TALES OF UNREST BY JOSEPH CONRAD "Be
it thy course to being giddy minds
With foreign quarrels."-- SHAKESPEARE
TO
ADOLF P. KRIEGER
FOR THE SAKE OF
OLD DAYS
OF THE five stories in
this volume, "The Lagoon," the last in order, is the earliest in
date. It is the first short story I ever wrote and marks, in a manner of
speaking, the end of my first phase, the Malayan phase with its special subject
and its verbal suggestions. Conceived in the same mood which produced
"Almayer's Folly" and "An Outcast of the Islands," it is told
in the same breath (with what was left of it, that is, after the end of
"An Outcast"), seen with the same vision, rendered in the same method
-- if such a thing as method did exist then in my conscious relation to this
new adventure of writing for print. I doubt it very much. One does one's work
first and theorises about it afterwards. It is a very amusing and egotistical
occupation of no use whatever to any one and just as likely as not to lead to
false conclusions.
Anybody can see that
between the last paragraph of "An Outcast" and the first of "The
Lagoon" there has been no change of pen, figuratively speaking. It
happened also to be literally true. It was the same pen: a common steel pen.
Having been charged with a certain lack of emotional faculty I am glad to be
able to say that on one occasion at least I did give way to a sentimental
impulse. I thought the pen had been a good pen and that it had done enough for
me, and so, with the idea of keeping it for a sort of memento on which I could
look later with tender eyes, I put it into my waistcoat pocket. Afterwards it
used to turn up in all sorts of places -- at the bottom of small drawers, among
my studs in cardboard boxes -- till at last it found permanent rest in a large
wooden bowl containing some loose keys, bits of sealing wax, bits of string,
small broken chains, a few buttons, and similar minute wreckage that washes out
of a man's life into such receptacles. I would catch sight of it from time to
time with a distinct feeling of satisfaction till, one day, I perceived with
horror that there were two old pens in there. How the other pen found its way
into the bowl instead of the fire-place or wastepaper basket I can't imagine,
but there the two were, lying side by side, both encrusted with ink and
completely undistinguishable from each other. It was very distressing, but
being determined not to share my sentiment between two pens or run the risk of
sentimentalising over a mere stranger, I threw them both out of the window into
a flower bed -- which strikes me now as a poetical grave for the remnants of
one's past.
But the tale remained.
It was first fixed in print in the Cornhill Magazine, being my first appearance
in a serial of any kind; and I have lived long enough to see it guyed most
agreeably by Mr. Max Beerbohm in a volume of parodies entitled A Christmas
Garland, where I found myself in very good company. I was immensely gratified.
I began to believe in my public existence. I have much to thank "The
Lagoon" for.
My next effort in
short-story writing was a departure -- I mean a departure from the Malay
Archipelago. Without premeditation, without sorrow, without rejoicing, and
almost without noticing it, I stepped into the very different atmosphere of
"An Outpost of Progress." I found there a different moral attitude. I
seemed able to capture new reactions, new suggestions, and even new rhythms for
my paragraphs. For a moment I fancied myself a new man -- a most exciting
illusion. It clung to me for some time, monstrous, half conviction and half
hope as to its body, with an iridescent tail of dreams and with a changeable
head like a plastic mask. It was only later that I perceived that in common
with the rest of men nothing could deliver me from my fatal consistency. We
cannot escape from ourselves.
"An Outpost of
Progress" is the lightest part of the loot I carried off from Central
Africa, the main portion being of course "The Heart of Darkness."
Other men have found a lot of quite different things there and I have the
comfortable conviction that what I took would not have been of much use to
anybody else. And it must be said that it was but a very small amount of
plunder. All of it could go into one's breast pocket when folded neatly. As for
the story itself it is true enough in its essentials. The sustained invention
of a really telling lie demands a talent which I do not possess.
"The Idiots"
is such an obviously derivative piece of work that it is impossible for me to
say anything about it here. The suggestion of it was not mental but visual: the
actual idiots. It was after an interval of long groping amongst vague impulses
and hesitations which ended in the production of "The Nigger" that I
turned to my third short story in the order of time, the first in this volume: "Karain:
A Memory."
Reading it after many
years "Karain" produced on me the effect of something seen through a
pair of glasses from a rather advantageous position. In that story I had not
gone back to the Archipelago, I had only turned for another look at it. I admit
that I was absorbed by the distant view, so absorbed that I didn't notice then
that the motif of the story is almost identical with the motif of "The
Lagoon." However, the idea at the back is very different; but the story is
mainly made memorable to me by the fact that it was my first contribution to
Blackwood's Magazine and that it led to my personal acquaintance with Mr.
William Blackwood whose guarded appreciation I felt nevertheless to be genuine,
and prized accordingly. "Karain" was begun on a sudden impulse only
three days after I wrote the last line of "The Nigger," and the
recollection of its difficulties is mixed up with the worries of the unfinished
"Return," the last pages of which I took up again at the time; the
only instance in my life when I made an attempt to write with both hands at
once as it were.
Indeed my innermost
feeling, now, is that "The Return" is a left-handed production.
Looking through that story lately I had the material impression of sitting
under a large and expensive umbrella in the loud drumming of a heavy
rain-shower. It was very distracting. In the general uproar one could hear
every individual drop strike on the stout and distended silk. Mentally, the
reading rendered me dumb for the remainder of the day, not exactly with
astonishment but with a sort of dismal wonder. I don't want to talk
disrespectfully of any pages of mine. Psychologically there were no doubt good
reasons for my attempt; and it was worth while, if only to see of what excesses
I was capable in that sort of virtuosity. In this connection I should like to
confess my surprise on finding that notwithstanding all its apparatus of
analysis the story consists for the most part of physical impressions;
impressions of sound and sight, railway station, streets, a trotting horse,
reflections in mirrors and so on, rendered as if for their own sake and
combined with a sublimated description of a desirable middle-class
town-residence which somehow manages to produce a sinister effect. For the rest
any kind word about "The Return" (and there have been such words said
at different times) awakens in me the liveliest gratitude, for I know how much
the writing of that fantasy has cost me in sheer toil, in temper, and in
disillusion.
KARAIN: A MEMORY . . .
. 3
THE IDIOTS . . . . . .
. 56
AN OUTPOST OF PROGRESS
. 86
THE RETURN . . . . . .
118
THE LAGOON . . . . . .
187
WE KNEW him in those
unprotected days when we were content to hold in our hands our lives and our
property. None of us, I believe, has any property now, and I hear that many,
negligently, have lost their lives; but I am sure that the few who survive are
not yet so dim-eyed as to miss in the befogged respectability of their
newspapers the intelligence of various native risings in the Eastern
Archipelago. Sunshine gleams between the lines of those short paragraphs --
sunshine and the glitter of the sea. A strange name wakes up memories; the
printed words scent the smoky atmosphere of to-day faintly, with the subtle and
penetrating perfume as of land breezes breathing through the starlight of
bygone nights; a signal fire gleams like a jewel on the high brow of a sombre
cliff; great trees, the advanced sentries of immense forests, stand watchful
and still over sleeping stretches of open water; a line of white surf thunders
on an empty beach, the shallow water foams on the reefs; and green islets
scattered through the calm of noonday lie upon the level of a polished sea,
like a handful of emeralds on a buckler of steel.
There are faces too --
faces dark, truculent, and smiling; the frank audacious faces of men
barefooted, well armed and noiseless. They thronged the narrow length of our
schooner's decks with their ornamented and barbarous crowd, with the variegated
colours of checkered sarongs, red turbans, white jackets, embroideries; with
the gleam of scabbards, gold rings, charms, armlets, lance blades, and jewelled
handles of their weapons. They had an independent bearing, resolute eyes, a
restrained manner; and we seem yet to hear their soft voices speaking of battles,
travels, and escapes; boasting with composure, joking quietly; sometimes in
well-bred murmurs extolling their own valour, our generosity; or celebrating
with loyal enthusiasm the virtues of their ruler. We remember the faces, the
eyes, the voices, we see again the gleam of silk and metal; the murmuring stir
of that crowd, brilliant, festive, and martial; and we seem to feel the touch
of friendly brown hands that, after one short grasp, return to rest on a chased
hilt. They were Karain's people -- a devoted following. Their movements hung on
his lips; they read their thoughts in his eyes; he murmured to them
nonchalantly of life and death, and they accepted his words humbly, like gifts
of fate. They were all free men, and when speaking to him said, "Your slave."
On his passage voices died out as though he had walked guarded by silence; awed
whispers followed him. They called him their war-chief. He was the ruler of
three villages on a narrow plain; the master of an insignificant foothold on
the earth -- of a conquered foothold that, shaped like a young moon, lay
ignored between the hills and the sea.
From the deck of our
schooner, anchored in the middle of the bay, he indicated by a theatrical sweep
of his arm along the jagged outline of the hills the whole of his domain; and
the ample movement seemed to drive back its limits, augmenting it suddenly into
something so immense and vague that for a moment it appeared to be bounded only
by the sky. And really, looking at that place, landlocked from the sea and shut
off from the land by the precipitous slopes of mountains, it was difficult to
believe in the existence of any neighbourhood. It was still, complete, unknown,
and full of a life that went on stealthily with a troubling effect of solitude;
of a life that seemed unaccountably empty of anything that would stir the
thought, touch the heart, give a hint of the ominous sequence of days. It
appeared to us a land without memories, regrets, and hopes; a land where
nothing could survive the coming of the night, and where each sunrise, like a
dazzling act of special creation, was disconnected from the eve and the morrow.
Karain swept his hand
over it. "All mine!" He struck the deck with his long staff; the gold
head flashed like a falling star; very close behind him a silent old fellow in
a richly embroidered black jacket alone of all the Malays around did not follow
the masterful gesture with a look. He did not even lift his eyelids. He bowed
his head behind his master, and without stirring held hilt up over his right
shoulder a long blade in a silver scabbard. He was there on duty, but without
curiosity, and seemed weary, not with age, but with the possession of a
burdensome secret of existence. Karain, heavy and proud, had a lofty pose and
breathed calmly. It was our first visit, and we looked about curiously.
The bay was like a
bottomless pit of intense light. The circular sheet of water reflected a
luminous sky, and the shores enclosing it made an opaque ring of earth floating
in an emptiness of transparent blue. The hills, purple and arid, stood out
heavily on the sky: their summits seemed to fade into a coloured tremble as of
ascending vapour; their steep sides were streaked with the green of narrow
ravines; at their foot lay rice-fields, plantain-patches, yellow sands. A
torrent wound about like a dropped thread. Clumps of fruit-trees marked the
villages; slim palms put their nodding heads together above the low houses;
dried palm-leaf roofs shone afar, like roofs of gold, behind the dark
colonnades of tree-trunks; figures passed vivid and vanishing; the smoke of
fires stood upright above the masses of flowering bushes; bamboo fences
glittered, running away in broken lines between the fields. A sudden cry on the
shore sounded plaintive in the distance, and ceased abruptly, as if stifled in
the downpour of sunshine. A puff of breeze made a flash of darkness on the
smooth water, touched our faces, and became forgotten. Nothing moved. The sun
blazed down into a shadowless hollow of colours and stillness.
It was the stage where,
dressed splendidly for his part, he strutted, incomparably dignified, made
important by the power he had to awaken an absurd expectation of something
heroic going to take place -- a burst of action or song -- upon the vibrating
tone of a wonderful sunshine. He was ornate and disturbing, for one could not
imagine what depth of horrible void such an elaborate front could be worthy to
hide. He was not masked -- there was too much life in him, and a mask is only a
lifeless thing; but he presented himself essentially as an actor, as a human
being aggressively disguised. His smallest acts were prepared and unexpected,
his speeches grave, his sentences ominous like hints and complicated like
arabesques. He was treated with a solemn respect accorded in the irreverent
West only to the monarchs of the stage, and he accepted the profound homage
with a sustained dignity seen nowhere else but behind the footlights and in the
condensed falseness of some grossly tragic situation. It was almost impossible to
remember who he was -- only a petty chief of a conveniently isolated corner of
Mindanao, where we could in comparative safety break the law against the
traffic in firearms and ammunition with the natives. What would happen should
one of the moribund Spanish gun-boats be suddenly galvanized into a flicker of
active life did not trouble us, once we were inside the bay -- so completely
did it appear out of the reach of a meddling world; and besides, in those days
we were imaginative enough to look with a kind of joyous equanimity on any
chance there was of being quietly hanged somewhere out of the way of diplomatic
remonstrance. As to Karain, nothing could happen to him unless what happens to
all -- failure and death; but his quality was to appear clothed in the illusion
of unavoidable success. He seemed too effective, too necessary there, too much
of an essential condition for the existence of his land and his people, to be
destroyed by anything short of an earthquake. He summed up his race, his
country, the elemental force of ardent life, of tropical nature. He had its
luxuriant strength, its fascination; and, like it, he carried the seed of peril
within.
In many successive
visits we came to know his stage well -- the purple semicircle of hills, the
slim trees leaning over houses, the yellow sands, the streaming green of
ravines. All that had the crude and blended colouring, the appropriateness
almost excessive, the suspicious immobility of a painted scene; and it enclosed
so perfectly the accomplished acting of his amazing pretences that the rest of
the world seemed shut out forever from the gorgeous spectacle. There could be
nothing outside. It was as if the earth had gone on spinning, and had left that
crumb of its surface alone in space. He appeared utterly cut off from
everything but the sunshine, and that even seemed to be made for him alone.
Once when asked what was on the other side of the hills, he said, with a
meaning smile, "Friends and enemies -- many enemies; else why should I buy
your rifles and powder?" He was always like this -- word-perfect in his
part, playing up faithfully to the mysteries and certitudes of his
surroundings. "Friends and enemies" -- nothing else. It was
impalpable and vast. The earth had indeed rolled away from under his land, and
he, with his handful of people, stood surrounded by a silent tumult as of
contending shades. Certainly no sound came from outside. "Friends and
enemies!" He might have added, "and memories," at least as far
as he himself was concerned; but he neglected to make that point then. It made
itself later on, though; but it was after the daily performance -- in the
wings, so to speak, and with the lights out. Meantime he filled the stage with
barbarous dignity. Some ten years ago he had led his people -- a scratch lot of
wandering Bugis -- to the conquest of the bay, and now in his august care they
had forgotten all the past, and had lost all concern for the future. He gave
them wisdom, advice, reward, punishment, life or death, with the same serenity
of attitude and voice. He understood irrigation and the art of war -- the
qualities of weapons and the craft of boat-building. He could conceal his
heart; had more endurance; he could swim longer, and steer a canoe better than
any of his people; he could shoot straighter, and negotiate more tortuously
than any man of his race I knew. He was an adventurer of the sea, an outcast, a
ruler -- and my very good friend. I wish him a quick death in a stand-up fight,
a death in sunshine; for he had known remorse and power, and no man can demand
more from life. Day after day he appeared before us, incomparably faithful to
the illusions of the stage, and at sunset the night descended upon him quickly,
like a falling curtain. The seamed hills became black shadows towering high upon
a clear sky; above them the glittering confusion of stars resembled a mad
turmoil stilled by a gesture; sounds ceased, men slept, forms vanished -- and
the reality of the universe alone remained -- a marvellous thing of darkness
and glimmers.
BUT it was at night
that he talked openly, forgetting the exactions of his stage. In the daytime
there were affairs to be discussed in state. There were at first between him
and me his own splendour, my shabby suspicions, and the scenic landscape that
intruded upon the reality of our lives by its motionless fantasy of outline and
colour. His followers thronged round him; above his head the broad blades of
their spears made a spiked halo of iron points, and they hedged him from
humanity by the shimmer of silks, the gleam of weapons, the excited and
respectful hum of eager voices. Before sunset he would take leave with
ceremony, and go off sitting under a red umbrella, and escorted by a score of
boats. All the paddles flashed and struck together with a mighty splash that
reverberated loudly in the monumental amphitheatre of hills. A broad stream of
dazzling foam trailed behind the flotilla. The canoes appeared very black on
the white hiss of water; turbaned heads swayed back and forth; a multitude of
arms in crimson and yellow rose and fell with one movement; the spearmen
upright in the bows of canoes had variegated sarongs and gleaming shoulders
like bronze statues; the muttered strophes of the paddlers' song ended
periodically in a plaintive shout. They diminished in the distance; the song
ceased; they swarmed on the beach in the long shadows of the western hills. The
sunlight lingered on the purple crests, and we could see him leading the way to
his stockade, a burly bareheaded figure walking far in advance of a straggling
cortège, and swinging regularly an ebony staff taller than himself. The
darkness deepened fast; torches gleamed fitfully, passing behind bushes; a long
hail or two trailed in the silence of the evening; and at last the night
stretched its smooth veil over the shore, the lights, and the voices.
Then, just as we were
thinking of repose, the watch-men of the schooner would hail a splash of
paddles away in the starlit gloom of the bay; a voice would respond in cautious
tones, and our serang, putting his head down the open skylight, would inform us
without surprise, "That Rajah, he coming. He here now." Karain
appeared noiselessly in the doorway of the little cabin. He was simplicity
itself then; all in white; muffled about his head; for arms only a kriss with a
plain buffalo-horn handle, which he would politely conceal within a fold of his
sarong before stepping over the threshold. The old sword-bearer's face, the
worn-out and mournful face so covered with wrinkles that it seemed to look out
through the meshes of a fine dark net, could be seen close above his shoulders.
Karain never moved without that attendant, who stood or squatted close at his
back. He had a dislike of an open space behind him. It was more than a dislike
-- it resembled fear, a nervous preoccupation of what went on where he could
not see. This, in view of the evident and fierce loyalty that surrounded him,
was inexplicable. He was there alone in the midst of devoted men; he was safe
from neighbourly ambushes, from fraternal ambitions; and yet more than one of
our visitors had assured us that their ruler could not bear to be alone. They
said, "Even when he eats and sleeps there is always one on the watch near
him who has strength and weapons." There was indeed always one near him,
though our informants had no conception of that watcher's strength and weapons,
which were both shadowy and terrible. We knew, but only later on, when we had
heard the story. Meantime we noticed that, even during the most important
interviews, Karain would often give a start, and interrupting his discourse,
would sweep his arm back with a sudden movement, to feel whether the old fellow
was there. The old fellow, impenetrable and weary, was always there. He shared
his food, his repose, and his thoughts; he knew his plans, guarded his secrets;
and, impassive behind his master's agitation, without stirring the least bit,
murmured above his head in a soothing tone some words difficult to catch.
It was only on board
the schooner, when surrounded by white faces, by unfamiliar sights and sounds,
that Karain seemed to forget the strange obsession that wound like a black
thread through the gorgeous pomp of his public life. At night we treated him in
a free and easy manner, which just stopped short of slapping him on the back,
for there are liberties one must not take with a Malay. He said himself that on
such occasions he was only a private gentleman coming to see other gentlemen
whom he supposed as well born as himself. I fancy that to the last he believed
us to be emissaries of Government, darkly official persons furthering by our
illegal traffic some dark scheme of high statecraft. Our denials and
protestations were unavailing. He only smiled with discreet politeness and
inquired about the Queen. Every visit began with that inquiry; he was
insatiable of details; he was fascinated by the holder of a sceptre the shadow
of which, stretching from the westward over the earth and over the seas, passed
far beyond his own hand's-breadth of conquered land. He multiplied questions;
he could never know enough of the Monarch of whom he spoke with wonder and
chivalrous respect -- with a kind of affectionate awe! Afterwards, when we had
learned that he was the son of a woman who had many years ago ruled a small
Bugis state, we came to suspect that the memory of his mother (of whom he spoke
with enthusiasm) mingled somehow in his mind with the image he tried to form
for himself of the far-off Queen whom he called Great, Invincible, Pious, and
Fortunate. We had to invent details at last to satisfy his craving curiosity;
and our loyalty must be pardoned, for we tried to make them fit for his august
and resplendent ideal. We talked. The night slipped over us, over the still
schooner, over the sleeping land, and over the sleepless sea that thundered
amongst the reefs outside the bay. His paddlers, two trustworthy men, slept in
the canoe at the foot of our side-ladder. The old confidant, relieved from
duty, dozed on his heels, with his back against the companion-doorway; and
Karain sat squarely in the ship's wooden armchair, under the slight sway of the
cabin lamp, a cheroot between his dark fingers, and a glass of lemonade before
him. He was amused by the fizz of the thing, but after a sip or two would let
it get flat, and with a courteous wave of his hand ask for a fresh bottle. He
decimated our slender stock; but we did not begrudge it to him, for, when he
began, he talked well. He must have been a great Bugis dandy in his time, for
even then (and when we knew him he was no longer young) his splendour was
spotlessly neat, and he dyed his hair a light shade of brown. The quiet dignity
of his bearing transformed the dim-lit cuddy of the schooner into an
audience-hall. He talked of inter-island politics with an ironic and melancholy
shrewdness. He had travelled much, suffered not a little, intrigued, fought. He
knew native Courts, European Settlements, the forests, the sea, and, as he said
himself, had spoken in his time to many great men. He liked to talk with me
because I had known some of these men: he seemed to think that I could
understand him, and, with a fine confidence, assumed that I, at least, could
appreciate how much greater he was himself. But he preferred to talk of his
native country -- a small Bugis state on the island of Celebes. I had visited
it some time before, and he asked eagerly for news. As men's names came up in
conversation he would say, "We swam against one another when we were
boys"; or, "We hunted the deer together -- he could use the noose and
the spear as well as I." Now and then his big dreamy eyes would roll
restlessly; he frowned or smiled, or he would become pensive, and, staring in
silence, would nod slightly for a time at some regretted vision of the past.
His mother had been the
ruler of a small semi-independent state on the sea-coast at the head of the
Gulf of Boni. He spoke of her with pride. She had been a woman resolute in
affairs of state and of her own heart. After the death of her first husband,
undismayed by the turbulent opposition of the chiefs, she married a rich
trader, a Korinchi man of no family. Karain was her son by that second
marriage, but his unfortunate descent had apparently nothing to do with his
exile. He said nothing as to its cause, though once he let slip with a sigh,
"Ha! my land will not feel any more the weight of my body." But he
related willingly the story of his wanderings, and told us all about the
conquest of the bay. Alluding to the people beyond the hills, he would murmur
gently, with a careless wave of the hand, "They came over the hills once
to fight us, but those who got away never came again." He thought for a
while, smiling to himself. "Very few got away," he added, with proud
serenity. He cherished the recollections of his successes; he had an exulting
eagerness for endeavour; when he talked, his aspect was warlike, chivalrous,
and uplifting. No wonder his people admired him. We saw him once walking in
daylight amongst the houses of the settlement. At the doors of huts groups of
women turned to look after him, warbling softly, and with gleaming eyes; armed
men stood out of the way, submissive and erect; others approached from the
side, bending their backs to address him humbly; an old woman stretched out a
draped lean arm -- "Blessings on thy head!" she cried from a dark
doorway; a fiery-eyed man showed above the low fence of a plantain-patch a
streaming face, a bare breast scarred in two places, and bellowed out pantingly
after him, "God give victory to our master!" Karain walked fast, and
with firm long strides; he answered greetings right and left by quick piercing
glances. Children ran forward between the houses, peeped fearfully round
corners; young boys kept up with him, gliding between bushes: their eyes
gleamed through the dark leaves. The old sword-bearer, shouldering the silver
scabbard, shuffled hastily at his heels with bowed head, and his eyes on the
ground. And in the midst of a great stir they passed swift and absorbed, like
two men hurrying through a great solitude.
In his council hall he
was surrounded by the gravity of armed chiefs, while two long rows of old
headmen dressed in cotton stuffs squatted on their heels, with idle arms
hanging over their knees. Under the thatch roof supported by smooth columns, of
which each one had cost the life of a straight-stemmed young palm, the scent of
flowering hedges drifted in warm waves. The sun was sinking. In the open
courtyard suppliants walked through the gate, raising, when yet far off, their
joined hands above bowed heads, and bending low in the bright stream of sunlight.
Young girls, with flowers in their laps, sat under the wide-spreading boughs of
a big tree. The blue smoke of wood fires spread in a thin mist above the
high-pitched roofs of houses that had glistening walls of woven reeds, and all
round them rough wooden pillars under the sloping eaves. He dispensed justice
in the shade; from a high seat he gave orders, advice, reproof. Now and then
the hum of approbation rose louder, and idle spearmen that lounged listlessly
against the posts, looking at the girls, would turn their heads slowly. To no
man had been given the shelter of so much respect, confidence, and awe. Yet at
times he would lean forward and appear to listen as for a far-off note of
discord, as if expecting to hear some faint voice, the sound of light
footsteps; or he would start half up in his seat, as though he had been
familiarly touched on the shoulder. He glanced back with apprehension; his aged
follower whispered inaudibly at his ear; the chiefs turned their eyes away in
silence, for the old wizard, the man who could command ghosts and send evil
spirits against enemies, was speaking low to their ruler. Around the short
stillness of the open place the trees rustled faintly, the soft laughter of
girls playing with the flowers rose in clear bursts of joyous sound. At the end
of upright spear-shafts the long tufts of dyed horse-hair waved crimson and
filmy in the gust of wind; and beyond the blaze of hedges the brook of limpid
quick water ran invisible and loud under the drooping grass of the bank, with a
great murmur, passionate and gentle.
After sunset, far
across the fields and over the bay, clusters of torches could be seen burning
under the high roofs of the council shed. Smoky red flames swayed on high
poles, and the fiery blaze flickered over faces, clung to the smooth trunks of
palm-trees, kindled bright sparks on the rims of metal dishes standing on fine
floor-mats. That obscure adventurer feasted like a king. Small groups of men
crouched in tight circles round the wooden platters; brown hands hovered over
snowy heaps of rice. Sitting upon a rough couch apart from the others, he
leaned on his elbow with inclined head; and near him a youth improvised in a
high tone a song that celebrated his valour and wisdom. The singer rocked
himself to and fro, rolling frenzied eyes; old women hobbled about with dishes,
and men, squatting low, lifted their heads to listen gravely without ceasing to
eat. The song of triumph vibrated in the night, and the stanzas rolled out
mournful and fiery like the thoughts of a hermit. He silenced it with a sign,
"Enough!" An owl hooted far away, exulting in the delight of deep
gloom in dense foliage; overhead lizards ran in the attap thatch, calling
softly; the dry leaves of the roof rustled; the rumour of mingled voices grew
louder suddenly. After a circular and startled glance, as of a man waking up
abruptly to the sense of danger, he would throw himself back, and under the
downward gaze of the old sorcerer take up, wide-eyed, the slender thread of his
dream. They watched his moods; the swelling rumour of animated talk subsided
like a wave on a sloping beach. The chief is pensive. And above the spreading
whisper of lowered voices only a little rattle of weapons would be heard, a
single louder word distinct and alone, or the grave ring of a big brass tray.
FOR two years at short
intervals we visited him. We came to like him, to trust him, almost to admire
him. He was plotting and preparing a war with patience, with foresight -- with
a fidelity to his purpose and with a steadfastness of which I would have thought
him racially incapable. He seemed fearless of the future, and in his plans
displayed a sagacity that was only limited by his profound ignorance of the
rest of the world. We tried to enlighten him, but our attempts to make clear
the irresistible nature of the forces which he desired to arrest failed to
discourage his eagerness to strike a blow for his own primitive ideas. He did
not understand us, and replied by arguments that almost drove one to
desperation by their childish shrewdness. He was absurd and unanswerable.
Sometimes we caught glimpses of a sombre, glowing fury within him -- a brooding
and vague sense of wrong, and a concentrated lust of violence which is
dangerous in a native. He raved like one inspired. On one occasion, after we
had been talking to him late in his campong, he jumped up. A great, clear fire
blazed in the grove; lights and shadows danced together between the trees; in
the still night bats flitted in and out of the boughs like fluttering flakes of
denser darkness. He snatched the sword from the old man, whizzed it out of the
scabbard, and thrust the point into the earth. Upon the thin, upright blade the
silver hilt, released, swayed before him like something alive. He stepped back
a pace, and in a deadened tone spoke fiercely to the vibrating steel: "If
there is virtue in the fire, in the iron, in the hand that forged thee, in the
words spoken over thee, in the desire of my heart, and in the wisdom of thy
makers, -- then we shall be victorious together!" He drew it out, looked
along the edge. "Take," he said over his shoulder to the old
sword-bearer. The other, unmoved on his hams, wiped the point with a corner of
his sarong, and returning the weapon to its scabbard, sat nursing it on his
knees without a single look upwards. Karain, suddenly very calm, reseated
himself with dignity. We gave up remonstrating after this, and let him go his
way to an honourable disaster. All we could do for him was to see to it that
the powder was good for the money and the rifles serviceable, if old.
But the game was
becoming at last too dangerous; and if we, who had faced it pretty often,
thought little of the danger, it was decided for us by some very respectable
people sitting safely in counting-houses that the risks were too great, and
that only one more trip could be made. After giving in the usual way many
misleading hints as to our destination, we slipped away quietly, and after a
very quick passage entered the bay. It was early morning, and even before the
anchor went to the bottom the schooner was surrounded by boats.
The first thing we
heard was that Karain's mysterious sword-bearer had died a few days ago. We did
not attach much importance to the news. It was certainly difficult to imagine
Karain without his inseparable follower; but the fellow was old, he had never
spoken to one of us, we hardly ever had heard the sound of his voice; and we
had come to look upon him as upon something inanimate, as a part of our
friend's trappings of state -- like that sword he had carried, or the fringed red
umbrella displayed during an official progress. Karain did not visit us in the
afternoon as usual. A message of greeting and a present of fruit and vegetables
came off for us before sunset. Our friend paid us like a banker, but treated us
like a prince. We sat up for him till midnight. Under the stern awning bearded
Jackson jingled an old guitar and sang, with an execrable accent, Spanish
love-songs; while young Hollis and I, sprawling on the deck, had a game of
chess by the light of a cargo lantern. Karain did not appear. Next day we were
busy unloading, and heard that the Rajah was unwell. The expected invitation to
visit him ashore did not come. We sent friendly messages, but, fearing to
intrude upon some secret council, remained on board. Early on the third day we
had landed all the powder and rifles, and also a six-pounder brass gun with its
carriage which we had subscribed together for a present for our friend. The
afternoon was sultry. Ragged edges of black clouds peeped over the hills, and
invisible thunderstorms circled outside, growling like wild beasts. We got the
schooner ready for sea, intending to leave next morning at daylight. All day a
merciless sun blazed down into the bay, fierce and pale, as if at white heat.
Nothing moved on the land. The beach was empty, the villages seemed deserted;
the trees far off stood in unstirring clumps, as if painted; the white smoke of
some invisible bush-fire spread itself low over the shores of the bay like a
settling fog. Late in the day three of Karain's chief men, dressed in their
best and armed to the teeth, came off in a canoe, bringing a case of dollars.
They were gloomy and languid, and told us they had not seen their Rajah for
five days. No one had seen him! We settled all accounts, and after shaking
hands in turn and in profound silence, they descended one after another into
their boat, and were paddled to the shore, sitting close together, clad in
vivid colours, with hanging heads: the gold embroideries of their jackets
flashed dazzlingly as they went away gliding on the smooth water, and not one
of them looked back once. Before sunset the growling clouds carried with a rush
the ridge of hills, and came tumbling down the inner slopes. Everything
disappeared; black whirling vapours filled the bay, and in the midst of them
the schooner swung here and there in the shifting gusts of wind. A single clap
of thunder detonated in the hollow with a violence that seemed capable of
bursting into small pieces the ring of high land, and a warm deluge descended. The
wind died out. We panted in the close cabin; our faces streamed; the bay
outside hissed as if boiling; the water fell in perpendicular shafts as heavy
as lead; it swished about the deck, poured off the spars, gurgled, sobbed,
splashed, murmured in the blind night. Our lamp burned low. Hollis, stripped to
the waist, lay stretched out on the lockers, with closed eyes and motionless
like a despoiled corpse; at his head Jackson twanged the guitar, and gasped out
in sighs a mournful dirge about hopeless love and eyes like stars. Then we
heard startled voices on deck crying in the rain, hurried footsteps overhead,
and suddenly Karain appeared in the doorway of the cabin. His bare breast and
his face glistened in the light; his sarong, soaked, clung about his legs; he
had his sheathed kriss in his left hand; and wisps of wet hair, escaping from
under his red kerchief, stuck over his eyes and down his cheeks. He stepped in
with a headlong stride and looking over his shoulder like a man pursued. Hollis
turned on his side quickly and opened his eyes. Jackson clapped his big hand
over the strings and the jingling vibration died suddenly. I stood up.
"We did not hear
your boat's hail!" I exclaimed.
"Boat! The man's
swum off," drawled out Hollis from the locker. "Look at him!"
He breathed heavily,
wild-eyed, while we looked at him in silence. Water dripped from him, made a
dark pool, and ran crookedly across the cabin floor. We could hear Jackson, who
had gone out to drive away our Malay seamen from the doorway of the companion;
he swore menacingly in the patter of a heavy shower, and there was a great
commotion on deck. The watchmen, scared out of their wits by the glimpse of a
shadowy figure leaping over the rail, straight out of the night as it were, had
alarmed all hands.
Then Jackson, with
glittering drops of water on his hair and beard, came back looking angry, and
Hollis, who, being the youngest of us, assumed an indolent superiority, said
without stirring, "Give him a dry sarong -- give him mine; it's hanging up
in the bathroom." Karain laid the kriss on the table, hilt inwards, and
murmured a few words in a strangled voice.
"What's
that?" asked Hollis, who had not heard.
"He apologizes for
coming in with a weapon in his hand," I said, dazedly.
"Ceremonious
beggar. Tell him we forgive a friend . . . on such a night," drawled out
Hollis. "What's wrong?"
Karain slipped the dry
sarong over his head, dropped the wet one at his feet, and stepped out of it. I
pointed to the wooden armchair -- his armchair. He sat down very straight, said
"Ha!" in a strong voice; a short shiver shook his broad frame. He
looked over his shoulder uneasily, turned as if to speak to us, but only stared
in a curious blind manner, and again looked back. Jackson bellowed out,
"Watch well on deck there!" heard a faint answer from above, and
reaching out with his foot slammed-to the cabin door.
"All right
now," he said.
Karain's lips moved
slightly. A vivid flash of lightning made the two round sternports facing him
glimmer like a pair of cruel and phosphorescent eyes. The flame of the lamp
seemed to wither into brown dust for an instant, and the looking-glass over the
little sideboard leaped out behind his back in a smooth sheet of livid light.
The roll of thunder came near, crashed over us; the schooner trembled, and the
great voice went on, threatening terribly, into the distance. For less than a
minute a furious shower rattled on the decks. Karain looked slowly from face to
face, and then the silence became so profound that we all could hear distinctly
the two chronometers in my cabin ticking along with unflagging speed against
one another.
And we three, strangely
moved, could not take our eyes from him. He had become enigmatical and
touching, in virtue of that mysterious cause that had driven him through the
night and through the thunderstorm to the shelter of the schooner's cuddy. Not
one of us doubted that we were looking at a fugitive, incredible as it appeared
to us. He was haggard, as though he had not slept for weeks; he had become
lean, as though he had not eaten for days. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes
sunk, the muscles of his chest and arms twitched slightly as if after an
exhausting contest. Of course it had been a long swim off to the schooner; but
his face showed another kind of fatigue, the tormented weariness, the anger and
the fear of a struggle against a thought, an idea -- against something that
cannot be grappled, that never rests -- a shadow, a nothing, unconquerable and
immortal, that preys upon life. We knew it as though he had shouted it at us.
His chest expanded time after time, as if it could not contain the beating of
his heart. For a moment he had the power of the possessed -- the power to
awaken in the beholders wonder, pain, pity, and a fearful near sense of things
invisible, of things dark and mute, that surround the loneliness of mankind.
His eyes roamed about aimlessly for a moment, then became still. He said with
effort --
"I came here . . .
I leaped out of my stockade as after a defeat. I ran in the night. The water
was black. I left him calling on the edge of black water. . . . I left him
standing alone on the beach. I swam . . . he called out after me . . . I swam .
. ."
He trembled from head
to foot, sitting very upright and gazing straight before him. Left whom? Who
called? We did not know. We could not understand. I said at all hazards --
"Be firm."
The sound of my voice
seemed to steady him into a sudden rigidity, but otherwise he took no notice.
He seemed to listen, to expect something for a moment, then went on --
"He cannot come
here -- therefore I sought you. You men with white faces who despise the
invisible voices. He cannot abide your unbelief and your strength."
He was silent for a
while, then exclaimed softly --
"Oh! the strength
of unbelievers!"
"There's no one
here but you -- and we three," said Hollis, quietly. He reclined with his
head supported on elbow and did not budge.
"I know,"
said Karain. "He has never followed me here. Was not the wise man ever by
my side? But since the old wise man, who knew of my trouble, has died, I have
heard the voice every night. I shut myself up -- for many days -- in the dark.
I can hear the sorrowful murmurs of women, the whisper of the wind, of the
running waters; the clash of weapons in the hands of faithful men, their
footsteps -- and his voice! . . . Near . . . So! In my ear! I felt him near . .
. His breath passed over my neck. I leaped out without a cry. All about me men
slept quietly. I ran to the sea. He ran by my side without footsteps,
whispering, whispering old words -- whispering into my ear in his old voice. I
ran into the sea; I swam off to you, with my kriss between my teeth. I, armed,
I fled before a breath -- to you. Take me away to your land. The wise old man
has died, and with him is gone the power of his words and charms. And I can
tell no one. No one. There is no one here faithful enough and wise enough to
know. It is only near you, unbelievers, that my trouble fades like a mist under
the eye of day."
He turned to me.
"With you I
go!" he cried in a contained voice. "With you, who know so many of
us. I want to leave this land -- my people . . . and him -- there!"
He pointed a shaking
finger at random over his shoulder. It was hard for us to bear the intensity of
that undisclosed distress. Hollis stared at him hard. I asked gently --
"Where is the
danger?"
"Everywhere
outside this place," he answered, mournfully. "In every place where I
am. He waits for me on the paths, under the trees, in the place where I sleep
-- everywhere but here."
He looked round the
little cabin, at the painted beams, at the tarnished varnish of bulkheads; he
looked round as if appealing to all its shabby strangeness, to the disorderly
jumble of unfamiliar things that belong to an inconceivable life of stress, of
power, of endeavour, of unbelief -- to the strong life of white men, which
rolls on irresistible and hard on the edge of outer darkness. He stretched out
his arms as if to embrace it and us. We waited. The wind and rain had ceased,
and the stillness of the night round the schooner was as dumb and complete as
if a dead world had been laid to rest in a grave of clouds. We expected him to
speak. The necessity within him tore at his lips. There are those who say that
a native will not speak to a white man. Error. No man will speak to his master;
but to a wanderer and a friend, to him who does not come to teach or to rule,
to him who asks for nothing and accepts all things, words are spoken by the
camp-fires, in the shared solitude of the sea, in riverside villages, in
resting-places surrounded by forests -- words are spoken that take no account
of race or colour. One heart speaks -- another one listens; and the earth, the
sea, the sky, the passing wind and the stirring leaf, hear also the futile tale
of the burden of life.
He spoke at last. It is
impossible to convey the effect of his story. It is undying, it is but a
memory, and its vividness cannot be made clear to another mind, any more than
the vivid emotions of a dream. One must have seen his innate splendour, one
must have known him before -- looked at him then. The wavering gloom of the
little cabin; the breathless stillness outside, through which only the lapping
of water against the schooner's sides could be heard; Hollis's pale face, with
steady dark eyes; the energetic head of Jackson held up between two big palms,
and with the long yellow hair of his beard flowing over the strings of the
guitar lying on the table; Karain's upright and motionless pose, his tone --
all this made an impression that cannot be forgotten. He faced us across the
table. His dark head and bronze torso appeared above the tarnished slab of
wood, gleaming and still as if cast in metal. Only his lips moved, and his eyes
glowed, went out, blazed again, or stared mournfully. His expressions came
straight from his tormented heart. His words sounded low, in a sad murmur as of
running water; at times they rang loud like the clash of a war-gong -- or
trailed slowly like weary travellers -- or rushed forward with the speed of
fear.
THIS is, imperfectly,
what he said --
"It was after the
great trouble that broke the alliance of the four states of Wajo. We fought
amongst ourselves, and the Dutch watched from afar till we were weary. Then the
smoke of their fire-ships was seen at the mouth of our rivers, and their great
men came in boats full of soldiers to talk to us of protection and peace. We
answered with caution and wisdom, for our villages were burnt, our stockades
weak, the people weary, and the weapons blunt. They came and went; there had
been much talk, but after they went away everything seemed to be as before,
only their ships remained in sight from our coast, and very soon their traders
came amongst us under a promise of safety. My brother was a Ruler, and one of
those who had given the promise. I was young then, and had fought in the war,
and Pata Matara had fought by my side. We had shared hunger, danger, fatigue,
and victory. His eyes saw my danger quickly, and twice my arm had preserved his
life. It was his destiny. He was my friend. And he was great amongst us -- one
of those who were near my brother, the Ruler. He spoke in council, his courage
was great, he was the chief of many villages round the great lake that is in
the middle of our country as the heart is in the middle of a man's body. When
his sword was carried into a campong in advance of his coming, the maidens
whispered wonderingly under the fruit-trees, the rich men consulted together in
the shade, and a feast was made ready with rejoicing and songs. He had the
favour of the Ruler and the affection of the poor. He loved war, deer hunts,
and the charms of women. He was the possessor of jewels, of lucky weapons, and
of men's devotion. He was a fierce man; and I had no other friend.
"I was the chief
of a stockade at the mouth of the river, and collected tolls for my brother
from the passing boats. One day I saw a Dutch trader go up the river. He went
up with three boats, and no toll was demanded from him, because the smoke of
Dutch war-ships stood out from the open sea, and we were too weak to forget
treaties. He went up under the promise of safety, and my brother gave him
protection. He said he came to trade. He listened to our voices, for we are men
who speak openly and without fear; he counted the number of our spears, he
examined the trees, the running waters, the grasses of the bank, the slopes of
our hills. He went up to Matara's country and obtained permission to build a
house. He traded and planted. He despised our joys, our thoughts, and our
sorrows. His face was red, his hair like flame, and his eyes pale, like a river
mist; he moved heavily, and spoke with a deep voice; he laughed aloud like a
fool, and knew no courtesy in his speech. He was a big, scornful man, who
looked into women's faces and put his hand on the shoulders of free men as
though he had been a noble-born chief. We bore with him. Time passed.
"Then Pata
Matara's sister fled from the campong and went to live in the Dutchman's house.
She was a great and wilful lady: I had seen her once carried high on slaves'
shoulders amongst the people, with uncovered face, and I had heard all men say
that her beauty was extreme, silencing the reason and ravishing the heart of
the beholders. The people were dismayed; Matara's face was blackened with that
disgrace, for she knew she had been promised to another man. Matara went to the
Dutchman's house, and said, 'Give her up to die -- she is the daughter of
chiefs.' The white man refused and shut himself up, while his servants kept
guard night and day with loaded guns. Matara raged. My brother called a
council. But the Dutch ships were near, and watched our coast greedily. My
brother said, 'If he dies now our land will pay for his blood. Leave him alone
till we grow stronger and the ships are gone.' Matara was wise; he waited and
watched. But the white man feared for her life and went away.
"He left his
house, his plantations, and his goods! He departed, armed and menacing, and
left all -- for her! She had ravished his heart! From my stockade I saw him put
out to sea in a big boat. Matara and I watched him from the fighting platform
behind the pointed stakes. He sat cross-legged, with his gun in his hands, on
the roof at the stern of his prau. The barrel of his rifle glinted aslant
before his big red face. The broad river was stretched under him -- level,
smooth, shining, like a plain of silver; and his prau, looking very short and
black from the shore, glided along the silver plain and over into the blue of
the sea.
"Thrice Matara,
standing by my side, called aloud her name with grief and imprecations. He
stirred my heart. It leaped three times; and three times with the eyes of my
mind I saw in the gloom within the enclosed space of the prau a woman with
streaming hair going away from her land and her people. I was angry -- and
sorry. Why? And then I also cried out insults and threats. Matara said, 'Now
they have left our land their lives are mind. I shall follow and strike -- and,
alone, pay the price of blood.' A great wind was sweeping towards the setting
sun over the empty river. I cried, 'By your side I will go!' He lowered his head
in sign of assent. It was his destiny. The sun had set, and the trees swayed
their boughs with a great noise above our heads.
"On the third
night we two left our land together in a trading prau.
"The sea met us --
the sea, wide, pathless, and without voice. A sailing prau leaves no track. We
went south. The moon was full; and, looking up, we said to one another, 'When
the next moon shines as this one, we shall return and they will be dead.' It
was fifteen years ago. Many moons have grown full and withered and I have not
seen my land since. We sailed south; we overtook many praus; we examined the
creeks and the bays; we saw the end of our coast, of our island -- a steep cape
over a disturbed strait, where drift the shadows of shipwrecked praus and drowned
men clamour in the night. The wide sea was all round us now. We saw a great
mountain burning in the midst of water; we saw thousands of islets scattered
like bits of iron fired from a big gun; we saw a long coast of mountain and
lowlands stretching away in sunshine from west to east. It was Java. We said,
'They are there; their time is near, and we shall return or die cleansed from
dishonour.'
"We landed. Is
there anything good in that country? The paths run straight and hard and dusty.
Stone campongs, full of white faces, are surrounded by fertile fields, but
every man you meet is a slave. The rulers live under the edge of a foreign
sword. We ascended mountains, we traversed valleys; at sunset we entered
villages. We asked everyone, 'Have you seen such a white man?' Some stared;
others laughed; women gave us food, sometimes, with fear and respect, as though
we had been distracted by the visitation of God; but some did not understand
our language, and some cursed us, or, yawning, asked with contempt the reason
of our quest. Once, as we were going away, an old man called after us,
'Desist!'
"We went on.
Concealing our weapons, we stood humbly aside before the horsemen on the road;
we bowed low in the courtyards of chiefs who were no better than slaves. We
lost ourselves in the fields, in the jungle; and one night, in a tangled
forest, we came upon a place where crumbling old walls had fallen amongst the
trees, and where strange stone idols -- carved images of devils with many arms
and legs, with snakes twined round their bodies, with twenty heads and holding
a hundred swords -- seemed to live and threaten in the light of our camp fire.
Nothing dismayed us. And on the road, by every fire, in resting-places, we
always talked of her and of him. Their time was near. We spoke of nothing else.
No! not of hunger, thirst, weariness, and faltering hearts. No! we spoke of him
and her! Of her! And we thought of them -- of her! Matara brooded by the fire.
I sat and thought and thought, till suddenly I could see again the image of a
woman, beautiful, and young, and great and proud, and tender, going away from
her land and her people. Matara said, 'When we find them we shall kill her
first to cleanse the dishonour -- then the man must die.' I would say, 'It
shall be so; it is your vengeance.' He stared long at me with his big sunken
eyes.
"We came back to
the coast. Our feet were bleeding, our bodies thin. We slept in rags under the
shadow of stone enclosures; we prowled, soiled and lean, about the gateways of
white men's courtyards. Their hairy dogs barked at us, and their servants
shouted from afar, 'Begone!' Low-born wretches, that keep watch over the
streets of stone campongs, asked us who we were. We lied, we cringed, we smiled
with hate in our hearts, and we kept looking here, looking there for them --
for the white man with hair like flame, and for her, for the woman who had
broken faith, and therefore must die. We looked. At last in every woman's face
I thought I could see hers. We ran swiftly. No! Sometimes Matara would whisper,
'Here is the man,' and we waited, crouching. He came near. It was not the man
-- those Dutchmen are all alike. We suffered the anguish of deception. In my
sleep I saw her face, and was both joyful and sorry. . . . Why? . . . I seemed
to hear a whisper near me. I turned swiftly. She was not there! And as we
trudged wearily from stone city to stone city I seemed to hear a light footstep
near me. A time came when I heard it always, and I was glad. I thought, walking
dizzy and weary in sunshine on the hard paths of white men I thought, She is
there -- with us! . . . Matara was sombre. We were often hungry.
"We sold the
carved sheaths of our krisses -- the ivory sheaths with golden ferules. We sold
the jewelled hilts. But we kept the blades -- for them. The blades that never
touch but kill -- we kept the blades for her. . . . Why? She was always by our
side. . . . We starved. We begged. We left Java at last.
"We went West, we
went East. We saw many lands, crowds of strange faces, men that live in trees
and men who eat their old people. We cut rattans in the forest for a handful of
rice, and for a living swept the decks of big ships and heard curses heaped
upon our heads. We toiled in villages; we wandered upon the seas with the Bajow
people, who have no country. We fought for pay; we hired ourselves to work for
Goram men, and were cheated; and under the orders of rough white faces we dived
for pearls in barren bays, dotted with black rocks, upon a coast of sand and
desolation. And everywhere we watched, we listened, we asked. We asked traders,
robbers, white men. We heard jeers, mockery, threats -- words of wonder and
words of contempt. We never knew rest; we never thought of home, for our work
was not done. A year passed, then another. I ceased to count the number of
nights, of moons, of years. I watched over Matara. He had my last handful of
rice; if there was water enough for one he drank it; I covered him up when he
shivered with cold; and when the hot sickness came upon him I sat sleepless through
many nights and fanned his face. He was a fierce man, and my friend. He spoke
of her with fury in the daytime, with sorrow in the dark; he remembered her in
health, in sickness. I said nothing; but I saw her every day -- always! At
first I saw only her head, as of a woman walking in the low mist on a river
bank. Then she sat by our fire. I saw her! I looked at her! She had tender eyes
and a ravishing face. I murmured to her in the night. Matara said sleepily
sometimes, 'To whom are you talking? Who is there?' I answered quickly, 'No
one' . . . It was a lie! She never left me. She shared the warmth of our fire,
she sat on my couch of leaves, she swam on the sea to follow me. . . . I saw
her! . . . I tell you I saw her long black hair spread behind her upon the
moonlit water as she struck out with bare arms by the side of a swift prau. She
was beautiful, she was faithful, and in the silence of foreign countries she
spoke to me very low in the language of my people. No one saw her; no one heard
her; she was mine only! In daylight she moved with a swaying walk before me
upon the weary paths; her figure was straight and flexible like the stem of a
slender tree; the heels of her feet were round and polished like shells of
eggs; with her round arm she made signs. At night she looked into my face. And
she was sad! Her eyes were tender and frightened; her voice soft and pleading.
Once I murmured to her, 'You shall not die,' and she smiled . . . ever after
she smiled! . . . She gave me courage to bear weariness and hardships. Those
were times of pain, and she soothed me. We wandered patient in our search. We
knew deception, false hopes; we knew captivity, sickness, thirst, misery,
despair . . . . Enough! We found them! . . ."
He cried out the last
words and paused. His face was impassive, and he kept still like a man in a
trance. Hollis sat up quickly, and spread his elbows on the table. Jackson made
a brusque movement, and accidentally touched the guitar. A plaintive resonance
filled the cabin with confused vibrations and died out slowly. Then Karain
began to speak again. The restrained fierceness of his tone seemed to rise like
a voice from outside, like a thing unspoken but heard; it filled the cabin and
enveloped in its intense and deadened murmur the motionless figure in the
chair.
"We were on our
way to Atjeh, where there was war; but the vessel ran on a sandbank, and we had
to land in Delli. We had earned a little money, and had bought a gun from some
Selangore traders; only one gun, which was fired by the spark of a stone;
Matara carried it. We landed. Many white men lived there, planting tobacco on
conquered plains, and Matara . . . But no matter. He saw him! . . . The
Dutchman! . . . At last! . . . We crept and watched. Two nights and a day we
watched. He had a house -- a big house in a clearing in the midst of his
fields; flowers and bushes grew around; there were narrow paths of yellow earth
between the cut grass, and thick hedges to keep people out. The third night we
came armed, and lay behind a hedge.
"A heavy dew
seemed to soak through our flesh and made our very entrails cold. The grass,
the twigs, the leaves, covered with drops of water, were gray in the moonlight.
Matara, curled up in the grass, shivered in his sleep. My teeth rattled in my head
so loud that I was afraid the noise would wake up all the land. Afar, the
watchmen of white men's houses struck wooden clappers and hooted in the
darkness. And, as every night, I saw her by my side. She smiled no more! . . .
The fire of anguish burned in my breast, and she whispered to me with
compassion, with pity, softly -- as women will; she soothed the pain of my
mind; she bent her face over me -- the face of a woman who ravishes the hearts
and silences the reason of men. She was all mine, and no one could see her --
no one of living mankind! Stars shone through her bosom, through her floating
hair. I was overcome with regret, with tenderness, with sorrow. Matara slept .
. . Had I slept? Matara was shaking me by the shoulder, and the fire of the sun
was drying the grass, the bushes, the leaves. It was day. Shreds of white mist
hung between the branches of trees.
"Was it night or
day? I saw nothing again till I heard Matara breathe quickly where he lay, and
then outside the house I saw her. I saw them both. They had come out. She sat
on a bench under the wall, and twigs laden with flowers crept high above her
head, hung over her hair. She had a box on her lap, and gazed into it, counting
the increase of her pearls. The Dutchman stood by looking on; he smiled down at
her; his white teeth flashed; the hair on his lip was like two twisted flames.
He was big and fat, and joyous, and without fear. Matara tipped fresh priming
from the hollow of his palm, scraped the flint with his thumb-nail, and gave
the gun to me. To me! I took it . . . O fate!
"He whispered into
my ear, lying on his stomach, 'I shall creep close and then amok . . . let her
die by my hand. You take aim at the fat swine there. Let him see me strike my
shame off the face of the earth -- and then . . . you are my friend -- kill
with a sure shot.' I said nothing; there was no air in my chest -- there was no
air in the world. Matara had gone suddenly from my side. The grass nodded. Then
a bush rustled. She lifted her head.
"I saw her! The
consoler of sleepless nights, of weary days; the companion of troubled years! I
saw her! She looked straight at the place where I crouched. She was there as I
had seen her for years -- a faithful wanderer by my side. She looked with sad
eyes and had smiling lips; she looked at me . . . Smiling lips! Had I not
promised that she should not die!
"She was far off
and I felt her near. Her touch caressed me, and her voice murmured, whispered
above me, around me. 'Who shall be thy companion, who shall console thee if I
die?' I saw a flowering thicket to the left of her stir a little . . . Matara
was ready . . . I cried aloud -- 'Return!'
"She leaped up;
the box fell; the pearls streamed at her feet. The big Dutchman by her side
rolled menacing eyes through the still sunshine. The gun went up to my
shoulder. I was kneeling and I was firm -- firmer than the trees, the rocks,
the mountains. But in front of the steady long barrel the fields, the house,
the earth, the sky swayed to and fro like shadows in a forest on a windy day.
Matara burst out of the thicket; before him the petals of torn flowers whirled
high as if driven by a tempest. I heard her cry; I saw her spring with open
arms in front of the white man. She was a woman of my country and of noble
blood. They are so! I heard her shriek of anguish and fear -- and all stood
still! The fields, the house, the earth, the sky stood still -- while Matara
leaped at her with uplifted arm. I pulled the trigger, saw a spark, heard
nothing; the smoke drove back into my face, and then I could see Matara roll
over head first and lie with stretched arms at her feet. Ha! A sure shot! The
sunshine fell on my back colder than the running water. A sure shot! I flung
the gun after the shot. Those two stood over the dead man as though they had
been bewitched by a charm. I shouted at her, 'Live and remember!' Then for a
time I stumbled about in a cold darkness.
"Behind me there
were great shouts, the running of many feet; strange men surrounded me, cried
meaningless words into my face, pushed me, dragged me, supported me . . . I
stood before the big Dutchman: he stared as if bereft of his reason. He wanted
to know, he talked fast, he spoke of gratitude, he offered me food, shelter,
gold -- he asked many questions. I laughed in his face. I said, 'I am a
Korinchi traveller from Perak over there, and know nothing of that dead man. I
was passing along the path when I heard a shot, and your senseless people
rushed out and dragged me here.' He lifted his arms, he wondered, he could not
believe, he could not understand, he clamoured in his own tongue! She had her
arms clasped round his neck, and over her shoulder stared back at me with wide
eyes. I smiled and looked at her; I smiled and waited to hear the sound of her
voice. The white man asked her suddenly. 'Do you know him?' I listened -- my
life was in my ears! She looked at me long, she looked at me with unflinching
eyes, and said aloud, 'No! I never saw him before.' . . . What! Never before?
Had she forgotten already? Was it possible? Forgotten already -- after so many
years -- so many years of wandering, of companionship, of trouble, of tender
words! Forgotten already! . . . I tore myself out from the hands that held me
and went away without a word . . . They let me go.
"I was weary. Did
I sleep? I do not know. I remember walking upon a broad path under a clear
starlight; and that strange country seemed so big, the rice-fields so vast,
that, as I looked around, my head swam with the fear of space. Then I saw a
forest. The joyous starlight was heavy upon me. I turned off the path and
entered the forest, which was very sombre and very sad."
KARAIN's tone had been
getting lower and lower, as though he had been going away from us, till the
last words sounded faint but clear, as if shouted on a calm day from a very
great distance. He moved not. He stared fixedly past the motionless head of
Hollis, who faced him, as still as himself. Jackson had turned sideways, and
with elbow on the table shaded his eyes with the palm of his hand. And I looked
on, surprised and moved; I looked at that man, loyal to a vision, betrayed by
his dream, spurned by his illusion, and coming to us unbelievers for help --
against a thought. The silence was profound; but it seemed full of noiseless phantoms,
of things sorrowful, shadowy, and mute, in whose invisible presence the firm,
pulsating beat of the two ship's chronometers ticking off steadily the seconds
of Greenwich Time seemed to me a protection and a relief. Karain stared
stonily; and looking at his rigid figure, I thought of his wanderings, of that
obscure Odyssey of revenge, of all the men that wander amongst illusions
faithful, faithless; of the illusions that give joy, that give sorrow, that
give pain, that give peace; of the invincible illusions that can make life and
death appear serene, inspiring, tormented, or ignoble.
A murmur was heard;
that voice from outside seemed to flow out of a dreaming world into the
lamp-light of the cabin. Karain was speaking.
"I lived in the
forest.
"She came no more.
Never! Never once! I lived alone. She had forgotten. It was well. I did not
want her; I wanted no one. I found an abandoned house in an old clearing.
Nobody came near. Sometimes I heard in the distance the voices of people going
along a path. I slept; I rested; there was wild rice, water from a running
stream -- and peace! Every night I sat alone by my small fire before the hut.
Many nights passed over my head.
"Then, one
evening, as I sat by my fire after having eaten, I looked down on the ground
and began to remember my wanderings. I lifted my head. I had heard no sound, no
rustle, no footsteps -- but I lifted my head. A man was coming towards me
across the small clearing. I waited. He came up without a greeting and squatted
down into the firelight. Then he turned his face to me. It was Matara. He
stared at me fiercely with his big sunken eyes. The night was cold; the heat
died suddenly out of the fire, and he stared at me. I rose and went away from
there, leaving him by the fire that had no heat.
"I walked all that
night, all next day, and in the evening made up a big blaze and sat down -- to
wait for him. He had not come into the light. I heard him in the bushes here
and there, whispering, whispering. I understood at last -- I had heard the
words before, 'You are my friend -- kill with a sure shot.'
"I bore it as long
as I could -- then leaped away, as on this very night I leaped from my stockade
and swam to you. I ran -- I ran crying like a child left alone and far from the
houses. He ran by my side, without footsteps, whispering, whispering --
invisible and heard. I sought people -- I wanted men around me! Men who had not
died! And again we two wandered. I sought danger, violence, and death. I fought
in the Atjeh war, and a brave people wondered at the valiance of a stranger.
But we were two; he warded off the blows . . . Why? I wanted peace, not life.
And no one could see him; no one knew -- I dared tell no one. At times he would
leave me, but not for long; then he would return and whisper or stare. My heart
was torn with a strange fear, but could not die. Then I met an old man.
"You all knew him.
People here called him my sorcerer, my servant and sword-bearer; but to me he
was father, mother, protection, refuge and peace. When I met him he was
returning from a pilgrimage, and I heard him intoning the prayer of sunset. He
had gone to the holy place with his son, his son's wife, and a little child;
and on their return, by the favour of the Most High, they all died: the strong
man, the young mother, the little child -- they died; and the old man reached
his country alone. He was a pilgrim serene and pious, very wise and very
lonely. I told him all. For a time we lived together. He said over me words of
compassion, of wisdom, of prayer. He warded from me the shade of the dead. I
begged him for a charm that would make me safe. For a long time he refused; but
at last, with a sigh and a smile, he gave me one. Doubtless he could command a
spirit stronger than the unrest of my dead friend, and again I had peace; but I
had become restless, and a lover of turmoil and danger. The old man never left
me. We travelled together. We were welcomed by the great; his wisdom and my
courage are remembered where your strength, O white men, is forgotten! We served
the Sultan of Sula. We fought the Spaniards. There were victories, hopes,
defeats, sorrow, blood, women's tears . . . What for? . . . We fled. We
collected wanderers of a warlike race and came here to fight again. The rest
you know. I am the ruler of a conquered land, a lover of war and danger, a
fighter and a plotter. But the old man has died, and I am again the slave of
the dead. He is not here now to drive away the reproachful shade -- to silence
the lifeless voice! The power of his charm has died with him. And I know fear;
and I hear the whisper, 'Kill! kill! kill!' . . . Have I not killed enough? . .
."
For the first time that
night a sudden convulsion of madness and rage passed over his face. His
wavering glances darted here and there like scared birds in a thunderstorm. He
jumped up, shouting --
"By the spirits
that drink blood: by the spirits that cry in the night: by all the spirits of
fury, misfortune, and death, I swear -- some day I will strike into every heart
I meet -- I . . ."
He looked so dangerous
that we all three leaped to our feet, and Hollis, with the back of his hand,
sent the kriss flying off the table. I believe we shouted together. It was a
short scare, and the next moment he was again composed in his chair, with three
white men standing over him in rather foolish attitudes. We felt a little
ashamed of ourselves. Jackson picked up the kriss, and, after an inquiring
glance at me, gave it to him. He received it with a stately inclination of the
head and stuck it in the twist of his sarong, with punctilious care to give his
weapon a pacific position. Then he looked up at us with an austere smile. We
were abashed and reproved. Hollis sat sideways on the table and, holding his
chin in his hand, scrutinized him in pensive silence. I said --
"You must abide
with your people. They need you. And there is forgetfulness in life. Even the
dead cease to speak in time."
"Am I a woman, to
forget long years before an eyelid has had the time to beat twice?" he
exclaimed, with bitter resentment. He startled me. It was amazing. To him his
life -- that cruel mirage of love and peace -- seemed as real, as undeniable,
as theirs would be to any saint, philosopher, or fool of us all. Hollis
muttered --
"You won't soothe
him with your platitudes."
Karain spoke to me.
"You know us. You
have lived with us. Why? -- we cannot know; but you understand our sorrows and
our thoughts. You have lived with my people, and you understand our desires and
our fears. With you I will go. To your land -- to your people. To your people,
who live in unbelief; to whom day is day, and night is night -- nothing more,
because you understand all things seen, and despise all else! To your land of
unbelief, where the dead do not speak, where every man is wise, and alone --
and at peace!"
"Capital
description," murmured Hollis, with the flicker of a smile.
Karain hung his head.
"I can toil, and
fight -- and be faithful," he whispered, in a weary tone, "but I
cannot go back to him who waits for me on the shore. No! Take me with you . . .
Or else give me some of your strength -- of your unbelief . . . A charm! . .
."
He seemed utterly
exhausted.
"Yes, take him
home," said Hollis, very low, as if debating with himself. "That
would be one way. The ghosts there are in society, and talk affably to ladies
and gentlemen, but would scorn a naked human being -- like our princely friend.
. . . Naked . . . Flayed! I should say. I am sorry for him. Impossible -- of
course. The end of all this shall be," he went on, looking up at us --
"the end of this shall be, that some day he will run amuck amongst his
faithful subjects and send ad patres ever so many of them before they make up
their minds to the disloyalty of knocking him on the head."
I nodded. I thought it
more than probable that such would be the end of Karain. It was evident that he
had been hunted by his thought along the very limit of human endurance, and
very little more pressing was needed to make him swerve over into the form of
madness peculiar to his race. The respite he had during the old man's life made
the return of the torment unbearable. That much was clear.
He lifted his head
suddenly; we had imagined for a moment that he had been dozing.
"Give me your
protection -- or your strength!" he cried. "A charm . . . a
weapon!"
Again his chin fell on
his breast. We looked at him, then looked at one another with suspicious awe in
our eyes, like men who come unexpectedly upon the scene of some mysterious
disaster. He had given himself up to us; he had thrust into our hands his
errors and his torment, his life and his peace; and we did not know what to do
with that problem from the outer darkness. We three white men, looking at the
Malay, could not find one word to the purpose amongst us -- if indeed there
existed a word that could solve that problem. We pondered, and our hearts sank.
We felt as though we three had been called to the very gate of Infernal Regions
to judge, to decide the fate of a wanderer coming suddenly from a world of
sunshine and illusions.
"By Jove, he seems
to have a great idea of our power," whispered Hollis, hopelessly. And then
again there was a silence, the feeble plash of water, the steady tick of
chronometers. Jackson, with bare arms crossed, leaned his shoulders against the
bulkhead of the cabin. He was bending his head under the deck beam; his fair
beard spread out magnificently over his chest; he looked colossal, ineffectual,
and mild. There was something lugubrious in the aspect of the cabin; the air in
it seemed to become slowly charged with the cruel chill of helplessness, with
the pitiless anger of egoism against the incomprehensible form of an intruding
pain. We had no idea what to do; we began to resent bitterly the hard necessity
to get rid of him.
Hollis mused, muttered
suddenly with a short laugh, "Strength . . . Protection . . . Charm."
He slipped off the table and left the cuddy without a look at us. It seemed a
base desertion. Jackson and I exchanged indignant glances. We could hear him
rummaging in his pigeon-hole of a cabin. Was the fellow actually going to bed?
Karain sighed. It was intolerable!
Then Hollis reappeared,
holding in both hands a small leather box. He put it down gently on the table
and looked at us with a queer gasp, we thought, as though he had from some
cause become speechless for a moment, or were ethically uncertain about
producing that box. But in an instant the insolent and unerring wisdom of his
youth gave him the needed courage. He said, as he unlocked the box with a very
small key, "Look as solemn as you can, you fellows."
Probably we looked only
surprised and stupid, for he glanced over his shoulder, and said angrily --
"This is no play;
I am going to do something for him. Look serious. Confound it! . . . Can't you
lie a little . . . for a friend!"
Karain seemed to take
no notice of us, but when Hollis threw open the lid of the box his eyes flew to
it -- and so did ours. The quilted crimson satin of the inside put a violent
patch of colour into the sombre atmosphere; it was something positive to look
at -- it was fascinating.
HOLLIS looked smiling
into the box. He had lately made a dash home through the Canal. He had been
away six months, and only joined us again just in time for this last trip. We
had never seen the box before. His hands hovered above it; and he talked to us
ironically, but his face became as grave as though he were pronouncing a
powerful incantation over the things inside.
"Every one of
us," he said, with pauses that somehow were more offensive than his words
-- "every one of us, you'll admit, has been haunted by some woman . . .
And . . . as to friends . . . dropped by the way . . . Well! . . . ask
yourselves . . ."
He paused. Karain
stared. A deep rumble was heard high up under the deck. Jackson spoke seriously
--
"Don't be so
beastly cynical."
"Ah! You are
without guile," said Hollis, sadly. "You will learn . . . Meantime
this Malay has been our friend . . ."
He repeated several
times thoughtfully, "Friend . . . Malay. Friend, Malay," as though
weighing the words against one another, then went on more briskly --
"A good fellow --
a gentleman in his way. We can't, so to speak, turn our backs on his confidence
and belief in us. Those Malays are easily impressed -- all nerves, you know --
therefore . . ."
He turned to me
sharply.
"You know him
best," he said, in a practical tone. "Do you think he is fanatical --
I mean very strict in his faith?"
I stammered in profound
amazement that "I did not think so."
"It's on account
of its being a likeness -- an engraved image," muttered Hollis,
enigmatically, turning to the box. He plunged his fingers into it. Karain's
lips were parted and his eyes shone. We looked into the box.
There were there a
couple of reels of cotton, a packet of needles, a bit of silk ribbon, dark
blue; a cabinet photograph, at which Hollis stole a glance before laying it on
the table face downwards. A girl's portrait, I could see. There were, amongst a
lot of various small objects, a bunch of flowers, a narrow white glove with
many buttons, a slim packet of letters carefully tied up. Amulets of white men!
Charms and talismans! Charms that keep them straight, that drive them crooked,
that have the power to make a young man sigh, an old man smile. Potent things
that procure dreams of joy, thoughts of regret; that soften hard hearts, and
can temper a soft one to the hardness of steel. Gifts of heaven -- things of
earth . . .
Hollis rummaged in the
box.
And it seemed to me,
during that moment of waiting, that the cabin of the schooner was becoming
filled with a stir invisible and living as of subtle breaths. All the ghosts
driven out of the unbelieving West by men who pretend to be wise and alone and
at peace -- all the homeless ghosts of an unbelieving world -- appeared
suddenly round the figure of Hollis bending over the box; all the exiled and
charming shades of loved women; all the beautiful and tender ghosts of ideals,
remembered, forgotten, cherished, execrated; all the cast-out and reproachful
ghosts of friends admired, trusted, traduced, betrayed, left dead by the way --
they all seemed to come from the inhospitable regions of the earth to crowd
into the gloomy cabin, as though it had been a refuge and, in all the
unbelieving world, the only place of avenging belief. . . . It lasted a second
-- all disappeared. Hollis was facing us alone with something small that
glittered between his fingers. It looked like a coin.
"Ah! here it
is," he said.
He held it up. It was a
sixpence -- a Jubilee sixpence. It was gilt; it had a hole punched near the
rim. Hollis looked towards Karain.
"A charm for our
friend," he said to us. "The thing itself is of great power -- money,
you know -- and his imagination is struck. A loyal vagabond; if only his
puritanism doesn't shy at a likeness . . ."
We said nothing. We did
not know whether to be scandalized, amused, or relieved. Hollis advanced
towards Karain, who stood up as if startled, and then, holding the coin up,
spoke in Malay.
"This is the image
of the Great Queen, and the most powerful thing the white men know," he
said, solemnly.
Karain covered the
handle of his kriss in sign of respect, and stared at the crowned head.
"The Invincible,
the Pious," he muttered.
"She is more
powerful than Suleiman the Wise, who commanded the genii, as you know,"
said Hollis, gravely. "I shall give this to you."
He held the sixpence in
the palm of his hand, and looking at it thoughtfully, spoke to us in English.
"She commands a
spirit, too -- the spirit of her nation; a masterful, conscientious,
unscrupulous, unconquerable devil . . . that does a lot of good -- incidentally
. . . a lot of good . . . at times -- and wouldn't stand any fuss from the best
ghost out for such a little thing as our friend's shot. Don't look
thunderstruck, you fellows. Help me to make him believe -- everything's in
that."
"His people will
be shocked," I murmured.
Hollis looked fixedly
at Karain, who was the incarnation of the very essence of still excitement. He
stood rigid, with head thrown back; his eyes rolled wildly, flashing; the
dilated nostrils quivered.
"Hang it
all!" said Hollis at last, "he is a good fellow. I'll give him
something that I shall really miss."
He took the ribbon out
of the box, smiled at it scornfully, then with a pair of scissors cut out a
piece from the palm of the glove.
"I shall make him
a thing like those Italian peasants wear, you know."
He sewed the coin in
the delicate leather, sewed the leather to the ribbon, tied the ends together.
He worked with haste. Karain watched his fingers all the time.
"Now then,"
he said -- then stepped up to Karain. They looked close into one another's
eyes. Those of Karain stared in a lost glance, but Hollis's seemed to grow
darker and looked out masterful and compelling. They were in violent contrast
together -- one motionless and the colour of bronze, the other dazzling white
and lifting his arms, where the powerful muscles rolled slightly under a skin
that gleamed like satin. Jackson moved near with the air of a man closing up to
a chum in a tight place. I said impressively, pointing to Hollis --
"He is young, but
he is wise. Believe him!"
Karain bent his head:
Hollis threw lightly over it the dark-blue ribbon and stepped back.
"Forget, and be at
peace!" I cried.
Karain seemed to wake
up from a dream. He said, "Ha!" shook himself as if throwing off a
burden. He looked round with assurance. Someone on deck dragged off the
skylight cover, and a flood of light fell into the cabin. It was morning
already.
"Time to go on
deck," said Jackson.
Hollis put on a coat,
and we went up, Karain leading.
The sun had risen
beyond the hills, and their long shadows stretched far over the bay in the
pearly light. The air was clear, stainless, and cool. I pointed at the curved
line of yellow sands.
"He is not
there," I said, emphatically, to Karain. "He waits no more. He has
departed forever."
A shaft of bright hot
rays darted into the bay between the summits of two hills, and the water all round
broke out as if by magic into a dazzling sparkle.
"No! He is not
there waiting," said Karain, after a long look over the beach. "I do
not hear him," he went on, slowly. "No!"
He turned to us.
"He has departed
again -- forever!" he cried.
We assented vigorously,
repeatedly, and without compunction. The great thing was to impress him
powerfully; to suggest absolute safety -- the end of all trouble. We did our
best; and I hope we affirmed our faith in the power of Hollis's charm
efficiently enough to put the matter beyond the shadow of a doubt. Our voices
rang around him joyously in the still air, and above his head the sky,
pellucid, pure, stainless, arched its tender blue from shore to shore and over
the bay, as if to envelop the water, the earth, and the man in the caress of
its light.
The anchor was up, the
sails hung still, and half-a-dozen big boats were seen sweeping over the bay to
give us a tow out. The paddlers in the first one that came alongside lifted
their heads and saw their ruler standing amongst us. A low murmur of surprise
arose -- then a shout of greeting.
He left us, and seemed
straightway to step into the glorious splendour of his stage, to wrap himself
in the illusion of unavoidable success. For a moment he stood erect, one foot
over the gangway, one hand on the hilt of his kriss, in a martial pose; and,
relieved from the fear of outer darkness, he held his head high, he swept a
serene look over his conquered foothold on the earth. The boats far off took up
the cry of greeting; a great clamour rolled on the water; the hills echoed it,
and seemed to toss back at him the words invoking long life and victories.
He descended into a
canoe, and as soon as he was clear of the side we gave him three cheers. They
sounded faint and orderly after the wild tumult of his loyal subjects, but it
was the best we could do. He stood up in the boat, lifted up both his arms,
then pointed to the infallible charm. We cheered again; and the Malays in the
boats stared -- very much puzzled and impressed. I wondered what they thought;
what he thought; . . . what the reader thinks?
We towed out slowly. We
saw him land and watch us from the beach. A figure approached him humbly but
openly -- not at all like a ghost with a grievance. We could see other men
running towards him. Perhaps he had been missed? At any rate there was a great
stir. A group formed itself rapidly near him, and he walked along the sands,
followed by a growing cortége and kept nearly abreast of the schooner. With our
glasses we could see the blue ribbon on his neck and a patch of white on his
brown chest. The bay was waking up. The smokes of morning fires stood in faint
spirals higher than the heads of palms; people moved between the houses; a herd
of buffaloes galloped clumsily across a green slope; the slender figures of
boys brandishing sticks appeared black and leaping in the long grass; a
coloured line of women, with water bamboos on their heads, moved swaying
through a thin grove of fruit-trees. Karain stopped in the midst of his men and
waved his hand; then, detaching himself from the splendid group, walked alone
to the water's edge and waved his hand again. The schooner passed out to sea
between the steep headlands that shut in the bay, and at the same instant
Karain passed out of our life forever.
But the memory remains.
Some years afterwards I met Jackson, in the Strand. He was magnificent as ever.
His head was high above the crowd. His beard was gold, his face red, his eyes
blue; he had a wide-brimmed gray hat and no collar or waistcoat; he was
inspiring; he had just come home -- had landed that very day! Our meeting
caused an eddy in the current of humanity. Hurried people would run against us,
then walk round us, and turn back to look at that giant. We tried to compress
seven years of life into seven exclamations; then, suddenly appeased, walked
sedately along, giving one another the news of yesterday. Jackson gazed about
him, like a man who looks for landmarks, then stopped before Bland's window. He
always had a passion for firearms; so he stopped short and contemplated the row
of weapons, perfect and severe, drawn up in a line behind the black-framed
panes. I stood by his side. Suddenly he said --
"Do you remember
Karain?"
I nodded.
"The sight of all
this made me think of him," he went on, with his face near the glass . . .
and I could see another man, powerful and bearded, peering at him intently from
amongst the dark and polished tubes that can cure so many illusions. "Yes;
it made me think of him," he continued, slowly. "I saw a paper this
morning; they are fighting over there again. He's sure to be in it. He will
make it hot for the caballeros. Well, good luck to him, poor devil! He was
perfectly stunning."
We walked on.
"I wonder whether
the charm worked -- you remember Hollis's charm, of course. If it did . . .
Never was a sixpence wasted to better advantage! Poor devil! I wonder whether
he got rid of that friend of his. Hope so. . . . Do you know, I sometimes think
that --"
I stood still and
looked at him.
"Yes . . . I mean,
whether the thing was so, you know . . . whether it really happened to him. . .
. What do you think?"
"My dear
chap," I cried, "you have been too long away from home. What a
question to ask! Only look at all this."
A watery gleam of
sunshine flashed from the west and went out between two long lines of walls;
and then the broken confusion of roofs, the chimney-stacks, the gold letters
sprawling over the fronts of houses, the sombre polish of windows, stood
resigned and sullen under the falling gloom. The whole length of the street,
deep as a well and narrow like a corridor, was full of a sombre and ceaseless
stir. Our ears were filled by a headlong shuffle and beat of rapid footsteps
and by an underlying rumour -- a rumour vast, faint, pulsating, as of panting
breaths, of beating hearts, of gasping voices. Innumerable eyes stared straight
in front, feet moved hurriedly, blank faces flowed, arms swung. Over all, a
narrow ragged strip of smoky sky wound about between the high roofs, extended
and motionless, like a soiled streamer flying above the rout of a mob.
"Ye-e-e-s,"
said Jackson, meditatively.
The big wheels of
hansoms turned slowly along the edge of side-walks; a pale-faced youth
strolled, overcome by weariness, by the side of his stick and with the tails of
his overcoat flapping gently near his heels; horses stepped gingerly on the
greasy pavement, tossing their heads; two young girls passed by, talking
vivaciously and with shining eyes; a fine old fellow strutted, red-faced,
stroking a white moustache; and a line of yellow boards with blue letters on
them approached us slowly, tossing on high behind one another like some queer
wreckage adrift upon a river of hats.
"Ye-e-es,"
repeated Jackson. His clear blue eyes looked about, contemptuous, amused and
hard, like the eyes of a boy. A clumsy string of red, yellow, and green
omnibuses rolled swaying, monstrous and gaudy; two shabby children ran across
the road; a knot of dirty men with red neckerchiefs round their bare throats
lurched along, discussing filthily; a ragged old man with a face of despair
yelled horribly in the mud the name of a paper; while far off, amongst the
tossing heads of horses, the dull flash of harnesses, the jumble of lustrous
panels and roofs of carriages, we could see a policeman, helmeted and dark,
stretching out a rigid arm at the crossing of the streets.
"Yes; I see
it," said Jackson, slowly. "It is there; it pants, it runs, it rolls;
it is strong and alive; it would smash you if you didn't look out; but I'll be
hanged if it is yet as real to me as . . . as the other thing . . . say,
Karain's story."
I think that,
decidedly, he had been too long away from home.
WE WERE driving along
the road from Treguier to Kervanda. We passed at a smart trot between the
hedges topping an earth wall on each side of the road; then at the foot of the
steep ascent before Ploumar the horse dropped into a walk, and the driver
jumped down heavily from the box. He flicked his whip and climbed the incline,
stepping clumsily uphill by the side of the carriage, one hand on the
footboard, his eyes on the ground. After a while he lifted his head, pointed up
the road with the end of the whip, and said --
"The idiot!"
The sun was shining
violently upon the undulating surface of the land. The rises were topped by
clumps of meagre trees, with their branches showing high on the sky as if they
had been perched upon stilts. The small fields, cut up by hedges and stone
walls that zig-zagged over the slopes, lay in rectangular patches of vivid
greens and yellows, resembling the unskilful daubs of a naïve picture. And the
landscape was divided in two by the white streak of a road stretching in long
loops far away, like a river of dust crawling out of the hills on its way to
the sea.
"Here he is,"
said the driver, again.
In the long grass
bordering the road a face glided past the carriage at the level of the wheels
as we drove slowly by. The imbecile face was red, and the bullet head with close-cropped
hair seemed to lie alone, its chin in the dust. The body was lost in the bushes
growing thick along the bottom of the deep ditch.
It was a boy's face. He
might have been sixteen, judging from the size -- perhaps less, perhaps more.
Such creatures are forgotten by time, and live untouched by years till death
gathers them up into its compassionate bosom; the faithful death that never
forgets in the press of work the most insignificant of its children.
"Ah! there's
another," said the man, with a certain satisfaction in his tone, as if he
had caught sight of something expected.
There was another. That
one stood nearly in the middle of the road in the blaze of sunshine at the end
of his own short shadow. And he stood with hands pushed into the opposite
sleeves of his long coat, his head sunk between the shoulders, all hunched up
in the flood of heat. From a distance he had the aspect of one suffering from
intense cold.
"Those are
twins," explained the driver.
The idiot shuffled two
paces out of the way and looked at us over his shoulder when we brushed past
him. The glance was unseeing and staring, a fascinated glance; but he did not
turn to look after us. Probably the image passed before the eyes without
leaving any trace on the misshapen brain of the creature. When we had topped
the ascent I looked over the hood. He stood in the road just where we had left
him.
The driver clambered
into his seat, clicked his tongue, and we went downhill. The brake squeaked
horribly from time to time. At the foot he eased off the noisy mechanism and
said, turning half round on his box --
"We shall see some
more of them by-and-by."
"More idiots? How
many of them are there, then?" I asked.
"There's four of
them -- children of a farmer near Ploumar here. . . . The parents are dead
now," he added, after a while. "The grandmother lives on the farm. In
the daytime they knock about on this road, and they come home at dusk along with
the cattle. . . . It's a good farm."
We saw the other two: a
boy and a girl, as the driver said. They were dressed exactly alike, in
shapeless garments with petticoat-like skirts. The imperfect thing that lived
within them moved those beings to howl at us from the top of the bank, where
they sprawled amongst the tough stalks of furze. Their cropped black heads
stuck out from the bright yellow wall of countless small blossoms. The faces
were purple with the strain of yelling; the voices sounded blank and cracked
like a mechanical imitation of old people's voices; and suddenly ceased when we
turned into a lane.
I saw them many times
in my wandering about the country. They lived on that road, drifting along its
length here and there, according to the inexplicable impulses of their
monstrous darkness. They were an offence to the sunshine, a reproach to empty
heaven, a blight on the concentrated and purposeful vigour of the wild
landscape. In time the story of their parents shaped itself before me out of
the listless answers to my questions, out of the indifferent words heard in
wayside inns or on the very road those idiots haunted. Some of it was told by
an emaciated and sceptical old fellow with a tremendous whip, while we trudged
together over the sands by the side of a two-wheeled cart loaded with dripping
seaweed. Then at other times other people confirmed and completed the story:
till it stood at last before me, a tale formidable and simple, as they always
are, those disclosures of obscure trials endured by ignorant hearts.
When he returned from
his military service Jean-Pierre Bacadou found the old people very much aged.
He remarked with pain that the work of the farm was not satisfactorily done.
The father had not the energy of old days. The hands did not feel over them the
eye of the master. Jean-Pierre noted with sorrow that the heap of manure in the
courtyard before the only entrance to the house was not so large as it should
have been. The fences were out of repair, and the cattle suffered from neglect.
At home the mother was practically bedridden, and the girls chattered loudly in
the big kitchen, unrebuked, from morning to night. He said to himself: "We
must change all this." He talked the matter over with his father one
evening when the rays of the setting sun entering the yard between the
outhouses ruled the heavy shadows with luminous streaks. Over the manure heap
floated a mist, opal-tinted and odorous, and the marauding hens would stop in
their scratching to examine with a sudden glance of their round eye the two
men, both lean and tall, talking in hoarse tones. The old man, all twisted with
rheumatism and bowed with years of work, the younger bony and straight, spoke
without gestures in the indifferent manner of peasants, grave and slow. But
before the sun had set the father had submitted to the sensible arguments of
the son. "It is not for me that I am speaking," insisted Jean-Pierre.
"It is for the land. It's a pity to see it badly used. I am not impatient
for myself." The old fellow nodded over his stick. "I dare say; I
dare say," he muttered. "You may be right. Do what you like. It's the
mother that will be pleased."
The mother was pleased
with her daughter-in-law. Jean-Pierre brought the two-wheeled spring-cart with
a rush into the yard. The gray horse galloped clumsily, and the bride and
bridegroom, sitting side by side, were jerked backwards and forwards by the up
and down motion of the shafts, in a manner regular and brusque. On the road the
distanced wedding guests straggled in pairs and groups. The men advanced with
heavy steps, swinging their idle arms. They were clad in town clothes; jackets
cut with clumsy smartness, hard black hats, immense boots, polished highly.
Their women all in simple black, with white caps and shawls of faded tints
folded triangularly on the back, strolled lightly by their side. In front the
violin sang a strident tune, and the biniou snored and hummed, while the player
capered solemnly, lifting high his heavy clogs. The sombre procession drifted
in and out of the narrow lanes, through sunshine and through shade, between
fields and hedgerows, scaring the little birds that darted away in troops right
and left. In the yard of Bacadou's farm the dark ribbon wound itself up into a
mass of men and women pushing at the door with cries and greetings. The wedding
dinner was remembered for months. It was a splendid feast in the orchard.
Farmers of considerable means and excellent repute were to be found sleeping in
ditches, all along the road to Treguier, even as late as the afternoon of the
next day. All the countryside participated in the happiness of Jean-Pierre. He
remained sober, and, together with his quiet wife, kept out of the way, letting
father and mother reap their due of honour and thanks. But the next day he took
hold strongly, and the old folks felt a shadow -- precursor of the grave --
fall upon them finally. The world is to the young.
When the twins were
born there was plenty of room in the house, for the mother of Jean-Pierre had
gone away to dwell under a heavy stone in the cemetery of Ploumar. On that day,
for the first time since his son's marriage, the elder Bacadou, neglected by
the cackling lot of strange women who thronged the kitchen, left in the morning
his seat under the mantel of the fireplace, and went into the empty cow-house,
shaking his white locks dismally. Grandsons were all very well, but he wanted
his soup at midday. When shown the babies, he stared at them with a fixed gaze,
and muttered something like: "It's too much." Whether he meant too
much happiness, or simply commented upon the number of his descendants, it is
impossible to say. He looked offended -- as far as his old wooden face could
express anything; and for days afterwards could be seen, almost any time of the
day, sitting at the gate, with his nose over his knees, a pipe between his
gums, and gathered up into a kind of raging concentrated sulkiness. Once he
spoke to his son, alluding to the newcomers with a groan: "They will
quarrel over the land." "Don't bother about that, father,"
answered Jean-Pierre, stolidly, and passed, bent double, towing a recalcitrant
cow over his shoulder.
He was happy, and so
was Susan, his wife. It was not an ethereal joy welcoming new souls to
struggle, perchance to victory. In fourteen years both boys would be a help;
and, later on, Jean-Pierre pictured two big sons striding over the land from
patch to patch, wringing tribute from the earth beloved and fruitful. Susan was
happy too, for she did not want to be spoken of as the unfortunate woman, and
now she had children no one could call her that. Both herself and her husband
had seen something of the larger world -- he during the time of his service;
while she had spent a year or so in Paris with a Breton family; but had been
too home-sick to remain longer away from the hilly and green country, set in a
barren circle of rocks and sands, where she had been born. She thought that one
of the boys ought perhaps to be a priest, but said nothing to her husband, who
was a republican, and hated the "crows," as he called the ministers
of religion. The christening was a splendid affair. All the commune came to it,
for the Bacadous were rich and influential, and, now and then, did not mind the
expense. The grandfather had a new coat.
Some months afterwards,
one evening when the kitchen had been swept, and the door locked, Jean-Pierre,
looking at the cot, asked his wife: "What's the matter with those
children?" And, as if these words, spoken calmly, had been the portent of
misfortune, she answered with a loud wail that must have been heard across the
yard in the pig-sty; for the pigs (the Bacadous had the finest pigs in the
country) stirred and grunted complainingly in the night. The husband went on
grinding his bread and butter slowly, gazing at the wall, the soup-plate smoking
under his chin. He had returned late from the market, where he had overheard
(not for the first time) whispers behind his back. He revolved the words in his
mind as he drove back. "Simple! Both of them. . . . Never any use! . . .
Well! May be, may be. One must see. Would ask his wife." This was her
answer. He felt like a blow on his chest, but said only: "Go, draw me some
cider. I am thirsty!"
She went out moaning,
an empty jug in her hand. Then he arose, took up the light, and moved slowly
towards the cradle. They slept. He looked at them sideways, finished his
mouthful there, went back heavily, and sat down before his plate. When his wife
returned he never looked up, but swallowed a couple of spoonfuls noisily, and
remarked, in a dull manner --
"When they sleep
they are like other people's children."
She sat down suddenly
on a stool near by, and shook with a silent tempest of sobs, unable to speak.
He finished his meal, and remained idly thrown back in his chair, his eyes lost
amongst the black rafters of the ceiling. Before him the tallow candle flared
red and straight, sending up a slender thread of smoke. The light lay on the
rough, sunburnt skin of his throat; the sunk cheeks were like patches of
darkness, and his aspect was mournfully stolid, as if he had ruminated with
difficulty endless ideas. Then he said, deliberately --
"We must see . . .
consult people. Don't cry. . . . They won't all be like that . . . surely! We
must sleep now."
After the third child,
also a boy, was born, Jean-Pierre went about his work with tense hopefulness.
His lips seemed more narrow, more tightly compressed than before; as if for
fear of letting the earth he tilled hear the voice of hope that murmured within
his breast. He watched the child, stepping up to the cot with a heavy clang of
sabots on the stone floor, and glanced in, along his shoulder, with that
indifference which is like a deformity of peasant humanity. Like the earth they
master and serve, those men, slow of eye and speech, do not show the inner fire;
so that, at last, it becomes a question with them as with the earth, what there
is in the core: heat, violence, a force mysterious and terrible -- or nothing
but a clod, a mass fertile and inert, cold and unfeeling, ready to bear a crop
of plants that sustain life or give death.
The mother watched with
other eyes; listened with otherwise expectant ears. Under the high hanging
shelves supporting great sides of bacon overhead, her body was busy by the
great fireplace, attentive to the pot swinging on iron gallows, scrubbing the
long table where the field hands would sit down directly to their evening meal.
Her mind remained by the cradle, night and day on the watch, to hope and
suffer. That child, like the other two, never smiled, never stretched its hands
to her, never spoke; never had a glance of recognition for her in its big black
eyes, which could only stare fixedly at any glitter, but failed hopelessly to
follow the brilliance of a sun-ray slipping slowly along the floor. When the
men were at work she spent long days between her three idiot children and the
childish grandfather, who sat grim, angular, and immovable, with his feet near
the warm ashes of the fire. The feeble old fellow seemed to suspect that there
was something wrong with his grandsons. Only once, moved either by affection or
by the sense of proprieties, he attempted to nurse the youngest. He took the
boy up from the floor, clicked his tongue at him, and essayed a shaky gallop of
his bony knees. Then he looked closely with his misty eyes at the child's face
and deposited him down gently on the floor again. And he sat, his lean shanks
crossed, nodding at the steam escaping from the cooking-pot with a gaze senile
and worried.
Then mute affliction
dwelt in Bacadou's farmhouse, sharing the breath and the bread of its
inhabitants; and the priest of the Ploumar parish had great cause for
congratulation. He called upon the rich landowner, the Marquis de Chavanes, on
purpose to deliver himself with joyful unction of solemn platitudes about the inscrutable
ways of Providence. In the vast dimness of the curtained drawing-room, the
little man, resembling a black bolster, leaned towards a couch, his hat on his
knees, and gesticulated with a fat hand at the elongated, gracefully-flowing
lines of the clear Parisian toilette from which the half-amused, half-bored
marquise listened with gracious languor. He was exulting and humble, proud and
awed. The impossible had come to pass. Jean-Pierre Bacadou, the enraged
republican farmer, had been to mass last Sunday -- had proposed to entertain
the visiting priests at the next festival of Ploumar! It was a triumph for the
Church and for the good cause. "I thought I would come at once to tell
Monsieur le Marquis. I know how anxious he is for the welfare of our country,"
declared the priest, wiping his face. He was asked to stay to dinner.
The Chavanes returning
that evening, after seeing their guest to the main gate of the park, discussed
the matter while they strolled in the moonlight, trailing their long shadows up
the straight avenue of chestnuts. The marquise, a royalist of course, had been
mayor of the commune which includes Ploumar, the scattered hamlets of the
coast, and the stony islands that fringe the yellow flatness of the sands. He
had felt his position insecure, for there was a strong republican element in
that part of the country; but now the conversion of Jean-Pierre made him safe.
He was very pleased. "You have no idea how influential those people
are," he explained to his wife. "Now, I am sure, the next communal
election will go all right. I shall be re-elected." "Your ambition is
perfectly insatiable, Charles," exclaimed the marquise, gaily. "But,
ma chère amie," argued the husband, seriously, "it's most important
that the right man should be mayor this year, because of the elections to the
Chamber. If you think it amuses me . . ."
Jean-Pierre had
surrendered to his wife's mother. Madame Levaille was a woman of business,
known and respected within a radius of at least fifteen miles. Thick-set and
stout, she was seen about the country, on foot or in an acquaintance's cart,
perpetually moving, in spite of her fifty-eight years, in steady pursuit of
business. She had houses in all the hamlets, she worked quarries of granite,
she freighted coasters with stone -- even traded with the Channel Islands. She
was broad-cheeked, wide-eyed, persuasive in speech: carrying her point with the
placid and invincible obstinacy of an old woman who knows her own mind. She
very seldom slept for two nights together in the same house; and the wayside
inns were the best places to inquire in as to her whereabouts. She had either
passed, or was expected to pass there at six; or somebody, coming in, had seen
her in the morning, or expected to meet her that evening. After the inns that
command the roads, the churches were the buildings she frequented most. Men of
liberal opinions would induce small children to run into sacred edifices to see
whether Madame Levaille was there, and to tell her that so-and-so was in the
road waiting to speak to her about potatoes, or flour, or stones, or houses;
and she would curtail her devotions, come out blinking and crossing herself
into the sunshine; ready to discuss business matters in a calm, sensible way
across a table in the kitchen of the inn opposite. Latterly she had stayed for
a few days several times with her son-in-law, arguing against sorrow and
misfortune with composed face and gentle tones. Jean-Pierre felt the
convictions imbibed in the regiment torn out of his breast -- not by
arguments but by facts.
Striding over his fields he thought it over. There were three of them. Three!
All alike! Why? Such things did not happen to everybody -- to nobody he ever
heard of. One -- might pass. But three! All three. Forever useless, to be fed
while he lived and . . . What would become of the land when he died? This must
be seen to. He would sacrifice his convictions. One day he told his wife --
"See what your God
will do for us. Pay for some masses."
Susan embraced her man.
He stood unbending, then turned on his heels and went out. But afterwards, when
a black soutane darkened his doorway, he did not object; even offered some
cider himself to the priest. He listened to the talk meekly; went to mass
between the two women; accomplished what the priest called "his religious
duties" at Easter. That morning he felt like a man who had sold his soul.
In the afternoon he fought ferociously with an old friend and neighbour who had
remarked that the priests had the best of it and were now going to eat the
priest-eater. He came home dishevelled and bleeding, and happening to catch
sight of his children (they were kept generally out of the way), cursed and
swore incoherently, banging the table. Susan wept. Madame Levaille sat serenely
unmoved. She assured her daughter that "It will pass;" and taking up
her thick umbrella, departed in haste to see after a schooner she was going to
load with granite from her quarry.
A year or so afterwards
the girl was born. A girl. Jean-Pierre heard of it in the fields, and was so
upset by the news that he sat down on the boundary wall and remained there till
the evening, instead of going home as he was urged to do. A girl! He felt half
cheated. However, when he got home he was partly reconciled to his fate. One
could marry her to a good fellow -- not to a good for nothing, but to a fellow
with some understanding and a good pair of arms. Besides, the next may be a
boy, he thought. Of course they would be all right. His new credulity knew of
no doubt. The ill luck was broken. He spoke cheerily to his wife. She was also
hopeful. Three priests came to that christening, and Madame Levaille was
godmother. The child turned out an idiot too.
Then on market days
Jean-Pierre was seen bargaining bitterly, quarrelsome and greedy; then getting
drunk with taciturn earnestness; then driving home in the dusk at a rate fit
for a wedding, but with a face gloomy enough for a funeral. Sometimes he would
insist on his wife coming with him; and they would drive in the early morning,
shaking side by side on the narrow seat above the helpless pig, that, with tied
legs, grunted a melancholy sigh at every rut. The morning drives were silent;
but in the evening, coming home, Jean-Pierre, tipsy, was viciously muttering,
and growled at the confounded woman who could not rear children that were like
anybody else's. Susan, holding on against the erratic swayings of the cart,
pretended not to hear. Once, as they were driving through Ploumar, some obscure
and drunken impulse caused him to pull up sharply opposite the church. The moon
swam amongst light white clouds. The tombstones gleamed pale under the fretted
shadows of the trees in the churchyard. Even the village dogs slept. Only the
nightingales, awake, spun out the thrill of their song above the silence of
graves. Jean-Pierre said thickly to his wife --
"What do you think
is there?"
He pointed his whip at
the tower -- in which the big dial of the clock appeared high in the moonlight
like a pallid face without eyes -- and getting out carefully, fell down at once
by the wheel. He picked himself up and climbed one by one the few steps to the
iron gate of the churchyard. He put his face to the bars and called out
indistinctly --
"Hey there! Come
out!"
"Jean! Return!
Return!" entreated his wife in low tones.
He took no notice, and
seemed to wait there. The song of nightingales beat on all sides against the
high walls of the church, and flowed back between stone crosses and flat gray
slabs, engraved with words of hope and sorrow.
"Hey! Come
out!" shouted Jean-Pierre, loudly.
The nightingales ceased
to sing.
"Nobody?"
went on Jean-Pierre. "Nobody there. A swindle of the crows. That's what
this is. Nobody anywhere. I despise it. Allez! Houp!"
He shook the gate with
all his strength, and the iron bars rattled with a frightful clanging, like a
chain dragged over stone steps. A dog near by barked hurriedly. Jean-Pierre
staggered back, and after three successive dashes got into his cart. Susan sat very
quiet and still. He said to her with drunken severity --
"See? Nobody. I've
been made a fool! Malheur! Somebody will pay for it. The next one I see near
the house I will lay my whip on . . . on the black spine . . . I will. I don't
want him in there . . . he only helps the carrion crows to rob poor folk. I am
a man. . . . We will see if I can't have children like anybody else . . . now
you mind. . . . They won't be all . . . all . . . we see. . . ."
She burst out through
the fingers that hid her face --
"Don't say that,
Jean; don't say that, my man!"
He struck her a
swinging blow on the head with the back of his hand and knocked her into the
bottom of the cart, where she crouched, thrown about lamentably by every jolt.
He drove furiously, standing up, brandishing his whip, shaking the reins over
the gray horse that galloped ponderously, making the heavy harness leap upon
his broad quarters. The country rang clamorous in the night with the irritated
barking of farm dogs, that followed the rattle of wheels all along the road. A
couple of belated wayfarers had only just time to step into the ditch. At his
own gate he caught the post and was shot out of the cart head first. The horse
went on slowly to the door. At Susan's piercing cries the farm hands rushed
out. She thought him dead, but he was only sleeping where he fell, and cursed
his men, who hastened to him, for disturbing his slumbers.
Autumn came. The
clouded sky descended low upon the black contours of the hills; and the dead
leaves danced in spiral whirls under naked trees, till the wind, sighing
profoundly, laid them to rest in the hollows of bare valleys. And from morning
till night one could see all over the land black denuded boughs, the boughs
gnarled and twisted, as if contorted with pain, swaying sadly between the wet
clouds and the soaked earth. The clear and gentle streams of summer days rushed
discoloured and raging at the stones that barred the way to the sea, with the
fury of madness bent upon suicide. From horizon to horizon the great road to
the sands lay between the hills in a dull glitter of empty curves, resembling
an unnavigable river of mud.
Jean-Pierre went from
field to field, moving blurred and tall in the drizzle, or striding on the
crests of rises, lonely and high upon the gray curtain of drifting clouds, as
if he had been pacing along the very edge of the universe. He looked at the
black earth, at the earth mute and promising, at the mysterious earth doing its
work of life in death-like stillness under the veiled sorrow of the sky. And it
seemed to him that to a man worse than childless there was no promise in the
fertility of fields, that from him the earth escaped, defied him, frowned at
him like the clouds, sombre and hurried above his head. Having to face alone his
own fields, he felt the inferiority of man who passes away before the clod that
remains. Must he give up the hope of having by his side a son who would look at
the turned-up sods with a master's eye? A man that would think as he thought,
that would feel as he felt; a man who would be part of himself, and yet remain
to trample masterfully on that earth when he was gone? He thought of some
distant relations, and felt savage enough to curse them aloud. They! Never! He
turned homewards, going straight at the roof of his dwelling, visible between
the enlaced skeletons of trees. As he swung his legs over the stile a cawing
flock of birds settled slowly on the field; dropped down behind his back,
noiseless and fluttering, like flakes of soot.
That day Madame Levaille
had gone early in the afternoon to the house she had near Kervanion. She had to
pay some of the men who worked in her granite quarry there, and she went in
good time because her little house contained a shop where the workmen could
spend their wages without the trouble of going to town. The house stood alone
amongst rocks. A lane of mud and stones ended at the door. The sea-winds coming
ashore on Stonecutter's point, fresh from the fierce turmoil of the waves,
howled violently at the unmoved heaps of black boulders holding up steadily
short-armed, high crosses against the tremendous rush of the invisible. In the
sweep of gales the sheltered dwelling stood in a calm resonant and disquieting,
like the calm in the centre of a hurricane. On stormy nights, when the tide was
out, the bay of Fougère, fifty feet below the house, resembled an immense black
pit, from which ascended mutterings and sighs as if the sands down there had
been alive and complaining. At high tide the returning water assaulted the
ledges of rock in short rushes, ending in bursts of livid light and columns of
spray, that flew inland, stinging to death the grass of pastures.
The darkness came from
the hills, flowed over the coast, put out the red fires of sunset, and went on
to seaward pursuing the retiring tide. The wind dropped with the sun, leaving a
maddened sea and a devastated sky. The heavens above the house seemed to be
draped in black rags, held up here and there by pins of fire. Madame Levaille,
for this evening the servant of her own workmen, tried to induce them to
depart. "An old woman like me ought to be in bed at this late hour,"
she good-humouredly repeated. The quarrymen drank, asked for more. They shouted
over the table as if they had been talking across a field. At one end four of
them played cards, banging the wood with their hard knuckles, and swearing at
every lead. One sat with a lost gaze, humming a bar of some song, which he
repeated endlessly. Two others, in a corner, were quarrelling confidentially
and fiercely over some woman, looking close into one another's eyes as if they
had wanted to tear them out, but speaking in whispers that promised violence
and murder discreetly, in a venomous sibillation of subdued words. The
atmosphere in there was thick enough to slice with a knife. Three candles
burning about the long room glowed red and dull like sparks expiring in ashes.
The slight click of the
iron latch was at that late hour as unexpected and startling as a thunder-clap.
Madame Levaille put down a bottle she held above a liqueur glass; the players
turned their heads; the whispered quarrel ceased; only the singer, after
darting a glance at the door, went on humming with a stolid face. Susan
appeared in the doorway, stepped in, flung the door to, and put her back against
it, saying, half aloud --
"Mother!"
Madame Levaille, taking
up the bottle again, said calmly: "Here you are, my girl. What a state you
are in!" The neck of the bottle rang on the rim of the glass, for the old
woman was startled, and the idea that the farm had caught fire had entered her
head. She could think of no other cause for her daughter's appearance.
Susan, soaked and
muddy, stared the whole length of the room towards the men at the far end. Her
mother asked --
"What has
happened? God guard us from misfortune!"
Susan moved her lips.
No sound came. Madame Levaille stepped up to her daughter, took her by the arm,
looked into her face.
"In God's
name," she said, shakily, "what's the matter? You have been rolling
in mud. . . . Why did you come? . . . Where's Jean?"
The men had all got up
and approached slowly, staring with dull surprise. Madame Levaille jerked her
daughter away from the door, swung her round upon a seat close to the wall.
Then she turned fiercely to the men --
"Enough of this!
Out you go -- you others! I close."
One of them observed,
looking down at Susan collapsed on the seat: "She is -- one may say --
half dead."
Madame Levaille flung
the door open.
"Get out!
March!" she cried, shaking nervously.
They dropped out into
the night, laughing stupidly. Outside, the two Lotharios broke out into loud
shouts. The others tried to soothe them, all talking at once. The noise went
away up the lane with the men, who staggered together in a tight knot,
remonstrating with one another foolishly.
"Speak, Susan.
What is it? Speak!" entreated Madame Levaille, as soon as the door was
shut.
Susan pronounced some
incomprehensible words, glaring at the table. The old woman clapped her hands
above her head, let them drop, and stood looking at her daughter with
disconsolate eyes. Her husband had been "deranged in his head" for a
few years before he died, and now she began to suspect her daughter was going
mad. She asked, pressingly --
"Does Jean know
where you are? Where is Jean?"
"He knows . . . he
is dead."
"What!" cried
the old woman. She came up near, and peering at her daughter, repeated three
times: "What do you say? What do you say? What do you say?"
Susan sat dry-eyed and
stony before Madame Levaille, who contemplated her, feeling a strange sense of
inexplicable horror creep into the silence of the house. She had hardly
realised the news, further than to understand that she had been brought in one
short moment face to face with something unexpected and final. It did not even
occur to her to ask for any explanation. She thought: accident -- terrible
accident -- blood to the head -- fell down a trap door in the loft. . . . She
remained there, distracted and mute, blinking her old eyes.
Suddenly, Susan said --
"I have killed
him."
For a moment the mother
stood still, almost unbreathing, but with composed face. The next second she
burst out into a shout --
"You miserable
madwoman . . . they will cut your neck. . . ."
She fancied the
gendarmes entering the house, saying to her: "We want your daughter; give
her up:" the gendarmes with the severe, hard faces of men on duty. She
knew the brigadier well -- an old friend, familiar and respectful, saying heartily,
"To your good health, Madame!" before lifting to his lips the small
glass of cognac -- out of the special bottle she kept for friends. And now! . .
. She was losing her head. She rushed here and there, as if looking for
something urgently needed -- gave that up, stood stock still in the middle of
the room, and screamed at her daughter --
"Why? Say! Say!
Why?"
The other seemed to
leap out of her strange apathy.
"Do you think I am
made of stone?" she shouted back, striding towards her mother.
"No! It's
impossible. . . ." said Madame Levaille, in a convinced tone.
"You go and see,
mother," retorted Susan, looking at her with blazing eyes. "There's
no money in heaven -- no justice. No! . . . I did not know. . . . Do you think
I have no heart? Do you think I have never heard people jeering at me, pitying
me, wondering at me? Do you know how some of them were calling me? The mother
of idiots -- that was my nickname! And my children never would know me, never
speak to me. They would know nothing; neither men -- nor God. Haven't I prayed!
But the Mother of God herself would not hear me. A mother! . . . Who is
accursed -- I, or the man who is dead? Eh? Tell me. I took care of myself. Do
you think I would defy the anger of God and have my house full of those things
-- that are worse than animals who know the hand that feeds them? Who
blasphemed in the night at the very church door? Was it I? . . . I only wept
and prayed for mercy . . . and I feel the curse at every moment of the day -- I
see it round me from morning to night . . . I've got to keep them alive -- to
take care of my misfortune and shame. And he would come. I begged him and
Heaven for mercy. . . . No! . . . Then we shall see. . . . He came this
evening. I thought to myself: 'Ah! again!' . . . I had my long scissors. I
heard him shouting . . . I saw him near. . . . I must -- must I? . . . Then
take! . . . And I struck him in the throat above the breastbone. . . . I never
heard him even sigh. . . . I left him standing. . . . It was a minute ago. How
did I come here?"
Madame Levaille
shivered. A wave of cold ran down her back, down her fat arms under her tight
sleeves, made her stamp gently where she stood. Quivers ran over the broad
cheeks, across the thin lips, ran amongst the wrinkles at the corners of her
steady old eyes. She stammered --
"You wicked woman
-- you disgrace me. But there! You always resembled your father. What do you
think will become of you . . . in the other world? In this . . . Oh
misery!"
She was very hot now.
She felt burning inside. She wrung her perspiring hands -- and suddenly,
starting in great haste, began to look for her big shawl and umbrella,
feverishly, never once glancing at her daughter, who stood in the middle of the
room following her with a gaze distracted and cold.
"Nothing worse
than in this," said Susan.
Her mother, umbrella in
hand and trailing the shawl over the floor, groaned profoundly.
"I must go to the
priest," she burst out passionately. "I do not know whether you even
speak the truth! You are a horrible woman. They will find you anywhere. You may
stay here -- or go. There is no room for you in this world."
Ready now to depart,
she yet wandered aimlessly about the room, putting the bottles on the shelf,
trying to fit with trembling hands the covers on cardboard boxes. Whenever the
real sense of what she had heard emerged for a second from the haze of her
thoughts she would fancy that something had exploded in her brain without,
unfortunately, bursting her head to pieces -- which would have been a relief.
She blew the candles out one by one without knowing it, and was horribly
startled by the darkness. She fell on a bench and began to whimper. After a
while she ceased, and sat listening to the breathing of her daughter, whom she
could hardly see, still and upright, giving no other sign of life. She was
becoming old rapidly at last, during those minutes. She spoke in tones
unsteady, cut about by the rattle of teeth, like one shaken by a deadly cold
fit of ague.
"I wish you had
died little. I will never dare to show my old head in the sunshine again. There
are worse misfortunes than idiot children. I wish you had been born to me
simple -- like your own. . . ."
She saw the figure of
her daughter pass before the faint and livid clearness of a window. Then it
appeared in the doorway for a second, and the door swung to with a clang.
Madame Levaille, as if awakened by the noise from a long nightmare, rushed out.
"Susan!" she
shouted from the doorstep.
She heard a stone roll
a long time down the declivity of the rocky beach above the sands. She stepped
forward cautiously, one hand on the wall of the house, and peered down into the
smooth darkness of the empty bay. Once again she cried --
"Susan! You will
kill yourself there."
The stone had taken its
last leap in the dark, and she heard nothing now. A sudden thought seemed to
strangle her, and she called no more. She turned her back upon the black
silence of the pit and went up the lane towards Ploumar, stumbling along with
sombre determination, as if she had started on a desperate journey that would
last, perhaps, to the end of her life. A sullen and periodic clamour of waves
rolling over reefs followed her far inland between the high hedges sheltering
the gloomy solitude of the fields.
Susan had run out,
swerving sharp to the left at the door, and on the edge of the slope crouched
down behind a boulder. A dislodged stone went on downwards, rattling as it
leaped. When Madame Levaille called out, Susan could have, by stretching her
hand, touched her mother's skirt, had she had the courage to move a limb. She
saw the old woman go away, and she remained still, closing her eyes and
pressing her side to the hard and rugged surface of the rock. After a while a
familiar face with fixed eyes and an open mouth became visible in the intense
obscurity amongst the boulders. She uttered a low cry and stood up. The face
vanished, leaving her to gasp and shiver alone in the wilderness of stone
heaps. But as soon as she had crouched down again to rest, with her head
against the rock, the face returned, came very near, appeared eager to finish
the speech that had been cut short by death, only a moment ago. She scrambled
quickly to her feet and said: "Go away, or I will do it again." The
thing wavered, swung to the right, to the left. She moved this way and that,
stepped back, fancied herself screaming at it, and was appalled by the unbroken
stillness of the night. She tottered on the brink, felt the steep declivity
under her feet, and rushed down blindly to save herself from a headlong fall.
The shingle seemed to wake up; the pebbles began to roll before her, pursued
her from above, raced down with her on both sides, rolling past with an
increasing clatter. In the peace of the night the noise grew, deepening to a
rumour, continuous and violent, as if the whole semicircle of the stony beach
had started to tumble down into the bay. Susan's feet hardly touched the slope
that seemed to run down with her. At the bottom she stumbled, shot forward,
throwing her arms out, and fell heavily. She jumped up at once and turned
swiftly to look back, her clenched hands full of sand she had clutched in her
fall. The face was there, keeping its distance, visible in its own sheen that
made a pale stain in the night. She shouted, "Go away!" -- she
shouted at it with pain, with fear, with all the rage of that useless stab that
could not keep him quiet, keep him out of her sight. What did he want now? He
was dead. Dead men have no children. Would he never leave her alone? She shrieked
at it -- waved her outstretched hands. She seemed to feel the breath of parted
lips, and, with a long cry of discouragement, fled across the level bottom of
the bay.
She ran lightly,
unaware of any effort of her body. High sharp rocks that, when the bay is full,
show above the glittering plain of blue water like pointed towers of submerged
churches, glided past her, rushing to the land at a tremendous pace. To the
left, in the distance, she could see something shining: a broad disc of light
in which narrow shadows pivoted round the centre like the spokes of a wheel.
She heard a voice calling, "Hey! There!" and answered with a wild
scream. So, he could call yet! He was calling after her to stop. Never! . . .
She tore through the night, past the startled group of seaweed-gatherers who
stood round their lantern paralysed with fear at the unearthly screech coming
from that fleeing shadow. The men leaned on their pitchforks staring fearfully.
A woman fell on her knees, and, crossing herself, began to pray aloud. A little
girl with her ragged skirt full of slimy seaweed began to sob despairingly,
lugging her soaked burden close to the man who carried the light. Somebody
said: "The thing ran out towards the sea." Another voice exclaimed:
"And the sea is coming back! Look at the spreading puddles. Do you hear --
you woman -- there! Get up!" Several voices cried together. "Yes, let
us be off! Let the accursed thing go to the sea!" They moved on, keeping
close round the light. Suddenly a man swore loudly. He would go and see what
was the matter. It had been a woman's voice. He would go. There were shrill
protests from women -- but his high form detached itself from the group and
went off running. They sent an unanimous call of scared voices after him. A
word, insulting and mocking, came back, thrown at them through the darkness. A
woman moaned. An old man said gravely: "Such things ought to be left
alone." They went on slower, shuffling in the yielding sand and whispering
to one another that Millot feared nothing, having no religion, but that it
would end badly some day.
Susan met the incoming
tide by the Raven islet and stopped, panting, with her feet in the water. She
heard the murmur and felt the cold caress of the sea, and, calmer now, could
see the sombre and confused mass of the Raven on one side and on the other the
long white streak of Molène sands that are left high above the dry bottom of
Fougère Bay at every ebb. She turned round and saw far away, along the starred
background of the sky, the ragged outline of the coast. Above it, nearly facing
her, appeared the tower of Ploumar Church; a slender and tall pyramid shooting
up dark and pointed into the clustered glitter of the stars. She felt strangely
calm. She knew where she was, and began to remember how she came there -- and
why. She peered into the smooth obscurity near her. She was alone. There was
nothing there; nothing near her, either living or dead.
The tide was creeping
in quietly, putting out long impatient arms of strange rivulets that ran
towards the land between ridges of sand. Under the night the pools grew bigger
with mysterious rapidity, while the great sea, yet far off, thundered in a
regular rhythm along the indistinct line of the horizon. Susan splashed her way
back for a few yards without being able to get clear of the water that murmured
tenderly all around and, suddenly, with a spiteful gurgle, nearly took her off
her feet. Her heart thumped with fear. This place was too big and too empty to
die in. To-morrow they would do with her what they liked. But before she died
she must tell them -- tell the gentlemen in black clothes that there are things
no woman can bear. She must explain how it happened. . . . She splashed through
a pool, getting wet to the waist, too preoccupied to care. . . . She must
explain. "He came in the same way as ever and said, just so: 'Do you think
I am going to leave the land to those people from Morbihan that I do not know?
Do you? We shall see! Come along, you creature of mischance!' And he put his
arms out. Then, Messieurs, I said: 'Before God -- never!' And he said, striding
at me with open palms: 'There is no God to hold me! Do you understand, you
useless carcase. I will do what I like.' And he took me by the shoulders. Then
I, Messieurs, called to God for help, and next minute, while he was shaking me,
I felt my long scissors in my hand. His shirt was unbuttoned, and, by the
candle-light, I saw the hollow of his throat. I cried: 'Let go!' He was
crushing my shoulders. He was strong, my man was! Then I thought: No! . . .
Must I? . . . Then take! -- and I struck in the hollow place. I never saw him
fall. . . . The old father never turned his head. He is deaf and childish,
gentlemen. . . . Nobody saw him fall. I ran out . . . Nobody saw. . . ."
She had been scrambling
amongst the boulders of the Raven and now found herself, all out of breath,
standing amongst the heavy shadows of the rocky islet. The Raven is connected
with the main land by a natural pier of immense and slippery stones. She
intended to return home that way. Was he still standing there? At home. Home!
Four idiots and a corpse. She must go back and explain. Anybody would
understand. . . .
Below her the night or
the sea seemed to pronounce distinctly --
"Aha! I see you at
last!"
She started, slipped,
fell; and without attempting to rise, listened, terrified. She heard heavy
breathing, a clatter of wooden clogs. It stopped.
"Where the devil
did you pass?" said an invisible man, hoarsely.
She held her breath.
She recognized the voice. She had not seen him fall. Was he pursuing her there
dead, or perhaps . . . alive?
She lost her head. She
cried from the crevice where she lay huddled, "Never, never!"
"Ah! You are still
there. You led me a fine dance. Wait, my beauty, I must see how you look after
all this. You wait. . . ."
Millot was stumbling,
laughing, swearing meaninglessly out of pure satisfaction, pleased with himself
for having run down that fly-by-night. "As if there were such things as
ghosts! Bah! It took an old African soldier to show those clodhoppers. . . .
But it was curious. Who the devil was she?"
Susan listened,
crouching. He was coming for her, this dead man. There was no escape. What a
noise he made amongst the stones. . . . She saw his head rise up, then the
shoulders. He was tall -- her own man! His long arms waved about, and it was
his own voice sounding a little strange . . . because of the scissors. She
scrambled out quickly, rushed to the edge of the causeway, and turned round.
The man stood still on a high stone, detaching himself in dead black on the
glitter of the sky.
"Where are you
going to?" he called, roughly.
She answered,
"Home!" and watched him intensely. He made a striding, clumsy leap on
to another boulder, and stopped again, balancing himself, then said --
"Ha! ha! Well, I
am going with you. It's the least I can do. Ha! ha! ha!"
She stared at him till
her eyes seemed to become glowing coals that burned deep into her brain, and
yet she was in mortal fear of making out the well-known features. Below her the
sea lapped softly against the rock with a splash continuous and gentle.
The man said, advancing
another step --
"I am coming for
you. What do you think?"
She trembled. Coming
for her! There was no escape, no peace, no hope. She looked round despairingly.
Suddenly the whole shadowy coast, the blurred islets, the heaven itself, swayed
about twice, then came to a rest. She closed her eyes and shouted --
"Can't you wait
till I am dead!"
She was shaken by a
furious hate for that shade that pursued her in this world, unappeased even by
death in its longing for an heir that would be like other people's children.
"Hey! What?"
said Millot, keeping his distance prudently. He was saying to himself:
"Look out! Some lunatic. An accident happens soon."
She went on, wildly --
"I want to live.
To live alone -- for a week -- for a day. I must explain to them. . . . I would
tear you to pieces, I would kill you twenty times over rather than let you
touch me while I live. How many times must I kill you -- you blasphemer! Satan
sends you here. I am damned too!"
"Come," said
Millot, alarmed and conciliating. "I am perfectly alive! . . . Oh, my
God!"
She had screamed,
"Alive!" and at once vanished before his eyes, as if the islet itself
had swerved aside from under her feet. Millot rushed forward, and fell flat
with his chin over the edge. Far below he saw the water whitened by her
struggles, and heard one shrill cry for help that seemed to dart upwards along
the perpendicular face of the rock, and soar past, straight into the high and
impassive heaven.
Madame Levaille sat,
dry-eyed, on the short grass of the hill side, with her thick legs stretched
out, and her old feet turned up in their black cloth shoes. Her clogs stood
near by, and further off the umbrella lay on the withered sward like a weapon
dropped from the grasp of a vanquished warrior. The Marquis of Chavanes, on
horseback, one gloved hand on thigh, looked down at her as she got up
laboriously, with groans. On the narrow track of the seaweed-carts four men
were carrying inland Susan's body on a hand-barrow, while several others
straggled listlessly behind. Madame Levaille looked after the procession.
"Yes, Monsieur le Marquis," she said dispassionately, in her usual calm
tone of a reasonable old woman. "There are unfortunate people on this
earth. I had only one child. Only one! And they won't bury her in consecrated
ground!"
Her eyes filled
suddenly, and a short shower of tears rolled down the broad cheeks. She pulled
the shawl close about her. The Marquis leaned slightly over in his saddle, and
said --
"It is very sad.
You have all my sympathy. I shall speak to the Curé. She was unquestionably
insane, and the fall was accidental. Millot says so distinctly. Good-day,
Madame."
And he trotted off,
thinking to himself: "I must get this old woman appointed guardian of
those idiots, and administrator of the farm. It would be much better than
having here one of those other Bacadous, probably a red republican, corrupting
my commune."
THERE were two white
men in charge of the trading station. Kayerts, the chief, was short and fat;
Carlier, the assistant, was tall, with a large head and a very broad trunk
perched upon a long pair of thin legs. The third man on the staff was a Sierra
Leone nigger, who maintained that his name was Henry Price. However, for some
reason or other, the natives down the river had given him the name of Makola,
and it stuck to him through all his wanderings about the country. He spoke
English and French with a warbling accent, wrote a beautiful hand, understood
bookkeeping, and cherished in his innermost heart the worship of evil spirits.
His wife was a negress from Loanda, very large and very noisy. Three children
rolled about in sunshine before the door of his low, shed-like dwelling.
Makola, taciturn and impenetrable, despised the two white men. He had charge of
a small clay storehouse with a dried-grass roof, and pretended to keep a
correct account of beads, cotton cloth, red kerchiefs, brass wire, and other trade
goods it contained. Besides the storehouse and Makola's hut, there was only one
large building in the cleared ground of the station. It was built neatly of
reeds, with a verandah on all the four sides. There were three rooms in it. The
one in the middle was the living-room, and had two rough tables and a few
stools in it. The other two were the bedrooms for the white men. Each had a
bedstead and a mosquito net for all furniture. The plank floor was littered
with the belongings of the white men; open half-empty boxes, torn wearing
apparel, old boots; all the things dirty, and all the things broken, that
accumulate mysteriously round untidy men. There was also another dwelling-place
some distance away from the buildings. In it, under a tall cross much out of
the perpendicular, slept the man who had seen the beginning of all this; who
had planned and had watched the construction of this outpost of progress. He
had been, at home, an unsuccessful painter who, weary of pursuing fame on an
empty stomach, had gone out there through high protections. He had been the
first chief of that station. Makola had watched the energetic artist die of
fever in the just finished house with his usual kind of "I told you
so" indifference. Then, for a time, he dwelt alone with his family, his
account books, and the Evil Spirit that rules the lands under the equator. He
got on very well with his god. Perhaps he had propitiated him by a promise of
more white men to play with, by and by. At any rate the director of the Great
Trading Company, coming up in a steamer that resembled an enormous sardine box
with a flat-roofed shed erected on it, found the station in good order, and
Makola as usual quietly diligent. The director had the cross put up over the
first agent's grave, and appointed Kayerts to the post. Carlier was told off as
second in charge. The director was a man ruthless and efficient, who at times,
but very imperceptibly, indulged in grim humour. He made a speech to Kayerts
and Carlier, pointing out to them the promising aspect of their station. The
nearest trading-post was about three hundred miles away. It was an exceptional
opportunity for them to distinguish themselves and to earn percentages on the
trade. This appointment was a favour done to beginners. Kayerts was moved almost
to tears by his director's kindness. He would, he said, by doing his best, try
to justify the flattering confidence, &c., &c. Kayerts had been in the
Administration of the Telegraphs, and knew how to express himself correctly.
Carlier, an ex-non-commissioned officer of cavalry in an army guaranteed from
harm by several European Powers, was less impressed. If there were commissions
to get, so much the better; and, trailing a sulky glance over the river, the
forests, the impenetrable bush that seemed to cut off the station from the rest
of the world, he muttered between his teeth, "We shall see, very
soon."
Next day, some bales of
cotton goods and a few cases of provisions having been thrown on shore, the
sardine-box steamer went off, not to return for another six months. On the deck
the director touched his cap to the two agents, who stood on the bank waving
their hats, and turning to an old servant of the Company on his passage to
headquarters, said, "Look at those two imbeciles. They must be mad at home
to send me such specimens. I told those fellows to plant a vegetable garden,
build new storehouses and fences, and construct a landing-stage. I bet nothing
will be done! They won't know how to begin. I always thought the station on
this river useless, and they just fit the station!"
"They will form
themselves there," said the old stager with a quiet smile.
"At any rate, I am
rid of them for six months," retorted the director.
The two men watched the
steamer round the bend, then, ascending arm in arm the slope of the bank,
returned to the station. They had been in this vast and dark country only a
very short time, and as yet always in the midst of other white men, under the
eye and guidance of their superiors. And now, dull as they were to the subtle
influences of surroundings, they felt themselves very much alone, when suddenly
left unassisted to face the wilderness; a wilderness rendered more strange,
more incomprehensible by the mysterious glimpses of the vigorous life it
contained. They were two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals,
whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of
civilized crowds. Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their
character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of
their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure,
the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every
insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the
crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and
of its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion. But the contact
with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man, brings
sudden and profound trouble into the heart. To the sentiment of being alone of
one's kind, to the clear perception of the loneliness of one's thoughts, of
one's sensations -- to the negation of the habitual, which is safe, there is
added the affirmation of the unusual, which is dangerous; a suggestion of
things vague, uncontrollable, and repulsive, whose discomposing intrusion
excites the imagination and tries the civilized nerves of the foolish and the
wise alike.
Kayerts and Carlier
walked arm in arm, drawing close to one another as children do in the dark; and
they had the same, not altogether unpleasant, sense of danger which one half
suspects to be imaginary. They chatted persistently in familiar tones.
"Our station is prettily situated," said one. The other assented with
enthusiasm, enlarging volubly on the beauties of the situation. Then they
passed near the grave. "Poor devil!" said Kayerts. "He died of
fever, didn't he?" muttered Carlier, stopping short. "Why,"
retorted Kayerts, with indignation, "I've been told that the fellow
exposed himself recklessly to the sun. The climate here, everybody says, is not
at all worse than at home, as long as you keep out of the sun. Do you hear
that, Carlier? I am chief here, and my orders are that you should not expose
yourself to the sun!" He assumed his superiority jocularly, but his
meaning was serious. The idea that he would, perhaps, have to bury Carlier and
remain alone, gave him an inward shiver. He felt suddenly that this Carlier was
more precious to him here, in the centre of Africa, than a brother could be
anywhere else. Carlier, entering into the spirit of the thing, made a military
salute and answered in a brisk tone, "Your orders shall be attended to,
chief!" Then he burst out laughing, slapped Kayerts on the back and
shouted, "We shall let life run easily here! Just sit still and gather in
the ivory those savages will bring. This country has its good points, after
all!" They both laughed loudly while Carlier thought: "That poor
Kayerts; he is so fat and unhealthy. It would be awful if I had to bury him
here. He is a man I respect." . . . Before they reached the verandah of
their house they called one another "my dear fellow."
The first day they were
very active, pottering about with hammers and nails and red calico, to put up
curtains, make their house habitable and pretty; resolved to settle down
comfortably to their new life. For them an impossible task. To grapple
effectually with even purely material problems requires more serenity of mind
and more lofty courage than people generally imagine. No two beings could have
been more unfitted for such a struggle. Society, not from any tenderness, but
because of its strange needs, had taken care of those two men, forbidding them
all independent thought, all initiative, all departure from routine; and
forbidding it under pain of death. They could only live on condition of being
machines. And now, released from the fostering care of men with pens behind the
ears, or of men with gold lace on the sleeves, they were like those lifelong prisoners
who, liberated after many years, do not know what use to make of their freedom.
They did not know what use to make of their faculties, being both, through want
of practice, incapable of independent thought.
At the end of two
months Kayerts often would say, "If it was not for my Melie, you wouldn't
catch me here." Melie was his daughter. He had thrown up his post in the
Administration of the Telegraphs, though he had been for seventeen years
perfectly happy there, to earn a dowry for his girl. His wife was dead, and the
child was being brought up by his sisters. He regretted the streets, the
pavements, the cafés, his friends of many years; all the things he used to see,
day after day; all the thoughts suggested by familiar things -- the thoughts
effortless, monotonous, and soothing of a Government clerk; he regretted all
the gossip, the small enmities, the mild venom, and the little jokes of
Government offices. "If I had had a decent brother-in-law," Carlier
would remark, "a fellow with a heart, I would not be here." He had
left the army and had made himself so obnoxious to his family by his laziness
and impudence, that an exasperated brother-in-law had made superhuman efforts
to procure him an appointment in the Company as a second-class agent. Having not
a penny in the world he was compelled to accept this means of livelihood as
soon as it became quite clear to him that there was nothing more to squeeze out
of his relations. He, like Kayerts, regretted his old life. He regretted the
clink of sabre and spurs on a fine afternoon, the barrack-room witticisms, the
girls of garrison towns; but, besides, he had also a sense of grievance. He was
evidently a much ill-used man. This made him moody, at times. But the two men
got on well together in the fellowship of their stupidity and laziness.
Together they did nothing, absolutely nothing, and enjoyed the sense of the
idleness for which they were paid. And in time they came to feel something
resembling affection for one another.
They lived like blind
men in a large room, aware only of what came in contact with them (and of that
only imperfectly), but unable to see the general aspect of things. The river,
the forest, all the great land throbbing with life, were like a great
emptiness. Even the brilliant sunshine disclosed nothing intelligible. Things
appeared and disappeared before their eyes in an unconnected and aimless kind
of way. The river seemed to come from nowhere and flow nowhither. It flowed
through a void. Out of that void, at times, came canoes, and men with spears in
their hands would suddenly crowd the yard of the station. They were naked,
glossy black, ornamented with snowy shells and glistening brass wire, perfect
of limb. They made an uncouth babbling noise when they spoke, moved in a
stately manner, and sent quick, wild glances out of their startled,
never-resting eyes. Those warriors would squat in long rows, four or more deep,
before the verandah, while their chiefs bargained for hours with Makola over an
elephant tusk. Kayerts sat on his chair and looked down on the proceedings,
understanding nothing. He stared at them with his round blue eyes, called out
to Carlier, "Here, look! look at that fellow there -- and that other one,
to the left. Did you ever such a face? Oh, the funny brute!"
Carlier, smoking native
tobacco in a short wooden pipe, would swagger up twirling his moustaches, and
surveying the warriors with haughty indulgence, would say --
"Fine animals.
Brought any bone? Yes? It's not any too soon. Look at the muscles of that
fellow third from the end. I wouldn't care to get a punch on the nose from him.
Fine arms, but legs no good below the knee. Couldn't make cavalry men of
them." And after glancing down complacently at his own shanks, he always
concluded: "Pah! Don't they stink! You, Makola! Take that herd over to the
fetish" (the storehouse was in every station called the fetish, perhaps
because of the spirit of civilization it contained) "and give them up some
of the rubbish you keep there. I'd rather see it full of bone than full of
rags."
Kayerts approved.
"Yes, yes! Go and
finish that palaver over there, Mr. Makola. I will come round when you are
ready, to weigh the tusk. We must be careful." Then turning to his
companion: "This is the tribe that lives down the river; they are rather
aromatic. I remember, they had been once before here. D'ye hear that row? What
a fellow has got to put up with in this dog of a country! My head is
split."
Such profitable visits
were rare. For days the two pioneers of trade and progress would look on their
empty courtyard in the vibrating brilliance of vertical sunshine. Below the
high bank, the silent river flowed on glittering and steady. On the sands in
the middle of the stream, hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side.
And stretching away in all directions, surrounding the insignificant cleared
spot of the trading post, immense forests, hiding fateful complications of
fantastic life, lay in the eloquent silence of mute greatness. The two men
understood nothing, cared for nothing but for the passage of days that
separated them from the steamer's return. Their predecessor had left some torn
books. They took up these wrecks of novels, and, as they had never read
anything of the kind before, they were surprised and amused. Then during long
days there were interminable and silly discussions about plots and personages.
In the centre of Africa they made acquaintance of Richelieu and of d'Artagnan,
of Hawk's Eye and of Father Goriot, and of many other people. All these
imaginary personages became subjects for gossip as if they had been living
friends. They discounted their virtues, suspected their motives, decried their
successes; were scandalized at their duplicity or were doubtful about their
courage. The accounts of crimes filled them with indignation, while tender or
pathetic passages moved them deeply. Carlier cleared his throat and said in a
soldierly voice, "What nonsense!" Kayerts, his round eyes suffused
with tears, his fat cheeks quivering, rubbed his bald head, and declared.
"This is a splendid book. I had no idea there were such clever fellows in
the world." They also found some old copies of a home paper. That print
discussed what it was pleased to call "Our Colonial Expansion" in
high-flown language. It spoke much of the rights and duties of civilization, of
the sacredness of the civilizing work, and extolled the merits of those who
went about bringing light, and faith and commerce to the dark places of the
earth. Carlier and Kayerts read, wondered, and began to think better of themselves.
Carlier said one evening, waving his hand about, "In a hundred years,
there will be perhaps a town here. Quays, and ware-houses, and barracks, and --
and -- billiard-rooms. Civilization, my boy, and virtue -- and all. And then,
chaps will read that two good fellows, Kayerts and Carlier, were the first
civilized men to live in this very spot!" Kayerts nodded, "Yes, it is
a consolation to think of that." They seemed to forget their dead
predecessor; but, early one day, Carlier went out and replanted the cross
firmly. "It used to make me squint whenever I walked that way," he
explained to Kayerts over the morning coffee. "It made me squint, leaning
over so much. So I just planted it upright. And solid, I promise you! I
suspended myself with both hands to the cross-piece. Not a move. Oh, I did that
properly."
At times Gobila came to
see them. Gobila was the chief of the neighbouring villages. He was a
gray-headed savage, thin and black, with a white cloth round his loins and a
mangy panther skin hanging over his back. He came up with long strides of his
skeleton legs, swinging a staff as tall as himself, and, entering the common
room of the station, would squat on his heels to the left of the door. There he
sat, watching Kayerts, and now and then making a speech which the other did not
understand. Kayerts, without interrupting his occupation, would from time to
time say in a friendly manner: "How goes it, you old image?" and they
would smile at one another. The two whites had a liking for that old and incomprehensible
creature, and called him Father Gobila. Gobila's manner was paternal, and he
seemed really to love all white men. They all appeared to him very young,
indistinguishably alike (except for stature), and he knew that they were all
brothers, and also immortal. The death of the artist, who was the first white
man whom he knew intimately, did not disturb this belief, because he was firmly
convinced that the white stranger had pretended to die and got himself buried
for some mysterious purpose of his own, into which it was useless to inquire.
Perhaps it was his way of going home to his own country? At any rate, these
were his brothers, and he transferred his absurd affection to them. They
returned it in a way. Carlier slapped him on the back, and recklessly struck
off matches for his amusement. Kayerts was always ready to let him have a sniff
at the ammonia bottle. In short, they behaved just like that other white
creature that had hidden itself in a hole in the ground. Gobila considered them
attentively. Perhaps they were the same being with the other -- or one of them
was. He couldn't decide -- clear up that mystery; but he remained always very
friendly. In consequence of that friendship the women of Gobila's village
walked in single file through the reedy grass, bringing every morning to the
station, fowls, and sweet potatoes, and palm wine, and sometimes a goat. The
Company never provisions the stations fully, and the agents required those
local supplies to live. They had them through the good-will of Gobila, and
lived well. Now and then one of them had a bout of fever, and the other nursed
him with gentle devotion. They did not think much of it. It left them weaker,
and their appearance changed for the worse. Carlier was hollow-eyed and
irritable. Kayerts showed a drawn, flabby face above the rotundity of his
stomach, which gave him a weird aspect. But being constantly together, they did
not notice the change that took place gradually in their appearance, and also
in their dispositions.
Five months passed in
that way.
Then, one morning, as
Kayerts and Carlier, lounging in their chairs under the verandah, talked about
the approaching visit of the steamer, a knot of armed men came out of the
forest and advanced towards the station. They were strangers to that part of
the country. They were tall, slight, draped classically from neck to heel in
blue fringed cloths, and carried percussion muskets over their bare right
shoulders. Makola showed signs of excitement, and ran out of the storehouse
(where he spent all his days) to meet these visitors. They came into the
courtyard and looked about them with steady, scornful glances. Their leader, a
powerful and determined-looking negro with bloodshot eyes, stood in front of
the verandah and made a long speech. He gesticulated much, and ceased very
suddenly.
There was something in
his intonation, in the sounds of the long sentences he used, that startled the
two whites. It was like a reminiscence of something not exactly familiar, and
yet resembling the speech of civilized men. It sounded like one of those
impossible languages which sometimes we hear in our dreams.
"What lingo is
that?" said the amazed Carlier. "In the first moment I fancied the
fellow was going to speak French. Anyway, it is a different kind of gibberish
to what we ever heard."
"Yes,"
replied Kayerts. "Hey, Makola, what does he say? Where do they come from?
Who are they?"
But Makola, who seemed
to be standing on hot bricks, answered hurriedly, "I don't know. They come
from very far. Perhaps Mrs. Price will understand. They are perhaps bad
men."
The leader, after
waiting for a while, said something sharply to Makola, who shook his head. Then
the man, after looking round, noticed Makola's hut and walked over there. The
next moment Mrs. Makola was heard speaking with great volubility. The other
strangers -- they were six in all -- strolled about with an air of ease, put
their heads through the door of the store-room, congregated round the grave,
pointed understandingly at the cross, and generally made themselves at home.
"I don't like
those chaps -- and, I say, Kayerts, they must be from the coast; they've got
firearms," observed the sagacious Carlier.
Kayerts also did not
like those chaps. They both, for the first time, became aware that they lived
in conditions where the unusual may be dangerous, and that there was no power
on earth outside of themselves to stand between them and the unusual. They
became uneasy, went in and loaded their revolvers. Kayerts said, "We must
order Makola to tell them to go away before dark."
The strangers left in
the afternoon, after eating a meal prepared for them by Mrs. Makola. The
immense woman was excited, and talked much with the visitors. She rattled away
shrilly, pointing here and there at the forests and at the river. Makola sat
apart and watched. At times he got up and whispered to his wife. He accompanied
the strangers across the ravine at the back of the station-ground, and returned
slowly looking very thoughtful. When questioned by the white men he was very
strange, seemed not to understand, seemed to have forgotten French -- seemed to
have forgotten how to speak altogether. Kayerts and Carlier agreed that the
nigger had had too much palm wine.
There was some talk
about keeping a watch in turn, but in the evening everything seemed so quiet
and peaceful that they retired as usual. All night they were disturbed by a lot
of drumming in the villages. A deep, rapid roll near by would be followed by
another far off -- then all ceased. Soon short appeals would rattle out here
and there, then all mingle together, increase, become vigorous and sustained,
would spread out over the forest, roll through the night, unbroken and
ceaseless, near and far, as if the whole land had been one immense drum booming
out steadily an appeal to heaven. And through the deep and tremendous noise
sudden yells that resembled snatches of songs from a madhouse darted shrill and
high in discordant jets of sound which seemed to rush far above the earth and
drive all peace from under the stars.
Carlier and Kayerts slept
badly. They both thought they had heard shots fired during the night -- but
they could not agree as to the direction. In the morning Makola was gone
somewhere. He returned about noon with one of yesterday's strangers, and eluded
all Kayerts' attempts to close with him: had become deaf apparently. Kayerts
wondered. Carlier, who had been fishing off the bank, came back and remarked
while he showed his catch, "The niggers seem to be in a deuce of a stir; I
wonder what's up. I saw about fifteen canoes cross the river during the two
hours I was there fishing." Kayerts, worried, said, "Isn't this
Makola very queer to-day?" Carlier advised, "Keep all our men
together in case of some trouble."
THERE were ten station
men who had been left by the Director. Those fellows, having engaged themselves
to the Company for six months (without having any idea of a month in particular
and only a very faint notion of time in general), had been serving the cause of
progress for upwards of two years. Belonging to a tribe from a very distant
part of the land of darkness and sorrow, they did not run away, naturally
supposing that as wandering strangers they would be killed by the inhabitants
of the country; in which they were right. They lived in straw huts on the slope
of a ravine over-grown with reedy grass, just behind the station buildings.
They were not happy, regretting the festive incantations, the sorceries, the
human sacrifices of their own land; where they also had parents, brothers,
sisters, admired chiefs, respected magicians, loved friends, and other ties
supposed generally to be human. Besides, the rice rations served out by the
Company did not agree with them, being a food unknown to their land, and to
which they could not get used. Consequently they were unhealthy and miserable.
Had they been of any other tribe they would have made up their minds to die --
for nothing is easier to certain savages than suicide -- and so have escaped
from the puzzling difficulties of existence. But belonging, as they did, to a warlike
tribe with filed teeth, they had more grit, and went on stupidly living through
disease and sorrow. They did very little work, and had lost their splendid
physique. Carlier and Kayerts doctored them assiduously without being able to
bring them back into condition again. They were mustered every morning and told
off to different tasks -- grass-cutting, fence-building, tree-felling, &c.,
&c., which no power on earth could induce them to execute efficiently. The
two whites had practically very little control over them.
In the afternoon Makola
came over to the big house and found Kayerts watching three heavy columns of
smoke rising above the forests. "What is that?" asked Kayerts.
"Some villages burn," answered Makola, who seemed to have regained
his wits. Then he said abruptly: "We have got very little ivory; bad six
months' trading. Do you like get a little more ivory?"
"Yes," said
Kayerts, eagerly. He thought of percentages which were low.
"Those men who
came yesterday are traders from Loanda who have got more ivory than they can
carry home. Shall I buy? I know their camp."
"Certainly,"
said Kayerts. "What are those traders?"
"Bad
fellows," said Makola, indifferently. "They fight with people, and
catch women and children. They are bad men, and got guns. There is a great
disturbance in the country. Do you want ivory?"
"Yes," said
Kayerts. Makola said nothing for a while. Then: "Those workmen of ours are
no good at all," he muttered, looking round. "Station in very bad
order, sir. Director will growl. Better get a fine lot of ivory, then he say
nothing."
"I can't help it;
the men won't work," said Kayerts. "When will you get that
ivory?"
"Very soon,"
said Makola. "Perhaps to-night. You leave it to me, and keep indoors, sir.
I think you had better give some palm wine to our men to make a dance this
evening. Enjoy themselves. Work better to-morrow. There's plenty palm wine --
gone a little sour."
Kayerts said
"yes," and Makola, with his own hands carried big calabashes to the
door of his hut. They stood there till the evening, and Mrs. Makola looked into
every one. The men got them at sunset. When Kayerts and Carlier retired, a big
bonfire was flaring before the men's huts. They could hear their shouts and
drumming. Some men from Gobila's village had joined the station hands, and the
entertainment was a great success.
In the middle of the
night, Carlier waking suddenly, heard a man shout loudly; then a shot was
fired. Only one. Carlier ran out and met Kayerts on the verandah. They were
both startled. As they went across the yard to call Makola, they saw shadows
moving in the night. One of them cried, "Don't shoot! It's me,
Price." Then Makola appeared close to them. "Go back, go back,
please," he urged, "you spoil all." "There are strange men
about," said Carlier. "Never mind; I know," said Makola. Then he
whispered, "All right. Bring ivory. Say nothing! I know my business."
The two white men reluctantly went back to the house, but did not sleep. They
heard footsteps, whispers, some groans. It seemed as if a lot of men came in,
dumped heavy things on the ground, squabbled a long time, then went away. They
lay on their hard beds and thought: "This Makola is invaluable." In
the morning Carlier came out, very sleepy, and pulled at the cord of the big bell.
The station hands mustered every morning to the sound of the bell. That morning
nobody came. Kayerts turned out also, yawning. Across the yard they saw Makola
come out of his hut, a tin basin of soapy water in his hand. Makola, a
civilized nigger, was very neat in his person. He threw the soapsuds skilfully
over a wretched little yellow cur he had, then turning his face to the agent's
house, he shouted from the distance, "All the men gone last night!"
They heard him plainly,
but in their surprise they both yelled out together: "What!" Then
they stared at one another. "We are in a proper fix now," growled
Carlier. "It's incredible!" muttered Kayerts. "I will go to the
huts and see," said Carlier, striding off. Makola coming up found Kayerts
standing alone.
"I can hardly
believe it," said Kayerts, tearfully. "We took care of them as if
they had been our children."
"They went with
the coast people," said Makola after a moment of hesitation.
"What do I care
with whom they went -- the ungrateful brutes!" exclaimed the other. Then
with sudden suspicion, and looking hard at Makola, he added: "What do you
know about it?"
Makola moved his
shoulders, looking down on the ground. "What do I know? I think only. Will
you come and look at the ivory I've got there? It is a fine lot. You never saw
such."
He moved towards the
store. Kayerts followed him mechanically, thinking about the incredible
desertion of the men. On the ground before the door of the fetish lay six
splendid tusks.
"What did you give
for it?" asked Kayerts, after surveying the lot with satisfaction.
"No regular
trade," said Makola. "They brought the ivory and gave it to me. I
told them to take what they most wanted in the station. It is a beautiful lot.
No station can show such tusks. Those traders wanted carriers badly, and our
men were no good here. No trade, no entry in books: all correct."
Kayerts nearly burst
with indignation. "Why!" he shouted, "I believe you have sold
our men for these tusks!" Makola stood impassive and silent. "I -- I
-- will -- I," stuttered Kayerts. "You fiend!" he yelled out.
"I did the best
for you and the Company," said Makola, imperturbably. "Why you shout
so much? Look at this tusk."
"I dismiss you! I
will report you -- I won't look at the tusk. I forbid you to touch them. I
order you to throw them into the river. You -- you!"
"You very red, Mr.
Kayerts. If you are so irritable in the sun, you will get fever and die -- like
the first chief!" pronounced Makola impressively.
They stood still,
contemplating one another with intense eyes, as if they had been looking with
effort across immense distances. Kayerts shivered. Makola had meant no more
than he said, but his words seemed to Kayerts full of ominous menace! He turned
sharply and went away to the house. Makola retired into the bosom of his
family; and the tusks, left lying before the store, looked very large and
valuable in the sunshine.
Carlier came back on
the verandah. "They're all gone, hey?" asked Kayerts from the far end
of the common room in a muffled voice. "You did not find anybody?"
"Oh, yes,"
said Carlier, "I found one of Gobila's people lying dead before the huts
-- shot through the body. We heard that shot last night."
Kayerts came out
quickly. He found his companion staring grimly over the yard at the tusks, away
by the store. They both sat in silence for a while. Then Kayerts related his
conversation with Makola. Carlier said nothing. At the midday meal they ate
very little. They hardly exchanged a word that day. A great silence seemed to
lie heavily over the station and press on their lips. Makola did not open the
store; he spent the day playing with his children. He lay full-length on a mat
outside his door, and the youngsters sat on his chest and clambered all over
him. It was a touching picture. Mrs. Makola was busy cooking all day, as usual.
The white men made a somewhat better meal in the evening. Afterwards, Carlier
smoking his pipe strolled over to the store; he stood for a long time over the
tusks, touched one or two with his foot, even tried to lift the largest one by
its small end. He came back to his chief, who had not stirred from the
verandah, threw himself in the chair and said --
"I can see it!
They were pounced upon while they slept heavily after drinking all that palm
wine you've allowed Makola to give them. A put-up job! See? The worst is, some
of Gobila's people were there, and got carried off too, no doubt. The least
drunk woke up, and got shot for his sobriety. This is a funny country. What
will you do now?"
"We can't touch
it, of course," said Kayerts.
"Of course
not," assented Carlier.
"Slavery is an
awful thing," stammered out Kayerts in an unsteady voice.
"Frightful -- the
sufferings," grunted Carlier with conviction.
They believed their
words. Everybody shows a respectful deference to certain sounds that he and his
fellows can make. But about feelings people really know nothing. We talk with
indignation or enthusiasm; we talk about oppression, cruelty, crime, devotion,
self-sacrifice, virtue, and we know nothing real beyond the words. Nobody knows
what suffering or sacrifice mean -- except, perhaps the victims of the
mysterious purpose of these illusions.
Next morning they saw
Makola very busy setting up in the yard the big scales used for weighing ivory.
By and by Carlier said: "What's that filthy scoundrel up to?" and
lounged out into the yard. Kayerts followed. They stood watching. Makola took
no notice. When the balance was swung true, he tried to lift a tusk into the scale.
It was too heavy. He looked up helplessly without a word, and for a minute they
stood round that balance as mute and still as three statues. Suddenly Carlier
said: "Catch hold of the other end, Makola -- you beast!" and
together they swung the tusk up. Kayerts trembled in every limb. He muttered,
"I say! O! I say!" and putting his hand in his pocket found there a
dirty bit of paper and the stump of a pencil. He turned his back on the others,
as if about to do something tricky, and noted stealthily the weights which
Carlier shouted out to him with unnecessary loudness. When all was over Makola
whispered to himself: "The sun's very strong here for the tusks."
Carlier said to Kayerts in a careless tone: "I say, chief, I might just as
well give him a lift with this lot into the store."
As they were going back
to the house Kayerts observed with a sigh: "It had to be done." And
Carlier said: "It's deplorable, but, the men being Company's men the ivory
is Company's ivory. We must look after it." "I will report to the
Director, of course," said Kayerts. "Of course; let him decide,"
approved Carlier.
At midday they made a
hearty meal. Kayerts sighed from time to time. Whenever they mentioned Makola's
name they always added to it an opprobrious epithet. It eased their conscience.
Makola gave himself a half-holiday, and bathed his children in the river. No
one from Gobila's villages came near the station that day. No one came the next
day, and the next, nor for a whole week. Gobila's people might have been dead
and buried for any sign of life they gave. But they were only mourning for
those they had lost by the witchcraft of white men, who had brought wicked
people into their country. The wicked people were gone, but fear remained. Fear
always remains. A man may destroy everything within himself, love and hate and
belief, and even doubt; but as long as he clings to life he cannot destroy
fear: the fear, subtle, indestructible, and terrible, that pervades his being;
that tinges his thoughts; that lurks in his heart; that watches on his lips the
struggle of his last breath. In his fear, the mild old Gobila offered extra
human sacrifices to all the Evil Spirits that had taken possession of his white
friends. His heart was heavy. Some warriors spoke about burning and killing,
but the cautious old savage dissuaded them. Who could foresee the woe those
mysterious creatures, if irritated, might bring? They should be left alone.
Perhaps in time they would disappear into the earth as the first one had
disappeared. His people must keep away from them, and hope for the best.
Kayerts and Carlier did
not disappear, but remained above on this earth, that, somehow, they fancied
had become bigger and very empty. It was not the absolute and dumb solitude of
the post that impressed them so much as an inarticulate feeling that something
from within them was gone, something that worked for their safety, and had kept
the wilderness from interfering with their hearts. The images of home; the
memory of people like them, of men that thought and felt as they used to think
and feel, receded into distances made indistinct by the glare of unclouded
sunshine. And out of the great silence of the surrounding wilderness, its very
hopelessness and savagery seemed to approach them nearer, to draw them gently,
to look upon them, to envelop them with a solicitude irresistible, familiar,
and disgusting.
Days lengthened into
weeks, then into months. Gobila's people drummed and yelled to every new moon,
as of yore, but kept away from the station. Makola and Carlier tried once in a
canoe to open communications, but were received with a shower of arrows, and
had to fly back to the station for dear life. That attempt set the country up
and down the river into an uproar that could be very distinctly heard for days.
The steamer was late. At first they spoke of delay jauntily, then anxiously,
then gloomily. The matter was becoming serious. Stores were running short.
Carlier cast his lines off the bank, but the river was low, and the fish kept
out in the stream. They dared not stroll far away from the station to shoot.
Moreover, there was no game in the impenetrable forest. Once Carlier shot a
hippo in the river. They had no boat to secure it, and it sank. When it floated
up it drifted away, and Gobila's people secured the carcase. It was the
occasion for a national holiday, but Carlier had a fit of rage over it and
talked about the necessity of exterminating all the niggers before the country
could be made habitable. Kayerts mooned about silently; spent hours looking at
the portrait of his Melie. It represented a little girl with long bleached
tresses and a rather sour face. His legs were much swollen, and he could hardly
walk. Carlier, undermined by fever, could not swagger any more, but kept
tottering about, still with a devil-may-care air, as became a man who
remembered his crack regiment. He had become hoarse, sarcastic, and inclined to
say unpleasant things. He called it "being frank with you." They had
long ago reckoned their percentages on trade, including in them that last deal
of "this infamous Makola." They had also concluded not to say
anything about it. Kayerts hesitated at first -- was afraid of the Director.
"He has seen worse
things done on the quiet," maintained Carlier, with a hoarse laugh.
"Trust him! He won't thank you if you blab. He is no better than you or
me. Who will talk if we hold our tongues? There is nobody here."
That was the root of
the trouble! There was nobody there; and being left there alone with their
weakness, they became daily more like a pair of accomplices than like a couple
of devoted friends. They had heard nothing from home for eight months. Every
evening they said, "To-morrow we shall see the steamer." But one of
the Company's steamers had been wrecked, and the Director was busy with the
other, relieving very distant and important stations on the main river. He
thought that the useless station, and the useless men, could wait. Meantime
Kayerts and Carlier lived on rice boiled without salt, and cursed the Company,
all Africa, and the day they were born. One must have lived on such diet to
discover what ghastly trouble the necessity of swallowing one's food may
become. There was literally nothing else in the station but rice and coffee;
they drank the coffee without sugar. The last fifteen lumps Kayerts had
solemnly locked away in his box, together with a half-bottle of Cognâc,
"in case of sickness," he explained. Carlier approved. "When one
is sick," he said, "any little extra like that is cheering."
They waited. Rank grass
began to sprout over the courtyard. The bell never rang now. Days passed,
silent, exasperating, and slow. When the two men spoke, they snarled; and their
silences were bitter, as if tinged by the bitterness of their thoughts.
One day after a lunch
of boiled rice, Carlier put down his cup untasted, and said: "Hang it all!
Let's have a decent cup of coffee for once. Bring out that sugar,
Kayerts!"
"For the
sick," muttered Kayerts, without looking up.
"For the
sick," mocked Carlier. "Bosh! . . . Well! I am sick."
"You are no more
sick than I am, and I go without," said Kayerts in a peaceful tone.
"Come! out with
that sugar, you stingy old slave-dealer."
Kayerts looked up
quickly. Carlier was smiling with marked insolence. And suddenly it seemed to Kayerts
that he had never seen that man before. Who was he? He knew nothing about him.
What was he capable of? There was a surprising flash of violent emotion within
him, as if in the presence of something undreamt-of, dangerous, and final. But
he managed to pronounce with composure --
"That joke is in
very bad taste. Don't repeat it."
"Joke!" said
Carlier, hitching himself forward on his seat. "I am hungry -- I am sick
-- I don't joke! I hate hypocrites. You are a hypocrite. You are a
slave-dealer. I am a slave-dealer. There's nothing but slave-dealers in this
cursed country. I mean to have sugar in my coffee to-day, anyhow!"
"I forbid you to
speak to me in that way," said Kayerts with a fair show of resolution.
"You! --
What?" shouted Carlier, jumping up.
Kayerts stood up also.
"I am your chief," he began, trying to master the shakiness of his
voice.
"What?"
yelled the other. "Who's chief? There's no chief here. There's nothing
here: there's nothing but you and I. Fetch the sugar -- you pot-bellied
ass."
"Hold your tongue.
Go out of this room," screamed Kayerts. "I dismiss you -- you
scoundrel!"
Carlier swung a stool.
All at once he looked dangerously in earnest. "You flabby,
good-for-nothing civilian -- take that!" he howled.
Kayerts dropped under
the table, and the stool struck the grass inner wall of the room. Then, as
Carlier was trying to upset the table, Kayerts in desperation made a blind
rush, head low, like a cornered pig would do, and over-turning his friend,
bolted along the verandah, and into his room. He locked the door, snatched his
revolver, and stood panting. In less than a minute Carlier was kicking at the
door furiously, howling, "If you don't bring out that sugar, I will shoot
you at sight, like a dog. Now then -- one -- two -- three. You won't? I will
show you who's the master."
Kayerts thought the
door would fall in, and scrambled through the square hole that served for a
window in his room. There was then the whole breadth of the house between them.
But the other was apparently not strong enough to break in the door, and
Kayerts heard him running round. Then he also began to run laboriously on his
swollen legs. He ran as quickly as he could, grasping the revolver, and unable
yet to understand what was happening to him. He saw in succession Makola's
house, the store, the river, the ravine, and the low bushes; and he saw all
those things again as he ran for the second time round the house. Then again
they flashed past him. That morning he could not have walked a yard without a
groan.
And now he ran. He ran
fast enough to keep out of sight of the other man.
Then as, weak and
desperate, he thought, "Before I finish the next round I shall die,"
he heard the other man stumble heavily, then stop. He stopped also. He had the
back and Carlier the front of the house, as before. He heard him drop into a
chair cursing, and suddenly his own legs gave way, and he slid down into a
sitting posture with his back to the wall. His mouth was as dry as a cinder,
and his face was wet with perspiration -- and tears. What was it all about? He
thought it must be a horrible illusion; he thought he was dreaming; he thought
he was going mad! After a while he collected his senses. What did they quarrel
about? That sugar! How absurd! He would give it to him -- didn't want it
himself. And he began scrambling to his feet with a sudden feeling of security.
But before he had fairly stood upright, a common-sense reflection occurred to
him and drove him back into despair. He thought: "If I give way now to
that brute of a soldier, he will begin this horror again to-morrow -- and the
day after -- every day -- raise other pretensions, trample on me, torture me,
make me his slave -- and I will be lost! Lost! The steamer may not come for
days -- may never come." He shook so that he had to sit down on the floor
again. He shivered forlornly. He felt he could not, would not move any more. He
was completely distracted by the sudden perception that the position was
without issue -- that death and life had in a moment become equally difficult
and terrible.
All at once he heard
the other push his chair back; and he leaped to his feet with extreme facility.
He listened and got confused. Must run again! Right or left? He heard
footsteps. He darted to the left, grasping his revolver, and at the very same
instant, as it seemed to him, they came into violent collision. Both shouted
with surprise. A loud explosion took place between them; a roar of red fire,
thick smoke; and Kayerts, deafened and blinded, rushed back thinking: "I
am hit -- it's all over." He expected the other to come round -- to gloat
over his agony. He caught hold of an upright of the roof -- "All
over!" Then he heard a crashing fall on the other side of the house, as if
somebody had tumbled headlong over a chair -- then silence. Nothing more
happened. He did not die. Only his shoulder felt as if it had been badly
wrenched, and he had lost his revolver. He was disarmed and helpless! He waited
for his fate. The other man made no sound. It was a stratagem. He was stalking
him now! Along what side? Perhaps he was taking aim this very minute!
After a few moments of
an agony frightful and absurd, he decided to go and meet his doom. He was
prepared for every surrender. He turned the corner, steadying himself with one
hand on the wall; made a few paces, and nearly swooned. He had seen on the
floor, protruding past the other corner, a pair of turned-up feet. A pair of
white naked feet in red slippers. He felt deadly sick, and stood for a time in
profound darkness. Then Makola appeared before him, saying quietly: "Come
along, Mr. Kayerts. He is dead." He burst into tears of gratitude; a loud,
sobbing fit of crying. After a time he found himself sitting in a chair and
looking at Carlier, who lay stretched on his back. Makola was kneeling over the
body.
"Is this your
revolver?" asked Makola, getting up.
"Yes," said
Kayerts; then he added very quickly, "He ran after me to shoot me -- you
saw!"
"Yes, I saw,"
said Makola. "There is only one revolver; where's his?"
"Don't know,"
whispered Kayerts in a voice that had become suddenly very faint.
"I will go and
look for it," said the other, gently. He made the round along the
verandah, while Kayerts sat still and looked at the corpse. Makola came back
empty-handed, stood in deep thought, then stepped quietly into the dead man's
room, and came out directly with a revolver, which he held up before Kayerts. Kayerts
shut his eyes. Everything was going round. He found life more terrible and
difficult than death. He had shot an unarmed man.
After meditating for a
while, Makola said softly, pointing at the dead man who lay there with his
right eye blown out --
"He died of
fever." Kayerts looked at him with a stony stare. "Yes,"
repeated Makola, thoughtfully, stepping over the corpse, "I think he died
of fever. Bury him to-morrow."
And he went away slowly
to his expectant wife, leaving the two white men alone on the verandah.
Night came, and Kayerts
sat unmoving on his chair. He sat quiet as if he had taken a dose of opium. The
violence of the emotions he had passed through produced a feeling of exhausted
serenity. He had plumbed in one short afternoon the depths of horror and
despair, and now found repose in the conviction that life had no more secrets
for him: neither had death! He sat by the corpse thinking; thinking very
actively, thinking very new thoughts. He seemed to have broken loose from
himself altogether. His old thoughts, convictions, likes and dislikes, things
he respected and things he abhorred, appeared in their true light at last!
Appeared contemptible and childish, false and ridiculous. He revelled in his
new wisdom while he sat by the man he had killed. He argued with himself about
all things under heaven with that kind of wrong-headed lucidity which may be
observed in some lunatics. Incidentally he reflected that the fellow dead there
had been a noxious beast anyway; that men died every day in thousands; perhaps
in hundreds of thousands -- who could tell? -- and that in the number, that one
death could not possibly make any difference; couldn't have any importance, at
least to a thinking creature. He, Kayerts, was a thinking creature. He had been
all his life, till that moment, a believer in a lot of nonsense like the rest
of mankind -- who are fools; but now he thought! He knew! He was at peace; he
was familiar with the highest wisdom! Then he tried to imagine himself dead,
and Carlier sitting in his chair watching him; and his attempt met with such
unexpected success, that in a very few moments he became not at all sure who
was dead and who was alive. This extraordinary achievement of his fancy
startled him, however, and by a clever and timely effort of mind he saved
himself just in time from becoming Carlier. His heart thumped, and he felt hot
all over at the thought of that danger. Carlier! What a beastly thing! To
compose his now disturbed nerves -- and no wonder! -- he tried to whistle a little.
Then, suddenly, he fell asleep, or thought he had slept; but at any rate there
was a fog, and somebody had whistled in the fog.
He stood up. The day
had come, and a heavy mist had descended upon the land: the mist penetrating,
enveloping, and silent; the morning mist of tropical lands; the mist that
clings and kills; the mist white and deadly, immaculate and poisonous. He stood
up, saw the body, and threw his arms above his head with a cry like that of a
man who, waking from a trance, finds himself immured forever in a tomb.
"Help! . . . . My God!"
A shriek inhuman,
vibrating and sudden, pierced like a sharp dart the white shroud of that land
of sorrow. Three short, impatient screeches followed, and then, for a time, the
fog-wreaths rolled on, undisturbed, through a formidable silence. Then many
more shrieks, rapid and piercing, like the yells of some exasperated and
ruthless creature, rent the air. Progress was calling to Kayerts from the
river. Progress and civilization and all the virtues. Society was calling to
its accomplished child to come, to be taken care of, to be instructed, to be
judged, to be condemned; it called him to return to that rubbish heap from
which he had wandered away, so that justice could be done.
Kayerts heard and
understood. He stumbled out of the verandah, leaving the other man quite alone
for the first time since they had been thrown there together. He groped his way
through the fog, calling in his ignorance upon the invisible heaven to undo its
work. Makola flitted by in the mist, shouting as he ran --
"Steamer! Steamer!
They can't see. They whistle for the station. I go ring the bell. Go down to
the landing, sir. I ring."
He disappeared. Kayerts
stood still. He looked upwards; the fog rolled low over his head. He looked
round like a man who has lost his way; and he saw a dark smudge, a cross-shaped
stain, upon the shifting purity of the mist. As he began to stumble towards it,
the station bell rang in a tumultuous peal its answer to the impatient clamour
of the steamer.
The Managing Director
of the Great Civilizing Company (since we know that civilization follows trade)
landed first, and incontinently lost sight of the steamer. The fog down by the
river was exceedingly dense; above, at the station, the bell rang unceasing and
brazen.
The Director shouted
loudly to the steamer:
"There is nobody
down to meet us; there may be something wrong, though they are ringing. You had
better come, too!"
And he began to toil up
the steep bank. The captain and the engine-driver of the boat followed behind.
As they scrambled up the fog thinned, and they could see their Director a good
way ahead. Suddenly they saw him start forward, calling to them over his
shoulder: -- "Run! Run to the house! I've found one of them. Run, look for
the other!"
He had found one of
them! And even he, the man of varied and startling experience, was somewhat
discomposed by the manner of this finding. He stood and fumbled in his pockets
(for a knife) while he faced Kayerts, who was hanging by a leather strap from
the cross. He had evidently climbed the grave, which was high and narrow, and
after tying the end of the strap to the arm, had swung himself off. His toes
were only a couple of inches above the ground; his arms hung stiffly down; he
seemed to be standing rigidly at attention, but with one purple cheek playfully
posed on the shoulder. And, irreverently, he was putting out a swollen tongue
at his Managing Director.
THE inner circle train
from the City rushed impetuously out of a black hole and pulled up with a
discordant, grinding racket in the smirched twilight of a West-End station. A
line of doors flew open and a lot of men stepped out headlong. They had high hats,
healthy pale faces, dark overcoats and shiny boots; they held in their gloved
hands thin umbrellas and hastily folded evening papers that resembled stiff,
dirty rags of greenish, pinkish, or whitish colour. Alvan Hervey stepped out
with the rest, a smouldering cigar between his teeth. A disregarded little
woman in rusty black, with both arms full of parcels, ran along in distress,
bolted suddenly into a third-class compartment and the train went on. The
slamming of carriage doors burst out sharp and spiteful like a fusillade; an
icy draught mingled with acrid fumes swept the whole length of the platform and
made a tottering old man, wrapped up to his ears in a woollen comforter, stop
short in the moving throng to cough violently over his stick. No one spared him
a glance.
Alvan Hervey passed
through the ticket gate. Between the bare walls of a sordid staircase men
clambered rapidly; their backs appeared alike -- almost as if they had been
wearing a uniform; their indifferent faces were varied but somehow suggested
kinship, like the faces of a band of brothers who through prudence, dignity,
disgust, or foresight would resolutely ignore each other; and their eyes, quick
or slow; their eyes gazing up the dusty steps; their eyes brown, black, gray,
blue, had all the same stare, concentrated and empty, satisfied and unthinking.
Outside the big doorway
of the street they scattered in all directions, walking away fast from one
another with the hurried air of men fleeing from something compromising; from
familiarity or confidences; from something suspected and concealed -- like
truth or pestilence. Alvan Hervey hesitated, standing alone in the doorway for
a moment; then decided to walk home.
He strode firmly. A
misty rain settled like silvery dust on clothes, on moustaches; wetted the
faces, varnished the flagstones, darkened the walls, dripped from umbrellas.
And he moved on in the rain with careless serenity, with the tranquil ease of
someone successful and disdainful, very sure of himself -- a man with lots of
money and friends. He was tall, well set-up, good-looking and healthy; and his
clear pale face had under its commonplace refinement that slight tinge of
overbearing brutality which is given by the possession of only partly difficult
accomplishments; by excelling in games, or in the art of making money; by the
easy mastery over animals and over needy men.
He was going home much
earlier than usual, straight from the City and without calling at his club. He
considered himself well connected, well educated and intelligent. Who doesn't?
But his connections, education and intelligence were strictly on a par with
those of the men with whom he did business or amused himself. He had married
five years ago. At the time all his acquaintances had said he was very much in
love; and he had said so himself, frankly, because it is very well understood
that every man falls in love once in his life -- unless his wife dies, when it
may be quite praiseworthy to fall in love again. The girl was healthy, tall,
fair, and in his opinion was well connected, well educated and intelligent. She
was also intensely bored with her home where, as if packed in a tight box, her
individuality -- of which she was very conscious -- had no play. She strode
like a grenadier, was strong and upright like an obelisk, had a beautiful face,
a candid brow, pure eyes, and not a thought of her own in her head. He
surrendered quickly to all those charms, and she appeared to him so
unquestionably of the right sort that he did not hesitate for a moment to declare
himself in love. Under the cover of that sacred and poetical fiction he desired
her masterfully, for various reasons; but principally for the satisfaction of
having his own way. He was very dull and solemn about it -- for no earthly
reason, unless to conceal his feelings -- which is an eminently proper thing to
do. Nobody, however, would have been shocked had he neglected that duty, for
the feeling he experienced really was a longing -- a longing stronger and a
little more complex no doubt, but no more reprehensible in its nature than a
hungry man's appetite for his dinner.
After their marriage
they busied themselves, with marked success, in enlarging the circle of their
acquaintance. Thirty people knew them by sight; twenty more with smiling demonstrations
tolerated their occasional presence within hospitable thresholds; at least
fifty others became aware of their existence. They moved in their enlarged
world amongst perfectly delightful men and women who feared emotion,
enthusiasm, or failure, more than fire, war, or mortal disease; who tolerated
only the commonest formulas of commonest thoughts, and recognized only
profitable facts. It was an extremely charming sphere, the abode of all the
virtues, where nothing is realized and where all joys and sorrows are
cautiously toned down into pleasures and annoyances. In that serene region,
then, where noble sentiments are cultivated in sufficient profusion to conceal
the pitiless materialism of thoughts and aspirations Alvan Hervey and his wife
spent five years of prudent bliss unclouded by any doubt as to the moral
propriety of their existence. She, to give her individuality fair play, took up
all manner of philanthropic work and became a member of various rescuing and
reforming societies patronized or presided over by ladies of title. He took an
active interest in politics; and having met quite by chance a literary man --
who nevertheless was related to an earl -- he was induced to finance a moribund
society paper. It was a semi-political, and wholly scandalous publication,
redeemed by excessive dulness; and as it was utterly faithless, as it contained
no new thought, as it never by any chance had a flash of wit, satire, or
indignation in its pages, he judged it respectable enough, at first sight.
Afterwards, when it paid, he promptly perceived that upon the whole it was a
virtuous undertaking. It paved the way of his ambition; and he enjoyed also the
special kind of importance he derived from this connection with what he
imagined to be literature.
This connection still
further enlarged their world. Men who wrote or drew prettily for the public
came at times to their house, and his editor came very often. He thought him
rather an ass because he had such big front teeth (the proper thing is to have
small, even teeth) and wore his hair a trifle longer than most men do. However,
some dukes wear their hair long, and the fellow indubitably knew his business.
The worst was that his gravity, though perfectly portentous, could not be
trusted. He sat, elegant and bulky, in the drawing-room, the head of his stick
hovering in front of his big teeth, and talked for hours with a thick-lipped
smile (he said nothing that could be considered objectionable and not quite the
thing) talked in an unusual manner -- not obviously irritatingly. His forehead
was too lofty -- unusually so -- and under it there was a straight nose, lost
between the hairless cheeks, that in a smooth curve ran into a chin shaped like
the end of a snow-shoe. And in this face that resembled the face of a fat and
fiendishly knowing baby there glittered a pair of clever, peering, unbelieving
black eyes. He wrote verses too. Rather an ass. But the band of men who trailed
at the skirts of his monumental frock-coat seemed to perceive wonderful things
in what he said. Alvan Hervey put it down to affectation. Those artist chaps,
upon the whole, were so affected. Still, all this was highly proper -- very
useful to him -- and his wife seemed to like it -- as if she also had derived
some distinct and secret advantage from this intellectual connection. She
received her mixed and decorous guests with a kind of tall, ponderous grace,
peculiarly her own and which awakened in the mind of intimidated strangers
incongruous and improper reminiscences of an elephant, a giraffe, a gazelle; of
a gothic tower -- of an overgrown angel. Her Thursdays were becoming famous in
their world; and their world grew steadily, annexing street after street. It
included also Somebody's Gardens, a Crescent -- a couple of Squares.
Thus Alvan Hervey and
his wife for five prosperous years lived by the side of one another. In time
they came to know each other sufficiently well for all the practical purposes
of such an existence, but they were no more capable of real intimacy than two
animals feeding at the same manger, under the same roof, in a luxurious stable.
His longing was appeased and became a habit; and she had her desire -- the
desire to get away from under the paternal roof, to assert her individuality,
to move in her own set (so much smarter than the parental one); to have a home
of her own, and her own share of the world's respect, envy, and applause. They
understood each other warily, tacitly, like a pair of cautious conspirators in
a profitable plot; because they were both unable to look at a fact, a
sentiment, a principle, or a belief otherwise than in the light of their own
dignity, of their own glorification, of their own advantage. They skimmed over
the surface of life hand in hand, in a pure and frosty atmosphere -- like two
skilful skaters cutting figures on thick ice for the admiration of the
beholders, and disdainfully ignoring the hidden stream, the stream restless and
dark; the stream of life, profound and unfrozen.
Alvan Hervey turned
twice to the left, once to the right, walked along two sides of a square, in
the middle of which groups of tame-looking trees stood in respectable captivity
behind iron railings, and rang at his door. A parlourmaid opened. A fad of his
wife's, this, to have only women servants. That girl, while she took his hat
and overcoat, said something which made him look at his watch. It was five
o'clock, and his wife not at home. There was nothing unusual in that. He said,
"No; no tea," and went upstairs.
He ascended without
footfalls. Brass rods glimmered all up the red carpet. On the first-floor
landing a marble woman, decently covered from neck to instep with stone
draperies, advanced a row of lifeless toes to the edge of the pedestal, and
thrust out blindly a rigid white arm holding a cluster of lights. He had
artistic tastes -- at home. Heavy curtains caught back, half concealed dark
corners. On the rich, stamped paper of the walls hung sketches, water-colours,
engravings. His tastes were distinctly artistic. Old church towers peeped above
green masses of foliage; the hills were purple, the sands yellow, the seas
sunny, the skies blue. A young lady sprawled with dreamy eyes in a moored boat,
in company of a lunch basket, a champagne bottle, and an enamoured man in a
blazer. Bare-legged boys flirted sweetly with ragged maidens, slept on stone
steps, gambolled with dogs. A pathetically lean girl flattened against a blank
wall, turned up expiring eyes and tendered a flower for sale; while, near by,
the large photographs of some famous and mutilated bas-reliefs seemed to
represent a massacre turned into stone.
He looked, of course,
at nothing, ascended another flight of stairs and went straight into the
dressing room. A bronze dragon nailed by the tail to a bracket writhed away
from the wall in calm convolutions, and held, between the conventional fury of
its jaws, a crude gas flame that resembled a butterfly. The room was empty, of
course; but, as he stepped in, it became filled all at once with a stir of many
people; because the strips of glass on the doors of wardrobes and his wife's
large pier-glass reflected him from head to foot, and multiplied his image into
a crowd of gentlemanly and slavish imitators, who were dressed exactly like
himself; had the same restrained and rare gestures; who moved when he moved,
stood still with him in an obsequious immobility, and had just such appearances
of life and feeling as he thought it dignified and safe for any man to
manifest. And like real people who are slaves of common thoughts, that are not
even their own, they affected a shadowy independence by the superficial variety
of their movements. They moved together with him; but they either advanced to
meet him, or walked away from him; they appeared, disappeared; they seemed to
dodge behind walnut furniture, to be seen again, far within the polished panes,
stepping about distinct and unreal in the convincing illusion of a room. And
like the men he respected they could be trusted to do nothing individual,
original, or startling -- nothing unforeseen and nothing improper.
He moved for a time
aimlessly in that good company, humming a popular but refined tune, and
thinking vaguely of a business letter from abroad, which had to be answered on
the morrow with cautious prevarication. Then, as he walked towards a wardrobe,
he saw appearing at his back, in the high mirror, the corner of his wife's
dressing-table, and amongst the glitter of silver-mounted objects on it, the
square white patch of an envelope. It was such an unusual thing to be seen
there that he spun round almost before he realized his surprise; and all the
sham men about him pivoted on their heels; all appeared surprised; and all
moved rapidly towards envelopes on dressing-tables.
He recognized his
wife's handwriting and saw that the envelope was addressed to himself. He
muttered, "How very odd," and felt annoyed. Apart from any odd action
being essentially an indecent thing in itself, the fact of his wife indulging
in it made it doubly offensive. That she should write to him at all, when she
knew he would be home for dinner, was perfectly ridiculous; but that she should
leave it like this -- in evidence for chance discovery -- struck him as so
outrageous that, thinking of it, he experienced suddenly a staggering sense of
insecurity, an absurd and bizarre flash of a notion that the house had moved a
little under his feet. He tore the envelope open, glanced at the letter, and
sat down in a chair near by.
He held the paper
before his eyes and looked at half a dozen lines scrawled on the page, while he
was stunned by a noise meaningless and violent, like the clash of gongs or the
beating of drums; a great aimless uproar that, in a manner, prevented him from
hearing himself think and made his mind an absolute blank. This absurd and
distracting tumult seemed to ooze out of the written words, to issue from
between his very fingers that trembled, holding the paper. And suddenly he
dropped the letter as though it had been something hot, or venomous, or filthy;
and rushing to the window with the unreflecting precipitation of a man anxious
to raise an alarm of fire or murder, he threw it up and put his head out.
A chill gust of wind,
wandering through the damp and sooty obscurity over the waste of roofs and
chimney-pots, touched his face with a clammy flick. He saw an illimitable
darkness, in which stood a black jumble of walls, and, between them, the many
rows of gaslights stretched far away in long lines, like strung-up beads of
fire. A sinister loom as of a hidden conflagration lit up faintly from below
the mist, falling upon a billowy and motionless sea of tiles and bricks. At the
rattle of the opened window the world seemed to leap out of the night and
confront him, while floating up to his ears there came a sound vast and faint;
the deep mutter of something immense and alive. It penetrated him with a
feeling of dismay and he gasped silently. From the cab-stand in the square came
distinct hoarse voices and a jeering laugh which sounded ominously harsh and
cruel. It sounded threatening. He drew his head in, as if before an aimed blow,
and flung the window down quickly. He made a few steps, stumbled against a
chair, and with a great effort, pulled himself together to lay hold of a
certain thought that was whizzing about loose in his head.
He got it at last,
after more exertion than he expected; he was flushed and puffed a little as
though he had been catching it with his hands, but his mental hold on it was
weak, so weak that he judged it necessary to repeat it aloud -- to hear it
spoken firmly -- in order to insure a perfect measure of possession. But he was
unwilling to hear his own voice -- to hear any sound whatever -- owing to a
vague belief, shaping itself slowly within him, that solitude and silence are
the greatest felicities of mankind. The next moment it dawned upon him that
they are perfectly unattainable -- that faces must be seen, words spoken,
thoughts heard. All the words -- all the thoughts!
He said very
distinctly, and looking at the carpet, "She's gone."
It was terrible -- not
the fact but the words; the words charged with the shadowy might of a meaning,
that seemed to possess the tremendous power to call Fate down upon the earth,
like those strange and appalling words that sometimes are heard in sleep. They
vibrated round him in a metallic atmosphere, in a space that had the hardness
of iron and the resonance of a bell of bronze. Looking down between the toes of
his boots he seemed to listen thoughtfully to the receding wave of sound; to
the wave spreading out in a widening circle, embracing streets, roofs,
church-steeples, fields -- and travelling away, widening endlessly, far, very
far, where he could not hear -- where he could not imagine anything -- where .
. .
"And -- with that
. . . ass," he said again without stirring in the least. And there was nothing
but humiliation. Nothing else. He could derive no moral solace from any aspect
of the situation, which radiated pain only on every side. Pain. What kind of
pain? It occurred to him that he ought to be heart-broken; but in an
exceedingly short moment he perceived that his suffering was nothing of so
trifling and dignified a kind. It was altogether a more serious matter, and
partook rather of the nature of those subtle and cruel feelings which are
awakened by a kick or a horse-whipping.
He felt very sick --
physically sick -- as though he had bitten through something nauseous. Life,
that to a well-ordered mind should be a matter of congratulation, appeared to
him, for a second or so, perfectly intolerable. He picked up the paper at his
feet, and sat down with the wish to think it out, to understand why his wife --
his wife! -- should leave him, should throw away respect, comfort, peace,
decency, position throw away everything for nothing! He set himself to think
out the hidden logic of her action -- a mental undertaking fit for the leisure
hours of a madhouse, though he couldn't see it. And he thought of his wife in
every relation except the only fundamental one. He thought of her as a
well-bred girl, as a wife, as a cultured person, as the mistress of a house, as
a lady; but he never for a moment thought of her simply as a woman.
Then a fresh wave, a
raging wave of humiliation, swept through his mind, and left nothing there but
a personal sense of undeserved abasement. Why should he be mixed up with such a
horrid exposure! It annihilated all the advantages of his well-ordered past, by
a truth effective and unjust like a calumny -- and the past was wasted. Its
failure was disclosed -- a distinct failure, on his part, to see, to guard, to
understand. It could not be denied; it could not be explained away, hustled out
of sight. He could not sit on it and look solemn. Now -- if she had only died!
If she had only died!
He was driven to envy such a respectable bereavement, and one so perfectly free
from any taint of misfortune that even his best friend or his best enemy would
not have felt the slightest thrill of exultation. No one would have cared. He
sought comfort in clinging to the contemplation of the only fact of life that
the resolute efforts of mankind had never failed to disguise in the clatter and
glamour of phrases. And nothing lends itself more to lies than death. If she
had only died! Certain words would have been said to him in a sad tone, and he,
with proper fortitude, would have made appropriate answers. There were
precedents for such an occasion. And no one would have cared. If she had only
died! The promises, the terrors, the hopes of eternity, are the concern of the
corrupt dead; but the obvious sweetness of life belongs to living, healthy men.
And life was his concern: that sane and gratifying existence untroubled by too
much love or by too much regret. She had interfered with it; she had defaced
it. And suddenly it occurred to him he must have been mad to marry. It was too
much in the nature of giving yourself away, of wearing -- if for a moment --
your heart on your sleeve. But every one married. Was all mankind mad!
In the shock of that
startling thought he looked up, and saw to the left, to the right, in front,
men sitting far off in chairs and looking at him with wild eyes -- emissaries
of a distracted mankind intruding to spy upon his pain and his humiliation. It
was not to be borne. He rose quickly, and the others jumped up, too, on all
sides. He stood still in the middle of the room as if discouraged by their
vigilance. No escape! He felt something akin to despair. Everybody must know.
The servants must know to-night. He ground his teeth . . . And he had never
noticed, never guessed anything. Every one will know. He thought: "The
woman's a monster, but everybody will think me a fool"; and standing still
in the midst of severe walnut-wood furniture, he felt such a tempest of anguish
within him that he seemed to see himself rolling on the carpet, beating his
head against the wall. He was disgusted with himself, with the loathsome rush
of emotion breaking through all the reserves that guarded his manhood.
Something unknown, withering and poisonous, had entered his life, passed near
him, touched him, and he was deteriorating. He was appalled. What was it? She
was gone. Why? His head was ready to burst with the endeavour to understand her
act and his subtle horror of it. Everything was changed. Why? Only a woman
gone, after all; and yet he had a vision, a vision quick and distinct as a
dream: the vision of everything he had thought indestructible and safe in the
world crashing down about him, like solid walls do before the fierce breath of
a hurricane. He stared, shaking in every limb, while he felt the destructive
breath, the mysterious breath, the breath of passion, stir the profound peace
of the house. He looked round in fear. Yes. Crime may be forgiven;
uncalculating sacrifice, blind trust, burning faith, other follies, may be
turned to account; suffering, death itself, may with a grin or a frown be
explained away; but passion is the unpardonable and secret infamy of our
hearts, a thing to curse, to hide and to deny; a shameless and forlorn thing
that tramples upon the smiling promises, that tears off the placid mask, that
strips the body of life. And it had come to him! It had laid its unclean hand
upon the spotless draperies of his existence, and he had to face it alone with
all the world looking on. All the world! And he thought that even the bare
suspicion of such an adversary within his house carried with it a taint and a
condemnation. He put both his hands out as if to ward off the reproach of a
defiling truth; and, instantly, the appalled conclave of unreal men, standing
about mutely beyond the clear lustre of mirrors, made at him the same gesture
of rejection and horror.
He glanced vainly here
and there, like a man looking in desperation for a weapon or for a hiding
place, and understood at last that he was disarmed and cornered by the enemy
that, without any squeamishness, would strike so as to lay open his heart. He
could get help nowhere, or even take counsel with himself, because in the
sudden shock of her desertion the sentiments which he knew that in fidelity to
his bringing up, to his prejudices and his surroundings, he ought to experience,
were so mixed up with the novelty of real feelings, of fundamental feelings
that know nothing of creed, class, or education, that he was unable to
distinguish clearly between what is and what ought to be; between the
inexcusable truth and the valid pretences. And he knew instinctively that truth
would be of no use to him. Some kind of concealment seemed a necessity because
one cannot explain. Of course not! Who would listen? One had simply to be
without stain and without reproach to keep one's place in the forefront of
life.
He said to himself,
"I must get over it the best I can," and began to walk up and down
the room. What next? What ought to be done? He thought: "I will travel --
no I won't. I shall face it out." And after that resolve he was greatly
cheered by the reflection that it would be a mute and an easy part to play, for
no one would be likely to converse with him about the abominable conduct of --
that woman. He argued to himself that decent people -- and he knew no others --
did not care to talk about such indelicate affairs. She had gone off -- with
that unhealthy, fat ass of a journalist. Why? He had been all a husband ought
to be. He had given her a good position -- she shared his prospects -- he had
treated her invariably with great consideration. He reviewed his conduct with a
kind of dismal pride. It had been irreproachable. Then, why? For love?
Profanation! There could be no love there. A shameful impulse of passion. Yes,
passion. His own wife! Good God! . . . And the indelicate aspect of his
domestic misfortune struck him with such shame that, next moment, he caught
himself in the act of pondering absurdly over the notion whether it would not
be more dignified for him to induce a general belief that he had been in the
habit of beating his wife. Some fellows do . . . and anything would be better
than the filthy fact; for it was clear he had lived with the root of it for
five years -- and it was too shameful. Anything! Anything! Brutality . . . But
he gave it up directly, and began to think of the Divorce Court. It did not
present itself to him, notwithstanding his respect for law and usage, as a
proper refuge for dignified grief. It appeared rather as an unclean and
sinister cavern where men and women are haled by adverse fate to writhe
ridiculously in the presence of uncompromising truth. It should not be allowed.
That woman! Five . . . years . . . married five years . . . and never to see
anything. Not to the very last day . . . not till she coolly went off. And he
pictured to himself all the people he knew engaged in speculating as to whether
all that time he had been blind, foolish, or infatuated. What a woman! Blind! .
. . Not at all. Could a clean-minded man imagine such depravity? Evidently not.
He drew a free breath. That was the attitude to take; it was dignified enough;
it gave him the advantage, and he could not help perceiving that it was moral.
He yearned unaffectedly to see morality (in his person) triumphant before the
world. As to her she would be forgotten. Let her be forgotten -- buried in
oblivion -- lost! No one would allude . . . Refined people -- and every man and
woman he knew could be so described -- had, of course, a horror of such topics.
Had they? Oh, yes. No one would allude to her . . . in his hearing. He stamped
his foot, tore the letter across, then again and again. The thought of
sympathizing friends excited in him a fury of mistrust. He flung down the small
bits of paper. They settled, fluttering at his feet, and looked very white on
the dark carpet, like a scattered handful of snow-flakes.
This fit of hot anger
was succeeded by a sudden sadness, by the darkening passage of a thought that
ran over the scorched surface of his heart, like upon a barren plain, and after
a fiercer assault of sunrays, the melancholy and cooling shadow of a cloud. He
realized that he had had a shock -- not a violent or rending blow, that can be
seen, resisted, returned, forgotten, but a thrust, insidious and penetrating,
that had stirred all those feelings, concealed and cruel, which the arts of the
devil, the fears of mankind -- God's infinite compassion, perhaps -- keep
chained deep down in the inscrutable twilight of our breasts. A dark curtain
seemed to rise before him, and for less than a second he looked upon the mysterious
universe of moral suffering. As a landscape is seen complete, and vast, and
vivid, under a flash of lightning, so he could see disclosed in a moment all
the immensity of pain that can be contained in one short moment of human
thought. Then the curtain fell again, but his rapid vision left in Alvan
Hervey's mind a trail of invincible sadness, a sense of loss and bitter
solitude, as though he had been robbed and exiled. For a moment he ceased to be
a member of society with a position, a career, and a name attached to all this,
like a descriptive label of some complicated compound. He was a simple human
being removed from the delightful world of crescents and squares. He stood
alone, naked and afraid, like the first man on the first day of evil. There are
in life events, contacts, glimpses, that seem brutally to bring all the past to
a close. There is a shock and a crash, as of a gate flung to behind one by the
perfidious hand of fate. Go and seek another paradise, fool or sage. There is a
moment of dumb dismay, and the wanderings must begin again; the painful
explaining away of facts, the feverish raking up of illusions, the cultivation
of a fresh crop of lies in the sweat of one's brow, to sustain life, to make it
supportable, to make it fair, so as to hand intact to another generation of
blind wanderers the charming legend of a heartless country, of a promised land,
all flowers and blessings . . .
He came to himself with
a slight start, and became aware of an oppressive, crushing desolation. It was
only a feeling, it is true, but it produced on him a physical effect, as though
his chest had been squeezed in a vice. He perceived himself so extremely
forlorn and lamentable, and was moved so deeply by the oppressive sorrow, that
another turn of the screw, he felt, would bring tears out of his eyes. He was
deteriorating. Five years of life in common had appeased his longing. Yes,
long-time ago. The first five months did that -- but . . . There was the habit
-- the habit of her person, of her smile, of her gestures, of her voice, of her
silence. She had a pure brow and good hair. How utterly wretched all this was.
Good hair and fine eyes -- remarkably fine. He was surprised by the number of
details that intruded upon his unwilling memory. He could not help remembering
her foot-steps, the rustle of her dress, her way of holding her head, her
decisive manner of saying "Alvan," the quiver of her nostrils when
she was annoyed. All that had been so much his property, so intimately and
specially his! He raged in a mournful, silent way, as he took stock of his
losses. He was like a man counting the cost of an unlucky speculation --
irritated, depressed -- exasperated with himself and with others, with the
fortunate, with the indifferent, with the callous; yet the wrong done him
appeared so cruel that he would perhaps have dropped a tear over that
spoliation if it had not been for his conviction that men do not weep.
Foreigners do; they also kill sometimes in such circumstances. And to his
horror he felt himself driven to regret almost that the usages of a society
ready to forgive the shooting of a burglar forbade him, under the
circumstances, even as much as a thought of murder. Nevertheless, he clenched
his fists and set his teeth hard. And he was afraid at the same time. He was
afraid with that penetrating faltering fear that seems, in the very middle of a
beat, to turn one's heart into a handful of dust. The contamination of her
crime spread out, tainted the universe, tainted himself; woke up all the
dormant infamies of the world; caused a ghastly kind of clairvoyance in which
he could see the towns and fields of the earth, its sacred places, its temples
and its houses, peopled by monsters -- by monsters of duplicity, lust, and
murder. She was a monster -- he himself was thinking monstrous thoughts . . .
and yet he was like other people. How many men and women at this very moment
were plunged in abominations -- meditated crimes. It was frightful to think of.
He remembered all the streets -- the well-to-do streets he had passed on his
way home; all the innumerable houses with closed doors and curtained windows.
Each seemed now an abode of anguish and folly. And his thought, as if appalled,
stood still, recalling with dismay the decorous and frightful silence that was
like a conspiracy; the grim, impenetrable silence of miles of walls concealing
passions, misery, thoughts of crime. Surely he was not the only man; his was
not the only house . . . and yet no one knew -- no one guessed. But he knew. He
knew with unerring certitude that could not be deceived by the correct silence
of walls, of closed doors, of curtained windows. He was beside himself with a
despairing agitation, like a man informed of a deadly secret -- the secret of a
calamity threatening the safety of mankind -- the sacredness, the peace of
life.
He caught sight of
himself in one of the looking-glasses. It was a relief. The anguish of his
feeling had been so powerful that he more than half expected to see some
distorted wild face there, and he was pleasantly surprised to see nothing of
the kind. His aspect, at any rate, would let no one into the secret of his
pain. He examined himself with attention. His trousers were turned up, and his
boots a little muddy, but he looked very much as usual. Only his hair was
slightly ruffled, and that disorder, somehow, was so suggestive of trouble that
he went quickly to the table, and began to use the brushes, in an anxious
desire to obliterate the compromising trace, that only vestige of his emotion.
He brushed with care, watching the effect of his smoothing; and another face,
slightly pale and more tense than was perhaps desirable, peered back at him
from the toilet glass. He laid the brushes down, and was not satisfied. He took
them up again and brushed, brushed mechanically -- forgot himself in that
occupation. The tumult of his thoughts ended in a sluggish flow of reflection,
such as, after the outburst of a volcano, the almost imperceptible progress of
a stream of lava, creeping languidly over a convulsed land and pitilessly
obliterating any landmark left by the shock of the earthquake. It is a
destructive but, by comparison, it is a peaceful phenomenon. Alvan Hervey was
almost soothed by the deliberate pace of his thoughts. His moral landmarks were
going one by one, consumed in the fire of his experience, buried in hot mud, in
ashes. He was cooling -- on the surface; but there was enough heat left
somewhere to make him slap the brushes on the table, and turning away, say in a
fierce whisper: "I wish him joy . . . Damn the woman."
He felt himself utterly
corrupted by her wickedness, and the most significant symptom of his moral
downfall was the bitter, acrid satisfaction with which he recognized it. He,
deliberately, swore in his thoughts; he meditated sneers; he shaped in profound
silence words of cynical unbelief, and his most cherished convictions stood
revealed finally as the narrow prejudices of fools. A crowd of shapeless,
unclean thoughts crossed his mind in a stealthy rush, like a band of veiled
malefactors hastening to a crime. He put his hands deep into his pockets. He
heard a faint ringing somewhere, and muttered to himself: "I am not the
only one . . . not the only one." There was another ring. Front door!
His heart leaped up
into his throat, and forthwith descended as low as his boots. A call! Who? Why?
He wanted to rush out on the landing and shout to the servant: "Not at
home! Gone away abroad!" . . . Any excuse. He could not face a visitor.
Not this evening. No. To-morrow. . . . Before he could break out of the
numbness that enveloped him like a sheet of lead, he heard far below, as if in
the entrails of the earth, a door close heavily. The house vibrated to it more
than to a clap of thunder. He stood still, wishing himself invisible. The room
was very chilly. He did not think he would ever feel like that. But people must
be met -- they must be faced -- talked to -- smiled at. He heard another door,
much nearer -- the door of the drawing-room -- being opened and flung to again.
He imagined for a moment he would faint. How absurd! That kind of thing had to
be gone through. A voice spoke. He could not catch the words. Then the voice
spoke again, and footsteps were heard on the first floor landing. Hang it all!
Was he to hear that voice and those footsteps whenever any one spoke or moved?
He thought: "This is like being haunted -- I suppose it will last for a
week or so, at least. Till I forget. Forget! Forget!" Someone was coming up
the second flight of stairs. Servant? He listened, then, suddenly, as though an
incredible, frightful revelation had been shouted to him from a distance, he
bellowed out in the empty room: "What! What!" in such a fiendish tone
as to astonish himself. The footsteps stopped outside the door. He stood
openmouthed, maddened and still, as if in the midst of a catastrophe. The
door-handle rattled lightly. It seemed to him that the walls were coming apart,
that the furniture swayed at him; the ceiling slanted queerly for a moment, a
tall wardrobe tried to topple over. He caught hold of something and it was the
back of a chair. So he had reeled against a chair! Oh! Confound it! He gripped
hard.
The flaming butterfly
poised between the jaws of the bronze dragon radiated a glare, a glare that
seemed to leap up all at once into a crude, blinding fierceness, and made it
difficult for him to distinguish plainly the figure of his wife standing
upright with her back to the closed door. He looked at her and could not detect
her breathing. The harsh and violent light was beating on her, and he was
amazed to see her preserve so well the composure of her upright attitude in
that scorching brilliance which, to his eyes, enveloped her like a hot and
consuming mist. He would not have been surprised if she had vanished in it as
suddenly as she had appeared. He stared and listened; listened for some sound,
but the silence round him was absolute -- as though he had in a moment grown
completely deaf as well as dim-eyed. Then his hearing returned, preternaturally
sharp. He heard the patter of a rain-shower on the window panes behind the
lowered blinds, and below, far below, in the artificial abyss of the square,
the deadened roll of wheels and the splashy trotting of a horse. He heard a
groan also -- very distinct -- in the room -- close to his ear.
He thought with alarm:
"I must have made that noise myself;" and at the same instant the
woman left the door, stepped firmly across the floor before him, and sat down
in a chair. He knew that step. There was no doubt about it. She had come back!
And he very nearly said aloud "Of course!" -- such was his sudden and
masterful perception of the indestructible character of her being. Nothing
could destroy her -- and nothing but his own destruction could keep her away.
She was the incarnation of all the short moments which every man spares out of
his life for dreams, for precious dreams that concrete the most cherished, the
most profitable of his illusions. He peered at her with inward trepidation. She
was mysterious, significant, full of obscure meaning -- like a symbol. He
peered, bending forward, as though he had been discovering about her things he
had never seen before. Unconsciously he made a step towards her -- then
another. He saw her arm make an ample, decided movement and he stopped. She had
lifted her veil. It was like the lifting of a vizor.
The spell was broken.
He experienced a shock as though he had been called out of a trance by the
sudden noise of an explosion. It was even more startling and more distinct; it
was an infinitely more intimate change, for he had the sensation of having come
into this room only that very moment; of having returned from very far; he was
made aware that some essential part of himself had in a flash returned into his
body, returned finally from a fierce and lamentable region, from the
dwelling-place of unveiled hearts. He woke up to an amazing infinity of
contempt, to a droll bitterness of wonder, to a disenchanted conviction of
safety. He had a glimpse of the irresistible force, and he saw also the
barrenness of his convictions -- of her convictions. It seemed to him that he
could never make a mistake as long as he lived. It was morally impossible to go
wrong. He was not elated by that certitude; he was dimly uneasy about its
price; there was a chill as of death in this triumph of sound principles, in
this victory snatched under the very shadow of disaster.
The last trace of his
previous state of mind vanished, as the instantaneous and elusive trail of a
bursting meteor vanishes on the profound blackness of the sky; it was the faint
flicker of a painful thought, gone as soon as perceived, that nothing but her
presence -- after all -- had the power to recall him to himself. He stared at
her. She sat with her hands on her lap, looking down; and he noticed that her
boots were dirty, her skirts wet and splashed, as though she had been driven
back there by a blind fear through a waste of mud. He was indignant, amazed and
shocked, but in a natural, healthy way now; so that he could control those
unprofitable sentiments by the dictates of cautious self-restraint. The light
in the room had no unusual brilliance now; it was a good light in which he
could easily observe the expression of her face. It was that of dull fatigue.
And the silence that surrounded them was the normal silence of any quiet house,
hardly disturbed by the faint noises of a respectable quarter of the town. He
was very cool -- and it was quite coolly that he thought how much better it
would be if neither of them ever spoke again. She sat with closed lips, with an
air of lassitude in the stony forgetfulness of her pose, but after a moment she
lifted her drooping eyelids and met his tense and inquisitive stare by a look
that had all the formless eloquence of a cry. It penetrated, it stirred without
informing; it was the very essence of anguish stripped of words that can be
smiled at, argued away, shouted down, disdained. It was anguish naked and
unashamed, the bare pain of existence let loose upon the world in the fleeting
unreserve of a look that had in it an immensity of fatigue, the scornful
sincerity, the black impudence of an extorted confession. Alvan Hervey was
seized with wonder, as though he had seen something inconceivable; and some
obscure part of his being was ready to exclaim with him: "I would never
have believed it!" but an instantaneous revulsion of wounded
susceptibilities checked the unfinished thought.
He felt full of
rancorous indignation against the woman who could look like this at one. This
look probed him; it tampered with him. It was dangerous to one as would be a
hint of unbelief whispered by a priest in the august decorum of a temple; and
at the same time it was impure, it was disturbing, like a cynical consolation
muttered in the dark, tainting the sorrow, corroding the thought, poisoning the
heart. He wanted to ask her furiously: "Who do you take me for? How dare
you look at me like this?" He felt himself helpless before the hidden
meaning of that look; he resented it with pained and futile violence as an
injury so secret that it could never, never be redressed. His wish was to crush
her by a single sentence. He was stainless. Opinion was on his side; morality,
men and gods were on his side; law, conscience -- all the world! She had
nothing but that look. And he could only say:
"How long do you
intend to stay here?"
Her eyes did not waver,
her lips remained closed; and for any effect of his words he might have spoken
to a dead woman, only that this one breathed quickly. He was profoundly
disappointed by what he had said. It was a great deception, something in the
nature of treason. He had deceived himself. It should have been altogether
different -- other words -- another sensation. And before his eyes, so fixed
that at times they saw nothing, she sat apparently as unconscious as though she
had been alone, sending that look of brazen confession straight at him -- with
an air of staring into empty space. He said significantly:
"Must I go
then?" And he knew he meant nothing of what he implied.
One of her hands on her
lap moved slightly as though his words had fallen there and she had thrown them
off on the floor. But her silence encouraged him. Possibly it meant remorse --
perhaps fear. Was she thunder-struck by his attitude? . . . Her eyelids
dropped. He seemed to understand ever so much -- everything! Very well -- but
she must be made to suffer. It was due to him. He understood everything, yet he
judged it indispensable to say with an obvious affectation of civility:
"I don't
understand -- be so good as to . . ."
She stood up. For a
second he believed she intended to go away, and it was as though someone had
jerked a string attached to his heart. It hurt. He remained open-mouthed and
silent. But she made an irresolute step towards him, and instinctively he moved
aside. They stood before one another, and the fragments of the torn letter lay
between them -- at their feet -- like an insurmountable obstacle, like a sign
of eternal separation! Around them three other couples stood still and face to
face, as if waiting for a signal to begin some action -- a struggle, a dispute,
or a dance.
She said: "Don't
-- Alvan!" and there was something that resembled a warning in the pain of
her tone. He narrowed his eyes as if trying to pierce her with his gaze. Her
voice touched him. He had aspirations after magnanimity, generosity,
superiority -- interrupted, however, by flashes of indignation and anxiety --
frightful anxiety to know how far she had gone. She looked down at the torn paper.
Then she looked up, and their eyes met again, remained fastened together, like
an unbreakable bond, like a clasp of eternal complicity; and the decorous
silence, the pervading quietude of the house which enveloped this meeting of
their glances became for a moment inexpressibly vile, for he was afraid she
would say too much and make magnanimity impossible, while behind the profound
mournfulness of her face there was a regret -- a regret of things done -- the
regret of delay -- the thought that if she had only turned back a week sooner
-- a day sooner -- only an hour sooner. . . . They were afraid to hear again
the sound of their voices; they did not know what they might say -- perhaps
something that could not be recalled; and words are more terrible than facts.
But the tricky fatality that lurks in obscure impulses spoke through Alvan
Hervey's lips suddenly; and he heard his own voice with the excited and
sceptical curiosity with which one listens to actors' voices speaking on the
stage in the strain of a poignant situation.
"If you have
forgotten anything . . . of course . . . I . . ."
Her eyes blazed at him
for an instant; her lips trembled -- and then she also became the mouth-piece
of the mysterious force forever hovering near us; of that perverse inspiration,
wandering capricious and uncontrollable, like a gust of wind.
"What is the good
of this, Alvan? . . . You know why I came back. . . . You know that I could not
. . . "
He interrupted her with
irritation.
"Then! what's
this?" he asked, pointing downwards at the torn letter.
"That's a
mistake," she said hurriedly, in a muffled voice.
This answer amazed him.
He remained speechless, staring at her. He had half a mind to burst into a
laugh. It ended in a smile as involuntary as a grimace of pain.
"A mistake . .
." he began, slowly, and then found himself unable to say another word.
"Yes . . . it was
honest," she said very low, as if speaking to the memory of a feeling in a
remote past.
He exploded.
"Curse your
honesty! . . . Is there any honesty in all this! . . . When did you begin to be
honest? Why are you here? What are you now? . . . Still honest? . . . "
He walked at her,
raging, as if blind; during these three quick strides he lost touch of the
material world and was whirled interminably through a kind of empty universe
made up of nothing but fury and anguish, till he came suddenly upon her face --
very close to his. He stopped short, and all at once seemed to remember
something heard ages ago.
"You don't know
the meaning of the word," he shouted.
She did not flinch. He
perceived with fear that everything around him was still. She did not move a
hair's breadth; his own body did not stir. An imperturbable calm enveloped
their two motionless figures, the house, the town, all the world -- and the
trifling tempest of his feelings. The violence of the short tumult within him
had been such as could well have shattered all creation; and yet nothing was
changed. He faced his wife in the familiar room in his own house. It had not fallen.
And right and left all the innumerable dwellings, standing shoulder to
shoulder, had resisted the shock of his passion, had presented, unmoved, to the
loneliness of his trouble, the grim silence of walls, the impenetrable and
polished discretion of closed doors and curtained windows. Immobility and
silence pressed on him, assailed him, like two accomplices of the immovable and
mute woman before his eyes. He was suddenly vanquished. He was shown his
impotence. He was soothed by the breath of a corrupt resignation coming to him
through the subtle irony of the surrounding peace.
He said with villainous
composure:
"At any rate it
isn't enough for me. I want to know more -- if you're going to stay."
"There is nothing
more to tell," she answered, sadly.
It struck him as so
very true that he did not say anything. She went on:
"You wouldn't
understand. . . ."
"No?" he
said, quietly. He held himself tight not to burst into howls and imprecations.
"I tried to be
faithful . . ." she began again.
"And this?"
he exclaimed, pointing at the fragments of her letter.
"This -- this is a
failure," she said.
"I should think
so," he muttered, bitterly.
"I tried to be
faithful to myself -- Alvan -- and . . . and honest to you. . . ."
"If you had tried
to be faithful to me it would have been more to the purpose," he
interrupted, angrily. "I've been faithful to you and you have spoiled my
life -- both our lives . . ." Then after a pause the unconquerable
preoccupation of self came out, and he raised his voice to ask resentfully,
"And, pray, for how long have you been making a fool of me?"
She seemed horribly
shocked by that question. He did not wait for an answer, but went on moving
about all the time; now and then coming up to her, then wandering off
restlessly to the other end of the room.
"I want to know.
Everybody knows, I suppose, but myself -- and that's your honesty!"
"I have told you
there is nothing to know," she said, speaking unsteadily as if in pain.
"Nothing of what you suppose. You don't understand me. This letter is the
beginning -- and the end."
"The end -- this
thing has no end," he clamoured, unexpectedly. "Can't you understand
that? I can . . . The beginning . . ."
He stopped and looked
into her eyes with concentrated intensity, with a desire to see, to penetrate,
to understand, that made him positively hold his breath till he gasped.
"By Heavens!"
he said, standing perfectly still in a peering attitude and within less than a
foot from her. "By Heavens!" he repeated, slowly, and in a tone whose
involuntary strangeness was a complete mystery to himself. "By Heavens --
I could believe you -- I could believe anything -- now!"
He turned short on his
heel and began to walk up and down the room with an air of having disburdened
himself of the final pronouncement of his life -- of having said something on
which he would not go back, even if he could. She remained as if rooted to the
carpet. Her eyes followed the restless movements of the man, who avoided
looking at her. Her wide stare clung to him, inquiring, wondering and doubtful.
"But the fellow
was forever sticking in here," he burst out, distractedly. "He made
love to you, I suppose -- and, and . . ." He lowered his voice. "And
-- you let him."
"And I let
him," she murmured, catching his intonation, so that her voice sounded
unconscious, sounded far off and slavish, like an echo.
He said twice,
"You! You!" violently, then calmed down. "What could you see in
the fellow?" he asked, with unaffected wonder. "An effeminate, fat
ass. What could you . . . Weren't you happy? Didn't you have all you wanted?
Now -- frankly; did I deceive your expectations in any way? Were you
disappointed with our position -- or with our prospects -- perhaps? You know
you couldn't be -- they are much better than you could hope for when you
married me. . . ."
He forgot himself so
far as to gesticulate a little while he went on with animation:
"What could you
expect from such a fellow? He's an outsider -- a rank outsider. . . . If it
hadn't been for my money . . . do you hear? . . . for my money, he wouldn't
know where to turn. His people won't have anything to do with him. The fellow's
no class -- no class at all. He's useful, certainly, that's why I . . . I
thought you had enough intelligence to see it. . . . And you . . . No! It's
incredible! What did he tell you? Do you care for no one's opinion -- is there
no restraining influence in the world for you -- women? Did you ever give me a
thought? I tried to be a good husband. Did I fail? Tell me -- what have I
done?"
Carried away by his
feelings he took his head in both his hands and repeated wildly:
"What have I done?
. . . Tell me! What? . . ."
"Nothing,"
she said.
"Ah! You see . . .
you can't . . ." he began, triumphantly, walking away; then suddenly, as
though he had been flung back at her by something invisible he had met, he spun
round and shouted with exasperation:
"What on earth did
you expect me to do?"
Without a word she
moved slowly towards the table, and, sitting down, leaned on her elbow, shading
her eyes with her hand. All that time he glared at her watchfully as if
expecting every moment to find in her deliberate movements an answer to his
question. But he could not read anything, he could gather no hint of her
thought. He tried to suppress his desire to shout, and after waiting awhile,
said with incisive scorn:
"Did you want me
to write absurd verses; to sit and look at you for hours -- to talk to you
about your soul? You ought to have known I wasn't that sort. . . . I had
something better to do. But if you think I was totally blind . . ."
He perceived in a flash
that he could remember an infinity of enlightening occurrences. He could recall
ever so many distinct occasions when he came upon them; he remembered the
absurdly interrupted gesture of his fat, white hand, the rapt expression of her
face, the glitter of unbelieving eyes; snatches of incomprehensible
conversations not worth listening to, silences that had meant nothing at the
time and seemed now illuminating like a burst of sunshine. He remembered all
that. He had not been blind. Oh! No! And to know this was an exquisite relief:
it brought back all his composure.
"I thought it
beneath me to suspect you," he said, loftily.
The sound of that
sentence evidently possessed some magical power, because, as soon as he had
spoken, he felt wonderfully at ease; and directly afterwards he experienced a
flash of joyful amazement at the discovery that he could be inspired to such
noble and truthful utterance. He watched the effect of his words. They caused
her to glance to him quickly over her shoulder. He caught a glimpse of wet
eyelashes, of a red cheek with a tear running down swiftly; and then she turned
away again and sat as before, covering her face with her hands.
"You ought to be
perfectly frank with me," he said, slowly.
"You know
everything," she answered, indistinctly, through her fingers.
"This letter. . .
. Yes . . . but . . ."
"And I came
back," she exclaimed in a stifled voice; "you know everything."
"I am glad of it
-- for your sake," he said with impressive gravity. He listened to himself
with solemn emotion. It seemed to him that something inexpressibly momentous
was in progress within the room, that every word and every gesture had the
importance of events preordained from the beginning of all things, and summing
up in their finality the whole purpose of creation.
"For your
sake," he repeated.
Her shoulders shook as
though she had been sobbing, and he forgot himself in the contemplation of her
hair. Suddenly he gave a start, as if waking up, and asked very gently and not
much above a whisper --
"Have you been
meeting him often?"
"Never!" she
cried into the palms of her hands.
This answer seemed for
a moment to take from him the power of speech. His lips moved for some time
before any sound came.
"You preferred to
make love here -- under my very nose," he said, furiously. He calmed down
instantly, and felt regretfully uneasy, as though he had let himself down in
her estimation by that outburst. She rose, and with her hand on the back of the
chair confronted him with eyes that were perfectly dry now. There was a red
spot on each of her cheeks.
"When I made up my
mind to go to him -- I wrote," she said.
"But you didn't go
to him," he took up in the same tone. "How far did you go? What made
you come back?"
"I didn't know
myself," she murmured. Nothing of her moved but her lips. He fixed her
sternly.
"Did he expect
this? Was he waiting for you?" he asked.
She answered him by an
almost imperceptible nod, and he continued to look at her for a good while
without making a sound. Then, at last --
"And I suppose he
is waiting yet?" he asked, quickly.
Again she seemed to nod
at him. For some reason he felt he must know the time. He consulted his watch
gloomily. Half-past seven.
"Is he?" he
muttered, putting the watch in his pocket. He looked up at her, and, as if
suddenly overcome by a sense of sinister fun, gave a short, harsh laugh,
directly repressed.
"No! It's the most
unheard! . . ." he mumbled while she stood before him biting her lower
lip, as if plunged in deep thought. He laughed again in one low burst that was
as spiteful as an imprecation. He did not know why he felt such an overpowering
and sudden distaste for the facts of existence -- for facts in general -- such
an immense disgust at the thought of all the many days already lived through.
He was wearied. Thinking seemed a labour beyond his strength. He said --
"You deceived me
-- now you make a fool of him . . . It's awful! Why?"
"I deceived
myself!" she exclaimed.
"Oh!
Nonsense!" he said, impatiently.
"I am ready to go
if you wish it," she went on, quickly. "It was due to you -- to be
told -- to know. No! I could not!" she cried, and stood still wringing her
hands stealthily.
"I am glad you
repented before it was too late," he said in a dull tone and looking at
his boots. "I am glad . . . some spark of better feeling," he
muttered, as if to himself. He lifted up his head after a moment of brooding
silence. "I am glad to see that there is some sense of decency left in
you," he added a little louder. Looking at her he appeared to hesitate, as
if estimating the possible consequences of what he wished to say, and at last
blurted out --
"After all, I
loved you. . . ."
"I did not
know," she whispered.
"Good God!"
he cried. "Why do you imagine I married you?"
The indelicacy of his
obtuseness angered her.
"Ah -- why?"
she said through her teeth.
He appeared overcome
with horror, and watched her lips intently as though in fear.
"I imagined many
things," she said, slowly, and paused. He watched, holding his breath. At
last she went on musingly, as if thinking aloud, "I tried to understand. I
tried honestly. . . . Why? . . . To do the usual thing -- I suppose. . . . To
please yourself."
He walked away smartly,
and when he came back, close to her, he had a flushed face.
"You seemed pretty
well pleased, too -- at the time," he hissed, with scathing fury. "I
needn't ask whether you loved me."
"I know now I was
perfectly incapable of such a thing," she said, calmly, "If I had,
perhaps you would not have married me."
"It's very clear I
would not have done it if I had known you -- as I know you now."
He seemed to see
himself proposing to her -- ages ago. They were strolling up the slope of a
lawn. Groups of people were scattered in sunshine. The shadows of leafy boughs
lay still on the short grass. The coloured sunshades far off, passing between
trees, resembled deliberate and brilliant butterflies moving without a flutter.
Men smiling amiably, or else very grave, within the impeccable shelter of their
black coats, stood by the side of women who, clustered in clear summer
toilettes, recalled all the fabulous tales of enchanted gardens where animated
flowers smile at bewitched knights. There was a sumptuous serenity in it all, a
thin, vibrating excitement, the perfect security, as of an invincible ignorance,
that evoked within him a transcendent belief in felicity as the lot of all
mankind, a recklessly picturesque desire to get promptly something for himself
only, out of that splendour unmarred by any shadow of a thought. The girl
walked by his side across an open space; no one was near, and suddenly he stood
still, as if inspired, and spoke. He remembered looking at her pure eyes, at
her candid brow; he remembered glancing about quickly to see if they were being
observed, and thinking that nothing could go wrong in a world of so much charm,
purity, and distinction. He was proud of it. He was one of its makers, of its
possessors, of its guardians, of its extollers. He wanted to grasp it solidly,
to get as much gratification as he could out of it; and in view of its
incomparable quality, of its unstained atmosphere, of its nearness to the
heaven of its choice, this gust of brutal desire seemed the most noble of
aspirations. In a second he lived again through all these moments, and then all
the pathos of his failure presented itself to him with such vividness that
there was a suspicion of tears in his tone when he said almost unthinkingly,
"My God! I did love you!"
She seemed touched by
the emotion of his voice. Her lips quivered a little, and she made one
faltering step towards him, putting out her hands in a beseeching gesture, when
she perceived, just in time, that being absorbed by the tragedy of his life he
had absolutely forgotten her very existence. She stopped, and her outstretched
arms fell slowly. He, with his features distorted by the bitterness of his
thought, saw neither her movement nor her gesture. He stamped his foot in
vexation, rubbed his head -- then exploded.
"What the devil am
I to do now?"
He was still again. She
seemed to understand, and moved to the door firmly.
"It's very simple
-- I'm going," she said aloud.
At the sound of her
voice he gave a start of surprise, looked at her wildly, and asked in a
piercing tone --
"You. . . . Where?
To him?"
"No -- alone --
good-bye."
The door-handle rattled
under her groping hand as though she had been trying to get out of some dark
place.
"No -- stay!"
he cried.
She heard him faintly.
He saw her shoulder touch the lintel of the door. She swayed as if dazed. There
was less than a second of suspense while they both felt as if poised on the
very edge of moral annihilation, ready to fall into some devouring nowhere.
Then, almost simultaneously, he shouted, "Come back!" and she let go
the handle of the door. She turned round in peaceful desperation like one who
deliberately has thrown away the last chance of life; and, for a moment, the
room she faced appeared terrible, and dark, and safe -- like a grave.
He said, very hoarse
and abrupt: "It can't end like this. . . . Sit down;" and while she
crossed the room again to the low-backed chair before the dressing-table, he
opened the door and put his head out to look and listen. The house was quiet.
He came back pacified, and asked --
"Do you speak the
truth?"
She nodded.
"You have lived a
lie, though," he said, suspiciously.
"Ah! You made it
so easy," she answered.
"You reproach me
-- me!"
"How could
I?" she said; "I would have you no other -- now."
"What do you mean
by . . ." he began, then checked himself, and without waiting for an
answer went on, "I won't ask any questions. Is this letter the worst of
it?"
She had a nervous
movement of her hands.
"I must have a
plain answer," he said, hotly.
"Then, no! The
worst is my coming back."
There followed a period
of dead silence, during which they exchanged searching glances.
He said authoritatively
--
"You don't know
what you are saying. Your mind is unhinged. You are beside yourself, or you would
not say such things. You can't control yourself. Even in your remorse . .
." He paused a moment, then said with a doctoral air: "Self-restraint
is everything in life, you know. It's happiness, it's dignity . . . it's
everything."
She was pulling nervously
at her handkerchief while he went on watching anxiously to see the effect of
his words. Nothing satisfactory happened. Only, as he began to speak again, she
covered her face with both her hands.
"You see where the
want of self-restraint leads to. Pain -- humiliation -- loss of respect -- of
friends, of everything that ennobles life, that . . . All kinds of
horrors," he concluded, abruptly.
She made no stir. He
looked at her pensively for some time as though he had been concentrating the
melancholy thoughts evoked by the sight of that abased woman. His eyes became
fixed and dull. He was profoundly penetrated by the solemnity of the moment; he
felt deeply the greatness of the occasion. And more than ever the walls of his
house seemed to enclose the sacredness of ideals to which he was about to offer
a magnificent sacrifice. He was the high priest of that temple, the severe
guardian of formulas, of rites, of the pure ceremonial concealing the black
doubts of life. And he was not alone. Other men, too -- the best of them --
kept watch and ward by the hearthstones that were the altars of that profitable
persuasion. He understood confusedly that he was part of an immense and
beneficent power, which had a reward ready for every discretion. He dwelt within
the invincible wisdom of silence; he was protected by an indestructible faith
that would last forever, that would withstand unshaken all the assaults -- the
loud execrations of apostates, and the secret weariness of its confessors! He
was in league with a universe of untold advantages. He represented the moral
strength of a beautiful reticence that could vanquish all the deplorable
crudities of life -- fear, disaster, sin -- even death itself. It seemed to him
he was on the point of sweeping triumphantly away all the illusory mysteries of
existence. It was simplicity itself.
"I hope you see
now the folly -- the utter folly of wickedness," he began in a dull,
solemn manner. "You must respect the conditions of your life or lose all
it can give you. All! Everything!"
He waved his arm once,
and three exact replicas of his face, of his clothes, of his dull severity, of
his solemn grief, repeated the wide gesture that in its comprehensive sweep
indicated an infinity of moral sweetness, embraced the walls, the hangings, the
whole house, all the crowd of houses outside, all the flimsy and inscrutable
graves of the living, with their doors numbered like the doors of prison-cells,
and as impenetrable as the granite of tombstones.
"Yes! Restraint,
duty, fidelity -- unswerving fidelity to what is expected of you. This -- only
this -- secures the reward, the peace. Everything else we should labour to
subdue -- to destroy. It's misfortune; it's disease. It is terrible --
terrible. We must not know anything about it -- we needn't. It is our duty to
ourselves -- to others. You do not live all alone in the world -- and if you
have no respect for the dignity of life, others have. Life is a serious matter.
If you don't conform to the highest standards you are no one -- it's a kind of
death. Didn't this occur to you? You've only to look round you to see the truth
of what I am saying. Did you live without noticing anything, without
understanding anything? From a child you had examples before your eyes -- you
could see daily the beauty, the blessings of morality, of principles. . .
."
His voice rose and fell
pompously in a strange chant. His eyes were still, his stare exalted and
sullen; his face was set, was hard, was woodenly exulting over the grim
inspiration that secretly possessed him, seethed within him, lifted him up into
a stealthy frenzy of belief. Now and then he would stretch out his right arm
over her head, as it were, and he spoke down at that sinner from a height, and
with a sense of avenging virtue, with a profound and pure joy as though he
could from his steep pinnacle see every weighty word strike and hurt like a
punishing stone.
"Rigid principles
-- adherence to what is right," he finished after a pause.
"What is
right?" she said, distinctly, without uncovering her face.
"Your mind is
diseased!" he cried, upright and austere. "Such a question is rot --
utter rot. Look round you -- there's your answer, if you only care to see.
Nothing that outrages the received beliefs can be right. Your conscience tells
you that. They are the received beliefs because they are the best, the noblest,
the only possible. They survive. . . ."
He could not help
noticing with pleasure the philosophic breadth of his view, but he could not
pause to enjoy it, for his inspiration, the call of august truth, carried him
on.
"You must respect
the moral foundations of a society that has made you what you are. Be true to
it. That's duty -- that's honour -- that's honesty."
He felt a great glow
within him, as though he had swallowed something hot. He made a step nearer.
She sat up and looked at him with an ardour of expectation that stimulated his
sense of the supreme importance of that moment. And as if forgetting himself he
raised his voice very much.
"'What's right?'
you ask me. Think only. What would you have been if you had gone off with that
infernal vagabond? . . . What would you have been? . . . You! My wife! . .
."
He caught sight of
himself in the pier glass, drawn up to his full height, and with a face so
white that his eyes, at the distance, resembled the black cavities in a skull.
He saw himself as if about to launch imprecations, with arms uplifted above her
bowed head. He was ashamed of that unseemly posture, and put his hands in his
pockets hurriedly. She murmured faintly, as if to herself --
"Ah! What am I
now?"
"As it happens you
are still Mrs. Alvan Hervey -- uncommonly lucky for you, let me tell you,"
he said in a conversational tone. He walked up to the furthest corner of the
room, and, turning back, saw her sitting very upright, her hands clasped on her
lap, and with a lost, unswerving gaze of her eyes which stared unwinking like
the eyes of the blind, at the crude gas flame, blazing and still, between the
jaws of the bronze dragon.
He came up quite close
to her, and straddling his legs a little, stood looking down at her face for
some time without taking his hands out of his pockets. He seemed to be turning
over in his mind a heap of words, piecing his next speech out of an
overpowering abundance of thoughts.
"You've tried me
to the utmost," he said at last; and as soon as he said these words he
lost his moral footing, and felt himself swept away from his pinnacle by a
flood of passionate resentment against the bungling creature that had come so
near to spoiling his life. "Yes; I've been tried more than any man ought
to be," he went on with righteous bitterness. "It was unfair. What
possessed you to? . . . What possessed you? . . . Write such a . . . After five
years of perfect happiness! 'Pon my word, no one would believe. . . . Didn't
you feel you couldn't? Because you couldn't . . . it was impossible -- you
know. Wasn't it? Think. Wasn't it?"
"It was
impossible," she whispered, obediently.
This submissive assent
given with such readiness did not soothe him, did not elate him; it gave him,
inexplicably, that sense of terror we experience when in the midst of
conditions we had learned to think absolutely safe we discover all at once the
presence of a near and unsuspected danger. It was impossible, of course! He
knew it. She knew it. She confessed it. It was impossible! That man knew it,
too -- as well as any one; couldn't help knowing it. And yet those two had been
engaged in a conspiracy against his peace -- in a criminal enterprise for which
there could be no sanction of belief within themselves. There could not be!
There could not be! And yet how near to . . . With a short thrill he saw
himself an exiled forlorn figure in a realm of ungovernable, of unrestrained
folly. Nothing could be foreseen, foretold -- guarded against. And the
sensation was intolerable, had something of the withering horror that may be
conceived as following upon the utter extinction of all hope. In the flash of
thought the dishonouring episode seemed to disengage itself from everything
actual, from earthly conditions, and even from earthly suffering; it became
purely a terrifying knowledge, an annihilating knowledge of a blind and
infernal force. Something desperate and vague, a flicker of an insane desire to
abase himself before the mysterious impulses of evil, to ask for mercy in some
way, passed through his mind; and then came the idea, the persuasion, the
certitude, that the evil must be forgotten -- must be resolutely ignored to
make life possible; that the knowledge must be kept out of mind, out of sight,
like the knowledge of certain death is kept out of the daily existence of men.
He stiffened himself inwardly for the effort, and next moment it appeared very
easy, amazingly feasible, if one only kept strictly to facts, gave one's mind
to their perplexities and not to their meaning. Becoming conscious of a long
silence, he cleared his throat warningly, and said in a steady voice --
"I am glad you
feel this . . . uncommonly glad . . . you felt this in time. For, don't you see
. . ." Unexpectedly he hesitated.
"Yes . . . I
see," she murmured.
"Of course you
would," he said, looking at the carpet and speaking like one who thinks of
something else. He lifted his head. "I cannot believe -- even after this
-- even after this -- that you are altogether -- altogether . . . other than
what I thought you. It seems impossible -- to me."
"And to me,"
she breathed out.
"Now -- yes,"
he said, "but this morning? And to-morrow? . . . This is what . . ."
He started at the drift
of his words and broke off abruptly. Every train of thought seemed to lead into
the hopeless realm of ungovernable folly, to recall the knowledge and the
terror of forces that must be ignored. He said rapidly --
"My position is
very painful -- difficult . . . I feel . . ."
He looked at her
fixedly with a pained air, as though frightfully oppressed by a sudden
inability to express his pent-up ideas.
"I am ready to go,"
she said very low. "I have forfeited everything . . . to learn . . . to
learn . . ."
Her chin fell on her
breast; her voice died out in a sigh. He made a slight gesture of impatient
assent.
"Yes! Yes! It's
all very well . . . of course. Forfeited -- ah! Morally forfeited -- only
morally forfeited . . . if I am to believe you . . ."
She startled him by
jumping up.
"Oh! I believe, I
believe," he said, hastily, and she sat down as suddenly as she had got
up. He went on gloomily --
"I've suffered --
I suffer now. You can't understand how much. So much that when you propose a
parting I almost think. . . . But no. There is duty. You've forgotten it; I
never did. Before heaven, I never did. But in a horrid exposure like this the
judgment of mankind goes astray -- at least for a time. You see, you and I --
at least I feel that -- you and I are one before the world. It is as it should
be. The world is right -- in the main -- or else it couldn't be -- couldn't be
-- what it is. And we are part of it. We have our duty to -- to our fellow
beings who don't want to . . . to. . . er."
He stammered. She
looked up at him with wide eyes, and her lips were slightly parted. He went on
mumbling --
". . . Pain. . . .
Indignation. . . . Sure to misunderstand. I've suffered enough. And if there
has been nothing irreparable -- as you assure me . . . then . . ."
"Alvan!" she
cried.
"What?" he
said, morosely. He gazed down at her for a moment with a sombre stare, as one
looks at ruins, at the devastation of some natural disaster.
"Then," he
continued after a short pause, "the best thing is . . . the best for us .
. . for every one. . . . Yes . . . least pain -- most unselfish. . . ."
His voice faltered, and she heard only detached words. ". . . Duty. . . .
Burden. . . . Ourselves. . . . Silence."
A moment of perfect
stillness ensued.
"This is an appeal
I am making to your conscience," he said, suddenly, in an explanatory
tone, "not to add to the wretchedness of all this: to try loyally and help
me to live it down somehow. Without any reservations -- you know. Loyally! You
can't deny I've been cruelly wronged and -- after all -- my affection deserves
. . ." He paused with evident anxiety to hear her speak.
"I make no
reservations," she said, mournfully. "How could I? I found myself out
and came back to . . ." her eyes flashed scornfully for an instant ".
. . to what -- to what you propose. You see . . . I . . . I can be trusted . .
. now."
He listened to every
word with profound attention, and when she ceased seemed to wait for more.
"Is that all
you've got to say?" he asked.
She was startled by his
tone, and said faintly --
"I spoke the
truth. What more can I say?"
"Confound it! You
might say something human," he burst out. "It isn't being truthful;
it's being brazen -- if you want to know. Not a word to show you feel your
position, and -- and mine. Not a single word of acknowledgment, or regret -- or
remorse . . . or . . . something."
"Words!" she
whispered in a tone that irritated him. He stamped his foot.
"This is
awful!" he exclaimed. "Words? Yes, words. Words mean something -- yes
-- they do -- for all this infernal affectation. They mean something to me --
to everybody -- to you. What the devil did you use to express those sentiments
-- sentiments -- pah! -- which made you forget me, duty, shame!" . . . He
foamed at the mouth while she stared at him, appalled by this sudden fury.
"Did you two talk only with your eyes?" he spluttered savagely. She
rose.
"I can't bear
this," she said, trembling from head to foot. "I am going."
They stood facing one
another for a moment.
"Not you," he
said, with conscious roughness, and began to walk up and down the room. She
remained very still with an air of listening anxiously to her own heart-beats,
then sank down on the chair slowly, and sighed, as if giving up a task beyond
her strength.
"You misunderstand
everything I say," he began quietly, "but I prefer to think that --
just now -- you are not accountable for your actions." He stopped again
before her. "Your mind is unhinged," he said, with unction. "To
go now would be adding crime -- yes, crime -- to folly. I'll have no scandal in
my life, no matter what's the cost. And why? You are sure to misunderstand me
-- but I'll tell you. As a matter of duty. Yes. But you're sure to
misunderstand me -- recklessly. Women always do -- they are too -- too
narrow-minded."
He waited for a while,
but she made no sound, didn't even look at him; he felt uneasy, painfully uneasy,
like a man who suspects he is unreasonably mistrusted. To combat that
exasperating sensation he recommenced talking very fast. The sound of his words
excited his thoughts, and in the play of darting thoughts he had glimpses now
and then of the inexpugnable rock of his convictions, towering in solitary
grandeur above the unprofitable waste of errors and passions.
"For it is
self-evident," he went on with anxious vivacity, "it is self-evident
that, on the highest ground we haven't the right -- no, we haven't the right to
intrude our miseries upon those who -- who naturally expect better things from
us. Every one wishes his own life and the life around him to be beautiful and
pure. Now, a scandal amongst people of our position is disastrous for the morality
-- a fatal influence -- don't you see -- upon the general tone of the class --
very important -- the most important, I verily believe, in -- in the community.
I feel this -- profoundly. This is the broad view. In time you'll give me . . .
when you become again the woman I loved -- and trusted. . . ."
He stopped short, as
though unexpectedly suffocated, then in a completely changed voice said,
"For I did love and trust you" -- and again was silent for a moment.
She put her handkerchief to her eyes.
"You'll give me
credit for -- for -- my motives. It's mainly loyalty to -- to the larger
conditions of our life -- where you -- you! of all women -- failed. One doesn't
usually talk like this -- of course -- but in this case you'll admit . . . And
consider -- the innocent suffer with the guilty. The world is pitiless in its
judgments. Unfortunately there are always those in it who are only too eager to
misunderstand. Before you and before my conscience I am guiltless, but any --
any disclosure would impair my usefulness in the sphere -- in the larger sphere
in which I hope soon to . . . I believe you fully shared my views in that
matter -- I don't want to say any more . . . on -- on that point -- but,
believe me, true unselfishness is to bear one's burdens in -- in silence. The
ideal must -- must be preserved -- for others, at least. It's clear as
daylight. If I've a -- a loathsome sore, to gratuitously display it would be
abominable -- abominable! And often in life -- in the highest conception of
life -- outspokenness in certain circumstances is nothing less than criminal.
Temptation, you know, excuses no one. There is no such thing really if one
looks steadily to one's welfare -- which is grounded in duty. But there are the
weak." . . . His tone became ferocious for an instant . . . "And
there are the fools and the envious -- especially for people in our position. I
am guiltless of this terrible -- terrible . . . estrangement; but if there has
been nothing irreparable." . . . Something gloomy, like a deep shadow
passed over his face. . . . "Nothing irreparable -- you see even now I am
ready to trust you implicitly -- then our duty is clear."
He looked down. A
change came over his expression and straightway from the outward impetus of his
loquacity he passed into the dull contemplation of all the appeasing truths
that, not without some wonder, he had so recently been able to discover within
himself. During this profound and soothing communion with his innermost beliefs
he remained staring at the carpet, with a portentously solemn face and with a
dull vacuity of eyes that seemed to gaze into the blankness of an empty hole.
Then, without stirring in the least, he continued:
"Yes. Perfectly
clear. I've been tried to the utmost, and I can't pretend that, for a time, the
old feelings -- the old feelings are not. . . ." He sighed. . . .
"But I forgive you. . . ."
She made a slight
movement without uncovering her eyes. In his profound scrutiny of the carpet he
noticed nothing. And there was silence, silence within and silence without, as
though his words had stilled the beat and tremor of all the surrounding life,
and the house had stood alone -- the only dwelling upon a deserted earth.
He lifted his head and
repeated solemnly:
"I forgive you . .
. from a sense of duty -- and in the hope . . ."
He heard a laugh, and
it not only interrupted his words but also destroyed the peace of his
self-absorption with the vile pain of a reality intruding upon the beauty of a
dream. He couldn't understand whence the sound came. He could see,
foreshortened, the tear-stained, dolorous face of the woman stretched out, and
with her head thrown over the back of the seat. He thought the piercing noise
was a delusion. But another shrill peal followed by a deep sob and succeeded by
another shriek of mirth positively seemed to tear him out from where he stood.
He bounded to the door. It was closed. He turned the key and thought: that's no
good. . . . "Stop this!" he cried, and perceived with alarm that he
could hardly hear his own voice in the midst of her screaming. He darted back
with the idea of stifling that unbearable noise with his hands, but stood still
distracted, finding himself as unable to touch her as though she had been on
fire. He shouted, "Enough of this!" like men shout in the tumult of a
riot, with a red face and starting eyes; then, as if swept away before another
burst of laughter, he disappeared in a flash out of three looking-glasses,
vanished suddenly from before her. For a time the woman gasped and laughed at
no one in the luminous stillness of the empty room.
He reappeared, striding
at her, and with a tumbler of water in his hand. He stammered: "Hysterics
-- Stop -- They will hear -- Drink this." She laughed at the ceiling.
"Stop this!" he cried. "Ah!"
He flung the water in
her face, putting into the action all the secret brutality of his spite, yet
still felt that it would have been perfectly excusable -- in any one -- to send
the tumbler after the water. He restrained himself, but at the same time was so
convinced nothing could stop the horror of those mad shrieks that, when the
first sensation of relief came, it did not even occur to him to doubt the
impression of having become suddenly deaf. When, next moment, he became sure
that she was sitting up, and really very quiet, it was as though everything --
men, things, sensations, had come to a rest. He was prepared to be grateful. He
could not take his eyes off her, fearing, yet unwilling to admit, the
possibility of her beginning again; for, the experience, however contemptuously
he tried to think of it, had left the bewilderment of a mysterious terror. Her
face was streaming with water and tears; there was a wisp of hair on her
forehead, another stuck to her cheek; her hat was on one side, undecorously
tilted; her soaked veil resembled a sordid rag festooning her forehead. There
was an utter unreserve in her aspect, an abandonment of safeguards, that
ugliness of truth which can only be kept out of daily life by unremitting care
for appearances. He did not know why, looking at her, he thought suddenly of
to-morrow, and why the thought called out a deep feeling of unutterable,
discouraged weariness -- a fear of facing the succession of days. To-morrow! It
was as far as yesterday. Ages elapsed between sunrises -- sometimes. He scanned
her features like one looks at a forgotten country. They were not distorted --
he recognized landmarks, so to speak; but it was only a resemblance that he
could see, not the woman of yesterday -- or was it, perhaps, more than the
woman of yesterday? Who could tell? Was it something new? A new expression --
or a new shade of expression? or something deep -- an old truth unveiled, a
fundamental and hidden truth -- some unnecessary, accursed certitude? He became
aware that he was trembling very much, that he had an empty tumbler in his hand
-- that time was passing. Still looking at her with lingering mistrust he
reached towards the table to put the glass down and was startled to feel it
apparently go through the wood. He had missed the edge. The surprise, the
slight jingling noise of the accident annoyed him beyond expression. He turned
to her irritated.
"What's the
meaning of this?" he asked, grimly.
She passed her hand
over her face and made an attempt to get up.
"You're not going
to be absurd again," he said. "'Pon my soul, I did not know you could
forget yourself to that extent." He didn't try to conceal his physical
disgust, because he believed it to be a purely moral reprobation of every
unreserve, of anything in the nature of a scene. "I assure you -- it was
revolting," he went on. He stared for a moment at her. "Positively
degrading," he added with insistence.
She stood up quickly as
if moved by a spring and tottered. He started forward instinctively. She caught
hold of the back of the chair and steadied herself. This arrested him, and they
faced each other wide-eyed, uncertain, and yet coming back slowly to the
reality of things with relief and wonder, as though just awakened after tossing
through a long night of fevered dreams.
"Pray, don't begin
again," he said, hurriedly, seeing her open her lips. "I deserve some
little consideration -- and such unaccountable behaviour is painful to me. I
expect better things. . . . I have the right. . . ."
She pressed both her
hands to her temples.
"Oh,
nonsense!" he said, sharply. "You are perfectly capable of coming
down to dinner. No one should even suspect; not even the servants. No one! No
one! . . . I am sure you can."
She dropped her arms;
her face twitched. She looked straight into his eyes and seemed incapable of
pronouncing a word. He frowned at her.
"I -- wish --
it," he said, tyrannically. "For your own sake also. . . ." He
meant to carry that point without any pity. Why didn't she speak? He feared
passive resistance. She must. . . . Make her come. His frown deepened, and he
began to think of some effectual violence, when most unexpectedly she said in a
firm voice, "Yes, I can," and clutched the chair-back again. He was
relieved, and all at once her attitude ceased to interest him. The important
thing was that their life would begin again with an every-day act -- with
something that could not be misunderstood, that, thank God, had no moral
meaning, no perplexity -- and yet was symbolic of their uninterrupted communion
in the past -- in all the future. That morning, at that table, they had
breakfast together; and now they would dine. It was all over! What had happened
between could be forgotten -- must be forgotten, like things that can only
happen once -- death for instance.
"I will wait for
you," he said, going to the door. He had some difficulty with it, for he
did not remember he had turned the key. He hated that delay, and his checked
impatience to be gone out of the room made him feel quite ill as, with the
consciousness of her presence behind his back, he fumbled at the lock. He
managed it at last; then in the doorway he glanced over his shoulder to say,
"It's rather late -- you know --" and saw her standing where he had
left her, with a face white as alabaster and perfectly still, like a woman in a
trance.
He was afraid she would
keep him waiting, but without any breathing time, he hardly knew how, he found
himself sitting at table with her. He had made up his mind to eat, to talk, to
be natural. It seemed to him necessary that deception should begin at home. The
servants must not know -- must not suspect. This intense desire of secrecy; of
secrecy dark, destroying, profound, discreet like a grave, possessed him with
the strength of a hallucination -- seemed to spread itself to inanimate objects
that had been the daily companions of his life, affected with a taint of enmity
every single thing within the faithful walls that would stand forever between
the shamelessness of facts and the indignation of mankind. Even when -- as it
happened once or twice -- both the servants left the room together he remained
carefully natural, industriously hungry, laboriously at his ease, as though he
had wanted to cheat the black oak sideboard, the heavy curtains, the
stiff-backed chairs, into the belief of an unstained happiness. He was
mistrustful of his wife's self-control, unwilling to look at her and reluctant
to speak, for it seemed to him inconceivable that she should not betray herself
by the slightest movement, by the very first word spoken. Then he thought the
silence in the room was becoming dangerous, and so excessive as to produce the
effect of an intolerable uproar. He wanted to end it, as one is anxious to
interrupt an indiscreet confession; but with the memory of that laugh upstairs
he dared not give her an occasion to open her lips. Presently he heard her
voice pronouncing in a calm tone some unimportant remark. He detached his eyes
from the centre of his plate and felt excited as if on the point of looking at
a wonder. And nothing could be more wonderful than her composure. He was
looking at the candid eyes, at the pure brow, at what he had seen every evening
for years in that place; he listened to the voice that for five years he had
heard every day. Perhaps she was a little pale -- but a healthy pallor had
always been for him one of her chief attractions. Perhaps her face was rigidly
set -- but that marmoreal impassiveness, that magnificent stolidity, as of a
wonderful statue by some great sculptor working under the curse of the gods;
that imposing, unthinking stillness of her features, had till then mirrored for
him the tranquil dignity of a soul of which he had thought himself -- as a
matter of course -- the inexpugnable possessor. Those were the outward signs of
her difference from the ignoble herd that feels, suffers, fails, errs -- but
has no distinct value in the world except as a moral contrast to the prosperity
of the elect. He had been proud of her appearance. It had the perfectly proper
frankness of perfection -- and now he was shocked to see it unchanged. She
looked like this, spoke like this, exactly like this, a year ago, a month ago
-- only yesterday when she. . . . What went on within made no difference. What
did she think? What meant the pallor, the placid face, the candid brow, the
pure eyes? What did she think during all these years? What did she think
yesterday -- to-day; what would she think to-morrow? He must find out. . . .
And yet how could he get to know? She had been false to him, to that man, to
herself; she was ready to be false -- for him. Always false. She looked lies,
breathed lies, lived lies -- would tell lies -- always -- to the end of life!
And he would never know what she meant. Never! Never! No one could. Impossible
to know.
He dropped his knife
and fork, brusquely, as though by the virtue of a sudden illumination he had
been made aware of poison in his plate, and became positive in his mind that he
could never swallow another morsel of food as long as he lived. The dinner went
on in a room that had been steadily growing, from some cause, hotter than a
furnace. He had to drink. He drank time after time, and, at last, recollecting
himself, was frightened at the quantity, till he perceived that what he had
been drinking was water -- out of two different wine glasses; and the
discovered unconsciousness of his actions affected him painfully. He was
disturbed to find himself in such an unhealthy state of mind. Excess of feeling
-- excess of feeling; and it was part of his creed that any excess of feeling
was unhealthy -- morally unprofitable; a taint on practical manhood. Her fault.
Entirely her fault. Her sinful self-forgetfulness was contagious. It made him
think thoughts he had never had before; thoughts disintegrating, tormenting,
sapping to the very core of life -- like mortal disease; thoughts that bred the
fear of air, of sunshine, of men -- like the whispered news of a pestilence.
The maids served
without noise; and to avoid looking at his wife and looking within himself, he
followed with his eyes first one and then the other without being able to
distinguish between them. They moved silently about, without one being able to
see by what means, for their skirts touched the carpet all round; they glided
here and there, receded, approached, rigid in black and white, with precise
gestures, and no life in their faces, like a pair of marionettes in mourning;
and their air of wooden unconcern struck him as unnatural, suspicious,
irremediably hostile. That such people's feelings or judgment could affect one
in any way, had never occurred to him before. He understood they had no
prospects, no principles -- no refinement and no power. But now he had become
so debased that he could not even attempt to disguise from himself his yearning
to know the secret thoughts of his servants. Several times he looked up
covertly at the faces of those girls. Impossible to know. They changed his
plates and utterly ignored his existence. What impenetrable duplicity. Women --
nothing but women round him. Impossible to know. He experienced that
heart-probing, fiery sense of dangerous loneliness, which sometimes assails the
courage of a solitary adventurer in an unexplored country. The sight of a man's
face -- he felt -- of any man's face, would have been a profound relief. One would
know then -- something -- could understand. . . . He would engage a butler as
soon as possible. And then the end of that dinner -- which had seemed to have
been going on for hours -- the end came, taking him violently by surprise, as
though he had expected in the natural course of events to sit at that table for
ever and ever.
But upstairs in the
drawing-room he became the victim of a restless fate, that would, on no
account, permit him to sit down. She had sunk on a low easy-chair, and taking
up from a small table at her elbow a fan with ivory leaves, shaded her face
from the fire. The coals glowed without a flame; and upon the red glow the
vertical bars of the grate stood out at her feet, black and curved, like the
charred ribs of a consumed sacrifice. Far off, a lamp perched on a slim brass
rod, burned under a wide shade of crimson silk: the centre, within the shadows
of the large room, of a fiery twilight that had in the warm quality of its tint
something delicate, refined and infernal. His soft footfalls and the subdued
beat of the clock on the high mantel-piece answered each other regularly -- as
if time and himself, engaged in a measured contest, had been pacing together
through the infernal delicacy of twilight towards a mysterious goal.
He walked from one end
of the room to the other without a pause, like a traveller who, at night,
hastens doggedly upon an interminable journey. Now and then he glanced at her.
Impossible to know. The gross precision of that thought expressed to his
practical mind something illimitable and infinitely profound, the all-embracing
subtlety of a feeling, the eternal origin of his pain. This woman had accepted
him, had abandoned him -- had returned to him. And of all this he would never
know the truth. Never. Not till death -- not after -- not on judgment day when
all shall be disclosed, thoughts and deeds, rewards and punishments, but the
secret of hearts alone shall return, forever unknown, to the Inscrutable
Creator of good and evil, to the Master of doubts and impulses.
He stood still to look
at her. Thrown back and with her face turned away from him, she did not stir --
as if asleep. What did she think? What did she feel? And in the presence of her
perfect stillness, in the breathless silence, he felt himself insignificant and
powerless before her, like a prisoner in chains. The fury of his impotence
called out sinister images, that faculty of tormenting vision, which in a
moment of anguishing sense of wrong induces a man to mutter threats or make a
menacing gesture in the solitude of an empty room. But the gust of passion
passed at once, left him trembling a little, with the wondering, reflective
fear of a man who has paused on the very verge of suicide. The serenity of
truth and the peace of death can be only secured through a largeness of
contempt embracing all the profitable servitudes of life. He found he did not
want to know. Better not. It was all over. It was as if it hadn't been. And it
was very necessary for both of them, it was morally right, that nobody should
know.
He spoke suddenly, as
if concluding a discussion.
"The best thing
for us is to forget all this."
She started a little
and shut the fan with a click.
"Yes, forgive --
and forget," he repeated, as if to himself.
"I'll never
forget," she said in a vibrating voice. "And I'll never forgive
myself. . . ."
"But I, who have
nothing to reproach myself . . ." He began, making a step towards her. She
jumped up.
"I did not come
back for your forgiveness," she exclaimed, passionately, as if clamouring
against an unjust aspersion.
He only said
"oh!" and became silent. He could not understand this unprovoked
aggressiveness of her attitude, and certainly was very far from thinking that
an unpremeditated hint of something resembling emotion in the tone of his last
words had caused that uncontrollable burst of sincerity. It completed his
bewilderment, but he was not at all angry now. He was as if benumbed by the
fascination of the incomprehensible. She stood before him, tall and indistinct,
like a black phantom in the red twilight. At last poignantly uncertain as to
what would happen if he opened his lips, he muttered:
"But if my love is
strong enough . . ." and hesitated.
He heard something snap
loudly in the fiery stillness. She had broken her fan. Two thin pieces of ivory
fell, one after another, without a sound, on the thick carpet, and
instinctively he stooped to pick them up. While he groped at her feet it
occurred to him that the woman there had in her hands an indispensable gift
which nothing else on earth could give; and when he stood up he was penetrated
by an irresistible belief in an enigma, by the conviction that within his reach
and passing away from him was the very secret of existence -- its certitude,
immaterial and precious! She moved to the door, and he followed at her elbow,
casting about for a magic word that would make the enigma clear, that would
compel the surrender of the gift. And there is no such word! The enigma is only
made clear by sacrifice, and the gift of heaven is in the hands of every man.
But they had lived in a world that abhors enigmas, and cares for no gifts but
such as can be obtained in the street. She was nearing the door. He said
hurriedly:
"'Pon my word, I
loved you -- I love you now."
She stopped for an
almost imperceptible moment to give him an indignant glance, and then moved on.
That feminine penetration -- so clever and so tainted by the eternal instinct
of self-defence, so ready to see an obvious evil in everything it cannot
understand -- filled her with bitter resentment against both the men who could
offer to the spiritual and tragic strife of her feelings nothing but the
coarseness of their abominable materialism. In her anger against her own
ineffectual self-deception she found hate enough for them both. What did they
want? What more did this one want? And as her husband faced her again, with his
hand on the door-handle, she asked herself whether he was unpardonably stupid,
or simply ignoble.
She said nervously, and
very fast:
"You are deceiving
yourself. You never loved me. You wanted a wife -- some woman -- any woman that
would think, speak, and behave in a certain way -- in a way you approved. You
loved yourself."
"You won't believe
me?" he asked, slowly.
"If I had believed
you loved me," she began, passionately, then drew in a long breath; and
during that pause he heard the steady beat of blood in his ears. "If I had
believed it . . . I would never have come back," she finished, recklessly.
He stood looking down
as though he had not heard. She waited. After a moment he opened the door, and,
on the landing, the sightless woman of marble appeared, draped to the chin,
thrusting blindly at them a cluster of lights.
He seemed to have
forgotten himself in a meditation so deep that on the point of going out she
stopped to look at him in surprise. While she had been speaking he had wandered
on the track of the enigma, out of the world of senses into the region of
feeling. What did it matter what she had done, what she had said, if through
the pain of her acts and words he had obtained the word of the enigma! There
can be no life without faith and love -- faith in a human heart, love of a
human being! That touch of grace, whose help once in life is the privilege of
the most undeserving, flung open for him the portals of beyond, and in
contemplating there the certitude immaterial and precious he forgot all the
meaningless accidents of existence: the bliss of getting, the delight of
enjoying; all the protean and enticing forms of the cupidity that rules a
material world of foolish joys, of contemptible sorrows. Faith! -- Love! -- the
undoubting, clear faith in the truth of a soul -- the great tenderness, deep as
the ocean, serene and eternal, like the infinite peace of space above the short
tempests of the earth. It was what he had wanted all his life -- but he
understood it only then for the first time. It was through the pain of losing
her that the knowledge had come. She had the gift! She had the gift! And in all
the world she was the only human being that could surrender it to his immense
desire. He made a step forward, putting his arms out, as if to take her to his
breast, and, lifting his head, was met by such a look of blank consternation
that his arms fell as though they had been struck down by a blow. She started
away from him, stumbled over the threshold, and once on the landing turned,
swift and crouching. The train of her gown swished as it flew round her feet.
It was an undisguised panic. She panted, showing her teeth, and the hate of
strength, the disdain of weakness, the eternal preoccupation of sex came out
like a toy demon out of a box.
"This is
odious," she screamed.
He did not stir; but
her look, her agitated movements, the sound of her voice were like a mist of
facts thickening between him and the vision of love and faith. It vanished; and
looking at that face triumphant and scornful, at that white face, stealthy and
unexpected, as if discovered staring from an ambush, he was coming back slowly
to the world of senses. His first clear thought was: I am married to that
woman; and the next: she will give nothing but what I see. He felt the need not
to see. But the memory of the vision, the memory that abides forever within the
seer made him say to her with the naïve austerity of a convert awed by the
touch of a new creed, "You haven't the gift." He turned his back on
her, leaving her completely mystified. And she went upstairs slowly, struggling
with a distasteful suspicion of having been confronted by something more subtle
than herself -- more profound than the misunderstood and tragic contest of her
feelings.
He shut the door of the
drawing-room and moved at hazard, alone amongst the heavy shadows and in the
fiery twilight as of an elegant place of perdition. She hadn't the gift -- no
one had. . . . He stepped on a book that had fallen off one of the crowded little
tables. He picked up the slender volume, and holding it, approached the
crimson-shaded lamp. The fiery tint deepened on the cover, and contorted gold
letters sprawling all over it in an intricate maze, came out, gleaming redly.
"Thorns and Arabesques." He read it twice, "Thorns and Ar . . .
. . . . ." The other's book of verses. He dropped it at his feet, but did
not feel the slightest pang of jealousy or indignation. What did he know? . . .
What? . . . The mass of hot coals tumbled down in the grate, and he turned to
look at them . . . Ah! That one was ready to give up everything he had for that
woman -- who did not come -- who had not the faith, the love, the courage to
come. What did that man expect, what did he hope, what did he want? The woman --
or the certitude immaterial and precious! The first unselfish thought he had
ever given to any human being was for that man who had tried to do him a
terrible wrong. He was not angry. He was saddened by an impersonal sorrow, by a
vast melancholy as of all mankind longing for what cannot be attained. He felt
his fellowship with every man -- even with that man -- especially with that
man. What did he think now? Had he ceased to wait -- and hope? Would he ever
cease to wait and hope? Would he understand that the woman, who had no courage,
had not the gift -- had not the gift!
The clock began to
strike, and the deep-toned vibration filled the room as though with the sound
of an enormous bell tolling far away. He counted the strokes. Twelve. Another
day had begun. To-morrow had come; the mysterious and lying to-morrow that
lures men, disdainful of love and faith, on and on through the poignant
futilities of life to the fitting reward of a grave. He counted the strokes,
and gazing at the grate seemed to wait for more. Then, as if called out, left
the room, walking firmly.
When outside he heard
footsteps in the hall and stood still. A bolt was shot -- then another. They
were locking up -- shutting out his desire and his deception from the indignant
criticism of a world full of noble gifts for those who proclaim themselves
without stain and without reproach. He was safe; and on all sides of his
dwelling servile fears and servile hopes slept, dreaming of success, behind the
severe discretion of doors as impenetrable to the truth within as the granite
of tombstones. A lock snapped -- a short chain rattled. Nobody shall know!
Why was this assurance
of safety heavier than a burden of fear, and why the day that began presented
itself obstinately like the last day of all -- like a to-day without a
to-morrow? Yet nothing was changed, for nobody would know; and all would go on
as before -- the getting, the enjoying, the blessing of hunger that is appeased
every day; the noble incentives of unappeasable ambitions. All -- all the
blessings of life. All -- but the certitude immaterial and precious -- the
certitude of love and faith. He believed the shadow of it had been with him as
long as he could remember; that invisible presence had ruled his life. And now
the shadow had appeared and faded he could not extinguish his longing for the
truth of its substance. His desire of it was naïve; it was masterful like the
material aspirations that are the groundwork of existence, but, unlike these,
it was unconquerable. It was the subtle despotism of an idea that suffers no
rivals, that is lonely, inconsolable, and dangerous. He went slowly up the
stairs. Nobody shall know. The days would go on and he would go far -- very
far. If the idea could not be mastered, fortune could be, man could be -- the
whole world. He was dazzled by the greatness of the prospect; the brutality of
a practical instinct shouted to him that only that which could be had was worth
having. He lingered on the steps. The lights were out in the hall, and a small
yellow flame flitted about down there. He felt a sudden contempt for himself
which braced him up. He went on, but at the door of their room and with his arm
advanced to open it, he faltered. On the flight of stairs below the head of the
girl who had been locking up appeared. His arm fell. He thought, "I'll
wait till she is gone" -- and stepped back within the perpendicular folds
of a portière.
He saw her come up
gradually, as if ascending from a well. At every step the feeble flame of the
candle swayed before her tired, young face, and the darkness of the hall seemed
to cling to her black skirt, followed her, rising like a silent flood, as
though the great night of the world had broken through the discreet reserve of
walls, of closed doors, of curtained windows. It rose over the steps, it leaped
up the walls like an angry wave, it flowed over the blue skies, over the yellow
sands, over the sunshine of landscapes, and over the pretty pathos of ragged
innocence and of meek starvation. It swallowed up the delicious idyll in a boat
and the mutilated immortality of famous bas-reliefs. It flowed from outside --
it rose higher, in a destructive silence. And, above it, the woman of marble,
composed and blind on the high pedestal, seemed to ward off the devouring night
with a cluster of lights.
He watched the rising
tide of impenetrable gloom with impatience, as if anxious for the coming of a
darkness black enough to conceal a shameful surrender. It came nearer. The
cluster of lights went out. The girl ascended facing him. Behind her the shadow
of a colossal woman danced lightly on the wall. He held his breath while she
passed by, noiseless and with heavy eyelids. And on her track the flowing tide
of a tenebrous sea filled the house, seemed to swirl about his feet, and rising
unchecked, closed silently above his head.
The time had come but
he did not open the door. All was still; and instead of surrendering to the
reasonable exigencies of life he stepped out, with a rebelling heart, into the
darkness of the house. It was the abode of an impenetrable night; as though
indeed the last day had come and gone, leaving him alone in a darkness that has
no to-morrow. And looming vaguely below the woman of marble, livid and still
like a patient phantom, held out in the night a cluster of extinguished lights.
His obedient thought
traced for him the image of an uninterrupted life, the dignity and the
advantages of an uninterrupted success; while his rebellious heart beat
violently within his breast, as if maddened by the desire of a certitude
immaterial and precious -- the certitude of love and faith. What of the night
within his dwelling if outside he could find the sunshine in which men sow, in
which men reap! Nobody would know. The days, the years would pass, and . . . He
remembered that he had loved her. The years would pass . . . And then he
thought of her as we think of the dead -- in a tender immensity of regret, in a
passionate longing for the return of idealized perfections. He had loved her --
he had loved her -- and he never knew the truth . . . The years would pass in
the anguish of doubt . . . He remembered her smile, her eyes, her voice, her
silence, as though he had lost her forever. The years would pass and he would
always mistrust her smile, suspect her eyes; he would always misbelieve her
voice, he would never have faith in her silence. She had no gift -- she had no
gift! What was she? Who was she? . . . The years would pass; the memory of this
hour would grow faint -- and she would share the material serenity of an
unblemished life. She had no love and no faith for any one. To give her your
thought, your belief, was like whispering your confession over the edge of the
world. Nothing came back -- not even an echo.
In the pain of that
thought was born his conscience; not that fear of remorse which grows slowly,
and slowly decays amongst the complicated facts of life, but a Divine wisdom
springing full-grown, armed and severe out of a tried heart, to combat the
secret baseness of motives. It came to him in a flash that morality is not a
method of happiness. The revelation was terrible. He saw at once that nothing
of what he knew mattered in the least. The acts of men and women, success,
humiliation, dignity, failure -- nothing mattered. It was not a question of
more or less pain, of this joy, of that sorrow. It was a question of truth or
falsehood -- it was a question of life or death.
He stood in the
revealing night -- in the darkness that tries the hearts, in the night useless
for the work of men, but in which their gaze, undazzled by the sunshine of
covetous days, wanders sometimes as far as the stars. The perfect stillness
around him had something solemn in it, but he felt it was the lying solemnity
of a temple devoted to the rites of a debasing persuasion. The silence within
the discreet walls was eloquent of safety but it appeared to him exciting and
sinister, like the discretion of a profitable infamy; it was the prudent peace
of a den of coiners -- of a house of ill-fame! The years would pass -- and
nobody would know. Never! Not till death -- not after . . .
"Never!" he
said aloud to the revealing night.
And he hesitated. The
secret of hearts, too terrible for the timid eyes of men, shall return, veiled
forever, to the Inscrutable Creator of good and evil, to the Master of doubts
and impulses. His conscience was born -- he heard its voice, and he hesitated,
ignoring the strength within, the fateful power, the secret of his heart! It
was an awful sacrifice to cast all one's life into the flame of a new belief.
He wanted help against himself, against the cruel decree of salvation. The need
of tacit complicity, where it had never failed him, the habit of years affirmed
itself. Perhaps she would help . . . He flung the door open and rushed in like
a fugitive.
He was in the middle of
the room before he could see anything but the dazzling brilliance of the light;
and then, as if detached and floating in it on the level of his eyes, appeared
the head of a woman. She had jumped up when he burst into the room.
For a moment they
contemplated each other as if struck dumb with amazement. Her hair streaming on
her shoulders glinted like burnished gold. He looked into the unfathomable
candour of her eyes. Nothing within -- nothing -- nothing.
He stammered
distractedly.
"I want . . . I
want . . . to . . . to . . . know . . ."
On the candid light of
the eyes flitted shadows; shadows of doubt, of suspicion, the ready suspicion
of an unquenchable antagonism, the pitiless mistrust of an eternal instinct of
defence; the hate, the profound, frightened hate of an incomprehensible -- of
an abominable emotion intruding its coarse materialism upon the spiritual and
tragic contest of her feelings.
"Alvan . . . I
won't bear this . . ." She began to pant suddenly, "I've a right -- a
right to -- to -- myself . . ."
He lifted one arm, and
appeared so menacing that she stopped in a fright and shrank back a little.
He stood with uplifted
hand . . . The years would pass -- and he would have to live with that
unfathomable candour where flit shadows of suspicions and hate . . . The years
would pass -- and he would never know -- never trust . . . The years would pass
without faith and love. . . .
"Can you stand
it?" he shouted, as though she could have heard all his thoughts.
He looked menacing. She
thought of violence, of danger -- and, just for an instant, she doubted whether
there were splendours enough on earth to pay the price of such a brutal
experience. He cried again:
"Can you stand
it?" and glared as if insane. Her eyes blazed, too. She could not hear the
appalling clamour of his thoughts. She suspected in him a sudden regret, a
fresh fit of jealousy, a dishonest desire of evasion. She shouted back angrily
--
"Yes!"
He was shaken where he
stood as if by a struggle to break out of invisible bonds. She trembled from
head to foot.
"Well, I
can't!" He flung both his arms out, as if to push her away, and strode
from the room. The door swung to with a click. She made three quick steps
towards it and stood still, looking at the white and gold panels. No sound came
from beyond, not a whisper, not a sigh; not even a footstep was heard outside
on the thick carpet. It was as though no sooner gone he had suddenly expired --
as though he had died there and his body had vanished on the instant together
with his soul. She listened, with parted lips and irresolute eyes. Then below,
far below her, as if in the entrails of the earth, a door slammed heavily; and
the quiet house vibrated to it from roof to foundations, more than to a clap of
thunder.
He never returned.
THE white man, leaning
with both arms over the roof of the little house in the stern of the boat, said
to the steersman --
"We will pass the
night in Arsat's clearing. It is late."
The Malay only grunted,
and went on looking fixedly at the river. The white man rested his chin on his
crossed arms and gazed at the wake of the boat. At the end of the straight
avenue of forests cut by the intense glitter of the river, the sun appeared
unclouded and dazzling, poised low over the water that shone smoothly like a
band of metal. The forests, sombre and dull, stood motionless and silent on
each side of the broad stream. At the foot of big, towering trees, trunkless
nipa palms rose from the mud of the bank, in bunches of leaves enormous and
heavy, that hung unstirring over the brown swirl of eddies. In the stillness of
the air every tree, every leaf, every bough, every tendril of creeper and every
petal of minute blossoms seemed to have been bewitched into an immobility
perfect and final. Nothing moved on the river but the eight paddles that rose
flashing regularly, dipped together with a single splash; while the steersman
swept right and left with a periodic and sudden flourish of his blade
describing a glinting semicircle above his head. The churned-up water frothed
alongside with a confused murmur. And the white man's canoe, advancing upstream
in the short-lived disturbance of its own making, seemed to enter the portals
of a land from which the very memory of motion had forever departed.
The white man, turning
his back upon the setting sun, looked along the empty and broad expanse of the
sea-reach. For the last three miles of its course the wandering, hesitating
river, as if enticed irresistibly by the freedom of an open horizon, flows
straight into the sea, flows straight to the east -- to the east that harbours
both light and darkness. Astern of the boat the repeated call of some bird, a
cry discordant and feeble, skipped along over the smooth water and lost itself,
before it could reach the other shore, in the breathless silence of the world.
The steersman dug his
paddle into the stream, and held hard with stiffened arms, his body thrown
forward. The water gurgled aloud; and suddenly the long straight reach seemed
to pivot on its centre, the forests swung in a semicircle, and the slanting
beams of sunset touched the broadside of the canoe with a fiery glow, throwing
the slender and distorted shadows of its crew upon the streaked glitter of the
river. The white man turned to look ahead. The course of the boat had been
altered at right-angles to the stream, and the carved dragon-head of its prow
was pointing now at a gap in the fringing bushes of the bank. It glided
through, brushing the overhanging twigs, and disappeared from the river like
some slim and amphibious creature leaving the water for its lair in the
forests.
The narrow creek was
like a ditch: tortuous, fabulously deep; filled with gloom under the thin strip
of pure and shining blue of the heaven. Immense trees soared up, invisible
behind the festooned draperies of creepers. Here and there, near the glistening
blackness of the water, a twisted root of some tall tree showed amongst the
tracery of small ferns, black and dull, writhing and motionless, like an
arrested snake. The short words of the paddlers reverberated loudly between the
thick and sombre walls of vegetation. Darkness oozed out from between the
trees, through the tangled maze of the creepers, from behind the great
fantastic and unstirring leaves; the darkness, mysterious and invincible; the
darkness scented and poisonous of impenetrable forests.
The men poled in the
shoaling water. The creek broadened, opening out into a wide sweep of a
stagnant lagoon. The forests receded from the marshy bank, leaving a level
strip of bright green, reedy grass to frame the reflected blueness of the sky.
A fleecy pink cloud drifted high above, trailing the delicate colouring of its
image under the floating leaves and the silvery blossoms of the lotus. A little
house, perched on high piles, appeared black in the distance. Near it, two tall
nibong palms, that seemed to have come out of the forests in the background,
leaned slightly over the ragged roof, with a suggestion of sad tenderness and
care in the droop of their leafy and soaring heads.
The steersman, pointing
with his paddle, said, "Arsat is there. I see his canoe fast between the
piles."
The polers ran along
the sides of the boat glancing over their shoulders at the end of the day's
journey. They would have preferred to spend the night somewhere else than on
this lagoon of weird aspect and ghostly reputation. Moreover, they disliked
Arsat, first as a stranger, and also because he who repairs a ruined house, and
dwells in it, proclaims that he is not afraid to live amongst the spirits that
haunt the places abandoned by mankind. Such a man can disturb the course of
fate by glances or words; while his familiar ghosts are not easy to propitiate
by casual wayfarers upon whom they long to wreak the malice of their human
master. White men care not for such things, being unbelievers and in league
with the Father of Evil, who leads them unharmed through the invisible dangers
of this world. To the warnings of the righteous they oppose an offensive
pretence of disbelief. What is there to be done?
So they thought,
throwing their weight on the end of their long poles. The big canoe glided on
swiftly, noiselessly, and smoothly, towards Arsat's clearing, till, in a great
rattling of poles thrown down, and the loud murmurs of "Allah be
praised!" it came with a gentle knock against the crooked piles below the
house.
The boatmen with
uplifted faces shouted discordantly, "Arsat! O Arsat!" Nobody came.
The white man began to climb the rude ladder giving access to the bamboo
platform before the house. The juragan of the boat said sulkily, "We will
cook in the sampan, and sleep on the water."
"Pass my blankets
and the basket," said the white man, curtly.
He knelt on the edge of
the platform to receive the bundle. Then the boat shoved off, and the white
man, standing up, confronted Arsat, who had come out through the low door of
his hut. He was a man young, powerful, with broad chest and muscular arms. He
had nothing on but his sarong. His head was bare. His big, soft eyes stared
eagerly at the white man, but his voice and demeanour were composed as he
asked, without any words of greeting --
"Have you
medicine, Tuan?"
"No," said
the visitor in a startled tone. "No. Why? Is there sickness in the
house?"
"Enter and
see," replied Arsat, in the same calm manner, and turning short round,
passed again through the small doorway. The white man, dropping his bundles,
followed.
In the dim light of the
dwelling he made out on a couch of bamboos a woman stretched on her back under
a broad sheet of red cotton cloth. She lay still, as if dead; but her big eyes,
wide open, glittered in the gloom, staring upwards at the slender rafters,
motionless and unseeing. She was in a high fever, and evidently unconscious.
Her cheeks were sunk slightly, her lips were partly open, and on the young face
there was the ominous and fixed expression -- the absorbed, contemplating
expression of the unconscious who are going to die. The two men stood looking
down at her in silence.
"Has she been long
ill?" asked the traveller.
"I have not slept
for five nights," answered the Malay, in a deliberate tone. "At first
she heard voices calling her from the water and struggled against me who held
her. But since the sun of to-day rose she hears nothing -- she hears not me.
She sees nothing. She sees not me -- me!"
He remained silent for
a minute, then asked softly --
"Tuan, will she
die?"
"I fear so,"
said the white man, sorrowfully. He had known Arsat years ago, in a far country
in times of trouble and danger, when no friendship is to be despised. And since
his Malay friend had come unexpectedly to dwell in the hut on the lagoon with a
strange woman, he had slept many times there, in his journeys up and down the
river. He liked the man who knew how to keep faith in council and how to fight
without fear by the side of his white friend. He liked him -- not so much
perhaps as a man likes his favourite dog -- but still he liked him well enough
to help and ask no questions, to think sometimes vaguely and hazily in the
midst of his own pursuits, about the lonely man and the long-haired woman with
audacious face and triumphant eyes, who lived together hidden by the forests --
alone and feared.
The white man came out
of the hut in time to see the enormous conflagration of sunset put out by the
swift and stealthy shadows that, rising like a black and impalpable vapour above
the tree-tops, spread over the heaven, extinguishing the crimson glow of
floating clouds and the red brilliance of departing daylight. In a few moments
all the stars came out above the intense blackness of the earth and the great
lagoon gleaming suddenly with reflected lights resembled an oval patch of night
sky flung down into the hopeless and abysmal night of the wilderness. The white
man had some supper out of the basket, then collecting a few sticks that lay
about the platform, made up a small fire, not for warmth, but for the sake of
the smoke, which would keep off the mosquitos. He wrapped himself in the
blankets and sat with his back against the reed wall of the house, smoking
thoughtfully.
Arsat came through the
doorway with noiseless steps and squatted down by the fire. The white man moved
his outstretched legs a little.
"She
breathes," said Arsat in a low voice, anticipating the expected question.
"She breathes and burns as if with a great fire. She speaks not; she hears
not -- and burns!"
He paused for a moment,
then asked in a quiet, incurious tone --
"Tuan . . . will
she die?"
The white man moved his
shoulders uneasily and muttered in a hesitating manner --
"If such is her
fate."
"No, Tuan,"
said Arsat, calmly. "If such is my fate. I hear, I see, I wait. I remember
. . . Tuan, do you remember the old days? Do you remember my brother?"
"Yes," said
the white man. The Malay rose suddenly and went in. The other, sitting still
outside, could hear the voice in the hut. Arsat said: "Hear me!
Speak!" His words were succeeded by a complete silence. "O
Diamelen!" he cried, suddenly. After that cry there was a deep sigh. Arsat
came out and sank down again in his old place.
They sat in silence
before the fire. There was no sound within the house, there was no sound near
them; but far away on the lagoon they could hear the voices of the boatmen
ringing fitful and distinct on the calm water. The fire in the bows of the
sampan shone faintly in the distance with a hazy red glow. Then it died out.
The voices ceased. The land and the water slept invisible, unstirring and mute.
It was as though there had been nothing left in the world but the glitter of
stars streaming, ceaseless and vain, through the black stillness of the night.
The white man gazed
straight before him into the darkness with wide-open eyes. The fear and
fascination, the inspiration and the wonder of death -- of death near,
unavoidable, and unseen, soothed the unrest of his race and stirred the most
indistinct, the most intimate of his thoughts. The ever-ready suspicion of
evil, the gnawing suspicion that lurks in our hearts, flowed out into the
stillness round him -- into the stillness profound and dumb, and made it appear
untrustworthy and infamous, like the placid and impenetrable mask of an
unjustifiable violence. In that fleeting and powerful disturbance of his being
the earth enfolded in the starlight peace became a shadowy country of inhuman
strife, a battle-field of phantoms terrible and charming, august or ignoble,
struggling ardently for the possession of our helpless hearts. An unquiet and
mysterious country of inextinguishable desires and fears.
A plaintive murmur rose
in the night; a murmur saddening and startling, as if the great solitudes of
surrounding woods had tried to whisper into his ear the wisdom of their immense
and lofty indifference. Sounds hesitating and vague floated in the air round
him, shaped themselves slowly into words; and at last flowed on gently in a
murmuring stream of soft and monotonous sentences. He stirred like a man waking
up and changed his position slightly. Arsat, motionless and shadowy, sitting
with bowed head under the stars, was speaking in a low and dreamy tone --
". . . for where
can we lay down the heaviness of our trouble but in a friend's heart? A man
must speak of war and of love. You, Tuan, know what war is, and you have seen
me in time of danger seek death as other men seek life! A writing may be lost;
a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the
mind!"
"I remember,"
said the white man, quietly. Arsat went on with mournful composure --
"Therefore I shall
speak to you of love. Speak in the night. Speak before both night and love are
gone -- and the eye of day looks upon my sorrow and my shame; upon my blackened
face; upon my burnt-up heart."
A sigh, short and
faint, marked an almost imperceptible pause, and then his words flowed on,
without a stir, without a gesture.
"After the time of
trouble and war was over and you went away from my country in the pursuit of
your desires, which we, men of the islands, cannot understand, I and my brother
became again, as we had been before, the sword-bearers of the Ruler. You know
we were men of family, belonging to a ruling race, and more fit than any to
carry on our right shoulder the emblem of power. And in the time of prosperity
Si Dendring showed us favour, as we, in time of sorrow, had showed to him the
faithfulness of our courage. It was a time of peace. A time of deer-hunts and
cock-fights; of idle talks and foolish squabbles between men whose bellies are
full and weapons are rusty. But the sower watched the young rice-shoots grow up
without fear, and the traders came and went, departed lean and returned fat
into the river of peace. They brought news, too. Brought lies and truth mixed
together, so that no man knew when to rejoice and when to be sorry. We heard
from them about you also. They had seen you here and had seen you there. And I
was glad to hear, for I remembered the stirring times, and I always remembered
you, Tuan, till the time came when my eyes could see nothing in the past,
because they had looked upon the one who is dying there -- in the house."
He stopped to exclaim in
an intense whisper, "O Mara bahia! O Calamity!" then went on speaking
a little louder:
"There's no worse
enemy and no better friend than a brother, Tuan, for one brother knows another,
and in perfect knowledge is strength for good or evil. I loved my brother. I
went to him and told him that I could see nothing but one face, hear nothing
but one voice. He told me: 'Open your heart so that she can see what is in it
-- and wait. Patience is wisdom. Inchi Midah may die or our Ruler may throw off
his fear of a woman!' . . . I waited! . . . You remember the lady with the
veiled face, Tuan, and the fear of our Ruler before her cunning and temper. And
if she wanted her servant, what could I do? But I fed the hunger of my heart on
short glances and stealthy words. I loitered on the path to the bath-houses in
the daytime, and when the sun had fallen behind the forest I crept along the
jasmine hedges of the women's court-yard. Unseeing, we spoke to one another
through the scent of flowers, through the veil of leaves, through the blades of
long grass that stood still before our lips; so great was our prudence, so
faint was the murmur of our great longing. The time passed swiftly . . . and
there were whispers amongst women -- and our enemies watched -- my brother was
gloomy, and I began to think of killing and of a fierce death. . . . We are of
a people who take what they want -- like you whites. There is a time when a man
should forget loyalty and respect. Might and authority are given to rulers, but
to all men is given love and strength and courage. My brother said, 'You shall
take her from their midst. We are two who are like one.' And I answered, 'Let
it be soon, for I find no warmth in sunlight that does not shine upon her.' Our
time came when the Ruler and all the great people went to the mouth of the
river to fish by torchlight. There were hundreds of boats, and on the white
sand, between the water and the forests, dwellings of leaves were built for the
households of the Rajahs. The smoke of cooking-fires was like a blue mist of
the evening, and many voices rang in it joyfully. While they were making the
boats ready to beat up the fish, my brother came to me and said, 'To-night!' I
looked to my weapons, and when the time came our canoe took its place in the
circle of boats carrying the torches. The lights blazed on the water, but
behind the boats there was darkness. When the shouting began and the excitement
made them like mad we dropped out. The water swallowed our fire, and we floated
back to the shore that was dark with only here and there the glimmer of embers.
We could hear the talk of slave-girls amongst the sheds. Then we found a place
deserted and silent. We waited there. She came. She came running along the
shore, rapid and leaving no trace, like a leaf driven by the wind into the sea.
My brother said gloomily, 'Go and take her; carry her into our boat.' I lifted
her in my arms. She panted. Her heart was beating against my breast. I said, 'I
take you from those people. You came to the cry of my heart, but my arms take
you into my boat against the will of the great!' 'It is right,' said my
brother. 'We are men who take what we want and can hold it against many. We
should have taken her in daylight.' I said, 'Let us be off'; for since she was
in my boat I began to think of our Ruler's many men. 'Yes. Let us be off,' said
my brother. 'We are cast out and this boat is our country now -- and the sea is
our refuge.' He lingered with his foot on the shore, and I entreated him to
hasten, for I remembered the strokes of her heart against my breast and thought
that two men cannot withstand a hundred. We left, paddling downstream close to
the bank; and as we passed by the creek where they were fishing, the great
shouting had ceased, but the murmur of voices was loud like the humming of
insects flying at noonday. The boats floated, clustered together, in the red
light of torches, under a black roof of smoke; and men talked of their sport.
Men that boasted, and praised, and jeered -- men that would have been our
friends in the morning, but on that night were already our enemies. We paddled
swiftly past. We had no more friends in the country of our birth. She sat in
the middle of the canoe with covered face; silent as she is now; unseeing as
she is now -- and I had no regret at what I was leaving because I could hear
her breathing close to me -- as I can hear her now."
He paused, listened
with his ear turned to the doorway, then shook his head and went on:
"My brother wanted
to shout the cry of challenge -- one cry only -- to let the people know we were
freeborn robbers who trusted our arms and the great sea. And again I begged him
in the name of our love to be silent. Could I not hear her breathing close to
me? I knew the pursuit would come quick enough. My brother loved me. He dipped
his paddle without a splash. He only said, 'There is half a man in you now --
the other half is in that woman. I can wait. When you are a whole man again,
you will come back with me here to shout defiance. We are sons of the same
mother.' I made no answer. All my strength and all my spirit were in my hands
that held the paddle -- for I longed to be with her in a safe place beyond the
reach of men's anger and of women's spite. My love was so great, that I thought
it could guide me to a country where death was unknown, if I could only escape
from Inchi Midah's fury and from our Ruler's sword. We paddled with haste,
breathing through our teeth. The blades bit deep into the smooth water. We
passed out of the river; we flew in clear channels amongst the shallows. We
skirted the black coast; we skirted the sand beaches where the sea speaks in
whispers to the land; and the gleam of white sand flashed back past our boat,
so swiftly she ran upon the water. We spoke not. Only once I said, 'Sleep,
Diamelen, for soon you may want all your strength.' I heard the sweetness of
her voice, but I never turned my head. The sun rose and still we went on. Water
fell from my face like rain from a cloud. We flew in the light and heat. I
never looked back, but I knew that my brother's eyes, behind me, were looking
steadily ahead, for the boat went as straight as a bushman's dart, when it
leaves the end of the sumpitan. There was no better paddler, no better
steersman than my brother. Many times, together, we had won races in that
canoe. But we never had put out our strength as we did then -- then, when for
the last time we paddled together! There was no braver or stronger man in our
country than my brother. I could not spare the strength to turn my head and
look at him, but every moment I heard the hiss of his breath getting louder
behind me. Still he did not speak. The sun was high. The heat clung to my back
like a flame of fire. My ribs were ready to burst, but I could no longer get
enough air into my chest. And then I felt I must cry out with my last breath,
'Let us rest!' . . . 'Good!' he answered; and his voice was firm. He was
strong. He was brave. He knew not fear and no fatigue . . . My brother!"
A murmur powerful and
gentle, a murmur vast and faint; the murmur of trembling leaves, of stirring
boughs, ran through the tangled depths of the forests, ran over the starry
smoothness of the lagoon, and the water between the piles lapped the slimy
timber once with a sudden splash. A breath of warm air touched the two men's faces
and passed on with a mournful sound -- a breath loud and short like an uneasy
sigh of the dreaming earth.
Arsat went on in an
even, low voice.
"We ran our canoe
on the white beach of a little bay close to a long tongue of land that seemed
to bar our road; a long wooded cape going far into the sea. My brother knew
that place. Beyond the cape a river has its entrance, and through the jungle of
that land there is a narrow path. We made a fire and cooked rice. Then we lay
down to sleep on the soft sand in the shade of our canoe, while she watched. No
sooner had I closed my eyes than I heard her cry of alarm. We leaped up. The
sun was halfway down the sky already, and coming in sight in the opening of the
bay we saw a prau manned by many paddlers. We knew it at once; it was one of
our Rajah's praus. They were watching the shore, and saw us. They beat the
gong, and turned the head of the prau into the bay. I felt my heart become weak
within my breast. Diamelen sat on the sand and covered her face. There was no
escape by sea. My brother laughed. He had the gun you had given him, Tuan,
before you went away, but there was only a handful of powder. He spoke to me
quickly: 'Run with her along the path. I shall keep them back, for they have no
firearms, and landing in the face of a man with a gun is certain death for
some. Run with her. On the other side of that wood there is a fisherman's house
-- and a canoe. When I have fired all the shots I will follow. I am a great
runner, and before they can come up we shall be gone. I will hold out as long
as I can, for she is but a woman -- that can neither run nor fight, but she has
your heart in her weak hands.' He dropped behind the canoe. The prau was
coming. She and I ran, and as we rushed along the path I heard shots. My
brother fired -- once -- twice -- and the booming of the gong ceased. There was
silence behind us. That neck of land is narrow. Before I heard my brother fire
the third shot I saw the shelving shore, and I saw the water again; the mouth
of a broad river. We crossed a grassy glade. We ran down to the water. I saw a
low hut above the black mud, and a small canoe hauled up. I heard another shot
behind me. I thought, 'That is his last charge.' We rushed down to the canoe; a
man came running from the hut, but I leaped on him, and we rolled together in
the mud. Then I got up, and he lay still at my feet. I don't know whether I had
killed him or not. I and Diamelen pushed the canoe afloat. I heard yells behind
me, and I saw my brother run across the glade. Many men were bounding after
him, I took her in my arms and threw her into the boat, then leaped in myself.
When I looked back I saw that my brother had fallen. He fell and was up again,
but the men were closing round him. He shouted, 'I am coming!' The men were
close to him. I looked. Many men. Then I looked at her. Tuan, I pushed the
canoe! I pushed it into deep water. She was kneeling forward looking at me, and
I said, 'Take your paddle,' while I struck the water with mine. Tuan, I heard
him cry. I heard him cry my name twice; and I heard voices shouting, 'Kill!
Strike!' I never turned back. I heard him calling my name again with a great
shriek, as when life is going out together with the voice -- and I never turned
my head. My own name! . . . My brother! Three times he called -- but I was not
afraid of life. Was she not there in that canoe? And could I not with her find
a country where death is forgotten -- where death is unknown!"
The white man sat up.
Arsat rose and stood, an indistinct and silent figure above the dying embers of
the fire. Over the lagoon a mist drifting and low had crept, erasing slowly the
glittering images of the stars. And now a great expanse of white vapour covered
the land: it flowed cold and gray in the darkness, eddied in noiseless whirls
round the tree-trunks and about the platform of the house, which seemed to
float upon a restless and impalpable illusion of a sea. Only far away the tops
of the trees stood outlined on the twinkle of heaven, like a sombre and
forbidding shore -- a coast deceptive, pitiless and black.
Arsat's voice vibrated
loudly in the profound peace.
"I had her there!
I had her! To get her I would have faced all mankind. But I had her -- and
--"
His words went out
ringing into the empty distances. He paused, and seemed to listen to them dying
away very far -- beyond help and beyond recall. Then he said quietly --
"Tuan, I loved my
brother."
A breath of wind made
him shiver. High above his head, high above the silent sea of mist the drooping
leaves of the palms rattled together with a mournful and expiring sound. The
white man stretched his legs. His chin rested on his chest, and he murmured
sadly without lifting his head --
"We all love our
brothers."
Arsat burst out with an
intense whispering violence --
"What did I care
who died? I wanted peace in my own heart."
He seemed to hear a
stir in the house -- listened -- then stepped in noiselessly. The white man
stood up. A breeze was coming in fitful puffs. The stars shone paler as if they
had retreated into the frozen depths of immense space. After a chill gust of
wind there were a few seconds of perfect calm and absolute silence. Then from
behind the black and wavy line of the forests a column of golden light shot up
into the heavens and spread over the semicircle of the eastern horizon. The sun
had risen. The mist lifted, broke into drifting patches, vanished into thin
flying wreaths; and the unveiled lagoon lay, polished and black, in the heavy
shadows at the foot of the wall of trees. A white eagle rose over it with a
slanting and ponderous flight, reached the clear sunshine and appeared
dazzlingly brilliant for a moment, then soaring higher, became a dark and
motionless speck before it vanished into the blue as if it had left the earth
forever. The white man, standing gazing upwards before the doorway, heard in
the hut a confused and broken murmur of distracted words ending with a loud
groan. Suddenly Arsat stumbled out with outstretched hands, shivered, and stood
still for some time with fixed eyes. Then he said --
"She burns no
more."
Before his face the sun
showed its edge above the tree-tops rising steadily. The breeze freshened; a
great brilliance burst upon the lagoon, sparkled on the rippling water. The
forests came out of the clear shadows of the morning, became distinct, as if
they had rushed nearer -- to stop short in a great stir of leaves, of nodding
boughs, of swaying branches. In the merciless sunshine the whisper of
unconscious life grew louder, speaking in an incomprehensible voice round the
dumb darkness of that human sorrow. Arsat's eyes wandered slowly, then stared
at the rising sun.
"I can see
nothing," he said half aloud to himself.
"There is
nothing," said the white man, moving to the edge of the platform and
waving his hand to his boat. A shout came faintly over the lagoon and the
sampan began to glide towards the abode of the friend of ghosts.
"If you want to
come with me, I will wait all the morning," said the white man, looking
away upon the water.
"No, Tuan,"
said Arsat, softly. "I shall not eat or sleep in this house, but I must
first see my road. Now I can see nothing -- see nothing! There is no light and
no peace in the world; but there is death -- death for many. We are sons of the
same mother -- and I left him in the midst of enemies; but I am going back
now."
He drew a long breath
and went on in a dreamy tone:
"In a little while
I shall see clear enough to strike -- to strike. But she has died, and . . .
now . . . darkness."
He flung his arms wide
open, let them fall along his body, then stood still with unmoved face and
stony eyes, staring at the sun. The white man got down into his canoe. The
polers ran smartly along the sides of the boat, looking over their shoulders at
the beginning of a weary journey. High in the stern, his head muffled up in
white rags, the juragan sat moody, letting his paddle trail in the water. The
white man, leaning with both arms over the grass roof of the little cabin,
looked back at the shining ripple of the boat's wake. Before the sampan passed
out of the lagoon into the creek he lifted his eyes. Arsat had not moved. He
stood lonely in the searching sunshine; and he looked beyond the great light of
a cloudless day into the darkness of a world of illusions.
THE END