THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES OF JOSEPH CONRAD. Джозеф Конрад
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through his teeth, "if your Excellency deigns to favour me with any more confidential information I don't know what I will do. It's enough to make one break one's sword over one's knee and fling the pieces..."
"What government do you imagine yourself to be serving?" interrupted the minister sharply. After a short pause the crestfallen voice of General D'Hubert answered:
"The government of France."
"That's paying your conscience off with mere words, general. The truth is that you are serving a government of returned exiles, of men who have been without country for twenty years. Of men also who have just got over a very bad and humiliating fright.... Have no illusions on that score."
The Duke of Otranto ceased. He had relieved himself, and had attained his object of stripping some self-respect off that man who had inconveniently discovered him posturing in a gold-embroidered court costume before a mirror. But they were a hot-headed lot in the army, and it occurred to him that it would be inconvenient if a well-disposed general officer, received by him on the recommendation of one of the princes, were to go and do something rashly scandalous directly after a private interview with the minister. In a changed voice he put a question to the point:
"Your relation—this Feraud?"
"No. No relation at all."
"Intimate friend?"
"Intimate... yes. There is between us an intimate connection of a nature which makes it a point of honour with me to try..."
The minister rang a bell without waiting for the end of the phrase. When the servant had gone, after bringing in a pair of heavy silver candelabra for the writing desk, the Duke of Otranto stood up, his breast glistening all over with gold in the strong light, and taking a piece of paper out of a drawer held it in his hand ostentatiously while he said with persuasive gentleness:
"You must not talk of breaking your sword across your knee, general. Perhaps you would never get another. The emperor shall not return this time.... Diable d'homme! There was just a moment here in Paris, soon after Waterloo, when he frightened me. It looked as though he were going to begin again. Luckily one never does begin again really. You must not think of breaking your sword, general."
General D'Hubert, his eyes fixed on the ground, made with his hand a hopeless gesture of renunciation. The Minister of Police turned his eyes away from him and began to scan deliberately the paper he had been holding up all the time.
"There are only twenty general officers to be brought before the Special Commission. Twenty. A round number. And let's see, Feraud. Ah, he's there! Gabriel Florian. Parfaitement. That's your man. Well, there will be only nineteen examples made now."
General D'Hubert stood up feeling as though he had gone through an infectious illness.
"I must beg your Excellency to keep my interference a profound secret. I attach the greatest importance to his never knowing..."
"Who is going to inform him I should like to know," said Fouché, raising his eyes curiously to General D'Hubert's white face. "Take one of these pens and run it through the name yourself. This is the only list in existence. If you are careful to take up enough ink no one will be able to tell even what was the name thus struck out. But, par example, I am not responsible for what Clarke will do with him. If he persist in being rabid he will be ordered by the Minster of War to reside in some provincial town under the supervision of the police."
A few days later General D'Hubert was saying to his sister after the first greetings had been got over:
"Ah, my dear Léonie! It seemed to me I couldn't get away from Paris quick enough."
"Effect of love," she suggested with a malicious smile.
"And horror," added General D'Hubert with profound seriousness. "I have nearly died there of... of nausea."
His face was contracted with disgust. And as his sister looked at him attentively he continued:
"I have had to see Fouché. I have had an audience. I have been in his cabinet. There remains with one, after the misfortune of having to breathe the air of the same room with that man, a sense of diminished dignity, the uneasy feeling of being not so clean after all as one hoped one was.... But you can't understand."
She nodded quickly several times. She understood very well on the contrary. She knew her brother thoroughly and liked him as he was. Moreover, the scorn and loathing of mankind were the lot of the Jacobin Fouché, who, exploiting for his own advantage every weakness, every virtue, every generous illusion of mankind, made dupes of his whole generation and died obscurely as Duke of Otranto.
"My dear Armand," she said compassionately, "what could you want from that man?"
"Nothing less than a life," answered General D'Hubert. "And I've got it. It had to be done. But I feel yet as if I could never forgive the necessity to the man I had to save."
General Feraud, totally unable as is the case with most men to comprehend what was happening to him, received the Minister of War's order to proceed at once to a small town of Central France with feelings whose natural expression consisted in a fierce rolling of the eye and savage grinding of the teeth. But he went. The bewilderment and awe at the passing away of the state of war—the only condition of society he had ever known—the prospect of a world at peace frightened him. He went away to his little town firmly persuaded that this could not last. There he was informed of his retirement from the army, and that his pension (calculated on the scale of a colonel's half-pay) was made dependent on the circumspection of his conduct and on the good reports of the police. No longer in the army! He felt suddenly a stranger to the earth like a disembodied spirit. It was impossible to exist. But at first he reacted from sheer incredulity. This could not be. It could not last. The heavens would fall presently. He called upon thunder, earthquakes, natural cataclysms. But nothing happened. The leaden weight of an irremediable idleness descended upon General Feraud, who, having no resources within himself, sank into a state of awe-inspiring hebetude. He haunted the streets of the little town gazing before him with lack-lustre eyes, disregarding the hats raised on his passage; and the people, nudging each other as he went by, said: "That's poor General Feraud. His heart is broken. Behold how he loved the emperor!"
The other living wreckage of Napoleonic tempest to be found in that quiet nook of France clustered round him infinitely respectful of that sorrow. He himself imagined his soul to be crushed by grief. He experienced quickly succeeding impulses to weep, to howl, to bite his fists till blood came, to lie for days on his bed with his head thrust under the pillow; but they arose from sheer ennui, from the anguish of an immense, indescribable, inconceivable boredom. Only his mental inability to grasp the hopeless nature of his case as a whole saved him from suicide. He never even thought of it once. He thought of nothing; but his appetite abandoned him, and the difficulty of expressing the overwhelming horror of his feelings (the most furious swearing could do no justice to it) induced gradually a habit of silence:—a sort of death to a Southern temperament.
Great therefore was the emotion amongst the anciens militaires frequenting a certain little café full of flies when one stuffy afternoon "that poor General Feraud" let out suddenly a volley of formidable curses.
He had been sitting quietly in his own privileged corner looking through the Paris gazettes with about as much interest as a condemned man on the eve of execution could be expected to show in the news of the day. A cluster of martial, bronzed faces, including one lacking an eye and another lacking the tip of a nose frost-bitten in Russia, surrounded him anxiously.
"What's the matter, general?"
General Feraud sat erect, holding the newspaper at arm's length in order to make out the small print better. He was reading very low to himself over again fragments of the intelligence which had caused what may be called his resurrection.
"We are informed... till now on sick leave... is to be called to the command of the 5th Cavalry Brigade in..."
He dropped the paper stonily, mumbled once more... "Called to the command"... and suddenly gave his forehead a mighty slap.
"I had almost