before. Protest? Assent? Was there to be nothing more? He was relieved
when she spoke in that warm and wonderful voice which in itself
comforted and fascinated one's heart, which made her lovable.
“I heard this before you and I ever spoke to each other. It went out of
my memory afterwards. Everything went out of my memory then; and I was
glad of it. It was a fresh start for me, with you--and you know it. I
wish I had forgotten who I was--that would have been best; and I very
nearly did forget.”
He was moved by the vibrating quality of the last words. She seemed to
be talking low of some wonderful enchantment, in mysterious terms of
special significance. He thought that if she only could talk to him
in some unknown tongue, she would enslave him altogether by the sheer
beauty of the sound, suggesting infinite depths of wisdom and feeling.
“But,” she went on, “the name stuck in my head, it seems; and when you
mentioned it--”
“It broke the spell,” muttered Heyst in angry disappointment as if he
had been deceived in some hope.
The girl, from her position a little above him, surveyed with still
eyes the abstracted silence of the man on whom she now depended with
a completeness of which she had not been vividly conscious before,
because, till then, she had never felt herself swinging between the
abysses of earth and heaven in the hollow of his arm. What if he should
grow weary of the burden?
“And, moreover, nobody had ever believed that tale!”
Heyst came out with an abrupt burst of sound which made her open her
steady eyes wider, with an effect of immense surprise. It was a purely
mechanical effect, because she was neither surprised nor puzzled. In
fact, she could understand him better then than at any moment since she
first set eyes on him.
He laughed scornfully.
“What am I thinking of?” he cried. “As if it could matter to me what
anybody had ever said or believed, from the beginning of the world till
the crack of doom!”
“I never heard you laugh till today,” she observed. “This is the second
time!”
He scrambled to his feet and towered above her.
“That's because, when one's heart has been broken into in the way you
have broken into mine, all sorts of weaknesses are free to enter--shame,
anger, stupid indignation, stupid fears--stupid laughter, too. I wonder
what interpretation you are putting on it?”
“It wasn't gay, certainly,” she said. “But why are you angry with me?
Are you sorry you took me away from those beasts? I told you who I was.
You could see it.”
“Heavens!” he muttered. He had regained his command of himself. “I
assure you I could see much more than you could tell me. I could see
quite a lot that you don't even suspect yet, but you can't be seen quite
through.”
He sank to the ground by her side and took her hand. She asked gently:
“What more do you want from me?”
He made no sound for a time.
“The impossible, I suppose,” he said very low, as one makes a
confidence, and pressing the hand he grasped.
It did not return the pressure. He shook his head as if to drive away
the thought of this, and added in a louder, light tone:
“Nothing less. And it isn't because I think little of what I've got
already. Oh, no! It is because I think so much of this possession of
mine that I can't have it complete enough. I know it's unreasonable. You
can't hold back anything--now.”
“Indeed I couldn't,” she whispered, letting her hand lie passive in his
tight grasp. “I only wish I could give you something more, or better, or
whatever it is you want.”
He was touched by the sincere accent of these simple words.
“I tell you what you can do--you can tell me whether you would have gone
with me like this if you had known of whom that abominable idiot of a
hotel-keeper was speaking. A murderer--no less!”
“But I didn't know you at all then,” she cried. “And I had the sense to
understand what he was saying. It wasn't murder, really. I never thought
it was.”
“What made him invent such an atrocity?” Heyst exclaimed. “He seems
a stupid animal. He is stupid. How did he manage to hatch that pretty
tale? Have I a particularly vile countenance? Is black selfishness
written all over my face? Or is that sort of thing so universally human
that it might be said of anybody?”
“It wasn't murder,” she insisted earnestly.
“I know. I understand. It was worse. As to killing a man, which would be
a comparatively decent thing to do, well--I have never done that.”
“Why should you do it?” she asked in a frightened voice.
“My dear girl, you don't know the sort of life I have been leading in
unexplored countries, in the wilds; it's difficult to give you an idea.
There are men who haven't been in such tight places as I have found
myself in who have had to--to shed blood, as the saying is. Even the
wilds hold prizes which tempt some people; but I had no schemes, no
plans--and not even great firmness of mind to make me unduly obstinate.
I was simply moving on, while the others, perhaps, were going somewhere.
An indifference as to roads and purposes makes one meeker, as it were.
And I may say truly, too, that I never did care, I won't say for life--I
had scorned what people call by that name from the first--but for being
alive. I don't know if that is what men call courage, but I doubt it
very much.”
“You! You have no courage?” she protested.
“I really don't know. Not the sort that always itches for a weapon, for
I have never been anxious to use one in the quarrels that a man gets
into in the most innocent way sometimes. The differences for which
men murder each other are, like everything else they do, the most
contemptible, the most pitiful things to look back upon. No, I've never
killed a man or loved a woman--not even in my thoughts, not even in my
dreams.”
He raised her hand to his lips, and let them rest on it for a space,
during which she moved a little closer to him. After the lingering kiss
he did not relinquish his hold.
“To slay, to love--the greatest enterprises of life upon a man! And I
have no experience of either. You must forgive me anything that may have
appeared to you awkward in my behaviour, inexpressive in my speeches,
untimely in my silences.”
He moved uneasily, a little disappointed by her attitude, but indulgent
to it, and feeling, in this moment of perfect quietness, that in holding
her surrendered hand he had found a closer communion than they had ever
achieved before. But even then there still lingered in him a sense of
incompleteness not altogether overcome--which, it seemed, nothing ever
would overcome--the fatal imperfection of all the gifts of life, which
makes of them a delusion and a snare.
All of a sudden he squeezed her hand angrily. His delicately playful
equanimity, the product of kindness and scorn, had perished with the
loss of his bitter liberty.
“Not murder, you say! I should think not. But when you led me to talk
just now, when the name turned up, when you understood that it was of me
that these things had been said, you showed a strange emotion. I could
see it.”
“I was a bit startled,” she said.
“At the baseness of my conduct?” he asked.
“I wouldn't judge you, not for anything.”
“Really?”
“It would be as if I dared to judge everything that there is.” With her
other hand she made a gesture that seemed to embrace in one movement the
earth and the heaven. “I wouldn't do such a thing.”
Then came a silence, broken at last by Heyst:
“I! I! do a deadly wrong to my poor Morrison!” he cried. “I, who could
not bear to hurt his feelings. I, who respected his very madness! Yes,
this madness, the wreck of which you can see lying about the jetty of
Diamond Bay. What else could I do? He insisted on regarding me as his
saviour; he was always restraining the eternal obligation on the tip of
his tongue, till I was burning with shame at his gratitude. What could I
do? He was going to repay me with this infernal coal, and I had to join
him as one joins a child's game in a nursery. One would no more have
thought of humiliating him than one would think of humiliating a child.
What's the use of talking of all this! Of course, the people here
could not understand the truth of our relation to each other. But what
business of theirs was it? Kill old Morrison! Well, it is less criminal,
less base--I am not saying it is less difficult--to kill a man than to
cheat him in that way. You understand that?”
She nodded slightly, but more than once and with evident conviction. His
eyes rested on her, inquisitive, ready for tenderness.
“But it was neither one nor the other,” he went on. “Then, why your
emotion? All you confess is that you wouldn't judge me.”
She turned upon him her veiled, unseeing grey eyes in which nothing of
her wonder could be read.
“I said I couldn't,” she whispered.
“But you thought that there was no smoke without fire!” the playfulness
of tone hardly concealed his irritation. “What power there must be in
words, only imperfectly heard--for you did not listen with particular
care, did you? What were they? What evil effort of invention drove them
into that idiot's mouth out of his lying throat? If you were to try to
remember, they would perhaps convince me, too.”
“I didn't listen,” she protested. “What was it to me what they said of
anybody? He was saying that there never were such loving friends to
look at as you two; then, when you got all you wanted out of him and got
thoroughly tired of him, too, you kicked him out to go home and die.”
Indignation, with an undercurrent of some other feeling, rang in these
quoted words, uttered in her pure and enchanting voice. She ceased
abruptly and lowered her long, dark lashes, as if mortally weary, sick
at heart.
“Of course, why shouldn't you get tired of that or any other--company?
You aren't like anyone else, and--and the thought of it made me unhappy
suddenly; but indeed, I did not believe anything bad of you. I--”
A brusque movement of his arm, flinging her hand away, stopped her
short. Heyst had again lost control of himself. He would have shouted,
if shouting had been in his character.
“No, this earth must be the appointed hatching planet of calumny enough
to furnish the whole universe. I feel a disgust at my own person, as if
I had tumbled into some filthy hole. Pah! And you--all you can say is
that you won't judge me; that you--”
She raised her head at this attack, though indeed he had not turned to
her.
“I don't believe anything bad of you,” she repeated. “I couldn't.”
He made a gesture as if to say:
“That's sufficient.”
In his soul and in his body he experienced a nervous reaction from
tenderness. All at once, without transition, he detested her. But only
for a moment. He remembered that she was pretty, and, more, that she
had a special grace in the intimacy of life. She had the secret of
individuality which excites--and escapes.
He jumped up and began to walk to and fro. Presently his hidden fury
fell into dust within him, like a crazy structure, leaving behind
emptiness, desolation, regret. His resentment was not against the girl,
but against life itself--that commonest of snares, in which he felt
himself caught, seeing clearly the plot of plots and unconsoled by the
lucidity of his mind.
He swerved and, stepping up to her, sank to the ground by her side.
Before she could make a movement or even turn her head his way, he took
her in his arms and kissed her lips. He tasted on them the bitterness
of a tear fallen there. He had never seen her cry. It was like another
appeal to his tenderness--a new seduction. The girl glanced round,
moved suddenly away, and averted her face. With her hand she signed
imperiously to him to leave her alone--a command which Heyst did not
obey.
CHAPTER FIVE
When she opened her eyes at last and sat up, Heyst scrambled quickly to
his feet and went to pick up her cork helmet, which had rolled a little
way off. Meanwhile she busied herself in doing up her hair, plaited on
the top of her head in two heavy, dark tresses, which had come loose. He
tendered her the helmet in silence, and waited as if unwilling to hear
the sound of his own voice.
“We had better go down now,” he suggested in a low tone.
He extended his hand to help her up. He had the intention to smile,
but abandoned it at the nearer sight of her still face, in which was
depicted the infinite lassitude of her soul. On their way to regain the
forest path they had to pass through the spot from which the view of
the sea could be obtained. The flaming abyss of emptiness, the liquid,
undulating glare, the tragic brutality of the light, made her long for
the friendly night, with its stars stilled by an austere spell; for the
velvety dark sky and the mysterious great shadow of the sea, conveying
peace to the day-weary heart. She put her hand to her eyes. Behind her
back Heyst spoke gently.
“Let us get on, Lena.”
She walked ahead in silence. Heyst remarked that they had never been
out before during the hottest hours. It would do her no good, he feared.
This solicitude pleased and soothed her. She felt more and more like
herself--a poor London girl playing in an orchestra, and snatched out
from the humiliations, the squalid dangers of a miserable existence,
by a man like whom there was not, there could not be, another in this
world. She felt this with elation, with uneasiness, with an intimate
pride--and with a peculiar sinking of the heart.
“I am not easily knocked out by any such thing as heat,” she said
decisively.
“Yes, but I don't forget that you're not a tropical bird.”
“You weren't born in these parts, either,” she returned.
“No, and perhaps I haven't even your physique. I am a transplanted
being. Transplanted! I ought to call myself uprooted--an unnatural state
of existence; but a man is supposed to stand anything.”
She looked back at him and received a smile. He told her to keep in the
shelter of the forest path, which was very still and close, full of heat
if free from glare. Now and then they had glimpses of the company's old
clearing blazing with light, in which the black stumps of trees stood
charred, without shadows, miserable and sinister. They crossed the open
in a direct line for the bungalow. On the veranda they fancied they had
a glimpse of the vanishing Wang, though the girl was not at all sure
that she had seen anything move. Heyst had no doubts.
“Wang has been looking out for us. We are late.”
“Was he? I thought I saw something white for a moment, and then I did
not see it any more.”
“That's it--he vanishes. It's a very remarkable gift in that Chinaman.”
“Are they all like that?” she asked with naive curiosity and uneasiness.
“Not in such perfection,” said Heyst, amused.
He noticed with approval that she was not heated by the walk. The drops
of perspiration on her forehead were like dew on the cool, white petal
of a flower. He looked at her figure of grace and strength, solid and
supple, with an ever-growing appreciation.
“Go in and rest yourself for a quarter of an hour; and then Mr. Wang
will give us something to eat,” he said.
They had found the table laid. When they came together again and sat
down to it, Wang materialized without a sound, unheard, uncalled, and
did his office. Which being accomplished, at a given moment he was not.
A great silence brooded over Samburan--the silence of the great heat
that seems pregnant with fatal issues, like the silence of ardent
thought. Heyst remained alone in the big room. The girl seeing him
take up a book, had retreated to her chamber. Heyst sat down under
his father's portrait; and the abominable calumny crept back into his
recollection. The taste of it came on his lips, nauseating and corrosive
like some kinds of poison. He was tempted to spit on the floor, naively,
in sheer unsophisticated disgust of the physical sensation. He shook his
head, surprised at himself. He was not used to receive his intellectual
impressions in that way--reflected in movements of carnal emotion. He
stirred impatiently in his chair, and raised the book to his eyes with
both hands. It was one of his father's. He opened it haphazard, and
his eyes fell on the middle of the page. The elder Heyst had written of
everything in many books--of space and of time, of animals and of stars;
analysing ideas and actions, the laughter and the frowns of men, and the
grimaces of their agony. The son read, shrinking into himself, composing
his face as if under the author's eye, with a vivid consciousness of
the portrait on his right hand, a little above his head; a wonderful
presence in its heavy frame on the flimsy wall of mats, looking exiled
and at home, out of place and masterful, in the painted immobility of
profile.
And Heyst, the son, read:
Of the stratagems of life the most cruel is the consolation of love--the
most subtle, too; for the desire is the bed of dreams.
He turned the pages of the little volume, “Storm and Dust,” glancing
here and there at the broken text of reflections, maxims, short phrases,
enigmatical sometimes and sometimes eloquent. It seemed to him that he
was hearing his father's voice, speaking and ceasing to speak again.
Startled at first, he ended by finding a charm in the illusion. He
abandoned himself to the half-belief that something of his father dwelt
yet on earth--a ghostly voice, audible to the ear of his own flesh and
blood. With what strange serenity, mingled with terrors, had that man
considered the universal nothingness! He had plunged into it headlong,
perhaps to render death, the answer that faced one at every inquiry,
more supportable.
Heyst stirred, and the ghostly voice ceased; but his eyes followed the
words on the last page of the book:
Men of tormented conscience, or of a criminal imagination, are aware of
much that minds of a peaceful, resigned cast do not even suspect. It is
not poets alone who dare descend into the abyss of infernal regions, or
even who dream of such a descent. The most inexpressive of human beings
must have said to himself, at one time or another: “Anything but this!”
. . .
We all have our instants of clairvoyance. They are not very helpful.
The character of the scheme does not permit that or anything else to
be helpful. Properly speaking its character, judged by the standards
established by its victims, is infamous. It excuses every violence of
protest and at the same time never fails to crush it, just as it
crushes the blindest assent. The so-called wickedness must be, like the
so-called virtue, its own reward--to be anything at all . . .
Clairvoyance or no clairvoyance, men love their captivity. To the
unknown force of negation they prefer the miserably tumbled bed of their
servitude. Man alone can give one the disgust of pity; yet I find it
easier to believe in the misfortune of mankind than in its wickedness.
These were the last words. Heyst lowered the book to his knees. Lena's
voice spoke above his drooping head:
“You sit there as if you were unhappy.”
“I thought you were asleep,” he said.
“I was lying down right enough, but I never closed my eyes.”
“The rest would have done you good after our walk. Didn't you try?”
“I was lying down, I tell you, but sleep I couldn't.”
“And you made no sound! What want of sincerity. Or did you want to be
alone for a time?”
“I--alone?” she murmured.
He noticed her eyeing the book, and got up to put it back in the
bookcase. When he turned round, he saw that she had dropped into the
chair--it was the one she always used--and looked as if her strength had
suddenly gone from her, leaving her only her youth, which seemed very
pathetic, very much at his mercy. He moved quickly towards the chair.
“Tired, are you? It's my fault, taking you up so high and keeping you
out so long. Such a windless day, too!”
She watched his concern, her pose languid, her eyes raised to him,
but as unreadable as ever. He avoided looking into them for that very
reason. He forgot himself in the contemplation of those passive arms, of
these defenceless lips, and--yes, one had to go back to them--of these
wide-open eyes. Something wild in their grey stare made him think of
sea-birds in the cold murkiness of high latitudes. He started when she
spoke, all the charm of physical intimacy revealed suddenly in that
voice.
“You should try to love me!” she said.
He made a movement of astonishment.
“Try,” he muttered. “But it seems to me--” He broke off, saying to
himself that if he loved her, he had never told her so in so many words.
Simple words! They died on his lips. “What makes you say that?” he
asked.
She lowered her eyelids and turned her head a little.
“I have done nothing,” she said in a low voice. “It's you who have been
good, helpful, and tender to me. Perhaps you love me for that--just
for that; or perhaps you love me for company, and because--well! But
sometimes it seems to me that you can never love me for myself, only
for myself, as people do love each other when it is to be for ever.”
Her head drooped. “Forever,” she breathed out again; then, still more
faintly, she added an entreating: “Do try!”
These last words went straight to his heart--the sound of them more than
the sense. He did not know what to say, either from want of practice in
dealing with women or simply from his innate honesty of thought. All
his defences were broken now. Life had him fairly by the throat. But he
managed a smile, though she was not looking at him; yes, he did manage
it--the well-known Heyst smile of playful courtesy, so familiar to all
sorts and conditions of men in the islands.
“My dear Lena,” he said, “it looks as if you were trying to pick a very
unnecessary quarrel with me--of all people!”
She made no movement. With his elbows spread out he was twisting the
ends of his long moustaches, very masculine and perplexed, enveloped in
the atmosphere of femininity as in a cloud, suspecting pitfalls, and as
if afraid to move.
“I must admit, though,” he added, “that there is no one else; and I
suppose a certain amount of quarrelling is necessary for existence in
this world.”
That girl, seated in her chair in graceful quietude, was to him like a
script in an unknown language, or even more simply mysterious, like
any writing to the illiterate. As far as women went he was altogether
uninstructed and he had not the gift of intuition which is fostered in
the days of youth by dreams and visions, exercises of the heart fitting
it for the encounters of a world, in which love itself rests as much
on antagonism as on attraction. His mental attitude was that of a man
looking this way and that on a piece of writing which he is unable to
decipher, but which may be big with some revelation. He didn't know what
to say. All he found to add was:
“I don't even understand what I have done or left undone to distress you
like this.”
He stopped, struck afresh by the physical and moral sense of the
imperfections of their relations--a sense which made him desire her
constant nearness, before his eyes, under his hand, and which, when
she was out of his sight, made her so vague, so elusive and illusory, a
promise that could not be embraced and held.
“No! I don't see clearly what you mean. Is your mind turned towards the
future?” he interpellated her with marked playfulness, because he
was ashamed to let such a word pass his lips. But all his cherished
negations were falling off him one by one.
“Because if it is so there is nothing easier than to dismiss it. In our
future, as in what people call the other life, there is nothing to be
frightened of.”
She raised her eyes to him; and if nature had formed them to express
anything else but blank candour he would have learned how terrified
she was by his talk and the fact that her sinking heart loved him more
desperately than ever. He smiled at her.
“Dismiss all thought of it,” he insisted. “Surely you don't suspect
after what I have heard from you, that I am anxious to return to
mankind. I! I! murder my poor Morrison! It's possible that I may be
really capable of that which they say I have done. The point is that I
haven't done it. But it is an unpleasant subject to me. I ought to be
ashamed to confess it--but it is! Let us forget it. There's that in you,
Lena, which can console me for worse things, for uglier passages. And if
we forget, there are no voices here to remind us.”
She had raised her head before he paused.