was too much in the nature of giving yourself away, of wearing it for a moment your heart on your sleeve. But everyone married was all mankind mad. In the shock of that startling thought he looked up and saw to the left, to the right. In front, men sitting far off in chairs and looking at him with wild eyes, emissaries of a distracted mankind intruding to spy upon his pain and his humiliation. It was not to be borne. He rose quickly, and the others jumped up too, on all sides. He stood still in the middle of the room as if discouraged by their vigilance. No escape. He felt something akin to despair. Everybody must know. The servants must know tonight. He ground his teeth, and he had never noticed, never guessed anything. Everyone will know. He thought, the woman's a monster, but everybody will think me a fool. And standing still in the midst of severe walnut wood furniture, he felt such a tempest of anguish within him that he seemed to see himself rolling on the carpet, beating his head against the wall. He was disgusted with himself, with a loathsome rush of emotion breaking through all the reserves that guarded his manhood. Something unknown, withering and poisonous, had entered his life, passed near him, touched him, and he was deteriorating. He was appalled. What was it? She was gone. Why? His head was ready to burst with the endeavour to understand her act and his subtle horror of it. Everything was changed. Why? Only a woman gone, after all, and yet he had a vision, a vision quick and distinct as a dream, the vision of everything he had thought indestructible and safe in the world crashing down about him, like solid walls do before the fierce breath of a hurricane. He stared, shaking in every limb, while he felt the destructive breath, the mysterious breath, the breath of passion, stir the profound piece of the house. He looked round in fear. Yes, crime may be forgiven. Uncalculating sacrifice, blind trust, burning faith, other follies may be turned to account. Suffering, death itself, may with a grin or a frown be explained away, but passion in the unpardonable and secret infamy of our hearts, a thing to curse, to hide and to deny, a shameless and forlorn thing that tramples upon the smiling promises that tears off the placid mask that strips the body of life. And it had come to him. It had laid its unclean hand upon the spotless draperies of his existence, and he had to face it alone with all the world looking on. All the world. And he thought that even the bare suspicion of such an adversary within his house carried with it a taint and a condemnation. He put both his hands out as if to ward off the reproach of a defying truth. And instantly, the appalled conclave of unreal men, standing about mutely beyond the clear luster of mirrors, made at him the same gesture of rejection and horror. He glanced vainly here and there, like a man looking in desperation for a weapon or for a hiding place, and understood at last that he was disarmed and concerned by the enemy that, without any squeamishness, would strike so as to lay open his heart. He could get help nowhere, or even take counsel with himself, because in the sudden shock of a desertion, the sentiments which he knew that in fidelity to his bringing up, to his prejudices and his surroundings, he ought to experience, were so mixed up with the novelty of real feelings, of fundamental feelings that know nothing of creed, class, or education that he was unable to distinguish clearly between what is and what ought to be, between the inexcusable truth and the valid pretenses. And he knew instinctively that truth would be of no use to him. Some kind of concealment seemed a necessity, because one cannot explain. Of course not. Who would listen? One had simply to be without stain and without reproach to keep one's place in the forefront of life. He said to himself, I must get over it the best I can, and began to walk up and down the room. What next? What ought to be done? He thought, I will travel. No, I won't. I shall face it out. And after that resolve, he was greatly cheered by the reflection that it would be a mute and easy part to play, for no one would be likely to converse with him about the abominable conduct of that woman. He argued to himself that decent people, and he knew no others, did not care to talk about such indelicate affairs. She had gone off with that unhealthy fat ass of a journalist. Why? He had been all a husband ought to be. He had given her a good position. She shared his prospects. He had treated her invariably with great consideration. He reviewed his conduct with a kind of dismal pride. It had been irreproachable. Then why? For love? Profanation, there could be no love there, a shameful impulse of passion. Yes, passion, his own wife, good God. And the indelicate aspect of his domestic misfortune struck him with such shame that next moment he caught himself in the act of pondering absurdly over the notion whether it would not be more dignified for him to induce a general belief that he had been in the habit of beating his wife. Some fellows do, and anything would be better than that filthy fact. For it was clear he had lived with the root of it for five years, and it was too shameful. Anything, anything, brutality. But he gave it up directly and began to think of the divorce court. It did not present itself to him, notwithstanding his respectful law and usage as a proper refuge for dignified grief. It appeared rather as an unclean and sinister cavern where men and women are hailed by adverse fate to writhe ridiculously in the presence of uncompromising truth. It should not be allowed. That woman, five years, married five years, and never to see anything. Not to the very last day, not till she coolly went off. And he pictured to himself all the people he knew engaged in speculating as to whether all the time he had been blind, foolish, or infatuated. What a woman, blind. Not at all. Could a clean-minded man imagine such depravity? Evidently not. He drew a free breath. That was the attitude to take. It was dignified enough. It gave him the advantage, and he could not help perceiving that it was moral. He yearned unaffectedly to see morality in his person, triumphant before the world. As to her, she would be forgotten. Let her be forgotten, buried in oblivion, lost. No one would elude. Refined people and every man and woman he knew could be so described had, of course, a horror of such topics. Had they? Oh, yes. No one would elude to her. In his hearing. He stamped his foot, tore the letter across, then again and again. The thought of sympathizing friends excited in him a fury of mistrust. He flung down the small bits of paper. They settled, flattering at his feet, and looked very white on the dark carpet, like a scattered handful of snowflakes. This fit of hot anger was succeeded by a sudden sadness, by the darkening passage of a thought that ran over the scorched surface of his heart, like upon a barren plain, and after a fiercer assault of sun rays, the melancholy and cooling shadow of a cloud. He realized that he had had a shock, not a violent or rending blow, that can be seen, resisted, returned, forgotten, but a thrust, insidious and penetrating, that had stirred all those feelings, concealed and cruel, which the arts of the devil, the fears of mankind, God's infinite passion, perhaps, keep chained deep down in the inscrutable twilight of our breasts. A dark curtain seemed to rise before him, and for less than a second he looked upon the mysterious universe of moral suffering, as a landscape is seen complete and vast and vivid and with a flash of lightning, so he could see disclosed in the moment all the immensity of pain that can be contained in one short moment of human thought. Then the curtain fell again, but his rapid vision left an Alvin Hervey's mind a trail of invincible sadness, a sense of loss and bitter solitude, as though he had been robbed and exiled. For a moment he seized to be a member of society with position, a career and a name attached to all of this, like a descriptive label of some complicated compound. He was a simple human being, removed from the delightful world of crescents and squares. He stood alone, naked and afraid, like the first man on the first day of evil. There are in life events, contacts, glimpses that seem brutally to bring all the past to a close. There is a shock and a crash, as of a gate flung to behind one by the perfidious hand of fate. Go and seek another paradise, fool or sage. There is a moment of dumb dismay and the wanderings must begin again. The painful explaining a way of facts, the feverish raking up of illusions, the cultivation of a fresh crop of lies in the sweat of one's brow, to sustain life, to make it supportable, to make it fair, so as to hand intact to another generation of blind wanderers the charming legend of a heartless country of a promised land or flowers and blessings. He came to himself with a slight start and became aware of an oppressive crushing desolation. It was only a feeling, it is true, but it produced on him a physical effect as though his chest had been squeezed in a vice. He perceived himself so extremely forlorn and lamentable and was moved so deeply by the oppressive sorrow that another turn of the screw he felt would bring tears out of his eyes. He was deteriorating. Five years of life in common had appeased his longing. Yes, long time ago. The first five months did that, but there was the habit, the habit of her person, of her smile, of her gestures, of her voice, of her silence. She had a pure brow and good hair. How utterly wretched all this was, good hair and the eyes remarkably fine. He was surprised by the number of details that intruded upon his unwilling memory. He could not help remembering her footsteps, the rustle of her dress, her way of holding her head, her decisive manner of saying, Alvin, the quiver of her nostrils when she was annoyed. All that had been so much his property, so intimately and specially his. He raged in a mournful, silent way as he took stock of his losses. He was like a man counting the cost of an unlucky speculation, irritated, depressed, exasperated with himself and with others, with the fortunate, with the indifferent, with the callous. Yet the wrong done him appeared so cruel that he would perhaps have dropped a tear over that spoilation if it had not been for his conviction that men do not weep. Foreigners do. They also kill sometimes in such circumstances. And to his horror he felt himself driven to regret almost that the usages of a society ready to forgive the shooting of a burglar forbade him under the circumstances even as much as a thought of murder. Nevertheless, he clenched his fists and set his teeth hard. And he was afraid at the same time. He was afraid with that penetrating, faltering fear that seems in the very middle of a beat to turn one's heart into a handful of dust. The contamination of her crime spread out, tainted the universe, tainted himself, woke up all the dormant infamies of the world, caused a ghastly kind of clairvoyance in which he could see the towns and fields of the earth, its sacred places, its temples and its houses, people by monsters, by monsters of duplicity, lust, and murder. She was a monster. He himself was thinking monstrous thoughts. And yet he was like other people. How many men and women at this very moment were plunged in abominations, meditated crimes. It was frightful to think of. He remembered all the streets, the well-to-do streets he had passed on his way home, all the innumerable houses with closed doors and curtain windows. Each seemed now an abode of anguish and folly. And his thought as of appalled stood still, recalling with dismay the decorous and frightful silence that was like a conspiracy, the grim, impenetrable silence of miles of wars concealing passions, misery, thoughts of crime. Surely he was not the only man. His was not the only house. And yet no one knew, no one guessed. But he knew. He knew with unerring certitude that could not be deceived by the correct silence of walls, of closed doors, of curtain windows. He was beside himself with despairing agitation, like a man informed of a deadly secret, the secret of a calamity threatening the safety of mankind, the sacredness, the peace of life. End of second part of The Return. Recording by Ray. Section 14 of Tales of Unrest. Third part of The Return. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Ray. Tales of Unrest by Joseph Conrad. Third part of The Return. He caught sight of himself in one of the looking glasses. It was a relief. The anguish of his feeling had been so powerful that he more than half expected to see some distorted wild face there, and he was pleasantly surprised to see nothing of the kind. His aspect at any rate would let no one into the secret of his pain. He examined himself with attention. His trousers were turned up, and his boots a little muddy, but he looked very much as usual. Only his hair was slightly ruffled, and that disorder somehow was so suggestive of trouble that he went quickly to the table and began to use the brushes in an anxious desire to obliterate the compromising trace that only vestige of his emotion. He brushed with care, watching the effect of his smoothing, and another face, slightly pale and more tense than was perhaps desirable, peered back at him from the toilet glass. He laid the brushes down and was not satisfied. He took them up again and brushed, mechanically, forgot himself in that occupation. The tumult of his thoughts ended in a sluggish flow of reflection, such as after the outburst of a volcano, the almost imperceptible progress of a stream of lava creeping languidly over a convulsed land and pitilessly obliterating any landmark left by the shock of the earthquake. It is a destructive, but by comparison it is a peaceful phenomenon. Alvin Hervey was almost soothed by the deliberate pace of his thoughts. His moral landmarks were going one by one, consumed in the fire of his experience, buried in hot mud and ashes. He was cooling on the surface, but there was enough heat left somewhere to make him slap the brushes on the table and turning away, saying a fierce whisper, I wish him joy. Damn the woman. He felt himself utterly corrupted by her wickedness and the most significant symptom of his moral downfall was the bitter, accurate satisfaction with which he recognized it. He deliberately swore in his thoughts. He meditated smears. He shaped in profound silence words of cynical unbelief and his most cherished convictions stood revealed finally as the narrow prejudices of fools. A crowd of shapeless, unclean thoughts crossed his mind in a stealthy rush like a band of veiled malefactors hastening to a crime. He put his hands deep into his pockets. He heard a faint ringing somewhere and muttered to himself, I am not the only one, not the only one. There was another ring, front door. His heart leaped up into his throat and forthwith descended as low as his boots. A call? Who? Why? He wanted to rush out onto the landing and shout to the servant, not at home, gone away abroad. Any excuse, he could not face the visitor, not this evening, no, tomorrow. Before he could break out of the numbness that enveloped him like a sheet of lead, he heard far below as if in the entrails of the earth a door closed heavily. The house vibrated to it more than a clap of thunder. He stood still, wishing himself invisible. The room was very chilly. He did not think he would ever feel like that. But people must be met, they must be faced, talked to, smiled at. He heard another door, much nearer, the door of the drawing room, being opened and flung to again. He imagined for a moment he would faint, how absurd that kind of thing had begun through. A voice spoke. He could not catch the words. Then the voice spoke again, and footsteps were heard on the first floor landing. Hang it all, was he to hear that voice since those footsteps, whenever anyone spoke or moved? He thought, this is like being haunted. I suppose it will last for a week or so, at least, till I forget, forget, forget. Someone was coming up the second flight of stairs. Servant, he listened. Then suddenly, as though an incredible, frightful revelation had been shouted to him from a distance, he bellowed out in the empty room. What, what? In such a fiendish tone as to astonish himself. The footsteps stopped outside the door. He stood open-mouthed, maddened and still, as if in the midst of a catastrophe. The door handled rattled lightly. It seemed to him that the walls were coming apart, that the furniture swayed at him, the ceiling slanted clearly for a moment. A tall wardrobe tried to topple over. He caught hold of something, and it was the back of a chair, so he had reeled against a chair. Oh, confound it! He gripped hard. The flaming butterfly, poised between the jaws of the bronze dragon, radiated a glare, a glare that seemed to leap up all at once into a crude, blinding fierceness, and made it difficult for him to distinguish plainly the figure of his wife, standing upright with her back to the closed door. He looked at her and could not detect her breathing. The harsh and violent light was beating on her, and he was amazed to see her preserve so well the composure of her upright attitude, in that scorching brilliance which, to his eyes, enveloped her like a hot and consuming mist. He would not have been surprised if she had vanished in it as suddenly as she had appeared. He stared and listened. He looked for some sound, but the silence around him was absolute, as though he had in a moment grown completely deaf as well as dim-eyed. Then his hearing returned, preternaturally sharp. He heard the patter of a rain-shower on the window-panes behind the lowered blinds, and below, far below, in the artificial abyss of the square, the deadened roll of wheels and the splashy trotting of a horse. He heard a groan also, very distinct, in the room. It was to his ear. He thought with alarm, I must have made that noise myself. And at the same instant the woman left the door, stepped firmly across the floor before him, and sat down in a chair. He knew that step. There was no doubt about it. She had come back, and he very nearly said aloud, Of course! Such was his sudden and masterful perception of the indestructible character of her being. Nothing could destroy her, and nothing but his own destruction could keep her away. She was the incarnation of all the short moments which every man spares out of his life for dreams, for precious dreams that concrete the most cherished, the most profitable of his illusions. He peered at her with inward trepidation. She was mysterious, significant, full of obscure meaning like a symbol. He peered, bending forward as though he had been discovering about her things he had never seen before. Unconsciously he made a step towards her, then another. He saw her arm make an ample, decided movement, and he stopped. She had lifted her veil. It was like the lifting of a visor. The spell was broken. He experienced a shock, as though he had been called out of a trance by the sudden noise of an explosion. It was even more startling and more distinct. It was an infinitely more intimate change, for he had the sensation of having come into this room only that very moment, of having returned from very far. He was made aware that some essential part of himself had in a flash returned into his body, returned finally from a fierce and lamentable region from the dwelling place of unveiled hearts. He woke up to an amazing infinity of contempt, to a droll bitterness of wonder, to a disenjointed conviction of safety. He had a glimpse of the irresistible force, and he also saw the barrenness of his convictions, of her convictions. It seemed to him that he could never make a mistake as long as he lived. It was morally impossible to go wrong. He was not elated by that certitude. He was dimly uneasy about its price. There was a chill as of death, in this triumph of sound principles, in this victory snatched under the very shadow of disaster. The last trace of his previous state of mind vanished, as the instantaneous and elusive trail of a bursting meteor vanishes on the profound blackness of the sky. It was the faint flicker of a painful thought, gone as soon as perceived, that nothing but a presence, after all, had the power to recall him to himself. He stared at her. She sat with her hands on her lap, looking down, and he noticed that her boots were dirty, her skirts wet and splashed, as though she had driven back there by a blind fear through a waste of mud. He was indignant, amazed, and shocked, but in a natural, healthy way now, so that he could control those unprofitable sentiments by the dictates of cautious self-restraint. The light in the room had no unusual brilliance now. It was a good light, in which he could easily observe the expression of her face. It was that of dull fatigue, and the silence that surrounded them was the normal silence of any quiet house, hardly disturbed by the faint noises of a respectable quarter of the town. He was very cool, and it was quite cooly that he thought how much better it would be if neither of them ever spoke again. She sat with closed lips, with an air of lassitude in the stony forgetfulness of her pose, but after a moment she lifted her drooping eyelids and met his tense and inquisitive stare by a look that had all the formless eloquence of a cry. It penetrated, it stirred without informing, it was the very essence of anguish stripped of words that can be smiled at, argued away, shouted down, disdained. It was anguish, naked, and unashamed. The bare pain of existence let loose upon the world in the fleeting unreserve of a look that had in it an immensity of fatigue, the scornful sincerity, the black impudence of an extorted confession. Alan Hervey was seized with wonder as though he had seen something inconceivable, and some obscure part of his being was ready to exclaim with him. I would never have believed it. But an instantaneous revulsion of wounded susceptibilities checked the unfinished thought. He felt full of rankrous indignation against the woman who could look like this at one. This look probed him, it tampered with him. It was dangerous to one as would be a hint of unbelief whispered by a priest in the august decorum of a temple, and at the same time it was impure, it was disturbing, like a cynical consolation muttered in the dark, tainting the sorrow, corroding the thought, poisoning the heart. He wanted to ask her furiously, Who do you take me for? How dare you look at me like this? He felt himself helpless before the hidden meaning of that look. He resented it with pain and futile violence as an injury so secret that it could never, never be redressed. His wish was to crush her by a single sentence he was stainless. Opinion was on his side, morality, men and gods were on his side, law, conscience, all the world. She had nothing but that look. And he could only say, How long do you intend to stay here? Her eyes did not waver, her lips remained closed, and for any effect of his words he might have spoken to a dead woman, only that this one breathed quickly. He was profoundly disappointed by what he had said. It was a great deception, something in the nature of treason. He had deceived himself. It should have been altogether different, other words, another sensation. Before his eyes, so fixed that at times they saw nothing, she sat apparently as unconscious as though she had been alone, sending that look of brazen confession straight at him, with an air of staring into empty space. He said significantly, Must I go then? And he knew he meant nothing of what he implied. One of her hands on her lap moved slightly as though his words had fallen there, and she had thrown them off on the floor. But her silence encouraged him. Possibly it meant remorse, perhaps fear. Was she thunderstruck by his attitude? Her eyelids dropped. He seemed to understand ever so much, everything. Very well. But she must be made to suffer. It was due to him. He understood everything, yet he judged it indispensable to say with an obvious effectation of civility. I don't understand, being so good as to... She stood up. For a second he believed she intended to go away, and it was as though someone had jerked a string attached to his heart. It hurt. He remained open-mouthed and silent. But she made an irresolute step towards him and instinctively he moved aside. They stood before one another, and the fragments of the torn letter lay between them, at their feet, like an insurmountable obstacle, like a sign of eternal separation. Around them three other couples stood still and face to face, as if waiting for a signal to begin some action, a struggle, a dispute, or a dance. She said, Don't, Alvin. There was something that resembled a warning in the pain of her tone. He narrowed his eyes as of trying to pierce her with his gaze. Her voice touched him. He had aspirations after magnanimity, generosity, superiority, interrupted, however, by flashes of indignation and anxiety, frightful anxiety to know how far she had gone. She looked down at the torn paper. Then she looked up, and their eyes met again, remained fastened together, like an unbreakable bond, like a clasp of eternal complicity and the decorous silence. The pervading quietude of the house, which enveloped this meeting of their glances, became for a moment inexpressibly vile, for he was afraid she would say too much and make magnanimity impossible, while behind the profound mournfulness of her face there was a regret, a regret of things done, the regret of delay, the thought that if she had only turned back a week sooner, a day sooner, only an hour sooner, they were afraid to hear again the sound of their voices. They did not know what they might say, perhaps something that could not be recalled, and words are more terrible than facts. But the tricky fatality that lurks in obscure impulses spoke through Alan Herve's lips suddenly, and he heard his own voice, with the excited and skeptical curiosity with which one listens to actors' voices speaking on stage in the strain of a poignant situation. If you have forgotten anything, of course I— her eyes blazed at him for an instant, her lips trembled, and then she also became the mouthpiece of the mysterious force forever hovering near us, of that perverse inspiration wandering capricious and uncontrollable, like a gust of wind. What is the good of this, Alvin? You know why I came back. You know that I could not. He interrupted her with irritation. Then what's this? He asked, pointing downwards at the torn letter. That's a mistake, she said hurriedly in a muffled voice. He asked, what is this? This answer amazed him. He remained speechless, staring at her. He had half a mind to burst into a laugh. It ended in a smile as involuntary as a grimace of pain. A mistake. He began slowly, and then found himself unable to say another word. Yes. It was honest. She said very low, as a speaking to the memory of a feeling in a remote past. He exploded. Curse your honesty! Is there any honesty in all this? When did you begin to be honest? Why are you here? What are you now, still honest? He walked at her, raging as a blind. During these three quick strides he lost touch of the material world and was world-interminably through a kind of empty universe made up of nothing but fury and anguish, till he came suddenly upon her face very close to his. He stopped short, and all at once seemed to remember something heard ages ago. You don't know the meaning of the word, he shouted. She did not flinch. He perceived with fear that everything around him was still. She did not move a hair's breath. His own body did not stir. An imperturbable calm enveloped their two motionless figures, the house, the town, or the world, and the trifling tempest of his feelings. The violence of the short tumult within him had been such as could well have shattered all creation, and yet nothing was changed. He faced his wife in the familiar room in his own house. It had not fallen. And right and left all the innumerable dwellings standing shoulder to shoulder had resisted the shock of his passion, had presented unmoved to the loneliness of his trouble, the grim silence of walls, the impenetrable and polished discretion of closed doors and curtained windows. Immobility and silence pressed on him, assailed him, like two accomplices of the immovable and mute woman before his eyes. He was suddenly vanquished. He was shown his impotence. He was soothed by the breath of a corrupt resignation, coming to him through the subtle irony of the surrounding peace. End of third part of the return. Recording by Ray