slender stem of a tree-fern some dozen feet in front of her. “It wasn't
very long after we left England--some few days, though. I was so ill at
first that I lost count of days. A smoking mountain--I can't think how
they called it.”
“Vesuvius, perhaps,” suggested Heyst.
“That's the name.”
“I saw it, too, years, ages ago,” said Heyst.
“On your way here?”
“No, long before I ever thought of coming into this part of the world. I
was yet a boy.”
She turned and looked at him attentively, as if seeking to discover some
trace of that boyhood in the mature face of the man with the hair
thin at the top and the long, thick moustaches. Heyst stood the frank
examination with a playful smile, hiding the profound effect these
veiled grey eyes produced--whether on his heart or on his nerves,
whether sensuous or spiritual, tender or irritating, he was unable to
say.
“Well, princess of Samburan,” he said at last, “have I found favour in
your sight?”
She seemed to wake up, and shook her head.
“I was thinking,” she murmured very low.
“Thought, action--so many snares! If you begin to think you will be
unhappy.”
“I wasn't thinking of myself!” she declared with a simplicity which took
Heyst aback somewhat.
“On the lips of a moralist this would sound like a rebuke,” he said,
half seriously; “but I won't suspect you of being one. Moralists and I
haven't been friends for many years.”
She had listened with an air of attention.
“I understood you had no friends,” she said. “I am pleased that there's
nobody to find fault with you for what you have done. I like to think
that I am in no one's way.”
Heyst would have said something, but she did not give him time.
Unconscious of the movement he made she went on:
“What I was thinking to myself was, why are you here?”
Heyst let himself sink on his elbow again.
“If by 'you' you mean 'we'--well, you know why we are here.”
She bent her gaze down at him.
“No, it isn't that. I meant before--all that time before you came across
me and guessed at once that I was in trouble, with no one to turn to.
And you know it was desperate trouble too.”
Her voice fell on the last words, as if she would end there; but there
was something so expectant in Heyst's attitude as he sat at her feet,
looking up at her steadily, that she continued, after drawing a short,
quick breath:
“It was, really. I told you I had been worried before by bad fellows.
It made me unhappy, disturbed--angry, too. But oh, how I hated, hated,
hated that man!”
“That man” was the florid Schomberg with the military bearing,
benefactor of white men ['decent food to eat in decent company')--mature
victim of belated passion. The girl shuddered. The characteristic
harmoniousness of her face became, as it were, decomposed for an
instant. Heyst was startled.
“Why think of it now?” he cried.
“It's because I was cornered that time. It wasn't as before. It was
worse, ever so much. I wished I could die of my fright--and yet it's
only now that I begin to understand what a horror it might have been.
Yes, only now, since we--”
Heyst stirred a little.
“Came here,” he finished.
Her tenseness relaxed, her flushed face went gradually back to its
normal tint.
“Yes,” she said indifferently, but at the same time she gave him a
stealthy glance of passionate appreciation; and then her face took on a
melancholy cast, her whole figure drooped imperceptibly.
“But you were coming back here anyhow?” she asked.
“Yes. I was only waiting for Davidson. Yes, I was coming back here, to
these ruins--to Wang, who perhaps did not expect to see me again. It's
impossible to guess at the way that Chinaman draws his conclusions, and
how he looks upon one.”
“Don't talk about him. He makes me feel uncomfortable. Talk about
yourself!”
“About myself? I see you are still busy with the mystery of my existence
here; but it isn't at all mysterious. Primarily the man with the quill
pen in his hand in that picture you so often look at is responsible for
my existence. He is also responsible for what my existence is, or
rather has been. He was a great man in his way. I don't know much of his
history. I suppose he began like other people; took fine words for good,
ringing coin and noble ideals for valuable banknotes. He was a great
master of both, himself, by the way. Later he discovered--how am I to
explain it to you? Suppose the world were a factory and all mankind
workmen in it. Well, he discovered that the wages were not good enough.
That they were paid in counterfeit money.”
“I see!” the girl said slowly.
“Do you?”
Heyst, who had been speaking as if to himself, looked up curiously.
“It wasn't a new discovery, but he brought his capacity for scorn to
bear on it. It was immense. It ought to have withered this globe. I
don't know how many minds he convinced. But my mind was very young then,
and youth I suppose can be easily seduced--even by a negation. He was
very ruthless, and yet he was not without pity. He dominated me without
difficulty. A heartless man could not have done so. Even to fools he was
not utterly merciless. He could be indignant, but he was too great for
flouts and jeers. What he said was not meant for the crowd; it could not
be; and I was flattered to find myself among the elect. They read his
books, but I have heard his living word. It was irresistible. It was
as if that mind were taking me into its confidence, giving me a special
insight into its mastery of despair. Mistake, no doubt. There is
something of my father in every man who lives long enough. But they
don't say anything. They can't. They wouldn't know how, or perhaps,
they wouldn't speak if they could. Man on this earth is an unforeseen
accident which does not stand close investigation. However, that
particular man died as quietly as a child goes to sleep. But, after
listening to him, I could not take my soul down into the street to fight
there. I started off to wander about, an independent spectator--if that
is possible.”
For a long time the girl's grey eyes had been watching his face. She
discovered that, addressing her, he was really talking to himself. Heyst
looked up, caught sight of her as it were, and caught himself up, with a
low laugh and a change of tone.
“All this does not tell you why I ever came here. Why, indeed? It's like
prying into inscrutable mysteries which are not worth scrutinizing. A
man drifts. The most successful men have drifted into their successes.
I don't want to tell you that this is a success. You wouldn't believe
me if I did. It isn't; neither is it the ruinous failure it looks. It
proves nothing, unless perhaps some hidden weakness in my character--and
even that is not certain.”
He looked fixedly at her, and with such grave eyes that she felt obliged
to smile faintly at him, since she did not understand what he meant. Her
smile was reflected, still fainter, on his lips.
“This does not advance you much in your inquiry,” he went on. “And in
truth your question is unanswerable; but facts have a certain positive
value, and I will tell you a fact. One day I met a cornered man. I use
the word because it expresses the man's situation exactly, and because
you just used it yourself. You know what that means?”
“What do you say?” she whispered, astounded. “A man!”
Heyst laughed at her wondering eyes.
“No! No! I mean in his own way.”
“I knew very well it couldn't be anything like that,” she observed under
her breath.
“I won't bother you with the story. It was a custom-house affair,
strange as it may sound to you. He would have preferred to be killed
outright--that is, to have his soul dispatched to another world, rather
than to be robbed of his substance, his very insignificant substance, in
this. I saw that he believed in another world because, being cornered,
as I have told you, he went down on his knees and prayed. What do you
think of that?”
Heyst paused. She looked at him earnestly.
“You didn't make fun of him for that?” she said.
Heyst made a brusque movement of protest
“My dear girl, I am not a ruffian,” he cried. Then, returning to his
usual tone: “I didn't even have to conceal a smile. Somehow it didn't
look a smiling matter. No, it was not funny; it was rather pathetic; he
was so representative of all the past victims of the Great Joke. But it
is by folly alone that the world moves, and so it is a respectable thing
upon the whole. And besides, he was what one would call a good man. I
don't mean especially because he had offered up a prayer. No! He was
really a decent fellow, he was quite unfitted for this world, he was a
failure, a good man cornered--a sight for the gods; for no decent mortal
cares to look at that sort.” A thought seemed to occur to him. He turned
his face to the girl. “And you, who have been cornered too--did you
think of offering a prayer?”
Neither her eyes nor a single one of her features moved the least bit.
She only let fall the words:
“I am not what they call a good girl.”
“That sounds evasive,” said Heyst after a short silence. “Well, the good
fellow did pray and after he had confessed to it I was struck by the
comicality of the situation. No, don't misunderstand me--I am not
alluding to his act, of course. And even the idea of Eternity, Infinity,
Omnipotence, being called upon to defeat the conspiracy of two miserable
Portuguese half-castes did not move my mirth. From the point of view of
the supplicant, the danger to be conjured was something like the end
of the world, or worse. No! What captivated my fancy was that I, Axel
Heyst, the most detached of creatures in this earthly captivity, the
veriest tramp on this earth, an indifferent stroller going through the
world's bustle--that I should have been there to step into the situation
of an agent of Providence. I, a man of universal scorn and unbelief. . .
.”
“You are putting it on,” she interrupted in her seductive voice, with a
coaxing intonation.
“No. I am not like that, born or fashioned, or both. I am not for
nothing the son of my father, of that man in the painting. I am he, all
but the genius. And there is even less in me than I make out, because
the very scorn is falling away from me year after year. I have never
been so amused as by that episode in which I was suddenly called to act
such an incredible part. For a moment I enjoyed it greatly. It got him
out of his corner, you know.”
“You saved a man for fun--is that what you mean? Just for fun?”
“Why this tone of suspicion?” remonstrated Heyst. “I suppose the sight
of this particular distress was disagreeable to me. What you call fun
came afterwards, when it dawned on me that I was for him a walking,
breathing, incarnate proof of the efficacy of prayer. I was a little
fascinated by it--and then, could I have argued with him? You don't
argue against such evidence, and besides it would have looked as if
I had wanted to claim all the merit. Already his gratitude was simply
frightful. Funny position, wasn't it? The boredom came later, when we
lived together on board his ship. I had, in a moment of inadvertence,
created for myself a tie. How to define it precisely I don't know. One
gets attached in a way to people one has done something for. But is that
friendship? I am not sure what it was. I only know that he who forms a
tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered into his soul.”
Heyst's tone was light, with the flavour of playfulness which seasoned
all his speeches and seemed to be of the very essence of his thoughts.
The girl he had come across, of whom he had possessed himself, to whose
presence he was not yet accustomed, with whom he did not yet know how to
live; that human being so near and still so strange, gave him a greater
sense of his own reality than he had ever known in all his life.
CHAPTER FOUR
With her knees drawn up, Lena rested her elbows on them and held her
head in both her hands.
“Are you tired of sitting here?” Heyst asked.
An almost imperceptible negative movement of the head was all the answer
she made.
“Why are you looking so serious?” he pursued, and immediately thought
that habitual seriousness, in the long run, was much more bearable than
constant gaiety. “However, this expression suits you exceedingly,” he
added, not diplomatically, but because, by the tendency of his taste,
it was a true statement. “And as long as I can be certain that it is not
boredom which gives you this severe air, I am willing to sit here and
look at you till you are ready to go.”
And this was true. He was still under the fresh sortilege of their
common life, the surprise of novelty, the flattered vanity of his
possession of this woman; for a man must feel that, unless he has ceased
to be masculine. Her eyes moved in his direction, rested on him,
then returned to their stare into the deeper gloom at the foot of the
straight tree-trunks, whose spreading crowns were slowly withdrawing
their shade. The warm air stirred slightly about her motionless head.
She would not look at him, from some obscure fear of betraying herself.
She felt in her innermost depths an irresistible desire to give herself
up to him more completely, by some act of absolute sacrifice. This was
something of which he did not seem to have an idea. He was a strange
being without needs. She felt his eyes fixed upon her; and as he kept
silent, she said uneasily--for she didn't know what his silences might
mean:
“And so you lived with that friend--that good man?”
“Excellent fellow,” Heyst responded, with a readiness that she did not
expect. “But it was a weakness on my part. I really didn't want to, only
he wouldn't let me off, and I couldn't explain. He was the sort of man
to whom you can't explain anything. He was extremely sensitive, and it
would have been a tigerish thing to do to mangle his delicate feelings
by the sort of plain speaking that would have been necessary. His
mind was like a white-walled, pure chamber, furnished with, say, six
straw-bottomed chairs, and he was always placing and displacing them
in various combinations. But they were always the same chairs. He was
extremely easy to live with; but then he got hold of this coal idea--or,
rather, the idea got hold of him, it entered into that scantily
furnished chamber of which I have just spoken, and sat on all the
chairs. There was no dislodging it, you know! It was going to make his
fortune, my fortune, everybody's fortune. In past years, in moments of
doubt that will come to a man determined to remain free from absurdities
of existence, I often asked myself, with a momentary dread, in what way
would life try to get hold of me? And this was the way. He got it into
his head that he could do nothing without me. And was I now, he asked
me, to spurn and ruin him? Well, one morning--I wonder if he had gone
down on his knees to pray that night!--one morning I gave in.”
Heyst tugged violently at a tuft of dried grass, and cast it away from
him with a nervous gesture.
“I gave in,” he repeated.
Looking towards him with a movement of her eyes only, the girl noticed
the strong feeling on his face with that intense interest which his
person awakened in her mind and in her heart. But it soon passed away,
leaving only a moody expression.
“It's difficult to resist where nothing matters,” he observed. “And
perhaps there is a grain of freakishness in my nature. It amused me
to go about uttering silly, commonplace phrases. I was never so well
thought of in the islands till I began to jabber commercial gibberish
like the veriest idiot. Upon my word, I believe that I was actually
respected for a time. I was as grave as an owl over it; I had to be
loyal to the man. I have been, from first to last, completely, utterly
loyal to the best of my ability. I thought he understood something about
coal. And if I had been aware that he knew nothing of it, as in fact he
didn't, well--I don't know what I could have done to stop him. In one
way or another I should have had to be loyal. Truth, work, ambition,
love itself, may be only counters in the lamentable or despicable game
of life, but when one takes a hand one must play the game. No, the shade
of Morrison needn't haunt me. What's the matter? I say, Lena, why are
you staring like that? Do you feel ill?”
Heyst made as if to get on his feet. The girl extended her arm to arrest
him, and he remained staring in a sitting posture, propped on one arm,
observing her indefinable expression of anxiety, as if she were unable
to draw breath.
“What has come to you?” he insisted, feeling strangely unwilling to
move, to touch her.
“Nothing!” She swallowed painfully. “Of course it can't be. What name
did you say? I didn't hear it properly.”
“Name?” repeated Heyst dazedly. “I only mentioned Morrison. It's the
name of that man of whom I've been speaking. What of it?”
“And you mean to say that he was your friend?”
“You have heard enough to judge for yourself. You know as much of our
connection as I know myself. The people in this part of the world
went by appearances, and called us friends, as far as I can remember.
Appearances--what more, what better can you ask for? In fact you can't
have better. You can't have anything else.”
“You are trying to confuse me with your talk,” she cried. “You can't
make fun of this.”
“Can't? Well, no I can't. It's a pity. Perhaps it would have been the
best way,” said Heyst, in a tone which for him could be called gloomy.
“Unless one could forget the silly business altogether.” His faint
playfulness of manner and speech returned, like a habit one has schooled
oneself into, even before his forehead had cleared completely. “But why
are you looking so hard at me? Oh, I don't object, and I shall try not
to flinch. Your eyes--”
He was looking straight into them, and as a matter of fact had forgotten
all about the late Morrison at that moment.
“No,” he exclaimed suddenly. “What an impenetrable girl you are Lena,
with those grey eyes of yours! Windows of the soul, as some poet has
said. The fellow must have been a glazier by vocation. Well, nature has
provided excellently for the shyness of your soul.”
When he ceased speaking, the girl came to herself with a catch of her
breath. He heard her voice, the varied charm of which he thought he knew
so well, saying with an unfamiliar intonation:
“And that partner of yours is dead?”
“Morrison? Oh, yes, as I've told you, he--”
“You never told me.”
“Didn't I? I thought I did; or, rather, I thought you must know. It
seems impossible that anybody with whom I speak should not know that
Morrison is dead.”
She lowered her eyelids, and Heyst was startled by something like an
expression of horror on her face.
“Morrison!” she whispered in an appalled tone. “Morrison!” Her head
drooped. Unable to see her features, Heyst could tell from her voice
that for some reason or other she was profoundly moved by the syllables
of that unromantic name. A thought flashed through his head--could she
have known Morrison? But the mere difference of their origins made it
wildly improbable.
“This is very extraordinary!” he said. “Have you ever heard the name
before?”
Her head moved quickly several times in tiny affirmative nods, as if she
could not trust herself to speak, or even to look at him. She was biting
her lower lip.
“Did you ever know anybody of that name?” he asked.
The girl answered by a negative sign; and then at last she spoke,
jerkily, as if forcing herself against some doubt or fear. She had heard
of that very man, she told Heyst.
“Impossible!” he said positively. “You are mistaken. You couldn't have
heard of him, it's--”
He stopped short, with the thought that to talk like this was perfectly
useless; that one doesn't argue against thin air.
“But I did hear of him; only I didn't know then, I couldn't guess, that
it was your partner they were talking about.”
“Talking about my partner?” repeated Heyst slowly.
“No.” Her mind seemed almost as bewildered, as full of incredulity, as
his. “No. They were talking of you really; only I didn't know it.”
“Who were they?” Heyst raised his voice. “Who was talking of me? Talking
where?”
With the first question he had lifted himself from his reclining
position; at the last he was on his knees before her, their heads on a
level.
“Why, in that town, in that hotel. Where else could it have been?” she
said.
The idea of being talked about was always novel to Heyst's simplified
conception of himself. For a moment he was as much surprised as if he
had believed himself to be a mere gliding shadow among men. Besides,
he had in him a half-unconscious notion that he was above the level of
island gossip.
“But you said first that it was of Morrison they talked,” he remarked to
the girl, sinking on his heels, and no longer much interested. “Strange
that you should have the opportunity to hear any talk at all! I was
rather under the impression that you never saw anybody belonging to the
town except from the platform.”
“You forget that I was not living with the other girls,” she said.
“After meals they used to go back to the Pavilion, but I had to stay in
the hotel and do my sewing, or what not, in the room where they talked.”
“I didn't think of that. By the by, you never told me who they were.”
“Why, that horrible red-faced beast,” she said, with all the energy of
disgust which the mere thought of the hotel-keeper provoked in her.
“Oh, Schomberg!” Heyst murmured carelessly.
“He talked to the boss--to Zangiacomo, I mean. I had to sit there. That
devil-woman sometimes wouldn't let me go away. I mean Mrs. Zangiacomo.”
“I guessed,” murmured Heyst. “She liked to torment you in a variety
of ways. But it is really strange that the hotel-keeper should talk of
Morrison to Zangiacomo. As far as I can remember he saw very little of
Morrison professionally. He knew many others much better.”
The girl shuddered slightly.
“That was the only name I ever overheard. I would get as far away from
them as I could, to the other end of the room, but when that beast
started shouting I could not help hearing. I wish I had never heard
anything. If I had got up and gone out of the room I don't suppose the
woman would have killed me for it; but she would have rowed me in a
nasty way. She would have threatened me and called me names. That sort,
when they know you are helpless, there's nothing to stop them. I don't
know how it is, but bad people, real bad people that you can see are
bad, they get over me somehow. It's the way they set about downing one.
I am afraid of wickedness.”
Heyst watched the changing expressions of her face. He encouraged her,
profoundly sympathetic, a little amused.
“I quite understand. You needn't apologize for your great delicacy in
the perception of inhuman evil. I am a little like you.”
“I am not very plucky,” she said.
“Well! I don't know myself what I would do, what countenance I would
have before a creature which would strike me as being evil incarnate.
Don't you be ashamed!”
She sighed, looked up with her pale, candid gaze and a timid expression
on her face, and murmured:
“You don't seem to want to know what he was saying.”
“About poor Morrison? It couldn't have been anything bad, for the poor
fellow was innocence itself. And then, you know, he is dead, and nothing
can possibly matter to him now.”
“But I tell you that it was of you he was talking!” she cried.
“He was saying that Morrison's partner first got all there was to get
out of him, and then, and then--well, as good as murdered him--sent him
out to die somewhere!”
“You believe that of me?” said Heyst, after a moment of perfect silence.
“I didn't know it had anything to do with you. Schomberg was talking
of some Swede. How was I to know? It was only when you began telling me
about how you came here--”
“And now you have my version.” Heyst forced himself to speak quietly.
“So that's how the business looked from outside!” he muttered.
“I remember him saying that everybody in these parts knew the story,”
the girl added breathlessly.
“Strange that it should hurt me!” mused Heyst to himself; “yet it does.
I seem to be as much of a fool as those everybodies who know the story
and no doubt believe it. Can you remember any more?” he addressed the
girl in a grimly polite tone. “I've often heard of the moral advantages
of seeing oneself as others see one. Let us investigate further. Can't
you recall something else that everybody knows?”
“Oh! Don't laugh!” she cried.
“Did I laugh? I assure you I was not aware of it. I won't ask you
whether you believe the hotel-keeper's version. Surely you must know the
value of human judgement!”