Джозеф Конрад - Suspense

Without departing from his immobility he broke silence by a “Signore” pronounced in a distinct but restrained voice. Cosmo was glad to learn the story before the moment came for them to part. But the theory of luck which Attilio tacked on to the facts did not seem to him convincing. He remarked that if Attilio had not come for him at all, he would have been now far on the way in his mysterious affairs, whereas now he was only in another trap.

For all answer the other murmured: “ Si , but I wonder if it would have been the same. Signore, isn’t it strange that we should have been drawn together from the first moment you put foot in Genoa?”

“It is,” said Cosmo, with an emphasis that encouraged the other to continue, but with a less assured voice.

“Some people of old believed that stars have something to do with meetings and partings by their disposition, and that some, if not all men, have each a star allotted to them.”

“Perhaps,” said Cosmo in the same subdued voice. “But I believe there is a man greater than you or I who believes he has a star of his own.”

“Napoleon, perhaps?”

“So I have heard,” said Cosmo, and thought: “Here he is, whenever two men meet he is a third, one can’t get rid of him.”

“I wonder where it is,” said Attilio, as if to himself, looking up at the sky. “Or yours, or mine,” he added in a still lower tone. “They must be pretty close together.”

Cosmo humoured the superstitious strain absently, for he felt a secret sympathy for that man. “Yes, it looks as if yours and mine had been fated to draw together.”

“No, I mean all three together.”

“Do you? Then you must know more than I do. Though, indeed, as a matter of fact he is not very far from us where we sit. But don’t you think, my friend, that there are men, and women, too, whose stars mark them for loneliness no man can approach?”

“You mean because they are great?”

“Because they are incomparable,” said Cosmo after a short pause, in which Attilio seemed to ponder.—“I like what you said,” Attilio was heard at last. “Their stars may be lonely. Look how still they are. But men are more like ships that come suddenly upon each other without a warning. And yet they, too, are guided by the stars. I can’t get over the wonder of our meeting to–night.”

“If you hadn’t been so long in saying good–bye, we wouldn’t have met,” said Cosmo, looking at the two men dozing on the thwarts, the whisperers of the tower. They were not at all like what he had imagined them to be.

Attilio gazed at his Englishman for a time closely. He seemed to see a smile on Cosmo’s lips. Wonder at his omniscience prevented him from making a reply. He preferred not to ask, and yet he was incapable of forming a guess, for there are certain kinds of obviousness that escape speculation.

“You may be right,” he said. “It’s the first time in my life that I found it hard to say good–bye. I begin to believe,” he went on murmuring, “that there are people it would be better for one not to know. There are women … ”

“Yes,” said Cosmo very low, and as if unconscious of what he was saying. “I have seen your faces very close together.”

The other made a slight movement away from Cosmo, and then bent towards him. “You have seen?” he said slowly, and stopped short. He was thinking of something that had happened only two hours before. “Oh, well,” he said with composure, “you know everything, you see everything that happens. Do you know what will happen to us two?”

“It’s very likely that when we part, we will never see each other again,” Cosmo said, resting his elbows on his knees, and taking his head between his hands. He did not look like a man preparing to go ashore.

There were no material difficulties absolutely to prevent him from landing. The foot of the tower with the narrow strip of ground which a boat could approach was not sixty yards off, and all this was in the shadow of its own reflection, the high side of the breakwater, the bulk of the tower, making the glassy water dark in that corner of the shore. And besides, the water in which the boat floated was so shallow that Cosmo could have got to land by wading from where the boat lay, without wetting himself much above the knees, should Attilio refuse to come out from under the shelter of the rock. But probably Attilio would not have objected. The difficulty was not there.

Attilio must have been thinking on the same subject, as became evident when he asked Cosmo whether those sbirri knew where he lived. After some reflection Cosmo said that he was quite certain they knew nothing about it. The sbirri had put no questions to him. They had not, he said, displayed any particular curiosity about who he was. “But why do you ask?”

“Don’t you know?” said Attilio, with only half–affected surprise. “There might have been half a dozen of them waiting for you in the neighbourhood on the chance of your returning, and you have no other place to go to.”

“No, I haven’t,” said Cosmo, in a tone as though he regretted that circumstance. He thought, however, that there might have been some of them out between the port and the town, and he knew only one way, and that not very well, he added.

As a matter of fact, that danger was altogether imaginary, because Barbone, who certainly was in the pay of the police for work of that sort, was not imaginative enough to do things without orders, and after sending his prisoner off, left the rest of the gendarmes and went home to bed, while his young acolyte went about his own affairs. The other two sbirri were being medically attended to, one of them especially being very nearly half–killed by an unlucky blow on the temple. All the other sbirro could say in a feeble voice was that there were four in the boat, that they were attacked by an inexplicable murderous gang, and that he imagined that the other two, the prisoner and the boatman, were now dead and very likely at the bottom of the harbour. The brigadier of the gendarmerie could not get any more out of him, and knowing absolutely nothing of the affair, thought it would be time to make his report to the superior authorities in the morning. All he did was to go round to the places where the boats were chained, which were under his particular charge, and count the boats. Not one was missing. His responsibility was not engaged.

Thus there was nothing between Cosmo and Cantelucci’s inn except his own distaste. There was a strange tameness in that proceeding, a lack of finality, something almost degrading. He imagined himself slinking like a criminal at the back of the beastly guard–house, starting at shadows, creeping under the colonnade, getting lost in those dreadful deep lanes between palaces, with the constant dread of having suddenly the paws of those vile fellows laid on him, and being dragged to some police post with an absurd tale on his lips, and without a hat on his head—and what for? Simply to get back to that abominable bedroom. However, he would have to go through with it.

“Pity you don’t know the town,” Attilio’s cautious voice was heard again, “or else I could tell you of a place where you could spend the remainder of the night, and send word to your servant to–morrow. But you could not find it by yourself. And that’s a pity. I assure your Excellency that she is a real good woman. To have a secret place is not such a bad thing. One never knows what one may need, and she is a creature to be trusted. She has an Italian heart, and she is a giardiniera , too. What more could I tell you?”

Cosmo thought to himself vaguely that the girl he had seen in Cantelucci’s kitchen did not look like a woman gardener, though, of course, if Attilio had a love–affair it would be naturally amongst people of that sort. But it occurred to him that perhaps it was some other woman Attilio was talking about. He made no movement. Attilio’s murmurs took on a tone of resignation. “Your luck, signore, will depart with you, and perhaps ours will follow after.” Cosmo protested against that unreasonable assumption, which was, of course, an absurdity, but nevertheless touched him in one of those sensitive spots which are like a défaut d’armure in the battle–harness of various conceits which one wears against one’s kind. He considered himself luckless in a sudden overwhelming conviction of it, in the manner of a man who had crossed the path of a radiating influence, or who had awakened a sleeping and destructive power which would now pursue him to the end of his life. He was young, farouche , mistrustful and austere, not like a stoic, but in the more human way like a man who has been born fastidious. In a sense, altogether unworldly. Attilio emitted an audible sigh.