wharf, energetic and unaided. He rose up at Heyst's elbow and stamped
his foot on the planks, with a sharp, provocative, double beat, such
as is heard sometimes in fencing-schools before the adversaries engage
their foils. Not that the renegade seaman Ricardo knew anything of
fencing. What he called “shooting-irons,” were his weapons, or the still
less aristocratic knife, such as was even then ingeniously strapped
to his leg. He thought of it, at that moment. A swift stooping motion,
then, on the recovery, a ripping blow, a shove off the wharf, and no
noise except a splash in the water that would scarcely disturb the
silence. Heyst would have no time for a cry. It would be quick and neat,
and immensely in accord with Ricardo's humour. But he repressed this
gust of savagery. The job was not such a simple one. This piece had to
be played to another tune, and in much slower time. He returned to his
note of talkative simplicity.
“Ay; and I too don't feel as strong as I thought I was when the first
drink set me up. Great wonder-worker water is! And to get it right here
on the spot! It was heaven--hey, sir?”
Mr. Jones, being directly addressed, took up his part in the concerted
piece:
“Really, when I saw a wharf on what might have been an uninhabited
island, I couldn't believe my eyes. I doubted its existence. I thought
it was a delusion till the boat actually drove between the piles, as you
see her lying now.”
While he was speaking faintly, in a voice which did not seem to belong
to the earth, his henchman, in extremely loud and terrestrial accents,
was fussing about their belongings in the boat, addressing himself to
Pedro:
“Come, now--pass up the dunnage there! Move, yourself, hombre, or I'll
have to get down again and give you a tap on those bandages of yours,
you growling bear, you!”
“Ah! You didn't believe in the reality of the wharf?” Heyst was saying
to Mr. Jones.
“You ought to kiss my hands!”
Ricardo caught hold of an ancient Gladstone bag and swung it on the
wharf with a thump.
“Yes! You ought to burn a candle before me as they do before the saints
in your country. No saint has ever done so much for you as I have, you
ungrateful vagabond. Now then! Up you get!”
Helped by the talkative Ricardo, Pedro scrambled up on the wharf, where
he remained for some time on all fours, swinging to and fro his shaggy
head tied up in white rags. Then he got up clumsily, like a bulky animal
in the dusk, balancing itself on its hind legs.
Mr. Jones began to explain languidly to Heyst that they were in a pretty
bad state that morning, when they caught sight of the smoke of the
volcano. It nerved them to make an effort for their lives. Soon
afterwards they made out the island.
“I had just wits enough left in my baked brain to alter the direction
of the boat,” the ghostly voice went on. “As to finding assistance,
a wharf, a white man--nobody would have dreamed of it. Simply
preposterous!”
“That's what I thought when my Chinaman came and told me he had seen a
boat with white men pulling up,” said Heyst.
“Most extraordinary luck,” interjected Ricardo, standing by anxiously
attentive to every word. “Seems a dream,” he added. “A lovely dream!”
A silence fell on that group of three, as if everyone had become afraid
to speak, in an obscure sense of an impending crisis. Pedro on one side
of them and Wang on the other had the air of watchful spectators. A few
stars had come out pursuing the ebbing twilight. A light draught of air
tepid enough in the thickening twilight after the scorching day, struck
a chill into Mr. Jones in his soaked clothes.
“I may infer, then, that there is a settlement of white people here?” he
murmured, shivering visibly.
Heyst roused himself.
“Oh, abandoned, abandoned. I am alone here--practically alone; but
several empty houses are still standing. No lack of accommodation. We
may just as well--here, Wang, go back to the shore and run the trolley
out here.”
The last words having been spoken in Malay, he explained courteously
that he had given directions for the transport of the luggage. Wang had
melted into the night--in his soundless manner.
“My word! Rails laid down and all,” exclaimed Ricardo softly, in a tone
of admiration. “Well, I never!”
“We were working a coal-mine here,” said the late manager of the
Tropical Belt Coal Company. “These are only the ghosts of things that
have been.”
Mr. Jones's teeth were suddenly started chattering by another faint puff
of wind, a mere sigh from the west, where Venus cast her rays on the
dark edge of the horizon, like a bright lamp hung above the grave of the
sun.
“We might be moving on,” proposed Heyst. “My Chinaman and
that--ah--ungrateful servant of yours, with the broken head, can load
the things and come along after us.”
The suggestion was accepted without words. Moving towards the shore,
the three men met the trolley, a mere metallic rustle which whisked past
them, the shadowy Wang running noiselessly behind. Only the sound of
their footsteps accompanied them. It was a long time since so many
footsteps had rung together on that jetty. Before they stepped on to the
path trodden through the grass, Heyst said:
“I am prevented from offering you a share of my own quarters.” The
distant courtliness of this beginning arrested the other two suddenly,
as if amazed by some manifest incongruity. “I should regret it more,”
he went on, “if I were not in a position to give you the choice of those
empty bungalows for a temporary home.”
He turned round and plunged into the narrow track, the two others
following in single file.
“Queer start!” Ricardo took the opportunity for whispering, as he fell
behind Mr. Jones, who swayed in the gloom, enclosed by the stalks of
tropical grass, almost as slender as a stalk of grass himself.
In this order they emerged into the open space kept clear of vegetation
by Wang's judicious system of periodic firing. The shapes of buildings,
unlighted, high-roofed, looked mysteriously extensive and featureless
against the increasing glitter of the stars. Heyst was pleased at
the absence of light in his bungalow. It looked as uninhabited as
the others. He continued to lead the way, inclining to the right. His
equable voice was heard:
“This one would be the best. It was our counting-house. There is some
furniture in it yet. I am pretty certain that you'll find a couple of
camp bedsteads in one of the rooms.”
The high-pitched roof of the bungalow towered up very close, eclipsing
the sky.
“Here we are. Three steps. As you see, there's a wide veranda. Sorry to
keep you waiting for a moment; the door is locked, I think.”
He was heard trying it. Then he leaned against the rail, saying:
“Wang will get the keys.”
The others waited, two vague shapes nearly mingled together in the
darkness of the veranda, from which issued a sudden chattering of Mr.
Jones's teeth, directly suppressed, and a slight shuffle of Ricardo's
feet. Their guide and host, his back against the rail, seemed to have
forgotten their existence. Suddenly he moved, and murmured:
“Ah, here's the trolley.”
Then he raised his voice in Malay, and was answered, “Ya tuan,” from an
indistinct group that could be made out in the direction of the track.
“I have sent Wang for the key and a light,” he said, in a voice
that came out without any particular direction--a peculiarity which
disconcerted Ricardo.
Wang did not tarry long on his mission. Very soon from the distant
recesses of obscurity appeared the swinging lantern he carried. It cast
a fugitive ray on the arrested trolley with the uncouth figure of the
wild Pedro drooping over the load; then it moved towards the bungalow
and ascended the stairs. After working at the stiff lock, Wang applied
his shoulder to the door. It came open with explosive suddenness, as if
in a passion at being thus disturbed after two years' repose. From the
dark slope of a tall stand-up writing-desk a forgotten, solitary sheet
of paper flew up and settled gracefully on the floor.
Wang and Pedro came and went through the offended door, bringing the
things off the trolley, one flitting swiftly in and out, the other
staggering heavily. Later, directed by a few quiet words from Number
One, Wang made several journeys with the lantern to the store-rooms,
bringing in blankets, provisions in tins, coffee, sugar, and a packet of
candles. He lighted one, and stuck it on the ledge of the stand-up desk.
Meantime Pedro, being introduced to some kindling-wood and a bundle of
dry sticks, had busied himself outside in lighting a fire, on which he
placed a ready-filled kettle handed to him by Wang impassively, at arm's
length, as if across a chasm. Having received the thanks of his guests,
Heyst wished them goodnight and withdrew, leaving them to their repose.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Heyst walked away slowly. There was still no light in his bungalow, and
he thought that perhaps it was just as well. By this time he was much
less perturbed. Wang had preceded him with the lantern, as if in a hurry
to get away from the two white men and their hairy attendant. The light
was not dancing along any more; it was standing perfectly still by the
steps of the veranda.
Heyst, glancing back casually, saw behind him still another light--the
light of the strangers' open fire. A black, uncouth form, stooping over
it monstrously, staggered away into the outlying shadows. The kettle had
boiled, probably.
With that weird vision of something questionably human impressed upon
his senses, Heyst moved on a pace or two. What could the people be who
had such a creature for their familiar attendant? He stopped. The vague
apprehension, of a distant future, in which he saw Lena unavoidably
separated from him by profound and subtle differences; the sceptical
carelessness which had accompanied every one of his attempts at action,
like a secret reserve of his soul, fell away from him. He no longer
belonged to himself. There was a call far more imperious and august. He
came up to the bungalow, and at the very limit of the lantern's light,
on the top step, he saw her feet and the bottom part of her dress. The
rest of her person was suggested dimly as high as her waist. She sat
on a chair, and the gloom of the low eaves descended upon her head and
shoulders. She didn't stir.
“You haven't gone to sleep here?” he asked.
“Oh, no! I was waiting for you--in the dark.”
Heyst, on the top step, leaned against a wooden pillar, after moving the
lantern to one side.
“I have been thinking that it is just as well you had no light. But
wasn't it dull for you to sit in the dark?”
“I don't need a light to think of you.” Her charming voice gave a value
to this banal answer, which had also the merit of truth. Heyst laughed
a little, and said that he had had a curious experience. She made no
remark. He tried to figure to himself the outlines of her easy pose.
A spot of dim light here and there hinted at the unfailing grace of
attitude which was one of her natural possessions.
She had thought of him, but not in connection with the strangers. She
had admired him from the first; she had been attracted by his warm
voice, his gentle eye, but she had felt him too wonderfully difficult to
know. He had given to life a savour, a movement, a promise mingled with
menaces, which she had not suspected were to be found in it--or, at any
rate, not by a girl wedded to misery as she was. She said to herself
that she must not be irritated because he seemed too self-contained, and
as if shut up in a world of his own. When he took her in his arms, she
felt that his embrace had a great and compelling force, that he was
moved deeply, and that perhaps he would not get tired of her so very
soon. She thought that he had opened to her the feelings of delicate
joy, that the very uneasiness he caused her was delicious in its
sadness, and that she would try to hold him as long as she could--till
her fainting arms, her sinking soul, could cling to him no more.
“Wang's not here, of course?” Heyst said suddenly. She answered as if in
her sleep.
“He put this light down here without stopping, and ran.”
“Ran, did he? H'm! Well, it's considerably later than his usual time
to go home to his Alfuro wife; but to be seen running is a sort of
degradation for Wang, who has mastered the art of vanishing. Do you
think he was startled out of his perfection by something?”
“Why should he be startled?”
Her voice remained dreamy, a little uncertain.
“I have been startled,” Heyst said.
She was not listening to him. The lantern at their feet threw the
shadows of her face upward. Her eyes glistened, as if frightened and
attentive, above a lighted chin and a very white throat.
“Upon my word,” mused Heyst, “now that I don't see them, I can hardly
believe that those fellows exist!”
“And what about me?” she asked, so swiftly that he made a movement like
somebody pounced upon from an ambush. “When you don't see me, do you
believe that I exist?”
“Exist? Most charmingly! My dear Lena, you don't know your own
advantages. Why, your voice alone would be enough to make you
unforgettable!”
“Oh, I didn't mean forgetting in that way. I dare say if I were to
die you would remember me right enough. And what good would that be to
anybody? It's while I am alive that I want--”
Heyst stood by her chair, a stalwart figure imperfectly lighted. The
broad shoulders, the martial face that was like a disguise of his
disarmed soul, were lost in the gloom above the plane of light in which
his feet were planted. He suffered from a trouble with which she had
nothing to do. She had no general conception of the conditions of the
existence he had offered to her. Drawn into its peculiar stagnation she
remained unrelated to it because of her ignorance.
For instance, she could never perceive the prodigious improbability of
the arrival of that boat. She did not seem to be thinking of it. Perhaps
she had already forgotten the fact herself. And Heyst resolved suddenly
to say nothing more of it. It was not that he shrank from alarming her.
Not feeling anything definite himself he could not imagine a precise
effect being produced on her by any amount of explanation. There is a
quality in events which is apprehended differently by different minds
or even by the same mind at different times. Any man living at all
consciously knows that embarrassing truth. Heyst was aware that this
visit could bode nothing pleasant. In his present soured temper
towards all mankind he looked upon it as a visitation of a particularly
offensive kind.
He glanced along the veranda in the direction of the other bungalow. The
fire of sticks in front of it had gone out. No faint glow of embers, not
the slightest thread of light in that direction, hinted at the presence
of strangers. The darker shapes in the obscurity, the dead silence,
betrayed nothing of that strange intrusion. The peace of Samburan
asserted itself as on any other night. Everything was as before,
except--Heyst became aware of it suddenly--that for a whole minute,
perhaps, with his hand on the back of the girl's chair and within a foot
of her person, he had lost the sense of her existence, for the first
time since he had brought her over to share this invincible, this
undefiled peace. He picked up the lantern, and the act made a silent
stir all along the veranda. A spoke of shadow swung swiftly across her
face, and the strong light rested on the immobility of her features, as
of a woman looking at a vision. Her eyes were still, her lips serious.
Her dress, open at the neck, stirred slightly to her even breathing.
“We had better go in, Lena,” suggested Heyst, very low, as if breaking a
spell cautiously.
She rose without a word. Heyst followed her indoors. As they passed
through the living-room, he left the lantern burning on the centre
table.
CHAPTER NINE
That night the girl woke up, for the first time in her new experience,
with the sensation of having been abandoned to her own devices. She woke
up from a painful dream of separation brought about in a way which she
could not understand, and missed the relief of the waking instant.
The desolate feeling of being alone persisted. She was really alone.
A night-light made it plain enough, in the dim, mysterious manner of a
dream; but this was reality. It startled her exceedingly.
In a moment she was at the curtain that hung in the doorway, and raised
it with a steady hand. The conditions of their life in Samburan would
have made peeping absurd; nor was such a thing in her character. This
was not a movement of curiosity, but of downright alarm--the continued
distress and fear of the dream. The night could not have been very far
advanced. The light of the lantern was burning strongly, striping the
floor and walls of the room with thick black bands. She hardly knew
whether she expected to see Heyst or not; but she saw him at once,
standing by the table in his sleeping-suit, his back to the doorway.
She stepped in noiselessly with her bare feet, and let the curtain fall
behind her. Something characteristic in Heyst's attitude made her say,
almost in a whisper:
“You are looking for something.”
He could not have heard her before; but he didn't start at the
unexpected whisper. He only pushed the drawer of the table in and,
without even looking over his shoulder, asked quietly, accepting her
presence as if he had been aware of all her movements:
“I say, are you certain that Wang didn't go through this room this
evening?”
“Wang? When?”
“After leaving the lantern, I mean.”
“Oh, no. He ran on. I watched him.”
“Or before, perhaps--while I was with these boat people? Do you know?
Can you tell?”
“I hardly think so. I came out as the sun went down, and sat outside
till you came back to me.”
“He could have popped in for an instant through the back veranda.”
“I heard nothing in here,” she said. “What is the matter?”
“Naturally you wouldn't hear. He can be as quiet as a shadow, when he
likes. I believe he could steal the pillows from under our heads. He
might have been here ten minutes ago.”
“What woke you up? Was it a noise?”
“Can't say that. Generally one can't tell, but is it likely, Lena? You
are, I believe, the lighter sleeper of us two. A noise loud enough to
wake me up would have awakened you, too. I tried to be as quiet as I
could. What roused you?”
“I don't know--a dream, perhaps. I woke up crying.”
“What was the dream?”
Heyst, with one hand resting on the table, had turned in her direction,
his round, uncovered head set on a fighter's muscular neck. She left his
question unanswered, as if she had not heard it.
“What is it you have missed?” she asked in her turn, very grave.
Her dark hair, drawn smoothly back, was done in two thick tresses for
the night. Heyst noticed the good form of her brow, the dignity of its
width, its unshining whiteness. It was a sculptural forehead. He had a
moment of acute appreciation intruding upon another order of thoughts.
It was as if there could be no end of his discoveries about that girl,
at the most incongruous moments.
She had on nothing but a hand-woven cotton sarong--one of Heyst's few
purchases, years ago, in Celebes, where they are made. He had forgotten
all about it till she came, and then had found it at the bottom of an
old sandalwood trunk dating back to pre-Morrison days. She had quickly
learned to wind it up under her armpits with a safe twist, as Malay
village girls do when going down to bathe in a river. Her shoulders and
arms were bare; one of her tresses, hanging forward, looked almost black
against the white skin. As she was taller than the average Malay woman,
the sarong ended a good way above her ankles. She stood poised firmly,
half-way between the table and the curtained doorway, the insteps of her
bare feet gleaming like marble on the overshadowed matting of the floor.
The fall of her lighted shoulders, the strong and fine modelling of
her arms hanging down her sides, her immobility, too, had something
statuesque, the charm of art tense with life. She was not very
big--Heyst used to think of her, at first, as “that poor little
girl,”--but revealed free from the shabby banality of a white platform
dress, in the simple drapery of the sarong, there was that in her form
and in the proportions of her body which suggested a reduction from a
heroic size.
She moved forward a step.
“What is it you have missed?” she asked again.
Heyst turned his back altogether on the table. The black spokes of
darkness over the floor and the walls, joining up on the ceiling in a
path of shadow, were like the bars of a cage about them. It was his turn
to ignore a question.
“You woke up in a fright, you say?” he said.
She walked up to him, exotic yet familiar, with her white woman's face
and shoulders above the Malay sarong, as if it were an airy disguise,
but her expression was serious.
“No,” she replied. “It was distress, rather. You see, you weren't there,
and I couldn't tell why you had gone away from me. A nasty dream--the
first I've had, too, since--”
“You don't believe in dreams, do you?” asked Heyst.
“I once knew a woman who did. Leastwise, she used to tell people what
dreams mean, for a shilling.”
“Would you go now and ask her what this dream means?” inquired Heyst
jocularly.
“She lived in Camberwell. She was a nasty old thing!”
Heyst laughed a little uneasily.
“Dreams are madness, my dear. It's things that happen in the waking
world, while one is asleep, that one would be glad to know the meaning
of.”
“You have missed something out of this drawer,” she said positively.
“This or some other. I have looked into every single one of them and
come back to this again, as people do. It's difficult to believe the
evidence of my own senses; but it isn't there. Now, Lena, are you sure
that you didn't--”
“I have touched nothing in the house but what you have given me.”
“Lena!” he cried.
He was painfully affected by this disclaimer of a charge which he had
not made. It was what a servant might have said--an inferior open
to suspicion--or, at any rate, a stranger. He was angry at being so
wretchedly misunderstood; disenchanted at her not being instinctively
aware of the place he had secretly given her in his thoughts.
“After all,” he said to himself, “we are strangers to each other.”
And then he felt sorry for her. He spoke calmly:
“I was about to say, are you sure you have no reason to think that the
Chinaman has been in this room tonight?”
“You suspect him?” she asked, knitting her eyebrows.
“There is no one else to suspect. You may call it a certitude.”
“You don't want to tell me what it is?” she inquired, in the equable
tone in which one takes a fact into account.
Heyst only smiled faintly.
“Nothing very precious, as far as value goes,” he replied.
“I thought it might have been money,” she said.
“Money!” exclaimed Heyst, as if the suggestion had been altogether
preposterous. She was so visibly surprised that he hastened to add: “Of
course, there is some money in the house--there, in that writing-desk,
the drawer on the left. It's not locked. You can pull it right out.
There is a recess, and the board at the back pivots: a very simple
hiding-place, when you know the way to it. I discovered it by accident,
and I keep our store of sovereigns in there. The treasure, my dear, is
not big enough to require a cavern.”
He paused, laughed very low, and returned her steady stare.
“The loose silver, some guilders and dollars, I have always kept in that
unlocked left drawer. I have no doubt Wang knows what there is in it,
but he isn't a thief, and that's why I--no, Lena, what I've missed is
not gold or jewels; and that's what makes the fact interesting--which
the theft of money cannot be.”
She took a long breath, relieved to hear that it was not money. A great
curiosity was depicted on her face, but she refrained from pressing him
with questions. She only gave him one of her deep-gleaming smiles.
“It isn't me so it must be Wang. You ought to make him give it back to
you.”
Heyst said nothing to that naive and practical suggestion, for the
object that he missed from the drawer was his revolver.
It was a heavy weapon which he had owned for many years and had never
used in his life. Ever since the London furniture had arrived in
Samburan, it had been reposing in the drawer of the table. The real
dangers of life, for him, were not those which could be repelled
by swords or bullets. On the other hand neither his manner nor his
appearance looked sufficiently inoffensive to expose him to light-minded
aggression.
He could not have explained what had induced him to go to the drawer
in the middle of the night. He had started up suddenly--which was very
unusual with him. He had found himself sitting up and extremely wide
awake all at once, with the girl reposing by his side, lying with her
face away from him, a vague, characteristically feminine form in the dim
light. She was perfectly still.
At that season of the year there were no mosquitoes in Samburan, and the
sides of the mosquito net were looped up. Heyst swung his feet to the
floor, and found himself standing there, almost before he had become
aware of his intention to get up.