flee from it incontinently, as one might have expected him to do. He
remained, astonished at himself for remaining, since nothing could have
been more repulsive to his tastes, more painful to his senses, and,
so to speak, more contrary to his genius, than this rude exhibition
of vigour. The Zangiacomo band was not making music; it was simply
murdering silence with a vulgar, ferocious energy. One felt as if
witnessing a deed of violence; and that impression was so strong that it
seemed marvellous to see the people sitting so quietly on their
chairs, drinking so calmly out of their glasses, and giving no signs
of distress, anger, or fear. Heyst averted his gaze from the unnatural
spectacle of their indifference.
When the piece of music came to an end the relief was so great that he
felt slightly dizzy, as if a chasm of silence had yawned at his feet.
When he raised his eyes, the audience, most perversely, was exhibiting
signs of animation and interest in their faces, and the women in white
muslin dresses were coming down in pairs from the platform into the body
of Schomberg's “concert-hall.” They dispersed themselves all over the
place. The male creature with the hooked nose and purple-black beard
disappeared somewhere. This was the interval during which, as the astute
Schomberg had stipulated, the members of the orchestra were encouraged
to favour the members of the audience with their company--that is, such
members as seemed inclined to fraternize with the arts in a familiar and
generous manner; the symbol of familiarity and generosity consisting in
offers of refreshment.
The procedure struck Heyst as highly incorrect. However, the impropriety
of Schomberg's ingenious scheme was defeated by the circumstance that
most of the women were no longer young, and that none of them had ever
been beautiful. Their more or less worn cheeks were slightly rouged, but
apart from that fact, which might have been simply a matter of routine,
they did not seem to take the success of the scheme unduly to heart.
The impulse to fraternize with the arts being obviously weak in the
audience, some of the musicians sat down listlessly at unoccupied
tables, while others went on perambulating the central passage: arm in
arm, glad enough, no doubt, to stretch their legs while resting their
arms. Their crimson sashes gave a factitious touch of gaiety to the
smoky atmosphere of the concert-hall; and Heyst felt a sudden pity for
these beings, exploited, hopeless, devoid of charm and grace, whose fate
of cheerless dependence invested their coarse and joyless features with
a touch of pathos.
Heyst was temperamentally sympathetic. To have them passing and
repassing close to his little table was painful to him. He was preparing
to rise and go out when he noticed that two white muslin dresses and
crimson sashes had not yet left the platform. One of these dresses
concealed the raw-boned frame of the woman with the bad-tempered curve
to her nostrils. She was no less a personage than Mrs. Zangiacomo. She
had left the piano, and, with her back to the hall, was preparing the
parts for the second half of the concert, with a brusque, impatient
action of her ugly elbow. This task done, she turned, and, perceiving
the other white muslin dress motionless on a chair in the second row,
she strode towards it between the music-stands with an aggressive and
masterful gait. On the lap of that dress there lay, unclasped and idle,
a pair of small hands, not very white, attached to well-formed arms.
The next detail Heyst was led to observe was the arrangement of the
hair--two thick, brown tresses rolled round an attractively shaped head.
“A girl, by Jove!” he exclaimed mentally.
It was evident that she was a girl. It was evident in the outline of the
shoulders, in the slender white bust springing up, barred slantwise by
the crimson sash, from the bell-shaped spread of muslin skirt hiding the
chair on which she sat averted a little from the body of the hall. Her
feet, in low white shoes, were crossed prettily.
She had captured Heyst's awakened faculty of observation; he had
the sensation of a new experience. That was because his faculty of
observation had never before been captured by any feminine creature in
that marked and exclusive fashion. He looked at her anxiously, as no man
ever looks at another man; and he positively forgot where he was. He had
lost touch with his surroundings. The big woman, advancing, concealed
the girl from his sight for a moment. She bent over the seated youthful
figure, in passing it very close, as if to drop a word into its ear.
Her lips did certainly move. But what sort of word could it have been
to make the girl jump up so swiftly? Heyst, at his table, was surprised
into a sympathetic start. He glanced quickly round. Nobody was looking
towards the platform; and when his eyes swept back there again, the
girl, with the big woman treading at her heels, was coming down the
three steps from the platform to the floor of the hall. There she
paused, stumbled one pace forward, and stood still again, while
the other--the escort, the dragoon, the coarse big woman of the
piano--passed her roughly, and, marching truculently down the centre
aisle between the chairs and tables, went out to rejoin the hook-nosed
Zangiacomo somewhere outside. During her extraordinary transit, as if
everything in the hall were dirt under her feet, her scornful eyes met
the upward glance of Heyst, who looked away at once towards the girl.
She had not moved. Her arms hung down; her eyelids were lowered.
Heyst laid down his half-smoked cigar and compressed his lips. Then he
got up. It was the same sort of impulse which years ago had made him
cross the sandy street of the abominable town of Delli in the island of
Timor and accost Morrison, practically a stranger to him then, a man in
trouble, expressively harassed, dejected, lonely.
It was the same impulse. But he did not recognize it. He was not
thinking of Morrison then. It may be said that, for the first time
since the final abandonment of the Samburan coal mine, he had completely
forgotten the late Morrison. It is true that to a certain extent he
had forgotten also where he was. Thus, unchecked by any sort of self
consciousness, Heyst walked up the central passage.
Several of the women, by this time, had found anchorage here and there
among the occupied tables. They talked to the men, leaning on their
elbows, and suggesting funnily--if it hadn't been for the crimson
sashes--in their white dresses an assembly of middle-aged brides
with free and easy manners and hoarse voices. The murmuring noise
of conversations carried on with some spirit filled Schomberg's
concert-room. Nobody remarked Heyst's movements; for indeed he was not
the only man on his legs there. He had been confronting the girl for
some time before she became aware of his presence. She was looking down,
very still, without colour, without glances, without voice, without
movement. It was only when Heyst addressed her in his courteous tone
that she raised her eyes.
“Excuse me,” he said in English, “but that horrible female has done
something to you. She has pinched you, hasn't she? I am sure she pinched
you just now, when she stood by your chair.”
The girl received this overture with the wide, motionless stare of
profound astonishment. Heyst, vexed with himself, suspected that she did
not understand what he said. One could not tell what nationality these
women were, except that they were of all sorts. But she was astonished
almost more by the near presence of the man himself, by his largely
bald head, by the white brow, the sunburnt cheeks, the long, horizontal
moustaches of crinkly bronze hair, by the kindly expression of the man's
blue eyes looking into her own. He saw the stony amazement in hers
give way to a momentary alarm, which was succeeded by an expression of
resignation.
“I am sure she pinched your arm most cruelly,” he murmured, rather
disconcerted now at what he had done.
It was a great comfort to hear her say:
“It wouldn't have been the first time. And suppose she did--what are you
going to do about it?”
“I don't know,” he said with a faint, remote playfulness in his tone
which had not been heard in it lately, and which seemed to catch her
ear pleasantly. “I am grieved to say that I don't know. But can I do
anything? What would you wish me to do? Pray command me.”
Again, the greatest astonishment became visible in her face; for she now
perceived how different he was from the other men in the room. He was as
different from them as she was different from the other members of the
ladies' orchestra.
“Command you?” she breathed, after a time, in a bewildered tone. “Who
are you?” she asked a little louder.
“I am staying in this hotel for a few days. I just dropped in casually
here. This outrage--”
“Don't you try to interfere,” she said so earnestly that Heyst asked, in
his faintly playful tone:
“Is it your wish that I should leave you?”
“I haven't said that,” the girl answered. “She pinched me because I
didn't get down here quick enough--”
“I can't tell you how indignant I am--” said Heyst. “But since you are
down here now,” he went on, with the ease of a man of the world speaking
to a young lady in a drawing-room, “hadn't we better sit down?”
She obeyed his inviting gesture, and they sat down on the nearest
chairs. They looked at each other across a little round table with a
surprised, open gaze, self-consciousness growing on them so slowly that
it was a long time before they averted their eyes; and very soon they
met again, temporarily, only to rebound, as it were. At last they
steadied in contact, but by that time, say some fifteen minutes from the
moment when they sat down, the “interval” came to an end.
So much for their eyes. As to the conversation, it had been perfectly
insignificant because naturally they had nothing to say to each other.
Heyst had been interested by the girl's physiognomy. Its expression was
neither simple nor yet very clear. It was not distinguished--that could
not be expected--but the features had more fineness than those of any
other feminine countenance he had ever had the opportunity to observe so
closely. There was in it something indefinably audacious and infinitely
miserable--because the temperament and the existence of that girl were
reflected in it. But her voice! It seduced Heyst by its amazing quality.
It was a voice fit to utter the most exquisite things, a voice which
would have made silly chatter supportable and the roughest talk
fascinating. Heyst drank in its charm as one listens to the tone of some
instrument without heeding the tune.
“Do you sing as well as play?” he asked her abruptly.
“Never sang a note in my life,” she said, obviously surprised by the
irrelevant question; for they had not been discoursing of sweet sounds.
She was clearly unaware of her voice. “I don't remember that I ever had
much reason to sing since I was little,” she added.
That inelegant phrase, by the mere vibrating, warm nobility of the
sound, found its way into Heyst's heart. His mind, cool, alert, watched
it sink there with a sort of vague concern at the absurdity of
the occupation, till it rested at the bottom, deep down, where our
unexpressed longings lie.
“You are English, of course?” he said.
“What do you think?” she answered in the most charming accents. Then, as
if thinking that it was her turn to place a question: “Why do you always
smile when you speak?”
It was enough to make anyone look grave, but her good faith was so
evident that Heyst recovered himself at once.
“It's my unfortunate manner--” he said with his delicate, polished
playfulness. “Is is very objectionable to you?”
She was very serious.
“No. I only noticed it. I haven't come across so many pleasant people as
all that, in my life.”
“It's certain that this woman who plays the piano is infinitely more
disagreeable than any cannibal I have ever had to do with.”
“I believe you!” She shuddered. “How did you come to have anything to do
with cannibals?”
“It would be too long a tale,” said Heyst with a faint smile. Heyst's
smiles were rather melancholy, and accorded badly with his great
moustaches, under which his mere playfulness lurked as comfortable as a
shy bird in its native thicket. “Much too long. How did you get amongst
this lot here?”
“Bad luck,” she answered briefly.
“No doubt, no doubt,” Heyst assented with slight nods. Then, still
indignant at the pinch which he had divined rather than actually seen
inflicted: “I say, couldn't you defend yourself somehow?”
She had risen already. The ladies of the orchestra were slowly regaining
their places. Some were already seated, idle stony-eyed, before the
music-stands. Heyst was standing up, too.
“They are too many for me,” she said.
These few words came out of the common experience of mankind; yet by
virtue of her voice, they thrilled Heyst like a revelation. His feelings
were in a state of confusion, but his mind was clear.
“That's bad. But it isn't actual ill-usage that this girl is complaining
of,” he thought lucidly after she left him.
CHAPTER TWO
That was how it began. How it was that it ended, as we know it did end,
is not so easy to state precisely. It is very clear that Heyst was not
indifferent, I won't say to the girl, but to the girl's fate. He was
the same man who had plunged after the submerged Morrison whom he
hardly knew otherwise than by sight and through the usual gossip of the
islands. But this was another sort of plunge altogether, and likely to
lead to a very different kind of partnership.
Did he reflect at all? Probably. He was sufficiently reflective. But
if he did, it was with insufficient knowledge. For there is no evidence
that he paused at any time between the date of that evening and the
morning of the flight. Truth to say, Heyst was not one of those men
who pause much. Those dreamy spectators of the world's agitation are
terrible once the desire to act gets hold of them. They lower their
heads and charge a wall with an amazing serenity which nothing but an
indisciplined imagination can give.
He was not a fool. I suppose he knew--or at least he felt--where this
was leading him. But his complete inexperience gave him the necessary
audacity. The girl's voice was charming when she spoke to him of her
miserable past, in simple terms, with a sort of unconscious cynicism
inherent in the truth of the ugly conditions of poverty. And whether
because he was humane or because her voice included all the modulations
of pathos, cheerfulness, and courage in its compass, it was not disgust
that the tale awakened in him, but the sense of an immense sadness.
On a later evening, during the interval between the two parts of the
concert, the girl told Heyst about herself. She was almost a child
of the streets. Her father was a musician in the orchestras of small
theatres. Her mother ran away from him while she was little, and the
landladies of various poor lodging-houses had attended casually to her
abandoned childhood. It was never positive starvation and absolute rags,
but it was the hopeless grip of poverty all the time. It was her father
who taught her to play the violin. It seemed that he used to get drunk
sometimes, but without pleasure, and only because he was unable to
forget his fugitive wife. After he had a paralytic stroke, falling
over with a crash in the well of a music-hall orchestra during the
performance, she had joined the Zangiacomo company. He was now in a home
for incurables.
“And I am here,” she finished, “with no one to care if I make a hole in
the water the next chance I get or not.”
Heyst told her that he thought she could do a little better than that,
if it was only a question of getting out of the world. She looked at him
with special attention, and with a puzzled expression which gave to her
face an air of innocence.
This was during one of the “intervals” between the two parts of the
concert. She had come down that time without being incited thereto by a
pinch from the awful Zangiacomo woman. It is difficult to suppose that
she was seduced by the uncovered intellectual forehead and the long
reddish moustaches of her new friend. New is not the right word. She had
never had a friend before; and the sensation of this friendliness going
out to her was exciting by its novelty alone. Besides, any man who did
not resemble Schomberg appeared for that very reason attractive. She was
afraid of the hotel-keeper, who, in the daytime, taking advantage of the
fact that she lived in the hotel itself, and not in the Pavilion with
the other “artists” prowled round her, mute, hungry, portentous behind
his great beard, or else assailed her in quiet corners and empty
passages with deep, mysterious murmurs from behind, which, not
withstanding their clear import, sounded horribly insane somehow.
The contrast of Heyst's quiet, polished manner gave her special delight
and filled her with admiration. She had never seen anything like that
before. If she had, perhaps, known kindness in her life, she had never
met the forms of simple courtesy. She was interested by it as a very
novel experience, not very intelligible, but distinctly pleasurable.
“I tell you they are too many for me,” she repeated, sometimes
recklessly, but more often shaking her head with ominous dejection.
She had, of course, no money at all. The quantities of “black men” all
about frightened her. She really had no definite idea where she was on
the surface of the globe. The orchestra was generally taken from the
steamer to some hotel, and kept shut up there till it was time to go on
board another steamer. She could not remember the names she heard.
“How do you call this place again?” she used to ask Heyst.
“Sourabaya,” he would say distinctly, and would watch the discouragement
at the outlandish sound coming into her eyes, which were fastened on his
face.
He could not defend himself from compassion. He suggested that she might
go to the consul, but it was his conscience that dictated this advice,
not his conviction. She had never heard of the animal or of its uses. A
consul! What was it? Who was he? What could he do? And when she learned
that perhaps he could be induced to send her home, her head dropped on
her breast.
“What am I to do when I get there?” she murmured with an intonation so
just, with an accent so penetrating--the charm of her voice did not fail
her even in whispering--that Heyst seemed to see the illusion of human
fellowship on earth vanish before the naked truth of her existence, and
leave them both face to face in a moral desert as arid as the sands of
Sahara, without restful shade, without refreshing water.
She leaned slightly over the little table, the same little table at
which they had sat when they first met each other; and with no other
memories but of the stones in the streets her childhood had known, in
the distress of the incoherent, confused, rudimentary impressions of her
travels inspiring her with a vague terror of the world she said rapidly,
as one speaks in desperation:
“You do something! You are a gentleman. It wasn't I who spoke to you
first, was it? I didn't begin, did I? It was you who came along and
spoke to me when I was standing over there. What did you want to speak
to me for? I don't care what it is, but you must do something.”
Her attitude was fierce and entreating at the same time--clamorous, in
fact though her voice had hardly risen above a breath. It was clamorous
enough to be noticed. Heyst, on purpose, laughed aloud. She nearly
choked with indignation at this brutal heartlessness.
“What did you mean, then, by saying 'command me!'?” she almost hissed.
Something hard in his mirthless stare, and a quiet final “All right,”
steadied her.
“I am not rich enough to buy you out,” he went on, speaking with an
extraordinary detached grin, “even if it were to be done; but I can
always steal you.”
She looked at him profoundly, as though these words had a hidden and
very complicated meaning.
“Get away now,” he said rapidly, “and try to smile as you go.”
She obeyed with unexpected readiness; and as she had a set of very good
white teeth, the effect of the mechanical, ordered smile was joyous,
radiant. It astonished Heyst. No wonder, it flashed through his mind,
women can deceive men so completely. The faculty was inherent in them;
they seemed to be created with a special aptitude. Here was a smile
the origin of which was well known to him; and yet it had conveyed a
sensation of warmth, had given him a sort of ardour to live which was
very new to his experience.
By this time she was gone from the table, and had joined the other
“ladies of the orchestra.” They trooped towards the platform, driven in
truculently by the haughty mate of Zangiacomo, who looked as though
she were restraining herself with difficulty from punching their backs.
Zangiacomo followed, with his great, pendulous dyed beard and short
mess-jacket, with an aspect of hang-dog concentration imparted by his
drooping head and the uneasiness of his eyes, which were set very close
together. He climbed the steps last of all, turned about, displaying
his purple beard to the hall, and tapped with his bow. Heyst winced in
anticipation of the horrible racket. It burst out immediately unabashed
and awful. At the end of the platform the woman at the piano, presenting
her cruel profile, her head tilted back, banged the keys without looking
at the music.
Heyst could not stand the uproar for more than a minute. He went out,
his brain racked by the rhythm of some more or less Hungarian dance
music. The forests inhabited by the New Guinea cannibals where he had
encountered the most exciting of his earlier futile adventures were
silent. And this adventure, not in its execution, perhaps, but in its
nature, required even more nerve than anything he had faced before.
Walking among the paper lanterns suspended to trees he remembered with
regret the gloom and the dead stillness of the forests at the back of
Geelvink Bay, perhaps the wildest, the unsafest, the most deadly spot
on earth from which the sea can be seen. Oppressed by his thoughts,
he sought the obscurity and peace of his bedroom; but they were not
complete. The distant sounds of the concert reached his ear, faint
indeed, but still disturbing. Neither did he feel very safe in there;
for that sentiment depends not on extraneous circumstances but on our
inward conviction. He did not attempt to go to sleep; he did not even
unbutton the top button of his tunic. He sat in a chair and mused.
Formerly, in solitude and in silence, he had been used to think clearly
and sometimes even profoundly, seeing life outside the flattering
optical delusion of everlasting hope, of conventional self-deceptions,
of an ever-expected happiness. But now he was troubled; a light veil
seemed to hang before his mental vision; the awakening of a tenderness,
indistinct and confused as yet, towards an unknown woman.
Gradually silence, a real silence, had established itself round him. The
concert was over; the audience had gone; the concert-hall was dark; and
even the Pavilion, where the ladies' orchestra slept after its noisy
labours, showed not a gleam of light. Heyst suddenly felt restless in
all his limbs, as this reaction from the long immobility would not be
denied, he humoured it by passing quietly along the back veranda and out
into the grounds at the side of the house, into the black shadows under
the trees, where the extinguished paper lanterns were gently swinging
their globes like withered fruit.
He paced there to and fro for a long time, a calm, meditative ghost in
his white drill-suit, revolving in his head thoughts absolutely novel,
disquieting, and seductive; accustoming his mind to the contemplation
of his purpose, in order that by being faced steadily it should appear
praiseworthy and wise. For the use of reason is to justify the obscure
desires that move our conduct, impulses, passions, prejudices, and
follies, and also our fears.