Authors: Joseph Conrad
On sitting down Mr. Travers alluded in a vexed tone to the necessity of
living on preserves, all the stock of fresh provisions for the passage
to Batavia having been already consumed. It was distinctly unpleasant.
"I don't travel for my pleasure, however," he added; "and the belief
that the sacrifice of my time and comfort will be productive of some
good to the world at large would make up for any amount of privations."
Mrs. Travers and d'Alcacer seemed unable to shake off a strong aversion
to talk, and the conversation, like an expiring breeze, kept on dying
out repeatedly after each languid gust. The large silence of the
horizon, the profound repose of all things visible, enveloping the
bodies and penetrating the souls with their quieting influence, stilled
thought as well as voice. For a long time no one spoke. Behind the
taciturnity of the masters the servants hovered without noise.
Suddenly, Mr. Travers, as if concluding a train of thought, muttered
aloud:
"I own with regret I did in a measure lose my temper; but then you will
admit that the existence of such a man is a disgrace to civilization."
This remark was not taken up and he returned for a time to the nursing
of his indignation, at the bottom of which, like a monster in a fog,
crept a bizarre feeling of rancour. He waved away an offered dish.
"This coast," he began again, "has been placed under the sole protection
of Holland by the Treaty of 1820. The Treaty of 1820 creates special
rights and obligations. . . ."
Both his hearers felt vividly the urgent necessity to hear no more.
D'Alcacer, uncomfortable on a campstool, sat stiff and stared at the
glass stopper of a carafe. Mrs. Travers turned a little sideways and
leaning on her elbow rested her head on the palm of her hand like one
thinking about matters of profound import. Mr. Travers talked; he talked
inflexibly, in a harsh blank voice, as if reading a proclamation.
The other two, as if in a state of incomplete trance, had their ears
assailed by fragments of official verbiage.
"An international understanding—the duty to civilize—failed to carry
out—compact—Canning—" D'Alcacer became attentive for a moment.
"—not that this attempt, almost amusing in its impudence, influences my
opinion. I won't admit the possibility of any violence being offered to
people of our position. It is the social aspect of such an incident I am
desirous of criticising."
Here d'Alcacer lost himself again in the recollection of Mrs. Travers
and Immada looking at each other—the beginning and the end, the
flower and the leaf, the phrase and the cry. Mr. Travers' voice went
on dogmatic and obstinate for a long time. The end came with a certain
vehemence.
"And if the inferior race must perish, it is a gain, a step toward the
perfecting of society which is the aim of progress."
He ceased. The sparks of sunset in crystal and silver had gone out,
and around the yacht the expanse of coast and Shallows seemed to await,
unmoved, the coming of utter darkness. The dinner was over a long time
ago and the patient stewards had been waiting, stoical in the downpour
of words like sentries under a shower.
Mrs. Travers rose nervously and going aft began to gaze at the coast.
Behind her the sun, sunk already, seemed to force through the mass of
waters the glow of an unextinguishable fire, and below her feet, on each
side of the yacht, the lustrous sea, as if reflecting the colour of her
eyes, was tinged a sombre violet hue.
D'Alcacer came up to her with quiet footsteps and for some time they
leaned side by side over the rail in silence. Then he said—"How quiet
it is!" and she seemed to perceive that the quietness of that evening
was more profound and more significant than ever before. Almost without
knowing it she murmured—"It's like a dream." Another long silence
ensued; the tranquillity of the universe had such an August ampleness
that the sounds remained on the lips as if checked by the fear of
profanation. The sky was limpid like a diamond, and under the last
gleams of sunset the night was spreading its veil over the earth. There
was something precious and soothing in the beautifully serene end of
that expiring day, of the day vibrating, glittering and ardent, and
dying now in infinite peace, without a stir, without a tremor, without a
sigh—in the certitude of resurrection.
Then all at once the shadow deepened swiftly, the stars came out in a
crowd, scattering a rain of pale sparks upon the blackness of the water,
while the coast stretched low down, a dark belt without a gleam. Above
it the top-hamper of the brig loomed indistinct and high.
Mrs. Travers spoke first.
"How unnaturally quiet! It is like a desert of land and water without a
living soul."
"One man at least dwells in it," said d'Alcacer, lightly, "and if he is
to be believed there are other men, full of evil intentions."
"Do you think it is true?" Mrs. Travers asked.
Before answering d'Alcacer tried to see the expression of her face but
the obscurity was too profound already.
"How can one see a dark truth on such a dark night?" he said, evasively.
"But it is easy to believe in evil, here or anywhere else."
She seemed to be lost in thought for a while.
"And that man himself?" she asked.
After some time d'Alcacer began to speak slowly. "Rough, uncommon,
decidedly uncommon of his kind. Not at all what Don Martin thinks him to
be. For the rest—mysterious to me. He is
your
countryman after all—"
She seemed quite surprised by that view.
"Yes," she said, slowly. "But you know, I can not—what shall I
say?—imagine him at all. He has nothing in common with the mankind I
know. There is nothing to begin upon. How does such a man live? What are
his thoughts? His actions? His affections? His—"
"His conventions," suggested d'Alcacer. "That would include everything."
Mr. Travers appeared suddenly behind them with a glowing cigar in
his teeth. He took it between his fingers to declare with persistent
acrimony that no amount of "scoundrelly intimidation" would prevent him
from having his usual walk. There was about three hundred yards to the
southward of the yacht a sandbank nearly a mile long, gleaming a silvery
white in the darkness, plumetted in the centre with a thicket of dry
bushes that rustled very loud in the slightest stir of the heavy night
air. The day after the stranding they had landed on it "to stretch their
legs a bit," as the sailing-master defined it, and every evening since,
as if exercising a privilege or performing a duty, the three paced there
for an hour backward and forward lost in dusky immensity, threading at
the edge of water the belt of damp sand, smooth, level, elastic to the
touch like living flesh and sweating a little under the pressure of
their feet.
This time d'Alcacer alone followed Mr. Travers. Mrs. Travers heard them
get into the yacht's smallest boat, and the night-watchman, tugging at
a pair of sculls, pulled them off to the nearest point. Then the man
returned. He came up the ladder and she heard him say to someone on
deck:
"Orders to go back in an hour."
His footsteps died out forward, and a somnolent, unbreathing repose took
possession of the stranded yacht.
After a time this absolute silence which she almost could feel pressing
upon her on all sides induced in Mrs. Travers a state of hallucination.
She saw herself standing alone, at the end of time, on the brink of
days. All was unmoving as if the dawn would never come, the stars would
never fade, the sun would never rise any more; all was mute, still,
dead—as if the shadow of the outer darkness, the shadow of the
uninterrupted, of the everlasting night that fills the universe, the
shadow of the night so profound and so vast that the blazing suns lost
in it are only like sparks, like pin-points of fire, the restless shadow
that like a suspicion of an evil truth darkens everything upon the earth
on its passage, had enveloped her, had stood arrested as if to remain
with her forever.
And there was such a finality in that illusion, such an accord with the
trend of her thought that when she murmured into the darkness a faint
"so be it" she seemed to have spoken one of those sentences that resume
and close a life.
As a young girl, often reproved for her romantic ideas, she had
dreams where the sincerity of a great passion appeared like the ideal
fulfilment and the only truth of life. Entering the world she discovered
that ideal to be unattainable because the world is too prudent to
be sincere. Then she hoped that she could find the truth of life an
ambition which she understood as a lifelong devotion to some unselfish
ideal. Mr. Travers' name was on men's lips; he seemed capable of
enthusiasm and of devotion; he impressed her imagination by his
impenetrability. She married him, found him enthusiastically devoted to
the nursing of his own career, and had nothing to hope for now.
That her husband should be bewildered by the curious misunderstanding
which had taken place and also permanently grieved by her disloyalty
to his respectable ideals was only natural. He was, however, perfectly
satisfied with her beauty, her brilliance, and her useful connections.
She was admired, she was envied; she was surrounded by splendour and
adulation; the days went on rapid, brilliant, uniform, without a glimpse
of sincerity or true passion, without a single true emotion—not even
that of a great sorrow. And swiftly and stealthily they had led her on
and on, to this evening, to this coast, to this sea, to this moment of
time and to this spot on the earth's surface where she felt unerringly
that the moving shadow of the unbroken night had stood still to remain
with her forever.
"So be it!" she murmured, resigned and defiant, at the mute and smooth
obscurity that hung before her eyes in a black curtain without a
fold; and as if in answer to that whisper a lantern was run up to the
foreyard-arm of the brig. She saw it ascend swinging for a. short space,
and suddenly remain motionless in the air, piercing the dense night
between the two vessels by its glance of flame that strong and steady
seemed, from afar, to fall upon her alone.
Her thoughts, like a fascinated moth, went fluttering toward that
light—that man—that girl, who had known war, danger, seen death near,
had obtained evidently the devotion of that man. The occurrences of the
afternoon had been strange in themselves, but what struck her artistic
sense was the vigour of their presentation. They outlined themselves
before her memory with the clear simplicity of some immortal legend.
They were mysterious, but she felt certain they were absolutely true.
They embodied artless and masterful feelings; such, no doubt, as had
swayed mankind in the simplicity of its youth. She envied, for a moment,
the lot of that humble and obscure sister. Nothing stood between that
girl and the truth of her sensations. She could be sincerely courageous,
and tender and passionate and—well—ferocious. Why not ferocious? She
could know the truth of terror—and of affection, absolutely, without
artificial trammels, without the pain of restraint.
Thinking of what such life could be Mrs. Travers felt invaded by that
inexplicable exaltation which the consciousness of their physical
capacities so often gives to intellectual beings. She glowed with a
sudden persuasion that she also could be equal to such an existence; and
her heart was dilated with a momentary longing to know the naked truth
of things; the naked truth of life and passion buried under the growth
of centuries.
She glowed and, suddenly, she quivered with the shock of coming to
herself as if she had fallen down from a star. There was a sound of
rippling water and a shapeless mass glided out of the dark void she
confronted. A voice below her feet said:
"I made out your shape—on the sky." A cry of surprise expired on her
lips and she could only peer downward. Lingard, alone in the brig's
dinghy, with another stroke sent the light boat nearly under the yacht's
counter, laid his sculls in, and rose from the thwart. His head and
shoulders loomed up alongside and he had the appearance of standing upon
the sea. Involuntarily Mrs. Travers made a movement of retreat.
"Stop," he said, anxiously, "don't speak loud. No one must know. Where
do your people think themselves, I wonder? In a dock at home? And you—"
"My husband is not on board," she interrupted, hurriedly.
"I know."
She bent a little more over the rail.
"Then you are having us watched. Why?"
"Somebody must watch. Your people keep such a good look-out—don't they?
Yes. Ever since dark one of my boats has been dodging astern here, in
the deep water. I swore to myself I would never see one of you, never
speak to one of you here, that I would be dumb, blind, deaf. And—here I
am!"
Mrs. Travers' alarm and mistrust were replaced by an immense curiosity,
burning, yet quiet, too, as if before the inevitable work of destiny.
She looked downward at Lingard. His head was bared, and, with one hand
upon the ship's side, he seemed to be thinking deeply.
"Because you had something more to tell us," Mrs. Travers suggested,
gently.
"Yes," he said in a low tone and without moving in the least.
"Will you come on board and wait?" she asked.
"Who? I!" He lifted his head so quickly as to startle her. "I have
nothing to say to him; and I'll never put my foot on board this craft.
I've been told to go. That's enough."
"He is accustomed to be addressed deferentially," she said after a
pause, "and you—"
"Who is he?" asked Lingard, simply.
These three words seemed to her to scatter her past in the air—like
smoke. They robbed all the multitude of mankind of every vestige of
importance. She was amazed to find that on this night, in this place,
there could be no adequate answer to the searching naiveness of that
question.