Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (559 page)

“No.”

“And you a fighting man.”

“Listen to me, Jorgenson. Things turned out so that before the time came for a fight it was already too late.” He turned to Mrs. Travers still looking about with anxious eyes and a faint smile on her lips. “While I was talking to you that evening from the boat it was already too late. No. There was never any time for it. I have told you all about myself, Mrs. Travers, and you know that I speak the truth when I say too late. If you had only been alone in that yacht going about the seas!”

“Yes,” she struck in, “but I was not alone.”

Lingard dropped his chin on his breast. Already a foretaste of noonday heat staled the sparkling freshness of the morning. The smile had vanished from Edith Travers’ lips and her eyes rested on Lingard’s bowed head with an expression no longer curious but which might have appeared enigmatic to Jorgenson if he had looked at her. But Jorgenson looked at nothing. He asked from the remoteness of his dead past, “What have you left outside, Tom? What is there now?”

“There’s the yacht on the shoals, my brig at anchor, and about a hundred of the worst kind of Illanun vagabonds under three chiefs and with two war-praus moored to the edge of the bank. Maybe Daman is with them, too, out there.”

“No,” said Jorgenson, positively.

“He has come in,” cried Lingard. “He brought his prisoners in himself then.”

“Landed by torchlight,” uttered precisely the shade of Captain Jorgenson, late of the Barque Wild Rose. He swung his arm pointing across the lagoon and Mrs. Travers turned about in that direction.

All the scene was but a great light and a great solitude. Her gaze travelled over the lustrous, dark sheet of empty water to a shore bordered by a white beach empty, too, and showing no sign of human life. The human habitations were lost in the shade of the fruit trees, masked by the cultivated patches of Indian corn and the banana plantations. Near the shore the rigid lines of two stockaded forts could be distinguished flanking the beach, and between them with a great open space before it, the brown roof slope of an enormous long building that seemed suspended in the air had a great square flag fluttering above it. Something like a small white flame in the sky was the carved white coral finial on the gable of the mosque which had caught full the rays of the sun. A multitude of gay streamers, white and red, flew over the half-concealed roofs, over the brilliant fields and amongst the sombre palm groves. But it might have been a deserted settlement decorated and abandoned by its departed population. Lingard pointed to the stockade on the right.

“That’s where your husband is,” he said to Mrs. Travers.

“Who is the other?” uttered Jorgenson’s voice at their backs. He also was turned that way with his strange sightless gaze fixed beyond them into the void.

“A Spanish gentleman I believe you said, Mrs Travers,” observed Lingard.

“It is extremely difficult to believe that there is anybody there,” murmured Mrs. Travers.

“Did you see them both, Jorgenson?” asked Lingard.

“Made out nobody. Too far. Too dark.”

As a matter of fact Jorgenson had seen nothing, about an hour before daybreak, but the distant glare of torches while the loud shouts of an excited multitude had reached him across the water only like a faint and tempestuous murmur. Presently the lights went away processionally through the groves of trees into the armed stockades. The distant glare vanished in the fading darkness and the murmurs of the invisible crowd ceased suddenly as if carried off by the retreating shadow of the night. Daylight followed swiftly, disclosing to the sleepless Jorgenson the solitude of the shore and the ghostly outlines of the familiar forms of grouped trees and scattered human habitations. He had watched the varied colours come out in the dawn, the wide cultivated Settlement of many shades of green, framed far away by the fine black lines of the forest-edge that was its limit and its protection.

Mrs. Travers stood against the rail as motionless as a statue. Her face had lost all its mobility and her cheeks were dead white as if all the blood in her body had flowed back into her heart and had remained there. Her very lips had lost their colour. Lingard caught hold of her arm roughly.

“Don’t, Mrs. Travers. Why are you terrifying yourself like this? If you don’t believe what I say listen to me asking Jorgenson. . . .”

“Yes, ask me,” mumbled Jorgenson in his white moustache.

“Speak straight, Jorgenson. What do you think? Are the gentlemen alive?”

“Certainly,” said Jorgenson in a sort of disappointed tone as though he had expected a much more difficult question.

“Is their life in immediate danger?”

“Of course not,” said Jorgenson.

Lingard turned away from the oracle. “You have heard him, Mrs. Travers. You may believe every word he says. There isn’t a thought or a purpose in that Settlement,” he continued, pointing at the dumb solitude of the lagoon, “that this man doesn’t know as if they were his own.”

“I know. Ask me,” muttered Jorgenson, mechanically.

Mrs. Travers said nothing but made a slight movement and her whole rigid figure swayed dangerously. Lingard put his arm firmly round her waist and she did not seem aware of it till after she had turned her head and found Lingard’s face very near her own. But his eyes full of concern looked so close into hers that she was obliged to shut them like a woman about to faint.

The effect this produced upon Lingard was such that she felt the tightening of his arm and as she opened her eyes again some of the colour returned to her face. She met the deepened expression of his solicitude with a look so steady, with a gaze that in spite of herself was so profoundly vivid that its clearness seemed to Lingard to throw all his past life into shade. — ”I don’t feel faint. It isn’t that at all,” she declared in a perfectly calm voice. It seemed to Lingard as cold as ice.

“Very well,” he agreed with a resigned smile. “But you just catch hold of that rail, please, before I let you go.” She, too, forced a smile on her lips.

“What incredulity,” she remarked, and for a time made not the slightest movement. At last, as if making a concession, she rested the tips of her fingers on the rail. Lingard gradually removed his arm. “And pray don’t look upon me as a conventional ‘weak woman’ person, the delicate lady of your own conception,” she said, facing Lingard, with her arm extended to the rail. “Make that effort please against your own conception of what a woman like me should be. I am perhaps as strong as you are, Captain Lingard. I mean it literally. In my body.” — ”Don’t you think I have seen that long ago?” she heard his deep voice protesting. — ”And as to my courage,” Mrs. Travers continued, her expression charmingly undecided between frowns and smiles; “didn’t I tell you only a few hours ago, only last evening, that I was not capable of thinking myself into a fright; you remember, when you were begging me to try something of the kind. Don’t imagine that I would have been ashamed to try. But I couldn’t have done it. No. Not even for the sake of somebody else’s kingdom. Do you understand me?”

“God knows,” said the attentive Lingard after a time, with an unexpected sigh. “You people seem to be made of another stuff.”

“What has put that absurd notion into your head?”

“I didn’t mean better or worse. And I wouldn’t say it isn’t good stuff either. What I meant to say is that it’s different. One feels it. And here we are.”

“Yes, here we are,” repeated Mrs. Travers. “And as to this moment of emotion, what provoked it is not a concern for anybody or anything outside myself. I felt no terror. I cannot even fix my fears upon any distinct image. You think I am shamelessly heartless in telling you this.”

Lingard made no sign. It didn’t occur to him to make a sign. He simply hung on Mrs. Travers’ words as it were only for the sake of the sound. — ”I am simply frank with you,” she continued. “What do I know of savagery, violence, murder? I have never seen a dead body in my life. The light, the silence, the mysterious emptiness of this place have suddenly affected my imagination, I suppose. What is the meaning of this wonderful peace in which we stand — you and I alone?”

Lingard shook his head. He saw the narrow gleam of the woman’s teeth between the parted lips of her smile, as if all the ardour of her conviction had been dissolved at the end of her speech into wistful recognition of their partnership before things outside their knowledge. And he was warmed by something a little helpless in that smile. Within three feet of them the shade of Jorgenson, very gaunt and neat, stared into space.

“Yes. You are strong,” said Lingard. “But a whole long night sitting in a small boat! I wonder you are not too stiff to stand.”

“I am not stiff in the least,” she interrupted, still smiling. “I am really a very strong woman,” she added, earnestly. “Whatever happens you may reckon on that fact.”

Lingard gave her an admiring glance. But the shade of Jorgenson, perhaps catching in its remoteness the sound of the word woman, was suddenly moved to begin scolding with all the liberty of a ghost, in a flow of passionless indignation.

“Woman! That’s what I say. That’s just about the last touch — that you, Tom Lingard, red-eyed Tom, King Tom, and all those fine names, that you should leave your weapons twenty miles behind you, your men, your guns, your brig that is your strength, and come along here with your mouth full of fight, bare-handed and with a woman in tow. — Well — well!”

“Don’t forget, Jorgenson, that the lady hears you,” remonstrated Lingard in a vexed tone. . . . “He doesn’t mean to be rude,” he remarked to Mrs. Travers quite loud, as if indeed Jorgenson were but an immaterial and feelingless illusion. “He has forgotten.”

“The woman is not in the least offended. I ask for nothing better than to be taken on that footing.”

“Forgot nothing!” mumbled Jorgenson with a sort of ghostly assertiveness and as it were for his own satisfaction. “What’s the world coming to?”

“It was I who insisted on coming with Captain Lingard,” said Mrs. Travers, treating Jorgenson to a fascinating sweetness of tone.

“That’s what I say! What is the world coming to? Hasn’t King Tom a mind of his own? What has come over him? He’s mad! Leaving his brig with a hundred and twenty born and bred pirates of the worst kind in two praus on the other side of a sandbank. Did you insist on that, too? Has he put himself in the hands of a strange woman?”

Jorgenson seemed to be asking those questions of himself. Mrs. Travers observed the empty stare, the self-communing voice, his unearthly lack of animation. Somehow it made it very easy to speak the whole truth to him.

“No,” she said, “it is I who am altogether in his hands.”

Nobody would have guessed that Jorgenson had heard a single word of that emphatic declaration if he had not addressed himself to Lingard with the question neither more nor less abstracted than all his other speeches.

“Why then did you bring her along?”

“You don’t understand. It was only right and proper. One of the gentlemen is the lady’s husband.”

“Oh, yes,” muttered Jorgenson. “Who’s the other?”

“You have been told. A friend.”

“Poor Mr. d’Alcacer,” said Mrs. Travers. “What bad luck for him to have accepted our invitation. But he is really a mere acquaintance.”

“I hardly noticed him,” observed Lingard, gloomily. “He was talking to you over the back of your chair when I came aboard the yacht as if he had been a very good friend.”

“We always understood each other very well,” said Mrs. Travers, picking up from the rail the long glass that was lying there. “I always liked him, the frankness of his mind, and his great loyalty.”

“What did he do?” asked Lingard.

“He loved,” said Mrs. Travers, lightly. “But that’s an old story.” She raised the glass to her eyes, one arm extended fully to sustain the long tube, and Lingard forgot d’Alcacer in admiring the firmness of her pose and the absolute steadiness of the heavy glass. She was as firm as a rock after all those emotions and all that fatigue.

Mrs. Travers directed the glass instinctively toward the entrance of the lagoon. The smooth water there shone like a piece of silver in the dark frame of the forest. A black speck swept across the field of her vision. It was some time before she could find it again and then she saw, apparently so near as to be within reach of the voice, a small canoe with two people in it. She saw the wet paddles rising and dipping with a flash in the sunlight. She made out plainly the face of Immada, who seemed to be looking straight into the big end of the telescope. The chief and his sister, after resting under the bank for a couple of hours in the middle of the night, had entered the lagoon and were making straight for the hulk. They were already near enough to be perfectly distinguishable to the naked eye if there had been anybody on board to glance that way. But nobody was even thinking of them. They might not have existed except perhaps in the memory of old Jorgenson. But that was mostly busy with all the mysterious secrets of his late tomb.

Mrs. Travers lowered the glass suddenly. Lingard came out from a sort of trance and said:

“Mr. d’Alcacer. Loved! Why shouldn’t he?”

Mrs. Travers looked frankly into Lingard’s gloomy eyes. “It isn’t that alone, of course,” she said. “First of all he knew how to love and then. . . . You don’t know how artificial and barren certain kinds of life can be. But Mr. d’Alcacer’s life was not that. His devotion was worth having.”

“You seem to know a lot about him,’“ said Lingard, enviously. “Why do you smile?” She continued to smile at him for a little while. The long brass tube over her shoulder shone like gold against the pale fairness of her bare head. — ”At a thought,” she answered, preserving the low tone of the conversation into which they had fallen as if their words could have disturbed the self-absorption of Captain H. C. Jorgenson. “At the thought that for all my long acquaintance with Mr. d’Alcacer I don’t know half as much about him as I know about you.”

“Ah, that’s impossible,” contradicted Lingard. “Spaniard or no Spaniard, he is one of your kind.”

“Tarred with the same brush,” murmured Mrs. Travers, with only a half-amused irony. But Lingard continued: