instant she stooped for the slipper, and, with it in her hand, spun
round wildly, looking for some hiding-place; but there was no such spot
in the bare room. The chest, the leather bunk, a dress or two of hers
hanging on pegs--there was no place where the merest hazard might not
guide Heyst's hand at any moment. Her wildly roaming eyes were caught
by the half-closed window. She ran to it, and by raising herself on her
toes was able to reach the shutter with her fingertips. She pushed it
square, stole back to the middle of the room, and, turning about, swung
her arm, regulating the force of the throw so as not to let the slipper
fly too far out and hit the edge of the overhanging eaves. It was a
task of the nicest judgement for the muscles of those round arms, still
quivering from the deadly wrestle with a man, for that brain, tense with
the excitement of the situation and for the unstrung nerves flickering
darkness before her eyes. At last the slipper left her hand. As soon as
it passed the opening, it was out of her sight. She listened. She did
not hear it strike anything; it just vanished, as if it had wings to fly
on through the air. Not a sound! It had gone clear.
Her valiant arms hanging close against her side, she stood as if turned
into stone. A faint whistle reached her ears. The forgetful Ricardo,
becoming very much aware of his loss, had been hanging about in great
anxiety, which was relieved by the appearance of the slipper flying from
under the eaves; and now, thoughtfully, he had ventured a whistle to put
her mind at ease.
Suddenly the girl reeled forward. She saved herself from a fall only by
embracing with both arms one of the tall, roughly carved posts holding
the mosquito net above the bed. For a long time she clung to it, with
her forehead leaning against the wood. One side of her loosened sarong
had slipped down as low as her hip. The long brown tresses of her hair
fell in lank wisps, as if wet, almost black against her white body. Her
uncovered flank, damp with the sweat of anguish and fatigue, gleamed
coldly with the immobility of polished marble in the hot, diffused
light falling through the window above her head--a dim reflection of the
consuming, passionate blaze of sunshine outside, all aquiver with the
effort to set the earth on fire, to burn it to ashes.
CHAPTER FOUR
Heyst, seated at the table with his chin on his breast, raised his head
at the faint rustle of Lena's dress. He was startled by the dead pallor
of her cheeks, by something lifeless in her eyes, which looked at
him strangely, without recognition. But to his anxious inquiries she
answered reassuringly that there was nothing the matter with her,
really. She had felt giddy on rising. She had even had a moment of
faintness, after her bath. She had to sit down to wait for it to pass.
This had made her late dressing.
“I didn't try to do my hair. I didn't want to keep you waiting any
longer,” she said.
He was unwilling to press her with questions about her health, since she
seemed to make light of this indisposition. She had not done her hair,
but she had brushed it, and had tied it with a ribbon behind. With her
forehead uncovered, she looked very young, almost a child, a careworn
child; a child with something on its mind.
What surprised Heyst was the non-appearance of Wang. The Chinaman had
always materialized at the precise moment of his service, neither too
soon nor too late. This time the usual miracle failed. What was the
meaning of this?
Heyst raised his voice--a thing he disliked doing. It was promptly
answered from the compound:
“Ada tuan!”
Lena, leaning on her elbow, with her eyes on her plate, did not seem to
hear anything. When Wang entered with a tray, his narrow eyes, tilted
inward by the prominence of salient cheek-bones, kept her under stealthy
observation all the time. Neither the one nor the other of that white
couple paid the slightest attention to him and he withdrew without
having heard them exchange a single word. He squatted on his heels on
the back veranda. His Chinaman's mind, very clear but not far-reaching,
was made up according to the plain reason of things, such as it appeared
to him in the light of his simple feeling for self-preservation,
untrammelled by any notions of romantic honour or tender conscience. His
yellow hands, lightly clasped, hung idly between his knees. The graves
of Wang's ancestors were far away, his parents were dead, his elder
brother was a soldier in the yamen of some Mandarin away in Formosa. No
one near by had a claim on his veneration or his obedience. He had been
for years a labouring restless vagabond. His only tie in the world
was the Alfuro woman, in exchange for whom he had given away some
considerable part of his hard-earned substance; and his duty, in reason,
could be to no one but himself.
The scuffle behind the curtain was a thing of bad augury for that Number
One for whom the Chinaman had neither love nor dislike. He had been awed
enough by that development to hang back with the coffee-pot till at last
the white man was induced to call him in. Wang went in with curiosity.
Certainly, the white woman looked as if she had been wrestling with
a spirit which had managed to tear half her blood out of her before
letting her go. As to the man, Wang had long looked upon him as being in
some sort bewitched; and now he was doomed. He heard their voices in
the room. Heyst was urging the girl to go and lie down again. He was
extremely concerned. She had eaten nothing.
“The best thing for you. You really must!”
She sat listless, shaking her head from time to time negatively, as if
nothing could be any good. But he insisted; she saw the beginning of
wonder in his eyes, and suddenly gave way.
“Perhaps I had better.”
She did not want to arouse his wonder, which would lead him straight to
suspicion. He must not suspect!
Already, with the consciousness of her love for this man, of that
something rapturous and profound going beyond the mere embrace, there
was born in her a woman's innate mistrust of masculinity, of that
seductive strength allied to an absurd, delicate shrinking from the
recognition of the naked necessity of facts, which never yet frightened
a woman worthy of the name. She had no plan; but her mind, quieted down
somewhat by the very effort to preserve outward composure for his sake,
perceived that her behaviour had secured, at any rate, a short period of
safety. Perhaps because of the similarity of their miserable origin in
the dregs of mankind, she had understood Ricardo perfectly. He would
keep quiet for a time now. In this momentarily soothing certitude her
bodily fatigue asserted itself, the more overpoweringly since its cause
was not so much the demand on her strength as the awful suddenness of
the stress she had had to meet. She would have tried to overcome it
from the mere instinct of resistance, if it had not been for Heyst's
alternate pleadings and commands. Before this eminently masculine
fussing she felt the woman's need to give way, the sweetness of
surrender.
“I will do anything you like,” she said.
Getting up, she was surprised by a wave of languid weakness that came
over her, embracing and enveloping her like warm water, with a noise in
her ears as of a breaking sea.
“You must help me along,” she added quickly.
While he put his arm round her waist--not by any means an uncommon thing
for him to do--she found a special satisfaction in the feeling of being
thus sustained. She abandoned all her weight to that encircling and
protecting pressure, while a thrill went through her at the sudden
thought that it was she who would have to protect him, to be the
defender of a man who was strong enough to lift her bodily, as he was
doing even then in his two arms. For Heyst had done this as soon as they
had crept through the doorway of the room. He thought it was quicker
and simpler to carry her the last step or two. He had grown really too
anxious to be aware of the effort. He lifted her high and deposited her
on the bed, as one lays a child on its side in a cot. Then he sat down
on the edge, masking his concern with a smile which obtained no response
from the dreamy immobility of her eyes. But she sought his hand, seized
it eagerly; and while she was pressing it with all the force of
which she was capable, the sleep she needed overtook her suddenly,
overwhelmingly, as it overtakes a child in a cot, with her lips parted
for a safe, endearing word which she had thought of but had no time to
utter.
The usual flaming silence brooded over Samburan.
“What in the world is this new mystery?” murmured Heyst to himself,
contemplating her deep slumber.
It was so deep, this enchanted sleep, that when some time afterwards he
gently tried to open her fingers and free his hand, he succeeded without
provoking the slightest stir.
“There is some very simple explanation, no doubt,” he thought, as he
stole out into the living-room.
Absent-mindedly he pulled a book out of the top shelf, and sat down with
it; but even after he had opened it on his knee, and had been staring
at the pages for a time, he had not the slightest idea of what it was
about. He stared and stared at the crowded, parallel lines. It was only
when, raising his eyes for no particular reason, he saw Wang standing
motionless on the other side of the table, that he regained complete
control of his faculties.
“Oh, yes,” he said, as if suddenly reminded of a forgotten appointment
of a not particularly welcome sort.
He waited a little, and then, with reluctant curiosity, forced himself
to ask the silent Wang what he had to say. He had some idea that the
matter of the vanished revolver would come up at last; but the guttural
sounds which proceeded from the Chinaman did not refer to that delicate
subject. His speech was concerned with cups, saucers, plates, forks, and
knives. All these things had been put away in the cupboards on the
back veranda, where they belonged, perfectly clean, “all plopel.” Heyst
wondered at the scrupulosity of a man who was about to abandon him;
for he was not surprised to hear Wang conclude the account of his
stewardship with the words:
“I go now.”
“Oh! You go now?” said Heyst, leaning back, his book on his knees.
“Yes. Me no likee. One man, two man, three man--no can do! Me go now.”
“What's frightening you away like this?” asked Heyst, while through his
mind flashed the hope that something enlightening might come from that
being so unlike himself, taking contact with the world with a simplicity
and directness of which his own mind was not capable. “Why?” he went on.
“You are used to white men. You know them well.”
“Yes. Me savee them,” assented Wang inscrutably. “Me savee plenty.”
All that he really knew was his own mind. He had made it up to withdraw
himself and the Alfuro woman from the uncertainties of the relations
which were going to establish themselves between those white men. It
was Pedro who had been the first cause of Wang's suspicion and fear. The
Chinaman had seen wild men. He had penetrated, in the train of a Chinese
pedlar, up one or two of the Bornean rivers into the country of the
Dyaks. He had also been in the interior of Mindanao, where there are
people who live in trees--savages, no better than animals; but a
hairy brute like Pedro, with his great fangs and ferocious growls, was
altogether beyond his conception of anything that could be looked upon
as human. The strong impression made on him by Pedro was the prime
inducement which had led Wang to purloin the revolver. Reflection on
the general situation, and on the insecurity of Number One, came later,
after he had obtained possession of the revolver and of the box of
cartridges out of the table drawer in the living-room.
“Oh, you savee plenty about white men,” Heyst went on in a slightly
bantering tone, after a moment of silent reflection in which he had
confessed to himself that the recovery of the revolver was not to be
thought of, either by persuasion or by some more forcible means. “You
speak in that fashion, but you are frightened of those white men over
there.”
“Me no flightened,” protested Wang raucously, throwing up his
head--which gave to his throat a more strained, anxious appearance than
ever. “Me no likee,” he added in a quieter tone. “Me velly sick.”
He put his hand over the region under the breast-bone.
“That,” said Heyst, serenely positive, “belong one piecee lie. That
isn't proper man-talk at all. And after stealing my revolver, too!”
He had suddenly decided to speak about it, because this frankness could
not make the situation much worse than it was. He did not suppose for a
moment that Wang had the revolver anywhere about his person; and after
having thought the matter over, he had arrived at the conclusion that
the Chinaman never meant to use the weapon against him. After a slight
start, because the direct charge had taken him unawares, Wang tore open
the front of his jacket with a convulsive show of indignation.
“No hab got. Look see!” he mouthed in pretended anger.
He slapped his bare chest violently; he uncovered his very ribs, all
astir with the panting of outraged virtue; his smooth stomach heaved
with indignation. He started his wide blue breeches flapping about his
yellow calves. Heyst watched him quietly.
“I never said you had it on you,” he observed, without raising his
voice; “but the revolver is gone from where I kept it.”
“Me no savee levolvel,” Wang said obstinately.
The book lying open on Heyst's knee slipped suddenly and he made a
sharp movement to catch it up. Wang was unable to see the reason of
this because of the table, and leaped away from what seemed to him a
threatening symptom. When Heyst looked up, the Chinaman was already at
the door facing the room, not frightened, but alert.
“What's the matter?” asked Heyst.
Wang nodded his shaven head significantly at the curtain closing the
doorway of the bedroom.
“Me no likee,” he repeated.
“What the devil do you mean?” Heyst was genuinely amazed. “Don't like
what?”
Wang pointed a long lemon-coloured finger at the motionless folds.
“Two,” he said.
“Two what? I don't understand.”
“Suppose you savee, you no like that fashion. Me savee plenty. Me go
now.”
Heyst had risen from his chair, but Wang kept his ground in the doorway
for a little longer. His almond-shaped eyes imparted to his face an
expression of soft and sentimental melancholy. The muscles of his throat
moved visibly while he uttered a distinct and guttural “Goodbye” and
vanished from Number One's sight.
The Chinaman's departure altered the situation. Heyst reflected on what
would be best to do in view of that fact. For a long time he hesitated;
then, shrugging his shoulders wearily, he walked out on the veranda,
down the steps, and continued at a steady gait, with a thoughtful mien,
in the direction of his guests' bungalow. He wanted to make an important
communication to them, and he had no other object--least of all to give
them the shock of a surprise call. Nevertheless, their brutish henchman
not being on watch, it was Heyst's fate to startle Mr. Jones and his
secretary by his sudden appearance in the doorway. Their conversation
must have been very interesting to prevent them from hearing the
visitor's approach. In the dim room--the shutters were kept constantly
closed against the heat--Heyst saw them start apart. It was Mr. Jones
who spoke:
“Ah, here you are again! Come in, come in!”
Heyst, taking his hat off in the doorway, entered the room.
CHAPTER FIVE
Waking up suddenly, Lena looked, without raising her head from the
pillow, at the room in which she was alone. She got up quickly, as if
to counteract the awful sinking of her heart by the vigorous use of her
limbs. But this sinking was only momentary. Mistress of herself from
pride, from love, from necessity, and also because of a woman's
vanity in self-sacrifice, she met Heyst, returning from the strangers'
bungalow, with a clear glance and a smile.
The smile he managed to answer, but, noticing that he avoided her eyes,
she composed her lips and lowered her gaze. For the same reason she
hastened to speak to him in a tone of indifference, which she put on
without effort, as if she had grown adept in duplicity since sunrise.
“You have been over there again?”
“I have. I thought--but you had better know first that we have lost Wang
for good.”
She repeated “For good?” as if she had not understood.
“For good or evil--I shouldn't know which if you were to ask me. He has
dismissed himself. He's gone.”
“You expected him to go, though, didn't you?”
Heyst sat down on the other side of the table.
“Yes. I expected it as soon as I discovered that he had annexed my
revolver. He says he hasn't taken it. That's untrue of course. A
Chinaman would not see the sense of confessing under any circumstances.
To deny any charge is a principle of right conduct; but he hardly
expected to be believed. He was a little enigmatic at the last, Lena. He
startled me.”
Heyst paused. The girl seemed absorbed in her own thoughts.
“He startled me,” repeated Heyst. She noted the anxiety in his tone, and
turned her head slightly to look at him across the table.
“It must have been something--to startle you,” she said. In the depth
of her parted lips, like a ripe pomegranate, there was a gleam of white
teeth.
“It was only a single word--and some of his gestures. He had been making
a good deal of noise. I wonder we didn't wake you up. How soundly you
can sleep! I say, do you feel all right now?”
“As fresh as can be,” she said, treating him to another deep gleam of
a smile. “I heard no noise, and I'm glad of it. The way he talks in his
harsh voice frightens me. I don't like all these foreign people.”
“It was just before he went away--bolted out, I should say. He nodded
and pointed at the curtain to our room. He knew you were there, of
course. He seemed to think--he seemed to try to give me to understand
that you were in special--well, danger. You know how he talks.”
She said nothing; she made no sound, only the faint tinge of colour
ebbed out of her cheek.
“Yes,” Heyst went on. “He seemed to try to warn me. That must have been
it. Did he imagine I had forgotten your existence? The only word he said
was 'two'. It sounded so, at least. Yes, 'two'--and that he didn't like
it.”
“What does that mean?” she whispered.
“We know what the word two means, don't we, Lena? We are two. Never
were such a lonely two out of the world, my dear! He might have tried
to remind me that he himself has a woman to look after. Why are you so
pale, Lena?”
“Am I pale?” she asked negligently.
“You are.” Heyst was really anxious.
“Well, it isn't from fright,” she protested truthfully.
Indeed, what she felt was a sort of horror which left her absolutely
in the full possession of all her faculties; more difficult to bear,
perhaps, for that reason, but not paralysing to her fortitude.
Heyst in his turn smiled at her.
“I really don't know that there is any reason to be frightened.”
“I mean I am not frightened for myself.”
“I believe you are very plucky,” he said. The colour had returned to her
face. “I” continued Heyst, “am so rebellious to outward impressions
that I can't say that much about myself. I don't react with sufficient
distinctness.” He changed his tone. “You know I went to see those men
first thing this morning.”
“I know. Be careful!” she murmured.
“I wonder how one can be careful! I had a long talk with--but I don't
believe you have seen them. One of them is a fantastically thin, long
person, apparently ailing; I shouldn't wonder if he were really so. He
makes rather a point of it in a mysterious manner. I imagine he must
have suffered from tropical fevers, but not so much as he tries to make
out. He's what people would call a gentleman. He seemed on the point of
volunteering a tale of his adventures--for which I didn't ask him--but
remarked that it was a long story; some other time, perhaps.
“'I suppose you would like to know who I am?' he asked me.
“I told him I would leave it to him, in a tone which, between gentlemen,
could have left no doubt in his mind. He raised himself on his elbow--he
was lying down on the camp-bed--and said:
“'I am he who is--'”
Lena seemed not to be listening; but when Heyst paused, she turned her
head quickly to him. He took it for a movement of inquiry, but in this
he was wrong. A great vagueness enveloped her impressions, but all her
energy was concentrated on the struggle that she wanted to take upon
herself, in a great exaltation of love and self-sacrifice, which is
woman's sublime faculty; altogether on herself, every bit of it, leaving
him nothing, not even the knowledge of what she did, if that were
possible. She would have liked to lock him up by some stratagem. Had
she known of some means to put him to sleep for days she would have used
incantations or philtres without misgivings. He seemed to her too good
for such contacts, and not sufficiently equipped. This last feeling had
nothing to do with the material fact of the revolver being stolen. She
could hardly appreciate that fact at its full value.
Observing her eyes fixed and as if sightless--for the concentration on
her purpose took all expression out of them--Heyst imagined it to be the
effect of a great mental effort.
“No use asking me what he meant, Lena; I don't know, and I did not
ask him. The gentleman, as I have told you before, seems devoted to
mystification. I said nothing, and he laid down his head again on
the bundle of rugs he uses for a pillow. He affects a state of great
weakness, but I suspect that he's perfectly capable of leaping to his
feet if he likes. Having been ejected, he said, from his proper social
sphere because he had refused to conform to certain usual conventions,
he was a rebel now, and was coming and going up and down the earth. As
I really did not want to listen to all this nonsense, I told him that
I had heard that sort of story about somebody else before. His grin is
really ghastly. He confessed that I was very far from the sort of man he
expected to meet. Then he said:
“'As to me, I am no blacker than the gentleman you are thinking of, and
I have neither more nor less determination.'”
Heyst looked across the table at Lena. Propped on her elbows, and
holding her head in both hands, she moved it a little with an air of
understanding.
“Nothing could be plainer, eh?” said Heyst grimly. “Unless, indeed, this
is his idea of a pleasant joke; for, when he finished speaking, he burst
into a loud long laugh. I didn't join him!”
“I wish you had,” she breathed out.
“I didn't join him. It did not occur to me. I am not much of a
diplomatist. It would probably have been wise, for, indeed, I believe
he had said more than he meant to say, and was trying to take it back by
this affected jocularity. Yet when one thinks of it, diplomacy without
force in the background is but a rotten reed to lean upon. And I don't
know whether I could have done it if I had thought of it. I don't know.
It would have been against the grain. Could I have done it? I have lived
too long within myself, watching the mere shadows and shades of life.
To deceive a man on some issue which could be decided quicker, by his
destruction while one is disarmed, helpless, without even the power to
run away--no! That seems to me too degrading. And yet I have you here.
I have your very existence in my keeping. What do you say, Lena? Would I
be capable of throwing you to the lions to save my dignity?”
She got up, walked quickly round the table, posed herself on his knees
lightly, throwing one arm round his neck, and whispered in his ear:
“You may if you like. And may be that's the only way I would consent to
leave you. For something like that. If it were something no bigger than
your little finger.”
She gave him a light kiss on the lips and was gone before he could
detain her. She regained her seat and propped her elbows again on the
table. It was hard to believe that she had moved from the spot at all.
The fleeting weight of her body on his knees, the hug round his neck,
the whisper in his ear, the kiss on his lips, might have been the
unsubstantial sensations of a dream invading the reality of waking life;
a sort of charming mirage in the barren aridity of his thoughts. He
hesitated to speak till she said, businesslike:
“Well. And what then?”
Heyst gave a start.
“Oh, yes. I didn't join him. I let him have his laugh out by himself. He
was shaking all over, like a merry skeleton, under a cotton sheet he was
covered with--I believe in order to conceal the revolver that he had in
his right hand. I didn't see it, but I have a distinct impression it was
there in his fist. As he had not been looking at me for some time, but
staring into a certain part of the room, I turned my head and saw a
hairy, wild sort of creature which they take about with them, squatting
on its heels in the angle of the walls behind me. He wasn't there when
I came in. I didn't like the notion of that watchful monster behind my
back. If I had been less at their mercy, I should certainly have changed
my position. As things are now, to move would have been a mere weakness.
So I remained where I was. The gentleman on the bed said he could assure
me of one thing; and that was that his presence here was no more morally
reprehensible than mine.
“'We pursue the same ends,' he said, 'only perhaps I pursue them with
more openness than you--with more simplicity.'