Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (776 page)

“Going on board,” said old Nelson, perturbed by the event.  “What could have made him clear out so early?  Queer chap.  Devilishly touchy, too!  I shouldn’t wonder if it was your conduct last night that hurt his feelings?  I noticed you, Freya.  You as well as laughed in his face, while he was suffering agonies from neuralgia.  It isn’t the way to get yourself liked.  He’s offended with you.”

Freya’s hands now reposed passive on the keys; she bowed her fair head, feeling a sudden discontent, a nervous lassitude, as though she had passed through some exhausting crisis.  Old Nelson (or Nielsen), looking aggrieved, was revolving matters of policy in his bald head.

“I think it would be right for me to go on board just to inquire, some time this morning,” he declared fussily.  “Why don’t they bring me my morning tea?  Do you hear, Freya?  You have astonished me, I must say.  I didn’t think a young girl could be so unfeeling.  And the lieutenant thinks himself a friend of ours, too!  What?  No?  Well, he calls himself a friend, and that’s something to a person in my position.  Certainly!  Oh, yes, I must go on board.”

“Must you?” murmured Freya listlessly; then added, in her thought: “Poor man!”

CHAPTER V

In respect of the next seven weeks, all that is necessary to say is, first, that old Nelson (or Nielsen) failed in paying his politic call.  The Neptun gunboat of H.M. the King of the Netherlands, commanded by an outraged and infuriated lieutenant, left the cove at an unexpectedly early hour.  When Freya’s father came down to the shore, after seeing his precious crop of tobacco spread out properly in the sun, she was already steaming round the point.  Old Nelson regretted the circumstance for many days.

“Now, I don’t know in what disposition the man went away,” he lamented to his hard daughter.  He was amazed at her hardness.  He was almost frightened by her indifference.

Next, it must be recorded that the same day the gunboat Neptun, steering east, passed the brig Bonito becalmed in sight of Carimata, with her head to the eastward, too.  Her captain, Jasper Allen, giving himself up consciously to a tender, possessive reverie of his Freya, did not get out of his long chair on the poop to look at the Neptun which passed so close that the smoke belching out suddenly from her short black funnel rolled between the masts of the Bonito, obscuring for a moment the sunlit whiteness of her sails, consecrated to the service of love.  Jasper did not even turn his head for a glance.  But Heemskirk, on the bridge, had gazed long and earnestly at the brig from the distance, gripping hard the brass rail in front of him, till, the two ships closing, he lost all confidence in himself, and retreating to the chartroom, pulled the door to with a crash.  There, his brows knitted, his mouth drawn on one side in sardonic meditation, he sat through many still hours — a sort of Prometheus in the bonds of unholy desire, having his very vitals torn by the beak and claws of humiliated passion.

That species of fowl is not to be shooed off as easily as a chicken.  Fooled, cheated, deceived, led on, outraged, mocked at — beak and claws!  A sinister bird!  The lieutenant had no mind to become the talk of the Archipelago, as the naval officer who had had his face slapped by a girl.  Was it possible that she really loved that rascally trader?  He tried not to think, but, worse than thoughts, definite impressions beset him in his retreat.  He saw her — a vision plain, close to, detailed, plastic, coloured, lighted up — he saw her hanging round the neck of that fellow.  And he shut his eyes, only to discover that this was no remedy.  Then a piano began to play near by, very plainly; and he put his fingers to his ears with no better effect.  It was not to be borne — not in solitude.  He bolted out of the chartroom, and talked of indifferent things somewhat wildly with the officer of the watch on the bridge, to the mocking accompaniment of a ghostly piano.

The last thing to be recorded is that Lieutenant Heemskirk instead of pursuing his course towards Ternate, where he was expected, went out of his way to call at Makassar, where no one was looking for his arrival.  Once there, he gave certain explanations and laid a certain proposal before the governor, or some other authority, and obtained permission to do what he thought fit in these matters.  Thereupon the Neptun, giving up Ternate altogether, steamed north in view of the mountainous coast of Celebes, and then crossing the broad straits took up her station on the low coast of virgin forests, inviolate and mute, in waters phosphorescent at night; deep blue in daytime with gleaming green patches over the submerged reefs.  For days the Neptun could be seen moving smoothly up and down the sombre face of the shore, or hanging about with a watchful air near the silvery breaks of broad estuaries, under the great luminous sky never softened, never veiled, and flooding the earth with the everlasting sunshine of the tropics — that sunshine which, in its unbroken splendour, oppresses the soul with an inexpressible melancholy more intimate, more penetrating, more profound than the grey sadness of the northern mists.

The trading brig Bonito appeared gliding round a sombre forest-clad point of land on the silvery estuary of a great river.  The breath of air that gave her motion would not have fluttered the flame of a torch.  She stole out into the open from behind a veil of unstirring leaves, mysteriously silent, ghostly white, and solemnly stealthy in her imperceptible progress; and Jasper, his elbow in the main rigging, and his head leaning against his hand, thought of Freya.  Everything in the world reminded him of her.  The beauty of the loved woman exists in the beauties of Nature.  The swelling outlines of the hills, the curves of a coast, the free sinuosities of a river are less suave than the harmonious lines of her body, and when she moves, gliding lightly, the grace of her progress suggests the power of occult forces which rule the fascinating aspects of the visible world.

Dependent on things as all men are, Jasper loved his vessel — the house of his dreams.  He lent to her something of Freya’s soul.  Her deck was the foothold of their love.  The possession of his brig appeased his passion in a soothing certitude of happiness already conquered.

The full moon was some way up, perfect and serene, floating in air as calm and limpid as the glance of Freya’s eyes.  There was not a sound in the brig.

“Here she shall stand, by my side, on evenings like this,” he thought, with rapture.

And it was at that moment, in this peace, in this serenity, under the full, benign gaze of the moon propitious to lovers, on a sea without a wrinkle, under a sky without a cloud, as if all Nature had assumed its most clement mood in a spirit of mockery, that the gunboat Neptun, detaching herself from the dark coast under which she had been lying invisible, steamed out to intercept the trading brig Bonito standing out to sea.

Directly the gunboat had been made out emerging from her ambush, Schultz, of the fascinating voice, had given signs of strange agitation.  All that day, ever since leaving the Malay town up the river, he had shown a haggard face, going about his duties like a man with something weighing on his mind.  Jasper had noticed it, but the mate, turning away, as though he had not liked being looked at, had muttered shamefacedly of a headache and a touch of fever.  He must have had it very badly when, dodging behind his captain he wondered aloud: “What can that fellow want with us?” . . . A naked man standing in a freezing blast and trying not to shiver could not have spoken with a more harshly uncertain intonation.  But it might have been fever — a cold fit.

“He wants to make himself disagreeable, simply,” said Jasper, with perfect good humour.  “He has tried it on me before.  However, we shall soon see.”

And, indeed, before long the two vessels lay abreast within easy hail.  The brig, with her fine lines and her white sails, looked vaporous and sylph-like in the moonlight.  The gunboat, short, squat, with her stumpy dark spars naked like dead trees, raised against the luminous sky of that resplendent night, threw a heavy shadow on the lane of water between the two ships.

Freya haunted them both like an ubiquitous spirit, and as if she were the only woman in the world.  Jasper remembered her earnest recommendation to be guarded and cautious in all his acts and words while he was away from her.  In this quite unforeseen encounter he felt on his ear the very breath of these hurried admonitions customary to the last moment of their partings, heard the half-jesting final whisper of the “Mind, kid, I’d never forgive you!” with a quick pressure on his arm, which he answered by a quiet, confident smile.  Heemskirk was haunted in another fashion.  There were no whispers in it; it was more like visions.  He saw that girl hanging round the neck of a low vagabond — that vagabond, the vagabond who had just answered his hail.  He saw her stealing bare-footed across a verandah with great, clear, wide-open, eager eyes to look at a brig — that brig.  If she had shrieked, scolded, called names! . . . But she had simply triumphed over him.  That was all.  Led on (he firmly believed it), fooled, deceived, outraged, struck, mocked at. . . . Beak and claws!  The two men, so differently haunted by Freya of the Seven Isles, were not equally matched.

In the intense stillness, as of sleep, which had fallen upon the two vessels, in a world that itself seemed but a delicate dream, a boat pulled by Javanese sailors crossing the dark lane of water came alongside the brig.  The white warrant officer in her, perhaps the gunner, climbed aboard.  He was a short man, with a rotund stomach and a wheezy voice.  His immovable fat face looked lifeless in the moonlight, and he walked with his thick arms hanging away from his body as though he had been stuffed.  His cunning little eyes glittered like bits of mica.  He conveyed to Jasper, in broken English, a request to come on board the Neptun.

Jasper had not expected anything so unusual.  But after a short reflection he decided to show neither annoyance, nor even surprise.  The river from which he had come had been politically disturbed for a couple of years, and he was aware that his visits there were looked upon with some suspicion.  But he did not mind much the displeasure of the authorities, so terrifying to old Nelson.  He prepared to leave the brig, and Schultz followed him to the rail as if to say something, but in the end stood by in silence.  Jasper getting over the side, noticed his ghastly face.  The eyes of the man who had found salvation in the brig from the effects of his peculiar psychology looked at him with a dumb, beseeching expression.

“What’s the matter?” Jasper asked.

“I wonder how this will end?” said he of the beautiful voice, which had even fascinated the steady Freya herself.  But where was its charming timbre now?  These words had sounded like a raven’s croak.

“You are ill,” said Jasper positively.

“I wish I were dead!” was the startling statement uttered by Schultz talking to himself in the extremity of some mysterious trouble.  Jasper gave him a keen glance, but this was not the time to investigate the morbid outbreak of a feverish man.  He did not look as though he were actually delirious, and that for the moment must suffice.  Schultz made a dart forward.

“That fellow means harm!” he said desperately.  “He means harm to you, Captain Allen.  I feel it, and I — ”

He choked with inexplicable emotion.

“All right, Schultz.  I won’t give him an opening.”  Jasper cut him short and swung himself into the boat.

On board the Neptun Heemskirk, standing straddle-legs in the flood of moonlight, his inky shadow falling right across the quarter-deck, made no sign at his approach, but secretly he felt something like the heave of the sea in his chest at the sight of that man.  Jasper waited before him in silence.

Brought face to face in direct personal contact, they fell at once into the manner of their casual meetings in old Nelson’s bungalow.  They ignored each other’s existence — Heemskirk moodily; Jasper, with a perfectly colourless quietness.

“What’s going on in that river you’ve just come out of?” asked the lieutenant straight away.

“I know nothing of the troubles, if you mean that,” Jasper answered.  “I’ve landed there half a cargo of rice, for which I got nothing in exchange, and went away.  There’s no trade there now, but they would have been starving in another week — if I hadn’t turned up.”

“Meddling!  English meddling!  And suppose the rascals don’t deserve anything better than to starve, eh?”

“There are women and children there, you know,” observed Jasper, in his even tone.

“Oh, yes!  When an Englishman talks of women and children, you may be sure there’s something fishy about the business.  Your doings will have to be investigated.”

They spoke in turn, as though they had been disembodied spirits — mere voices in empty air; for they looked at each other as if there had been nothing there, or, at most, with as much recognition as one gives to an inanimate object, and no more.  But now a silence fell.  Heemskirk had thought, all at once: “She will tell him all about it.  She will tell him while she hangs round his neck laughing.”  And the sudden desire to annihilate Jasper on the spot almost deprived him of his senses by its vehemence.  He lost the power of speech, of vision.  For a moment he absolutely couldn’t see Jasper.  But he heard him inquiring, as of the world at large:

“Am I, then, to conclude that the brig is detained?”

Heemskirk made a recovery in a flush of malignant satisfaction.

“She is.  I am going to take her to Makassar in tow.”

“The courts will have to decide on the legality of this,” said Jasper, aware that the matter was becoming serious, but with assumed indifference.

“Oh, yes, the courts!  Certainly.  And as to you, I shall keep you on board here.”

Jasper’s dismay at being parted from his ship was betrayed by a stony immobility.  It lasted but an instant.  Then he turned away and hailed the brig.  Mr. Schultz answered:

“Yes, sir.”

“Get ready to receive a tow-rope from the gunboat!  We are going to be taken to Makassar.”

“Good God!  What’s that for, sir?” came an anxious cry faintly.

“Kindness, I suppose,” Jasper, ironical, shouted with great deliberation.  “We might have been — becalmed in here — for days.  And hospitality.  I am invited to stay — on board here.”