Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (9 page)

She recognised with a thrill of delicious fear the mysterious consciousness of her identity with that being.  Listening to his words, it seemed to her she was born only then to a knowledge of a new existence, that her life was complete only when near him, and she abandoned herself to a feeling of dreamy happiness, while with half-veiled face and in silence — as became a Malay girl — she listened to Dain’s words giving up to her the whole treasure of love and passion his nature was capable of with all the unrestrained enthusiasm of a man totally untrammelled by any influence of civilised self-discipline.

And they used to pass many a delicious and fast fleeting hour under the mango trees behind the friendly curtain of bushes till Mrs. Almayer’s shrill voice gave the signal of unwilling separation.  Mrs. Almayer had undertaken the easy task of watching her husband lest he should interrupt the smooth course of her daughter’s love affair, in which she took a great and benignant interest.  She was happy and proud to see Dain’s infatuation, believing him to be a great and powerful chief, and she found also a gratification of her mercenary instincts in Dain’s open-handed generosity.

On the eve of the day when Babalatchi’s suspicions were confirmed by ocular demonstration, Dain and Nina had remained longer than usual in their shady retreat.  Only Almayer’s heavy step on the verandah and his querulous clamour for food decided Mrs. Almayer to lift a warning cry.  Maroola leaped lightly over the low bamboo fence, and made his way stealthily through the banana plantation down to the muddy shore of the back creek, while Nina walked slowly towards the house to minister to her father’s wants, as was her wont every evening.  Almayer felt happy enough that evening; the preparations were nearly completed; to-morrow he would launch his boats.  In his mind’s eye he saw the rich prize in his grasp; and, with tin spoon in his hand, he was forgetting the plateful of rice before him in the fanciful arrangement of some splendid banquet to take place on his arrival in Amsterdam.  Nina, reclining in the long chair, listened absently to the few disconnected words escaping from her father’s lips.  Expedition!  Gold!  What did she care for all that?  But at the name of Maroola mentioned by her father she was all attention.  Dain was going down the river with his brig to-morrow to remain away for a few days, said Almayer.  It was very annoying, this delay.  As soon as Dain returned they would have to start without loss of time, for the river was rising.  He would not be surprised if a great flood was coming.  And he pushed away his plate with an impatient gesture on rising from the table.  But now Nina heard him not.  Dain going away!  That’s why he had ordered her, with that quiet masterfulness it was her delight to obey, to meet him at break of day in Bulangi’s creek.  Was there a paddle in her canoe? she thought.  Was it ready?  She would have to start early — at four in the morning, in a very few hours.

She rose from her chair, thinking she would require rest before the long pull in the early morning.  The lamp was burning dimly, and her father, tired with the day’s labour, was already in his hammock.  Nina put the lamp out and passed into a large room she shared with her mother on the left of the central passage.  Entering, she saw that Mrs. Almayer had deserted the pile of mats serving her as bed in one corner of the room, and was now bending over the opened lid of her large wooden chest.  Half a shell of cocoanut filled with oil, where a cotton rag floated for a wick, stood on the floor, surrounding her with a ruddy halo of light shining through the black and odorous smoke.  Mrs. Almayer’s back was bent, and her head and shoulders hidden in the deep box.  Her hands rummaged in the interior, where a soft clink as of silver money could be heard.  She did not notice at first her daughter’s approach, and Nina, standing silently by her, looked down on many little canvas bags ranged in the bottom of the chest, wherefrom her mother extracted handfuls of shining guilders and Mexican dollars, letting them stream slowly back again through her claw-like fingers.  The music of tinkling silver seemed to delight her, and her eyes sparkled with the reflected gleam of freshly-minted coins.  She was muttering to herself: “And this, and this, and yet this!  Soon he will give more — as much more as I ask.  He is a great Rajah — a Son of Heaven!  And she will be a Ranee — he gave all this for her!  Who ever gave anything for me?  I am a slave!  Am I?  I am the mother of a great Ranee!”  She became aware suddenly of her daughter’s presence, and ceased her droning, shutting the lid down violently; then, without rising from her crouching position, she looked up at the girl standing by with a vague smile on her dreamy face.

“You have seen.  Have you?” she shouted, shrilly.  “That is all mine, and for you.  It is not enough!  He will have to give more before he takes you away to the southern island where his father is king.  You hear me?  You are worth more, granddaughter of Rajahs!  More!  More!”

The sleepy voice of Almayer was heard on the verandah recommending silence.  Mrs. Almayer extinguished the light and crept into her corner of the room.  Nina laid down on her back on a pile of soft mats, her hands entwined under her head, gazing through the shutterless hole, serving as a window at the stars twinkling on the black sky; she was awaiting the time of start for her appointed meeting-place.  With quiet happiness she thought of that meeting in the great forest, far from all human eyes and sounds.  Her soul, lapsing again into the savage mood, which the genius of civilisation working by the hand of Mrs. Vinck could never destroy, experienced a feeling of pride and of some slight trouble at the high value her worldly-wise mother had put upon her person; but she remembered the expressive glances and words of Dain, and, tranquillised, she closed her eyes in a shiver of pleasant anticipation.

There are some situations where the barbarian and the, so-called, civilised man meet upon the same ground.  It may be supposed that Dain Maroola was not exceptionally delighted with his prospective mother-in-law, nor that he actually approved of that worthy woman’s appetite for shining dollars.  Yet on that foggy morning when Babalatchi, laying aside the cares of state, went to visit his fish-baskets in the Bulangi creek, Maroola had no misgivings, experienced no feelings but those of impatience and longing, when paddling to the east side of the island forming the back-water in question.  He hid his canoe in the bushes and strode rapidly across the islet, pushing with impatience through the twigs of heavy undergrowth intercrossed over his path.  From motives of prudence he would not take his canoe to the meeting-place, as Nina had done.  He had left it in the main stream till his return from the other side of the island.  The heavy warm fog was closing rapidly round him, but he managed to catch a fleeting glimpse of a light away to the left, proceeding from Bulangi’s house.  Then he could see nothing in the thickening vapour, and kept to the path only by a sort of instinct, which also led him to the very point on the opposite shore he wished to reach.  A great log had stranded there, at right angles to the bank, forming a kind of jetty against which the swiftly flowing stream broke with a loud ripple.  He stepped on it with a quick but steady motion, and in two strides found himself at the outer end, with the rush and swirl of the foaming water at his feet.

Standing there alone, as if separated from the world; the heavens, earth; the very water roaring under him swallowed up in the thick veil of the morning fog, he breathed out the name of Nina before him into the apparently limitless space, sure of being heard, instinctively sure of the nearness of the delightful creature; certain of her being aware of his near presence as he was aware of hers.

The bow of Nina’s canoe loomed up close to the log, canted high out of the water by the weight of the sitter in the stern.  Maroola laid his hand on the stem and leaped lightly in, giving it a vigorous shove off.  The light craft, obeying the new impulse, cleared the log by a hair’s breadth, and the river, with obedient complicity, swung it broadside to the current, and bore it off silently and rapidly between the invisible banks.  And once more Dain, at the feet of Nina, forgot the world, felt himself carried away helpless by a great wave of supreme emotion, by a rush of joy, pride, and desire; understood once more with overpowering certitude that there was no life possible without that being he held clasped in his arms with passionate strength in a prolonged embrace.

Nina disengaged herself gently with a low laugh.

“You will overturn the boat, Dain,” she whispered.

He looked into her eyes eagerly for a minute and let her go with a sigh, then lying down in the canoe he put his head on her knees, gazing upwards and stretching his arms backwards till his hands met round the girl’s waist.  She bent over him, and, shaking her head, framed both their faces in the falling locks of her long black hair.

And so they drifted on, he speaking with all the rude eloquence of a savage nature giving itself up without restraint to an overmastering passion, she bending low to catch the murmur of words sweeter to her than life itself.  To those two nothing existed then outside the gunwales of the narrow and fragile craft.  It was their world, filled with their intense and all-absorbing love.  They took no heed of thickening mist, or of the breeze dying away before sunrise; they forgot the existence of the great forests surrounding them, of all the tropical nature awaiting the advent of the sun in a solemn and impressive silence.

Over the low river-mist hiding the boat with its freight of young passionate life and all-forgetful happiness, the stars paled, and a silvery-grey tint crept over the sky from the eastward.  There was not a breath of wind, not a rustle of stirring leaf, not a splash of leaping fish to disturb the serene repose of all living things on the banks of the great river.  Earth, river, and sky were wrapped up in a deep sleep, from which it seemed there would be no waking.  All the seething life and movement of tropical nature seemed concentrated in the ardent eyes, in the tumultuously beating hearts of the two beings drifting in the canoe, under the white canopy of mist, over the smooth surface of the river.

Suddenly a great sheaf of yellow rays shot upwards from behind the black curtain of trees lining the banks of the Pantai.  The stars went out; the little black clouds at the zenith glowed for a moment with crimson tints, and the thick mist, stirred by the gentle breeze, the sigh of waking nature, whirled round and broke into fantastically torn pieces, disclosing the wrinkled surface of the river sparkling in the broad light of day.  Great flocks of white birds wheeled screaming above the swaying tree-tops.  The sun had risen on the east coast.

Dain was the first to return to the cares of everyday life.  He rose and glanced rapidly up and down the river.  His eye detected Babalatchi’s boat astern, and another small black speck on the glittering water, which was Taminah’s canoe.  He moved cautiously forward, and, kneeling, took up a paddle; Nina at the stern took hers.  They bent their bodies to the work, throwing up the water at every stroke, and the small craft went swiftly ahead, leaving a narrow wake fringed with a lace-like border of white and gleaming foam.  Without turning his head, Dain spoke.

“Somebody behind us, Nina.  We must not let him gain.  I think he is too far to recognise us.”

“Somebody before us also,” panted out Nina, without ceasing to paddle.

“I think I know,” rejoined Dain.  “The sun shines over there, but I fancy it is the girl Taminah.  She comes down every morning to my brig to sell cakes — stays often all day.  It does not matter; steer more into the bank; we must get under the bushes.  My canoe is hidden not far from here.”

As he spoke his eyes watched the broad-leaved nipas which they were brushing in their swift and silent course.

“Look out, Nina,” he said at last; “there, where the water palms end and the twigs hang down under the leaning tree.  Steer for the big green branch.”

He stood up attentive, and the boat drifted slowly in shore, Nina guiding it by a gentle and skilful movement of her paddle.  When near enough Dain laid hold of the big branch, and leaning back shot the canoe under a low green archway of thickly matted creepers giving access to a miniature bay formed by the caving in of the bank during the last great flood.  His own boat was there anchored by a stone, and he stepped into it, keeping his hand on the gunwale of Nina’s canoe.  In a moment the two little nutshells with their occupants floated quietly side by side, reflected by the black water in the dim light struggling through a high canopy of dense foliage; while above, away up in the broad day, flamed immense red blossoms sending down on their heads a shower of great dew-sparkling petals that descended rotating slowly in a continuous and perfumed stream; and over them, under them, in the sleeping water; all around them in a ring of luxuriant vegetation bathed in the warm air charged with strong and harsh perfumes, the intense work of tropical nature went on: plants shooting upward, entwined, interlaced in inextricable confusion, climbing madly and brutally over each other in the terrible silence of a desperate struggle towards the life-giving sunshine above — as if struck with sudden horror at the seething mass of corruption below, at the death and decay from which they sprang.

“We must part now,” said Dain, after a long silence.  “You must return at once, Nina.  I will wait till the brig drifts down here, and shall get on board then.”

“And will you be long away, Dain?” asked Nina, in a low voice.

“Long!” exclaimed Dain.  “Would a man willingly remain long in a dark place?  When I am not near you, Nina, I am like a man that is blind.  What is life to me without light?”

Nina leaned over, and with a proud and happy smile took Dain’s face between her hands, looking into his eyes with a fond yet questioning gaze.  Apparently she found there the confirmation of the words just said, for a feeling of grateful security lightened for her the weight of sorrow at the hour of parting.  She believed that he, the descendant of many great Rajahs, the son of a great chief, the master of life and death, knew the sunshine of life only in her presence.  An immense wave of gratitude and love welled forth out of her heart towards him.  How could she make an outward and visible sign of all she felt for the man who had filled her heart with so much joy and so much pride?  And in the great tumult of passion, like a flash of lightning came to her the reminiscence of that despised and almost forgotten civilisation she had only glanced at in her days of restraint, of sorrow, and of anger.  In the cold ashes of that hateful and miserable past she would find the sign of love, the fitting expression of the boundless felicity of the present, the pledge of a bright and splendid future.  She threw her arms around Dain’s neck and pressed her lips to his in a long and burning kiss.  He closed his eyes, surprised and frightened at the storm raised in his breast by the strange and to him hitherto unknown contact, and long after Nina had pushed her canoe into the river he remained motionless, without daring to open his eyes, afraid to lose the sensation of intoxicating delight he had tasted for the first time.