confidently asserted. At the beginning of the company's operations the
island had been provisioned in a manner which had outlasted the need.
Heyst did not need to fear hunger; and his very loneliness had not been
without some alleviation. Of the crowd of imported Chinese labourers,
one at least had remained in Samburan, solitary and strange, like a
swallow left behind at the migrating season of his tribe.
Wang was not a common coolie. He had been a servant to white men before.
The agreement between him and Heyst consisted in the exchange of a few
words on the day when the last batch of the mine coolies was leaving
Samburan. Heyst, leaning over the balustrade of the veranda, was looking
on, as calm in appearance as though he had never departed from the
doctrine that this world, for the wise, is nothing but an amusing
spectacle. Wang came round the house, and standing below, raised up his
yellow, thin face.
“All finished?” he asked. Heyst nodded slightly from above, glancing
towards the jetty. A crowd of blue-clad figures with yellow faces and
calves was being hustled down into the boats of the chartered steamer
lying well out, like a painted ship on a painted sea; painted in crude
colours, without shadows, without feeling, with brutal precision.
“You had better hurry up if you don't want to be left behind.”
But the Chinaman did not move.
“We stop,” he declared. Heyst looked down at him for the first time.
“You want to stop here?”
“Yes.”
“What were you? What was your work here?”
“Mess-loom boy.”
“Do you want to stay with me here as my boy?” inquired Heyst, surprised.
The Chinaman unexpectedly put on a deprecatory expression, and said,
after a marked pause:
“Can do.”
“You needn't,” said Heyst, “unless you like. I propose to stay on
here--it may be for a very long time. I have no power to make you go if
you wish to remain, but I don't see why you should.”
“Catchee one piecee wife,” remarked Wang unemotionally, and marched off,
turning his back on the wharf and the great world beyond, represented by
the steamer waiting for her boats.
Heyst learned presently that Wang had persuaded one of the women of
Alfuro village, on the west shore of the island, beyond the central
ridge, to come over to live with him in a remote part of the company's
clearing. It was a curious case, inasmuch as the Alfuros, having been
frightened by the sudden invasion of Chinamen, had blocked the path over
the ridge by felling a few trees, and had kept strictly on their own
side. The coolies, as a body, mistrusting the manifest mildness of these
harmless fisher-folk, had kept to their lines, without attempting to
cross the island. Wang was the brilliant exception. He must have been
uncommonly fascinating, in a way that was not apparent to Heyst, or else
uncommonly persuasive. The woman's services to Heyst were limited to
the fact that she had anchored Wang to the spot by her charms, which
remained unknown to the white man, because she never came near the
houses. The couple lived at the edge of the forest, and she could
sometimes be seen gazing towards the bungalow shading her eyes with her
hand. Even from a distance she appeared to be a shy, wild creature,
and Heyst, anxious not to try her primitive nerves unduly, scrupulously
avoided that side of the clearing in his strolls.
The day--or rather the first night--after his hermit life began, he was
aware of vague sounds of revelry in that direction. Emboldened by the
departure of the invading strangers, some Alfuros, the woman's friends
and relations, had ventured over the ridge to attend something in the
nature of a wedding feast. Wang had invited them. But this was the only
occasion when any sound louder than the buzzing of insects had troubled
the profound silence of the clearing. The natives were never invited
again. Wang not only knew how to live according to conventional
proprieties, but had strong personal views as to the manner of arranging
his domestic existence. After a time Heyst perceived that Wang had
annexed all the keys. Any keys left lying about vanished after Wang had
passed that way. Subsequently some of them--those that did not belong
to the store-rooms and the empty bungalows, and could not be regarded
as the common property of this community of two--were returned to Heyst,
tied in a bunch with a piece of string. He found them one morning
lying by the side of his plate. He had not been inconvenienced by their
absence, because he never locked up anything in the way of drawers and
boxes. Heyst said nothing. Wang also said nothing. Perhaps he had always
been a taciturn man; perhaps he was influenced by the genius of the
locality, which was certainly that of silence. Till Heyst and Morrison
had landed in Black Diamond Bay, and named it, that side of Samburan had
hardly ever heard the sound of human speech. It was easy to be taciturn
with Heyst, who had plunged himself into an abyss of meditation over
books, and remained in it till the shadow of Wang falling across the
page, and the sound of a rough, low voice uttering the Malay word
“makan,” would force him to climb out to a meal.
Wang in his native province in China might have been an aggressively,
sensitively genial person; but in Samburan he had clothed himself in
a mysterious stolidity and did not seem to resent not being spoken to
except in single words, at a rate which did not average half a dozen per
day. And he gave no more than he got. It is to be presumed that if he
suffered he made up for it with the Alfuro woman. He always went back to
her at the first fall of dusk, vanishing from the bungalow suddenly at
this hour, like a sort of topsy-turvy, day-hunting, Chinese ghost with a
white jacket and a pigtail. Presently, giving way to a Chinaman's ruling
passion, he could be observed breaking the ground near his hut, between
the mighty stumps of felled trees, with a miner's pickaxe. After a
time, he discovered a rusty but serviceable spade in one of the empty
store-rooms, and it is to be supposed that he got on famously; but
nothing of it could be seen, because he went to the trouble of pulling
to pieces one of the company's sheds in order to get materials for
making a high and very close fence round his patch, as if the growing
of vegetables were a patented process, or an awful and holy mystery
entrusted to the keeping of his race.
Heyst, following from a distance the progress of Wang's gardening and of
these precautions--there was nothing else to look at--was amused at
the thought that he, in his own person, represented the market for
its produce. The Chinaman had found several packets of seeds in the
store-rooms, and had surrendered to an irresistible impulse to put them
into the ground. He would make his master pay for the vegetables which
he was raising to satisfy his instinct. And, looking silently at the
silent Wang going about his work in the bungalow in his unhasty,
steady way; Heyst envied the Chinaman's obedience to his instincts, the
powerful simplicity of purpose which made his existence appear almost
automatic in the mysterious precision of its facts.
CHAPTER TWO
During his master's absence at Sourabaya, Wang had busied himself with
the ground immediately in front of the principal bungalow. Emerging
from the fringe of grass growing across the shore end of the coal-jetty,
Heyst beheld a broad, clear space, black and level, with only one or two
clumps of charred twigs, where the flame had swept from the front of his
house to the nearest trees of the forest.
“You took the risk of firing the grass?” Heyst asked.
Wang nodded. Hanging on the arm of the white man before whom he stood
was the girl called Alma; but neither from the Chinaman's eyes nor from
his expression could anyone have guessed that he was in the slightest
degree aware of the fact.
“He has been tidying the place in his labour-saving way,” explained
Heyst, without looking at the girl, whose hand rested on his forearm.
“He's the whole establishment, you see. I told you I hadn't even a dog
to keep me company here.”
Wang had marched off towards the wharf.
“He's like those waiters in that place,” she said. That place was
Schomberg's hotel.
“One Chinaman looks very much like another,” Heyst remarked. “We shall
find it useful to have him here. This is the house.”
They faced, at some distance, the six shallow steps leading up to the
veranda. The girl had abandoned Heyst's arm.
“This is the house,” he repeated.
She did not offer to budge away from his side, but stood staring fixedly
at the steps, as if they had been something unique and impracticable. He
waited a little, but she did not move.
“Don't you want to go in?” he asked, without turning his head to look at
her. “The sun's too heavy to stand about here.” He tried to overcome
a sort of fear, a sort of impatient faintness, and his voice sounded
rough. “You had better go in,” he concluded.
They both moved then, but at the foot of the stairs Heyst stopped, while
the girl went on rapidly, as if nothing could stop her now. She crossed
the veranda swiftly, and entered the twilight of the big central room
opening upon it, and then the deeper twilight of the room beyond. She
stood still in the dusk, in which her dazzled eyes could scarcely make
out the forms of objects, and sighed a sigh of relief. The impression
of the sunlight, of sea and sky, remained with her like a memory of a
painful trial gone through--done with at last!
Meanwhile Heyst had walked back slowly towards the jetty; but he did not
get so far as that. The practical and automatic Wang had got hold of
one of the little trucks that had been used for running baskets of coal
alongside ships. He appeared pushing it before him, loaded lightly with
Heyst's bag and the bundle of the girl's belongings, wrapped in Mrs.
Schomberg's shawl. Heyst turned about and walked by the side of the
rusty rails on which the truck ran. Opposite the house Wang stopped,
lifted the bag to his shoulder, balanced it carefully, and then took the
bundle in his hand.
“Leave those things on the table in the big room--understand?”
“Me savee,” grunted Wang, moving off.
Heyst watched the Chinaman disappear from the veranda. It was not till
he had seen Wang come out that he himself entered the twilight of the
big room. By that time Wang was out of sight at the back of the house,
but by no means out of hearing. The Chinaman could hear the voice of
him who, when there were many people there, was generally referred to
as “Number One.” Wang was not able to understand the words, but the tone
interested him.
“Where are you?” cried Number One.
Then Wang heard, much more faint, a voice he had never heard before--a
novel impression which he acknowledged by cocking his head slightly to
one side.
“I am here--out of the sun.”
The new voice sounded remote and uncertain. Wang heard nothing more,
though he waited for some time, very still, the top of his shaven poll
exactly level with the floor of the back veranda. His face meanwhile
preserved an inscrutable immobility. Suddenly he stooped to pick up
the lid of a deal candle-box which was lying on the ground by his foot.
Breaking it up with his fingers, he directed his steps towards the
cook-shed, where, squatting on his heels, he proceeded to kindle a small
fire under a very sooty kettle, possibly to make tea. Wang had some
knowledge of the more superficial rites and ceremonies of white men's
existence, otherwise so enigmatically remote to his mind, and containing
unexpected possibilities of good and evil, which had to be watched for
with prudence and care.
CHAPTER THREE
That morning, as on all the others of the full tale of mornings since
his return with the girl to Samburan, Heyst came out on the veranda and
spread his elbows on the railing, in an easy attitude of proprietorship.
The bulk of the central ridge of the island cut off the bungalow from
sunrises, whether glorious or cloudy, angry or serene. The dwellers
therein were debarred from reading early the fortune of the new-born
day. It sprang upon them in its fulness with a swift retreat of the
great shadow when the sun, clearing the ridge, looked down, hot and dry,
with a devouring glare like the eye of an enemy. But Heyst, once the
Number One of this locality, while it was comparatively teeming with
mankind, appreciated the prolongation of early coolness, the subdued,
lingering half-light, the faint ghost of the departed night, the
fragrance of its dewy, dark soul captured for a moment longer between
the great glow of the sky and the intense blaze of the uncovered sea.
It was naturally difficult for Heyst to keep his mind from dwelling on
the nature and consequences of this, his latest departure from the part
of an unconcerned spectator. Yet he had retained enough of his wrecked
philosophy to prevent him from asking himself consciously how it would
end. But at the same time he could not help being temperamentally, from
long habit and from set purpose, a spectator still, perhaps a little
less naive but (as he discovered with some surprise) not much more far
sighted than the common run of men. Like the rest of us who act, all he
could say to himself, with a somewhat affected grimness, was:
“We shall see!”
This mood of grim doubt intruded on him only when he was alone. There
were not many such moments in his day now; and he did not like them when
they came. On this morning he had no time to grow uneasy. Alma came out
to join him long before the sun, rising above the Samburan ridge, swept
the cool shadow of the early morning and the remnant of the night's
coolness clear off the roof under which they had dwelt for more than
three months already. She came out as on other mornings. He had heard
her light footsteps in the big room--the room where he had unpacked the
cases from London; the room now lined with the backs of books halfway up
on its three sides. Above the cases the fine matting met the ceiling of
tightly stretched white calico. In the dusk and coolness nothing gleamed
except the gilt frame of the portrait of Heyst's father, signed by a
famous painter, lonely in the middle of a wall.
Heyst did not turn round.
“Do you know what I was thinking of?” he asked.
“No,” she said. Her tone betrayed always a shade of anxiety, as though
she were never certain how a conversation with him would end. She leaned
on the guard-rail by his side.
“No,” she repeated. “What was it?” She waited. Then, rather with
reluctance than shyness, she asked:
“Were you thinking of me?”
“I was wondering when you would come out,” said Heyst, still without
looking at the girl--to whom, after several experimental essays in
combining detached letters and loose syllables, he had given the name of
Lena.
She remarked after a pause:
“I was not very far from you.”
“Apparently you were not near enough for me.”
“You could have called if you wanted me,” she said. “And I wasn't so
long doing my hair.”
“Apparently it was too long for me.”
“Well, you were thinking of me, anyhow. I am glad of it. Do you know,
it seems to me, somehow, that if you were to stop thinking of me I
shouldn't be in the world at all!”
He turned round and looked at her. She often said things which surprised
him. A vague smile faded away on her lips before his scrutiny.
“What is it?” he asked. “Is it a reproach?”
“A reproach! Why, how could it be?” she defended herself.
“Well, what did it mean?” he insisted.
“What I said--just what I said. Why aren't you fair?”
“Ah, this is at least a reproach!”
She coloured to the roots of her hair.
“It looks as if you were trying to make out that I am disagreeable,” she
murmured. “Am I? You will make me afraid to open my mouth presently. I
shall end by believing I am no good.”
Her head drooped a little. He looked at her smooth, low brow, the
faintly coloured cheeks, and the red lips parted slightly, with the
gleam of her teeth within.
“And then I won't be any good,” she added with conviction. “That I
won't! I can only be what you think I am.”
He made a slight movement. She put her hand on his arm, without raising
her head, and went on, her voice animated in the stillness of her body:
“It is so. It couldn't be any other way with a girl like me and a man
like you. Here we are, we two alone, and I can't even tell where we
are.”
“A very well-known spot of the globe,” Heyst uttered gently. “There
must have been at least fifty thousand circulars issued at the time--a
hundred and fifty thousand, more likely. My friend was looking after
that, and his ideas were large and his belief very strong. Of us two it
was he who had the faith. A hundred and fifty thousand, certainly.”
“What is it you mean?” she asked in a low tone.
“What should I find fault with you for?” Heyst went on. “For being
amiable, good, gracious--and pretty?”
A silence fell. Then she said:
“It's all right that you should think that of me. There's no one here to
think anything of us, good or bad.”
The rare timbre of her voice gave a special value to what she uttered.
The indefinable emotion which certain intonations gave him, he was
aware, was more physical than moral. Every time she spoke to him she
seemed to abandon to him something of herself--something excessively
subtle and inexpressible, to which he was infinitely sensible, which he
would have missed horribly if she were to go away. While he was looking
into her eyes she raised her bare forearm, out of the short sleeve, and
held it in the air till he noticed it and hastened to pose his great
bronze moustaches on the whiteness of the skin. Then they went in.
Wang immediately appeared in front, and, squatting on his heels, began
to potter mysteriously about some plants at the foot of the veranda.
When Heyst and the girl came out again, the Chinaman had gone in his
peculiar manner, which suggested vanishing out of existence rather than
out of sight, a process of evaporation rather than of movement. They
descended the steps, looking at each other, and started off smartly
across the cleared ground; but they were not ten yards away when,
without perceptible stir or sound, Wang materialized inside the empty
room. The Chinaman stood still with roaming eyes, examining the walls as
if for signs, for inscriptions; exploring the floor as if for pitfalls,
for dropped coins. Then he cocked his head slightly at the profile of
Heyst's father, pen in hand above a white sheet of paper on a crimson
tablecloth; and, moving forward noiselessly, began to clear away the
breakfast things.
Though he proceeded without haste, the unerring precision of his
movements, the absolute soundlessness of the operation, gave it
something of the quality of a conjuring trick. And, the trick having
been performed, Wang vanished from the scene, to materialize presently
in front of the house. He materialized walking away from it, with no
visible or guessable intention; but at the end of some ten paces he
stopped, made a half turn, and put his hand up to shade his eyes. The
sun had topped the grey ridge of Samburan. The great morning shadow was
gone; and far away in the devouring sunshine Wang was in time to see
Number One and the woman, two remote white specks against the sombre
line of the forest. In a moment they vanished. With the smallest display
of action, Wang also vanished from the sunlight of the clearing.
Heyst and Lena entered the shade of the forest path which crossed the
island, and which, near its highest point had been blocked by felled
trees. But their intention was not to go so far. After keeping to the
path for some distance, they left it at a point where the forest was
bare of undergrowth, and the trees, festooned with creepers, stood clear
of one another in the gloom of their own making. Here and there great
splashes of light lay on the ground. They moved, silent in the great
stillness, breathing the calmness, the infinite isolation, the repose of
a slumber without dreams. They emerged at the upper limit of vegetation,
among some rocks; and in a depression of the sharp slope, like a small
platform, they turned about and looked from on high over the sea,
lonely, its colour effaced by sunshine, its horizon a heat mist, a mere
unsubstantial shimmer in the pale and blinding infinity overhung by the
darker blaze of the sky.
“It makes my head swim,” the girl murmured, shutting her eyes and
putting her hand on his shoulder.
Heyst, gazing fixedly to the southward, exclaimed:
“Sail ho!”
A moment of silence ensued.
“It must be very far away,” he went on. “I don't think you could see it.
Some native craft making for the Moluccas, probably. Come, we mustn't
stay here.”
With his arm round her waist, he led her down a little distance, and
they settled themselves in the shade; she, seated on the ground, he a
little lower, reclining at her feet.
“You don't like to look at the sea from up there?” he said after a time.
She shook her head. That empty space was to her the abomination of
desolation. But she only said again:
“It makes my head swim.”
“Too big?” he inquired.
“Too lonely. It makes my heart sink, too,” she added in a low voice, as
if confessing a secret.
“I'm afraid,” said Heyst, “that you would be justified in reproaching me
for these sensations. But what would you have?”
His tone was playful, but his eyes, directed at her face, were serious.
She protested.
“I am not feeling lonely with you--not a bit. It is only when we come up
to that place, and I look at all that water and all that light--”
“We will never come here again, then,” he interrupted her.
She remained silent for a while, returning his gaze till he removed it.
“It seems as if everything that there is had gone under,” she said.
“Reminds you of the story of the deluge,” muttered the man, stretched at
her feet and looking at them. “Are you frightened at it?”
“I should be rather frightened to be left behind alone. When I say, I,
of course I mean we.”
“Do you?” . . . Heyst remained silent for a while. “The vision of a
world destroyed,” he mused aloud. “Would you be sorry for it?”
“I should be sorry for the happy people in it,” she said simply.
His gaze travelled up her figure and reached her face, where he seemed
to detect the veiled glow of intelligence, as one gets a glimpse of the
sun through the clouds.
“I should have thought it's they specially who ought to have been
congratulated. Don't you?”
“Oh, yes--I understand what you mean; but there were forty days before
it was all over.”
“You seem to be in possession of all the details.”
Heyst spoke just to say something rather than to gaze at her in silence.
She was not looking at him.
“Sunday school,” she murmured. “I went regularly from the time I
was eight till I was thirteen. We lodged in the north of London, off
Kingsland Road. It wasn't a bad time. Father was earning good money
then. The woman of the house used to pack me off in the afternoon with
her own girls. She was a good woman. Her husband was in the post office.
Sorter or something. Such a quiet man. He used to go off after supper
for night-duty, sometimes. Then one day they had a row, and broke up the
home. I remember I cried when we had to pack up all of a sudden and go
into other lodgings. I never knew what it was, though--”
“The deluge,” muttered Heyst absently.
He felt intensely aware of her personality, as if this were the first
moment of leisure he had found to look at her since they had come
together. The peculiar timbre of her voice, with its modulations of
audacity and sadness, would have given interest to the most inane
chatter. But she was no chatterer. She was rather silent, with a
capacity for immobility, an upright stillness, as when resting on the
concert platform between the musical numbers, her feet crossed, her
hands reposing on her lap. But in the intimacy of their life her grey,
unabashed gaze forced upon him the sensation of something inexplicable
reposing within her; stupidity or inspiration, weakness or force--or
simply an abysmal emptiness, reserving itself even in the moments of
complete surrender.
During a long pause she did not look at him. Then suddenly, as if
the word “deluge” had stuck in her mind, she asked, looking up at the
cloudless sky:
“Does it ever rain here?”
“There is a season when it rains almost every day,” said Heyst,
surprised. “There are also thunderstorms. We once had a 'mud-shower.'”
“Mud-shower?”
“Our neighbour there was shooting up ashes. He sometimes clears his
red-hot gullet like that; and a thunderstorm came along at the
same time. It was very messy; but our neighbour is generally well
behaved--just smokes quietly, as he did that day when I first showed
you the smudge in the sky from the schooner's deck. He's a good-natured,
lazy fellow of a volcano.”