with incalculable consequences. And then he asked himself if the girl
had understood what he meant. Who could tell? He was assailed by all
sorts of doubts. Raising his head, he perceived something white flitting
between the trees. It vanished almost at once; but there could be no
mistake. He was vexed at being detected roaming like this in the middle
of the night. Who could that be? It never occurred to him that perhaps
the girl, too, would not be able to sleep. He advanced prudently. Then
he saw the white, phantom-like apparition again; and the next moment
all his doubts as to the state of her mind were laid at rest, because he
felt her clinging to him after the manner of supplicants all the world
over. Her whispers were so incoherent that he could not understand
anything; but this did not prevent him from being profoundly moved. He
had no illusions about her; but his sceptical mind was dominated by the
fulness of his heart.
“Calm yourself, calm yourself,” he murmured in her ear, returning her
clasp at first mechanically, and afterwards with a growing appreciation
of her distressed humanity. The heaving of her breast and the trembling
of all her limbs, in the closeness of his embrace, seemed to enter his
body, to infect his very heart. While she was growing quieter in his
arms, he was becoming more agitated, as if there were only a fixed
quantity of violent emotion on this earth. The very night seemed
more dumb, more still, and the immobility of the vague, black shapes,
surrounding him more perfect.
“It will be all right,” he tried to reassure her, with a tone of
conviction, speaking into her ear, and of necessity clasping her more
closely than before.
Either the words or the action had a very good effect. He heard a light
sigh of relief. She spoke with a calmed ardour.
“Oh, I knew it would be all right from the first time you spoke to me!
Yes, indeed, I knew directly you came up to me that evening. I knew it
would be all right, if you only cared to make it so; but of course I
could not tell if you meant it. 'Command me,' you said. Funny thing for
a man like you to say. Did you really mean it? You weren't making fun of
me?”
He protested that he had been a serious person all his life.
“I believe you,” she said ardently. He was touched by this declaration.
“It's the way you have of speaking as if you were amused with people,”
she went on. “But I wasn't deceived. I could see you were angry with
that beast of a woman. And you are clever. You spotted something at
once. You saw it in my face, eh? It isn't a bad face--say? You'll never
be sorry. Listen--I'm not twenty yet. It's the truth, and I can't be so
bad looking, or else--I will tell you straight that I have been worried
and pestered by fellows like this before. I don't know what comes to
them--”
She was speaking hurriedly. She choked, and then exclaimed, with an
accent of despair:
“What is it? What's the matter?”
Heyst had removed his arms from her suddenly, and had recoiled a little.
“Is it my fault? I didn't even look at them, I tell you straight. Never!
Have I looked at you? Tell me. It was you that began it.”
In truth, Heyst had shrunk from the idea of competition with fellows
unknown, with Schomberg the hotel-keeper. The vaporous white figure
before him swayed pitifully in the darkness. He felt ashamed of his
fastidiousness.
“I am afraid we have been detected,” he murmured. “I think I saw
somebody on the path between the house and the bushes behind you.”
He had seen no one. It was a compassionate lie, if there ever was one.
His compassion was as genuine as his shrinking had been, and in his
judgement more honourable.
She didn't turn her head. She was obviously relieved.
“Would it be that brute?” she breathed out, meaning Schomberg, of
course. “He's getting too forward with me now. What can you expect? Only
this evening, after supper, he--but I slipped away. You don't mind him,
do you? Why, I could face him myself now that I know you care for me.
A girl can always put up a fight. You believe me? Only it isn't easy to
stand up for yourself when you feel there's nothing and nobody at your
back. There's nothing so lonely in the world as a girl who has got to
look after herself. When I left poor dad in that home--it was in the
country, near a village--I came out of the gates with seven shillings
and threepence in my old purse, and my railway ticket. I tramped a mile,
and got into a train--”
She broke off, and was silent for a moment.
“Don't you throw me over now,” she went on. “If you did, what should
I do? I should have to live, to be sure, because I'd be afraid to kill
myself, but you would have done a thousand times worse than killing a
body. You told me you had been always alone, you had never had a dog
even. Well, then, I won't be in anybody's way if I live with you--not
even a dog's. And what else did you mean when you came up and looked at
me so close?”
“Close? Did I?” he murmured unstirring before her in the profound
darkness. “So close as that?”
She had an outbreak of anger and despair in subdued tones.
“Have you forgotten, then? What did you expect to find? I know what sort
of girl I am; but all the same I am not the sort that men turn their
backs on--and you ought to know it, unless you aren't made like the
others. Oh, forgive me! You aren't like the others; you are like no one
in the world I ever spoke to. Don't you care for me? Don't you see--?”
What he saw was that, white and spectral, she was putting out her arms
to him out of the black shadows like an appealing ghost. He took her
hands, and was affected, almost surprised, to find them so warm, so
real, so firm, so living in his grasp. He drew her to him, and she
dropped her head on his shoulder with a deep-sigh.
“I am dead tired,” she whispered plaintively.
He put his arms around her, and only by the convulsive movements of her
body became aware that she was sobbing without a sound. Sustaining her,
he lost himself in the profound silence of the night. After a while she
became still, and cried quietly. Then, suddenly, as if waking up, she
asked:
“You haven't seen any more of that somebody you thought was spying
about?”
He started at her quick, sharp whisper, and answered that very likely he
had been mistaken.
“If it was anybody at all,” she reflected aloud, “it wouldn't have been
anyone but that hotel woman--the landlord's wife.”
“Mrs. Schomberg,” Heyst said, surprised.
“Yes. Another one that can't sleep o' nights. Why? Don't you see why?
Because, of course, she sees what's going on. That beast doesn't even
try to keep it from her. If she had only the least bit of spirit! She
knows how I feel, too, only she's too frightened even to look him in the
face, let alone open her mouth. He would tell her to go hang herself.”
For some time Heyst said nothing. A public, active contest with the
hotel-keeper was not to be thought of. The idea was horrible. Whispering
gently to the girl, he tried to explain to her that as things stood, an
open withdrawal from the company would be probably opposed. She listened
to his explanation anxiously, from time to time pressing the hand she
had sought and got hold of in the dark.
“As I told you, I am not rich enough to buy you out so I shall steal you
as soon as I can arrange some means of getting away from here. Meantime
it would be fatal to be seen together at night. We mustn't give
ourselves away. We had better part at once. I think I was mistaken just
now; but if, as you say, that poor Mrs. Schomberg can't sleep of nights,
we must be more careful. She would tell the fellow.”
The girl had disengaged herself from his loose hold while he talked, and
now stood free of him, but still clasping his hand firmly.
“Oh, no,” she said with perfect assurance. “I tell you she daren't open
her mouth to him. And she isn't as silly as she looks. She wouldn't give
us away. She knows a trick worth two of that. She'll help--that's what
she'll do, if she dares do anything at all.”
“You seem to have a very clear view of the situation,” said Heyst, and
received a warm, lingering kiss for this commendation.
He discovered that to part from her was not such an easy matter as he
had supposed it would be.
“Upon my word,” he said before they separated, “I don't even know your
name.”
“Don't you? They call me Alma. I don't know why. Silly name! Magdalen
too. It doesn't matter; you can call me by whatever name you choose.
Yes, you give me a name. Think of one you would like the sound
of--something quite new. How I should like to forget everything that has
gone before, as one forgets a dream that's done with, fright and all! I
would try.”
“Would you really?” he asked in a murmur. “But that's not forbidden. I
understand that women easily forget whatever in their past diminishes
them in their eyes.”
“It's your eyes that I was thinking of, for I'm sure I've never wished
to forget anything till you came up to me that night and looked me
through and through. I know I'm not much account; but I know how to
stand by a man. I stood by father ever since I could understand. He
wasn't a bad chap. Now that I can't be of any use to him, I would just
as soon forget all that and make a fresh start. But these aren't things
that I could talk to you about. What could I ever talk to you about?”
“Don't let it trouble you,” Heyst said. “Your voice is enough. I am in
love with it, whatever it says.”
She remained silent for a while, as if rendered breathless by this quiet
statement.
“Oh! I wanted to ask you--”
He remembered that she probably did not know his name, and expected the
question to be put to him now; but after a moment of hesitation she went
on:
“Why was it that you told me to smile this evening in the concert-room
there--you remember?”
“I thought we were being observed. A smile is the best of masks.
Schomberg was at a table next but one to us, drinking with some Dutch
clerks from the town. No doubt he was watching us--watching you, at
least. That's why I asked you to smile.”
“Ah, that's why. It never came into my head!”
“And you did it very well, too--very readily, as if you had understood
my intention.”
“Readily!” she repeated. “Oh, I was ready enough to smile then. That's
the truth. It was the first time for years I may say that I felt
disposed to smile. I've not had many chances to smile in my life, I can
tell you; especially of late.”
“But you do it most charmingly--in a perfectly fascinating way.”
He paused. She stood still, waiting for more with the stillness of
extreme delight, wishing to prolong the sensation.
“It astonished me,” he added. “It went as straight to my heart as though
you had smiled for the purpose of dazzling me. I felt as if I had never
seen a smile before in my life. I thought of it after I left you. It
made me restless.”
“It did all that?” came her voice, unsteady, gentle, and incredulous.
“If you had not smiled as you did, perhaps I should not have come out
here tonight,” he said, with his playful earnestness of tone. “It was
your triumph.”
He felt her lips touch his lightly, and the next moment she was gone.
Her white dress gleamed in the distance, and then the opaque darkness of
the house seemed to swallow it. Heyst waited a little before he went the
same way, round the corner, up the steps of the veranda, and into his
room, where he lay down at last--not to sleep, but to go over in his
mind all that had been said at their meeting.
“It's exactly true about that smile,” he thought. There he had spoken
the truth to her; and about her voice, too. For the rest--what must be
must be.
A great wave of heat passed over him. He turned on his back, flung his
arms crosswise on the broad, hard bed, and lay still, open-eyed under
the mosquito net, till daylight entered his room, brightened swiftly,
and turned to unfailing sunlight. He got up then, went to a small
looking-glass hanging on the wall, and stared at himself steadily. It
was not a new-born vanity which induced this long survey. He felt
so strange that he could not resist the suspicion of his personal
appearance having changed during the night. What he saw in the glass,
however, was the man he knew before. It was almost a disappointment--a
belittling of his recent experience. And then he smiled at his
naiveness; for, being over five and thirty years of age, he ought to
have known that in most cases the body is the unalterable mask of the
soul, which even death itself changes but little, till it is put out of
sight where no changes matter any more, either to our friends or to our
enemies.
Heyst was not conscious of either friends or of enemies. It was the very
essence of his life to be a solitary achievement, accomplished not by
hermit-like withdrawal with its silence and immobility, but by a system
of restless wandering, by the detachment of an impermanent dweller
amongst changing scenes. In this scheme he had perceived the means of
passing through life without suffering and almost without a single care
in the world--invulnerable because elusive.
CHAPTER THREE
For fifteen years Heyst had wandered, invariably courteous and
unapproachable, and in return was generally considered a “queer chap.”
He had started off on these travels of his after the death of his
father, an expatriated Swede who died in London, dissatisfied with his
country and angry with all the world, which had instinctively rejected
his wisdom.
Thinker, stylist, and man of the world in his time, the elder Heyst
had begun by coveting all the joys, those of the great and those of the
humble, those of the fools and those of the sages. For more than sixty
years he had dragged on this painful earth of ours the most weary, the
most uneasy soul that civilization had ever fashioned to its ends of
disillusion and regret. One could not refuse him a measure of greatness,
for he was unhappy in a way unknown to mediocre souls. His mother Heyst
had never known, but he kept his father's pale, distinguished face
in affectionate memory. He remembered him mainly in an ample blue
dressing-gown in a large house of a quiet London suburb. For three
years, after leaving school at the age of eighteen, he had lived with
the elder Heyst, who was then writing his last book. In this work, at
the end of his life, he claimed for mankind that right to absolute moral
and intellectual liberty of which he no longer believed them worthy.
Three years of such companionship at that plastic and impressionable age
were bound to leave in the boy a profound mistrust of life. The young
man learned to reflect, which is a destructive process, a reckoning
of the cost. It is not the clear-sighted who lead the world. Great
achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm mental fog, which the
pitiless cold blasts of the father's analysis had blown away from the
son.
“I'll drift,” Heyst had said to himself deliberately.
He did not mean intellectually or sentimentally or morally. He meant
to drift altogether and literally, body and soul, like a detached leaf
drifting in the wind-currents under the immovable trees of a forest
glade; to drift without ever catching on to anything.
“This shall be my defence against life,” he had said to himself with a
sort of inward consciousness that for the son of his father there was no
other worthy alternative.
He became a waif and stray, austerely, from conviction, as others
do through drink, from vice, from some weakness of character--with
deliberation, as others do in despair. This, stripped of its facts, had
been Heyst's life up to that disturbing night. Next day, when he saw the
girl called Alma, she managed to give him a glance of frank tenderness,
quick as lightning and leaving a profound impression, a secret touch on
the heart. It was in the grounds of the hotel, about tiffin time, while
the Ladies of the orchestra were strolling back to their pavilion after
rehearsal, or practice, or whatever they called their morning musical
exercises in the hall. Heyst, returning from the town, where he had
discovered that there would be difficulties in the way of getting away
at once, was crossing the compound, disappointed and worried. He had
walked almost unwittingly into the straggling group of Zangiacomo's
performers. It was a shock to him, on coming out of his brown study, to
find the girl so near to him, as if one waking suddenly should see the
figure of his dream turned into flesh and blood. She did not raise her
shapely head, but her glance was no dream thing. It was real, the most
real impression of his detached existence--so far.
Heyst had not acknowledged it in any way, though it seemed to him
impossible that its effect on him should not be visible to anyone who
happened to be looking on. And there were several men on the
veranda, steady customers of Schomberg's table d'hote, gazing in his
direction--at the ladies of the orchestra, in fact. Heyst's dread arose,
not out of shame or timidity, but from his fastidiousness. On getting
amongst them, however, he noticed no signs of interest or astonishment
in their faces, any more than if they had been blind men. Even Schomberg
himself, who had to make way for him at the top of the stairs, was
completely unperturbed, and continued the conversation he was carrying
on with a client.
Schomberg, indeed, had observed “that Swede” talking with the girl in
the intervals. A crony of his had nudged him; and he had thought that it
was so much the better; the silly fellow would keep everybody else off.
He was rather pleased than otherwise and watched them out of the corner
of his eye with a malicious enjoyment of the situation--a sort of
Satanic glee. For he had little doubt of his personal fascination, and
still less of his power to get hold of the girl, who seemed too ignorant
to know how to help herself, and who was worse than friendless, since
she had for some reason incurred the animosity of Mrs. Zangiacomo, a
woman with no conscience. The aversion she showed him as far as she
dared (for it is not always safe for the helpless to display the
delicacy of their sentiments), Schomberg pardoned on the score of
feminine conventional silliness. He had told Alma, as an argument, that
she was a clever enough girl to see that she could do no better than to
put her trust in a man of substance, in the prime of life, who knew
his way about. But for the excited trembling of his voice, and the
extraordinary way in which his eyes seemed to be starting out of his
crimson, hirsute countenance, such speeches had every character of calm,
unselfish advice--which, after the manner of lovers, passed easily into
sanguine plans for the future.
“We'll soon get rid of the old woman,” he whispered to her hurriedly,
with panting ferocity. “Hang her! I've never cared for her. The climate
don't suit her; I shall tell her to go to her people in Europe. She will
have to go, too! I will see to it. Eins, zwei, march! And then we shall
sell this hotel and start another somewhere else.”
He assured her that he didn't care what he did for her sake; and it
was true. Forty-five is the age of recklessness for many men, as if in
defiance of the decay and death waiting with open arms in the sinister
valley at the bottom of the inevitable hill. Her shrinking form, her
downcast eyes, when she had to listen to him, cornered at the end of an
empty corridor, he regarded as signs of submission to the overpowering
force of his will, the recognition of his personal fascinations. For
every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and
the human race come to an end.
It's easy to imagine Schomberg's humiliation, his shocked fury, when
he discovered that the girl who had for weeks resisted his attacks, his
prayers, and his fiercest protestations, had been snatched from under
his nose by “that Swede,” apparently without any trouble worth speaking
of. He refused to believe the fact. He would have it, at first, that
the Zangiacomos, for some unfathomable reason, had played him a scurvy
trick, but when no further doubt was possible, he changed his view of
Heyst. The despised Swede became for Schomberg the deepest, the most
dangerous, the most hateful of scoundrels. He could not believe that the
creature he had coveted with so much force and with so little effect,
was in reality tender, docile to her impulse, and had almost offered
herself to Heyst without a sense of guilt, in a desire of safety, and
from a profound need of placing her trust where her woman's instinct
guided her ignorance. Nothing would serve Schomberg but that she must
have been circumvented by some occult exercise of force or craft, by the
laying of some subtle trap. His wounded vanity wondered ceaselessly at
the means “that Swede” had employed to seduce her away from a man
like him--Schomberg--as though those means were bound to have been
extraordinary, unheard of, inconceivable. He slapped his forehead openly
before his customers; he would sit brooding in silence or else would
burst out unexpectedly declaiming against Heyst without measure,
discretion, or prudence, with swollen features and an affectation of
outraged virtue which could not have deceived the most childlike of
moralists for a moment--and greatly amused his audience.
It became a recognized entertainment to go and hear his abuse of Heyst,
while sipping iced drinks on the veranda of the hotel. It was, in a
manner, a more successful draw than the Zangiacomo concerts had ever
been--intervals and all. There was never any difficulty in starting the
performer off. Anybody could do it, by almost any distant allusion.
As likely as not he would start his endless denunciations in the very
billiard-room where Mrs. Schomberg sat enthroned as usual, swallowing
her sobs, concealing her tortures of abject humiliation and terror under
her stupid, set, everlasting grin, which, having been provided for her
by nature, was an excellent mask, in as much as nothing--not even death
itself, perhaps--could tear it away.
But nothing lasts in this world, at least without changing its
physiognomy. So, after a few weeks, Schomberg regained his outward calm,
as if his indignation had dried up within him. And it was time. He was
becoming a bore with his inability to talk of anything else but Heyst's
unfitness to be at large, Heyst's wickedness, his wiles, his astuteness,
and his criminality. Schomberg no longer pretended to despise him. He
could not have done it. After what had happened he could not pretend,
even to himself. But his bottled-up indignation was fermenting
venomously. At the time of his immoderate loquacity one of his
customers, an elderly man, had remarked one evening:
“If that ass keeps on like this, he will end by going crazy.”
And this belief was less than half wrong. Schomberg had Heyst on the
brain. Even the unsatisfactory state of his affairs, which had
never been so unpromising since he came out East directly after the
Franco-Prussian War, he referred to some subtly noxious influence of
Heyst. It seemed to him that he could never be himself again till he had
got even with that artful Swede. He was ready to swear that Heyst had
ruined his life. The girl so unfairly, craftily, basely decoyed away
would have inspired him to success in a new start. Obviously Mrs.
Schomberg, whom he terrified by savagely silent moods combined with
underhand, poisoned glances, could give him no inspiration. He had grown
generally neglectful, but with a partiality for reckless expedients, as
if he did not care when and how his career as a hotel-keeper was to be
brought to an end. This demoralized state accounted for what Davidson
had observed on his last visit to the Schomberg establishment, some two
months after Heyst's secret departure with the girl to the solitude of
Samburan.
The Schomberg of a few years ago--the Schomberg of the Bangkok days,
for instance, when he started the first of his famed table d'hote
dinners--would never have risked anything of the sort. His genius ran to
catering, “white man for white men” and to the inventing, elaborating,
and retailing of scandalous gossip with asinine unction and impudent
delight. But now his mind was perverted by the pangs of wounded vanity
and of thwarted passion. In this state of moral weakness Schomberg
allowed himself to be corrupted.
CHAPTER FOUR
The business was done by a guest who arrived one fine morning by
mail-boat--immediately from Celebes, having boarded her in Macassar,
but generally, Schomberg understood, from up China Sea way; a wanderer
clearly, even as Heyst was, but not alone and of quite another kind.
Schomberg, looking up from the stern-sheets of his steam-launch, which
he used for boarding passenger ships on arrival, discovered a dark
sunken stare plunging down on him over the rail of the first-class part
of the deck. He was no great judge of physiognomy. Human beings, for
him, were either the objects of scandalous gossip or else recipients of
narrow strips of paper, with proper bill-heads stating the name of his
hotel--“W. Schomberg, proprietor, accounts settled weekly.”