like regret. Davidson shared my suspicion that this was in its essence
the rescue of a distressed human being. Not that we were two romantics,
tingeing the world to the hue of our temperament, but that both of us
had been acute enough to discover a long time ago that Heyst was.
“I shouldn't have had the pluck,” he continued. “I see a thing all
round, as it were; but Heyst doesn't, or else he would have been scared.
You don't take a woman into a desert jungle without being made sorry for
it sooner or later, in one way or another; and Heyst being a gentleman
only makes it worse.”
CHAPTER SIX
We said no more about Heyst on that occasion, and it so happened that
I did not meet Davidson again for some three months. When we did come
together, almost the first thing he said to me was:
“I've seen him.”
Before I could exclaim, he assured me that he had taken no liberty,
that he had not intruded. He was called in. Otherwise he would not have
dreamed of breaking in upon Heyst's privacy.
“I am certain you wouldn't,” I assured him, concealing my amusement at
his wonderful delicacy. He was the most delicate man that ever took a
small steamer to and fro among the islands. But his humanity, which was
not less strong and praiseworthy, had induced him to take his
steamer past Samburan wharf (at an average distance of a mile) every
twenty-three days--exactly. Davidson was delicate, humane, and regular.
“Heyst called you in?” I asked, interested.
Yes, Heyst had called him in as he was going by on his usual date.
Davidson was examining the shore through his glasses with his unwearied
and punctual humanity as he steamed past Samburan.
I saw a man in white. It could only have been Heyst. He had fastened
some sort of enormous flag to a bamboo pole, and was waving it at the
end of the old wharf.
Davidson didn't like to take his steamer alongside--for fear of being
indiscreet, I suppose; but he steered close inshore, stopped his
engines, and lowered a boat. He went himself in that boat, which was
manned, of course, by his Malay seamen.
Heyst, when he saw the boat pulling towards him, dropped his
signalling-pole; and when Davidson arrived, he was kneeling down engaged
busily in unfastening the flag from it.
“Was there anything wrong?” I inquired, Davidson having paused in his
narrative and my curiosity being naturally aroused. You must remember
that Heyst as the Archipelago knew him was not--what shall I say--was
not a signalling sort of man.
“The very words that came out of my mouth,” said Davidson, “before I
laid the boat against the piles. I could not help it!”
Heyst got up from his knees and began carefully folding up the flag
thing, which struck Davidson as having the dimensions of a blanket.
“No, nothing wrong,” he cried. His white teeth flashed agreeably below
the coppery horizontal bar of his long moustaches.
I don't know whether it was his delicacy or his obesity which prevented
Davidson from clambering upon the wharf. He stood up in the boat,
and, above him, Heyst stooped low with urbane smiles, thanking him and
apologizing for the liberty, exactly in his usual manner. Davidson had
expected some change in the man, but there was none. Nothing in him
betrayed the momentous fact that within that jungle there was a girl, a
performer in a ladies' orchestra, whom he had carried straight off the
concert platform into the wilderness. He was not ashamed or defiant
or abashed about it. He might have been a shade confidential when
addressing Davidson. And his words were enigmatical.
“I took this course of signalling to you,” he said to Davidson, “because
to preserve appearances might be of the utmost importance. Not to me, of
course. I don't care what people may say, and of course no one can hurt
me. I suppose I have done a certain amount of harm, since I allowed
myself to be tempted into action. It seemed innocent enough, but all
action is bound to be harmful. It is devilish. That is why this world
is evil upon the whole. But I have done with it! I shall never lift a
little finger again. At one time I thought that intelligent observation
of facts was the best way of cheating the time which is allotted to us
whether we want it or not; but now I, have done with observation, too.”
Imagine poor, simple Davidson being addressed in such terms alongside
an abandoned, decaying wharf jutting out of tropical bush. He had
never heard anybody speak like this before; certainly not Heyst, whose
conversation was concise, polite, with a faint ring of playfulness in
the cultivated tones of his voice.
“He's gone mad,” Davidson thought to himself.
But, looking at the physiognomy above him on the wharf, he was obliged
to dismiss the notion of common, crude lunacy. It was truly most unusual
talk. Then he remembered--in his surprise he had lost sight of it--that
Heyst now had a girl there. This bizarre discourse was probably the
effect of the girl. Davidson shook off the absurd feeling, and asked,
wishing to make clear his friendliness, and not knowing what else to
say:
“You haven't run short of stores or anything like that?”
Heyst smiled and shook his head:
“No, no. Nothing of the kind. We are fairly well off here. Thanks, all
the same. If I have taken the liberty to detain you, it is not from any
uneasiness for myself and my--companion. The person I was thinking of
when I made up my mind to invoke your assistance is Mrs. Schomberg.”
“I have talked with her,” interjected Davidson.
“Oh! You? Yes, I hoped she would find means to--”
“But she didn't tell me much,” interrupted Davidson, who was not averse
from hearing something--he hardly knew what.
“H'm--Yes. But that note of mine? Yes? She found an opportunity to give
it to you? That's good, very good. She's more resourceful than one would
give her credit for.”
“Women often are--” remarked Davidson. The strangeness from which he had
suffered, merely because his interlocutor had carried off a girl, wore
off as the minutes went by. “There's a lot of unexpectedness about
women,” he generalized with a didactic aim which seemed to miss its
mark; for the next thing Heyst said was:
“This is Mrs. Schomberg's shawl.” He touched the stuff hanging over
his arm. “An Indian thing, I believe,” he added, glancing at his arm
sideways.
“It isn't of particular value,” said Davidson truthfully.
“Very likely. The point is that it belongs to Schomberg's wife. That
Schomberg seems to be an unconscionable ruffian--don't you think so?”
Davidson smiled faintly.
“We out here have got used to him,” he said, as if excusing a universal
and guilty toleration of a manifest nuisance. “I'd hardly call him that.
I only know him as a hotel-keeper.”
“I never knew him even as that--not till this time, when you were so
obliging as to take me to Sourabaya, I went to stay there from economy.
The Netherlands House is very expensive, and they expect you to bring
your own servant with you. It's a nuisance.”
“Of course, of course,” protested Davidson hastily.
After a short silence Heyst returned to the matter of the shawl. He
wanted to send it back to Mrs. Schomberg. He said that it might be very
awkward for her if she were unable, if asked, to produce it. This had
given him, Heyst, much uneasiness. She was terrified of Schomberg.
Apparently she had reason to be.
Davidson had remarked that, too. Which did not prevent her, he pointed
out, from making a fool of him, in a way, for the sake of a stranger.
“Oh! You know!” said Heyst. “Yes, she helped me--us.”
“She told me so. I had quite a talk with her,” Davidson informed him.
“Fancy anyone having a talk with Mrs. Schomberg! If I were to tell the
fellows they wouldn't believe me. How did you get round her, Heyst?
How did you think of it? Why, she looks too stupid to understand human
speech and too scared to shoo a chicken away. Oh, the women, the women!
You don't know what there may be in the quietest of them.”
“She was engaged in the task of defending her position in life,” said
Heyst. “It's a very respectable task.”
“Is that it? I had some idea it was that,” confessed Davidson.
He then imparted to Heyst the story of the violent proceedings following
on the discovery of his flight. Heyst's polite attention to the tale
took on a sombre cast; but he manifested no surprise, and offered no
comment. When Davidson had finished he handed down the shawl into
the boat, and Davidson promised to do his best to return it to Mrs.
Schomberg in some secret fashion. Heyst expressed his thanks in a few
simple words, set off by his manner of finished courtesy. Davidson
prepared to depart. They were not looking at each other. Suddenly Heyst
spoke:
“You understand that this was a case of odious persecution, don't you? I
became aware of it and--”
It was a view which the sympathetic Davidson was capable of
appreciating.
“I am not surprised to hear it,” he said placidly. “Odious enough, I
dare say. And you, of course--not being a married man--were free to step
in. Ah, well!”
He sat down in the stern-sheets, and already had the steering lines in
his hands when Heyst observed abruptly:
“The world is a bad dog. It will bite you if you give it a chance; but I
think that here we can safely defy the fates.”
When relating all this to me, Davidson's only comment was:
“Funny notion of defying the fates--to take a woman in tow!”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Some considerable time afterwards--we did not meet very often--I asked
Davidson how he had managed about the shawl and heard that he had
tackled his mission in a direct way, and had found it easy enough. At
the very first call he made in Samarang he rolled the shawl as tightly
as he could into the smallest possible brown-paper parcel, which he
carried ashore with him. His business in the town being transacted,
he got into a gharry with the parcel and drove to the hotel. With his
precious experience, he timed his arrival accurately for the hour of
Schomberg's siesta. Finding the place empty as on the former occasion,
he marched into the billiard-room, took a seat at the back, near the
sort of dais which Mrs. Schomberg would in due course come to occupy,
and broke the slumbering silence of the house by thumping a bell
vigorously. Of course a Chinaman appeared promptly. Davidson ordered a
drink and sat tight.
“I would have ordered twenty drinks one after another, if necessary,”
he said--Davidson's a very abstemious man--“rather than take that parcel
out of the house again. Couldn't leave it in a corner without letting
the woman know it was there. It might have turned out worse for her than
not bringing the thing back at all.”
And so he waited, ringing the bell again and again, and swallowing two
or three iced drinks which he did not want. Presently, as he hoped it
would happen, Mrs. Schomberg came in, silk dress, long neck, ringlets,
scared eyes, and silly grin--all complete. Probably that lazy beast had
sent her out to see who was the thirsty customer waking up the echoes of
the house at this quiet hour. Bow, nod--and she clambered up to her post
behind the raised counter, looking so helpless, so inane, as she sat
there, that if it hadn't been for the parcel, Davidson declared, he
would have thought he had merely dreamed all that had passed between
them. He ordered another drink, to get the Chinaman out of the room, and
then seized the parcel, which was reposing on a chair near him, and
with no more than a mutter--“this is something of yours”--he rammed it
swiftly into a recess in the counter, at her feet. There! The rest
was her affair. And just in time, too. Schomberg turned up, yawning
affectedly, almost before Davidson had regained his seat. He cast about
suspicious and irate glances. An invincible placidity of expression
helped Davidson wonderfully at the moment, and the other, of course,
could have no grounds for the slightest suspicion of any sort of
understanding between his wife and this customer.
As to Mrs. Schomberg, she sat there like a joss. Davidson was lost in
admiration. He believed, now, that the woman had been putting it on
for years. She never even winked. It was immense! The insight he had
obtained almost frightened him; he couldn't get over his wonder at
knowing more of the real Mrs. Schomberg than anybody in the Islands,
including Schomberg himself. She was a miracle of dissimulation. No
wonder Heyst got the girl away from under two men's noses, if he had her
to help with the job!
The greatest wonder, after all, was Heyst getting mixed up with
petticoats. The fellow's life had been open to us for years and nothing
could have been more detached from feminine associations. Except that he
stood drinks to people on suitable occasions, like any other man, this
observer of facts seemed to have no connection with earthly affairs and
passions. The very courtesy of his manner, the flavour of playfulness in
the voice set him apart. He was like a feather floating lightly in
the workaday atmosphere which was the breath of our nostrils. For this
reason whenever this looker-on took contact with things he attracted
attention. First, it was the Morrison partnership of mystery, then
came the great sensation of the Tropical Belt Coal where indeed varied
interests were involved: a real business matter. And then came this
elopement, this incongruous phenomenon of self-assertion, the greatest
wonder of all, astonishing and amusing.
Davidson admitted to me that, the hubbub was subsiding; and the affair
would have been already forgotten, perhaps, if that ass Schomberg
had not kept on gnashing his teeth publicly about it. It was really
provoking that Davidson should not be able to give one some idea of the
girl. Was she pretty? He didn't know. He had stayed the whole afternoon
in Schomberg's hotel, mainly for the purpose of finding out something
about her. But the story was growing stale. The parties at the tables on
the veranda had other, fresher, events to talk about and Davidson shrank
from making direct inquiries. He sat placidly there, content to be
disregarded and hoping for some chance word to turn up. I shouldn't
wonder if the good fellow hadn't been dozing. It's difficult to give you
an adequate idea of Davidson's placidity.
Presently Schomberg, wandering about, joined a party that had taken the
table next to Davidson's.
“A man like that Swede, gentlemen, is a public danger,” he began. “I
remember him for years. I won't say anything of his spying--well, he
used to say himself he was looking for out-of-the-way facts and what is
that if not spying? He was spying into everybody's business. He got hold
of Captain Morrison, squeezed him dry, like you would an orange, and
scared him off to Europe to die there. Everybody knows that Captain
Morrison had a weak chest. Robbed first and murdered afterwards! I don't
mince words--not I. Next he gets up that swindle of the Belt Coal. You
know all about it. And now, after lining his pockets with other people's
money, he kidnaps a white girl belonging to an orchestra which is
performing in my public room for the benefit of my patrons, and goes
off to live like a prince on that island, where nobody can get at him. A
damn silly girl . . . It's disgusting--tfui!”
He spat. He choked with rage--for he saw visions, no doubt. He jumped up
from his chair, and went away to flee from them--perhaps. He went into
the room where Mrs. Schomberg sat. Her aspect could not have been very
soothing to the sort of torment from which he was suffering.
Davidson did not feel called upon to defend Heyst. His proceeding was to
enter into conversation with one and another, casually, and showing no
particular knowledge of the affair, in order to discover something about
the girl. Was she anything out of the way? Was she pretty? She couldn't
have been markedly so. She had not attracted special notice. She was
young--on that everybody agreed. The English clerk of Tesmans remembered
that she had a sallow face. He was respectable and highly proper. He
was not the sort to associate with such people. Most of these women were
fairly battered specimens. Schomberg had them housed in what he called
the Pavilion, in the grounds, where they were hard at it mending and
washing their white dresses, and could be seen hanging them out to dry
between the trees, like a lot of washerwomen. They looked very much
like middle-aged washerwomen on the platform, too. But the girl had
been living in the main building along with the boss, the director, the
fellow with the black beard, and a hard-bitten, oldish woman who took
the piano and was understood to be the fellow's wife.
This was not a very satisfactory result. Davidson stayed on, and even
joined the table d'hote dinner, without gleaning any more information.
He was resigned.
“I suppose,” he wheezed placidly, “I am bound to see her some day.”
He meant to take the Samburan channel every trip, as before of course.
“Yes,” I said. “No doubt you will. Some day Heyst will be signalling to
you again; and I wonder what it will be for.”
Davidson made no reply. He had his own ideas about that, and his silence
concealed a good deal of thought. We spoke no more of Heyst's girl.
Before we separated, he gave me a piece of unrelated observation.
“It's funny,” he said, “but I fancy there's some gambling going on
in the evening at Schomberg's place, on the quiet. I've noticed men
strolling away in twos and threes towards that hall where the orchestra
used to play. The windows must be specially well shuttered, because I
could not spy the smallest gleam of light from that direction; but I
can't believe that those beggars would go in there only to sit and think
of their sins in the dark.”
“That's strange. It's incredible that Schomberg should risk that sort of
thing,” I said.
PART TWO
CHAPTER ONE
As we know, Heyst had gone to stay in Schomberg's hotel in complete
ignorance that his person was odious to that worthy. When he arrived,
Zangiacomo's Ladies' Orchestra had been established there for some time.
The business which had called him out from his seclusion in his lost
corner of the Eastern seas was with the Tesmans, and it had something
to do with money. He transacted it quickly, and then found himself with
nothing to do while he awaited Davidson, who was to take him back to his
solitude; for back to his solitude Heyst meant to go. He whom we used
to refer to as the Enchanted Heyst was suffering from thorough
disenchantment. Not with the islands, however. The Archipelago has a
lasting fascination. It is not easy to shake off the spell of island
life. Heyst was disenchanted with life as a whole. His scornful
temperament, beguiled into action, suffered from failure in a subtle way
unknown to men accustomed to grapple with the realities of common human
enterprise. It was like the gnawing pain of useless apostasy, a sort of
shame before his own betrayed nature; and in addition, he also suffered
from plain, downright remorse. He deemed himself guilty of Morrison's
death. A rather absurd feeling, since no one could possibly have
foreseen the horrors of the cold, wet summer lying in wait for poor
Morrison at home.
It was not in Heyst's character to turn morose; but his mental state was
not compatible with a sociable mood. He spent his evenings sitting
apart on the veranda of Schomberg's hotel. The lamentations of string
instruments issued from the building in the hotel compound, the
approaches to which were decorated with Japanese paper lanterns strung
up between the trunks of several big trees. Scraps of tunes more or
less plaintive reached his ears. They pursued him even into his bedroom,
which opened into an upstairs veranda. The fragmentary and rasping
character of these sounds made their intrusion inexpressibly tedious in
the long run. Like most dreamers, to whom it is given sometimes to hear
the music of the spheres, Heyst, the wanderer of the Archipelago, had
a taste for silence which he had been able to gratify for years. The
islands are very quiet. One sees them lying about, clothed in their dark
garments of leaves, in a great hush of silver and azure, where the sea
without murmurs meets the sky in a ring of magic stillness. A sort of
smiling somnolence broods over them; the very voices of their people are
soft and subdued, as if afraid to break some protecting spell.
Perhaps this was the very spell which had enchanted Heyst in the early
days. For him, however, that was broken. He was no longer enchanted,
though he was still a captive of the islands. He had no intention to
leave them ever. Where could he have gone to, after all these years?
Not a single soul belonging to him lived anywhere on earth. Of this
fact--not such a remote one, after all--he had only lately become aware;
for it is failure that makes a man enter into himself and reckon up his
resources. And though he had made up his mind to retire from the world
in hermit fashion, yet he was irrationally moved by this sense of
loneliness which had come to him in the hour of renunciation. It hurt
him. Nothing is more painful than the shock of sharp contradictions that
lacerate our intelligence and our feelings.
Meantime Schomberg watched Heyst out of the corner of his eye.
Towards the unconscious object of his enmity he preserved a distant
lieutenant-of-the-Reserve demeanour. Nudging certain of his customers
with his elbow, he begged them to observe what airs “that Swede” was
giving himself.
“I really don't know why he has come to stay in my house. This place
isn't good enough for him. I wish to goodness he had gone somewhere else
to show off his superiority. Here I have got up this series of concerts
for you gentlemen, just to make things a little brighter generally; and
do you think he'll condescend to step in and listen to a piece or two of
an evening? Not he. I know him of old. There he sits at the dark end of
the piazza, all the evening long--planning some new swindle, no doubt.
For two-pence I would ask him to go and look for quarters somewhere
else; only one doesn't like to treat a white man like that out in the
tropics. I don't know how long he means to stay, but I'm willing to bet
a trifle that he'll never work himself up to the point of spending the
fifty cents of entrance money for the sake of a little good music.”
Nobody cared to bet, or the hotel-keeper would have lost. One evening
Heyst was driven to desperation by the rasped, squeaked, scraped
snatches of tunes pursuing him even to his hard couch, with a mattress
as thin as a pancake and a diaphanous mosquito net. He descended among
the trees, where the soft glow of Japanese lanterns picked out parts of
their great rugged trunks, here and there, in the great mass of darkness
under the lofty foliage. More lanterns, of the shape of cylindrical
concertinas, hanging in a row from a slack string, decorated the doorway
of what Schomberg called grandiloquently “my concert-hall.” In his
desperate mood Heyst ascended three steps, lifted a calico curtain, and
went in.
The uproar in that small, barn-like structure, built of imported
pine boards, and raised clear of the ground, was simply stunning. An
instrumental uproar, screaming, grunting, whining, sobbing, scraping,
squeaking some kind of lively air; while a grand piano, operated upon
by a bony, red-faced woman with bad-tempered nostrils, rained hard notes
like hail through the tempest of fiddles. The small platform was filled
with white muslin dresses and crimson sashes slanting from shoulders
provided with bare arms, which sawed away without respite. Zangiacomo
conducted. He wore a white mess-jacket, a black dress waistcoat, and
white trousers. His longish, tousled hair and his great beard were
purple-black. He was horrible. The heat was terrific. There were perhaps
thirty people having drinks at several little tables. Heyst, quite
overcome by the volume of noise, dropped into a chair. In the quick time
of that music, in the varied, piercing clamour of the strings, in the
movements of the bare arms, in the low dresses, the coarse faces,
the stony eyes of the executants, there was a suggestion of
brutality--something cruel, sensual and repulsive.
“This is awful!” Heyst murmured to himself.