As she did so the curtain went up, and showed a divided scene. On the
right, the stage represented the office of a matrimonial agent; on the
left, the office of an agent who obtained "reliable evidence for
divorce." But Conrad was not attending. The two careers were followed
by the same person under different names--his introductions in the
first capacity led to business in the second. He explained this soon
after he bustled on, and the audience laughed. But Conrad did not
hear. The lady still held her handkerchief, a scrap of lawn and lace
that was scented with chypre--and he had been heaved to Rouen and was
seventeen years old there, by the side of The Woman We Never Forget.
For in the life of every man, whether he will own it or not, there is
at least one unmentioned woman whom he never permanently forgets while
he keeps his faculties. She may not be the best, or the prettiest, or
even the nicest woman he has loved--not her virtues, but his madness,
graved so deep--and he will take the impression out sometimes when he
has lost his figure and his hair, and when a boy who is storing
experiences on his own account calls him "the governor." No, her
qualities have as little to do with the matter as the date on her birth
certificate. A woman isn't her age, or herself; she is what she makes
us feel--like art, and nature, like a musical phrase, or a line of
words, like everything of suggestion and mystery. The woman her
husband hates and her lover adores, is an equally vivid personality to
both men. That to herself she is vividly a third character makes no
difference to the view of either of them.
To say that on the few occasions Conrad had smelt chypre during the
last twenty years it had never failed to "remind" him of Mrs.
Adaile--to say this would be to imply that he yielded himself leisurely
to reverie, and it would sound truer than the truth. But the fact is
that there was nothing voluntary at all in what occurred. It was a
physical swirl that the smell always caused him, and it left him
vibrant for a few seconds with the very craving, the very sickness of
the time when he had worshipped her. He often thought of her, even
strummed a song she used to sing, but in such moments as these he was
less conscious of thinking than of feeling. Normally he looked back at
her, with the reflections of a man; when he smelt chypre he was near
her again, with the tremors of a boy.
Life is less consistent than fiction, even than tolerably bad fiction.
"What perfume do you use?" wrote Maupassant to a correspondent whom he
had not seen, but who had made him curious. Her answer--if it hadn't
been "none"--would have meant a thousand times more to him than it
would mean to the man in the crowd, but it might very easily have
misled him too. In fiction, Conrad was dimly aware, Mrs. Adaile and
chypre would never have been associated; it wasn't faint enough, fresh
enough, it wasn't matutinal enough for Mrs. Adaile; to one who had not
seen her it could never be evocative. Yet--perhaps it had been a
passing fancy, even an experiment--in some days that were immortal to
him chypre had been her scent.
The piece became funny by-and-by, and he began to listen to it, but
though the sensations wakened by the lady's handkerchief subsided, the
memories did no more than doze. Between the acts, and when he left the
theatre, they beset him with full force. As he strolled to the club,
he surrendered to them. He had recalled Mrs. Adaile so often, so often
re-enacted scenes with her, and mocked himself that he had not played
them differently, that the episode seemed to him by no means so remote
as it was; it seemed much closer than many episodes that had happened
since. It was with a shock in the reading-room that he counted the
years. Was it possible? Good heavens! how time flew. It indicates
the fervour of his mood to say that when he made this reflection it had
to him a sense of novelty.
Then she must be--Again "Good heavens!" That girl!--for she had been
but a girl, although she was married and he had felt himself a child
beside her. He remembered the afternoon when she came to the hotel and
he told his people that "the most beautiful woman he had ever seen" had
just arrived. Well, she figured still as one of the most beautiful
women he had ever seen. But was that twenty years ago?
What a babe he had been! And he used to believe himself sapient for
his age.... Well, perhaps in some things! How stupid he must have
seemed to her for a boy of seventeen! Yet she used to confide in him
on the terrace. He could not have seemed so stupid to her after all?
... Innocent.
That night on the terrace--always the terrace, it appeared!--when she
let him hold her hand, and bent her face to him, saying, "A mosquito
has bitten me on the cheek--look." As if it were yesterday he could
remember how his heart pounded, and the fatuous words he muttered in
his tight throat. He wished forcefully now that he had had the
courage! What atom of difference would it make to-day? Yet he did
wish that he had had the courage. O imbecile! ... But how exquisite it
all was; if it could only come over again!
There were no more than two men besides himself in the room; one of
them was reading, and the other slept. The silence was absolute until
a page sped in to bawl the name of a member who wasn't there, and sped
forth to bawl for him somewhere else. The man who had slept said
"damn" very softly, and turned to sleep on the other side.
Conrad lay back in the deep chair, and let fancy reign. There were
many gaps, but there were moments that made the calendar unreal. He
remembered intimately things that she had said to him--oddly enough,
more of the things that he had said to her. He stared at his
whisky-and-potash, and mentally relived the story. And this is the
story he relived:--