The Inheritors

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  THE INHERITORS

  _An Extravagant Story_

  By

  JOSEPH CONRAD & FORD M. HUEFFER

  _"Sardanapalus builded seven cities in a day. Let us eat, drink and sleep, for to-morrow we die."_

  MCCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.

  _New York_

  MCMI

  _London, William Heinemann._ _1901, by_ MCCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.

  _The Trow Printing Company New York_

  To BORYS & CHRISTINA

  THE INHERITORS

  CHAPTER ONE

  "Ideas," she said. "Oh, as for ideas--"

  "Well?" I hazarded, "as for ideas--?"

  We went through the old gateway and I cast a glance over my shoulder.The noon sun was shining over the masonry, over the little saints'effigies, over the little fretted canopies, the grime and the whitestreaks of bird-dropping.

  "There," I said, pointing toward it, "doesn't that suggest something toyou?"

  She made a motion with her head--half negative, half contemptuous.

  "But," I stuttered, "the associations--the ideas--the historicalideas--"

  She said nothing.

  "You Americans," I began, but her smile stopped me. It was as if shewere amused at the utterances of an old lady shocked by the habits ofthe daughters of the day. It was the smile of a person who is confidentof superseding one fatally.

  In conversations of any length one of the parties assumes thesuperiority--superiority of rank, intellectual or social. In thisconversation she, if she did not attain to tacitly acknowledgedtemperamental superiority, seemed at least to claim it, to have no doubtas to its ultimate according. I was unused to this. I was a talker,proud of my conversational powers.

  I had looked at her before; now I cast a sideways, critical glance ather. I came out of my moodiness to wonder what type this was. She hadgood hair, good eyes, and some charm. Yes. And something besides--asomething--a something that was not an attribute of her beauty. Themodelling of her face was so perfect and so delicate as to produce aneffect of transparency, yet there was no suggestion of frailness; herglance had an extraordinary strength of life. Her hair was fair andgleaming, her cheeks coloured as if a warm light had fallen on them fromsomewhere. She was familiar till it occurred to you that she wasstrange.

  "Which way are you going?" she asked.

  "I am going to walk to Dover," I answered.

  "And I may come with you?"

  I looked at her--intent on divining her in that one glance. It was ofcourse impossible. "There will be time for analysis," I thought.

  "The roads are free to all," I said. "You are not an American?"

  She shook her head. No. She was not an Australian either, she came fromnone of the British colonies.

  "You are not English," I affirmed. "You speak too well." I was piqued.She did not answer. She smiled again and I grew angry. In the cathedralshe had smiled at the verger's commendation of particularly abominablerestorations, and that smile had drawn me toward her, had emboldened meto offer deferential and condemnatory remarks as to the plaster-of-Parismouldings. You know how one addresses a young lady who is obviouslycapable of taking care of herself. That was how I had come across her.She had smiled at the gabble of the cathedral guide as he showed theobsessed troop, of which we had formed units, the place of martyrdom ofBlessed Thomas, and her smile had had just that quality of superseder'scontempt. It had pleased me then; but, now that she smiled thus pastme--it was not quite at me--in the crooked highways of the town, I wasirritated. After all, I was somebody; I was not a cathedral verger. Ihad a fancy for myself in those days--a fancy that solitude and broodinghad crystallised into a habit of mind. I was a writer with high--withthe highest--ideals. I had withdrawn myself from the world, livedisolated, hidden in the countryside, lived as hermits do, on the hope ofone day doing something--of putting greatness on paper. She suddenlyfathomed my thoughts: "You write," she affirmed. I asked how she knew,wondered what she had read of mine--there was so little.

  "Are you a popular author?" she asked.

  "Alas, no!" I answered. "You must know that."

  "You would like to be?"

  "We should all of us like," I answered; "though it is true some of usprotest that we aim for higher things."

  "I see," she said, musingly. As far as I could tell she was coming tosome decision. With an instinctive dislike to any such proceeding asregarded myself, I tried to cut across her unknown thoughts.

  "But, really--" I said, "I am quite a commonplace topic. Let us talkabout yourself. Where do you come from?"

  It occurred to me again that I was intensely unacquainted with her type.Here was the same smile--as far as I could see, exactly the same smile.There are fine shades in smiles as in laughs, as in tones of voice. Iseemed unable to hold my tongue.

  "Where do you come from?" I asked. "You must belong to one of the newnations. You are a foreigner, I'll swear, because you have such a finecontempt for us. You irritate me so that you might almost be a Prussian.But it is obvious that you are of a new nation that is beginning to finditself."

  "Oh, we are to inherit the earth, if that is what you mean," she said.

  "The phrase is comprehensive," I said. I was determined not to givemyself away. "Where in the world do you come from?" I repeated. Thequestion, I was quite conscious, would have sufficed, but in the hope,I suppose, of establishing my intellectual superiority, I continued:

  "You know, fair play's a jewel. Now I'm quite willing to give youinformation as to myself. I have already told you the essentials--youought to tell me something. It would only be fair play."

  "Why should there be any fair play?" she asked.

  "What have you to say against that?" I said. "Do you not number it amongyour national characteristics?"

  "You really wish to know where I come from?"

  I expressed light-hearted acquiescence.

  "Listen," she said, and uttered some sounds. I felt a kind of unholyemotion. It had come like a sudden, suddenly hushed, intense gust ofwind through a breathless day. "What--what!" I cried.

  "I said I inhabit the Fourth Dimension."

  I recovered my equanimity with the thought that I had been visited bysome stroke of an obscure and unimportant physical kind.

  "I think we must have been climbing the hill too fast for me," I said,"I have not been very well. I missed what you said." I was certainlyout of breath.

  "I said I inhabit the Fourth Dimension," she repeated with admirablegravity.

  "Oh, come," I expostulated, "this is playing it rather low down. Youwalk a convalescent out of breath and then propound riddles to him."

  I was recovering my breath, and, with it, my inclination to expand.Instead, I looked at her. I was beginning to understand. It was obviousenough that she was a foreigner in a strange land, in a land thatbrought out her national characteristics. She must be of some race,perhaps Semitic, perhaps Sclav--of some incomprehensible race. I hadnever seen a Circassian, and there used to be a tradition thatCircassian women were beautiful, were fair-skinned, and so on. What wasrepelling in her was accounted for by this difference in national pointof view. One is, after all, not so very remote from the horse. What onedoes not understand one shies at--finds sinister, in fact. And shestruck me as sinister.

  "You won't tell me who you are?" I said.

  "I have done so," she answered.

  "If you expect me to believe that you inhabit a mathematicalmonstrosity, you are mistaken. You are, really."

  She turned round and pointed at the city.

  "Look!" she said.

  We had climbed the western hill. Below our feet, beneath a sky that thewind had swept clean of clouds, was the valley; a broad bowl, shallow,filled with the purple of smoke-wreaths. And above the mass of red roofsthere soared the golden stonework of the cathedral tower. It was avision, the last word of a great art. I looked at her. I was moved, andI knew that the glory of it must have moved her.

  She was smiling. "Look!" she repeated. I looked.

  There was the purple and the red, and the golden tower, the vision, thelast word. She said something--uttered some sound.

  What had happened? I don't know. It all looked contemptible. One seemedto see something beyond, something vaster--vaster than cathedrals,vaster than the conception of the gods to whom cathedrals were raised.The tower reeled out of the perpendicular. One saw beyond it, notroofs, or smoke, or hills, but an unrealised, an unrealisable infinityof space.

  It was merely momentary. The tower filled its place again and I lookedat her.

  "What the devil," I said, hysterically--"what the devil do you playthese tricks upon me for?"

  "You see," she answered, "the rudiments of the sense are there."

  "You must excuse me if I fail to understand," I said, grasping afterfragments of dropped dignity. "I am subject to fits of giddiness." Ifelt a need for covering a species of nakedness. "Pardon my swearing," Iadded; a proof of recovered equanimity.

  We resumed the road in silence. I was physically and mentally shaken;and I tried to deceive myself as to the cause. After some time I said:

  "You insist then in preserving your--your incognito."

  "Oh, I make no mystery of myself," she answered.

  "You have told me that you come from the Fourth Dimension," I remarked,ironically.

  "I come from the Fourth Dimension," she said, patiently. She had theair of one in a position of difficulty; of one aware of it and ready tob
rave it. She had the listlessness of an enlightened person who has toexplain, over and over again, to stupid children some rudimentary pointof the multiplication table.

  She seemed to divine my thoughts, to be aware of their very wording. Sheeven said "yes" at the opening of her next speech.

  "Yes," she said. "It is as if I were to try to explain the new ideas ofany age to a person of the age that has gone before." She paused,seeking a concrete illustration that would touch me. "As if I wereexplaining to Dr. Johnson the methods and the ultimate vogue of thecockney school of poetry."

  "I understand," I said, "that you wish me to consider myself asrelatively a Choctaw. But what I do not understand is; what bearing thathas upon--upon the Fourth Dimension, I think you said?"

  "I will explain," she replied.

  "But you must explain as if you were explaining to a Choctaw," I said,pleasantly, "you must be concise and convincing."

  She answered: "I will."

  She made a long speech of it; I condense. I can't remember her exactwords--there were so many; but she spoke like a book. There wassomething exquisitely piquant in her choice of words, in herexpressionless voice. I seemed to be listening to a phonograph recitinga technical work. There was a touch of the incongruous, of the mad, thatappealed to me--the commonplace rolling-down landscape, the straight,white, undulating road that, from the tops of rises, one saw running formiles and miles, straight, straight, and so white. Filtering downthrough the great blue of the sky came the thrilling of innumerableskylarks. And I was listening to a parody of a scientific work recitedby a phonograph.

  I heard the nature of the Fourth Dimension--heard that it was aninhabited plane--invisible to our eyes, but omnipresent; heard that Ihad seen it when Bell Harry had reeled before my eyes. I heard theDimensionists described: a race clear-sighted, eminently practical,incredible; with no ideals, prejudices, or remorse; with no feeling forart and no reverence for life; free from any ethical tradition; callousto pain, weakness, suffering and death, as if they had been invulnerableand immortal. She did not say that they were immortal, however. "Youwould--you will--hate us," she concluded. And I seemed only then to cometo myself. The power of her imagination was so great that I fanciedmyself face to face with the truth. I supposed she had been amusingherself; that she should have tried to frighten me was inadmissible. Idon't pretend that I was completely at my ease, but I said, amiably:"You certainly have succeeded in making these beings hateful."

  "I have made nothing," she said with a faint smile, and went on amusingherself. She would explain origins, now.

  "Your"--she used the word as signifying, I suppose, the inhabitants ofthe country, or the populations of the earth--"your ancestors were mine,but long ago you were crowded out of the Dimension as we are to-day, youoverran the earth as we shall do to-morrow. But you contracted diseases,as we shall contract them,--beliefs, traditions; fears; ideas of pity... of love. You grew luxurious in the worship of your ideals, andsorrowful; you solaced yourselves with creeds, with arts--you haveforgotten!"

  She spoke with calm conviction; with an overwhelming and dispassionateassurance. She was stating facts; not professing a faith. We approacheda little roadside inn. On a bench before the door a dun-clad countryfellow was asleep, his head on the table.

  "Put your fingers in your ears," my companion commanded.

  I humoured her.

  I saw her lips move. The countryman started, shuddered, and by a clumsy,convulsive motion of his arms, upset his quart. He rubbed his eyes.Before he had voiced his emotions we had passed on.

  "I have seen a horse-coper do as much for a stallion," I commented. "Iknow there are words that have certain effects. But you shouldn't playpranks like the low-comedy devil in Faustus."

  "It isn't good form, I suppose?" she sneered.

  "It's a matter of feeling," I said, hotly, "the poor fellow has lost hisbeer."

  "What's that to me?" she commented, with the air of one affording aconcrete illustration.

  "It's a good deal to him," I answered.

  "But what to me?"

  I said nothing. She ceased her exposition immediately afterward, growingsilent as suddenly as she had become discoursive. It was rather as ifshe had learnt a speech by heart and had come to the end of it. I wasquite at a loss as to what she was driving at. There was a newness, astrangeness about her; sometimes she struck me as mad, sometimes asfrightfully sane. We had a meal somewhere--a meal that broke the currentof her speech--and then, in the late afternoon, took a by-road andwandered in secluded valleys. I had been ill; trouble of the nerves,brooding, the monotony of life in the shadow of unsuccess. I had anerrand in this part of the world and had been approaching it deviously,seeking the normal in its quiet hollows, trying to get back to my oldself. I did not wish to think of how I should get through the year--ofthe thousand little things that matter. So I talked and she--shelistened very well.

  But topics exhaust themselves and, at the last, I myself brought thetalk round to the Fourth Dimension. We were sauntering along theforgotten valley that lies between Hardves and Stelling Minnis; we hadbeen silent for several minutes. For me, at least, the silence waspregnant with the undefinable emotions that, at times, run in currentsbetween man and woman. The sun was getting low and it was shadowy inthose shrouded hollows. I laughed at some thought, I forget what, andthen began to badger her with questions. I tried to exhaust thepossibilities of the Dimensionist idea, made grotesque suggestions. Isaid: "And when a great many of you have been crowded out of theDimension and invaded the earth you will do so and so--" somethingpreposterous and ironical. She coldly dissented, and at once the ironyappeared as gross as the jocularity of a commercial traveller. Sometimesshe signified: "Yes, that is what we shall do;" signified it withoutspeaking--by some gesture perhaps, I hardly know what. There wassomething impressive--something almost regal--in this manner of hers; itwas rather frightening in those lonely places, which were so forgotten,so gray, so closed in. There was something of the past world about thehanging woods, the little veils of unmoving mist--as if time did notexist in those furrows of the great world; and one was so absolutelyalone; anything might have happened. I grew weary of the sound of mytongue. But when I wanted to cease, I found she had on me the effect ofsome incredible stimulant.

  We came to the end of the valley where the road begins to climb thesouthern hill, out into the open air. I managed to maintain an uneasysilence. From her grimly dispassionate reiterations I had attained to aclear idea, even to a visualisation, of her fantastic conception--allegory,madness, or whatever it was. She certainly forced it home. TheDimensionists were to come in swarms, to materialise, to devour likelocusts, to be all the more irresistible because indistinguishable. Theywere to come like snow in the night: in the morning one would look out andfind the world white; they were to come as the gray hairs come, to sap thestrength of us as the years sap the strength of the muscles. As to methods,we should be treated as we ourselves treat the inferior races. There wouldbe no fighting, no killing; we--our whole social system--would break as abeam snaps, because we were worm-eaten with altruism and ethics. We, at ourworst, had a certain limit, a certain stage where we exclaimed: "No, thisis playing it too low down," because we had scruples that acted likehandicapping weights. She uttered, I think, only two sentences ofconnected words: "We shall race with you and we shall not be weighted,"and, "We shall merely sink you lower by our weight." All the rest wentlike this:

  "But then," I would say ... "we shall not be able to trust anyone.Anyone may be one of you...." She would answer: "Anyone." She prophesieda reign of terror for us. As one passed one's neighbour in the streetone would cast sudden, piercing glances at him.

  I was silent. The birds were singing the sun down. It was very darkamong the branches, and from minute to minute the colours of the worlddeepened and grew sombre.

  "But--" I said. A feeling of unrest was creeping over me. "But why doyou tell me all this?" I asked. "Do you think I will enlist with you?"

  "You will have to in the end," she said, "and I do not wish to waste mystrength. If you had to work unwittingly you would resist and resist andresist. I should have to waste my power on you. As it is, you willresist only at first, then you will begin to understand. You will seehow we will bring a man down--a man, you understand, with a great name,standing for probity and honour. You will see the nets drawing closerand closer, and you will begin to understand. Then you will ceaseresisting, that is all."

  I was silent. A June nightingale began to sing, a trifle hoarsely. Weseemed to be waiting for some signal. The things of the night came andwent, rustled through the grass, rustled through the leafage. At last Icould not even see the white gleam of her face....

  I stretched out my hand and it touched hers. I seized it without aninstant of hesitation. "How could I resist you?" I said, and heard myown whisper with a kind of amazement at its emotion. I raised her hand.It was very cold and she seemed to have no thought of resistance; butbefore it touched my lips something like a panic of prudence hadovercome me. I did not know what it would lead to--and I remembered thatI did not even know who she was. From the beginning she had struck meas sinister and now, in the obscurity, her silence and her coldnessseemed to be a passive threatening of unknown entanglement. I let herhand fall.

  "We must be getting on," I said.

  The road was shrouded and overhung by branches. There was a kind oftranslucent light, enough to see her face, but I kept my eyes on theground. I was vexed. Now that it was past the episode appeared to be alost opportunity. We were to part in a moment, and her rare mental giftsand her unfamiliar, but very vivid, beauty made the idea of partingintensely disagreeable. She had filled me with a curiosity that she haddone nothing whatever to satisfy, and with a fascination that was verynearly a fear. We mounted
the hill and came out on a stretch of softcommon sward. Then the sound of our footsteps ceased and the world grewmore silent than ever. There were little enclosed fields all round us.The moon threw a wan light, and gleaming mist hung in the ragged hedges.Broad, soft roads ran away into space on every side.

  "And now ..." I asked, at last, "shall we ever meet again?" My voicecame huskily, as if I had not spoken for years and years.

  "Oh, very often," she answered.

  "Very often?" I repeated. I hardly knew whether I was pleased ordismayed. Through the gate-gap in a hedge, I caught a glimmer of a whitehouse front. It seemed to belong to another world; to another order ofthings.

  "Ah ... here is Callan's," I said. "This is where I was going...."

  "I know," she answered; "we part here."

  "To meet again?" I asked.

  "Oh ... to meet again; why, yes, to meet again."