an appeal or a provocation in her upward glance, he bent down and took
her under the arms, raising her straight out of the chair into a sudden
and close embrace. Her alacrity to respond, which made her seem as light
as a feather, warmed his heart at that moment more than closer caresses
had done before. He had not expected that ready impulse towards himself
which had been dormant in her passive attitude. He had just felt the
clasp of her arms round his neck, when, with a slight exclamation--“He's
here!”--she disengaged herself and bolted, away into her room.
CHAPTER SIX
Heyst was astounded. Looking all round, as if to take the whole room
to witness of this outrage, he became aware of Wang materialized in the
doorway. The intrusion was as surprising as anything could be, in view
of the strict regularity with which Wang made himself visible. Heyst
was tempted to laugh at first. This practical comment on his affirmation
that nothing could break in on them relieved the strain of his feelings.
He was a little vexed, too. The Chinaman preserved a profound silence.
“What do you want?” asked Heyst sternly.
“Boat out there,” said the Chinaman.
“Where? What do you mean? Boat adrift in the straits?”
Some subtle change in Wang's bearing suggested his being out of breath;
but he did not pant, and his voice was steady.
“No--row.”
It was Heyst now who was startled and raised his voice.
“Malay man, eh?”
Wang made a slight negative movement with his head.
“Do you hear, Lena?” Heyst called out. “Wang says there is a boat in
sight--somewhere near apparently. Where's that boat Wang?”
“Round the point,” said Wang, leaping into Malay unexpectedly, and in a
loud voice. “White men three.”
“So close as that?” exclaimed Heyst, moving out on the veranda followed
by Wang. “White men? Impossible!”
Over the clearing the shadows were already lengthening. The sun
hung low; a ruddy glare lay on the burnt black patch in front of
the bungalow, and slanted on the ground between the straight, tall,
mast-like trees soaring a hundred feet or more without a branch. The
growth of bushes cut off all view of the jetty from the veranda. Far
away to the right Wang's hut, or rather its dark roof of mats, could
be seen above the bamboo fence which insured the privacy of the Alfuro
woman. The Chinaman looked that way swiftly. Heyst paused, and then
stepped back a pace into the room.
“White men, Lena, apparently. What are you doing?”
“I am just bathing my eyes a little,” the girl's voice said from the
inner room.
“Oh, yes; all right!”
“Do you want me?”
“No. You had better--I am going down to the jetty. Yes, you had better
stay in. What an extraordinary thing!”
It was so extraordinary that nobody could possibly appreciate
how extraordinary it was but himself. His mind was full of mere
exclamations, while his feet were carrying him in the direction of the
jetty. He followed the line of the rails, escorted by Wang.
“Where were you when you first saw the boat?” he asked over his
shoulder.
Wang explained in Malay that he had gone to the shore end of the wharf,
to get a few lumps of coal from the big heap, when, happening to raise
his eyes from the ground, he saw the boat--a white man boat, not a
canoe. He had good eyes. He had seen the boat, with the men at the oars;
and here Wang made a particular gesture over his eyes, as if his vision
had received a blow. He had turned at once and run to the house to
report.
“No mistake, eh?” said Heyst, moving on. At the very outer edge of the
belt he stopped short. Wang halted behind him on the path, till the
voice of Number One called him sharply forward into the open. He obeyed.
“Where's that boat?” asked Heyst forcibly. “I say--where is it?”
Nothing whatever was to be seen between the point and the jetty. The
stretch of Diamond Bay was like a piece of purple shadow, lustrous and
empty, while beyond the land, the open sea lay blue and opaque under the
sun. Heyst's eyes swept all over the offing till they met, far off, the
dark cone of the volcano, with its faint plume of smoke broadening and
vanishing everlastingly at the top, without altering its shape in the
glowing transparency of the evening.
“The fellow has been dreaming,” he muttered to himself.
He looked hard at the Chinaman. Wang seemed turned into stone. Suddenly,
as if he had received a shock, he started, flung his arm out with a
pointing forefinger, and made guttural noises to the effect that there,
there, there, he had seen a boat.
It was very uncanny. Heyst thought of some strange hallucination.
Unlikely enough; but that a boat with three men in it should have sunk
between the point and the jetty, suddenly, like a stone, without leaving
as much on the surface as a floating oar, was still more unlikely. The
theory of a phantom boat would have been more credible than that.
“Confound it!” he muttered to himself.
He was unpleasantly affected by this mystery; but now a simple
explanation occurred to him. He stepped hastily out on the wharf. The
boat, if it had existed and had retreated, could perhaps be seen from
the far end of the long jetty.
Nothing was to be seen. Heyst let his eyes roam idly over the sea. He
was so absorbed in his perplexity that a hollow sound, as of somebody
tumbling about in a boat, with a clatter of oars and spars, failed to
make him move for a moment. When his mind seized its meaning, he had
no difficulty in locating the sound. It had come from below--under the
jetty!
He ran back for a dozen yards or so, and then looked over. His sight
plunged straight into the stern-sheets of a big boat, the greater part
of which was hidden from him by the planking of the jetty. His eyes
fell on the thin back of a man doubled up over the tiller in a queer,
uncomfortable attitude of drooping sorrow. Another man, more directly
below Heyst, sprawled on his back from gunwale to gunwale, half off
the after thwart, his head lower than his feet. This second man glared
wildly upward, and struggled to raise himself, but to all appearance was
much too drunk to succeed. The visible part of the boat contained also
a flat, leather trunk, on which the first man's long legs were tucked
up nervelessly. A large earthenware jug, with its wide mouth uncorked,
rolled out on the bottom-boards from under the sprawling man.
Heyst had never been so much astonished in his life. He stared dumbly at
the strange boat's crew. From the first he was positive that these
men were not sailors. They wore the white drill-suit of tropical
civilization; but their apparition in a boat Heyst could not connect
with anything plausible. The civilization of the tropics could have
had nothing to do with it. It was more like those myths, current in
Polynesia, of amazing strangers, who arrive at an island, gods or
demons, bringing good or evil to the innocence of the inhabitants--gifts
of unknown things, words never heard before.
Heyst noticed a cork helmet floating alongside the boat, evidently
fallen from the head of the man doubled over the tiller, who displayed
a dark, bony poll. An oar, too, had been knocked overboard, probably
by the sprawling man, who was still struggling, between the thwarts.
By this time Heyst regarded the visitation no longer with surprise, but
with the sustained attention demanded by a difficult problem. With one
foot poised on the string-piece, and leaning on his raised knee, he
was taking in everything. The sprawling man rolled off the thwart,
collapsed, and, most unexpectedly, got on his feet. He swayed dizzily,
spreading his arms out and uttered faintly a hoarse, dreamy “Hallo!” His
upturned face was swollen, red, peeling all over the nose and cheeks.
His stare was irrational. Heyst perceived stains of dried blood all over
the front of his dirty white coat, and also on one sleeve.
“What's the matter? Are you wounded?”
The other glanced down, reeled--one of his feet was inside a large pith
hat--and, recovering himself, let out a dismal, grating sound in the
manner of a grim laugh.
“Blood--not mine. Thirst's the matter. Exhausted's the matter. Done up.
Drink, man! Give us water!”
Thirst was in the very tone of his words, alternating a broken croak and
a faint, throaty rustle which just reached Heyst's ears. The man in the
boat raised his hands to be helped up on the jetty, whispering:
“I tried. I am too weak. I tumbled down.”
Wang was coming along the jetty slowly, with intent, straining eyes.
“Run back and bring a crowbar here. There's one lying by the coal-heap,”
Heyst shouted to him.
The man standing in the boat sat down on the thwart behind him. A
horrible coughing laugh came through his swollen lips.
“Crowbar? What's that for?” he mumbled, and his head dropped on his
chest mournfully.
Meantime, Heyst, as if he had forgotten the boat, started kicking hard
at a large brass tap projecting above the planks. To accommodate ships
that came for coal and happened to need water as well, a stream had
been tapped in the interior and an iron pipe led along the jetty. It
terminated with a curved end almost exactly where the strangers' boat
had been driven between the piles; but the tap was set fast.
“Hurry up!” Heyst yelled to the Chinaman, who was running with the
crowbar in his hand.
Heyst snatched it from him and, obtaining a leverage against the
string-piece, wrung the stiff tap round with a mighty jerk. “I hope that
pipe hasn't got choked!” he muttered to himself anxiously.
It hadn't; but it did not yield a strong gush. The sound of a thin
stream, partly breaking on the gunwale of the boat and partly
splashing alongside, became at once audible. It was greeted by a cry of
inarticulate and savage joy. Heyst knelt on the string-piece and peered
down. The man who had spoken was already holding his open mouth under
the bright trickle. Water ran over his eyelids and over his nose,
gurgled down his throat, flowed over his chin. Then some obstruction in
the pipe gave way, and a sudden thick jet broke on his face. In a moment
his shoulders were soaked, the front of his coat inundated; he streamed
and dripped; water ran into his pockets, down his legs, into his shoes;
but he had clutched the end of the pipe, and, hanging on with both
hands, swallowed, spluttered, choked, snorted with the noises of a
swimmer. Suddenly a curious dull roar reached Heyst's ears. Something
hairy and black flew from under the jetty. A dishevelled head, coming on
like a cannonball, took the man at the pipe in flank, with enough force
to tear his grip loose and fling him headlong into the stern-sheets. He
fell upon the folded legs of the man at the tiller, who, roused by the
commotion in the boat, was sitting up, silent, rigid, and very much like
a corpse. His eyes were but two black patches, and his teeth glistened
with a death's head grin between his retracted lips, no thicker than
blackish parchment glued over the gums.
From him Heyst's eyes wandered to the creature who had replaced the
first man at the end of the water-pipe. Enormous brown paws clutched it
savagely; the wild, big head hung back, and in a face covered with a wet
mass of hair there gaped crookedly a wide mouth full of fangs. The water
filled it, welled up in hoarse coughs, ran down on each side of the jaws
and down the hairy throat, soaked the black pelt of the enormous chest,
naked under a torn check shirt, heaving convulsively with a play of
massive muscles carved in red mahogany.
As soon as the first man had recovered the breath knocked out of him
by the irresistible charge, a scream of mad cursing issued from the
stern-sheets. With a rigid, angular crooking of the elbow, the man at
the tiller put his hand back to his hip.
“Don't shoot him, sir!” yelled the first man. “Wait! Let me have that
tiller. I will teach him to shove himself in front of a caballero!”
Martin Ricardo flourished the heavy piece of wood, leaped forward with
astonishing vigour, and brought it down on Pedro's head with a crash
that resounded all over the quiet sweep of Black Diamond Bay. A crimson
patch appeared on the matted hair, red veins appeared in the water
flowing all over his face, and it dripped in rosy drops off his head.
But the man hung on. Not till a second furious blow descended did the
hairy paws let go their grip and the squirming body sink limply. Before
it could touch the bottom-boards, a tremendous kick in the ribs from
Ricardo's foot shifted it forward out of sight, whence came the noise of
a heavy thud, a clatter of spars, and a pitiful grunt. Ricardo stooped
to look under the jetty.
“Aha, dog! This will teach you to keep back where you belong, you
murdering brute, you slaughtering savage, you! You infidel, you robber
of churches! Next time I will rip you open from neck to heel, you
carrion-eater! Esclavo!”
He backed a little and straightened himself up.
“I don't mean it really,” he remarked to Heyst, whose steady eyes met
his from above. He ran aft briskly.
“Come along, sir. It's your turn. I oughtn't to have drunk first. 'S
truth, I forgot myself! A gentleman like you will overlook that, I
know.” As he made these apologies, Ricardo extended his hand. “Let me
steady you, sir.”
Slowly Mr. Jones unfolded himself in all his slenderness, rocked,
staggered, and caught Ricardo's shoulder. His henchman assisted him
to the pipe, which went on gushing a clear stream of water, sparkling
exceedingly against the black piles and the gloom under the jetty.
“Catch hold, sir,” Ricardo advised solicitously. “All right?”
He stepped back, and, while Mr. Jones revelled in the abundance of
water, he addressed himself to Heyst with a sort of justificatory
speech, the tone of which, reflecting his feelings, partook of purring
and spitting. They had been thirty hours tugging at the oars, he
explained, and they had been more than forty hours without water, except
that the night before they had licked the dew off the gunwales.
Ricardo did not explain to Heyst how it happened. At that precise moment
he had no explanation ready for the man on the wharf, who, he guessed,
must be wondering much more at the presence of his visitors than at
their plight.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The explanation lay in the two simple facts that the light winds and
strong currents of the Java Sea had drifted the boat about until they
partly lost their bearings; and that by some extra-ordinary mistake
one of the two jars put into the boat by Schomberg's man contained salt
water. Ricardo tried to put some pathos into his tones. Pulling for
thirty hours with eighteen-foot oars! And the sun! Ricardo relieved
his feelings by cursing the sun. They had felt their hearts and lungs
shrivel within them. And then, as if all that hadn't been trouble
enough, he complained bitterly, he had had to waste his fainting
strength in beating their servant about the head with a stretcher. The
fool had wanted to drink sea water, and wouldn't listen to reason.
There was no stopping him otherwise. It was better to beat him into
insensibility than to have him go crazy in the boat, and to be obliged
to shoot him. The preventive, administered with enough force to brain
an elephant, boasted Ricardo, had to be applied on two occasions--the
second time all but in sight of the jetty.
“You have seen the beauty,” Ricardo went on expansively, hiding his lack
of some sort of probable story under this loquacity. “I had to hammer
him away from the spout. Opened afresh all the old broken spots on his
head. You saw how hard I had to hit. He has no restraint, no restraint
at all. If it wasn't that he can be made useful in one way or another, I
would just as soon have let the governor shoot him.”
He smiled up at Heyst in his peculiar lip-retracting manner, and added
by way of afterthought:
“That's what will happen to him in the end, if he doesn't learn to
restrain himself. But I've taught him to mind his manners for a while,
anyhow!”
And again he addressed his quick grin up to the man on the wharf. His
round eyes had never left Heyst's face ever since he began to deliver
his account of the voyage.
“So that's how he looks!” Ricardo was saying to himself.
He had not expected Heyst to be like this. He had formed for himself
a conception containing the helpful suggestion of a vulnerable point.
These solitary men were often tipplers. But no!--this was not a drinking
man's face; nor could he detect the weakness of alarm, or even the
weakness of surprise, on these features, in those steady eyes.
“We were too far gone to climb out,” Ricardo went on. “I heard you
walking along though. I thought I shouted; I tried to. You didn't hear
me shout?”
Heyst made an almost imperceptible negative sign, which the greedy eyes
of Ricardo--greedy for all signs--did not miss.
“Throat too parched. We didn't even care to whisper to each other
lately. Thirst chokes one. We might have died there under this wharf
before you found us.”
“I couldn't think where you had gone to.” Heyst was heard at last,
addressing directly the newcomers from the sea. “You were seen as soon
as you cleared that point.”
“We were seen, eh?” grunted Mr. Ricardo. “We pulled like
machines--daren't stop. The governor sat at the tiller, but he couldn't
speak to us. She drove in between the piles till she hit something, and
we all tumbled off the thwarts as if we had been drunk. Drunk--ha,
ha! Too dry, by George! We fetched in here with the very last of our
strength, and no mistake. Another mile would have done for us. When I
heard your footsteps, above, I tried to get up, and I fell down.”
“That was the first sound I heard,” said Heyst.
Mr. Jones, the front of his soiled white tunic soaked and plastered
against his breast-bone, staggered away from the water-pipe. Steadying
himself on Ricardo's shoulder, he drew a long breath, raised his
dripping head, and produced a smile of ghastly amiability, which was
lost upon the thoughtful Heyst. Behind his back the sun, touching the
water, was like a disc of iron cooled to a dull red glow, ready to start
rolling round the circular steel plate of the sea, which, under the
darkening sky, looked more solid than the high ridge of Samburan; more
solid than the point, whose long outlined slope melted into its own
unfathomable shadow blurring the dim sheen on the bay. The forceful
stream from the pipe broke like shattered glass on the boat's gunwale.
Its loud, fitful, and persistent splashing revealed the depths of the
world's silence.
“Great notion, to lead the water out here,” pronounced Ricardo
appreciatively.
Water was life. He felt now as if he could run a mile, scale a ten-foot
wall, sing a song. Only a few minutes ago he was next door to a corpse,
done up, unable to stand, to lift a hand; unable to groan. A drop of
water had done that miracle.
“Didn't you feel life itself running and soaking into you, sir?” he
asked his principal, with deferential but forced vivacity.
Without a word, Mr. Jones stepped off the thwart and sat down in the
stern-sheets.
“Isn't that man of yours bleeding to death in the bows under there?”
inquired Heyst.
Ricardo ceased his ecstasies over the life-giving water and answered in
a tone of innocence:
“He? You may call him a man, but his hide is a jolly sight tougher than
the toughest alligator he ever skinned in the good old days. You don't
know how much he can stand: I do. We have tried him a long time ago.
Ola, there! Pedro! Pedro!” he yelled, with a force of lung testifying to
the regenerative virtues of water.
A weak “Senor?” came from under the wharf.
“What did I tell you?” said Ricardo triumphantly. “Nothing can hurt him.
He's all right. But, I say, the boat's getting swamped. Can't you turn
this water off before you sink her under us? She's half full already.”
At a sign from Heyst, Wang hammered at the brass tap on the wharf, then
stood behind Number One, crowbar in hand, motionless as before. Ricardo
was perhaps not so certain of Pedro's toughness as he affirmed; for he
stooped, peering under the wharf, then moved forward out of sight. The
gush of water ceasing suddenly, made a silence which became complete
when the after-trickle stopped. Afar, the sun was reduced to a red
spark, glowing very low in the breathless immensity of twilight. Purple
gleams lingered on the water all round the boat. The spectral figure in
the stern-sheets spoke in a languid tone:
“That--er--companion--er--secretary of mine is a queer chap. I am afraid
we aren't presenting ourselves in a very favourable light.”
Heyst listened. It was the conventional voice of an educated man,
only strangely lifeless. But more strange yet was this concern for
appearances, expressed, he did not know, whether in jest or in earnest.
Earnestness was hardly to be supposed under the circumstances, and no
one had ever jested in such dead tones. It was something which could not
be answered, and Heyst said nothing. The other went on:
“Travelling as I do, I find a man of his sort extremely useful. He has
his little weaknesses, no doubt.”
“Indeed!” Heyst was provoked into speaking. “Weakness of the arm is not
one of them; neither is an exaggerated humanity, as far as I can judge.”
“Defects of temper,” explained Mr. Jones from the stern-sheets.
The subject of this dialogue, coming out just then from under the
wharf into the visible part of the boat, made himself heard in his own
defence, in a voice full of life, and with nothing languid in his manner
on the contrary, it was brisk, almost jocose. He begged pardon for
contradicting. He was never out of temper with “our Pedro.” The
fellow was a Dago of immense strength and of no sense whatever. This
combination made him dangerous, and he had to be treated accordingly, in
a manner which he could understand. Reasoning was beyond him.
“And so”--Ricardo addressed Heyst with animation--“you mustn't be
surprised if--”
“I assure you,” Heyst interrupted, “that my wonder at your arrival
in your boat here is so great that it leaves no room for minor
astonishments. But hadn't you better land?”
“That's the talk, sir!” Ricardo began to bustle about the boat, talking
all the time. Finding himself unable to “size up” this man, he was
inclined to credit him with extraordinary powers of penetration, which,
it seemed to him, would be favoured by silence. Also, he feared some
pointblank question. He had no ready-made story to tell. He and his
patron had put off considering that rather important detail too
long. For the last two days, the horrors of thirst, coming on them
unexpectedly, had prevented consultation. They had had to pull for
dear life. But the man on the wharf, were he in league with the devil
himself, would pay for all their sufferings, thought Ricardo with an
unholy joy.
Meantime, splashing in the water which covered the bottom-boards,
Ricardo congratulated himself aloud on the luggage being out of the way
of the wet. He had piled it up forward. He had roughly tied up Pedro's
head. Pedro had nothing to grumble about. On the contrary, he ought to
be mighty thankful to him, Ricardo, for being alive at all.
“Well, now, let me give you a leg up, sir,” he said cheerily to
his motionless principal in the stern-sheets. “All our troubles are
over--for a time, anyhow. Ain't it luck to find a white man on this
island? I would have just as soon expected to meet an angel from
heaven--eh, Mr. Jones? Now then--ready, sir? one, two, three, up you
go!”
Helped from below by Ricardo, and from above by the man more unexpected
than an angel, Mr. Jones scrambled up and stood on the wharf by the side
of Heyst. He swayed like a reed. The night descending on Samburan turned
into dense shadow the point of land and the wharf itself, and gave a
dark solidity to the unshimmering water extending to the last faint
trace of light away to the west. Heyst stared at the guests whom the
renounced world had sent him thus at the end of the day. The only other
vestige of light left on earth lurked in the hollows of the thin man's
eyes. They gleamed, mobile and languidly evasive. The eyelids fluttered.
“You are feeling weak,” said Heyst.
“For the moment, a little,” confessed the other.