Authors: Joseph Conrad
He departed, he returned, he went away again, and each time those two
figures, lonely on some sandbank of the Shallows, made at him the same
futile sign of greeting or good-bye. Their arms at each movement seemed
to draw closer around his heart the bonds of a protecting affection.
He worked prosaically, earning money to pay the cost of the romantic
necessity that had invaded his life. And the money ran like water out of
his hands. The owner of the New England voice remitted not a little of
it to his people in Baltimore. But import houses in the ports of the
Far East had their share. It paid for a fast prau which, commanded by
Jaffir, sailed into unfrequented bays and up unexplored rivers, carrying
secret messages, important news, generous bribes. A good part of it went
to the purchase of the Emma.
The Emma was a battered and decrepit old schooner that, in the decline
of her existence, had been much ill-used by a paunchy white trader of
cunning and gluttonous aspect. This man boasted outrageously afterward
of the good price he had got "for that rotten old hooker of mine—you
know." The Emma left port mysteriously in company with the brig and
henceforth vanished from the seas forever. Lingard had her towed up the
creek and ran her aground upon that shore of the lagoon farthest from
Belarab's settlement. There had been at that time a great rise of
waters, which retiring soon after left the old craft cradled in the mud,
with her bows grounded high between the trunks of two big trees, and
leaning over a little as though after a hard life she had settled
wearily to an everlasting rest. There, a few months later, Jorgenson
found her when, called back into the life of men, he reappeared,
together with Lingard, in the Land of Refuge.
"She is better than a fort on shore," said Lingard, as side by side they
leant over the taffrail, looking across the lagoon on the houses and
palm groves of the settlement. "All the guns and powder I have got
together so far are stored in her. Good idea, wasn't it? There will
be, perhaps, no other such flood for years, and now they can't come
alongside unless right under the counter, and only one boat at a time.
I think you are perfectly safe here; you could keep off a whole fleet of
boats; she isn't easy to set fire to; the forest in front is better than
a wall. Well?"
Jorgenson assented in grunts. He looked at the desolate emptiness of the
decks, at the stripped spars, at the dead body of the dismantled little
vessel that would know the life of the seas no more. The gloom of the
forest fell on her, mournful like a winding sheet. The bushes of the
bank tapped their twigs on the bluff of her bows, and a pendent spike of
tiny brown blossoms swung to and fro over the ruins of her windlass.
Hassim's companions garrisoned the old hulk, and Jorgenson, left
in charge, prowled about from stem to stern, taciturn and anxiously
faithful to his trust. He had been received with astonishment,
respect—and awe. Belarab visited him often. Sometimes those whom he had
known in their prime years ago, during a struggle for faith and life,
would come to talk with the white man. Their voices were like the echoes
of stirring events, in the pale glamour of a youth gone by. They nodded
their old heads. Do you remember?—they said. He remembered only too
well! He was like a man raised from the dead, for whom the fascinating
trust in the power of life is tainted by the black scepticism of the
grave.
Only at times the invincible belief in the reality of existence would
come back, insidious and inspiring. He squared his shoulders, held
himself straight, and walked with a firmer step. He felt a glow within
him and the quickened beat of his heart. Then he calculated in silent
excitement Lingard's chances of success, and he lived for a time with
the life of that other man who knew nothing of the black scepticism of
the grave. The chances were good, very good.
"I should like to see it through," Jorgenson muttered to himself
ardently; and his lustreless eyes would flash for a moment.
"Some people," said Lingard, "go about the world with their eyes shut.
You are right. The sea is free to all of us. Some work on it, and some
play the fool on it—and I don't care. Only you may take it from me
that I will let no man's play interfere with my work. You want me to
understand you are a very great man—"
Mr. Travers smiled, coldly.
"Oh, yes," continued Lingard, "I understand that well enough. But
remember you are very far from home, while I, here, I am where I belong.
And I belong where I am. I am just Tom Lingard, no more, no less,
wherever I happen to be, and—you may ask—" A sweep of his hand along
the western horizon entrusted with perfect confidence the remainder of
his speech to the dumb testimony of the sea.
He had been on board the yacht for more than an hour, and nothing,
for him, had come of it but the birth of an unreasoning hate. To the
unconscious demand of these people's presence, of their ignorance, of
their faces, of their voices, of their eyes, he had nothing to give but
a resentment that had in it a germ of reckless violence. He could tell
them nothing because he had not the means. Their coming at this moment,
when he had wandered beyond that circle which race, memories, early
associations, all the essential conditions of one's origin, trace round
every man's life, deprived him in a manner of the power of speech. He
was confounded. It was like meeting exacting spectres in a desert.
He stared at the open sea, his arms crossed, with a reflective
fierceness. His very appearance made him utterly different from everyone
on board that vessel. The grey shirt, the blue sash, one rolled-up
sleeve baring a sculptural forearm, the negligent masterfulness of his
tone and pose were very distasteful to Mr. Travers, who, having made
up his mind to wait for some kind of official assistance, regarded
the intrusion of that inexplicable man with suspicion. From the moment
Lingard came on board the yacht, every eye in that vessel had been fixed
upon him. Only Carter, within earshot and leaning with his elbow upon
the rail, stared down at the deck as if overcome with drowsiness or lost
in thought.
Of the three other persons aft, Mr. Travers kept his hands in the side
pockets of his jacket and did not conceal his growing disgust.
On the other side of the deck, a lady, in a long chair, had a passive
attitude that to Mr. d'Alcacer, standing near her, seemed characteristic
of the manner in which she accepted the necessities of existence. Years
before, as an attache of his Embassy in London, he had found her an
interesting hostess. She was even more interesting now, since a chance
meeting and Mr. Travers' offer of a passage to Batavia had given him an
opportunity of studying the various shades of scorn which he suspected
to be the secret of her acquiescence in the shallowness of events and
the monotony of a worldly existence.
There were things that from the first he had not been able to
understand; for instance, why she should have married Mr. Travers. It
must have been from ambition. He could not help feeling that such a
successful mistake would explain completely her scorn and also her
acquiescence. The meeting in Manila had been utterly unexpected to
him, and he accounted for it to his uncle, the Governor-General of the
colony, by pointing out that Englishmen, when worsted in the struggle
of love or politics, travel extensively, as if by encompassing a large
portion of earth's surface they hoped to gather fresh strength for a
renewed contest. As to himself, he judged—but did not say—that his
contest with fate was ended, though he also travelled, leaving behind
him in the capitals of Europe a story in which there was nothing
scandalous but the publicity of an excessive feeling, and nothing more
tragic than the early death of a woman whose brilliant perfections were
no better known to the great world than the discreet and passionate
devotion she had innocently inspired.
The invitation to join the yacht was the culminating point of many
exchanged civilities, and was mainly prompted by Mr. Travers' desire
to have somebody to talk to. D'Alcacer had accepted with the reckless
indifference of a man to whom one method of flight from a relentless
enemy is as good as another. Certainly the prospect of listening to long
monologues on commerce, administration, and politics did not promise
much alleviation to his sorrow; and he could not expect much else from
Mr. Travers, whose life and thought, ignorant of human passion, were
devoted to extracting the greatest possible amount of personal advantage
from human institutions. D'Alcacer found, however, that he could attain
a measure of forgetfulness—the most precious thing for him now—in the
society of Edith Travers.
She had awakened his curiosity, which he thought nothing and nobody on
earth could do any more.
These two talked of things indifferent and interesting, certainly not
connected with human institutions, and only very slightly with human
passions; but d'Alcacer could not help being made aware of her latent
capacity for sympathy developed in those who are disenchanted with life
or death. How far she was disenchanted he did not know, and did
not attempt to find out. This restraint was imposed upon him by the
chivalrous respect he had for the secrets of women and by a conviction
that deep feeling is often impenetrably obscure, even to those it
masters for their inspiration or their ruin. He believed that even she
herself would never know; but his grave curiosity was satisfied by the
observation of her mental state, and he was not sorry that the stranding
of the yacht prolonged his opportunity.
Time passed on that mudbank as well as anywhere else, and it was not
from a multiplicity of events, but from the lapse of time alone, that
he expected relief. Yet in the sameness of days upon the Shallows, time
flowing ceaselessly, flowed imperceptibly; and, since every man clings
to his own, be it joy, be it grief, he was pleased after the unrest
of his wanderings to be able to fancy the whole universe and even time
itself apparently come to a standstill; as if unwilling to take him away
further from his sorrow, which was fading indeed but undiminished, as
things fade, not in the distance but in the mist.
D'Alcacer was a man of nearly forty, lean and sallow, with hollow eyes
and a drooping brown moustache. His gaze was penetrating and direct, his
smile frequent and fleeting. He observed Lingard with great interest.
He was attracted by that elusive something—a line, a fold, perhaps
the form of the eye, the droop of an eyelid, the curve of a cheek, that
trifling trait which on no two faces on earth is alike, that in each
face is the very foundation of expression, as if, all the rest being
heredity, mystery, or accident, it alone had been shaped consciously by
the soul within.
Now and then he bent slightly over the slow beat of a red fan in the
curve of the deck chair to say a few words to Mrs. Travers, who answered
him without looking up, without a modulation of tone or a play of
feature, as if she had spoken from behind the veil of an immense
indifference stretched between her and all men, between her heart and
the meaning of events, between her eyes and the shallow sea which, like
her gaze, appeared profound, forever stilled, and seemed, far off in the
distance of a faint horizon, beyond the reach of eye, beyond the power
of hand or voice, to lose itself in the sky.
Mr. Travers stepped aside, and speaking to Carter, overwhelmed him with
reproaches.
"You misunderstood your instructions," murmured Mr. Travers rapidly.
"Why did you bring this man here? I am surprised—"
"Not half so much as I was last night," growled the young seaman,
without any reverence in his tone, very provoking to Mr. Travers.
"I perceive now you were totally unfit for the mission I entrusted you
with," went on the owner of the yacht.
"It's he who got hold of me," said Carter. "Haven't you heard him
yourself, sir?"
"Nonsense," whispered Mr. Travers, angrily. "Have you any idea what his
intentions may be?"
"I half believe," answered Carter, "that his intention was to shoot me
in his cabin last night if I—"
"That's not the point," interrupted Mr. Travers. "Have you any opinion
as to his motives in coming here?"
Carter raised his weary, bloodshot eyes in a face scarlet and peeling as
though it had been licked by a flame. "I know no more than you do, sir.
Last night when he had me in that cabin of his, he said he would just as
soon shoot me as let me go to look for any other help. It looks as if
he were desperately bent upon getting a lot of salvage money out of a
stranded yacht."
Mr. Travers turned away, and, for a moment, appeared immersed in deep
thought. This accident of stranding upon a deserted coast was annoying
as a loss of time. He tried to minimize it by putting in order the notes
collected during the year's travel in the East. He had sent off for
assistance; his sailing-master, very crestfallen, made bold to say that
the yacht would most likely float at the next spring tides; d'Alcacer,
a person of undoubted nobility though of inferior principles, was better
than no company, in so far at least that he could play picquet.
Mr. Travers had made up his mind to wait. Then suddenly this rough
man, looking as if he had stepped out from an engraving in a book about
buccaneers, broke in upon his resignation with mysterious allusions to
danger, which sounded absurd yet were disturbing; with dark and warning
sentences that sounded like disguised menaces.
Mr. Travers had a heavy and rather long chin which he shaved. His eyes
were blue, a chill, naive blue. He faced Lingard untouched by travel,
without a mark of weariness or exposure, with the air of having been
born invulnerable. He had a full, pale face; and his complexion was
perfectly colourless, yet amazingly fresh, as if he had been reared in
the shade.