VICTORY: AN ISLAND TALE
By Joseph Conrad
Contents
NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION
AUTHOR'S NOTE
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
PART TWO
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
PART THREE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
PART FOUR
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION
The last word of this novel was written on 29 May 1914. And that last
word was the single word of the title.
Those were the times of peace. Now that the moment of publication
approaches I have been considering the discretion of altering the
title-page. The word “Victory” the shining and tragic goal of noble
effort, appeared too great, too august, to stand at the head of a mere
novel. There was also the possibility of falling under the suspicion of
commercial astuteness deceiving the public into the belief that the book
had something to do with war.
Of that, however, I was not afraid very much. What influenced my
decision most were the obscure promptings of that pagan residuum of
awe and wonder which lurks still at the bottom of our old humanity.
“Victory” was the last word I had written in peace-time. It was the last
literary thought which had occurred to me before the doors of the Temple
of Janus flying open with a crash shook the minds, the hearts, the
consciences of men all over the world. Such coincidence could not be
treated lightly. And I made up my mind to let the word stand, in the
same hopeful spirit in which some simple citizen of Old Rome would have
“accepted the Omen.”
The second point on which I wish to offer a remark is the existence (in
the novel) of a person named Schomberg.
That I believe him to be true goes without saying. I am not likely to
offer pinchbeck wares to my public consciously. Schomberg is an old
member of my company. A very subordinate personage in Lord Jim as far
back as the year 1899, he became notably active in a certain short story
of mine published in 1902. Here he appears in a still larger part, true
to life (I hope), but also true to himself. Only, in this instance, his
deeper passions come into play, and thus his grotesque psychology is
completed at last.
I don't pretend to say that this is the entire Teutonic psychology; but
it is indubitably the psychology of a Teuton. My object in mentioning
him here is to bring out the fact that, far from being the incarnation
of recent animosities, he is the creature of my old deep-seated, and, as
it were, impartial conviction.
J. C.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
On approaching the task of writing this Note for Victory, the first
thing I am conscious of is the actual nearness of the book, its nearness
to me personally, to the vanished mood in which it was written, and to
the mixed feelings aroused by the critical notices the book obtained
when first published almost exactly a year after the beginning of the
war. The writing of it was finished in 1914 long before the murder of an
Austrian Archduke sounded the first note of warning for a world already
full of doubts and fears.
The contemporaneous very short Author's Note which is preserved in this
edition bears sufficient witness to the feelings with which I consented
to the publication of the book. The fact of the book having been
published in the United States early in the year made it difficult
to delay its appearance in England any longer. It came out in the
thirteenth month of the war, and my conscience was troubled by the awful
incongruity of throwing this bit of imagined drama into the welter
of reality, tragic enough in all conscience, but even more cruel than
tragic and more inspiring than cruel. It seemed awfully presumptuous to
think there would be eyes to spare for those pages in a community which
in the crash of the big guns and in the din of brave words expressing
the truth of an indomitable faith could not but feel the edge of a sharp
knife at its throat.
The unchanging Man of history is wonderfully adaptable both by his power
of endurance and in his capacity for detachment. The fact seems to
be that the play of his destiny is too great for his fears and too
mysterious for his understanding. Were the trump of the Last Judgement
to sound suddenly on a working day the musician at his piano would go on
with his performance of Beethoven's sonata and the cobbler at his
stall stick to his last in undisturbed confidence in the virtues of the
leather. And with perfect propriety. For what are we to let ourselves be
disturbed by an angel's vengeful music too mighty for our ears and too
awful for our terrors? Thus it happens to us to be struck suddenly
by the lightning of wrath. The reader will go on reading if the book
pleases him and the critic will go on criticizing with that faculty of
detachment born perhaps from a sense of infinite littleness and which is
yet the only faculty that seems to assimilate man to the immortal gods.
It is only when the catastrophe matches the natural obscurity of our
fate that even the best representative of the race is liable to lose his
detachment. It is very obvious that on the arrival of the gentlemanly
Mr. Jones, the single-minded Ricardo, and the faithful Pedro, Heyst, the
man of universal detachment, loses his mental self-possession, that fine
attitude before the universally irremediable which wears the name of
stoicism. It is all a matter of proportion. There should have been a
remedy for that sort of thing. And yet there is no remedy. Behind this
minute instance of life's hazards Heyst sees the power of blind destiny.
Besides, Heyst in his fine detachment had lost the habit of asserting
himself. I don't mean the courage of self-assertion, either moral or
physical, but the mere way of it, the trick of the thing, the readiness
of mind and the turn of the hand that come without reflection and lead
the man to excellence in life, in art, in crime, in virtue, and, for the
matter of that, even in love. Thinking is the great enemy of perfection.
The habit of profound reflection, I am compelled to say, is the most
pernicious of all the habits formed by the civilized man.
But I wouldn't be suspected even remotely of making fun of Axel Heyst. I
have always liked him. The flesh-and-blood individual who stands
behind the infinitely more familiar figure of the book I remember as a
mysterious Swede right enough. Whether he was a baron, too, I am not so
certain. He himself never laid claim to that distinction. His detachment
was too great to make any claims, big or small, on one's credulity. I
will not say where I met him because I fear to give my readers a
wrong impression, since a marked incongruity between a man and his
surroundings is often a very misleading circumstance. We became very
friendly for a time, and I would not like to expose him to unpleasant
suspicions though, personally, I am sure he would have been indifferent
to suspicions as he was indifferent to all the other disadvantages of
life. He was not the whole Heyst of course; he is only the physical and
moral foundation of my Heyst laid on the ground of a short acquaintance.
That it was short was certainly not my fault for he had charmed me by
the mere amenity of his detachment which, in this case, I cannot help
thinking he had carried to excess. He went away from his rooms without
leaving a trace. I wondered where he had gone to--but now I know.
He vanished from my ken only to drift into this adventure that,
unavoidable, waited for him in a world which he persisted in looking
upon as a malevolent shadow spinning in the sunlight. Often in the
course of years an expressed sentiment, the particular sense of a phrase
heard casually, would recall him to my mind so that I have fastened on
to him many words heard on other men's lips and belonging to other men's
less perfect, less pathetic moods.
The same observation will apply mutatis mutandis to Mr. Jones, who is
built on a much slenderer connection. Mr. Jones (or whatever his name
was) did not drift away from me. He turned his back on me and walked out
of the room. It was in a little hotel in the island of St. Thomas in
the West Indies (in the year '75) where we found him one hot afternoon
extended on three chairs, all alone in the loud buzzing of flies to
which his immobility and his cadaverous aspect gave a most gruesome
significance. Our invasion must have displeased him because he got off
the chairs brusquely and walked out, leaving with me an indelibly weird
impression of his thin shanks. One of the men with me said that the
fellow was the most desperate gambler he had ever come across. I said:
“A professional sharper?” and got for an answer: “He's a terror; but I
must say that up to a certain point he will play fair. . . .” I wonder
what the point was. I never saw him again because I believe he went
straight on board a mail-boat which left within the hour for other
ports of call in the direction of Aspinall. Mr. Jones's characteristic
insolence belongs to another man of a quite different type. I will say
nothing as to the origins of his mentality because I don't intend to
make any damaging admissions.
It so happened that the very same year Ricardo--the physical
Ricardo--was a fellow passenger of mine on board an extremely small and
extremely dirty little schooner, during a four days' passage between two
places in the Gulf of Mexico whose names don't matter. For the most part
he lay on deck aft as it were at my feet, and raising himself from time
to time on his elbow would talk about himself and go on talking, not
exactly to me or even at me (he would not even look up but kept his
eyes fixed on the deck) but more as if communing in a low voice with
his familiar devil. Now and then he would give me a glance and make the
hairs of his stiff little moustache stir quaintly. His eyes were green
and every cat I see to this day reminds me of the exact contour of his
face. What he was travelling for or what was his business in life he
never confided to me. Truth to say, the only passenger on board that
schooner who could have talked openly about his activities and purposes
was a very snuffy and conversationally delightful friar, the superior
of a convent, attended by a very young lay brother, of a particularly
ferocious countenance. We had with us also, lying prostrate in the dark
and unspeakable cuddy of that schooner, an old Spanish gentleman, owner
of much luggage and, as Ricardo assured me, very ill indeed. Ricardo
seemed to be either a servant or the confidant of that aged and
distinguished-looking invalid, who early on the passage held a long
murmured conversation with the friar, and after that did nothing but
groan feebly, smoke cigarettes, and now and then call for Martin in a
voice full of pain. Then he who had become Ricardo in the book would go
below into that beastly and noisome hole, remain there mysteriously,
and coming up on deck again with a face on which nothing could be read,
would as likely as not resume for my edification the exposition of his
moral attitude towards life illustrated by striking particular instances
of the most atrocious complexion. Did he mean to frighten me? Or seduce
me? Or astonish me? Or arouse my admiration? All he did was to arouse my
amused incredulity. As scoundrels go he was far from being a bore.
For the rest my innocence was so great then that I could not take his
philosophy seriously. All the time he kept one ear turned to the cuddy
in the manner of a devoted servant, but I had the idea that in some way
or other he had imposed the connection on the invalid for some end of
his own. The reader, therefore, won't be surprised to hear that one
morning I was told without any particular emotion by the padrone of the
schooner that the “rich man” down there was dead: He had died in the
night. I don't remember ever being so moved by the desolate end of a
complete stranger. I looked down the skylight, and there was the devoted
Martin busy cording cowhide trunks belonging to the deceased whose white
beard and hooked nose were the only parts I could make out in the dark
depths of a horrible stuffy bunk.
As it fell calm in the course of the afternoon and continued calm during
all that night and the terrible, flaming day, the late “rich man” had
to be thrown overboard at sunset, though as a matter of fact we were in
sight of the low pestilential mangrove-lined coast of our destination.
The excellent Father Superior mentioned to me with an air of immense
commiseration: “The poor man has left a young daughter.” Who was to look
after her I don't know, but I saw the devoted Martin taking the trunks
ashore with great care just before I landed myself. I would perhaps have
tracked the ways of that man of immense sincerity for a little while,
but I had some of my own very pressing business to attend to, which in
the end got mixed up with an earthquake and so I had no time to give
to Ricardo. The reader need not be told that I have not forgotten him,
though.
My contact with the faithful Pedro was much shorter and my observation
of him was less complete but incomparably more anxious. It ended in a
sudden inspiration to get out of his way. It was in a hovel of sticks
and mats by the side of a path. As I went in there only to ask for a
bottle of lemonade I have not to this day the slightest idea what in
my appearance or actions could have roused his terrible ire. It became
manifest to me less than two minutes after I had set eyes on him for the
first time, and though immensely surprised of course I didn't stop
to think it out I took the nearest short cut--through the wall. This
bestial apparition and a certain enormous buck nigger encountered in
Haiti only a couple of months afterwards, have fixed my conception of
blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal, to
the end of my days. Of the nigger I used to dream for years afterwards.
Of Pedro never. The impression was less vivid. I got away from him too
quickly.
It seems to me but natural that those three buried in a corner of my
memory should suddenly get out into the light of the world--so natural
that I offer no excuse for their existence, They were there, they had to
come out; and this is a sufficient excuse for a writer of tales who had
taken to his trade without preparation, or premeditation, and without
any moral intention but that which pervades the whole scheme of this
world of senses.
Since this Note is mostly concerned with personal contacts and the
origins of the persons in the tale, I am bound also to speak of Lena,
because if I were to leave her out it would look like a slight; and
nothing would be further from my thoughts than putting a slight on Lena.
If of all the personages involved in the “mystery of Samburan” I have
lived longest with Heyst (or with him I call Heyst) it was at her, whom
I call Lena, that I have looked the longest and with a most sustained
attention. This attention originated in idleness for which I have a
natural talent. One evening I wandered into a cafe, in a town not of the
tropics but of the South of France. It was filled with tobacco smoke,
the hum of voices, the rattling of dominoes, and the sounds of strident
music. The orchestra was rather smaller than the one that performed
at Schomberg's hotel, had the air more of a family party than of an
enlisted band, and, I must confess, seemed rather more respectable than
the Zangiacomo musical enterprise. It was less pretentious also, more
homely and familiar, so to speak, insomuch that in the intervals when
all the performers left the platform one of them went amongst the
marble tables collecting offerings of sous and francs in a battered
tin receptacle recalling the shape of a sauceboat. It was a girl.
Her detachment from her task seems to me now to have equalled or even
surpassed Heyst's aloofness from all the mental degradations to which
a man's intelligence is exposed in its way through life. Silent and
wide-eyed she went from table to table with the air of a sleep-walker
and with no other sound but the slight rattle of the coins to attract
attention. It was long after the sea-chapter of my life had been closed
but it is difficult to discard completely the characteristics of half
a lifetime, and it was in something of the Jack-ashore spirit that
I dropped a five-franc piece into the sauceboat; whereupon the
sleep-walker turned her head to gaze at me and said “Merci, Monsieur”
in a tone in which there was no gratitude but only surprise. I must have
been idle indeed to take the trouble to remark on such slight evidence
that the voice was very charming and when the performers resumed
their seats I shifted my position slightly in order not to have that
particular performer hidden from me by the little man with the beard who
conducted, and who might for all I know have been her father, but whose
real mission in life was to be a model for the Zangiacomo of Victory.
Having got a clear line of sight I naturally (being idle) continued to
look at the girl through all the second part of the programme. The shape
of her dark head inclined over the violin was fascinating, and, while
resting between the pieces of that interminable programme she was, in
her white dress and with her brown hands reposing in her lap, the very
image of dreamy innocence. The mature, bad-tempered woman at the
piano might have been her mother, though there was not the slightest
resemblance between them. All I am certain of in their personal relation
to each other is that cruel pinch on the upper part of the arm. That I
am sure I have seen! There could be no mistake. I was in too idle a mood
to imagine such a gratuitous barbarity. It may have been playfulness,
yet the girl jumped up as if she had been stung by a wasp. It may have
been playfulness. Yet I saw plainly poor “dreamy innocence” rub gently
the affected place as she filed off with the other performers down the
middle aisle between the marble tables in the uproar of voices, the
rattling of dominoes through a blue atmosphere of tobacco smoke. I
believe that those people left the town next day.
Or perhaps they had only migrated to the other big cafe, on the other
side of the Place de la Comedie. It is very possible. I did not go
across to find out. It was my perfect idleness that had invested the
girl with a peculiar charm, and I did not want to destroy it by
any superfluous exertion. The receptivity of my indolence made the
impression so permanent that when the moment came for her meeting with
Heyst I felt that she would be heroically equal to every demand of the
risky and uncertain future. I was so convinced of it that I let her go
with Heyst, I won't say without a pang but certainly without misgivings.
And in view of her triumphant end what more could I have done for her
rehabilitation and her happiness?
1920. J. C.
VICTORY: AN ISLAND TALE PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
There is, as every schoolboy knows in this scientific age, a very
close chemical relation between coal and diamonds. It is the reason, I
believe, why some people allude to coal as “black diamonds.” Both these
commodities represent wealth; but coal is a much less portable form
of property. There is, from that point of view, a deplorable lack of
concentration in coal. Now, if a coal-mine could be put into one's
waistcoat pocket--but it can't! At the same time, there is a fascination
in coal, the supreme commodity of the age in which we are camped like
bewildered travellers in a garish, unrestful hotel. And I suppose
those two considerations, the practical and the mystical, prevented
Heyst--Axel Heyst--from going away.
The Tropical Belt Coal Company went into liquidation. The world of
finance is a mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may
appear, evaporation precedes liquidation. First the capital evaporates,
and then the company goes into liquidation. These are very unnatural
physics, but they account for the persistent inertia of Heyst, at which
we “out there” used to laugh among ourselves--but not inimically. An
inert body can do no harm to anyone, provokes no hostility, is scarcely
worth derision. It may, indeed, be in the way sometimes; but this could
not be said of Axel Heyst. He was out of everybody's way, as if he
were perched on the highest peak of the Himalayas, and in a sense as
conspicuous. Everyone in that part of the world knew of him, dwelling on
his little island. An island is but the top of a mountain. Axel Heyst,
perched on it immovably, was surrounded, instead of the imponderable
stormy and transparent ocean of air merging into infinity, by a tepid,
shallow sea; a passionless offshoot of the great waters which embrace
the continents of this globe. His most frequent visitors were shadows,
the shadows of clouds, relieving the monotony of the inanimate, brooding
sunshine of the tropics. His nearest neighbour--I am speaking now of
things showing some sort of animation--was an indolent volcano which
smoked faintly all day with its head just above the northern horizon,
and at night levelled at him, from amongst the clear stars, a dull red
glow, expanding and collapsing spasmodically like the end of a gigantic
cigar puffed at intermittently in the dark. Axel Heyst was also a
smoker; and when he lounged out on his veranda with his cheroot, the
last thing before going to bed, he made in the night the same sort of
glow and of the same size as that other one so many miles away.
In a sense, the volcano was company to him in the shades of the
night--which were often too thick, one would think, to let a breath of
air through. There was seldom enough wind to blow a feather along. On
most evenings of the year Heyst could have sat outside with a naked
candle to read one of the books left him by his late father. It was not
a mean store. But he never did that. Afraid of mosquitoes, very likely.
Neither was he ever tempted by the silence to address any casual remarks
to the companion glow of the volcano. He was not mad. Queer chap--yes,
that may have been said, and in fact was said; but there is a tremendous
difference between the two, you will allow.
On the nights of full moon the silence around Samburan--the “Round
Island” of the charts--was dazzling; and in the flood of cold light
Heyst could see his immediate surroundings, which had the aspect of
an abandoned settlement invaded by the jungle: vague roofs above low
vegetation, broken shadows of bamboo fences in the sheen of long grass,
something like an overgrown bit of road slanting among ragged thickets
towards the shore only a couple of hundred yards away, with a black
jetty and a mound of some sort, quite inky on its unlighted side. But
the most conspicuous object was a gigantic blackboard raised on two
posts and presenting to Heyst, when the moon got over that side, the
white letters “T. B. C. Co.” in a row at least two feet high. These were
the initials of the Tropical Belt Coal Company, his employers--his late
employers, to be precise.
According to the unnatural mysteries of the financial world, the T. B.
C. Company's capital having evaporated in the course of two years, the
company went into liquidation--forced, I believe, not voluntary. There
was nothing forcible in the process, however. It was slow; and while the
liquidation--in London and Amsterdam--pursued its languid course, Axel
Heyst, styled in the prospectus “manager in the tropics,” remained at
his post on Samburan, the No. 1 coaling-station of the company.
And it was not merely a coaling-station. There was a coal-mine there,
with an outcrop in the hillside less than five hundred yards from the
rickety wharf and the imposing blackboard. The company's object had been
to get hold of all the outcrops on tropical islands and exploit them
locally. And, Lord knows, there were any amount of outcrops. It was
Heyst who had located most of them in this part of the tropical belt
during his rather aimless wanderings, and being a ready letter-writer
had written pages and pages about them to his friends in Europe. At
least, so it was said.
We doubted whether he had any visions of wealth--for himself, at any
rate. What he seemed mostly concerned for was the “stride forward,”
as he expressed it, in the general organization of the universe,
apparently. He was heard by more than a hundred persons in the islands
talking of a “great stride forward for these regions.” The convinced
wave of the hand which accompanied the phrase suggested tropical
distances being impelled onward. In connection with the finished
courtesy of his manner, it was persuasive, or at any rate silencing--for
a time, at least. Nobody cared to argue with him when he talked in this
strain. His earnestness could do no harm to anybody. There was no danger
of anyone taking seriously his dream of tropical coal, so what was the
use of hurting his feelings?
Thus reasoned men in reputable business offices where he had his entree
as a person who came out East with letters of introduction--and modest
letters of credit, too--some years before these coal-outcrops began to
crop up in his playfully courteous talk. From the first there was
some difficulty in making him out. He was not a traveller. A traveller
arrives and departs, goes on somewhere. Heyst did not depart. I met a
man once--the manager of the branch of the Oriental Banking Corporation
in Malacca--to whom Heyst exclaimed, in no connection with anything in
particular (it was in the billiard-room of the club):
“I am enchanted with these islands!”
He shot it out suddenly, a propos des bottes, as the French say, and
while chalking his cue. And perhaps it was some sort of enchantment.
There are more spells than your commonplace magicians ever dreamed of.
Roughly speaking, a circle with a radius of eight hundred miles drawn
round a point in North Borneo was in Heyst's case a magic circle. It
just touched Manila, and he had been seen there. It just touched Saigon,
and he was likewise seen there once. Perhaps these were his attempts to
break out. If so, they were failures. The enchantment must have been
an unbreakable one. The manager--the man who heard the exclamation--had
been so impressed by the tone, fervour, rapture, what you will, or
perhaps by the incongruity of it that he had related the experience to
more than one person.
“Queer chap, that Swede,” was his only comment; but this is the origin
of the name “Enchanted Heyst” which some fellows fastened on our man.
He also had other names. In his early years, long before he got so
becomingly bald on the top, he went to present a letter of introduction
to Mr. Tesman of Tesman Brothers, a Sourabaya firm--tip-top house. Well,
Mr. Tesman was a kindly, benevolent old gentleman. He did not know what
to make of that caller. After telling him that they wished to render his
stay among the islands as pleasant as possible, and that they were
ready to assist him in his plans, and so on, and after receiving Heyst's
thanks--you know the usual kind of conversation--he proceeded to query
in a slow, paternal tone:
“And you are interested in--?”
“Facts,” broke in Heyst in his courtly voice. “There's nothing worth
knowing but facts. Hard facts! Facts alone, Mr. Tesman.”
I don't know if old Tesman agreed with him or not, but he must have
spoken about it, because, for a time, our man got the name of “Hard
Facts.” He had the singular good fortune that his sayings stuck to him
and became part of his name. Thereafter he mooned about the Java Sea in
some of the Tesmans' trading schooners, and then vanished, on board an
Arab ship, in the direction of New Guinea. He remained so long in that
outlying part of his enchanted circle that he was nearly forgotten
before he swam into view again in a native proa full of Goram vagabonds,
burnt black by the sun, very lean, his hair much thinned, and a
portfolio of sketches under his arm. He showed these willingly, but
was very reserved as to anything else. He had had an “amusing time,” he
said. A man who will go to New Guinea for fun--well!
Later, years afterwards, when the last vestiges of youth had gone off
his face and all the hair off the top of his head, and his red-gold
pair of horizontal moustaches had grown to really noble proportions,
a certain disreputable white man fastened upon him an epithet. Putting
down with a shaking hand a long glass emptied of its contents--paid
for by Heyst--he said, with that deliberate sagacity which no mere
water-drinker ever attained:
“Heyst's a puffect g'n'lman. Puffect! But he's a ut-uto-utopist.”
Heyst had just gone out of the place of public refreshment where this
pronouncement was voiced. Utopist, eh? Upon my word, the only thing
I heard him say which might have had a bearing on the point was his
invitation to old McNab himself. Turning with that finished courtesy of
attitude, movement voice, which was his obvious characteristic, he had
said with delicate playfulness:
“Come along and quench your thirst with us, Mr. McNab!”
Perhaps that was it. A man who could propose, even playfully, to quench
old McNab's thirst must have been a utopist, a pursuer of chimeras; for
of downright irony Heyst was not prodigal. And, may be, this was the
reason why he was generally liked. At that epoch in his life, in the
fulness of his physical development, of a broad, martial presence, with
his bald head and long moustaches, he resembled the portraits of Charles
XII., of adventurous memory. However, there was no reason to think that
Heyst was in any way a fighting man.
CHAPTER TWO
It was about this time that Heyst became associated with Morrison on
terms about which people were in doubt. Some said he was a partner,
others said he was a sort of paying guest, but the real truth of the
matter was more complex. One day Heyst turned up in Timor. Why in Timor,
of all places in the world, no one knows. Well, he was mooning about
Delli, that highly pestilential place, possibly in search of some
undiscovered facts, when he came in the street upon Morrison, who, in
his way, was also an “enchanted” man. When you spoke to Morrison of
going home--he was from Dorsetshire--he shuddered. He said it was dark
and wet there; that it was like living with your head and shoulders in
a moist gunny-bag. That was only his exaggerated style of talking.
Morrison was “one of us.” He was owner and master of the Capricorn,
trading brig, and was understood to be doing well with her, except for
the drawback of too much altruism. He was the dearly beloved friend of a
quantity of God-forsaken villages up dark creeks and obscure bays, where
he traded for produce. He would often sail, through awfully dangerous
channels up to some miserable settlement, only to find a very hungry
population clamorous for rice, and without so much “produce” between
them as would have filled Morrison's suitcase. Amid general rejoicings,
he would land the rice all the same, explain to the people that it was
an advance, that they were in debt to him now; would preach to them
energy and industry, and make an elaborate note in a pocket-diary which
he always carried; and this would be the end of that transaction.
I don't know if Morrison thought so, but the villagers had no doubt
whatever about it. Whenever a coast village sighted the brig it would
begin to beat all its gongs and hoist all its streamers, and all its
girls would put flowers in their hair and the crowd would line the river
bank, and Morrison would beam and glitter at all this excitement through
his single eyeglass with an air of intense gratification. He was tall
and lantern-jawed, and clean-shaven, and looked like a barrister who had
thrown his wig to the dogs.
We used to remonstrate with him:
“You will never see any of your advances if you go on like this,
Morrison.”
He would put on a knowing air.
“I shall squeeze them yet some day--never you fear. And that reminds
me”--pulling out his inseparable pocketbook--“there's that So-and-So
village. They are pretty well off again; I may just as well squeeze them
to begin with.”
He would make a ferocious entry in the pocketbook.
Memo: Squeeze the So-and-So village at the first time of calling.
Then he would stick the pencil back and snap the elastic on with
inflexible finality; but he never began the squeezing. Some men grumbled
at him. He was spoiling the trade. Well, perhaps to a certain extent;
not much. Most of the places he traded with were unknown not only to
geography but also to the traders' special lore which is transmitted by
word of mouth, without ostentation, and forms the stock of mysterious
local knowledge. It was hinted also that Morrison had a wife in each and
every one of them, but the majority of us repulsed these innuendoes
with indignation. He was a true humanitarian and rather ascetic than
otherwise.
When Heyst met him in Delli, Morrison was walking along the street,
his eyeglass tossed over his shoulder, his head down, with the hopeless
aspect of those hardened tramps one sees on our roads trudging from
workhouse to workhouse. Being hailed on the street he looked up with a
wild worried expression. He was really in trouble. He had come the week
before into Delli and the Portuguese authorities, on some pretence
of irregularity in his papers, had inflicted a fine upon him and had
arrested his brig.
Morrison never had any spare cash in hand. With his system of trading
it would have been strange if he had; and all these debts entered in
the pocketbook weren't good enough to raise a millrei on--let alone a
shilling. The Portuguese officials begged him not to distress himself.
They gave him a week's grace, and then proposed to sell the brig at
auction. This meant ruin for Morrison; and when Heyst hailed him across
the street in his usual courtly tone, the week was nearly out.
Heyst crossed over, and said with a slight bow, and in the manner of a
prince addressing another prince on a private occasion:
“What an unexpected pleasure. Would you have any objection to drink
something with me in that infamous wine-shop over there? The sun is
really too strong to talk in the street.”
The haggard Morrison followed obediently into a sombre, cool hovel which
he would have distained to enter at any other time. He was distracted.
He did not know what he was doing. You could have led him over the edge
of a precipice just as easily as into that wine-shop. He sat down like
an automaton. He was speechless, but he saw a glass full of rough red
wine before him, and emptied it. Heyst meantime, politely watchful, had
taken a seat opposite.
“You are in for a bout of fever, I fear,” he said sympathetically.
Poor Morrison's tongue was loosened at that.
“Fever!” he cried. “Give me fever. Give me plague. They are diseases.
One gets over them. But I am being murdered. I am being murdered by the
Portuguese. The gang here downed me at last among them. I am to have my
throat cut the day after tomorrow.”
In the face of this passion Heyst made, with his eyebrows, a
slight motion of surprise which would not have been misplaced in a
drawing-room. Morrison's despairing reserve had broken down. He had been
wandering with a dry throat all over that miserable town of mud hovels,
silent, with no soul to turn to in his distress, and positively
maddened by his thoughts; and suddenly he had stumbled on a white man,
figuratively and actually white--for Morrison refused to accept the
racial whiteness of the Portuguese officials. He let himself go for the
mere relief of violent speech, his elbows planted on the table, his
eyes blood-shot, his voice nearly gone, the brim of his round pith hat
shading an unshaven, livid face. His white clothes, which he had not
taken off for three days, were dingy. He had already gone to the bad,
past redemption. The sight was shocking to Heyst; but he let nothing
of it appear in his bearing, concealing his impression under that
consummate good-society manner of his. Polite attention, what's due from
one gentleman listening to another, was what he showed; and, as usual,
it was catching; so that Morrison pulled himself together and finished
his narrative in a conversational tone, with a man-of-the-world air.
“It's a villainous plot. Unluckily, one is helpless. That scoundrel
Cousinho--Andreas, you know--has been coveting the brig for years.
Naturally, I would never sell. She is not only my livelihood; she's my
life. So he has hatched this pretty little plot with the chief of the
customs. The sale, of course, will be a farce. There's no one here to
bid. He will get the brig for a song--no, not even that--a line of a
song. You have been some years now in the islands, Heyst. You know us
all; you have seen how we live. Now you shall have the opportunity
to see how some of us end; for it is the end, for me. I can't deceive
myself any longer. You see it--don't you?”
Morrison had pulled himself together, but one felt the snapping strain
on his recovered self-possession. Heyst was beginning to say that
he “could very well see all the bearings of this unfortunate--” when
Morrison interrupted him jerkily.
“Upon my word, I don't know why I have been telling you all this. I
suppose seeing a thoroughly white man made it impossible to keep my
trouble to myself. Words can't do it justice; but since I've told you so
much I may as well tell you more. Listen. This morning on board, in my
cabin I went down on my knees and prayed for help. I went down on my
knees!”
“You are a believer, Morrison?” asked Heyst with a distinct note of
respect.
“Surely I am not an infidel.”
Morrison was swiftly reproachful in his answer, and there came a pause,
Morrison perhaps interrogating his conscience, and Heyst preserving a
mien of unperturbed, polite interest.
“I prayed like a child, of course. I believe in children praying--well,
women, too, but I rather think God expects men to be more self-reliant.
I don't hold with a man everlastingly bothering the Almighty with his
silly troubles. It seems such cheek. Anyhow, this morning I--I have
never done any harm to any God's creature knowingly--I prayed. A sudden
impulse--I went flop on my knees; so you may judge--”
They were gazing earnestly into each other's eyes. Poor Morrison added,
as a discouraging afterthought:
“Only this is such a God-forsaken spot.”
Heyst inquired with a delicate intonation whether he might know the
amount for which the brig was seized.
Morrison suppressed an oath, and named curtly a sum which was in itself
so insignificant that any other person than Heyst would have exclaimed
at it. And even Heyst could hardly keep incredulity out of his politely
modulated voice as he asked if it was a fact that Morrison had not that
amount in hand.
Morrison hadn't. He had only a little English gold, a few sovereigns, on
board. He had left all his spare cash with the Tesmans, in Samarang, to
meet certain bills which would fall due while he was away on his cruise.
Anyhow, that money would not have been any more good to him than if it
had been in the innermost depths of the infernal regions. He said all
this brusquely. He looked with sudden disfavour at that noble forehead,
at those great martial moustaches, at the tired eyes of the man sitting
opposite him. Who the devil was he? What was he, Morrison, doing there,
talking like this? Morrison knew no more of Heyst than the rest of us
trading in the Archipelago did. Had the Swede suddenly risen and hit
him on the nose, he could not have been taken more aback than when this
stranger, this nondescript wanderer, said with a little bow across the
table:
“Oh! If that's the case I would be very happy if you'd allow me to be of
use!”
Morrison didn't understand. This was one of those things that don't
happen--unheard of things. He had no real inkling of what it meant, till
Heyst said definitely:
“I can lend you the amount.”
“You have the money?” whispered Morrison. “Do you mean here, in your
pocket?”
“Yes, on me. Glad to be of use.”
Morrison, staring open-mouthed, groped over his shoulder for the cord of
the eyeglass hanging down his back. When he found it, he stuck it in his
eye hastily. It was as if he expected Heyst's usual white suit of the
tropics to change into a shining garment, flowing down to his toes,
and a pair of great dazzling wings to sprout out on the Swede's
shoulders--and didn't want to miss a single detail of the
transformation. But if Heyst was an angel from on high, sent in answer
to prayer, he did not betray his heavenly origin by outward signs.
So, instead of going on his knees, as he felt inclined to do, Morrison
stretched out his hand, which Heyst grasped with formal alacrity and a
polite murmur in which “Trifle--delighted--of service,” could just be
distinguished.
“Miracles do happen,” thought the awestruck Morrison. To him, as to
all of us in the Islands, this wandering Heyst, who didn't toil or spin
visibly, seemed the very last person to be the agent of Providence in
an affair concerned with money. The fact of his turning up in Timor or
anywhere else was no more wonderful than the settling of a sparrow on
one's window-sill at any given moment. But that he should carry a sum of
money in his pocket seemed somehow inconceivable.
So inconceivable that as they were trudging together through the sand
of the roadway to the custom-house--another mud hovel--to pay the
fine, Morrison broke into a cold sweat, stopped short, and exclaimed in
faltering accents:
“I say! You aren't joking, Heyst?”
“Joking!” Heyst's blue eyes went hard as he turned them on the
discomposed Morrison. “In what way, may I ask?” he continued with
austere politeness.
Morrison was abashed.
“Forgive me, Heyst. You must have been sent by God in answer to my
prayer. But I have been nearly off my chump for three days with worry;
and it suddenly struck me: 'What if it's the Devil who has sent him?'”
“I have no connection with the supernatural,” said Heyst graciously,
moving on. “Nobody has sent me. I just happened along.”
“I know better,” contradicted Morrison. “I may be unworthy, but I have
been heard. I know it. I feel it. For why should you offer--”
Heyst inclined his head, as from respect for a conviction in which he
could not share. But he stuck to his point by muttering that in the
presence of an odious fact like this, it was natural--
Later in the day, the fine paid, and the two of them on board the brig,
from which the guard had been removed, Morrison who, besides, being a
gentleman was also an honest fellow began to talk about repayment. He
knew very well his inability to lay by any sum of money. It was partly
the fault of circumstances and partly of his temperament; and it would
have been very difficult to apportion the responsibility between the
two. Even Morrison himself could not say, while confessing to the fact.
With a worried air he ascribed it to fatality:
“I don't know how it is that I've never been able to save. It's some
sort of curse. There's always a bill or two to meet.”
He plunged his hand into his pocket for the famous notebook so well
known in the islands, the fetish of his hopes, and fluttered the pages
feverishly.
“And yet--look,” he went on. “There it is--more than five thousand
dollars owing. Surely that's something.”
He ceased suddenly. Heyst, who had been all the time trying to look
as unconcerned as he could, made reassuring noises in his throat.
But Morrison was not only honest. He was honourable, too; and on this
stressful day, before this amazing emissary of Providence and in the
revulsion of his feelings, he made his great renunciation. He cast off
the abiding illusion of his existence.
“No. No. They are not good. I'll never be able to squeeze them. Never.
I've been saying for years I would, but I give it up. I never really
believed I could. Don't reckon on that, Heyst. I have robbed you.”
Poor Morrison actually laid his head on the cabin table, and remained
in that crushed attitude while Heyst talked to him soothingly with the
utmost courtesy. The Swede was as much distressed as Morrison; for he
understood the other's feelings perfectly. No decent feeling was ever
scorned by Heyst. But he was incapable of outward cordiality of manner,
and he felt acutely his defect. Consummate politeness is not the right
tonic for an emotional collapse. They must have had, both of them, a
fairly painful time of it in the cabin of the brig. In the end Morrison,
casting desperately for an idea in the blackness of his despondency,
hit upon the notion of inviting Heyst to travel with him in his brig and
have a share in his trading ventures up to the amount of his loan.
It is characteristic of Heyst's unattached, floating existence that he
was in a position to accept this proposal. There is no reason to think
that he wanted particularly just then to go poking aboard the brig into
all the holes and corners of the Archipelago where Morrison picked up
most of his trade. Far from it; but he would have consented to almost
any arrangement in order to put an end to the harrowing scene in the
cabin. There was at once a great transformation act: Morrison raising
his diminished head, and sticking the glass in his eye to look
affectionately at Heyst, a bottle being uncorked, and so on. It was
agreed that nothing should be said to anyone of this transaction.
Morrison, you understand, was not proud of the episode, and he was
afraid of being unmercifully chaffed.
“An old bird like me! To let myself be trapped by those damned
Portuguese rascals! I should never hear the last of it. We must keep it
dark.”
From quite other motives, among which his native delicacy was the
principal, Heyst was even more anxious to bind himself to silence. A
gentleman would naturally shrink from the part of heavenly messenger
that Morrison would force upon him. It made Heyst uncomfortable, as it
was. And perhaps he did not care that it should be known that he had
some means, whatever they might have been--sufficient, at any rate, to
enable him to lend money to people. These two had a duet down there,
like conspirators in a comic opera, of “Sh--ssh, shssh! Secrecy!
Secrecy!” It must have been funny, because they were very serious about
it.
And for a time the conspiracy was successful in so far that we all
concluded that Heyst was boarding with the good-natured--some said:
sponging on the imbecile--Morrison, in his brig. But you know how it
is with all such mysteries. There is always a leak somewhere. Morrison
himself, not a perfect vessel by any means, was bursting with gratitude,
and under the stress he must have let out something vague--enough to
give the island gossip a chance. And you know how kindly the world is
in its comments on what it does not understand. A rumour sprang out that
Heyst, having obtained some mysterious hold on Morrison, had fastened
himself on him and was sucking him dry. Those who had traced these
mutters back to their origin were very careful not to believe them. The
originator, it seems, was a certain Schomberg, a big, manly, bearded
creature of the Teutonic persuasion, with an ungovernable tongue which
surely must have worked on a pivot. Whether he was a Lieutenant of the
Reserve, as he declared, I don't know. Out there he was by profession a
hotel-keeper, first in Bangkok, then somewhere else, and ultimately in
Sourabaya. He dragged after him up and down that section of the tropical
belt a silent, frightened, little woman with long ringlets, who smiled
at one stupidly, showing a blue tooth. I don't know why so many of us
patronized his various establishments. He was a noxious ass, and he
satisfied his lust for silly gossip at the cost of his customers. It
was he who, one evening, as Morrison and Heyst went past the hotel--they
were not his regular patrons--whispered mysteriously to the mixed
company assembled on the veranda:
“The spider and the fly just gone by, gentlemen.” Then, very important
and confidential, his thick paw at the side of his mouth: “We are among
ourselves; well, gentlemen, all I can say is, don't you ever get mixed
up with that Swede. Don't you ever get caught in his web.”
CHAPTER THREE