I had still some of the feeling of having been in contact with a personality of the most colossal significance as we went down the red carpet of the broad white marble stairs. With one foot on the lowest step, the figure of a perfectly clothed, perfectly groomed man was standing looking upward at our descent. I had thought so little of him that the sight of the Duc de Mersch’s face hardly suggested any train of emotions. It lit up with an expression of pleasure.
“You,” he said.
She stood looking down upon him from the altitude of two steps, looking with intolerable passivity.
“So you use the common stairs,” she said, “one had the idea that you communicated with these people through a private door.” He laughed uneasily, looking askance at me.
“Oh, I …” he said.
She moved a little to one side to pass him in her descent.
“So things have arranged themselves—là bas,” she said, referring, I supposed, to the elective grand duchy.
“Oh, it was like a miracle,” he answered, “and I owed a great deal—a great deal—to your hints. …”
“You must tell me all about it tonight,” she said.
De Mersch’s face had an extraordinary quality that I seemed to notice in all the faces around me—a quality of the flesh that seemed to lose all luminosity, of the eyes that seemed forever to have a tendency to seek the ground, to avoid the sight of the world. When he brightened to answer her it was as if with effort. It seemed as if a weight were on the mind of the whole world—a preoccupation that I shared without understanding. She herself, a certain absentmindedness apart, seemed the only one that was entirely unaffected.
As we sat side by side in the little carriage, she said suddenly:
“They are coming to the end of their tether, you see.” I shrank away from her a little—but I did not see and did not want to see. I said so. It even seemed to me that de Mersch having got over the troubles là bas, was taking a new lease of life.
“I did think,” I said, “a little time ago that …”
The wheels of the coupé suddenly began to rattle abominably over the cobbles of a narrow street. It was impossible to talk, and I was thrown back upon myself. I found that I was in a temper—in an abominable temper. The sudden sight of that man, her method of greeting him, the intimacy that the scene revealed … the whole thing had upset me. Of late, for want of any alarms, in spite of groundlessness I had had the impression that I was the integral part of her life. It was not a logical idea, but strictly a habit of mind that had grown up in the desolation of my solitude.
We passed into one of the larger boulevards, and the thing ran silently.
“That de Mersch was crumbling up,” she suddenly completed my unfinished sentence; “oh, that was only a grumble—premonitory. But it won’t take long now. I have been putting on the screw. Halderschrodt will … I suppose he will commit suicide, in a day or two. And then the—the fun will begin.”
I didn’t answer. The thing made no impression—no mental impression at all.
XIV
That afternoon we had a scene, and late that night another. The memory of the former is a little blotted out. Things began to move so quickly that, try as I will to arrange their sequence in my mind, I cannot. I cannot even very distinctly remember what she told me at that first explanation. I must have attacked her fiercely—on the score of de Mersch, in the old vein; must have told her that I would not in the interest of the name allow her to see the man again. She told me things, too, rather abominable things, about the way in which she had got Halderschrodt into her power and was pressing him down. Halderschrodt was de Mersch’s banker-in-chief; his fall would mean de Mersch’s, and so on. The “so on” in this case meant a great deal more. Halderschrodt, apparently, was the “somebody who was up to something” of the American paper—that is to say the allied firms that Halderschrodt represented. I can’t remember the details. They were too huge and too unfamiliar, and I was too agitated by my own share in the humanity of it. But, in sum, it seemed that the fall of Halderschrodt would mean a sort of incredibly vast Black Monday—a frightful thing in the existing state of public confidence, but one which did not mean much to me. I forget how she said she had been able to put the screw on him. Halderschrodt, as you must remember, was the third of his colossal name, a man without much genius and conscious of the lack, obsessed with the idea of operating some enormous coup, like the founder of his dynasty, something in which foresight in international occurrence played a chief part. That idea was his weakness, the defect of his mind, and she
