An Outcast of the Islands, by Joseph Conrad
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Title: An Outcast of the Islands
Author: Joseph Conrad
Release Date: January 9, 2006 [EBook #638]
Language: English
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*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN OUTCAST OF THE ISLANDS ***
Produced by Judith Boss and David Widger
AN OUTCAST OF THE ISLANDS
by Joseph Conrad
_Pues el delito mayor Del hombre es haber nacito_ CALDERON
TO EDWARD LANCELOT SANDERSON
AUTHOR'S NOTE
"An Outcast of the Islands" is my second novel in the absolute sense of
the word; second in conception, second in execution, second as it were
in its essence. There was no hesitation, half-formed plan, vague idea,
or the vaguest reverie of anything else between it and "Almayer's
Folly." The only doubt I suffered from, after the publication of
"Almayer's Folly," was whether I should write another line for print.
Those days, now grown so dim, had their poignant moments. Neither in
my mind nor in my heart had I then given up the sea. In truth I was
clinging to it desperately, all the more desperately because, against
my will, I could not help feeling that there was something changed in my
relation to it. "Almayer's Folly," had been finished and done with. The
mood itself was gone. But it had left the memory of an experience that,
both in thought and emotion was unconnected with the sea, and I suppose
that part of my moral being which is rooted in consistency was badly
shaken. I was a victim of contrary stresses which produced a state of
immobility. I gave myself up to indolence. Since it was impossible for
me to face both ways I had elected to face nothing. The discovery of
new values in life is a very chaotic experience; there is a tremendous
amount of jostling and confusion and a momentary feeling of darkness. I
let my spirit float supine over that chaos.
A phrase of Edward Garnett's is, as a matter of fact, responsible for
this book. The first of the friends I made for myself by my pen it
was but natural that he should be the recipient, at that time, of my
confidences. One evening when we had dined together and he had listened
to the account of my perplexities (I fear he must have been growing a
little tired of them) he pointed out that there was no need to determine
my future absolutely. Then he added: "You have the style, you have the
temperament; why not write another?" I believe that as far as one man
may wish to influence another man's life Edward Garnett had a great
desire that I should go on writing. At that time, and I may say, ever
afterwards, he was always very patient and gentle with me. What strikes
me most however in the phrase quoted above which was offered to me in a
tone of detachment is not its gentleness but its effective wisdom. Had
he said, "Why not go on writing," it is very probable he would have
scared me away from pen and ink for ever; but there was nothing either
to frighten one or arouse one's antagonism in the mere suggestion to
"write another." And thus a dead point in the revolution of my affairs
was insidiously got over. The word "another" did it. At about eleven
o'clock of a nice London night, Edward and I walked along interminable
streets talking of many things, and I remember that on getting home
I sat down and wrote about half a page of "An Outcast of the Islands"
before I slept. This was committing myself definitely, I won't say to
another life, but to another book. There is apparently something in my
character which will not allow me to abandon for good any piece of work
I have begun. I have laid aside many beginnings. I have laid them aside
with sorrow, with disgust, with rage, with melancholy and even with
self-contempt; but even at the worst I had an uneasy consciousness that
I would have to go back to them.
"An Outcast of the Islands" belongs to those novels of mine that were
never laid aside; and though it brought me the qualification of "exotic
writer" I don't think the charge was at all justified.
For the life of me I don't see that there is the slightest exotic spirit
in the conception or style of that novel. It is certainly the most
_tropical_ of my eastern tales. The mere scenery got a great hold on
me as I went on, perhaps because (I may just as well confess that) the
story itself was never very near my heart.
It engaged my imagination much more than my affection. As to my feeling
for Willems it was but the regard one cannot help having for one's own
creation. Obviously I could not be indifferent to a man on whose head I
had brought so much evil simply by imagining him such as he appears in
the novel--and that, too, on a very slight foundation.
The man who suggested Willems to me was not particularly interesting in
himself. My interest was aroused by his dependent position, his strange,
dubious status of a mistrusted, disliked, worn-out European living on
the reluctant toleration of that Settlement hidden in the heart of the
forest-land, up that sombre stream which our ship was the only white
men's ship to visit. With his hollow, clean-shaved cheeks, a heavy grey
moustache and eyes without any expression whatever, clad always in a
spotless sleeping suit much be-frogged in front, which left his lean
neck wholly uncovered, and with his bare feet in a pair of straw
slippers, he wandered silently amongst the houses in daylight, almost as
dumb as an animal and apparently much more homeless. I don't know
what he did with himself at night. He must have had a place, a hut,
a palm-leaf shed, some sort of hovel where he kept his razor and his
change of sleeping suits. An air of futile mystery hung over him,
something not exactly dark but obviously ugly. The only definite
statement I could extract from anybody was that it was he who had
"brought the Arabs into the river." That must have happened many years
before. But how did he bring them into the river? He could hardly have
done it in his arms like a lot of kittens. I knew that Almayer founded
the chronology of all his misfortunes on the date of that fateful
advent; and yet the very first time we dined with Almayer there was
Willems sitting at table with us in the manner of the skeleton at the
feast, obviously shunned by everybody, never addressed by any one, and
for all recognition of his existence getting now and then from Almayer
a venomous glance which I observed with great surprise. In the course
of the whole evening he ventured one single remark which I didn't catch
because his articulation was imperfect, as of a man who had forgotten
how to speak. I was the only person who seemed aware of the sound.
Willems subsided. Presently he retired, pointedly unnoticed--into the
forest maybe? Its immensity was there, within three hundred yards of
the verandah, ready to swallow up anything. Almayer conversing with my
captain did not stop talking while he glared angrily at the retreating
back. Didn't that fellow bring the Arabs into the river! Nevertheless
Willems turned up next morning on Almayer's verandah. From the bridge of
the steamer I could see plainly these two, breakfasting together, tete
a tete and, I suppose, in dead silence, one with his air of being no
longer interested in this world and the other raising his eyes now and
then with intense dislike.
It was clear that in those days Willems lived on Almayer's charity. Yet
on returning two months later to Sambir I heard that he had gone on an
expedition up the river in charge of a steam-launch belonging to the
Arabs, to make some discovery or other. On account of the strange
reluctance that everyone manifested to talk about Willems it was
impossible for me to get at the rights of that transaction. Moreover, I
was a newcomer, the youngest of the company, and, I suspect, not judged
quite fit as yet for a full confidence. I was not much concerned about
that exclusion. The faint suggestion of plots and mysteries pertaining
to all matters touching Almayer's affairs amused me vastly. Almayer was
obviously very much affected. I believe he missed Willems immensely. He
wore an air of sinister preoccupation and talked confidentially with
my captain. I could catch only snatches of mumbled sentences. Then one
morning as I came along the deck to take my place at the breakfast table
Almayer checked himself in his low-toned discourse. My captain's face
was perfectly impenetrable. There was a moment of profound silence and
then as if unable to contain himself Almayer burst out in a loud vicious
tone:
"One thing's certain; if he finds anything worth having up there they
will poison him like a dog."
Disconnected though it was, that phrase, as food for thought, was
distinctly worth hearing. We left the river three days afterwards and I
never returned to Sambir; but whatever happened to the protagonist of
my Willems nobody can deny that I have recorded for him a less squalid
fate.
J. C. 1919.
PART I
AN OUTCAST OF THE ISLANDS
CHAPTER ONE
When he stepped off the straight and narrow path of his peculiar
honesty, it was with an inward assertion of unflinching resolve to fall
back again into the monotonous but safe stride of virtue as soon as his
little excursion into the wayside quagmires had produced the desired
effect. It was going to be a short episode--a sentence in brackets, so
to speak--in the flowing tale of his life: a thing of no moment, to be
done unwillingly, yet neatly, and to be quickly forgotten. He imagined
that he could go on afterwards looking at the sunshine, enjoying the
shade, breathing in the perfume of flowers in the small garden before
his house. He fancied that nothing would be changed, that he would be
able as heretofore to tyrannize good-humouredly over his half-caste
wife, to notice with tender contempt his pale yellow child, to patronize
loftily his dark-skinned brother-in-law, who loved pink neckties and
wore patent-leather boots on his little feet, and was so humble before
the white husband of the lucky sister. Those were the delights of his
life, and he was unable to conceive that the moral significance of any
act of his could interfere with the very nature of things, could dim
the light of the sun, could destroy the perfume of the flowers, the
submission of his wife, the smile of his child, the awe-struck respect
of Leonard da Souza and of all the Da Souza family. That family's
admiration was the great luxury of his life. It rounded and completed
his existence in a perpetual assurance of unquestionable superiority.
He loved to breathe the coarse incense they offered before the shrine of
the successful white man; the man that had done them the honour to marry
their daughter, sister, cousin; the rising man sure to climb very
high; the confidential clerk of Hudig & Co. They were a numerous and an
unclean crowd, living in ruined bamboo houses, surrounded by neglected
compounds, on the outskirts of Macassar. He kept them at arm's length
and even further off, perhaps, having no illusions as to their worth.
They were a half-caste, lazy lot, and he saw them as they were--ragged,
lean, unwashed, undersized men of various ages, shuffling about
aimlessly in slippers; motionless old women who looked like monstrous
bags of pink calico stuffed with shapeless lumps of fat, and deposited
askew upon decaying rattan chairs in shady corners of dusty verandahs;
young women, slim and yellow, big-eyed, long-haired, moving languidly
amongst the dirt and rubbish of their dwellings as if every step
they took was going to be their very last. He heard their shrill
quarrellings, the squalling of their children, the grunting of their
pigs; he smelt the odours of the heaps of garbage in their courtyards:
and he was greatly disgusted. But he fed and clothed that shabby
multitude; those degenerate descendants of Portuguese conquerors; he was
their providence; he kept them singing his praises in the midst of their
laziness, of their dirt, of their immense and hopeless squalor: and he
was greatly delighted. They wanted much, but he could give them all they
wanted without ruining himself. In exchange he had their silent fear,
their loquacious love, their noisy veneration. It is a fine thing to be
a providence, and to be told so on every day of one's life. It gives one
a feeling of enormously remote superiority, and Willems revelled in
it. He did not analyze the state of his mind, but probably his greatest
delight lay in the unexpressed but intimate conviction that, should
he close his hand, all those admiring human beings would starve. His
munificence had demoralized them. An easy task. Since he descended
amongst them and married Joanna they had lost the little aptitude and
strength for work they might have had to put forth under the stress of
extreme necessity. They lived now by the grace of his will. This was
power. Willems loved it. In another, and perhaps a lower plane, his days
did not want for their less complex but more obvious pleasures. He liked
the simple games of skill--billiards; also games not so simple, and
calling for quite another kind of skill--poker. He had been the
aptest pupil of a steady-eyed, sententious American, who had drifted
mysteriously into Macassar from the wastes of the Pacific, and, after
knocking about for a time in the eddies of town life, had drifted out
enigmatically into the sunny solitudes of the Indian Ocean. The memory
of the Californian stranger was perpetuated in the game of poker--which
became popular in the capital of Celebes from that time--and in
a powerful cocktail, the recipe for which is transmitted--in the
Kwang-tung dialect--from head boy to head boy of the Chinese servants in
the Sunda Hotel even to this day. Willems was a connoisseur in the drink
and an adept at the game. Of those accomplishments he was moderately
proud. Of the confidence reposed in him by Hudig--the master--he was
boastfully and obtrusively proud. This arose from his great benevolence,
and from an exalted sense of his duty to himself and the world at large.
He experienced that irresistible impulse to impart information which is
inseparable from gross ignorance. There is always some one thing which
the ignorant man knows, and that thing is the only thing worth knowing;
it fills the ignorant man's universe. Willems knew all about himself.
On the day when, with many misgivings, he ran away from a Dutch
East-Indiaman in Samarang roads, he had commenced that study of
himself, of his own ways, of his own abilities, of those fate-compelling
qualities of his which led him toward that lucrative position which
he now filled. Being of a modest and diffident nature, his successes
amazed, almost frightened him, and ended--as he got over the succeeding
shocks of surprise--by making him ferociously conceited. He believed in
his genius and in his knowledge of the world. Others should know of it
also; for their own good and for his greater glory. All those friendly
men who slapped him on the back and greeted him noisily should have
the benefit of his example. For that he must talk. He talked to them
conscientiously. In the afternoon he expounded his theory of success
over the little tables, dipping now and then his moustache in the
crushed ice of the cocktails; in the evening he would often hold forth,
cue in hand, to a young listener across the billiard table. The billiard
balls stood still as if listening also, under the vivid brilliance of
the shaded oil lamps hung low over the cloth; while away in the shadows
of the big room the Chinaman marker would lean wearily against the
wall, the blank mask of his face looking pale under the mahogany
marking-board; his eyelids dropped in the drowsy fatigue of late hours
and in the buzzing monotony of the unintelligible stream of words poured
out by the white man. In a sudden pause of the talk the game would
recommence with a sharp click and go on for a time in the flowing soft
whirr and the subdued thuds as the balls rolled zig-zagging towards the
inevitably successful cannon. Through the big windows and the open doors
the salt dampness of the sea, the vague smell of mould and flowers from
the garden of the hotel drifted in and mingled with the odour of lamp
oil, growing heavier as the night advanced. The players' heads dived
into the light as they bent down for the stroke, springing back again
smartly into the greenish gloom of broad lamp-shades; the clock ticked
methodically; the unmoved Chinaman continuously repeated the score in a
lifeless voice, like a big talking doll--and Willems would win the game.
With a remark that it was getting late, and that he was a married man,
he would say a patronizing good-night and step out into the long,
empty street. At that hour its white dust was like a dazzling streak of
moonlight where the eye sought repose in the dimmer gleam of rare oil
lamps. Willems walked homewards, following the line of walls overtopped
by the luxuriant vegetation of the front gardens. The houses right and
left were hidden behind the black masses of flowering shrubs. Willems
had the street to himself. He would walk in the middle, his shadow
gliding obsequiously before him. He looked down on it complacently.
The shadow of a successful man! He would be slightly dizzy with the
cocktails and with the intoxication of his own glory. As he often told
people, he came east fourteen years ago--a cabin boy. A small boy. His
shadow must have been very small at that time; he thought with a smile
that he was not aware then he had anything--even a shadow--which
he dared call his own. And now he was looking at the shadow of the
confidential clerk of Hudig & Co. going home. How glorious! How good
was life for those that were on the winning side! He had won the game
of life; also the game of billiards. He walked faster, jingling his
winnings, and thinking of the white stone days that had marked the path
of his existence. He thought of the trip to Lombok for ponies--that
first important transaction confided to him by Hudig; then he reviewed
the more important affairs: the quiet deal in opium; the illegal traffic
in gunpowder; the great affair of smuggled firearms, the difficult
business of the Rajah of Goak. He carried that last through by sheer
pluck; he had bearded the savage old ruler in his council room; he had
bribed him with a gilt glass coach, which, rumour said, was used as a
hen-coop now; he had over-persuaded him; he had bested him in every way.
That was the way to get on. He disapproved of the elementary dishonesty
that dips the hand in the cash-box, but one could evade the laws and
push the principles of trade to their furthest consequences. Some call
that cheating. Those are the fools, the weak, the contemptible. The
wise, the strong, the respected, have no scruples. Where there are
scruples there can be no power. On that text he preached often to the
young men. It was his doctrine, and he, himself, was a shining example
of its truth.
Night after night he went home thus, after a day of toil and pleasure,
drunk with the sound of his own voice celebrating his own prosperity. On
his thirtieth birthday he went home thus. He had spent in good company
a nice, noisy evening, and, as he walked along the empty street, the
feeling of his own greatness grew upon him, lifted him above the white
dust of the road, and filled him with exultation and regrets. He had not
done himself justice over there in the hotel, he had not talked enough
about himself, he had not impressed his hearers enough. Never mind. Some
other time. Now he would go home and make his wife get up and listen to
him. Why should she not get up?--and mix a cocktail for him--and listen
patiently. Just so. She shall. If he wanted he could make all the Da
Souza family get up. He had only to say a word and they would all come
and sit silently in their night vestments on the hard, cold ground of
his compound and listen, as long as he wished to go on explaining to
them from the top of the stairs, how great and good he was. They would.
However, his wife would do--for to-night.
His wife! He winced inwardly. A dismal woman with startled eyes and
dolorously drooping mouth, that would listen to him in pained wonder
and mute stillness. She was used to those night-discourses now. She had
rebelled once--at the beginning. Only once. Now, while he sprawled in
the long chair and drank and talked, she would stand at the further
end of the table, her hands resting on the edge, her frightened eyes
watching his lips, without a sound, without a stir, hardly breathing,
till he dismissed her with a contemptuous: "Go to bed, dummy." She would
draw a long breath then and trail out of the room, relieved but unmoved.
Nothing could startle her, make her scold or make her cry. She did
not complain, she did not rebel. That first difference of theirs
was decisive. Too decisive, thought Willems, discontentedly. It had
frightened the soul out of her body apparently. A dismal woman! A
damn'd business altogether! What the devil did he want to go and saddle
himself. . . . Ah! Well! he wanted a home, and the match seemed to
please Hudig, and Hudig gave him the bungalow, that flower-bowered house
to which he was wending his way in the cool moonlight. And he had
the worship of the Da Souza tribe. A man of his stamp could carry off
anything, do anything, aspire to anything. In another five years those
white people who attended the Sunday card-parties of the Governor would
accept him--half-caste wife and all! Hooray! He saw his shadow dart
forward and wave a hat, as big as a rum barrel, at the end of an
arm several yards long. . . . Who shouted hooray? . . . He smiled
shamefacedly to himself, and, pushing his hands deep into his pockets,
walked faster with a suddenly grave face. Behind him--to the left--a
cigar end glowed in the gateway of Mr. Vinck's front yard. Leaning
against one of the brick pillars, Mr. Vinck, the cashier of Hudig &
Co., smoked the last cheroot of the evening. Amongst the shadows of
the trimmed bushes Mrs. Vinck crunched slowly, with measured steps, the
gravel of the circular path before the house.
"There's Willems going home on foot--and drunk I fancy," said Mr. Vinck
over his shoulder. "I saw him jump and wave his hat."
The crunching of the gravel stopped.
"Horrid man," said Mrs. Vinck, calmly. "I have heard he beats his wife."
"Oh no, my dear, no," muttered absently Mr. Vinck, with a vague gesture.
The aspect of Willems as a wife-beater presented to him no interest. How
women do misjudge! If Willems wanted to torture his wife he would have
recourse to less primitive methods. Mr. Vinck knew Willems well, and
believed him to be very able, very smart--objectionably so. As he took
the last quick draws at the stump of his cheroot, Mr. Vinck reflected
that the confidence accorded by Hudig to Willems was open, under the
circumstances, to loyal criticism from Hudig's cashier.
"He is becoming dangerous; he knows too much. He will have to be got rid
of," said Mr. Vinck aloud. But Mrs. Vinck had gone in already, and after
shaking his head he threw away his cheroot and followed her slowly.
Willems walked on homeward weaving the splendid web of his future. The
road to greatness lay plainly before his eyes, straight and shining,
without any obstacle that he could see. He had stepped off the path
of honesty, as he understood it, but he would soon regain it, never
to leave it any more! It was a very small matter. He would soon put it
right again. Meantime his duty was not to be found out, and he trusted
in his skill, in his luck, in his well-established reputation that would
disarm suspicion if anybody dared to suspect. But nobody would dare!
True, he was conscious of a slight deterioration. He had appropriated
temporarily some of Hudig's money. A deplorable necessity. But he judged
himself with the indulgence that should be extended to the weaknesses
of genius. He would make reparation and all would be as before; nobody
would be the loser for it, and he would go on unchecked toward the
brilliant goal of his ambition.
Hudig's partner!
Before going up the steps of his house he stood for awhile, his feet
well apart, chin in hand, contemplating mentally Hudig's future partner.
A glorious occupation. He saw him quite safe; solid as the hills;
deep--deep as an abyss; discreet as the grave.
CHAPTER TWO
The sea, perhaps because of its saltness, roughens the outside but keeps
sweet the kernel of its servants' soul. The old sea; the sea of many
years ago, whose servants were devoted slaves and went from youth to age
or to a sudden grave without needing to open the book of life, because
they could look at eternity reflected on the element that gave the life
and dealt the death. Like a beautiful and unscrupulous woman, the sea
of the past was glorious in its smiles, irresistible in its anger,
capricious, enticing, illogical, irresponsible; a thing to love, a thing
to fear. It cast a spell, it gave joy, it lulled gently into boundless
faith; then with quick and causeless anger it killed. But its cruelty
was redeemed by the charm of its inscrutable mystery, by the immensity
of its promise, by the supreme witchery of its possible favour. Strong
men with childlike hearts were faithful to it, were content to live by
its grace--to die by its will. That was the sea before the time when the
French mind set the Egyptian muscle in motion and produced a dismal
but profitable ditch. Then a great pall of smoke sent out by countless
steam-boats was spread over the restless mirror of the Infinite. The
hand of the engineer tore down the veil of the terrible beauty in
order that greedy and faithless landlubbers might pocket dividends. The
mystery was destroyed. Like all mysteries, it lived only in the hearts
of its worshippers. The hearts changed; the men changed. The once loving
and devoted servants went out armed with fire and iron, and conquering
the fear of their own hearts became a calculating crowd of cold and
exacting masters. The sea of the past was an incomparably beautiful
mistress, with inscrutable face, with cruel and promising eyes. The sea
of to-day is a used-up drudge, wrinkled and defaced by the churned-up
wakes of brutal propellers, robbed of the enslaving charm of its
vastness, stripped of its beauty, of its mystery and of its promise.
Tom Lingard was a master, a lover, a servant of the sea. The sea took
him young, fashioned him body and soul; gave him his fierce aspect, his
loud voice, his fearless eyes, his stupidly guileless heart. Generously
it gave him his absurd faith in himself, his universal love of creation,
his wide indulgence, his contemptuous severity, his straightforward
simplicity of motive and honesty of aim. Having made him what he was,
womanlike, the sea served him humbly and let him bask unharmed in the
sunshine of its terribly uncertain favour. Tom Lingard grew rich on the
sea and by the sea. He loved it with the ardent affection of a lover,
he made light of it with the assurance of perfect mastery, he feared it
with the wise fear of a brave man, and he took liberties with it as a
spoiled child might do with a paternal and good-natured ogre. He was
grateful to it, with the gratitude of an honest heart. His greatest
pride lay in his profound conviction of its faithfulness--in the deep
sense of his unerring knowledge of its treachery.
The little brig Flash was the instrument of Lingard's fortune. They came
north together--both young--out of an Australian port, and after a very
few years there was not a white man in the islands, from Palembang to
Ternate, from Ombawa to Palawan, that did not know Captain Tom and
his lucky craft. He was liked for his reckless generosity, for his
unswerving honesty, and at first was a little feared on account of his
violent temper. Very soon, however, they found him out, and the word
went round that Captain Tom's fury was less dangerous than many a man's
smile. He prospered greatly. After his first--and successful--fight with
the sea robbers, when he rescued, as rumour had it, the yacht of some
big wig from home, somewhere down Carimata way, his great popularity
began. As years went on it grew apace. Always visiting out-of-the-way
places of that part of the world, always in search of new markets for
his cargoes--not so much for profit as for the pleasure of finding
them--he soon became known to the Malays, and by his successful
recklessness in several encounters with pirates, established the
terror of his name. Those white men with whom he had business, and who
naturally were on the look-out for his weaknesses, could easily see that
it was enough to give him his Malay title to flatter him greatly. So
when there was anything to be gained by it, and sometimes out of pure
and unprofitable good nature, they would drop the ceremonious "Captain
Lingard" and address him half seriously as Rajah Laut--the King of the
Sea.
He carried the name bravely on his broad shoulders. He had carried it
many years already when the boy Willems ran barefooted on the deck of
the ship Kosmopoliet IV. in Samarang roads, looking with innocent eyes
on the strange shore and objurgating his immediate surroundings with
blasphemous lips, while his childish brain worked upon the heroic idea
of running away. From the poop of the Flash Lingard saw in the early
morning the Dutch ship get lumberingly under weigh, bound for the
eastern ports. Very late in the evening of the same day he stood on the
quay of the landing canal, ready to go on board of his brig. The night
was starry and clear; the little custom-house building was shut up, and
as the gharry that brought him down disappeared up the long avenue of
dusty trees leading to the town, Lingard thought himself alone on the
quay. He roused up his sleeping boat-crew and stood waiting for them to
get ready, when he felt a tug at his coat and a thin voice said, very
distinctly--
"English captain."
Lingard turned round quickly, and what seemed to be a very lean boy
jumped back with commendable activity.
"Who are you? Where do you spring from?" asked Lingard, in startled
surprise.
From a safe distance the boy pointed toward a cargo lighter moored to
the quay.
"Been hiding there, have you?" said Lingard. "Well, what do you want?
Speak out, confound you. You did not come here to scare me to death, for
fun, did you?"
The boy tried to explain in imperfect English, but very soon Lingard
interrupted him.
"I see," he exclaimed, "you ran away from the big ship that sailed this
morning. Well, why don't you go to your countrymen here?"
"Ship gone only a little way--to Sourabaya. Make me go back to the
ship," explained the boy.
"Best thing for you," affirmed Lingard with conviction.
"No," retorted the boy; "me want stop here; not want go home. Get money
here; home no good."
"This beats all my going a-fishing," commented the astonished Lingard.
"It's money you want? Well! well! And you were not afraid to run away,
you bag of bones, you!"
The boy intimated that he was frightened of nothing but of being sent
back to the ship. Lingard looked at him in meditative silence.
"Come closer," he said at last. He took the boy by the chin, and turning
up his face gave him a searching look. "How old are you?"
"Seventeen."
"There's not much of you for seventeen. Are you hungry?"
"A little."
"Will you come with me, in that brig there?"
The boy moved without a word towards the boat and scrambled into the
bows.
"Knows his place," muttered Lingard to himself as he stepped heavily
into the stern sheets and took up the yoke lines. "Give way there."
The Malay boat crew lay back together, and the gig sprang away from the
quay heading towards the brig's riding light.
Such was the beginning of Willems' career.
Lingard learned in half an hour all that there was of Willems'
commonplace story. Father outdoor clerk of some ship-broker in
Rotterdam; mother dead. The boy quick in learning, but idle in school.
The straitened circumstances in the house filled with small brothers and
sisters, sufficiently clothed and fed but otherwise running wild, while
the disconsolate widower tramped about all day in a shabby overcoat and
imperfect boots on the muddy quays, and in the evening piloted wearily
the half-intoxicated foreign skippers amongst the places of cheap
delights, returning home late, sick with too much smoking and
drinking--for company's sake--with these men, who expected such
attentions in the way of business. Then the offer of the good-natured
captain of Kosmopoliet IV., who was pleased to do something for the
patient and obliging fellow; young Willems' great joy, his still greater
disappointment with the sea that looked so charming from afar, but
proved so hard and exacting on closer acquaintance--and then this
running away by a sudden impulse. The boy was hopelessly at variance
with the spirit of the sea. He had an instinctive contempt for the
honest simplicity of that work which led to nothing he cared for.
Lingard soon found this out. He offered to send him home in an English
ship, but the boy begged hard to be permitted to remain. He wrote a
beautiful hand, became soon perfect in English, was quick at figures;
and Lingard made him useful in that way. As he grew older his trading
instincts developed themselves astonishingly, and Lingard left him
often to trade in one island or another while he, himself, made an
intermediate trip to some out-of-the-way place. On Willems expressing
a wish to that effect, Lingard let him enter Hudig's service. He felt
a little sore at that abandonment because he had attached himself, in
a way, to his protege. Still he was proud of him, and spoke up for him
loyally. At first it was, "Smart boy that--never make a seaman though."
Then when Willems was helping in the trading he referred to him as "that
clever young fellow." Later when Willems became the confidential agent
of Hudig, employed in many a delicate affair, the simple-hearted old
seaman would point an admiring finger at his back and whisper to whoever
stood near at the moment, "Long-headed chap that; deuced long-headed
chap. Look at him. Confidential man of old Hudig. I picked him up in a
ditch, you may say, like a starved cat. Skin and bone. 'Pon my word I
did. And now he knows more than I do about island trading. Fact. I am
not joking. More than I do," he would repeat, seriously, with innocent
pride in his honest eyes.
From the safe elevation of his commercial successes Willems patronized
Lingard. He had a liking for his benefactor, not unmixed with some
disdain for the crude directness of the old fellow's methods of conduct.
There were, however, certain sides of Lingard's character for which
Willems felt a qualified respect. The talkative seaman knew how to
be silent on certain matters that to Willems were very interesting.
Besides, Lingard was rich, and that in itself was enough to compel
Willems' unwilling admiration. In his confidential chats with Hudig,
Willems generally alluded to the benevolent Englishman as the "lucky
old fool" in a very distinct tone of vexation; Hudig would grunt an
unqualified assent, and then the two would look at each other in a
sudden immobility of pupils fixed by a stare of unexpressed thought.
"You can't find out where he gets all that india-rubber, hey Willems?"
Hudig would ask at last, turning away and bending over the papers on his
desk.
"No, Mr. Hudig. Not yet. But I am trying," was Willems' invariable
reply, delivered with a ring of regretful deprecation.
"Try! Always try! You may try! You think yourself clever perhaps,"
rumbled on Hudig, without looking up. "I have been trading with him
twenty--thirty years now. The old fox. And I have tried. Bah!"
He stretched out a short, podgy leg and contemplated the bare instep and
the grass slipper hanging by the toes. "You can't make him drunk?" he
would add, after a pause of stertorous breathing.
"No, Mr. Hudig, I can't really," protested Willems, earnestly.
"Well, don't try. I know him. Don't try," advised the master, and,
bending again over his desk, his staring bloodshot eyes close to the
paper, he would go on tracing laboriously with his thick fingers the
slim unsteady letters of his correspondence, while Willems waited
respectfully for his further good pleasure before asking, with great
deference--
"Any orders, Mr. Hudig?"
"Hm! yes. Go to Bun-Hin yourself and see the dollars of that payment
counted and packed, and have them put on board the mail-boat for
Ternate. She's due here this afternoon."
"Yes, Mr. Hudig."
"And, look here. If the boat is late, leave the case in Bun-Hin's godown
till to-morrow. Seal it up. Eight seals as usual. Don't take it away
till the boat is here."
"No, Mr. Hudig."
"And don't forget about these opium cases. It's for to-night. Use my own
boatmen. Transship them from the Caroline to the Arab barque," went
on the master in his hoarse undertone. "And don't you come to me with
another story of a case dropped overboard like last time," he added,
with sudden ferocity, looking up at his confidential clerk.
"No, Mr. Hudig. I will take care."
"That's all. Tell that pig as you go out that if he doesn't make the
punkah go a little better I will break every bone in his body," finished
up Hudig, wiping his purple face with a red silk handkerchief nearly as
big as a counterpane.
Noiselessly Willems went out, shutting carefully behind him the little
green door through which he passed to the warehouse. Hudig, pen in hand,
listened to him bullying the punkah boy with profane violence, born
of unbounded zeal for the master's comfort, before he returned to his
writing amid the rustling of papers fluttering in the wind sent down by
the punkah that waved in wide sweeps above his head.
Willems would nod familiarly to Mr. Vinck, who had his desk close to the
little door of the private office, and march down the warehouse with an
important air. Mr. Vinck--extreme dislike lurking in every wrinkle of
his gentlemanly countenance--would follow with his eyes the white figure
flitting in the gloom amongst the piles of bales and cases till it
passed out through the big archway into the glare of the street.
CHAPTER THREE
The opportunity and the temptation were too much for Willems, and under
the pressure of sudden necessity he abused that trust which was his
pride, the perpetual sign of his cleverness and a load too heavy for him
to carry. A run of bad luck at cards, the failure of a small speculation
undertaken on his own account, an unexpected demand for money from one
or another member of the Da Souza family--and almost before he was well
aware of it he was off the path of his peculiar honesty. It was such a
faint and ill-defined track that it took him some time to find out how
far he had strayed amongst the brambles of the dangerous wilderness he
had been skirting for so many years, without any other guide than his
own convenience and that doctrine of success which he had found for
himself in the book of life--in those interesting chapters that the
Devil has been permitted to write in it, to test the sharpness of men's
eyesight and the steadfastness of their hearts. For one short, dark and
solitary moment he was dismayed, but he had that courage that will not
scale heights, yet will wade bravely through the mud--if there be no
other road. He applied himself to the task of restitution, and devoted
himself to the duty of not being found out. On his thirtieth birthday he
had almost accomplished the task--and the duty had been faithfully and
cleverly performed. He saw himself safe. Again he could look hopefully
towards the goal of his legitimate ambition. Nobody would dare to
suspect him, and in a few days there would be nothing to suspect. He
was elated. He did not know that his prosperity had touched then its
high-water mark, and that the tide was already on the turn.
Two days afterwards he knew. Mr. Vinck, hearing the rattle of the
door-handle, jumped up from his desk--where he had been tremulously
listening to the loud voices in the private office--and buried his face
in the big safe with nervous haste. For the last time Willems passed
through the little green door leading to Hudig's sanctum, which, during
the past half-hour, might have been taken--from the fiendish noise
within--for the cavern of some wild beast. Willems' troubled eyes took
in the quick impression of men and things as he came out from the place
of his humiliation. He saw the scared expression of the punkah boy; the
Chinamen tellers sitting on their heels with unmovable faces turned up
blankly towards him while their arrested hands hovered over the
little piles of bright guilders ranged on the floor; Mr. Vinck's
shoulder-blades with the fleshy rims of two red ears above. He saw the
long avenue of gin cases stretching from where he stood to the arched
doorway beyond which he would be able to breathe perhaps. A thin rope's
end lay across his path and he saw it distinctly, yet stumbled heavily
over it as if it had been a bar of iron. Then he found himself in the
street at last, but could not find air enough to fill his lungs. He
walked towards his home, gasping.
As the sound of Hudig's insults that lingered in his ears grew fainter
by the lapse of time, the feeling of shame was replaced slowly by a
passion of anger against himself and still more against the stupid
concourse of circumstances that had driven him into his idiotic
indiscretion. Idiotic indiscretion; that is how he defined his guilt
to himself. Could there be anything worse from the point of view of his
undeniable cleverness? What a fatal aberration of an acute mind! He did
not recognize himself there. He must have been mad. That's it. A sudden
gust of madness. And now the work of long years was destroyed utterly.
What would become of him?
Before he could answer that question he found himself in the garden
before his house, Hudig's wedding gift. He looked at it with a vague
surprise to find it there. His past was so utterly gone from him that
the dwelling which belonged to it appeared to him incongruous standing
there intact, neat, and cheerful in the sunshine of the hot afternoon.
The house was a pretty little structure all doors and windows,
surrounded on all sides by the deep verandah supported on slender
columns clothed in the green foliage of creepers, which also fringed the
overhanging eaves of the high-pitched roof. Slowly, Willems mounted the
dozen steps that led to the verandah. He paused at every step. He
must tell his wife. He felt frightened at the prospect, and his alarm
dismayed him. Frightened to face her! Nothing could give him a better
measure of the greatness of the change around him, and in him. Another
man--and another life with the faith in himself gone. He could not be
worth much if he was afraid to face that woman.
He dared not enter the house through the open door of the dining-room,
but stood irresolute by the little work-table where trailed a white
piece of calico, with a needle stuck in it, as if the work had been left
hurriedly. The pink-crested cockatoo started, on his appearance, into
clumsy activity and began to climb laboriously up and down his perch,
calling "Joanna" with indistinct loudness and a persistent screech
that prolonged the last syllable of the name as if in a peal of insane
laughter. The screen in the doorway moved gently once or twice in the
breeze, and each time Willems started slightly, expecting his wife, but
he never lifted his eyes, although straining his ears for the sound of
her footsteps. Gradually he lost himself in his thoughts, in the endless
speculation as to the manner in which she would receive his news--and
his orders. In this preoccupation he almost forgot the fear of her
presence. No doubt she will cry, she will lament, she will be helpless
and frightened and passive as ever. And he would have to drag that limp
weight on and on through the darkness of a spoiled life. Horrible!
Of course he could not abandon her and the child to certain misery or
possible starvation. The wife and the child of Willems. Willems the
successful, the smart; Willems the conf . . . . Pah! And what was
Willems now? Willems the. . . . He strangled the half-born thought, and
cleared his throat to stifle a groan. Ah! Won't they talk to-night in
the billiard-room--his world, where he had been first--all those men to
whom he had been so superciliously condescending. Won't they talk with
surprise, and affected regret, and grave faces, and wise nods. Some of
them owed him money, but he never pressed anybody. Not he. Willems, the
prince of good fellows, they called him. And now they will rejoice, no
doubt, at his downfall. A crowd of imbeciles. In his abasement he was
yet aware of his superiority over those fellows, who were merely honest
or simply not found out yet. A crowd of imbeciles! He shook his fist at
the evoked image of his friends, and the startled parrot fluttered its
wings and shrieked in desperate fright.
In a short glance upwards Willems saw his wife come round the corner of
the house. He lowered his eyelids quickly, and waited silently till she
came near and stood on the other side of the little table. He would
not look at her face, but he could see the red dressing-gown he knew so
well. She trailed through life in that red dressing-gown, with its row
of dirty blue bows down the front, stained, and hooked on awry; a torn
flounce at the bottom following her like a snake as she moved languidly
about, with her hair negligently caught up, and a tangled wisp
straggling untidily down her back. His gaze travelled upwards from bow
to bow, noticing those that hung only by a thread, but it did not
go beyond her chin. He looked at her lean throat, at the obtrusive
collarbone visible in the disarray of the upper part of her attire. He
saw the thin arm and the bony hand clasping the child she carried,
and he felt an immense distaste for those encumbrances of his life. He
waited for her to say something, but as he felt her eyes rest on him in
unbroken silence he sighed and began to speak.
It was a hard task. He spoke slowly, lingering amongst the memories of
this early life in his reluctance to confess that this was the end of
it and the beginning of a less splendid existence. In his conviction of
having made her happiness in the full satisfaction of all material wants
he never doubted for a moment that she was ready to keep him company
on no matter how hard and stony a road. He was not elated by this
certitude. He had married her to please Hudig, and the greatness of his
sacrifice ought to have made her happy without any further exertion on
his part. She had years of glory as Willems' wife, and years of comfort,
of loyal care, and of such tenderness as she deserved. He had guarded
her carefully from any bodily hurt; and of any other suffering he had
no conception. The assertion of his superiority was only another benefit
conferred on her. All this was a matter of course, but he told her all
this so as to bring vividly before her the greatness of her loss. She
was so dull of understanding that she would not grasp it else. And now
it was at an end. They would have to go. Leave this house, leave
this island, go far away where he was unknown. To the English
Strait-Settlements perhaps. He would find an opening there for his
abilities--and juster men to deal with than old Hudig. He laughed
bitterly.
"You have the money I left at home this morning, Joanna?" he asked. "We
will want it all now."
As he spoke those words he thought he was a fine fellow. Nothing new
that. Still, he surpassed there his own expectations. Hang it all, there
are sacred things in life, after all. The marriage tie was one of them,
and he was not the man to break it. The solidity of his principles
caused him great satisfaction, but he did not care to look at his wife,
for all that. He waited for her to speak. Then he would have to console
her; tell her not to be a crying fool; to get ready to go. Go where?
How? When? He shook his head. They must leave at once; that was the
principal thing. He felt a sudden need to hurry up his departure.
"Well, Joanna," he said, a little impatiently---"don't stand there in a
trance. Do you hear? We must. . . ."
He looked up at his wife, and whatever he was going to add remained
unspoken. She was staring at him with her big, slanting eyes, that
seemed to him twice their natural size. The child, its dirty little
face pressed to its mother's shoulder, was sleeping peacefully. The deep
silence of the house was not broken, but rather accentuated, by the
low mutter of the cockatoo, now very still on its perch. As Willems was
looking at Joanna her upper lip was drawn up on one side, giving to her
melancholy face a vicious expression altogether new to his experience.
He stepped back in his surprise.
"Oh! You great man!" she said distinctly, but in a voice that was hardly
above a whisper.
Those words, and still more her tone, stunned him as if somebody had
fired a gun close to his ear. He stared back at her stupidly.
"Oh! you great man!" she repeated slowly, glancing right and left as
if meditating a sudden escape. "And you think that I am going to starve
with you. You are nobody now. You think my mamma and Leonard would let
me go away? And with you! With you," she repeated scornfully, raising
her voice, which woke up the child and caused it to whimper feebly.
"Joanna!" exclaimed Willems.
"Do not speak to me. I have heard what I have waited for all these
years. You are less than dirt, you that have wiped your feet on me. I
have waited for this. I am not afraid now. I do not want you; do not
come near me. Ah-h!" she screamed shrilly, as he held out his hand in an
entreating gesture--"Ah! Keep off me! Keep off me! Keep off!"
She backed away, looking at him with eyes both angry and frightened.
Willems stared motionless, in dumb amazement at the mystery of anger and
revolt in the head of his wife. Why? What had he ever done to her? This
was the day of injustice indeed. First Hudig--and now his wife. He felt
a terror at this hate that had lived stealthily so near him for years.
He tried to speak, but she shrieked again, and it was like a needle
through his heart. Again he raised his hand.
"Help!" called Mrs. Willems, in a piercing voice. "Help!"
"Be quiet! You fool!" shouted Willems, trying to drown the noise of
his wife and child in his own angry accents and rattling violently the
little zinc table in his exasperation.
From under the house, where there were bathrooms and a tool closet,
appeared Leonard, a rusty iron bar in his hand. He called threateningly
from the bottom of the stairs.
"Do not hurt her, Mr. Willems. You are a savage. Not at all like we,
whites."
"You too!" said the bewildered Willems. "I haven't touched her. Is this
a madhouse?" He moved towards the stairs, and Leonard dropped the bar
with a clang and made for the gate of the compound. Willems turned back
to his wife.
"So you expected this," he said. "It is a conspiracy. Who's that sobbing
and groaning in the room? Some more of your precious family. Hey?"
She was more calm now, and putting hastily the crying child in the big
chair walked towards him with sudden fearlessness.
"My mother," she said, "my mother who came to defend me from you--man
from nowhere; a vagabond!"
"You did not call me a vagabond when you hung round my neck--before we
were married," said Willems, contemptuously.
"You took good care that I should not hang round your neck after we
were," she answered, clenching her hands, and putting her face close to
his. "You boasted while I suffered and said nothing. What has become of
your greatness; of our greatness--you were always speaking about? Now
I am going to live on the charity of your master. Yes. That is true. He
sent Leonard to tell me so. And you will go and boast somewhere else,
and starve. So! Ah! I can breathe now! This house is mine."
"Enough!" said Willems, slowly, with an arresting gesture.
She leaped back, the fright again in her eyes, snatched up the child,
pressed it to her breast, and, falling into a chair, drummed insanely
with her heels on the resounding floor of the verandah.
"I shall go," said Willems, steadily. "I thank you. For the first time
in your life you make me happy. You were a stone round my neck; you
understand. I did not mean to tell you that as long as you lived, but
you made me--now. Before I pass this gate you shall be gone from my
mind. You made it very easy. I thank you."
He turned and went down the steps without giving her a glance, while she
sat upright and quiet, with wide-open eyes, the child crying querulously
in her arms. At the gate he came suddenly upon Leonard, who had been
dodging about there and failed to get out of the way in time.
"Do not be brutal, Mr. Willems," said Leonard, hurriedly. "It is
unbecoming between white men with all those natives looking on."
Leonard's legs trembled very much, and his voice wavered between high
and low tones without any attempt at control on his part. "Restrain your
improper violence," he went on mumbling rapidly. "I am a respectable man
of very good family, while you . . . it is regrettable . . . they all
say so . . ."
"What?" thundered Willems. He felt a sudden impulse of mad anger, and
before he knew what had happened he was looking at Leonard da Souza
rolling in the dust at his feet. He stepped over his prostrate
brother-in-law and tore blindly down the street, everybody making way
for the frantic white man.
When he came to himself he was beyond the outskirts of the town,
stumbling on the hard and cracked earth of reaped rice fields. How did
he get there? It was dark. He must get back. As he walked towards the
town slowly, his mind reviewed the events of the day and he felt a sense
of bitter loneliness. His wife had turned him out of his own house.
He had assaulted brutally his brother-in-law, a member of the Da Souza
family--of that band of his worshippers. He did. Well, no! It was some
other man. Another man was coming back. A man without a past, without
a future, yet full of pain and shame and anger. He stopped and looked
round. A dog or two glided across the empty street and rushed past him
with a frightened snarl. He was now in the midst of the Malay quarter
whose bamboo houses, hidden in the verdure of their little gardens, were
dark and silent. Men, women and children slept in there. Human beings.
Would he ever sleep, and where? He felt as if he was the outcast of all
mankind, and as he looked hopelessly round, before resuming his weary
march, it seemed to him that the world was bigger, the night more vast
and more black; but he went on doggedly with his head down as if pushing
his way through some thick brambles. Then suddenly he felt planks under
his feet and, looking up, saw the red light at the end of the jetty. He
walked quite to the end and stood leaning against the post, under the
lamp, looking at the roadstead where two vessels at anchor swayed their
slender rigging amongst the stars. The end of the jetty; and here in one
step more the end of life; the end of everything. Better so. What else
could he do? Nothing ever comes back. He saw it clearly. The respect
and admiration of them all, the old habits and old affections finished
abruptly in the clear perception of the cause of his disgrace. He
saw all this; and for a time he came out of himself, out of his
selfishness--out of the constant preoccupation of his interests and his
desires--out of the temple of self and the concentration of personal
thought.
His thoughts now wandered home. Standing in the tepid stillness of a
starry tropical night he felt the breath of the bitter east wind, he saw
the high and narrow fronts of tall houses under the gloom of a clouded
sky; and on muddy quays he saw the shabby, high-shouldered figure--the
patient, faded face of the weary man earning bread for the children
that waited for him in a dingy home. It was miserable, miserable. But it
would never come back. What was there in common between those things and
Willems the clever, Willems the successful. He had cut himself adrift
from that home many years ago. Better for him then. Better for them now.
All this was gone, never to come back again; and suddenly he shivered,
seeing himself alone in the presence of unknown and terrible dangers.
For the first time in his life he felt afraid of the future, because he
had lost his faith, the faith in his own success. And he had destroyed
it foolishly with his own hands!
CHAPTER FOUR
His meditation which resembled slow drifting into suicide was
interrupted by Lingard, who, with a loud "I've got you at last!" dropped
his hand heavily on Willems' shoulder. This time it was the old seaman
himself going out of his way to pick up the uninteresting waif--all
that there was left of that sudden and sordid shipwreck. To Willems,
the rough, friendly voice was a quick and fleeting relief followed by a
sharper pang of anger and unavailing regret. That voice carried him
back to the beginning of his promising career, the end of which was very
visible now from the jetty where they both stood. He shook himself free
from the friendly grasp, saying with ready bitterness--
"It's all your fault. Give me a push now, do, and send me over. I have
been standing here waiting for help. You are the man--of all men. You
helped at the beginning; you ought to have a hand in the end."
"I have better use for you than to throw you to the fishes," said
Lingard, seriously, taking Willems by the arm and forcing him gently to
walk up the jetty. "I have been buzzing over this town like a bluebottle
fly, looking for you high and low. I have heard a lot. I will tell you
what, Willems; you are no saint, that's a fact. And you have not been
over-wise either. I am not throwing stones," he added, hastily, as
Willems made an effort to get away, "but I am not going to mince
matters. Never could! You keep quiet while I talk. Can't you?"
With a gesture of resignation and a half-stifled groan Willems submitted
to the stronger will, and the two men paced slowly up and down the
resounding planks, while Lingard disclosed to Willems the exact manner
of his undoing. After the first shock Willems lost the faculty of
surprise in the over-powering feeling of indignation. So it was Vinck
and Leonard who had served him so. They had watched him, tracked his
misdeeds, reported them to Hudig. They had bribed obscure Chinamen,
wormed out confidences from tipsy skippers, got at various boatmen,
and had pieced out in that way the story of his irregularities. The
blackness of this dark intrigue filled him with horror. He could
understand Vinck. There was no love lost between them. But Leonard!
Leonard!
"Why, Captain Lingard," he burst out, "the fellow licked my boots."
"Yes, yes, yes," said Lingard, testily, "we know that, and you did your
best to cram your boot down his throat. No man likes that, my boy."
"I was always giving money to all that hungry lot," went on Willems,
passionately. "Always my hand in my pocket. They never had to ask
twice."
"Just so. Your generosity frightened them. They asked themselves
where all that came from, and concluded that it was safer to throw you
overboard. After all, Hudig is a much greater man than you, my friend,
and they have a claim on him also."
"What do you mean, Captain Lingard?"
"What do I mean?" repeated Lingard, slowly. "Why, you are not going to
make me believe you did not know your wife was Hudig's daughter. Come
now!"
Willems stopped suddenly and swayed about.
"Ah! I understand," he gasped. "I never heard . . . Lately I thought
there was . . . But no, I never guessed."
"Oh, you simpleton!" said Lingard, pityingly. "'Pon my word," he
muttered to himself, "I don't believe the fellow knew. Well! well!
Steady now. Pull yourself together. What's wrong there. She is a good
wife to you."
"Excellent wife," said Willems, in a dreary voice, looking far over the
black and scintillating water.
"Very well then," went on Lingard, with increasing friendliness.
"Nothing wrong there. But did you really think that Hudig was marrying
you off and giving you a house and I don't know what, out of love for
you?"
"I had served him well," answered Willems. "How well, you know
yourself--through thick and thin. No matter what work and what risk, I
was always there; always ready."
How well he saw the greatness of his work and the immensity of that
injustice which was his reward. She was that man's daughter!
In the light of this disclosure the facts of the last five years of his
life stood clearly revealed in their full meaning. He had spoken first
to Joanna at the gate of their dwelling as he went to his work in
the brilliant flush of the early morning, when women and flowers are
charming even to the dullest eyes. A most respectable family--two women
and a young man--were his next-door neighbours. Nobody ever came to
their little house but the priest, a native from the Spanish islands,
now and then. The young man Leonard he had met in town, and was
flattered by the little fellow's immense respect for the great Willems.
He let him bring chairs, call the waiters, chalk his cues when playing
billiards, express his admiration in choice words. He even condescended
to listen patiently to Leonard's allusions to "our beloved father," a
man of official position, a government agent in Koti, where he died of
cholera, alas! a victim to duty, like a good Catholic, and a good man.
It sounded very respectable, and Willems approved of those feeling
references. Moreover, he prided himself upon having no colour-prejudices
and no racial antipathies. He consented to drink curacoa one afternoon
on the verandah of Mrs. da Souza's house. He remembered Joanna that day,
swinging in a hammock. She was untidy even then, he remembered, and that
was the only impression he carried away from that visit. He had no time
for love in those glorious days, no time even for a passing fancy, but
gradually he fell into the habit of calling almost every day at that
little house where he was greeted by Mrs. da Souza's shrill voice
screaming for Joanna to come and entertain the gentleman from Hudig
& Co. And then the sudden and unexpected visit of the priest. He
remembered the man's flat, yellow face, his thin legs, his propitiatory
smile, his beaming black eyes, his conciliating manner, his veiled hints
which he did not understand at the time. How he wondered what the man
wanted, and how unceremoniously he got rid of him. And then came vividly
into his recollection the morning when he met again that fellow coming
out of Hudig's office, and how he was amused at the incongruous visit.
And that morning with Hudig! Would he ever forget it? Would he ever
forget his surprise as the master, instead of plunging at once into
business, looked at him thoughtfully before turning, with a furtive
smile, to the papers on the desk? He could hear him now, his nose in the
paper before him, dropping astonishing words in the intervals of wheezy
breathing.
"Heard said . . . called there often . . . most respectable ladies . . .
knew the father very well . . . estimable . . . best thing for a young
man . . . settle down. . . . Personally, very glad to hear . . . thing
arranged. . . . Suitable recognition of valuable services. . . . Best
thing--best thing to do."
And he believed! What credulity! What an ass! Hudig knew the father!
Rather. And so did everybody else probably; all except himself. How
proud he had been of Hudig's benevolent interest in his fate! How proud
he was when invited by Hudig to stay with him at his little house in the
country--where he could meet men, men of official position--as a friend.
Vinck had been green with envy. Oh, yes! He had believed in the best
thing, and took the girl like a gift of fortune. How he boasted to Hudig
of being free from prejudices. The old scoundrel must have been laughing
in his sleeve at his fool of a confidential clerk. He took the girl,
guessing nothing. How could he? There had been a father of some kind
to the common knowledge. Men knew him; spoke about him. A lank man of
hopelessly mixed descent, but otherwise--apparently--unobjectionable.
The shady relations came out afterward, but--with his freedom from
prejudices--he did not mind them, because, with their humble dependence,
they completed his triumphant life. Taken in! taken in! Hudig had found
an easy way to provide for the begging crowd. He had shifted the burden
of his youthful vagaries on to the shoulders of his confidential clerk;
and while he worked for the master, the master had cheated him; had
stolen his very self from him. He was married. He belonged to that
woman, no matter what she might do! . . . Had sworn . . . for all life!
. . . Thrown himself away. . . . And that man dared this very morning
call him a thief! Damnation!
"Let go, Lingard!" he shouted, trying to get away by a sudden jerk from
the watchful old seaman. "Let me go and kill that . . ."
"No you don't!" panted Lingard, hanging on manfully. "You want to kill,
do you? You lunatic. Ah!--I've got you now! Be quiet, I say!"
They struggled violently, Lingard forcing Willems slowly towards the
guard-rail. Under their feet the jetty sounded like a drum in the quiet
night. On the shore end the native caretaker of the wharf watched the
combat, squatting behind the safe shelter of some big cases. The next
day he informed his friends, with calm satisfaction, that two drunken
white men had fought on the jetty.
It had been a great fight. They fought without arms, like wild beasts,
after the manner of white men. No! nobody was killed, or there would
have been trouble and a report to make. How could he know why they
fought? White men have no reason when they are like that.
Just as Lingard was beginning to fear that he would be unable to
restrain much longer the violence of the younger man, he felt Willems'
muscles relaxing, and took advantage of this opportunity to pin him, by
a last effort, to the rail. They both panted heavily, speechless, their
faces very close.
"All right," muttered Willems at last. "Don't break my back over this
infernal rail. I will be quiet."
"Now you are reasonable," said Lingard, much relieved. "What made you
fly into that passion?" he asked, leading him back to the end of the
jetty, and, still holding him prudently with one hand, he fumbled with
the other for his whistle and blew a shrill and prolonged blast. Over
the smooth water of the roadstead came in answer a faint cry from one of
the ships at anchor.
"My boat will be here directly," said Lingard. "Think of what you are
going to do. I sail to-night."
"What is there for me to do, except one thing?" said Willems, gloomily.
"Look here," said Lingard; "I picked you up as a boy, and consider
myself responsible for you in a way. You took your life into your own
hands many years ago--but still . . ."
He paused, listening, till he heard the regular grind of the oars in the
rowlocks of the approaching boat then went on again.
"I have made it all right with Hudig. You owe him nothing now. Go back
to your wife. She is a good woman. Go back to her."
"Why, Captain Lingard," exclaimed Willems, "she . . ."
"It was most affecting," went on Lingard, without heeding him. "I
went to your house to look for you and there I saw her despair. It was
heart-breaking. She called for you; she entreated me to find you. She
spoke wildly, poor woman, as if all this was her fault."
Willems listened amazed. The blind old idiot! How queerly he
misunderstood! But if it was true, if it was even true, the very idea of
seeing her filled his soul with intense loathing. He did not break
his oath, but he would not go back to her. Let hers be the sin of that
separation; of the sacred bond broken. He revelled in the extreme purity
of his heart, and he would not go back to her. Let her come back to him.
He had the comfortable conviction that he would never see her again,
and that through her own fault only. In this conviction he told himself
solemnly that if she would come to him he would receive her with
generous forgiveness, because such was the praiseworthy solidity of his
principles. But he hesitated whether he would or would not disclose to
Lingard the revolting completeness of his humiliation. Turned out of his
house--and by his wife; that woman who hardly dared to breathe in his
presence, yesterday. He remained perplexed and silent. No. He lacked the
courage to tell the ignoble story.
As the boat of the brig appeared suddenly on the black water close to
the jetty, Lingard broke the painful silence.
"I always thought," he said, sadly, "I always thought you were somewhat
heartless, Willems, and apt to cast adrift those that thought most of
you. I appeal to what is best in you; do not abandon that woman."
"I have not abandoned her," answered Willems, quickly, with conscious
truthfulness. "Why should I? As you so justly observed, she has been a
good wife to me. A very good, quiet, obedient, loving wife, and I love
her as much as she loves me. Every bit. But as to going back now, to
that place where I . . . To walk again amongst those men who yesterday
were ready to crawl before me, and then feel on my back the sting of
their pitying or satisfied smiles--no! I can't. I would rather hide from
them at the bottom of the sea," he went on, with resolute energy. "I
don't think, Captain Lingard," he added, more quietly, "I don't think
that you realize what my position was there."
In a wide sweep of his hand he took in the sleeping shore from north to
south, as if wishing it a proud and threatening good-bye. For a short
moment he forgot his downfall in the recollection of his brilliant
triumphs. Amongst the men of his class and occupation who slept in those
dark houses he had been indeed the first.
"It is hard," muttered Lingard, pensively. "But whose the fault? Whose
the fault?"
"Captain Lingard!" cried Willems, under the sudden impulse of a
felicitous inspiration, "if you leave me here on this jetty--it's
murder. I shall never return to that place alive, wife or no wife. You
may just as well cut my throat at once."
The old seaman started.
"Don't try to frighten me, Willems," he said, with great severity, and
paused.
Above the accents of Willems' brazen despair he heard, with considerable
uneasiness, the whisper of his own absurd conscience. He meditated for
awhile with an irresolute air.
"I could tell you to go and drown yourself, and be damned to you," he
said, with an unsuccessful assumption of brutality in his manner, "but
I won't. We are responsible for one another--worse luck. I am almost
ashamed of myself, but I can understand your dirty pride. I can!
By . . ."
He broke off with a loud sigh and walked briskly to the steps, at the
bottom of which lay his boat, rising and falling gently on the slight
and invisible swell.
"Below there! Got a lamp in the boat? Well, light it and bring it up,
one of you. Hurry now!"
He tore out a page of his pocketbook, moistened his pencil with great
energy and waited, stamping his feet impatiently.
"I will see this thing through," he muttered to himself. "And I will
have it all square and ship-shape; see if I don't! Are you going to
bring that lamp, you son of a crippled mud-turtle? I am waiting."
The gleam of the light on the paper placated his professional anger, and
he wrote rapidly, the final dash of his signature curling the paper up
in a triangular tear.
"Take that to this white Tuan's house. I will send the boat back for you
in half an hour."
The coxswain raised his lamp deliberately to Willem's face.
"This Tuan? Tau! I know."
"Quick then!" said Lingard, taking the lamp from him--and the man went
off at a run.
"Kassi mem! To the lady herself," called Lingard after him.
Then, when the man disappeared, he turned to Willems.
"I have written to your wife," he said. "If you do not return for good,
you do not go back to that house only for another parting. You must come
as you stand. I won't have that poor woman tormented. I will see to it
that you are not separated for long. Trust me!"
Willems shivered, then smiled in the darkness.
"No fear of that," he muttered, enigmatically. "I trust you implicitly,
Captain Lingard," he added, in a louder tone.
Lingard led the way down the steps, swinging the lamp and speaking over
his shoulder.
"It is the second time, Willems, I take you in hand. Mind it is the
last. The second time; and the only difference between then and now is
that you were bare-footed then and have boots now. In fourteen years.
With all your smartness! A poor result that. A very poor result."
He stood for awhile on the lowest platform of the steps, the light of
the lamp falling on the upturned face of the stroke oar, who held the
gunwale of the boat close alongside, ready for the captain to step in.
"You see," he went on, argumentatively, fumbling about the top of
the lamp, "you got yourself so crooked amongst those 'longshore
quill-drivers that you could not run clear in any way. That's what comes
of such talk as yours, and of such a life. A man sees so much falsehood
that he begins to lie to himself. Pah!" he said, in disgust, "there's
only one place for an honest man. The sea, my boy, the sea! But you
never would; didn't think there was enough money in it; and now--look!"
He blew the light out, and, stepping into the boat, stretched quickly
his hand towards Willems, with friendly care. Willems sat by him in
silence, and the boat shoved off, sweeping in a wide circle towards the
brig.
"Your compassion is all for my wife, Captain Lingard," said Willems,
moodily. "Do you think I am so very happy?"
"No! no!" said Lingard, heartily. "Not a word more shall pass my lips.
I had to speak my mind once, seeing that I knew you from a child, so
to speak. And now I shall forget; but you are young yet. Life is very
long," he went on, with unconscious sadness; "let this be a lesson to
you."
He laid his hand affectionately on Willems' shoulder, and they both sat
silent till the boat came alongside the ship's ladder.
When on board Lingard gave orders to his mate, and leading Willems on
the poop, sat on the breech of one of the brass six-pounders with
which his vessel was armed. The boat went off again to bring back the
messenger. As soon as it was seen returning dark forms appeared on the
brig's spars; then the sails fell in festoons with a swish of their
heavy folds, and hung motionless under the yards in the dead calm of
the clear and dewy night. From the forward end came the clink of the
windlass, and soon afterwards the hail of the chief mate informing
Lingard that the cable was hove short.
"Hold on everything," hailed back Lingard; "we must wait for the
land-breeze before we let go our hold of the ground."
He approached Willems, who sat on the skylight, his body bent down, his
head low, and his hands hanging listlessly between his knees.
"I am going to take you to Sambir," he said. "You've never heard of the
place, have you? Well, it's up that river of mine about which people
talk so much and know so little. I've found out the entrance for a ship
of Flash's size. It isn't easy. You'll see. I will show you. You have
been at sea long enough to take an interest. . . . Pity you didn't stick
to it. Well, I am going there. I have my own trading post in the place.
Almayer is my partner. You knew him when he was at Hudig's. Oh, he lives
there as happy as a king. D'ye see, I have them all in my pocket. The
rajah is an old friend of mine. My word is law--and I am the only
trader. No other white man but Almayer had ever been in that settlement.
You will live quietly there till I come back from my next cruise to the
westward. We shall see then what can be done for you. Never fear. I have
no doubt my secret will be safe with you. Keep mum about my river when
you get amongst the traders again. There's many would give their ears
for the knowledge of it. I'll tell you something: that's where I get all
my guttah and rattans. Simply inexhaustible, my boy."
While Lingard spoke Willems looked up quickly, but soon his head fell on
his breast in the discouraging certitude that the knowledge he and Hudig
had wished for so much had come to him too late. He sat in a listless
attitude.
"You will help Almayer in his trading if you have a heart for it,"
continued Lingard, "just to kill time till I come back for you. Only six
weeks or so."
Over their heads the damp sails fluttered noisily in the first faint
puff of the breeze; then, as the airs freshened, the brig tended to the
wind, and the silenced canvas lay quietly aback. The mate spoke with low
distinctness from the shadows of the quarter-deck.
"There's the breeze. Which way do you want to cast her, Captain
Lingard?"
Lingard's eyes, that had been fixed aloft, glanced down at the dejected
figure of the man sitting on the skylight. He seemed to hesitate for a
minute.
"To the northward, to the northward," he answered, testily, as if
annoyed at his own fleeting thought, "and bear a hand there. Every puff
of wind is worth money in these seas."
He remained motionless, listening to the rattle of blocks and the
creaking of trusses as the head-yards were hauled round. Sail was made
on the ship and the windlass manned again while he stood still, lost in
thought. He only roused himself when a barefooted seacannie glided past
him silently on his way to the wheel.
"Put the helm aport! Hard over!" he said, in his harsh sea-voice, to the
man whose face appeared suddenly out of the darkness in the circle of
light thrown upwards from the binnacle lamps.
The anchor was secured, the yards trimmed, and the brig began to move
out of the roadstead. The sea woke up under the push of the sharp
cutwater, and whispered softly to the gliding craft in that tender and
rippling murmur in which it speaks sometimes to those it nurses and
loves. Lingard stood by the taff-rail listening, with a pleased smile
till the Flash began to draw close to the only other vessel in the
anchorage.
"Here, Willems," he said, calling him to his side, "d'ye see that barque
here? That's an Arab vessel. White men have mostly given up the game,
but this fellow drops in my wake often, and lives in hopes of cutting me
out in that settlement. Not while I live, I trust. You see, Willems,
I brought prosperity to that place. I composed their quarrels, and saw
them grow under my eyes. There's peace and happiness there. I am more
master there than his Dutch Excellency down in Batavia ever will be when
some day a lazy man-of-war blunders at last against the river. I mean to
keep the Arabs out of it, with their lies and their intrigues. I shall
keep the venomous breed out, if it costs me my fortune."
The Flash drew quietly abreast of the barque, and was beginning to drop
it astern when a white figure started up on the poop of the Arab vessel,
and a voice called out--
"Greeting to the Rajah Laut!"
"To you greeting!" answered Lingard, after a moment of hesitating
surprise. Then he turned to Willems with a grim smile. "That's Abdulla's
voice," he said. "Mighty civil all of a sudden, isn't he? I wonder
what it means. Just like his impudence! No matter! His civility or his
impudence are all one to me. I know that this fellow will be under way
and after me like a shot. I don't care! I have the heels of anything
that floats in these seas," he added, while his proud and loving glance
ran over and rested fondly amongst the brig's lofty and graceful spars.
CHAPTER FIVE
"It was the writing on his forehead," said Babalatchi, adding a couple
of small sticks to the little fire by which he was squatting, and
without looking at Lakamba who lay down supported on his elbow on the
other side of the embers. "It was written when he was born that he
should end his life in darkness, and now he is like a man walking in a
black night--with his eyes open, yet seeing not. I knew him well when he
had slaves, and many wives, and much merchandise, and trading praus, and
praus for fighting. Hai--ya! He was a great fighter in the days before
the breath of the Merciful put out the light in his eyes. He was a
pilgrim, and had many virtues: he was brave, his hand was open, and he
was a great robber. For many years he led the men that drank blood on
the sea: first in prayer and first in fight! Have I not stood behind
him when his face was turned to the West? Have I not watched by his side
ships with high masts burning in a straight flame on the calm water?
Have I not followed him on dark nights amongst sleeping men that woke up
only to die? His sword was swifter than the fire from Heaven, and struck
before it flashed. Hai! Tuan! Those were the days and that was a leader,
and I myself was younger; and in those days there were not so many
fireships with guns that deal fiery death from afar. Over the hill and
over the forest--O! Tuan Lakamba! they dropped whistling fireballs into
the creek where our praus took refuge, and where they dared not follow
men who had arms in their hands."
He shook his head with mournful regret and threw another handful of
fuel on the fire. The burst of clear flame lit up his broad, dark, and
pock-marked face, where the big lips, stained with betel-juice, looked
like a deep and bleeding gash of a fresh wound. The reflection of the
firelight gleamed brightly in his solitary eye, lending it for a moment
a fierce animation that died out together with the short-lived flame.
With quick touches of his bare hands he raked the embers into a heap,
then, wiping the warm ash on his waistcloth--his only garment--he
clasped his thin legs with his entwined fingers, and rested his chin
on his drawn-up knees. Lakamba stirred slightly without changing his
position or taking his eyes off the glowing coals, on which they had
been fixed in dreamy immobility.
"Yes," went on Babalatchi, in a low monotone, as if pursuing aloud a
train of thought that had its beginning in the silent contemplation of
the unstable nature of earthly greatness--"yes. He has been rich and
strong, and now he lives on alms: old, feeble, blind, and without
companions, but for his daughter. The Rajah Patalolo gives him rice, and
the pale woman--his daughter--cooks it for him, for he has no slave."
"I saw her from afar," muttered Lakamba, disparagingly. "A she-dog with
white teeth, like a woman of the Orang-Putih."
"Right, right," assented Babalatchi; "but you have not seen her near.
Her mother was a woman from the west; a Baghdadi woman with veiled face.
Now she goes uncovered, like our women do, for she is poor and he is
blind, and nobody ever comes near them unless to ask for a charm or a
blessing and depart quickly for fear of his anger and of the Rajah's
hand. You have not been on that side of the river?"
"Not for a long time. If I go . . ."
"True! true!" interrupted Babalatchi, soothingly, "but I go often
alone--for your good--and look--and listen. When the time comes; when we
both go together towards the Rajah's campong, it will be to enter--and
to remain."
Lakamba sat up and looked at Babalatchi gloomily.
"This is good talk, once, twice; when it is heard too often it becomes
foolish, like the prattle of children."
"Many, many times have I seen the cloudy sky and have heard the wind of
the rainy seasons," said Babalatchi, impressively.
"And where is your wisdom? It must be with the wind and the clouds of
seasons past, for I do not hear it in your talk."
"Those are the words of the ungrateful!" shouted Babalatchi, with sudden
exasperation. "Verily, our only refuge is with the One, the Mighty, the
Redresser of . . ."
"Peace! Peace!" growled the startled Lakamba. "It is but a friend's
talk."
Babalatchi subsided into his former attitude, muttering to himself.
After awhile he went on again in a louder voice--
"Since the Rajah Laut left another white man here in Sambir, the
daughter of the blind Omar el Badavi has spoken to other ears than
mine."
"Would a white man listen to a beggar's daughter?" said Lakamba,
doubtingly.
"Hai! I have seen . . ."
"And what did you see? O one-eyed one!" exclaimed Lakamba,
contemptuously.
"I have seen the strange white man walking on the narrow path before
the sun could dry the drops of dew on the bushes, and I have heard the
whisper of his voice when he spoke through the smoke of the morning fire
to that woman with big eyes and a pale skin. Woman in body, but in heart
a man! She knows no fear and no shame. I have heard her voice too."
He nodded twice at Lakamba sagaciously and gave himself up to silent
musing, his solitary eye fixed immovably upon the straight wall of
forest on the opposite bank. Lakamba lay silent, staring vacantly. Under
them Lingard's own river rippled softly amongst the piles supporting the
bamboo platform of the little watch-house before which they were lying.
Behind the house the ground rose in a gentle swell of a low hill cleared
of the big timber, but thickly overgrown with the grass and bushes, now
withered and burnt up in the long drought of the dry season. This old
rice clearing, which had been several years lying fallow, was framed
on three sides by the impenetrable and tangled growth of the untouched
forest, and on the fourth came down to the muddy river bank. There
was not a breath of wind on the land or river, but high above, in the
transparent sky, little clouds rushed past the moon, now appearing in
her diffused rays with the brilliance of silver, now obscuring her face
with the blackness of ebony. Far away, in the middle of the river, a
fish would leap now and then with a short splash, the very loudness of
which measured the profundity of the overpowering silence that swallowed
up the sharp sound suddenly.
Lakamba dozed uneasily off, but the wakeful Babalatchi sat thinking
deeply, sighing from time to time, and slapping himself over his naked
torso incessantly in a vain endeavour to keep off an occasional and
wandering mosquito that, rising as high as the platform above the swarms
of the riverside, would settle with a ping of triumph on the unexpected
victim. The moon, pursuing her silent and toilsome path, attained
her highest elevation, and chasing the shadow of the roof-eaves from
Lakamba's face, seemed to hang arrested over their heads. Babalatchi
revived the fire and woke up his companion, who sat up yawning and
shivering discontentedly.
Babalatchi spoke again in a voice which was like the murmur of a brook
that runs over the stones: low, monotonous, persistent; irresistible
in its power to wear out and to destroy the hardest obstacles. Lakamba
listened, silent but interested. They were Malay adventurers; ambitious
men of that place and time; the Bohemians of their race. In the early
days of the settlement, before the ruler Patalolo had shaken off his
allegiance to the Sultan of Koti, Lakamba appeared in the river with
two small trading vessels. He was disappointed to find already some
semblance of organization amongst the settlers of various races who
recognized the unobtrusive sway of old Patalolo, and he was not politic
enough to conceal his disappointment. He declared himself to be a man
from the east, from those parts where no white man ruled, and to be of
an oppressed race, but of a princely family. And truly enough he had
all the gifts of an exiled prince. He was discontented, ungrateful,
turbulent; a man full of envy and ready for intrigue, with brave words
and empty promises for ever on his lips. He was obstinate, but his will
was made up of short impulses that never lasted long enough to carry him
to the goal of his ambition. Received coldly by the suspicious Patalolo,
he persisted--permission or no permission--in clearing the ground on
a good spot some fourteen miles down the river from Sambir, and built
himself a house there, which he fortified by a high palisade. As he had
many followers and seemed very reckless, the old Rajah did not think
it prudent at the time to interfere with him by force. Once settled, he
began to intrigue. The quarrel of Patalolo with the Sultan of Koti was
of his fomenting, but failed to produce the result he expected because
the Sultan could not back him up effectively at such a great distance.
Disappointed in that scheme, he promptly organized an outbreak of the
Bugis settlers, and besieged the old Rajah in his stockade with much
noisy valour and a fair chance of success; but Lingard then appeared on
the scene with the armed brig, and the old seaman's hairy forefinger,
shaken menacingly in his face, quelled his martial ardour. No man cared
to encounter the Rajah Laut, and Lakamba, with momentary resignation,
subsided into a half-cultivator, half-trader, and nursed in his
fortified house his wrath and his ambition, keeping it for use on a
more propitious occasion. Still faithful to his character of a
prince-pretender, he would not recognize the constituted authorities,
answering sulkily the Rajah's messenger, who claimed the tribute for the
cultivated fields, that the Rajah had better come and take it himself.
By Lingard's advice he was left alone, notwithstanding his rebellious
mood; and for many days he lived undisturbed amongst his wives and
retainers, cherishing that persistent and causeless hope of better
times, the possession of which seems to be the universal privilege of
exiled greatness.
But the passing days brought no change. The hope grew faint and the
hot ambition burnt itself out, leaving only a feeble and expiring spark
amongst a heap of dull and tepid ashes of indolent acquiescence with the
decrees of Fate, till Babalatchi fanned it again into a bright flame.
Babalatchi had blundered upon the river while in search of a safe refuge
for his disreputable head.
He was a vagabond of the seas, a true Orang-Laut, living by rapine and
plunder of coasts and ships in his prosperous days; earning his living
by honest and irksome toil when the days of adversity were upon him. So,
although at times leading the Sulu rovers, he had also served as Serang
of country ships, and in that wise had visited the distant seas,
beheld the glories of Bombay, the might of the Mascati Sultan; had even
struggled in a pious throng for the privilege of touching with his lips
the Sacred Stone of the Holy City. He gathered experience and wisdom in
many lands, and after attaching himself to Omar el Badavi, he affected
great piety (as became a pilgrim), although unable to read the inspired
words of the Prophet. He was brave and bloodthirsty without any
affection, and he hated the white men who interfered with the manly
pursuits of throat-cutting, kidnapping, slave-dealing, and fire-raising,
that were the only possible occupation for a true man of the sea. He
found favour in the eyes of his chief, the fearless Omar el Badavi, the
leader of Brunei rovers, whom he followed with unquestioning loyalty
through the long years of successful depredation. And when that long
career of murder, robbery and violence received its first serious check
at the hands of white men, he stood faithfully by his chief, looked
steadily at the bursting shells, was undismayed by the flames of the
burning stronghold, by the death of his companions, by the shrieks
of their women, the wailing of their children; by the sudden ruin and
destruction of all that he deemed indispensable to a happy and glorious
existence. The beaten ground between the houses was slippery with blood,
and the dark mangroves of the muddy creeks were full of sighs of the
dying men who were stricken down before they could see their enemy. They
died helplessly, for into the tangled forest there was no escape, and
their swift praus, in which they had so often scoured the coast and the
seas, now wedged together in the narrow creek, were burning fiercely.
Babalatchi, with the clear perception of the coming end, devoted all his
energies to saving if it was but only one of them. He succeeded in time.
When the end came in the explosion of the stored powder-barrels, he was
ready to look for his chief. He found him half dead and totally blinded,
with nobody near him but his daughter Aissa:--the sons had fallen
earlier in the day, as became men of their courage. Helped by the girl
with the steadfast heart, Babalatchi carried Omar on board the light
prau and succeeded in escaping, but with very few companions only. As
they hauled their craft into the network of dark and silent creeks, they
could hear the cheering of the crews of the man-of-war's boats dashing
to the attack of the rover's village. Aissa, sitting on the high
after-deck, her father's blackened and bleeding head in her lap, looked
up with fearless eyes at Babalatchi. "They shall find only smoke, blood
and dead men, and women mad with fear there, but nothing else living,"
she said, mournfully. Babalatchi, pressing with his right hand the deep
gash on his shoulder, answered sadly: "They are very strong. When we
fight with them we can only die. Yet," he added, menacingly--"some of us
still live! Some of us still live!"
For a short time he dreamed of vengeance, but his dream was dispelled by
the cold reception of the Sultan of Sulu, with whom they sought refuge
at first and who gave them only a contemptuous and grudging hospitality.
While Omar, nursed by Aissa, was recovering from his wounds, Babalatchi
attended industriously before the exalted Presence that had extended to
them the hand of Protection. For all that, when Babalatchi spoke into
the Sultan's ear certain proposals of a great and profitable raid, that
was to sweep the islands from Ternate to Acheen, the Sultan was very
angry. "I know you, you men from the west," he exclaimed, angrily. "Your
words are poison in a Ruler's ears. Your talk is of fire and murder
and booty--but on our heads falls the vengeance of the blood you drink.
Begone!"
There was nothing to be done. Times were changed. So changed that, when
a Spanish frigate appeared before the island and a demand was sent
to the Sultan to deliver Omar and his companions, Babalatchi was
not surprised to hear that they were going to be made the victims of
political expediency. But from that sane appreciation of danger to tame
submission was a very long step. And then began Omar's second flight. It
began arms in hand, for the little band had to fight in the night on
the beach for the possession of the small canoes in which those that
survived got away at last. The story of that escape lives in the hearts
of brave men even to this day. They talk of Babalatchi and of the strong
woman who carried her blind father through the surf under the fire
of the warship from the north. The companions of that piratical and
son-less Aeneas are dead now, but their ghosts wander over the waters
and the islands at night--after the manner of ghosts--and haunt the
fires by which sit armed men, as is meet for the spirits of fearless
warriors who died in battle. There they may hear the story of their own
deeds, of their own courage, suffering and death, on the lips of living
men. That story is told in many places. On the cool mats in breezy
verandahs of Rajahs' houses it is alluded to disdainfully by impassive
statesmen, but amongst armed men that throng the courtyards it is a tale
which stills the murmur of voices and the tinkle of anklets; arrests the
passage of the siri-vessel, and fixes the eyes in absorbed gaze. They
talk of the fight, of the fearless woman, of the wise man; of long
suffering on the thirsty sea in leaky canoes; of those who died. . . .
Many died. A few survived. The chief, the woman, and another one who
became great.
There was no hint of incipient greatness in Babalatchi's unostentatious
arrival in Sambir. He came with Omar and Aissa in a small prau loaded
with green cocoanuts, and claimed the ownership of both vessel and
cargo. How it came to pass that Babalatchi, fleeing for his life in a
small canoe, managed to end his hazardous journey in a vessel full of a
valuable commodity, is one of those secrets of the sea that baffle
the most searching inquiry. In truth nobody inquired much. There were
rumours of a missing trading prau belonging to Menado, but they were
vague and remained mysterious. Babalatchi told a story which--it must be
said in justice to Patalolo's knowledge of the world--was not believed.
When the Rajah ventured to state his doubts, Babalatchi asked him in
tones of calm remonstrance whether he could reasonably suppose that two
oldish men--who had only one eye amongst them--and a young woman were
likely to gain possession of anything whatever by violence? Charity was
a virtue recommended by the Prophet. There were charitable people, and
their hand was open to the deserving. Patalolo wagged his aged head
doubtingly, and Babalatchi withdrew with a shocked mien and put himself
forthwith under Lakamba's protection. The two men who completed the
prau's crew followed him into that magnate's campong. The blind
Omar, with Aissa, remained under the care of the Rajah, and the Rajah
confiscated the cargo. The prau hauled up on the mud-bank, at the
junction of the two branches of the Pantai, rotted in the rain, warped
in the sun, fell to pieces and gradually vanished into the smoke of
household fires of the settlement. Only a forgotten plank and a rib or
two, sticking neglected in the shiny ooze for a long time, served to
remind Babalatchi during many months that he was a stranger in the land.
Otherwise, he felt perfectly at home in Lakamba's establishment, where
his peculiar position and influence were quickly recognized and soon
submitted to even by the women. He had all a true vagabond's pliability
to circumstances and adaptiveness to momentary surroundings. In his
readiness to learn from experience that contempt for early principles
so necessary to a true statesman, he equalled the most successful
politicians of any age; and he had enough persuasiveness and firmness
of purpose to acquire a complete mastery over Lakamba's vacillating
mind--where there was nothing stable but an all-pervading discontent.
He kept the discontent alive, he rekindled the expiring ambition, he
moderated the poor exile's not unnatural impatience to attain a high
and lucrative position. He--the man of violence--deprecated the use of
force, for he had a clear comprehension of the difficult situation. From
the same cause, he--the hater of white men--would to some extent admit
the eventual expediency of Dutch protection. But nothing should be done
in a hurry. Whatever his master Lakamba might think, there was no use in
poisoning old Patalolo, he maintained. It could be done, of course;
but what then? As long as Lingard's influence was paramount--as long
as Almayer, Lingard's representative, was the only great trader of
the settlement, it was not worth Lakamba's while--even if it had been
possible--to grasp the rule of the young state. Killing Almayer and
Lingard was so difficult and so risky that it might be dismissed as
impracticable. What was wanted was an alliance; somebody to set up
against the white men's influence--and somebody who, while favourable to
Lakamba, would at the same time be a person of a good standing with
the Dutch authorities. A rich and considered trader was wanted. Such a
person once firmly established in Sambir would help them to oust the old
Rajah, to remove him from power or from life if there was no other way.
Then it would be time to apply to the Orang Blanda for a flag; for a
recognition of their meritorious services; for that protection which
would make them safe for ever! The word of a rich and loyal trader would
mean something with the Ruler down in Batavia. The first thing to do
was to find such an ally and to induce him to settle in Sambir. A
white trader would not do. A white man would not fall in with their
ideas--would not be trustworthy. The man they wanted should be rich,
unscrupulous, have many followers, and be a well-known personality
in the islands. Such a man might be found amongst the Arab traders.
Lingard's jealousy, said Babalatchi, kept all the traders out of the
river. Some were afraid, and some did not know how to get there; others
ignored the very existence of Sambir; a good many did not think it
worth their while to run the risk of Lingard's enmity for the doubtful
advantage of trade with a comparatively unknown settlement. The great
majority were undesirable or untrustworthy. And Babalatchi mentioned
regretfully the men he had known in his young days: wealthy, resolute,
courageous, reckless, ready for any enterprise! But why lament the past
and speak about the dead? There is one man--living--great--not far
off . . .
Such was Babalatchi's line of policy laid before his ambitious
protector. Lakamba assented, his only objection being that it was
very slow work. In his extreme desire to grasp dollars and power, the
unintellectual exile was ready to throw himself into the arms of
any wandering cut-throat whose help could be secured, and Babalatchi
experienced great difficulty in restraining him from unconsidered
violence. It would not do to let it be seen that they had any hand in
introducing a new element into the social and political life of Sambir.
There was always a possibility of failure, and in that case Lingard's
vengeance would be swift and certain. No risk should be run. They must
wait.
Meantime he pervaded the settlement, squatting in the course of each
day by many household fires, testing the public temper and public
opinion--and always talking about his impending departure.
At night he would often take Lakamba's smallest canoe and depart
silently to pay mysterious visits to his old chief on the other side of
the river. Omar lived in odour of sanctity under the wing of Patalolo.
Between the bamboo fence, enclosing the houses of the Rajah, and the
wild forest, there was a banana plantation, and on its further edge
stood two little houses built on low piles under a few precious fruit
trees that grew on the banks of a clear brook, which, bubbling up behind
the house, ran in its short and rapid course down to the big river.
Along the brook a narrow path led through the dense second growth of
a neglected clearing to the banana plantation and to the houses in it
which the Rajah had given for residence to Omar. The Rajah was greatly
impressed by Omar's ostentatious piety, by his oracular wisdom, by
his many misfortunes, by the solemn fortitude with which he bore his
affliction. Often the old ruler of Sambir would visit informally the
blind Arab and listen gravely to his talk during the hot hours of an
afternoon. In the night, Babalatchi would call and interrupt Omar's
repose, unrebuked. Aissa, standing silently at the door of one of the
huts, could see the two old friends as they sat very still by the fire
in the middle of the beaten ground between the two houses, talking in
an indistinct murmur far into the night. She could not hear their words,
but she watched the two formless shadows curiously. Finally Babalatchi
would rise and, taking her father by the wrist, would lead him back
to the house, arrange his mats for him, and go out quietly. Instead of
going away, Babalatchi, unconscious of Aissa's eyes, often sat again by
the fire, in a long and deep meditation. Aissa looked with respect on
that wise and brave man--she was accustomed to see at her father's
side as long as she could remember--sitting alone and thoughtful in
the silent night by the dying fire, his body motionless and his mind
wandering in the land of memories, or--who knows?--perhaps groping for a
road in the waste spaces of the uncertain future.
Babalatchi noted the arrival of Willems with alarm at this new accession
to the white men's strength. Afterwards he changed his opinion. He met
Willems one night on the path leading to Omar's house, and noticed later
on, with only a moderate surprise, that the blind Arab did not seem
to be aware of the new white man's visits to the neighbourhood of his
dwelling. Once, coming unexpectedly in the daytime, Babalatchi fancied
he could see the gleam of a white jacket in the bushes on the other side
of the brook. That day he watched Aissa pensively as she moved about
preparing the evening rice; but after awhile he went hurriedly away
before sunset, refusing Omar's hospitable invitation, in the name of
Allah, to share their meal. That same evening he startled Lakamba by
announcing that the time had come at last to make the first move in
their long-deferred game. Lakamba asked excitedly for explanation.
Babalatchi shook his head and pointed to the flitting shadows of moving
women and to the vague forms of men sitting by the evening fires in the
courtyard. Not a word would he speak here, he declared. But when the
whole household was reposing, Babalatchi and Lakamba passed silent
amongst sleeping groups to the riverside, and, taking a canoe, paddled
off stealthily on their way to the dilapidated guard-hut in the old
rice-clearing. There they were safe from all eyes and ears, and could
account, if need be, for their excursion by the wish to kill a deer, the
spot being well known as the drinking-place of all kinds of game. In
the seclusion of its quiet solitude Babalatchi explained his plan to
the attentive Lakamba. His idea was to make use of Willems for the
destruction of Lingard's influence.
"I know the white men, Tuan," he said, in conclusion. "In many lands
have I seen them; always the slaves of their desires, always ready to
give up their strength and their reason into the hands of some woman.
The fate of the Believers is written by the hand of the Mighty One,
but they who worship many gods are thrown into the world with smooth
foreheads, for any woman's hand to mark their destruction there. Let one
white man destroy another. The will of the Most High is that they should
be fools. They know how to keep faith with their enemies, but towards
each other they know only deception. Hai! I have seen! I have seen!"
He stretched himself full length before the fire, and closed his eye in
real or simulated sleep. Lakamba, not quite convinced, sat for a long
time with his gaze riveted on the dull embers. As the night advanced,
a slight white mist rose from the river, and the declining moon, bowed
over the tops of the forest, seemed to seek the repose of the earth,
like a wayward and wandering lover who returns at last to lay his tired
and silent head on his beloved's breast.
CHAPTER SIX
"Lend me your gun, Almayer," said Willems, across the table on which a
smoky lamp shone redly above the disorder of a finished meal. "I have a
mind to go and look for a deer when the moon rises to-night."
Almayer, sitting sidewise to the table, his elbow pushed amongst the
dirty plates, his chin on his breast and his legs stretched stiffly out,
kept his eyes steadily on the toes of his grass slippers and laughed
abruptly.
"You might say yes or no instead of making that unpleasant noise,"
remarked Willems, with calm irritation.
"If I believed one word of what you say, I would," answered Almayer
without changing his attitude and speaking slowly, with pauses, as if
dropping his words on the floor. "As it is--what's the use? You know
where the gun is; you may take it or leave it. Gun. Deer. Bosh! Hunt
deer! Pah! It's a . . . gazelle you are after, my honoured guest. You
want gold anklets and silk sarongs for that game--my mighty hunter. And
you won't get those for the asking, I promise you. All day amongst the
natives. A fine help you are to me."
"You shouldn't drink so much, Almayer," said Willems, disguising his
fury under an affected drawl. "You have no head. Never had, as far as I
can remember, in the old days in Macassar. You drink too much."
"I drink my own," retorted Almayer, lifting his head quickly and darting
an angry glance at Willems.
Those two specimens of the superior race glared at each other savagely
for a minute, then turned away their heads at the same moment as if by
previous arrangement, and both got up. Almayer kicked off his slippers
and scrambled into his hammock, which hung between two wooden columns
of the verandah so as to catch every rare breeze of the dry season,
and Willems, after standing irresolutely by the table for a short time,
walked without a word down the steps of the house and over the courtyard
towards the little wooden jetty, where several small canoes and a couple
of big white whale-boats were made fast, tugging at their short painters
and bumping together in the swift current of the river. He jumped into
the smallest canoe, balancing himself clumsily, slipped the rattan
painter, and gave an unnecessary and violent shove, which nearly sent
him headlong overboard. By the time he regained his balance the canoe
had drifted some fifty yards down the river. He knelt in the bottom of
his little craft and fought the current with long sweeps of the paddle.
Almayer sat up in his hammock, grasping his feet and peering over the
river with parted lips till he made out the shadowy form of man and
canoe as they struggled past the jetty again.
"I thought you would go," he shouted. "Won't you take the gun? Hey?"
he yelled, straining his voice. Then he fell back in his hammock and
laughed to himself feebly till he fell asleep. On the river, Willems,
his eyes fixed intently ahead, swept his paddle right and left,
unheeding the words that reached him faintly.
It was now three months since Lingard had landed Willems in Sambir and
had departed hurriedly, leaving him in Almayer's care.
The two white men did not get on well together. Almayer, remembering the
time when they both served Hudig, and when the superior Willems treated
him with offensive condescension, felt a great dislike towards his
guest. He was also jealous of Lingard's favour. Almayer had married a
Malay girl whom the old seaman had adopted in one of his accesses of
unreasoning benevolence, and as the marriage was not a happy one from a
domestic point of view, he looked to Lingard's fortune for compensation
in his matrimonial unhappiness. The appearance of that man, who seemed
to have a claim of some sort upon Lingard, filled him with considerable
uneasiness, the more so because the old seaman did not choose to
acquaint the husband of his adopted daughter with Willems' history, or
to confide to him his intentions as to that individual's future fate.
Suspicious from the first, Almayer discouraged Willems' attempts to
help him in his trading, and then when Willems drew back, he made, with
characteristic perverseness, a grievance of his unconcern. From cold
civility in their relations, the two men drifted into silent hostility,
then into outspoken enmity, and both wished ardently for Lingard's
return and the end of a situation that grew more intolerable from day
to day. The time dragged slowly. Willems watched the succeeding sunrises
wondering dismally whether before the evening some change would occur
in the deadly dullness of his life. He missed the commercial activity of
that existence which seemed to him far off, irreparably lost, buried out
of sight under the ruins of his past success--now gone from him beyond
the possibility of redemption. He mooned disconsolately about Almayer's
courtyard, watching from afar, with uninterested eyes, the up-country
canoes discharging guttah or rattans, and loading rice or European goods
on the little wharf of Lingard & Co. Big as was the extent of ground
owned by Almayer, Willems yet felt that there was not enough room for
him inside those neat fences. The man who, during long years, became
accustomed to think of himself as indispensable to others, felt a bitter
and savage rage at the cruel consciousness of his superfluity, of his
uselessness; at the cold hostility visible in every look of the only
white man in this barbarous corner of the world. He gnashed his teeth
when he thought of the wasted days, of the life thrown away in the
unwilling company of that peevish and suspicious fool. He heard the
reproach of his idleness in the murmurs of the river, in the unceasing
whisper of the great forests. Round him everything stirred, moved, swept
by in a rush; the earth under his feet and the heavens above his head.
The very savages around him strove, struggled, fought, worked--if only
to prolong a miserable existence; but they lived, they lived! And it was
only himself that seemed to be left outside the scheme of creation in a
hopeless immobility filled with tormenting anger and with ever-stinging
regret.
He took to wandering about the settlement. The afterwards flourishing
Sambir was born in a swamp and passed its youth in malodorous mud.
The houses crowded the bank, and, as if to get away from the unhealthy
shore, stepped boldly into the river, shooting over it in a close row of
bamboo platforms elevated on high piles, amongst which the current below
spoke in a soft and unceasing plaint of murmuring eddies. There was only
one path in the whole town and it ran at the back of the houses along
the succession of blackened circular patches that marked the place of
the household fires. On the other side the virgin forest bordered the
path, coming close to it, as if to provoke impudently any passer-by to
the solution of the gloomy problem of its depths. Nobody would accept
the deceptive challenge. There were only a few feeble attempts at a
clearing here and there, but the ground was low and the river, retiring
after its yearly floods, left on each a gradually diminishing mudhole,
where the imported buffaloes of the Bugis settlers wallowed happily
during the heat of the day. When Willems walked on the path, the
indolent men stretched on the shady side of the houses looked at him
with calm curiosity, the women busy round the cooking fires would send
after him wondering and timid glances, while the children would only
look once, and then run away yelling with fright at the horrible
appearance of the man with a red and white face. These manifestations
of childish disgust and fear stung Willems with a sense of absurd
humiliation; he sought in his walks the comparative solitude of the
rudimentary clearings, but the very buffaloes snorted with alarm at his
sight, scrambled lumberingly out of the cool mud and stared wildly in a
compact herd at him as he tried to slink unperceived along the edge of
the forest. One day, at some unguarded and sudden movement of his, the
whole herd stampeded down the path, scattered the fires, sent the women
flying with shrill cries, and left behind a track of smashed pots,
trampled rice, overturned children, and a crowd of angry men brandishing
sticks in loud-voiced pursuit. The innocent cause of that disturbance
ran shamefacedly the gauntlet of black looks and unfriendly remarks,
and hastily sought refuge in Almayer's campong. After that he left the
settlement alone.
Later, when the enforced confinement grew irksome, Willems took one
of Almayer's many canoes and crossed the main branch of the Pantai in
search of some solitary spot where he could hide his discouragement
and his weariness. He skirted in his little craft the wall of tangled
verdure, keeping in the dead water close to the bank where the spreading
nipa palms nodded their broad leaves over his head as if in contemptuous
pity of the wandering outcast. Here and there he could see the
beginnings of chopped-out pathways, and, with the fixed idea of getting
out of sight of the busy river, he would land and follow the narrow and
winding path, only to find that it led nowhere, ending abruptly in
the discouragement of thorny thickets. He would go back slowly, with a
bitter sense of unreasonable disappointment and sadness; oppressed by
the hot smell of earth, dampness, and decay in that forest which seemed
to push him mercilessly back into the glittering sunshine of the
river. And he would recommence paddling with tired arms to seek another
opening, to find another deception.
As he paddled up to the point where the Rajah's stockade came down to
the river, the nipas were left behind rattling their leaves over the
brown water, and the big trees would appear on the bank, tall, strong,
indifferent in the immense solidity of their life, which endures for
ages, to that short and fleeting life in the heart of the man who crept
painfully amongst their shadows in search of a refuge from the unceasing
reproach of his thoughts. Amongst their smooth trunks a clear brook
meandered for a time in twining lacets before it made up its mind to
take a leap into the hurrying river, over the edge of the steep bank.
There was also a pathway there and it seemed frequented. Willems landed,
and following the capricious promise of the track soon found himself in
a comparatively clear space, where the confused tracery of sunlight fell
through the branches and the foliage overhead, and lay on the stream
that shone in an easy curve like a bright sword-blade dropped amongst
the long and feathery grass.
Further on, the path continued, narrowed again in the thick undergrowth.
At the end of the first turning Willems saw a flash of white and colour,
a gleam of gold like a sun-ray lost in shadow, and a vision of blackness
darker than the deepest shade of the forest. He stopped, surprised,
and fancied he had heard light footsteps--growing lighter--ceasing.
He looked around. The grass on the bank of the stream trembled and a
tremulous path of its shivering, silver-grey tops ran from the water to
the beginning of the thicket. And yet there was not a breath of wind.
Somebody kind passed there. He looked pensive while the tremor died out
in a quick tremble under his eyes; and the grass stood high, unstirring,
with drooping heads in the warm and motionless air.
He hurried on, driven by a suddenly awakened curiosity, and entered the
narrow way between the bushes. At the next turn of the path he caught
again the glimpse of coloured stuff and of a woman's black hair before
him. He hastened his pace and came in full view of the object of his
pursuit. The woman, who was carrying two bamboo vessels full of water,
heard his footsteps, stopped, and putting the bamboos down half turned
to look back. Willems also stood still for a minute, then walked
steadily on with a firm tread, while the woman moved aside to let
him pass. He kept his eyes fixed straight before him, yet almost
unconsciously he took in every detail of the tall and graceful figure.
As he approached her the woman tossed her head slightly back, and with a
free gesture of her strong, round arm, caught up the mass of loose black
hair and brought it over her shoulder and across the lower part of her
face. The next moment he was passing her close, walking rigidly, like a
man in a trance. He heard her rapid breathing and he felt the touch of
a look darted at him from half-open eyes. It touched his brain and his
heart together. It seemed to him to be something loud and stirring like
a shout, silent and penetrating like an inspiration. The momentum of his
motion carried him past her, but an invisible force made up of surprise
and curiosity and desire spun him round as soon as he had passed.
She had taken up her burden already, with the intention of pursuing her
path. His sudden movement arrested her at the first step, and again she
stood straight, slim, expectant, with a readiness to dart away suggested
in the light immobility of her pose. High above, the branches of the
trees met in a transparent shimmer of waving green mist, through which
the rain of yellow rays descended upon her head, streamed in glints down
her black tresses, shone with the changing glow of liquid metal on her
face, and lost itself in vanishing sparks in the sombre depths of her
eyes that, wide open now, with enlarged pupils, looked steadily at the
man in her path. And Willems stared at her, charmed with a charm that
carries with it a sense of irreparable loss, tingling with that feeling
which begins like a caress and ends in a blow, in that sudden hurt of a
new emotion making its way into a human heart, with the brusque stirring
of sleeping sensations awakening suddenly to the rush of new hopes, new
fears, new desires--and to the flight of one's old self.
She moved a step forward and again halted. A breath of wind that came
through the trees, but in Willems' fancy seemed to be driven by her
moving figure, rippled in a hot wave round his body and scorched his
face in a burning touch. He drew it in with a long breath, the last
long breath of a soldier before the rush of battle, of a lover before
he takes in his arms the adored woman; the breath that gives courage to
confront the menace of death or the storm of passion.
Who was she? Where did she come from? Wonderingly he took his eyes off
her face to look round at the serried trees of the forest that stood big
and still and straight, as if watching him and her breathlessly. He
had been baffled, repelled, almost frightened by the intensity of that
tropical life which wants the sunshine but works in gloom; which seems
to be all grace of colour and form, all brilliance, all smiles, but is
only the blossoming of the dead; whose mystery holds the promise of
joy and beauty, yet contains nothing but poison and decay. He had been
frightened by the vague perception of danger before, but now, as he
looked at that life again, his eyes seemed able to pierce the fantastic
veil of creepers and leaves, to look past the solid trunks, to see
through the forbidding gloom--and the mystery was disclosed--enchanting,
subduing, beautiful. He looked at the woman. Through the checkered light
between them she appeared to him with the impalpable distinctness of
a dream. The very spirit of that land of mysterious forests, standing
before him like an apparition behind a transparent veil--a veil woven of
sunbeams and shadows.
She had approached him still nearer. He felt a strange impatience
within him at her advance. Confused thoughts rushed through his head,
disordered, shapeless, stunning. Then he heard his own voice asking--
"Who are you?"
"I am the daughter of the blind Omar," she answered, in a low but
steady tone. "And you," she went on, a little louder, "you are the white
trader--the great man of this place."
"Yes," said Willems, holding her eyes with his in a sense of extreme
effort, "Yes, I am white." Then he added, feeling as if he spoke about
some other man, "But I am the outcast of my people."
She listened to him gravely. Through the mesh of scattered hair her
face looked like the face of a golden statue with living eyes. The heavy
eyelids dropped slightly, and from between the long eyelashes she sent
out a sidelong look: hard, keen, and narrow, like the gleam of sharp
steel. Her lips were firm and composed in a graceful curve, but the
distended nostrils, the upward poise of the half-averted head, gave to
her whole person the expression of a wild and resentful defiance.
A shadow passed over Willems' face. He put his hand over his lips as if
to keep back the words that wanted to come out in a surge of impulsive
necessity, the outcome of dominant thought that rushes from the heart to
the brain and must be spoken in the face of doubt, of danger, of fear,
of destruction itself.
"You are beautiful," he whispered.
She looked at him again with a glance that running in one quick flash of
her eyes over his sunburnt features, his broad shoulders, his straight,
tall, motionless figure, rested at last on the ground at his feet. Then
she smiled. In the sombre beauty of her face that smile was like the
first ray of light on a stormy daybreak that darts evanescent and pale
through the gloomy clouds: the forerunner of sunrise and of thunder.
CHAPTER SEVEN
There are in our lives short periods which hold no place in memory
but only as the recollection of a feeling. There is no remembrance of
gesture, of action, of any outward manifestation of life; those are lost
in the unearthly brilliance or in the unearthly gloom of such moments.
We are absorbed in the contemplation of that something, within our
bodies, which rejoices or suffers while the body goes on breathing,
instinctively runs away or, not less instinctively, fights--perhaps
dies. But death in such a moment is the privilege of the fortunate, it
is a high and rare favour, a supreme grace.
Willems never remembered how and when he parted from Aissa. He caught
himself drinking the muddy water out of the hollow of his hand, while
his canoe was drifting in mid-stream past the last houses of Sambir.
With his returning wits came the fear of something unknown that had
taken possession of his heart, of something inarticulate and masterful
which could not speak and would be obeyed. His first impulse was that of
revolt. He would never go back there. Never! He looked round slowly at
the brilliance of things in the deadly sunshine and took up his paddle!
How changed everything seemed! The river was broader, the sky was
higher. How fast the canoe flew under the strokes of his paddle! Since
when had he acquired the strength of two men or more? He looked up and
down the reach at the forests of the bank with a confused notion that
with one sweep of his hand he could tumble all these trees into the
stream. His face felt burning. He drank again, and shuddered with a
depraved sense of pleasure at the after-taste of slime in the water.
It was late when he reached Almayer's house, but he crossed the dark and
uneven courtyard, walking lightly in the radiance of some light of his
own, invisible to other eyes. His host's sulky greeting jarred him
like a sudden fall down a great height. He took his place at the table
opposite Almayer and tried to speak cheerfully t