did not strike me as practical; but on reflection it seems to me that
to propose a game is as good a way as any to let him understand that the
time has come to disgorge. It's less--how should I say?--vulgar. He will
know what it means. It's not a bad form to give to the business--which
in itself is crude, Martin, crude.”
“Want to spare his feelings?” jeered the secretary in such a bitter tone
that Mr. Jones was really surprised.
“Why, it was your own notion, confound you!”
“Who says it wasn't?” retorted Ricardo sulkily. “But I am fairly sick of
this crawling. No! No! Get the exact bearings of his swag and then a rip
up. That's plenty good enough for him.”
His passions being thoroughly aroused, a thirst for blood was allied in
him with a thirst for tenderness--yes, tenderness. A sort of anxious,
melting sensation pervaded and softened his heart when he thought of
that girl--one of his own sort. And at the same time jealousy started
gnawing at his breast as the image of Heyst intruded itself on his
fierce anticipation of bliss.
“The crudeness of your ferocity is positively gross, Martin,” Mr. Jones
said disdainfully. “You don't even understand my purpose. I mean to
have some sport out of him. Just try to imagine the atmosphere of the
game--the fellow handling the cards--the agonizing mockery of it! Oh,
I shall appreciate this greatly. Yes, let him lose his money instead of
being forced to hand it over. You, of course, would shoot him at once,
but I shall enjoy the refinement and the jest of it. He's a man of the
best society. I've been hounded out of my sphere by people very much
like that fellow. How enraged and humiliated he will be! I promise
myself some exquisite moments while watching his play.”
“Ay, and suppose he suddenly starts prancing. He may not appreciate the
fun.”
“I mean you to be present,” Mr. Jones remarked calmly.
“Well, as long as I am free to plug him or rip him up whenever I think
the time has come, you are welcome to your bit of sport, sir. I shan't
spoil it.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
It was at this precise moment of their conversation that Heyst had
intruded on Mr. Jones and his secretary with his warning about Wang, as
he had related to Lena. When he left them, the two looked at each other
in wondering silence. My Jones was the first to break it.
“I say, Martin!”
“Yes, sir.”
“What does this mean?”
“It's some move. Blame me if I can understand.”
“Too deep for you?” Mr. Jones inquired dryly.
“It's nothing but some of his infernal impudence,” growled the
secretary. “You don't believe all that about the Chink, do you, sir?
'Tain't true.”
“It isn't necessary for it to be true to have a meaning for us. It's the
why of his coming to tell us this tale that's important.”
“Do you think he made it up to frighten us?” asked Ricardo.
Mr. Jones scowled at him thoughtfully.
“The man looked worried,” he muttered, as if to himself. “Suppose that
Chinaman has really stolen his money! The man looked very worried.”
“Nothing but his artfulness, sir,” protested Ricardo earnestly, for the
idea was too disconcerting to entertain. “Is it likely that he would
have trusted a Chink with enough knowledge to make it possible?” he
argued warmly. “Why, it's the very thing that he would keep close about.
There's something else there. Ay, but what?”
“Ha, ha, ha!” Mr. Jones let out a ghostly, squeaky laugh. “I've never
been placed in such a ridiculous position before,” he went on, with a
sepulchral equanimity of tone. “It's you, Martin, who dragged me into
it. However, it's my own fault too. I ought to--but I was really
too bored to use my brain, and yours is not to be trusted. You are a
hothead!”
A blasphemous exclamation of grief escaped from Ricardo. Not to be
trusted! Hothead! He was almost tearful.
“Haven't I heard you, sir, saying more than twenty times since we got
fired out from Manila that we should want a lot of capital to work the
East Coast with? You were always telling me that to prime properly all
them officials and Portuguese scallywags we should have to lose heavily
at first. Weren't you always worrying about some means of getting hold
of a good lot of cash? It wasn't to be got hold of by allowing yourself
to become bored in that rotten Dutch town and playing a two-penny game
with confounded beggarly bank clerks and such like. Well, I've brought
you here, where there is cash to be got--and a big lot, to a moral,” he
added through his set teeth.
Silence fell. Each of them was staring into a different corner of the
room. Suddenly, with a slight stamp of his foot, Mr. Jones made for the
door. Ricardo caught him up outside.
“Put an arm through mine, sir,” he begged him gently but firmly. “No use
giving the game away. An invalid may well come out for a breath of fresh
air after the sun's gone down a bit. That's it, sir. But where do you
want to go? Why did you come out, sir?”
Mr. Jones stopped short.
“I hardly know myself,” he confessed in a hollow mutter, staring
intently at the Number One bungalow. “It's quite irrational,” he
declared in a still lower tone.
“Better go in, sir,” suggested Ricardo. “What's that? Those screens
weren't down before. He's spying from behind them now, I bet--the
dodging, artful, plotting beast!”
“Why not go over there and see if we can't get to the bottom of this
game?” was the unexpected proposal uttered by Mr. Jones. “He will have
to talk to us.”
Ricardo repressed a start of dismay, but for a moment could not speak.
He only pressed the governor's hand to his side instinctively.
“No, sir. What could you say? Do you expect to get to the bottom of his
lies? How could you make him talk? It isn't time yet to come to grips
with that gent. You don't think I would hang back, do you? His Chink, of
course, I'll shoot like a dog the moment I catch sight of him; but as
to that Mr. Blasted Heyst, the time isn't yet. My head's cooler just now
than yours. Let's go in again. Why, we are exposed here. Suppose he
took it into his head to let off a gun on us! He's an unaccountable,
'yporcritical skunk.”
Allowing himself to be persuaded, Mr. Jones returned to his seclusion.
The secretary, however, remained on the veranda--for the purpose, he
said, of seeing whether that Chink wasn't sneaking around; in which
case he proposed to take a long shot at the galoot and chance the
consequences. His real reason was that he wanted to be alone, away from
the governor's deep-sunk eyes. He felt a sentimental desire to indulge
his fancies in solitude. A great change had come over Mr. Ricardo since
that morning. A whole side of him which from prudence, from necessity,
from loyalty, had been kept dormant, was aroused now, colouring
his thoughts and disturbing his mental poise by the vision of such
staggering consequences as, for instance, the possibility of an active
conflict with the governor. The appearance of the monstrous Pedro with
his news drew Ricardo out of a feeling of dreaminess wrapped up in a
sense of impending trouble. A woman? Yes, there was one; and it made all
the difference. After driving away Pedro, and watching the white
helmets of Heyst and Lena vanishing among the bushes he stood lost in
meditation.
“Where could they be off to like this?” he mentally asked himself.
The answer found by his speculative faculties on their utmost stretch
was--to meet that Chink. For in the desertion of Wang Ricardo did not
believe. It was a lying yarn, the organic part of a dangerous plot.
Heyst had gone to combine some fresh move. But then Ricardo felt sure
that the girl was with him--the girl full of pluck, full of sense, full
of understanding; an ally of his own kind!
He went indoors briskly. Mr. Jones had resumed his cross-legged pose at
the head of the bed, with his back against the wall.
“Anything new?”
“No, sir.”
Ricardo walked about the room as if he had no care in the world. He
hummed snatches of song. Mr. Jones raised his waspish eyebrows, at the
sound. The secretary got down on his knees before an old leather trunk,
and, rummaging in there, brought out a small looking-glass. He fell to
examining his physiognomy in it with silent absorption.
“I think I'll shave,” he decided, getting up.
He gave a sidelong glance to the governor, and repeated it several times
during the operation, which did not take long, and even afterwards, when
after putting away the implements, he resumed his walking, humming more
snatches of unknown songs. Mr. Jones preserved a complete immobility,
his thin lips compressed, his eyes veiled. His face was like a carving.
“So you would like to try your hand at cards with that skunk, sir?” said
Ricardo, stopping suddenly and rubbing his hands.
Mr. Jones gave no sign of having heard anything.
“Well, why not? Why shouldn't he have the experience? You remember in
that Mexican town--what's its name?--the robber fellow they caught in
the mountains and condemned to be shot? He played cards half the night
with the jailer and the sheriff. Well, this fellow is condemned, too.
He must give you your game. Hang it all, a gentleman ought to have some
little relaxation! And you have been uncommonly patient, sir.”
“You are uncommonly volatile all of a sudden,” Mr. Jones remarked in a
bored voice. “What's come to you?”
The secretary hummed for a while, and then said:
“I'll try to get him over here for you tonight, after dinner. If I ain't
here myself, don't you worry, sir. I shall be doing a bit of nosing
around--see?”
“I see,” sneered Mr. Jones languidly. “But what do you expect to see in
the dark?”
Ricardo made no answer, and after another turn or two slipped out of the
room. He no longer felt comfortable alone with the governor.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Meantime Heyst and Lena, walking rather fast, approached Wang's hut.
Asking the girl to wait, Heyst ascended the little ladder of bamboos
giving access to the door. It was as he had expected. The smoky interior
was empty, except for a big chest of sandalwood too heavy for hurried
removal. Its lid was thrown up, but whatever it might have contained was
no longer there. All Wang's possessions were gone. Without tarrying in
the hut, Heyst came back to the girl, who asked no questions, with her
strange air of knowing or understanding everything.
“Let us push on,” he said.
He went ahead, the rustle of her white skirt following him into the
shades of the forest, along the path of their usual walk. Though the air
lay heavy between straight denuded trunks, the sunlit patches moved on
the ground, and raising her eyes Lena saw far above her head the
flutter of the leaves, the surface shudder on the mighty limbs extended
horizontally in the perfect immobility of patience. Twice Heyst looked
over his shoulder at her. Behind the readiness of her answering smile
there was a fund of devoted, concentrated passion, burning with the hope
of a more perfect satisfaction. They passed the spot where it was their
practice to turn towards the barren summit of the central hill. Heyst
held steadily on his way towards the upper limit of the forest. The
moment they left its shelter, a breeze enveloped them, and a great
cloud, racing over the sun, threw a peculiar sombre tint over
everything. Heyst pointed up a precipitous, rugged path clinging to the
side of the hill. It ended in a barricade of felled trees, a primitively
conceived obstacle which must have cost much labour to erect at just
that spot.
“This,” Heyst, explained in his urbane tone, “is a barrier against the
march of civilization. The poor folk over there did not like it, as it
appeared to them in the shape of my company--a great step forward, as
some people used to call it with mistaken confidence. The advanced foot
has been drawn back, but the barricade remains.”
They went on climbing slowly. The cloud had driven over, leaving an
added brightness on the face of the world.
“It's a very ridiculous thing,” Heyst went on; “but then it is the
product of honest fear--fear of the unknown, of the incomprehensible.
It's pathetic, too, in a way. And I heartily wish, Lena, that we were on
the other side of it.”
“Oh, stop, stop!” she cried, seizing his arm.
The face of the barricade they were approaching had been piled up with a
lot of fresh-cut branches. The leaves were still green. A gentle breeze,
sweeping over the top, stirred them a little; but what had startled the
girl was the discovery of several spear-blades protruding from the mass
of foliage. She had made them out suddenly. They did not gleam, but she
saw them with extreme distinctness, very still, very vicious to look at.
“You had better let me go forward alone, Lena,” said Heyst.
She tugged, persistently at his arm, but after a time, during which
he never ceased to look smilingly into her terrified eyes, he ended by
disengaging himself.
“It's a sign rather than a demonstration,” he argued, persuasively.
“Just wait here a moment. I promise not to approach near enough to be
stabbed.”
As in a nightmare she watched Heyst go up the few yards of the path as
if he never meant to stop; and she heard his voice, like voices heard
in dreams, shouting unknown words in an unearthly tone. Heyst was only
demanding to see Wang. He was not kept waiting very long. Recovering
from the first flurry of her fright, Lena noticed a commotion in the
green top-dressing of the barricade. She exhaled a sigh of relief when
the spear-blades retreated out of sight, sliding inward--the horrible
things! in a spot facing Heyst a pair of yellow hands parted the leaves,
and a face filled the small opening--a face with very noticeable eyes.
It was Wang's face, of course, with no suggestion of a body belonging to
it, like those cardboard faces at which she remembered gazing as a child
in the window of a certain dim shop kept by a mysterious little man in
Kingsland Road. Only this face, instead of mere holes, had eyes which
blinked. She could see the beating of the eyelids. The hands on each
side of the face, keeping the boughs apart, also did not look as if they
belonged to any real body. One of them was holding a revolver--a weapon
which she recognized merely by intuition, never having seen such an
object before.
She leaned her shoulders against the rock of the perpendicular hillside
and kept her eyes on Heyst, with comparative composure, since the spears
were not menacing him any longer. Beyond the rigid and motionless back
he presented to her, she saw Wang's unreal cardboard face moving its
thin lips and grimacing artificially. She was too far down the path to
hear the dialogue, carried on in an ordinary voice. She waited patiently
for its end. Her shoulders felt the warmth of the rock; now and then a
whiff of cooler air seemed to slip down upon her head from above; the
ravine at her feet, choked full of vegetation, emitted the faint, drowsy
hum of insect life. Everything was very quiet. She failed to notice
the exact moment when Wang's head vanished from the foliage, taking the
unreal hands away with it. To her horror, the spear-blades came gliding
slowly out. The very hair on her head stirred; but before she had
time to cry out, Heyst, who seemed rooted to the ground, turned round
abruptly and began to move towards her. His great moustaches did not
quite hide an ugly but irresolute smile; and when he had come down near
enough to touch her, he burst out into a harsh laugh:
“Ha, ha, ha!”
She looked at him, uncomprehending. He cut short his laugh and said
curtly:
“We had better go down as we came.”
She followed him into the forest. The advance of the afternoon had
filled it with gloom. Far away a slant of light between the trees closed
the view. All was dark beyond. Heyst stopped.
“No reason to hurry, Lena,” he said in his ordinary, serenely polite
tones. “We return unsuccessful. I suppose you know, or at least can
guess, what was my object in coming up there?”
“No, I can't guess, dear,” she said, and smiled, noticing with
emotion that his breast was heaving as if he had been out of breath.
Nevertheless, he tried to command his speech, pausing only a little
between the words.
“No? I went up to find Wang. I went up”--he gasped again here, but this
was for the last time--“I made you come with me because I didn't like
to leave you unprotected in the proximity of those fellows.” Suddenly he
snatched his cork helmet off his head and dashed it on the ground. “No!”
he cried roughly. “All this is too unreal altogether. It isn't to be
borne! I can't protect you! I haven't the power.”
He glared at her for a moment, then hastened after his hat which had
bounded away to some distance. He came back looking at her face, which
was very white.
“I ought to beg your pardon for these antics,” he said, adjusting his
hat. “A movement of childish petulance! Indeed, I feel very much like a
child in my ignorance, in my powerlessness, in my want of resource, in
everything except in the dreadful consciousness of some evil hanging
over your head--yours!”
“It's you they are after,” she murmured.
“No doubt, but unfortunately--”
“Unfortunately--what?”
“Unfortunately, I have not succeeded with Wang,” he said. “I failed to
move his Celestial, heart--that is, if there is such a thing. He told me
with horrible Chinese reasonableness that he could not let us pass the
barrier, because we should be pursued. He doesn't like fights. He gave
me to understand that he would shoot me with my own revolver without
any sort of compunction, rather than risk a rude and distasteful
contest with the strange barbarians for my sake. He has preached to the
villagers. They respect him. He is the most remarkable man they have
ever seen, and their kinsman by marriage. They understand his policy.
And anyway only women and children and a few old fellows are left in the
village. This is the season when the men are away in trading vessels.
But it would have been all the same. None of them have a taste for
fighting--and with white men too! They are peaceable, kindly folk and
would have seen me shot with extreme satisfaction. Wang seemed to think
my insistence--for I insisted, you know--very stupid and tactless. But a
drowning man clutches at straws. We were talking in such Malay as we are
both equal to.
“'Your fears are foolish,' I said to him.
“'Foolish? of course I am foolish,' he replied. 'If I were a wise man,
I would be a merchant with a big hong in Singapore, instead of being a
mine coolie turned houseboy. But if you don't go away in time, I will
shoot you before it grows too dark to take aim. Not till then, Number
One, but I will do it then. Now--finish!'
“'All right,' I said. 'Finish as far as I am concerned; but you can have
no objections to the mem putih coming over to stay with the Orang Kaya's
women for a few days. I will make a present in silver for it.' Orang
Kaya, is the head man of the village, Lena,” added Heyst.
She looked at him in astonishment.
“You wanted me to go to that village of savages?” she gasped. “You
wanted me to leave you?”
“It would have given me a freer hand.”
Heyst stretched out his hands and looked at them for a moment, then let
them fall by his side. Indignation was expressed more in the curve of
her lips than in her clear eyes, which never wavered.
“I believe Wang laughed,” he went on. “He made a noise like a
turkey-cock.”
“'That would be worse than anything,' he told me.
“I was taken aback. I pointed out to him that he was talking nonsense.
It could not make any difference to his security where you were, because
the evil men, as he calls them, did not know of your existence. I did
not lie exactly, Lena, though I did stretch the truth till it cracked;
but the fellow seems to have an uncanny insight. He shook his head. He
assured me they knew all about you. He made a horrible grimace at me.”
“It doesn't matter,” said the girl. “I didn't want--I would not have
gone.”
Heyst raised his eyes.
“Wonderful intuition! As I continued to press him, Wang made that
very remark about you. When he smiles, his face looks like a conceited
death's head. It was his very last remark that you wouldn't want to. I
went away then.”
She leaned back against a tree. Heyst faced her in the same attitude of
leisure, as if they had done with time and all the other concerns of the
earth. Suddenly, high above their heads the roof of leaves whispered at
them tumultuously and then ceased.
“That was a strange notion of yours, to send me away,” she said. “Send
me away? What for? Yes, what for?”
“You seem indignant,” he remarked listlessly.
“To these savages, too!” she pursued. “And you think I would have gone?
You can do what you like with me--but not that, not that!”
Heyst looked into the dim aisles of the forest. Everything was so still
now that the very ground on which they stood seemed to exhale silence
into the shade.
“Why be indignant?” he remonstrated. “It has not happened. I gave up
pleading with Wang. Here we are, repulsed! Not only without power to
resist the evil, but unable to make terms for ourselves with the worthy
envoys, the envoys extraordinary of the world we thought we had done
with for years and years. And that's bad, Lena, very bad.”
“It's funny,” she said thoughtfully. “Bad? I suppose it is. I don't know
that it is. But do you? Do you? You talk as if you didn't believe in
it.”
She gazed at him earnestly.
“Do I? Ah! That's it. I don't know how to talk. I have managed to refine
everything away. I've said to the Earth that bore me: 'I am I and you
are a shadow.' And, by Jove, it is so! But it appears that such words
cannot be uttered with impunity. Here I am on a Shadow inhabited
by Shades. How helpless a man is against the Shades! How is one to
intimidate, persuade, resist, assert oneself against them? I have lost
all belief in realities . . . Lena, give me your hand.”
She looked at him surprised, uncomprehending.
“Your hand,” he cried.
She obeyed; he seized it with avidity as if eager to raise it to his
lips, but halfway up released his grasp. They looked at each other for a
time.
“What's the matter, dear?” she whispered timidly.
“Neither force nor conviction,” Heyst muttered wearily to himself. “How
am I to meet this charmingly simple problem?”
“I am sorry,” she murmured.
“And so am I,” he confessed quickly. “And the bitterest of this
humiliation is its complete uselessness--which I feel, I feel!”
She had never before seen him give such signs of feeling. Across his
ghastly face the long moustaches flamed in the shade. He spoke suddenly:
“I wonder if I could find enough courage to creep among them in the
night, with a knife, and cut their throats one after another, as they
slept! I wonder--”
She was frightened by his unwonted appearance more than by the words in
his mouth, and said earnestly:
“Don't you try to do such a thing! Don't you think of it!”
“I don't possess anything bigger than a penknife. As to thinking of it,
Lena, there's no saying what one may think of. I don't think. Something
in me thinks--something foreign to my nature. What is the matter?”
He noticed her parted lips, and the peculiar stare in her eyes, which
had wandered from his face.
“There's somebody after us. I saw something white moving,” she cried.
Heyst did not turn his head; he only glanced at her out-stretched arm.
“No doubt we are followed; we are watched.”
“I don't see anything now,” she said.
“And it does not matter,” Heyst went on in his ordinary voice. “Here we
are in the forest. I have neither strength nor persuasion. Indeed, it's
extremely difficult to be eloquent before a Chinaman's head stuck at
one out of a lot of brushwood. But can we wander among these big trees
indefinitely? Is this a refuge? No! What else is left to us? I did think
for a moment of the mine; but even there we could not remain very long.
And then that gallery is not safe. The props were too weak to begin
with. Ants have been at work there--ants after the men. A death-trap, at
best. One can die but once, but there are many manners of death.”
The girl glanced about fearfully, in search of the watcher or follower
whom she had glimpsed once among the trees; but if he existed, he had
concealed himself. Nothing met her eyes but the deepening shadows of the
short vistas between the living columns of the still roof of leaves.
She looked at the man beside her expectantly, tenderly, with suppressed
affright and a sort of awed wonder.