Victory (Collins Classics) by Joseph Conrad

Author:Joseph Conrad [Conrad, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Classics, FICTION
ISBN: 9780008110499
Google: Vx0tBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Published: 2015-01-15T21:12:02+00:00

4

With her knees drawn up, Lena rested her elbows on them and held her head in both her hands.

‘Are you tired of sitting here?’ Heyst asked.

An almost imperceptible negative movement of the head was all the answer she made.

‘Why are you looking so serious?’ he pursued, and immediately thought that habitual seriousness, in the long run, was much more bearable than constant gaiety. ‘However, this expression suits you exceedingly,’ he added, not diplomatically, but because. by the tendency of his taste, it was a true statement. ‘And as long as I can be certain that it is not boredom which gives you this severe air, I am willing to sit here and look at you till you are ready to go.’

And this was true. He was still under the fresh sortilege of their common life, the surprise of novelty, the flattered vanity of his possession of this woman; for a man must feel that, unless he has ceased to be masculine. Her eyes moved in his direction, rested on him, then returned to their stare into the deeper gloom at the foot of the straight tree-trunks, whose spreading crowns were slowly withdrawing their shade. The warm air stirred slightly about her motionless head. She would not look at him, from some obscure fear of betraying herself. She felt in her innermost depths an irresistible desire to give herself up to him more completely, by some act of absolute sacrifice.76 This was something of which he did not seem to have an idea. He was a strange being without needs. She felt his eyes fixed upon her; and as he kept silent, she said uneasily - for she didn’t know what his silences might mean:

‘And so you lived with that friend - that good man?’

‘Excellent fellow,’ Heyst responded, with a readiness that she did not expect. ‘But it was a weakness on my part. I really didn’t want to, only he wouldn’t let me off, and I couldn’t explain. He was the sort of man to whom you can’t explain anything. He was extremely sensitive, and it would have been a tigerish thing to do to mangle his delicate feelings by the sort of plain speaking that would have been necessary. His mind was like a white-walled, pure chamber, furnished with, say, six straw-bottomed chairs, and he was always placing and displacing them in various combinations. But they were always the same chairs. He was extremely easy to live with; but then he got hold of this coal idea - or, rather, the idea got hold of him. It entered into that scantily furnished chamber of which I have just spoken, and sat on all the chairs. There was no dislodging it, you know! It was going to make his fortune, my fortune, everybody’s fortune. In past years, in moments of doubt that will come to a man determined to remain free from the absurdities of existence. I often asked myself, with a momentary dread. in what way would life try

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