FOR, pray, who was Heemskirk? You shall see at once how unreasonable
this dread of Heemskirk. . . . Certainly, his nature was malevolent
enough. That was obvious, directly you heard him laugh. Nothing gives
away more a man’s secret disposition than the unguarded ring of his
laugh. But, bless my soul! if we were to start at every evil guffaw like
a hare at every sound, we shouldn’t be fit for anything but the solitude
of a desert, or the seclusion of a hermitage. And even there we should
have to put up with the unavoidable company of the devil.
However, the devil is a considerable personage, who has known better days
and has moved high up in the hierarchy of Celestial Host; but in the
hierarchy of mere earthly Dutchmen, Heemskirk, whose early days could not
have been very splendid, was merely a naval officer forty years of age,
of no particular connections or ability to boast of. He was commanding
the _Neptun_, a little gunboat employed on dreary patrol duty up and down
the Archipelago, to look after the traders. Not a very exalted position
truly. I tell you, just a common middle-aged lieutenant of some
twenty-five years’ service and sure to be retired before long—that’s all.
He never bothered his head very much as to what was going on in the Seven
Isles group till he learned from some talk in Mintok or Palembang, I
suppose, that there was a pretty girl living there. Curiosity, I
presume, caused him to go poking around that way, and then, after he had
once seen Freya, he made a practice of calling at the group whenever he
found himself within half a day’s steaming from it.
I don’t mean to say that Heemskirk was a typical Dutch naval officer. I
have seen enough of them not to fall into that absurd mistake. He had a
big, clean-shaven face; great flat, brown cheeks, with a thin, hooked
nose and a small, pursy mouth squeezed in between. There were a few
silver threads in his black hair, and his unpleasant eyes were nearly
black, too. He had a surly way of casting side glances without moving
his head, which was set low on a short, round neck. A thick, round trunk
in a dark undress jacket with gold shoulder-straps, was sustained by a
straddly pair of thick, round legs, in white drill trousers. His round
skull under a white cap looked as if it were immensely thick too, but
there were brains enough in it to discover and take advantage maliciously
of poor old Nelson’s nervousness before everything that was invested with
the merest shred of authority.
Heemskirk would land on the point and perambulate silently every part of
the plantation as if the whole place belonged to him, before he went to
the house. On the verandah he would take the best chair, and would stay
for tiffin or dinner, just simply stay on, without taking the trouble to
invite himself by so much as a word.
He ought to have been kicked, if only for his manner to Miss Freya. Had
he been a naked savage, armed with spears and poisoned arrows, old Nelson
(or Nielsen) would have gone for him with his bare fists. But these gold
shoulder-straps—Dutch shoulder-straps at that—were enough to terrify the
old fellow; so he let the beggar treat him with heavy contempt, devour
his daughter with his eyes, and drink the best part of his little stock
of wine.
I saw something of this, and on one occasion I tried to pass a remark on
the subject. It was pitiable to see the trouble in old Nelson’s round
eyes. At first he cried out that the lieutenant was a good friend of
his; a very good fellow. I went on staring at him pretty hard, so that
at last he faltered, and had to own that, of course, Heemskirk was not a
very genial person outwardly, but all the same at bottom. . . .
“I haven’t yet met a genial Dutchman out here,” I interrupted.
“Geniality, after all, is not of much consequence, but don’t you see—”
Nelson looked suddenly so frightened at what I was going to say that I
hadn’t the heart to go on. Of course, I was going to tell him that the
fellow was after his girl. That just describes it exactly. What
Heemskirk might have expected or what he thought he could do, I don’t
know. For all I can tell, he might have imagined himself irresistible,
or have taken Freya for what she was not, on account of her lively,
assured, unconstrained manner. But there it is. He was after that girl.
Nelson could see it well enough. Only he preferred to ignore it. He did
not want to be told of it.
“All I want is to live in peace and quietness with the Dutch
authorities,” he mumbled shamefacedly.
He was incurable. I was sorry for him, and I really think Miss Freya was
sorry for her father, too. She restrained herself for his sake, and as
everything she did she did it simply, unaffectedly, and even good
humouredly. No small effort that, because in Heemskirk’s attentions
there was an insolent touch of scorn, hard to put up with. Dutchmen of
that sort are over-bearing to their inferiors, and that officer of the
king looked upon old Nelson and Freya as quite beneath him in every way.
I can’t say I felt sorry for Freya. She was not the sort of girl to take
anything tragically. One could feel for her and sympathise with her
difficulty, but she seemed equal to any situation. It was rather
admiration she extorted by her competent serenity. It was only when
Jasper and Heemskirk were together at the bungalow, as it happened now
and then, that she felt the strain, and even then it was not for
everybody to see. My eyes alone could detect a faint shadow on the
radiance of her personality. Once I could not help saying to her
appreciatively:
“Upon my word you are wonderful.”
She let it pass with a faint smile.
“The great thing is to prevent Jasper becoming unreasonable,” she said;
and I could see real concern lurking in the quiet depths of her frank
eyes gazing straight at me. “You will help to keep him quiet, won’t
you?”
“Of course, we must keep him quiet,” I declared, understanding very well
the nature of her anxiety. “He’s such a lunatic, too, when he’s roused.”
“He is!” she assented, in a soft tone; for it was our joke to speak of
Jasper abusively. “But I have tamed him a bit. He’s quite a good boy
now.”
“He would squash Heemskirk like a blackbeetle all the same,” I remarked.
“Rather!” she murmured. “And that wouldn’t do,” she added quickly.
“Imagine the state poor papa would get into. Besides, I mean to be
mistress of the dear brig and sail about these seas, not go off wandering
ten thousand miles away from here.”
“The sooner you are on board to look after the man and the brig the
better,” I said seriously. “They need you to steady them both a bit. I
don’t think Jasper will ever get sobered down till he has carried you off
from this island. You don’t see him when he is away from you, as I do.
He’s in a state of perpetual elation which almost frightens me.”
At this she smiled again, and then looked serious. For it could not be
unpleasant to her to be told of her power, and she had some sense of her
responsibility. She slipped away from me suddenly, because Heemskirk,
with old Nelson in attendance at his elbow, was coming up the steps of
the verandah. Directly his head came above the level of the floor his
ill-natured black eyes shot glances here and there.
“Where’s your girl, Nelson?” he asked, in a tone as if every soul in the
world belonged to him. And then to me: “The goddess has flown, eh?”
Nelson’s Cove—as we used to call it—was crowded with shipping that day.
There was first my steamer, then the _Neptun_ gunboat further out, and
the _Bonito_, brig, anchored as usual so close inshore that it looked as
if, with a little skill and judgment, one could shy a hat from the
verandah on to her scrupulously holystoned quarter-deck. Her brasses
flashed like gold, her white body-paint had a sheen like a satin robe.
The rake of her varnished spars and the big yards, squared to a hair,
gave her a sort of martial elegance. She was a beauty. No wonder that
in possession of a craft like that and the promise of a girl like Freya,
Jasper lived in a state of perpetual elation fit, perhaps, for the
seventh heaven, but not exactly safe in a world like ours.
I remarked politely to Heemskirk that, with three guests in the house,
Miss Freya had no doubt domestic matters to attend to. I knew, of
course, that she had gone to meet Jasper at a certain cleared spot on the
banks of the only stream on Nelson’s little island. The commander of the
_Neptun_ gave me a dubious black look, and began to make himself at home,
flinging his thick, cylindrical carcass into a rocking-chair, and
unbuttoning his coat. Old Nelson sat down opposite him in a most
unassuming manner, staring anxiously with his round eyes and fanning
himself with his hat. I tried to make conversation to while the time
away; not an easy task with a morose, enamoured Dutchman constantly
looking from one door to another and answering one’s advances either with
a jeer or a grunt.
However, the evening passed off all right. Luckily, there is a degree of
bliss too intense for elation. Jasper was quiet and concentrated
silently in watching Freya. As we went on board our respective ships I
offered to give his brig a tow out next morning. I did it on purpose to
get him away at the earliest possible moment. So in the first cold light
of the dawn we passed by the gunboat lying black and still without a
sound in her at the mouth of the glassy cove. But with tropical
swiftness the sun had climbed twice its diameter above the horizon before
we had rounded the reef and got abreast of the point. On the biggest
boulder there stood Freya, all in white and, in her helmet, like a
feminine and martial statue with a rosy face, as I could see very well
with my glasses. She fluttered an expressive handkerchief, and Jasper,
running up the main rigging of the white and warlike brig, waved his hat
in response. Shortly afterwards we parted, I to the northward and Jasper
heading east with a light wind on the quarter, for Banjermassin and two
other ports, I believe it was, that trip.
This peaceful occasion was the last on which I saw all these people
assembled together; the charmingly fresh and resolute Freya, the
innocently round-eyed old Nelson, Jasper, keen, long limbed, lean faced,
admirably self-contained, in his manner, because inconceivably happy
under the eyes of his Freya; all three tall, fair, and blue-eyed in
varied shades, and amongst them the swarthy, arrogant, black-haired
Dutchman, shorter nearly by a head, and so much thicker than any of them
that he seemed to be a creature capable of inflating itself, a grotesque
specimen of mankind from some other planet.
The contrast struck me all at once as we stood in the lighted verandah,
after rising from the dinner-table. I was fascinated by it for the rest
of the evening, and I remember the impression of something funny and
ill-omened at the same time in it to this day.