Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (770 page)

On this occasion I am speaking of, old Nelson was even fretty; for while I was trying to entertain him with a very funny and somewhat scandalous adventure which happened to a certain acquaintance of ours in Saigon, he exclaimed suddenly:

“What the devil he wants to turn up here for!”

Clearly he had not heard a word of the anecdote.  And this annoyed me, because the anecdote was really good.  I stared at him.

“Come, come!” I cried.  “Don’t you know what Jasper Allen is turning up here for?”

This was the first open allusion I had ever made to the true state of affairs between Jasper and his daughter.  He took it very calmly.

“Oh, Freya is a sensible girl!” he murmured absently, his mind’s eye obviously fixed on the “authorities.”  No; Freya was no fool.  He was not concerned about that.  He didn’t mind it in the least.  The fellow was just company for her; he amused the girl; nothing more.

When the perspicacious old chap left off mumbling, all was still in the house.  The other two were amusing themselves very quietly, and no doubt very heartily.  What more absorbing and less noisy amusement could they have found than to plan their future?  Side by side on the verandah they must have been looking at the brig, the third party in that fascinating game.  Without her there would have been no future.  She was the fortune and the home, and the great free world for them.  Who was it that likened a ship to a prison?  May I be ignominiously hanged at a yardarm if that’s true.  The white sails of that craft were the white wings — pinions, I believe, would be the more poetical style — well, the white pinions, of their soaring love.  Soaring as regards Jasper.  Freya, being a woman, kept a better hold of the mundane connections of this affair.

But Jasper was elevated in the true sense of the word ever since the day when, after they had been gazing at the brig in one of those decisive silences that alone establish a perfect communion between creatures gifted with speech, he proposed that she should share the ownership of that treasure with him.  Indeed, he presented the brig to her altogether.  But then his heart was in the brig since the day he bought her in Manilla from a certain middle-aged Peruvian, in a sober suit of black broadcloth, enigmatic and sententious, who, for all I know, might have stolen her on the South American coast, whence he said he had come over to the Philippines “for family reasons.”  This “for family reasons” was distinctly good.  No true caballero would care to push on inquiries after such a statement.

Indeed, Jasper was quite the caballero.  The brig herself was then all black and enigmatical, and very dirty; a tarnished gem of the sea, or, rather, a neglected work of art.  For he must have been an artist, the obscure builder who had put her body together on lovely lines out of the hardest tropical timber fastened with the purest copper.  Goodness only knows in what part of the world she was built.  Jasper himself had not been able to ascertain much of her history from his sententious, saturnine Peruvian — if the fellow was a Peruvian, and not the devil himself in disguise, as Jasper jocularly pretended to believe.  My opinion is that she was old enough to have been one of the last pirates, a slaver perhaps, or else an opium clipper of the early days, if not an opium smuggler.

However that may be, she was as sound as on the day she first took the water, sailed like a witch, steered like a little boat, and, like some fair women of adventurous life famous in history, seemed to have the secret of perpetual youth; so that there was nothing unnatural in Jasper Allen treating her like a lover.  And that treatment restored the lustre of her beauty.  He clothed her in many coats of the very best white paint so skilfully, carefully, artistically put on and kept clean by his badgered crew of picked Malays, that no costly enamel such as jewellers use for their work could have looked better and felt smoother to the touch.  A narrow gilt moulding defined her elegant sheer as she sat on the water, eclipsing easily the professional good looks of any pleasure yacht that ever came to the East in those days.  For myself, I must say I prefer a moulding of deep crimson colour on a white hull.  It gives a stronger relief besides being less expensive; and I told Jasper so.  But no, nothing less than the best gold-leaf would do, because no decoration could be gorgeous enough for the future abode of his Freya.

His feelings for the brig and for the girl were as indissolubly united in his heart as you may fuse two precious metals together in one crucible.  And the flame was pretty hot, I can assure you.  It induced in him a fierce inward restlessness both of activity and desire.  Too fine in face, with a lateral wave in his chestnut hair, spare, long-limbed, with an eager glint in his steely eyes and quick, brusque movements, he made me think sometimes of a flashing sword-blade perpetually leaping out of the scabbard.  It was only when he was near the girl, when he had her there to look at, that this peculiarly tense attitude was replaced by a grave devout watchfulness of her slightest movements and utterances.  Her cool, resolute, capable, good-humoured self-possession seemed to steady his heart.  Was it the magic of her face, of her voice, of her glances which calmed him so?  Yet these were the very things one must believe which had set his imagination ablaze — if love begins in imagination.  But I am no man to discuss such mysteries, and it strikes me that we have neglected poor old Nelson inflating his cheeks in a state of worry on the back verandah.

I pointed out to him that, after all, Jasper was not a very frequent visitor.  He and his brig worked hard all over the Archipelago.  But all old Nelson said, and he said it uneasily, was:

“I hope Heemskirk won’t turn up here while the brig’s about.”

Getting up a scare about Heemskirk now!  Heemskirk! . . . Really, one hadn’t the patience —

CHAPTER II

For, pray, who was Heemskirk?  You shall see at once how unreasonable this dread of Heemskirk. . . . Certainly, his nature was malevolent enough.  That was obvious, directly you heard him laugh.  Nothing gives away more a man’s secret disposition than the unguarded ring of his laugh.  But, bless my soul! if we were to start at every evil guffaw like a hare at every sound, we shouldn’t be fit for anything but the solitude of a desert, or the seclusion of a hermitage.  And even there we should have to put up with the unavoidable company of the devil.

However, the devil is a considerable personage, who has known better days and has moved high up in the hierarchy of Celestial Host; but in the hierarchy of mere earthly Dutchmen, Heemskirk, whose early days could not have been very splendid, was merely a naval officer forty years of age, of no particular connections or ability to boast of.  He was commanding the Neptun, a little gunboat employed on dreary patrol duty up and down the Archipelago, to look after the traders.  Not a very exalted position truly.  I tell you, just a common middle-aged lieutenant of some twenty-five years’ service and sure to be retired before long — that’s all.

He never bothered his head very much as to what was going on in the Seven Isles group till he learned from some talk in Mintok or Palembang, I suppose, that there was a pretty girl living there.  Curiosity, I presume, caused him to go poking around that way, and then, after he had once seen Freya, he made a practice of calling at the group whenever he found himself within half a day’s steaming from it.

I don’t mean to say that Heemskirk was a typical Dutch naval officer.  I have seen enough of them not to fall into that absurd mistake.  He had a big, clean-shaven face; great flat, brown cheeks, with a thin, hooked nose and a small, pursy mouth squeezed in between.  There were a few silver threads in his black hair, and his unpleasant eyes were nearly black, too.  He had a surly way of casting side glances without moving his head, which was set low on a short, round neck.  A thick, round trunk in a dark undress jacket with gold shoulder-straps, was sustained by a straddly pair of thick, round legs, in white drill trousers.  His round skull under a white cap looked as if it were immensely thick too, but there were brains enough in it to discover and take advantage maliciously of poor old Nelson’s nervousness before everything that was invested with the merest shred of authority.

Heemskirk would land on the point and perambulate silently every part of the plantation as if the whole place belonged to him, before her went to the house.  On the verandah he would take the best chair, and would stay for tiffin or dinner, just simply stay on, without taking the trouble to invite himself by so much as a word.

He ought to have been kicked, if only for his manner to Miss Freya.  Had he been a naked savage, armed with spears and poisoned arrows, old Nelson (or Nielsen) would have gone for him with his bare fists.  But these gold shoulder-straps — Dutch shoulder-straps at that — were enough to terrify the old fellow; so he let the beggar treat him with heavy contempt, devour his daughter with his eyes, and drink the best part of his little stock of wine.

I saw something of this, and on one occasion I tried to pass a remark on the subject.  It was pitiable to see the trouble in old Nelson’s round eyes.  At first he cried out that the lieutenant was a good friend of his; a very good fellow.  I went on staring at him pretty hard, so that at last he faltered, and had to own that, of course, Heemskirk was not a very genial person outwardly, but all the same at bottom. . . .

“I haven’t yet met a genial Dutchman out here,” I interrupted.  “Geniality, after all, is not of much consequence, but don’t you see — ”

Nelson looked suddenly so frightened at what I was going to say that I hadn’t the heart to go on.  Of course, I was going to tell him that the fellow was after his girl.  That just describes it exactly.  What Heemskirk might have expected or what he thought he could do, I don’t know.  For all I can tell, he might have imagined himself irresistible, or have taken Freya for what she was not, on account of her lively, assured, unconstrained manner.  But there it is.  He was after that girl.  Nelson could see it well enough.  Only he preferred to ignore it.  He did not want to be told of it.

“All I want is to live in peace and quietness with the Dutch authorities,” he mumbled shamefacedly.

He was incurable.  I was sorry for him, and I really think Miss Freya was sorry for her father, too.  She restrained herself for his sake, and as everything she did she did it simply, unaffectedly, and even good humouredly.  No small effort that, because in Heemskirk’s attentions there was an insolent touch of scorn, hard to put up with.  Dutchmen of that sort are over-bearing to their inferiors, and that officer of the king looked upon old Nelson and Freya as quite beneath him in every way.

I can’t say I felt sorry for Freya.  She was not the sort of girl to take anything tragically.  One could feel for her and sympathise with her difficulty, but she seemed equal to any situation.  It was rather admiration she extorted by her competent serenity.  It was only when Jasper and Heemskirk were together at the bungalow, as it happened now and then, that she felt the strain, and even then it was not for everybody to see.  My eyes alone could detect a faint shadow on the radiance of her personality.  Once I could not help saying to her appreciatively:

“Upon my word you are wonderful.”

She let it pass with a faint smile.

“The great thing is to prevent Jasper becoming unreasonable,” she said; and I could see real concern lurking in the quiet depths of her frank eyes gazing straight at me.  “You will help to keep him quiet, won’t you?”

“Of course, we must keep him quiet,” I declared, understanding very well the nature of her anxiety.  “He’s such a lunatic, too, when he’s roused.”

“He is!” she assented, in a soft tone; for it was our joke to speak of Jasper abusively.  “But I have tamed him a bit.  He’s quite a good boy now.”

“He would squash Heemskirk like a blackbeetle all the same,” I remarked.

“Rather!” she murmured.  “And that wouldn’t do,” she added quickly.  “Imagine the state poor papa would get into.  Besides, I mean to be mistress of the dear brig and sail about these seas, not go off wandering ten thousand miles away from here.”

“The sooner you are on board to look after the man and the brig the better,” I said seriously.  “They need you to steady them both a bit.  I don’t think Jasper will ever get sobered down till he has carried you off from this island.  You don’t see him when he is away from you, as I do.  He’s in a state of perpetual elation which almost frightens me.”

At this she smiled again, and then looked serious.  For it could not be unpleasant to her to be told of her power, and she had some sense of her responsibility.  She slipped away from me suddenly, because Heemskirk, with old Nelson in attendance at his elbow, was coming up the steps of the verandah.  Directly his head came above the level of the floor his ill-natured black eyes shot glances here and there.

“Where’s your girl, Nelson?” he asked, in a tone as if every soul in the world belonged to him.  And then to me: “The goddess has flown, eh?”

Nelson’s Cove — as we used to call it — was crowded with shipping that day.  There was first my steamer, then the Neptun gunboat further out, and the Bonito, brig, anchored as usual so close inshore that it looked as if, with a little skill and judgment, one could shy a hat from the verandah on to her scrupulously holystoned quarter-deck.  Her brasses flashed like gold, her white body-paint had a sheen like a satin robe.  The rake of her varnished spars and the big yards, squared to a hair, gave her a sort of martial elegance.  She was a beauty.  No wonder that in possession of a craft like that and the promise of a girl like Freya, Jasper lived in a state of perpetual elation fit, perhaps, for the seventh heaven, but not exactly safe in a world like ours.

I remarked politely to Heemskirk that, with three guests in the house, Miss Freya had no doubt domestic matters to attend to.  I knew, of course, that she had gone to meet Jasper at a certain cleared spot on the banks of the only stream on Nelson’s little island.  The commander of the Neptun gave me a dubious black look, and began to make himself at home, flinging his thick, cylindrical carcass into a rocking-chair, and unbuttoning his coat.  Old Nelson sat down opposite him in a most unassuming manner, staring anxiously with his round eyes and fanning himself with his hat.  I tried to make conversation to while the time away; not an easy task with a morose, enamoured Dutchman constantly looking from one door to another and answering one’s advances either with a jeer or a grunt.