IN respect of the next seven weeks, all that is necessary to say is,
first, that old Nelson (or Nielsen) failed in paying his politic call.
The _Neptun_ gunboat of H.M. the King of the Netherlands, commanded by an
outraged and infuriated lieutenant, left the cove at an unexpectedly
early hour. When Freya’s father came down to the shore, after seeing his
precious crop of tobacco spread out properly in the sun, she was already
steaming round the point. Old Nelson regretted the circumstance for many
days.
“Now, I don’t know in what disposition the man went away,” he lamented to
his hard daughter. He was amazed at her hardness. He was almost
frightened by her indifference.
Next, it must be recorded that the same day the gunboat _Neptun_,
steering east, passed the brig _Bonito_ becalmed in sight of Carimata,
with her head to the eastward, too. Her captain, Jasper Allen, giving
himself up consciously to a tender, possessive reverie of his Freya, did
not get out of his long chair on the poop to look at the _Neptun_ which
passed so close that the smoke belching out suddenly from her short black
funnel rolled between the masts of the Bonito, obscuring for a moment the
sunlit whiteness of her sails, consecrated to the service of love.
Jasper did not even turn his head for a glance. But Heemskirk, on the
bridge, had gazed long and earnestly at the brig from the distance,
gripping hard the brass rail in front of him, till, the two ships
closing, he lost all confidence in himself, and retreating to the
chartroom, pulled the door to with a crash. There, his brows knitted,
his mouth drawn on one side in sardonic meditation, he sat through many
still hours—a sort of Prometheus in the bonds of unholy desire, having
his very vitals torn by the beak and claws of humiliated passion.
That species of fowl is not to be shooed off as easily as a chicken.
Fooled, cheated, deceived, led on, outraged, mocked at—beak and claws! A
sinister bird! The lieutenant had no mind to become the talk of the
Archipelago, as the naval officer who had had his face slapped by a girl.
Was it possible that she really loved that rascally trader? He tried not
to think, but, worse than thoughts, definite impressions beset him in his
retreat. He saw her—a vision plain, close to, detailed, plastic,
coloured, lighted up—he saw her hanging round the neck of that fellow.
And he shut his eyes, only to discover that this was no remedy. Then a
piano began to play near by, very plainly; and he put his fingers to his
ears with no better effect. It was not to be borne—not in solitude. He
bolted out of the chartroom, and talked of indifferent things somewhat
wildly with the officer of the watch on the bridge, to the mocking
accompaniment of a ghostly piano.
The last thing to be recorded is that Lieutenant Heemskirk instead of
pursuing his course towards Ternate, where he was expected, went out of
his way to call at Makassar, where no one was looking for his arrival.
Once there, he gave certain explanations and laid a certain proposal
before the governor, or some other authority, and obtained permission to
do what he thought fit in these matters. Thereupon the _Neptun_, giving
up Ternate altogether, steamed north in view of the mountainous coast of
Celebes, and then crossing the broad straits took up her station on the
low coast of virgin forests, inviolate and mute, in waters phosphorescent
at night; deep blue in daytime with gleaming green patches over the
submerged reefs. For days the _Neptun_ could be seen moving smoothly up
and down the sombre face of the shore, or hanging about with a watchful
air near the silvery breaks of broad estuaries, under the great luminous
sky never softened, never veiled, and flooding the earth with the
everlasting sunshine of the tropics—that sunshine which, in its unbroken
splendour, oppresses the soul with an inexpressible melancholy more
intimate, more penetrating, more profound than the grey sadness of the
northern mists.
. . . . .
The trading brig _Bonito_ appeared gliding round a sombre forest-clad
point of land on the silvery estuary of a great river. The breath of air
that gave her motion would not have fluttered the flame of a torch. She
stole out into the open from behind a veil of unstirring leaves,
mysteriously silent, ghostly white, and solemnly stealthy in her
imperceptible progress; and Jasper, his elbow in the main rigging, and
his head leaning against his hand, thought of Freya. Everything in the
world reminded him of her. The beauty of the loved woman exists in the
beauties of Nature. The swelling outlines of the hills, the curves of a
coast, the free sinuosities of a river are less suave than the harmonious
lines of her body, and when she moves, gliding lightly, the grace of her
progress suggests the power of occult forces which rule the fascinating
aspects of the visible world.
Dependent on things as all men are, Jasper loved his vessel—the house of
his dreams. He lent to her something of Freya’s soul. Her deck was the
foothold of their love. The possession of his brig appeased his passion
in a soothing certitude of happiness already conquered.
The full moon was some way up, perfect and serene, floating in air as
calm and limpid as the glance of Freya’s eyes. There was not a sound in
the brig.
“Here she shall stand, by my side, on evenings like this,” he thought,
with rapture.
And it was at that moment, in this peace, in this serenity, under the
full, benign gaze of the moon propitious to lovers, on a sea without a
wrinkle, under a sky without a cloud, as if all Nature had assumed its
most clement mood in a spirit of mockery, that the gunboat _Neptun_,
detaching herself from the dark coast under which she had been lying
invisible, steamed out to intercept the trading brig _Bonito_ standing
out to sea.
Directly the gunboat had been made out emerging from her ambush, Schultz,
of the fascinating voice, had given signs of strange agitation. All that
day, ever since leaving the Malay town up the river, he had shown a
haggard face, going about his duties like a man with something weighing
on his mind. Jasper had noticed it, but the mate, turning away, as
though he had not liked being looked at, had muttered shamefacedly of a
headache and a touch of fever. He must have had it very badly when,
dodging behind his captain he wondered aloud: “What can that fellow want
with us?” . . . A naked man standing in a freezing blast and trying not
to shiver could not have spoken with a more harshly uncertain intonation.
But it might have been fever—a cold fit.
“He wants to make himself disagreeable, simply,” said Jasper, with
perfect good humour. “He has tried it on me before. However, we shall
soon see.”
And, indeed, before long the two vessels lay abreast within easy hail.
The brig, with her fine lines and her white sails, looked vaporous and
sylph-like in the moonlight. The gunboat, short, squat, with her stumpy
dark spars naked like dead trees, raised against the luminous sky of that
resplendent night, threw a heavy shadow on the lane of water between the
two ships.
Freya haunted them both like an ubiquitous spirit, and as if she were the
only woman in the world. Jasper remembered her earnest recommendation to
be guarded and cautious in all his acts and words while he was away from
her. In this quite unforeseen encounter he felt on his ear the very
breath of these hurried admonitions customary to the last moment of their
partings, heard the half-jesting final whisper of the “Mind, kid, I’d
never forgive you!” with a quick pressure on his arm, which he answered
by a quiet, confident smile. Heemskirk was haunted in another fashion.
There were no whispers in it; it was more like visions. He saw that girl
hanging round the neck of a low vagabond—that vagabond, the vagabond who
had just answered his hail. He saw her stealing bare-footed across a
verandah with great, clear, wide-open, eager eyes to look at a brig—that
brig. If she had shrieked, scolded, called names! . . . But she had
simply triumphed over him. That was all. Led on (he firmly believed
it), fooled, deceived, outraged, struck, mocked at. . . . Beak and claws!
The two men, so differently haunted by Freya of the Seven Isles, were not
equally matched.
In the intense stillness, as of sleep, which had fallen upon the two
vessels, in a world that itself seemed but a delicate dream, a boat
pulled by Javanese sailors crossing the dark lane of water came alongside
the brig. The white warrant officer in her, perhaps the gunner, climbed
aboard. He was a short man, with a rotund stomach and a wheezy voice.
His immovable fat face looked lifeless in the moonlight, and he walked
with his thick arms hanging away from his body as though he had been
stuffed. His cunning little eyes glittered like bits of mica. He
conveyed to Jasper, in broken English, a request to come on board the
_Neptun_.
Jasper had not expected anything so unusual. But after a short
reflection he decided to show neither annoyance, nor even surprise. The
river from which he had come had been politically disturbed for a couple
of years, and he was aware that his visits there were looked upon with
some suspicion. But he did not mind much the displeasure of the
authorities, so terrifying to old Nelson. He prepared to leave the brig,
and Schultz followed him to the rail as if to say something, but in the
end stood by in silence. Jasper getting over the side, noticed his
ghastly face. The eyes of the man who had found salvation in the brig
from the effects of his peculiar psychology looked at him with a dumb,
beseeching expression.
“What’s the matter?” Jasper asked.
“I wonder how this will end?” said he of the beautiful voice, which had
even fascinated the steady Freya herself. But where was its charming
timbre now? These words had sounded like a raven’s croak.
“You are ill,” said Jasper positively.
“I wish I were dead!” was the startling statement uttered by Schultz
talking to himself in the extremity of some mysterious trouble. Jasper
gave him a keen glance, but this was not the time to investigate the
morbid outbreak of a feverish man. He did not look as though he were
actually delirious, and that for the moment must suffice. Schultz made a
dart forward.
“That fellow means harm!” he said desperately. “He means harm to you,
Captain Allen. I feel it, and I—”
He choked with inexplicable emotion.
“All right, Schultz. I won’t give him an opening.” Jasper cut him short
and swung himself into the boat.
On board the _Neptun_ Heemskirk, standing straddle-legs in the flood of
moonlight, his inky shadow falling right across the quarter-deck, made no
sign at his approach, but secretly he felt something like the heave of
the sea in his chest at the sight of that man. Jasper waited before him
in silence.
Brought face to face in direct personal contact, they fell at once into
the manner of their casual meetings in old Nelson’s bungalow. They
ignored each other’s existence—Heemskirk moodily; Jasper, with a
perfectly colourless quietness.
“What’s going on in that river you’ve just come out of?” asked the
lieutenant straight away.
“I know nothing of the troubles, if you mean that,” Jasper answered.
“I’ve landed there half a cargo of rice, for which I got nothing in
exchange, and went away. There’s no trade there now, but they would have
been starving in another week—if I hadn’t turned up.”
“Meddling! English meddling! And suppose the rascals don’t deserve
anything better than to starve, eh?”
“There are women and children there, you know,” observed Jasper, in his
even tone.
“Oh, yes! When an Englishman talks of women and children, you may be
sure there’s something fishy about the business. Your doings will have
to be investigated.”
They spoke in turn, as though they had been disembodied spirits—mere
voices in empty air; for they looked at each other as if there had been
nothing there, or, at most, with as much recognition as one gives to an
inanimate object, and no more. But now a silence fell. Heemskirk had
thought, all at once: “She will tell him all about it. She will tell him
while she hangs round his neck laughing.” And the sudden desire to
annihilate Jasper on the spot almost deprived him of his senses by its
vehemence. He lost the power of speech, of vision. For a moment he
absolutely couldn’t see Jasper. But he heard him inquiring, as of the
world at large:
“Am I, then, to conclude that the brig is detained?”
Heemskirk made a recovery in a flush of malignant satisfaction.
“She is. I am going to take her to Makassar in tow.”
“The courts will have to decide on the legality of this,” said Jasper,
aware that the matter was becoming serious, but with assumed
indifference.
“Oh, yes, the courts! Certainly. And as to you, I shall keep you on
board here.”
Jasper’s dismay at being parted from his ship was betrayed by a stony
immobility. It lasted but an instant. Then he turned away and hailed
the brig. Mr. Schultz answered:
“Yes, sir.”
“Get ready to receive a tow-rope from the gunboat! We are going to be
taken to Makassar.”
“Good God! What’s that for, sir?” came an anxious cry faintly.
“Kindness, I suppose,” Jasper, ironical, shouted with great deliberation.
“We might have been—becalmed in here—for days. And hospitality. I am
invited to stay—on board here.”
The answer to this information was a loud ejaculation of distress.
Jasper thought anxiously: “Why, the fellow’s nerve’s gone to pieces;” and
with an awkward uneasiness of a new sort, looked intently at the brig.
The thought that he was parted from her—for the first time since they
came together—shook the apparently careless fortitude of his character to
its very foundations, which were deep. All that time neither Heemskirk
nor even his inky shadow had stirred in the least.
“I am going to send a boat’s crew and an officer on board your vessel,”
he announced to no one in particular. Jasper, tearing himself away from
the absorbed contemplation of the brig, turned round, and, without
passion, almost without expression in his voice, entered his protest
against the whole of the proceedings. What he was thinking of was the
delay. He counted the days. Makassar was actually on his way; and to be
towed there really saved time. On the other hand, there would be some
vexing formalities to go through. But the thing was too absurd. “The
beetle’s gone mad,” he thought. “I’ll be released at once. And if not,
Mesman must enter into a bond for me.” Mesman was a Dutch merchant with
whom Jasper had had many dealings, a considerable person in Makassar.
“You protest? H’m!” Heemskirk muttered, and for a little longer remained
motionless, his legs planted well apart, and his head lowered as though
he were studying his own comical, deeply-split shadow. Then he made a
sign to the rotund gunner, who had kept at hand, motionless, like a
vilely-stuffed specimen of a fat man, with a lifeless face and glittering
little eyes. The fellow approached, and stood at attention.
“You will board the brig with a boat’s crew!”
“Ya, mynherr!”
“You will have one of your men to steer her all the time,” went on
Heemskirk, giving his orders in English, apparently for Jasper’s
edification. “You hear?”
“Ya, mynherr.”
“You will remain on deck and in charge all the time.”
“Ya, mynherr.”
Jasper felt as if, together with the command of the brig, his very heart
were being taken out of his breast. Heemskirk asked, with a change of
tone:
“What weapons have you on board?”
At one time all the ships trading in the China Seas had a licence to
carry a certain quantity of firearms for purposes of defence. Jasper
answered:
“Eighteen rifles with their bayonets, which were on board when I bought
her, four years ago. They have been declared.”
“Where are they kept?”
“Fore-cabin. Mate has the key.”
“You will take possession of them,” said Heemskirk to the gunner.
“Ya, mynherr.”
“What is this for? What do you mean to imply?” cried out Jasper; then
bit his lip. “It’s monstrous!” he muttered.
Heemskirk raised for a moment a heavy, as if suffering, glance.
“You may go,” he said to his gunner. The fat man saluted, and departed.
During the next thirty hours the steady towing was interrupted once. At
a signal from the brig, made by waving a flag on the forecastle, the
gunboat was stopped. The badly-stuffed specimen of a warrant-officer,
getting into his boat, arrived on board the _Neptun_ and hurried straight
into his commander’s cabin, his excitement at something he had to
communicate being betrayed by the blinking of his small eyes. These two
were closeted together for some time, while Jasper at the taffrail tried
to make out if anything out of the common had occurred on board the brig.
But nothing seemed to be amiss on board. However, he kept a look-out for
the gunner; and, though he had avoided speaking to anybody since he had
finished with Heemskirk, he stopped that man when he came out on deck
again to ask how his mate was.
“He was feeling not very well when I left,” he explained.
The fat warrant-officer, holding himself as though the effort of carrying
his big stomach in front of him demanded a rigid carriage, understood
with difficulty. Not a single one of his features showed the slightest
animation, but his little eyes blinked rapidly at last.
“Oh, ya! The mate. Ya, ya! He is very well. But, mein Gott, he is one
very funny man!”
Jasper could get no explanation of that remark, because the Dutchman got
into the boat hurriedly, and went back on board the brig. But he
consoled himself with the thought that very soon all this unpleasant and
rather absurd experience would be over. The roadstead of Makassar was in
sight already. Heemskirk passed by him going on the bridge. For the
first time the lieutenant looked at Jasper with marked intention; and the
strange roll of his eyes was so funny—it had been long agreed by Jasper
and Freya that the lieutenant was funny—so ecstatically gratified, as
though he were rolling a tasty morsel on his tongue, that Jasper could
not help a broad smile. And then he turned to his brig again.
To see her, his cherished possession, animated by something of his
Freya’s soul, the only foothold of two lives on the wide earth, the
security of his passion, the companion of adventure, the power to snatch
the calm, adorable Freya to his breast, and carry her off to the end of
the world; to see this beautiful thing embodying worthily his pride and
his love, to see her captive at the end of a tow-rope was not indeed a
pleasant experience. It had something nightmarish in it, as, for
instance, the dream of a wild sea-bird loaded with chains.
Yet what else could he want to look at? Her beauty would sometimes come
to his heart with the force of a spell, so that he would forget where he
was. And, besides, that sense of superiority which the certitude of
being loved gives to a young man, that illusion of being set above the
Fates by a tender look in a woman’s eyes, helped him, the first shock
over, to go through these experiences with an amused self-confidence.
For what evil could touch the elect of Freya?
It was now afternoon, the sun being behind the two vessels as they headed
for the harbour. “The beetle’s little joke shall soon be over,” thought
Jasper, without any great animosity. As a seaman well acquainted with
that part of the world, a casual glance was enough to tell him what was
being done. “Hallo,” he thought, “he is going through Spermonde Passage.
We shall be rounding Tamissa reef presently.” And again he returned to
the contemplation of his brig, that main-stay of his material and
emotional existence which would be soon in his hands again. On a sea,
calm like a millpond, a heavy smooth ripple undulated and streamed away
from her bows, for the powerful _Neptun_ was towing at great speed, as if
for a wager. The Dutch gunner appeared on the forecastle of the
_Bonito_, and with him a couple of men. They stood looking at the coast,
and Jasper lost himself in a loverlike trance.
The deep-toned blast of the gunboat’s steam-whistle made him shudder by
its unexpectedness. Slowly he looked about. Swift as lightning he
leaped from where he stood, bounding forward along the deck.
“You will be on Tamissa reef!” he yelled.
High up on the bridge Heemskirk looked back over his shoulder heavily;
two seamen were spinning the wheel round, and the _Neptun_ was already
swinging rapidly away from the edge of the pale water over the danger.
Ha! just in time. Jasper turned about instantly to watch his brig; and,
even before he realised that—in obedience, it appears, to Heemskirk’s
orders given beforehand to the gunner—the tow-rope had been let go at the
blast of the whistle, before he had time to cry out or to move a limb, he
saw her cast adrift and shooting across the gunboat’s stern with the
impetus of her speed. He followed her fine, gliding form with eyes
growing big with incredulity, wild with horror. The cries on board of
her came to him only as a dreadful and confused murmur through the loud
thumping of blood in his ears, while she held on. She ran upright in a
terrible display of her gift of speed, with an incomparable air of life
and grace. She ran on till the smooth level of water in front of her
bows seemed to sink down suddenly as if sucked away; and, with a strange,
violent tremor of her mast-heads she stopped, inclined her lofty spars a
little, and lay still. She lay still on the reef, while the _Neptun_,
fetching a wide circle, continued at full speed up Spermonde Passage,
heading for the town. She lay still, perfectly still, with something
ill-omened and unnatural in her attitude. In an instant the subtle
melancholy of things touched by decay had fallen on her in the sunshine;
she was but a speck in the brilliant emptiness of space, already lonely,
already desolate.
“Hold him!” yelled a voice from the bridge.
Jasper had started to run to his brig with a headlong impulse, as a man
dashes forward to pull away with his hands a living, breathing, loved
creature from the brink of destruction. “Hold him! Stick to him!”
vociferated the lieutenant at the top of the bridge-ladder, while Jasper
struggled madly without a word, only his head emerging from the heaving
crowd of the _Neptun’s_ seamen, who had flung themselves upon him
obediently. “Hold—I would not have that fellow drown himself for
anything now!”
Jasper ceased struggling.
One by one they let go of him; they fell back gradually farther and
farther, in attentive silence, leaving him standing unsupported in a
widened, clear space, as if to give him plenty of room to fall after the
struggle. He did not even sway perceptibly. Half an hour later, when
the _Neptun_ anchored in front of the town, he had not stirred yet, had
moved neither head nor limb as much as a hair’s breadth. Directly the
rumble of the gunboat’s cable had ceased, Heemskirk came down heavily
from the bridge.
“Call a sampan” he said, in a gloomy tone, as he passed the sentry at the
gangway, and then moved on slowly towards the spot where Jasper, the
object of many awed glances, stood looking at the deck, as if lost in a
brown study. Heemskirk came up close, and stared at him thoughtfully,
with his fingers over his lips. Here he was, the favoured vagabond, the
only man to whom that infernal girl was likely to tell the story. But he
would not find it funny. The story how Lieutenant Heemskirk—No, he would
not laugh at it. He looked as though he would never laugh at anything in
his life.
Suddenly Jasper looked up. His eyes, without any other expression but
bewilderment, met those of Heemskirk, observant and sombre.
“Gone on the reef!” he said, in a low, astounded tone. “On-the-reef!” he
repeated still lower, and as if attending inwardly to the birth of some
awful and amazing sensation.
“On the very top of high-water, spring tides,” Heemskirk struck in, with
a vindictive, exulting violence which flashed and expired. He paused, as
if weary, fixing upon Jasper his arrogant eyes, over which secret
disenchantment, the unavoidable shadow of all passion, seemed to pass
like a saddening cloud. “On the very top,” he repeated, rousing himself
in fierce reaction to snatch his laced cap off his head with a
horizontal, derisive flourish towards the gangway. “And now you may go
ashore to the courts, you damned Englishman!” he said.