For in the life of every man, whether he will own it or not, there is at least one unmentioned woman whom he never permanently forgets while he keeps his faculties. She may not be the best, or the prettiest, or even the nicest woman he has loved—not her virtues, but his madness, graved so deep—and he will take the impression out sometimes when he has lost his figure and his hair, and when a boy who is storing experiences on his own account calls him "the governor." No, her qualities have as little to do with the matter as the date on her birth certificate. A woman isn't her age, or herself; she is what she makes us feel—like art, and nature, like a musical phrase, or a line of words, like everything of suggestion and mystery. The woman her husband hates and her lover adores, is an equally vivid personality to both men. That to herself she is vividly a third character makes no difference to the view of either of them.
To say that on the few occasions Conrad had smelt chypre during the last twenty years it had never failed to "remind" him of Mrs. Adaile—to say this would be to imply that he yielded himself leisurely to reverie, and it would sound truer than the truth. But the fact is that there was nothing voluntary at all in what occurred. It was a physical swirl that the smell always caused him, and it left him vibrant for a few seconds with the very craving, the very sickness of the time when he had worshipped her. He often thought of her, even strummed a song she used to sing, but in such moments as these he was less conscious of thinking than of feeling. Normally he looked back at her, with the reflections of a man; when he smelt chypre he was near her again, with the tremors of a boy.
Life is less consistent than fiction, even than tolerably bad fiction. "What perfume do you use?" wrote Maupassant to a correspondent whom he had not seen, but who had made him curious. Her answer—if it hadn't been "none"—would have meant a thousand times more to him than it would mean to the man in the crowd, but it might very easily have misled him too. In fiction, Conrad was dimly aware, Mrs. Adaile and chypre would never have been associated; it wasn't faint enough, fresh enough, it wasn't matutinal enough for Mrs. Adaile; to one who had not seen her it could never be evocative. Yet—perhaps it had been a passing fancy, even an experiment—in some days that were immortal to him chypre had been her scent.
The piece became funny by-and-by, and he began to listen to it, but though the sensations wakened by the lady's handkerchief subsided, the memories did no more than doze. Between the acts, and when he left the theatre, they beset him with full force. As he strolled to the club, he surrendered to them. He had recalled Mrs. Adaile so often, so often re-enacted scenes with her, and mocked himself that he had not played them differently, that the episode seemed to him by no means so remote as it was; it seemed much closer than many episodes that had happened since. It was with a shock in the reading-room that he counted the years. Was it possible? Good heavens! how time flew. It indicates the fervour of his mood to say that when he made this reflection it had to him a sense of novelty.
Then she must be—Again "Good heavens!" That girl!—for she had been but a girl, although she was married and he had felt himself a child beside her. He remembered the afternoon when she came to the hotel and he told his people that "the most beautiful woman he had ever seen" had just arrived. Well, she figured still as one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. But was that twenty years ago?
What a babe he had been! And he used to believe himself sapient for his age.... Well, perhaps in some things! How stupid he must have seemed to her for a boy of seventeen! Yet she used to confide in him on the terrace. He could not have seemed so stupid to her after all? ... Innocent.
That night on the terrace—always the terrace, it appeared!—when she let him hold her hand, and bent her face to him, saying, "A mosquito has bitten me on the cheek—look." As if it were yesterday he could remember how his heart pounded, and the fatuous words he muttered in his tight throat. He wished forcefully now that he had had the courage! What atom of difference would it make to-day? Yet he did wish that he had had the courage. O imbecile! ... But how exquisite it all was; if it could only come over again!
There were no more than two men besides himself in the room; one of them was reading, and the other slept. The silence was absolute until a page sped in to bawl the name of a member who wasn't there, and sped forth to bawl for him somewhere else. The man who had slept said "damn" very softly, and turned to sleep on the other side.
Conrad lay back in the deep chair, and let fancy reign. There were many gaps, but there were moments that made the calendar unreal. He remembered intimately things that she had said to him—oddly enough, more of the things that he had said to her. He stared at his whisky-and-potash, and mentally relived the story. And this is the story he relived:—