stir, hit the table with his fist a blow which caused the utterly
unprepared Ricardo to leap aside. And only then did Schomberg look up
with a dull, resentful expression.
Ricardo stared hard for a moment, spun on his heel, walked to the end
of the room, came back smartly, and muttered a profound “Ay! Ay!” above
Schomberg's rigid head. That the hotel-keeper was capable of a
great moral effort was proved by a gradual return of his severe,
Lieutenant-of-the-Reserve manner.
“Ay, ay!” repeated Ricardo more deliberately than before, and as if
after a further survey of the circumstances, “I wish I hadn't asked you,
or that you had told me a lie. It don't suit me to know that there's a
woman mixed up in this affair. What's she like? It's the girl you--”
“Leave off!” muttered Schomberg, utterly pitiful behind his stiff
military front.
“Ay, ay!” Ricardo ejaculated for the third time, more and more
enlightened and perplexed. “Can't bear to talk about it--so bad as that?
And yet I would bet she isn't a miracle to look at.”
Schomberg made a gesture as if he didn't know, as if he didn't care.
Then he squared his shoulders and frowned at vacancy.
“Swedish baron--h'm!” Ricardo continued meditatively. “I believe the
governor would think that business worth looking up, quite, if I put it
to him properly. The governor likes a duel, if you will call it so; but
I don't know a man that can stand up to him on the square. Have you ever
seen a cat play with a mouse? It's a pretty sight!”
Ricardo, with his voluptuously gleaming eyes and the coy expression,
looked so much like a cat that Schomberg would have felt all the alarm
of a mouse if other feelings had not had complete possession of his
breast.
“There are no lies between you and me,” he said, more steadily than he
thought he could speak.
“What's the good now? He funks women. In that Mexican pueblo where we
lay grounded on our beef-bones, so to speak, I used to go to dances of
an evening. The girls there would ask me if the English caballero in
the posada was a monk in disguise, or if he had taken a vow to the
sancissima madre not to speak to a woman, or whether--You can imagine
what fairly free-spoken girls will ask when they come to the point of
not caring what they say; and it used to vex me. Yes, the governor funks
facing women.”
“One woman?” interjected Schomberg in guttural tones.
“One may be more awkward to deal with than two, or two hundred, for that
matter. In a place that's full of women you needn't look at them unless
you like; but if you go into a room where there is only one woman, young
or old, pretty or ugly, you have got to face her. And, unless you are
after her, then--the governor is right enough--she's in the way.”
“Why notice them?” muttered Schomberg. “What can they do?”
“Make a noise, if nothing else,” opined Mr. Ricardo curtly, with the
distaste of a man whose path is a path of silence; for indeed, nothing
is more odious than a noise when one is engaged in a weighty and
absorbing card game. “Noise, noise, my friend,” he went on forcibly;
“confounded screeching about something or other, and I like it no more
than the governor does. But with the governor there's something else
besides. He can't stand them at all.”
He paused to reflect on this psychological phenomenon, and as no
philosopher was at hand to tell him that there is no strong sentiment
without some terror, as there is no real religion without a little
fetishism, he emitted his own conclusion, which surely could not go to
the root of the matter.
“I'm hanged if I don't think they are to him what liquor is to me.
Brandy--pah!”
He made a disgusted face, and produced a genuine shudder. Schomberg
listened to him in wonder. It looked as if the very scoundrelism, of
that--that Swede would protect him; the spoil of his iniquity standing
between the thief and the retribution.
“That's so, old buck.” Ricardo broke the silence after contemplating
Schomberg's mute dejection with a sort of sympathy. “I don't think this
trick will work.”
“But that's silly,” whispered the man deprived of the vengeance which he
had seemed already to hold in his hand, by a mysterious and exasperating
idiosyncrasy.
“Don't you set yourself to judge a gentleman.” Ricardo without anger
administered a moody rebuke. “Even I can't understand the governor
thoroughly. And I am an Englishman and his follower. No, I don't think I
care to put it before him, sick as I am of staying here.”
Ricardo could not be more sick of staying than Schomberg was of seeing
him stay. Schomberg believed so firmly in the reality of Heyst as
created by his own power of false inferences, of his hate, of his love
of scandal, that he could not contain a stifled cry of conviction
as sincere as most of our convictions, the disguised servants of our
passions, can appear at a supreme moment.
“It would have been like going to pick up a nugget of a thousand pounds,
or two or three times as much, for all I know. No trouble, no--”
“The petticoat's the trouble,” Ricardo struck in.
He had resumed his noiseless, feline, oblique prowling, in which an
observer would have detected a new character of excitement, such as a
wild animal of the cat species, anxious to make a spring, might betray.
Schomberg saw nothing. It would probably have cheered his drooping
spirits; but in a general way he preferred not to look at Ricardo.
Ricardo, however, with one of his slanting, gliding, restless glances,
observed the bitter smile on Schomberg's bearded lips--the unmistakable
smile of ruined hopes.
“You are a pretty unforgiving sort of chap,” he said, stopping for a
moment with an air of interest. “Hang me if I ever saw anybody look so
disappointed! I bet you would send black plague to that island if you
only knew how--eh, what? Plague too good for them? Ha, ha, ha!”
He bent down to stare at Schomberg who sat unstirring with stony eyes
and set features, and apparently deaf to the rasping derision of that
laughter so close to his red fleshy ear.
“Black plague too good for them, ha, ha!” Ricardo pressed the point on
the tormented hotel-keeper. Schomberg kept his eyes down obstinately.
“I don't wish any harm to the girl--” he muttered.
“But did she bolt from you? A fair bilk? Come!”
“Devil only knows what that villainous Swede had done to her--what he
promised her, how he frightened her. She couldn't have cared for him,
I know.” Schomberg's vanity clung to the belief in some atrocious,
extraordinary means of seduction employed by Heyst. “Look how he
bewitched that poor Morrison,” he murmured.
“Ah, Morrison--got all his money, what?”
“Yes--and his life.”
“Terrible fellow, that Swedish baron! How is one to get at him?”
Schomberg exploded.
“Three against one! Are you shy? Do you want me to give you a letter of
introduction?”
“You ought to look at yourself in a glass,” Ricardo said quietly. “Dash
me if you don't get a stroke of some kind presently. And this is the
fellow who says women can do nothing! That one will do for you, unless
you manage to forget her.”
“I wish I could,” Schomberg admitted earnestly. “And it's all the doing
of that Swede. I don't get enough sleep, Mr. Ricardo. And then, to
finish me off, you gentlemen turn up . . . as if I hadn't enough worry.”
“That's done you good,” suggested the secretary with ironic seriousness.
“Takes your mind off that silly trouble. At your age too.”
He checked himself, as if in pity, and changing his tone:
“I would really like to oblige you while doing a stroke of business at
the same time.”
“A good stroke,” insisted Schomberg, as if it were mechanically. In his
simplicity he was not able to give up the idea which had entered his
head. An idea must be driven out by another idea, and with Schomberg
ideas were rare and therefore tenacious. “Minted gold,” he murmured with
a sort of anguish.
Such an expressive combination of words was not without effect upon
Ricardo. Both these men were amenable to the influence of verbal
suggestions. The secretary of “plain Mr. Jones” sighed and murmured.
“Yes. But how is one to get at it?”
“Being three to one,” said Schomberg, “I suppose you could get it for
the asking.”
“One would think the fellow lived next door,” Ricardo growled
impatiently. “Hang it all, can't you understand a plain question? I have
asked you the way.”
Schomberg seemed to revive.
“The way?”
The torpor of deceived hopes underlying his superficial changes of mood
had been pricked by these words which seemed pointed with purpose.
“The way is over the water, of course,” said the hotel-keeper. “For
people like you, three days in a good, big boat is nothing. It's no more
than a little outing, a bit of a change. At this season the Java Sea
is a pond. I have an excellent, safe boat--a ship's life-boat--carry
thirty, let alone three, and a child could handle her. You wouldn't get
a wet face at this time of the year. You might call it a pleasure-trip.”
“And yet, having this boat, you didn't go after her yourself--or after
him? Well, you are a fine fellow for a disappointed lover.”
Schomberg gave a start at the suggestion.
“I am not three men,” he said sulkily, as the shortest answer of the
several he could have given.
“Oh, I know your sort,” Ricardo let fall negligently. “You are like most
people--or perhaps just a little more peaceable than the rest of the
buying and selling gang that bosses this rotten show. Well, well,
you respectable citizen,” he went on, “let us go thoroughly into the
matter.”
When Schomberg had been made to understand that Mr. Jones's henchman was
ready to discuss, in his own words, “this boat of yours, with courses
and distances,” and such concrete matters of no good augury to that
villainous Swede, he recovered his soldierly bearing, squared his
shoulders, and asked in his military manner:
“You wish, then, to proceed with the business?”
Ricardo nodded. He had a great mind to, he said. A gentleman had to be
humoured as much as possible; but he must be managed, too, on occasions,
for his own good. And it was the business of the right sort of
“follower” to know the proper time and the proper methods of that
delicate part of his duty. Having exposed this theory Ricardo proceeded
to the application.
“I've never actually lied to him,” he said, “and I ain't going to now.
I shall just say nothing about the girl. He will have to get over the
shock the best he can. Hang it all! Too much humouring won't do here.”
“Funny thing,” Schomberg observed crisply.
“Is it? Ay, you wouldn't mind taking a woman by the throat in some dark
corner and nobody by, I bet!”
Ricardo's dreadful, vicious, cat-like readiness to get his claws out at
any moment startled Schomberg as usual. But it was provoking too.
“And you?” he defended himself. “Don't you want me to believe you are up
to anything?”
“I, my boy? Oh, yes. I am not that gentleman; neither are you. Take 'em
by the throat or chuck 'em under the chin is all one to me--almost,”
affirmed Ricardo, with something obscurely ironical in his complacency.
“Now, as to this business. A three days' jaunt in a good boat isn't a
thing to frighten people like us. You are right, so far; but there are
other details.”
Schomberg was ready enough to enter into details. He explained that he
had a small plantation, with a fairly habitable hut on it, on Madura. He
proposed that his guest should start from town in his boat, as if going
for an excursion to that rural spot. The custom-house people on the quay
were used to see his boat go off on such trips.
From Madura, after some repose and on a convenient day, Mr. Jones
and party would make the real start. It would all be plain sailing.
Schomberg undertook to provision the boat. The greatest hardship the
voyagers need apprehend would be a mild shower of rain. At that season
of the year there were no serious thunderstorms.
Schomberg's heart began to thump as he saw himself nearing his
vengeance. His speech was thick but persuasive.
“No risk at all--none whatever.”
Ricardo dismissed these assurances of safety with an impatient gesture.
He was thinking of other risks.
“The getting away from here is all right; but we may be sighted at sea,
and that may bring awkwardness later on. A ship's boat with three white
men in her, knocking about out of sight of land, is bound to make talk.
Are we likely to be seen on our way?”
“No, unless by native craft,” said Schomberg.
Ricardo nodded, satisfied. Both these white men looked on native life as
a mere play of shadows. A play of shadows the dominant race could
walk through unaffected and disregarded in the pursuit of its
incomprehensible aims and needs. No. Native craft did not count, of
course. It was an empty, solitary part of the sea, Schomberg expounded
further. Only the Ternate mail-boat crossed that region about the eighth
of every month, regularly--nowhere near the island though. Rigid, his
voice hoarse, his heart thumping, his mind concentrated on the success
of his plan, the hotel-keeper multiplied words, as if to keep as many
of them as possible between himself and the murderous aspect of his
purpose.
“So, if you gentlemen depart from my plantation quietly at sunset on the
eighth--always best to make a start at night, with a land breeze--it's a
hundred to one--What am I saying?--it's a thousand to one that no
human eye will see you on the passage. All you've got to do is keep her
heading north-east for, say, fifty hours; perhaps not quite so long.
There will always be draft enough to keep a boat moving; you may reckon
on that; and then--”
The muscles about his waist quivered under his clothes with eagerness,
with impatience, and with something like apprehension, the true nature
of which was not clear to him. And he did not want to investigate it.
Ricardo regarded him steadily, with those dry eyes of his shining more
like polished stones than living tissue.
“And then what?” he asked.
“And then--why, you will astonish der herr baron--ha, ha!”
Schomberg seemed to force the words and the laugh out of himself in a
hoarse bass.
“And you believe he has all that plunder by him?” asked Ricardo, rather
perfunctorily, because the fact seemed to him extremely probable when
looked at all round by his acute mind.
Schomberg raised his hands and lowered them slowly.
“How can it be otherwise? He was going home, he was on his way, in this
hotel. Ask people. Was it likely he would leave it behind him?”
Ricardo was thoughtful. Then, suddenly raising his head, he remarked:
“Steer north-east for fifty hours, eh? That's not much of a sailing
direction. I've heard of a port being missed before on better
information. Can't you say what sort of landfall a fellow may expect?
But I suppose you have never seen that island yourself?”
Schomberg admitted that he had not seen it, in a tone in which a
man congratulates himself on having escaped the contamination of an
unsavoury experience. No, certainly not. He had never had any business
to call there. But what of that? He could give Mr. Ricardo as good a
sea-mark as anybody need wish for. He laughed nervously. Miss it! He
defied anyone that came within forty miles of it to miss the retreat of
that villainous Swede.
“What do you think of a pillar of smoke by day and a loom of fire at
night? There's a volcano in full blast near that island--enough to guide
almost a blind man. What more do you want? An active volcano to steer
by?”
These last words he roared out exultingly, then jumped up and glared.
The door to the left of the bar had swung open, and Mrs. Schomberg,
dressed for duty, stood facing him down the whole length of the room.
She clung to the handle for a moment, then came in and glided to her
place, where she sat down to stare straight before her, as usual.
PART THREE
CHAPTER ONE
Tropical nature had been kind to the failure of the commercial
enterprise. The desolation of the headquarters of the Tropical Belt Coal
Company had been screened from the side of the sea; from the side where
prying eyes--if any were sufficiently interested, either in malice or
in sorrow--could have noted the decaying bones of that once sanguine
enterprise.
Heyst had been sitting among the bones buried so kindly in the grass of
two wet seasons' growth. The silence of his surroundings, broken only by
such sounds as a distant roll of thunder, the lash of rain through the
foliage of some big trees, the noise of the wind tossing the leaves of
the forest, and of the short seas breaking against the shore, favoured
rather than hindered his solitary meditation.
A meditation is always--in a white man, at least--more or less an
interrogative exercise. Heyst meditated in simple terms on the mystery
of his actions; and he answered himself with the honest reflection:
“There must be a lot of the original Adam in me, after all.”
He reflected, too, with the sense of making a discovery, that this
primeval ancestor is not easily suppressed. The oldest voice in the
world is just the one that never ceases to speak. If anybody could have
silenced its imperative echoes, it should have been Heyst's father, with
his contemptuous, inflexible negation of all effort; but apparently he
could not. There was in the son a lot of that first ancestor who,
as soon as he could uplift his muddy frame from the celestial mould,
started inspecting and naming the animals of that paradise which he was
so soon to lose.
Action--the first thought, or perhaps the first impulse, on earth! The
barbed hook, baited with the illusions of progress, to bring out of the
lightless void the shoals of unnumbered generations!
“And I, the son of my father, have been caught too, like the silliest
fish of them all.” Heyst said to himself.
He suffered. He was hurt by the sight of his own life, which ought to
have been a masterpiece of aloofness. He remembered always his last
evening with his father. He remembered the thin features, the great mass
of white hair, and the ivory complexion. A five-branched candlestick
stood on a little table by the side of the easy chair. They had been
talking a long time. The noises of the street had died out one by one,
till at last, in the moonlight, the London houses began to look like the
tombs of an unvisited, unhonoured, cemetery of hopes.
He had listened. Then, after a silence, he had asked--for he was really
young then:
“Is there no guidance?”
His father was in an unexpectedly soft mood on that night, when the moon
swam in a cloudless sky over the begrimed shadows of the town.
“You still believe in something, then?” he said in a clear voice,
which had been growing feeble of late. “You believe in flesh and blood,
perhaps? A full and equable contempt would soon do away with that, too.
But since you have not attained to it, I advise you to cultivate
that form of contempt which is called pity. It is perhaps the least
difficult--always remembering that you, too, if you are anything, are as
pitiful as the rest, yet never expecting any pity for yourself.”
“What is one to do, then?” sighed the young man, regarding his father,
rigid in the high-backed chair.
“Look on--make no sound,” were the last words of the man who had spent
his life in blowing blasts upon a terrible trumpet which filled heaven
and earth with ruins, while mankind went on its way unheeding.
That very night he died in his bed, so quietly that they found him
in his usual attitude of sleep, lying on his side, one hand under his
cheek, and his knees slightly bent. He had not even straightened his
legs.
His son buried the silenced destroyer of systems, of hopes, of beliefs.
He observed that the death of that bitter contemner of life did not
trouble the flow of life's stream, where men and women go by thick as
dust, revolving and jostling one another like figures cut out of cork
and weighted with lead just sufficiently to keep them in their proudly
upright posture.
After the funeral, Heyst sat alone, in the dusk, and his meditation took
the form of a definite vision of the stream, of the fatuously jostling,
nodding, spinning figures hurried irresistibly along, and giving no sign
of being aware that the voice on the bank had been suddenly silenced .
. . Yes. A few obituary notices generally insignificant and some grossly
abusive. The son had read them all with mournful detachment.
“This is the hate and rage of their fear,” he thought to himself, “and
also of wounded vanity. They shriek their little shriek as they fly
past. I suppose I ought to hate him too . . .”
He became aware of his eyes being wet. It was not that the man was his
father. For him it was purely a matter of hearsay which could not in
itself cause this emotion. No! It was because he had looked at him so
long that he missed him so much. The dead man had kept him on the bank
by his side. And now Heyst felt acutely that he was alone on the bank of
the stream. In his pride he determined not to enter it.
A few slow tears rolled down his face. The rooms, filling with shadows,
seemed haunted by a melancholy, uneasy presence which could not express
itself. The young man got up with a strange sense of making way for
something impalpable that claimed possession, went out of the house, and
locked the door. A fortnight later he started on his travels--to “look
on and never make a sound.”
The elder Heyst had left behind him a little money and a certain
quantity of movable objects, such as books, tables, chairs, and
pictures, which might have complained of heartless desertion after many
years of faithful service; for there is a soul in things. Heyst, our
Heyst, had often thought of them, reproachful and mute, shrouded and
locked up in those rooms, far away in London with the sounds of the
street reaching them faintly, and sometimes a little sunshine, when
the blinds were pulled up and the windows opened from time to time in
pursuance of his original instructions and later reminders. It seemed
as if in his conception of a world not worth touching, and perhaps not
substantial enough to grasp, these objects familiar to his childhood and
his youth, and associated with the memory of an old man, were the only
realities, something having an absolute existence. He would never have
them sold, or even moved from the places they occupied when he looked
upon them last. When he was advised from London that his lease had
expired, and that the house, with some others as like it as two peas,
was to be demolished, he was surprisingly distressed.
He had entered by then the broad, human path of inconsistencies. Already
the Tropical Belt Coal Company was in existence. He sent instructions
to have some of the things sent out to him at Samburan, just as any
ordinary, credulous person would have done. They came, torn out from
their long repose--a lot of books, some chairs and tables, his father's
portrait in oils, which surprised Heyst by its air of youth, because he
remembered his father as a much older man; a lot of small objects, such
as candlesticks, inkstands, and statuettes from his father's study,
which surprised him because they looked so old and so much worn.
The manager of the Tropical Belt Coal Company, unpacking them on the
veranda in the shade besieged by a fierce sunshine, must have felt like
a remorseful apostate before these relics. He handled them tenderly;
and it was perhaps their presence there which attached him to the island
when he woke up to the failure of his apostasy. Whatever the decisive
reason, Heyst had remained where another would have been glad to be off.
The excellent Davidson had discovered the fact without discovering the
reason, and took a humane interest in Heyst's strange existence, while
at the same time his native delicacy kept him from intruding on the
other's whim of solitude. He could not possibly guess that Heyst, alone
on the island, felt neither more nor less lonely than in any other
place, desert or populous. Davidson's concern was, if one may express it
so, the danger of spiritual starvation; but this was a spirit which had
renounced all outside nourishment, and was sustaining itself proudly on
its own contempt of the usual coarse ailments which life offers to the
common appetites of men.