Joseph Conrad - The Point Of Honor

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General D'Hubert shrugged his shoulders without anger at this ferocious
prejudice. Rejected by his old friends and mistrusting profoundly the
advances of royalist society, the young and handsome general (he was
barely forty) adopted a manner of punctilious and cold courtesy which
at the merest shadow of an intended slight passed easily into harsh
haughtiness. Thus prepared, General D'Hubert went about his affairs in
Paris feeling inwardly very happy with the peculiar uplifting happiness
of a man very much in love. The charming girl looked out by his sister
had come upon the scene and had conquered him in the thorough manner in
which a young girl, by merely existing in his sight, can make a man of
forty her own. They were going to be married as soon as General D'Hubert
had obtained his official nomination to a promised command.

One afternoon, sitting on the _terrasse_ of the Cafe Tortoni, General
D'Hubert learned from the conversation of two strangers occupying
a table near his own that General Feraud, included in the batch of
superior officers arrested after the second return of the king, was in
danger of passing before the Special Commission. Living all his spare
moments, as is frequently the case with expectant lovers a day
in advance of reality, as it were, and in a state of bestarred
hallucination, it required nothing less than the name of his perpetual
antagonist pronounced in a loud voice to call the youngest of Napoleon's
generals away from the mental contemplation of his betrothed. He looked
round. The strangers wore civilian clothes. Lean and weather-beaten,
lolling back in their chairs, they looked at people with moody and
defiant abstraction from under their hats pulled low over their eyes. It
was not difficult to recognise them for two of the compulsorily retired
officers of the Old Guard. As from bravado or carelessness they chose to
speak in loud tones, General D'Hubert, who saw no reason why he should
change his seat, heard every word. They did not seem to be the personal
friends of General Feraud. His name came up with some others; and
hearing it repeated General D'Hubert's tender anticipations of a
domestic future adorned by a woman's grace were traversed by the harsh
regret of that warlike past, of that one long, intoxicating clash of
arms, unique in the magnitude of its glory and disaster--the marvellous
work and the special possession of his own generation. He felt an
irrational tenderness toward his old adversary, and appreciated
emotionally the murderous absurdity their encounter had introduced into
his life. It was like an additional pinch of spice in a hot dish. He
remembered the flavour with sudden melancholy. He would never taste
it again. It was all over.... "I fancy it was being left lying in the
garden that had exasperated him so against me," he thought indulgently.

The two strangers at the next table had fallen silent upon the third
mention of General Feraud's name. Presently, the oldest of the two,
speaking in a bitter tone, affirmed that General Feraud's account was
settled. And why? Simply because he was not like some big-wigs who loved
only themselves. The royalists knew that they could never make anything
of him. He loved the Other too well.

The Other was the man of St. Helena. The two officers nodded and touched
glasses before they drank to an impossible return. Then the same who had
spoken before remarked with a sardonic little laugh:

"His adversary showed more cleverness."

"What adversary?" asked the younger as if puzzled.

"Don't you know? They were two Hussars. At each promotion they fought a
duel. Haven't you heard of the duel that is going on since 1801?"

His friend had heard of the duel, of course. Now he understood the
allusion. General Baron D'Hubert would be able now to enjoy his fat
king's favour in peace.

"Much good may it do to him," mumbled the elder. "They were both
brave men. I never saw this D'Hubert--a sort of intriguing dandy, I
understand. But I can well believe what I've heard Feraud say once of
him--that he never loved the emperor."

They rose and went away.

General D'Hubert experienced the horror of a somnambulist who wakes
up from a complacent dream of activity to find himself walking on a
quagmire. A profound disgust of the ground on which he was making his
way overcame him. Even the image of the charming girl was swept from
his view in the flood of moral distress. Everything he had ever been
or hoped to be would be lost in ignominy unless he could manage to save
General Feraud from the fate which threatened so many braves. Under
the impulse of this almost morbid need to attend to the safety of his
adversary General D'Hubert worked so well with hands and feet (as the
French saying is) that in less than twenty-four hours he found means of
obtaining an extraordinary private audience from the Minister of Police.

General Baron D'Hubert was shown in suddenly without preliminaries. In
the dusk of the minister's cabinet, behind the shadowy forms of writing
desk, chairs, and tables, between two bunches of wax candles blazing in
sconces, he beheld a figure in a splendid coat posturing before a tall
mirror. The old _Conventional_ Fouche, ex-senator of the empire, traitor
to every man, every principle and motive of human conduct, Duke of
Otranto, and the wily artisan of the Second Restoration, was trying the
fit of a court suit, in which his young and accomplished _fiancee_ had
declared her wish to have his portrait painted on porcelain. It was a
caprice, a charming fancy which the Minister of Police of the Second
Restoration was anxious to gratify. For that man, often compared in
wiliness of intellect to a fox but whose ethical side could be worthily
symbolised by nothing less emphatic than a skunk, was as much possessed
by his love as General D'Hubert himself.

Startled to be discovered thus by the blunder of a servant, he met this
little vexation with the characteristic effrontery which had served
his turn so well in the endless intrigues of his self-seeking career.
Without altering his attitude a hair's breadth, one leg in a silk
stocking advanced, his head twisted over his left shoulder, he called
out calmly:

"This way, general. Pray approach. Well? I am all attention."

While General D'Hubert, as ill at ease as if one of his own little
weaknesses had been exposed, presented his request as shortly as
possible, the minister went on feeling the fit of his collar, settling
the lappels before the glass or buckling his back in his efforts to
behold the set of the gold-embroidered coat skirts behind. His still
face, his attentive eyes, could not have expressed a more complete
interest in those matters if he had been alone.

"Exclude from the operations of the Special Commission a certain Feraud,
Gabriel Florian, General of Brigade of the promotion of 1814?" he
repeated in a slightly wondering tone and then turned away from the
glass. "Why exclude him precisely?"

"I am surprised that your Excellency, so competent in the valuation of
men of his time, should have thought it worth while to have that name
put down on the list."

"A rabid Bonapartist."

"So is every grenadier and every trooper of the army, as your Excellency
well knows. And the individuality of General Feraud can have no more
weight than that of any casual grenadier. He is a man of no mental
grasp, of no capacity whatever. It is inconceivable that he should ever
have any influence."

"He has a well-hung tongue though," interjected Fouche.

"Noisy, I admit, but not dangerous."

"I will not dispute with you. I know next to nothing of him. Hardly his
name in fact."

"And yet your Excellency had the presidency of the commission charged by
the king to point out those who were to be tried," said General D'Hubert
with an emphasis which did not miss the minister's ear.

"Yes, general," he said, walking away into the dark part of the vast
room and throwing himself into a high-backed armchair whose overshadowed
depth swallowed him up, all but the gleam of gold embroideries on the
coat and the pallid patch of the face. "Yes, general. Take that chair
there."

General D'Hubert sat down.

"Yes, general," continued the arch-master in the arts of intrigue
and betrayal, whose duplicity as if at times intolerable to his
self-knowledge worked itself off in bursts of cynical openness. "I
did hurry on the formation of the proscribing commission and took its
presidency. And do you know why? Simply from fear that if I did not
take it quickly into my hands my own name would head the list of the
proscribed. Such are the times in which we live. But I am minister of
the king as yet, and I ask you plainly why I should take the name of
this obscure Feraud off the list? You wonder how his name got there. Is
it possible that you know men so little? My dear general, at the very
first sitting of the commission names poured on us like rain off the
tiles of the Tuileries. Names! We had our choice of thousands. How do
you know that the name of this Feraud, whose life or death don't matter
to France, does not keep out some other name?..."

The voice out of the armchair stopped. General D'Hubert sat still,
shadowy, and silent. Only his sabre clinked slightly. The voice in the
armchair began again. "And we must try to satisfy the exigencies of the
allied sovereigns. The Prince de Talleyrand told me only yesterday that
Nesselrode had informed him officially that his Majesty, the Emperor
Alexander, was very disappointed at the small number of examples the
government of the king intends to make--especially amongst military men.
I tell you this confidentially."

"Upon my word," broke out General D'Hubert, speaking 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 Fouche, 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 Leonie! 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 Fouche. 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
Fouche, 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 cafe 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 forgotten him," he cried in a conscience-stricken tone.

A deep-chested veteran shouted across the cafe:

"Some new villainy of the government, general?"

"The villainies of these scoundrels," thundered General Feraud, "are
innumerable. One more, one less!..." He lowered his tone. "But I will
set good order to one of them at least."

He looked all round the faces. "There's a pomaded curled staff officer,
the darling of some of the marshals who sold their father for a handful
of English gold. He will find out presently that I am alive yet," he
declared in a dogmatic tone.... "However, this is a private affair.
An old affair of honour. Bah! Our honour does not matter. Here we are
driven off with a split ear like a lot of cast troop horses--good only
for a knacker's yard. Who cares for our honour now? But it would be
like striking a blow for the emperor.... _Messieurs_, I require the
assistance of two of you."

Every man moved forward. General Feraud, deeply touched by this
demonstration, called with visible emotion upon the one-eyed veteran
cuirassier and the officer of the _Chasseurs a cheval_, who had left the
tip of his nose in Russia. He excused his choice to the others.

"A cavalry affair this--you know."

He was answered with a varied chorus of "_Parfaitement mon General...
C'est juste... Parbleu c'est connu..._" Everybody was satisfied. The
three left the cafe together, followed by cries of "_Bonne chance_."

Outside they linked arms, the general in the middle. The three rusty
cocked hats worn _en bataille_, with a sinister forward slant, barred
the narrow street nearly right across. The overheated little town of
gray stones and red tiles was drowsing away its provincial afternoon
under a blue sky. Far off the loud blows of some coopers hooping a cask,
reverberated regularly between the houses. The general dragged his left
foot a little in the shade of the walls.

"That damned winter of 1813 got into my bones for good. Never mind. We
must take pistols, that's all. A little lumbago. We must have pistols.
He's sure game for my bag. My eyes are as keen as ever. Always were. You
should have seen me picking off the dodging Cossacks with a beastly old
infantry musket. I have a natural gift for firearms."

In this strain General Feraud ran on, holding up his head with owlish
eyes and rapacious beak. A mere fighter all his life, a cavalry man, a
_sabreur_, he conceived war with the utmost simplicity as in the main a
massed lot of personal contests, a sort of gregarious duelling. And here
he had on hand a war of his own. He revived. The shadow of peace had
passed away from him like the shadow of death. It was a marvellous
resurrection of the named Feraud, Gabriel Florian, _engage volontaire_
of 1793, general of 1814, buried without ceremony by means of a service
order signed by the War Minister of the Second Restoration.

IV

No man succeeds in everything he undertakes. In that sense we are all
failures. The great point is not to fail in ordering and sustaining the
effort of our life. In this matter vanity is what leads us astray. It is
our vanity which hurries us into situations from which we must come out
damaged. Whereas pride is our safeguard by the reserve it imposes on
the choice of our endeavour, as much as by the virtue of its sustaining
power.

General D'Hubert was proud and reserved. He had not been damaged by
casual love affairs successful or otherwise. In his war-scarred body
his heart at forty remained unscratched. Entering with reserve into his
sister's matrimonial plans, he felt himself falling irremediably in love
as one falls off a roof. He was too proud to be frightened. Indeed, the
sensation was too delightful to be alarming.

The inexperience of a man of forty is a much more serious thing than
the inexperience of a youth of twenty, for it is not helped out by the
rashness of hot blood. The girl was mysterious, as all young girls
are, by the mere effect of their guarded ingenuity; and to him the
mysteriousness of that young girl appeared exceptional and fascinating.
But there was nothing mysterious about the arrangements of the match
which Madame Leonie had arranged. There was nothing peculiar, either. It
was a very appropriate match, commending itself extremely to the young
lady's mother (her father was dead) and tolerable to the young lady's
uncle--an old _emigre_, lately returned from Germany, and pervading cane
in hand like a lean ghost of the _ancien regime_ in a long-skirted brown
coat and powdered hair, the garden walks of the young lady's ancestral
home.

General D'Hubert was not the man to be satisfied merely with the girl
and the fortune--when it came to the point. His pride--and pride aims
always at true success--would be satisfied with nothing short of love.
But as pride excludes vanity, he could not imagine any reason why this
mysterious creature, with deep and candid eyes of a violet colour,
should have any feeling for him warmer than indifference. The young lady
(her name was Adele) baffled every attempt at a clear understanding on
that point. It is true that the attempts were clumsy and timidly made,
because by then General D'Hubert had become acutely aware of the number
of his years, of his wounds, of his many moral imperfections, of his
secret unworthiness--and had incidentally learned by experience the
meaning of the word funk. As far as he could make it out she seemed
to imply that with a perfect confidence in her mother's affection and
sagacity she had no pronounced antipathy for the person of General
D'Hubert; and that this was quite sufficient for a well-brought-up
dutiful young lady to begin married life upon. This view hurt and
tormented the pride of General D'Hubert. And yet, he asked himself with
a sort of sweet despair, What more could he expect? She had a quiet and
luminous forehead; her violet eyes laughed while the lines of her lips
and chin remained composed in an admirable gravity. All this was set off
by such a glorious mass of fair hair, by a complexion so marvellous, by
such a grace of expression, that General D'Hubert really never found the
opportunity to examine, with sufficient detachment, the lofty exigencies
of his pride. In fact, he became shy of that line of inquiry, since it
had led once or twice to a crisis of solitary passion in which it was
borne upon him that he loved her enough to kill her rather than lose
her. From such passages, not unknown to men of forty, he would come out
broken, exhausted, remorseful, a little dismayed. He derived, however,
considerable comfort from the quietist practice of sitting up now and
then half the night by an open window, and meditating upon the wonder of
her existence, like a believer lost in the mystic contemplation of his
faith.

It must not be supposed that all these variations of his inward state
were made manifest to the world. General D'Hubert found no difficulty
in appearing wreathed in smiles: because, in fact, he was very happy.
He followed the established rules of his condition, sending over flowers
(from his sister's garden and hothouses) early every morning, and a
little later following himself to have lunch with his intended, her
mother, and her _emigre_ uncle. The middle of the day was spent in
strolling or sitting in the shade. A watchful deferential gallantry
trembling on the verge of tenderness, was the note of their intercourse
on his side--with a playful turn of the phrase concealing the profound
trouble of his whole being caused by her inaccessible nearness. Late in
the afternoon General D'Hubert walked home between the fields of vines,
sometimes intensely miserable, sometimes supremely happy, sometimes
pensively sad, but always feeling a special intensity of existence: that
elation common to artists, poets, and lovers, to men haunted by a great
passion, by a noble thought or a new vision of plastic beauty.

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