Joseph Conrad - The Point Of Honor

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The outward world at that time did not exist with any special
distinctness for General D'Hubert. One evening, however, crossing a
ridge from which he could see both houses, General D'Hubert became aware
of two figures far down the road. The day had been divine. The festal
decoration of the inflamed sky cast a gentle glow on the sober tints
of the southern land. The gray rocks, the brown fields, the purple
undulating distances harmonised in luminous accord, exhaled already
the scents of the evening. The two figures down the road presented
themselves like two rigid and wooden silhouettes all black on the ribbon
of white dust. General D'Hubert made out the long, straight-cut military
_capotes_, buttoned closely right up to the black stocks, the cocked
hats, the lean carven brown countenances--old soldiers--_vieilles
moustaches!_ The taller of the two had a black patch over one eye;
the other's hard, dry countenance presented some bizarre disquieting
peculiarity which, on nearer approach, proved to be the absence of the
tip of the nose. Lifting their hands with one movement to salute the
slightly lame civilian walking with a thick stick, they inquired for the
house where the General Baron D'Hubert lived and what was the best way
to get speech with him quietly.

"If you think this quiet enough," said General D'Hubert, looking round
at the ripening vine-fields framed in purple lines and dominated by the
nest of gray and drab walls of a village clustering around the top of a
steep, conical hill, so that the blunt church tower seemed but the shape
of a crowning rock--"if you think this quiet enough you can speak to
him at once. And I beg you, comrades, to speak openly with perfect
confidence."

They stepped back at this and raised again their hands to their hats
with marked ceremoniousness. Then the one with the chipped nose,
speaking for both, remarked that the matter was confidential enough and
to be arranged discreetly. Their general quarters were in that village
over there where the infernal clodhoppers--damn their false royalist
hearts--looked remarkably cross-eyed at three unassuming military men.
For the present he should only ask for the name of General D'Hubert's
friends.

"What friends?" said the astonished General D'Hubert, completely off the
track. "I am staying with my brother-in-law over there."

"Well, he will do for one," suggested the chipped veteran.

"We're the friends of General Feraud," interjected the other, who had
kept silent till then, only glowering with his one eye at the man who
had never loved the emperor. That was something to look at. For even
the gold-laced Judases who had sold him to the English, the marshals and
princes, had loved him at some time or other. But this man had _never_
loved the emperor. General Feraud had said so distinctly.

General D'Hubert felt a sort of inward blow in his chest. For an
infinitesimal fraction of a second it was as if the spinning of the
earth had become perceptible with an awful, slight rustle in the eternal
stillness of space. But that was the noise of the blood in his ears and
passed off at once. Involuntarily he murmured:

"Feraud! I had forgotten his existence."

"He's existing at present, very uncomfortably it is true, in the
infamous inn of that nest of savages up there," said the one-eyed
cuirassier drily. "We arrived in your parts an hour ago on post horses.
He's awaiting our return with impatience. There is hurry, you know. The
general has broken the ministerial order of sojourn to obtain from you
the satisfaction he's entitled to by the laws of honour, and naturally
he's anxious to have it all over before the _gendarmerie_ gets the
scent."

The other elucidated the idea a little further.

"Get back on the quiet--you understand? Phitt! No one the wiser. We
have broken out, too. Your friend the king would be glad to cut off our
scurvy pittances at the first chance. It's a risk. But honour before
everything."

General D'Hubert had recovered his power of speech.

"So you come like this along the road to invite me to a throat-cutting
match with that--that..." A laughing sort of rage took possession of
him.

"Ha! ha! ha! ha!"

His fists on his hips, he roared without restraint while they stood
before him lank and straight, as unexpected as though they had been shot
up with a snap through a trapdoor in the ground. Only four-and-twenty
months ago the masters of Europe, they had already the air of antique
ghosts, they seemed less substantial in their faded coats than their own
narrow shadows falling so black across the white road--the military and
grotesque shadows of twenty years of war and conquests. They had the
outlandish appearance of two imperturbable bronzes of the religion of
the sword. And General D'Hubert, also one of the ex-masters of Europe,
laughed at these serious phantoms standing in his way.

Said one, indicating the laughing general with a jerk of the head:

"A merry companion that."

"There are some of us that haven't smiled from the day the Other went
away," said his comrade.

A violent impulse to set upon and beat these unsubstantial wraiths to
the ground frightened General D'Hubert. He ceased laughing suddenly.
His urgent desire now was to get rid of them, to get them away from his
sight quickly before he lost control of himself. He wondered at this
fury he felt rising in his breast. But he had no time to look into that
peculiarity just then.

"I understand your wish to be done with me as quickly as possible. Then
why waste time in empty ceremonies. Do you see that wood there at the
foot of that slope? Yes, the wood of pines. Let us meet there to-morrow
at sunrise. I will bring with me my sword or my pistols or both if you
like."

The seconds of General Feraud looked at each other.

"Pistols, general," said the cuirassier.

"So be it. _Au revoir_--to-morrow morning. Till then let me advise you
to keep close if you don't want the _gendarmerie_ making inquiries about
you before dark. Strangers are rare in this part of the country."

They saluted in silence. General D'Hubert, turning his back on their
retreating figures, stood still in the middle of the road for a long
time, biting his lower lip and looking on the ground. Then he began to
walk straight before him, thus retracing his steps till he found himself
before the park gate of his intended's home. Motionless he stared
through the bars at the front of the house gleaming clear beyond the
thickets and trees. Footsteps were heard on the gravel, and presently a
tall stooping shape emerged from the lateral alley following the inner
side of the park wall.

Le Chevalier de Valmassigue, uncle of the adorable Adele, ex-brigadier
in the army of the princes, bookbinder in Altona, afterwards shoemaker
(with a great reputation for elegance in the fit of ladies' shoes) in
another small German town, wore silk stockings on his lean shanks, low
shoes with silver buckles, a brocaded waistcoat. A long-skirted coat _a
la Francaise_ covered loosely his bowed back. A small three-cornered hat
rested on a lot of powdered hair tied behind in a queue.

"_Monsieur le Chevalier_," called General D'Hubert softly.

"What? You again here, _mon ami_? Have you forgotten something?"

"By heavens! That's just it. I have forgotten something. I am come to
tell you of it. No--outside. Behind this wall. It's too ghastly a thing
to be let in at all where she lives."

The Chevalier came out at once with that benevolent resignation some
old people display towards the fugue of youth. Older by a quarter of a
century than General D'Hubert, he looked upon him in the secret of
his heart as a rather troublesome youngster in love. He had heard his
enigmatical words very well, but attached no undue importance to what a
mere man of forty so hard hit was likely to do or say. The turn of mind
of the generation of Frenchmen grown up during the years of his exile
was almost unintelligible to him. Their sentiments appeared to him
unduly violent, lacking fineness and measure, their language needlessly
exaggerated. He joined the general on the road, and they made a few
steps in silence, the general trying to master his agitation and get
proper control of his voice.

"Chevalier, it is perfectly true. I forgot something. I forgot till
half an hour ago that I had an urgent affair of honour on my hands. It's
incredible but so it is!"

All was still for a moment. Then in the profound evening silence of the
countryside the thin, aged voice of the Chevalier was heard trembling
slightly.

"Monsieur! That's an indignity."

It was his first thought. The girl born during his exile, the posthumous
daughter of his poor brother, murdered by a band of Jacobins, had grown
since his return very dear to his old heart, which had been starving on
mere memories of affection for so many years.

"It is an inconceivable thing--I say. A man settles such affairs before
he thinks of asking for a young girl's hand. Why! If you had forgotten
for ten days longer you would have been married before your memory
returned to you. In my time men did not forget such things--nor yet
what's due to the feelings of an innocent young woman. If I did not
respect them myself I would qualify your conduct in a way which you
would not like."

General D'Hubert relieved himself frankly by a groan.

"Don't let that consideration prevent you. You run no risk of offending
her mortally."

But the old man paid no attention to this lover's nonsense. It's
doubtful whether he even heard.

"What is it?" he asked. "What's the nature of..."

"Call it a youthful folly, _Monsieur le Chevalier_. An inconceivable,
incredible result of..."

He stopped short. "He will never believe the story," he thought. "He
will only think I am taking him for a fool and get offended." General
D'Hubert spoke up again. "Yes, originating in youthful folly it has
become..."

The Chevalier interrupted. "Well then it must be arranged."

"Arranged."

"Yes. No matter what it may cost your _amour propre_. You should have
remembered you were engaged. You forgot that, too, I suppose. And then
you go and forget your quarrel. It's the most revolting exhibition of
levity I ever heard of."

"Good heavens, Chevalier! You don't imagine I have been picking up that
quarrel last time I was in Paris or anything of the sort. Do you?"

"Eh? What matters the precise date of your insane conduct!" exclaimed
the Chevalier testily. "The principal thing is to arrange it..."

Noticing General D'Hubert getting restive and trying to place a word,
the old _emigre_ raised his arm and added with dignity:

"I've been a soldier, too. I would never dare to suggest a doubtful
step to the man whose name my niece is to bear. I tell you that _entre
gallants hommes_ an affair can be always arranged."

"But, _saperlotte, Monsieur le Chevalier_, it's fifteen or sixteen years
ago. I was a lieutenant of Hussars then."

The old Chevalier seemed confounded by the vehemently despairing tone of
this information.

"You were a lieutenant of Hussars sixteen years ago?" he mumbled in a
dazed manner.

"Why, yes! You did not suppose I was made a general in my cradle like a
royal prince."

In the deepening purple twilight of the fields, spread with vine leaves,
backed by a low band of sombre crimson in the west, the voice of the old
ex-officer in the army of the princes sounded collected, punctiliously
civil.

"Do I dream? Is this a pleasantry? Or do you mean me to understand that
you have been hatching an affair of honour for sixteen years?"

"It has clung to me for that length of time. That is my precise meaning.
The quarrel itself is not to be explained easily. We have been on the
ground several times during that time of course."

"What manners! What horrible perversion of manliness! Nothing can
account for such inhumanity but the sanguinary madness of the Revolution
which has tainted a whole generation," mused the returned _emigre_ in a
low tone. "Who is your adversary?" he asked a little louder.

"What? My adversary! His name is Feraud." Shadowy in his_ tricorne_ and
old-fashioned clothes like a bowed thin ghost of the _ancien regime_ the
Chevalier voiced a ghostly memory.

"I can remember the feud about little Sophie Derval between Monsieur de
Brissac, captain in the Bodyguards and d'Anjorrant. Not the pockmarked
one. The other. The Beau d'Anjorrant as they called him. They met three
times in eighteen months in a most gallant manner. It was the fault of
that little Sophie, too, who _would_ keep on playing..."

"This is nothing of the kind," interrupted General D'Hubert. He laughed
a little sardonically. "Not at all so simple," he added. "Nor yet half
so reasonable," he finished inaudibly between his teeth and ground them
with rage.

After this sound nothing troubled the silence for a long time till the
Chevalier asked without animation:

"What is he--this Feraud?"

"Lieutenant of Hussars, too--I mean he's a general. A Gascon. Son of a
blacksmith, I believe."

"There! I thought so. That Bonaparte had a special predilection for
the _canaille_. I don't mean this for you, D'Hubert. You are one of us,
though you have served this usurper who..."

"Let's leave him out of this," broke in General D'Hubert.

The Chevalier shrugged his peaked shoulders.

"A Feraud of sorts. Offspring of a blacksmith and some village troll....
See what comes of mixing yourself up with that sort of people."

"You have made shoes yourself, Chevalier."

"Yes. But I am not the son of a shoemaker. Neither are you, Monsieur
D'Hubert. You and I have something that your Bonaparte's, princes,
dukes, and marshals have not because there's no power on earth that
could give it to them," retorted the _emigre_, with the rising animation
of a man who has got hold of a hopeful argument. "Those people don't
exist--all these Ferauds. Feraud! What is Feraud? A _va-nu-pieds_
disguised into a general by a Corsican adventurer masquerading as an
emperor. There is no earthly reason for a D'Hubert to _s'encanailler_
by a duel with a person of that sort. You can make your excuses to him
perfectly well. And if the _manant_ takes it into his head to decline
them you may simply refuse to meet him." "You say I may do that?" "Yes.
With the clearest conscience." "_Monsieur le Chevalier!_ To what do you
think you have returned from your emigration?"

This was said in such a startling tone that the old exile raised sharply
his bowed head, glimmering silvery white under the points of the little
_tricorne_. For a long time he made no sound.

"God knows!" he said at last, pointing with a slow and grave gesture
at a tall roadside cross mounted on a block of stone and stretching its
arms of forged stone all black against the darkening red band in the
sky. "God knows! If it were not for this emblem, which I remember seeing
in this spot as a child, I would wonder to what we, who have remained
faithful to our God and our king, have returned. The very voices of the
people have changed."

"Yes, it is a changed France," said General D'Hubert. He had regained
his calm. His tone was slightly ironic. "Therefore, I cannot take your
advice. Besides, how is one to refuse to be bitten by a dog that means
to bite? It's impracticable. Take my word for it. He isn't a man to be
stopped by apologies or refusals. But there are other ways. I could, for
instance, send a mounted messenger with a word to the brigadier of the
_gendarmerie_ in Senlac. These fellows are liable to arrest on my simple
order. It would make some talk in the army, both the organised and the
disbanded. Especially the disbanded. All _canaille_. All my comrades
once--the companions in arms of Armand D'Hubert. But what need a
D'Hubert care what people who don't exist may think? Or better still,
I might get my brother-in-law to send for the mayor of the village and
give him a hint. No more would be needed to get the three 'brigands'
set upon with flails and pitchforks and hunted into some nice deep wet
ditch. And nobody the wiser! It has been done only ten miles from here
to three poor devils of the disbanded Red Lancers of the Guard going
to their homes. What says your conscience, Chevalier? Can a D'Hubert do
that thing to three men who do not exist?"

A few stars had come out on the blue obscurity, clear as crystal, of the
sky. The dry, thin voice of the Chevalier spoke harshly.

"Why are you telling me all this?"

The general seized a withered, frail old hand with a strong grip.

"Because I owe you my fullest confidence. Who could tell Adele but you?
You understand why I dare not trust my brother-in-law nor yet my own
sister. Chevalier! I have been so near doing these things that I tremble
yet. You don't know how terrible this duel appears to me. And there's no
escape from it."

He murmured after a pause, "It's a fatality," dropped the Chevalier's
passive hand, and said in his ordinary conversational voice:

"I shall have to go without seconds. If it is my lot to remain on
the ground, you at least will know all that can be made known of this
affair."

The shadowy ghost of the _ancien regime_ seemed to have become more
bowed during the conversation.

"How am I to keep an indifferent face this evening before those two
women?" he groaned. "General! I find it very difficult to forgive you."

General D'Hubert made no answer.

"Is your cause good at least?"

"I am innocent."

This time he seized the Chevalier's ghostly arm above the elbow, gave it
a mighty squeeze.

"I must kill him," he hissed, and opening his hand strode away down the
road.

The delicate attentions of his adoring sister had secured for the
general perfect liberty of movement in the house where he was a guest.
He had even his own entrance through a small door in one corner of
the orangery. Thus he was not exposed that evening to the necessity
of dissembling his agitation before the calm ignorance of the other
inmates. He was glad of it. It seemed to him that if he had to open
his lips, he would break out into horrible imprecation, start breaking
furniture, smashing china and glasses. From the moment he opened the
private door, and while ascending the twenty-eight steps of winding
staircase, giving access to the corridor on which his room opened, he
went through a horrible and humiliating scene in which an infuriated
madman, with bloodshot eyes and a foaming mouth, played inconceivable
havoc with everything inanimate that may be found in a well-appointed
dining room. When he opened the door of his apartment the fit was over,
and his bodily fatigue was so great that he had to catch at the backs
of the chairs as he crossed the room to reach a low and broad divan
on which he let himself fall heavily. His moral prostration was still
greater. That brutality of feeling, which he had known only when
charging sabre in hand, amazed this man of forty, who did not recognise
in it the instinctive fury of his menaced passion. It was the revolt of
jeopardised desire. In his mental and bodily exhaustion it got cleared,
fined down, purified into a sentiment of melancholy despair at having,
perhaps, to die before he had taught this beautiful girl to love him.

On that night General D'Hubert, either stretched on his back with his
hands over his eyes or lying on his breast, with his face buried in a
cushion, made the full pilgrimage of emotions. Nauseating disgust at
the absurdity of the situation, dread of the fate that could play such
a vile trick on a man, awe at the remote consequences of an apparently
insignificant and ridiculous event in his past, doubt of his own fitness
to conduct his existence and mistrust of his best sentiments--for what
the devil did he want to go to Fouche for?--he knew them all in turn.
"I am an idiot, neither more nor less," he thought. "A sensitive idiot.
Because I overheard two men talk in a cafe... I am an idiot afraid of
lies--whereas in life it is only truth that matters."

Several times he got up, and walking about in his socks, so as not to
be heard by anybody downstairs, drank all the water he could find in
the dark. And he tasted the torments of jealousy, too. She would marry
somebody else. His very soul writhed. The tenacity of that Feraud, the
awful persistence of that imbecile brute came to him with the tremendous
force of a relentless fatality. General D'Hubert trembled as he put down
the empty water ewer. "He will have me," he thought. General D'Hubert
was tasting every emotion that life has to give. He had in his dry mouth
the faint, sickly flavour of fear, not the honourable fear of a
young girl's candid and amused glance, but the fear of death and the
honourable man's fear of cowardice.

But if true courage consists in going out to meet an odious danger from
which our body, soul and heart recoil together General D'Hubert had
the opportunity to practise it for the first time in his life. He had
charged exultingly at batteries and infantry squares and ridden with
messages through a hail of bullets without thinking anything about
it. His business now was to sneak out unheard, at break of day, to
an obscure and revolting death. General D'Hubert never hesitated. He
carried two pistols in a leather bag which he slung over his shoulder.
Before he had crossed the garden his mouth was dry again. He picked two
oranges. It was only after shutting the gate after him that he felt a
slight faintness.

He stepped out disregarding it, and after going a few yards regained
the command of his legs. He sucked an orange as he walked. It was a
colourless and pellucid dawn. The wood of pines detached its columns of
brown trunks and its dark-green canopy very clearly against the rocks
of the gray hillside behind. He kept his eyes fixed on it steadily. That
temperamental, good-humoured coolness in the face of danger, which made
him an officer liked by his men and appreciated by his superiors, was
gradually asserting itself. It was like going into battle. Arriving at
the edge of the wood he sat down on a boulder, holding the other orange
in his hand, and thought that he had come ridiculously early on the
ground. Before very long, however, he heard the swishing of bushes,
footsteps on the hard ground, and the sounds of a disjointed loud
conversation. A voice somewhere behind him said boastfully, "He's game
for my bag."

He thought to himself, "Here they are. What's this about game? Are they
talking of me?" And becoming aware of the orange in his hand he thought
further, "These are very good oranges. Leonie's own tree. I may just as
well eat this orange instead of flinging it away."

Emerging from a tangle of rocks and bushes, General Feraud and his
seconds discovered General D'Hubert engaged in peeling the orange. They
stood still waiting till he looked up. Then the seconds raised their
hats, and General Feraud, putting his hands behind his back, walked
aside a little way.

"I am compelled to ask one of you, messieurs, to act for me. I have
brought no friends. Will you?"

The one-eyed cuirassier said judicially:

"That cannot be refused."

The other veteran remarked:

"It's awkward all the same."

"Owing to the state of the people's minds in this part of the country
there was no one I could trust with the object of your presence here,"
explained General D'Hubert urbanely. They saluted, looked round, and
remarked both together:

"Poor ground."

"It's unfit."

"Why bother about ground, measurements, and so on. Let us simplify
matters. Load the two pairs of pistols. I will take those of General
Feraud and let him take mine. Or, better still, let us take a mixed
pair. One of each pair. Then we will go into the wood while you remain
outside. We did not come here for ceremonies, but for war. War to the
death. Any ground is good enough for that. If I fall you must leave me
where I lie and clear out. It wouldn't be healthy for you to be found
hanging about here after that."

It appeared after a short parley that General Feraud was willing to
accept these conditions. While the seconds were loading the pistols he
could be heard whistling, and was seen to rub his hands with an air of
perfect contentment. He flung off his coat briskly, and General D'Hubert
took off his own and folded it carefully on a stone.

"Suppose you take your principal to the other side of the wood and let
him enter exactly in ten minutes from now," suggested General D'Hubert
calmly, but feeling as if he were giving directions for his own
execution. This, however, was his last moment of weakness.

"Wait! Let us compare watches first."

He pulled out his own. The officer with the chipped nose went over to
borrow the watch of General Feraud. They bent their heads over them for
a time.

"That's it. At four minutes to five by yours. Seven to, by mine."

It was the cuirassier who remained by the side of General D'Hubert,
keeping his one eye fixed immovably on the white face of the watch he
held in the palm of his hand. He opened his mouth wide, waiting for the
beat of the last second, long before he snapped out the word:

"_Avancez!_"

General D'Hubert moved on, passing from the glaring sunshine of the
Provencal morning into the cool and aromatic shade of the pines. The
ground was clear between the reddish trunks, whose multitude, leaning at
slightly different angles, confused his eye at first. It was like going
into battle. The commanding quality of confidence in himself woke up in
his breast. He was all to his affair. The problem was how to kill his
adversary. Nothing short of that would free him from this imbecile
nightmare. "It's no use wounding that brute," he thought. He was known
as a resourceful officer. His comrades, years ago, used to call him "the
strategist." And it was a fact that he could think in the presence of
the enemy, whereas Feraud had been always a mere fighter. But a dead
shot, unluckily.

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