Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (210 page)

“Is this ship the Lion?”

“Aye, aye. That’s her. She is,” several seamen answered together, casting curious glances from their work.

“Tell your captain my name is Kemp,” I shouted after Sebright with what strength of lung I had.

What luck! Williams was the jolly little ship’s captain I was to have dined with on the day of execution on Kingston Point — the day I had been kidnapped. It seemed ages ago. I wanted to get to the side to look after Seraphina, but I simply couldn’t remember how to stand. I sat on the hatch, looking at the seamen.

They were clearing the ropes, collecting the lamps, picking up knives, handspikes, crowbars, swabbing the decks with squashy flaps. A bare-footed, bare-armed fellow, holding a bundle of brass-hilted cutlasses under his arm, had lost himself in the contemplation of my person.

“Where are you bound to?” I inquired at large, and everybody showed a friendly alacrity in answer.

“Havana.” “Havana, sir.” “Havana’s our next port. Aye, Havana.”

The deck rang with modulations of the name.

I heard a loud, “Alas,” sighed out behind me. A distracted, stricken voice repeated twice in Spanish, “Oh, my greatness; oh, my greatness.” Then, shiveringly, in a tone of profound self-communion, “I have a greatly parched throat,” it said. Harshly jovial voices answered:

“Stow your lingo and come before the captain. Step along.”

A prisoner, conducted aft, stalked reluctantly into the light between two short, bustling sailors. Dishevelled black hair like a damaged peruke, mournful, yellow face, enormous stag’s eyes straining down on me. I recognized Manuel-del-Popolo. At the same moment he sprang back, shrieking, “This is a miracle of the devil — of the devil.”

The sailors fell to tugging at his arms savagely, asking, “What’s come to you?” and, after a short struggle that shook his tatters and his raven locks tempestuously like a gust of wind, he submitted to be walked up repeating:

“Is it you, Señor? Is it you? Is it you?”

One of his shoulders was bare from neck to elbow; at every step one of his knees and part of a lean thigh protruded their nakedness through a large rent; a strip of grimy, blood-stained linen, torn right down to the waist, dangled solemnly in front of his legs. There was a horrible raw patch amongst the roots of his hair just above his temple; there was blood in his nostrils, the stamp of excessive anguish on his features, a sort of guarded despair in his eye. His voice sank while he said again, twice:

“Is it you? Is it you?” And then, for the last time, “Is it you?” he repeated in a whisper.

The seamen formed a wide ring, and, looking at me, he talked to himself confidentially.

“Escaped — the Inglez! Then thou art doomed, Domingo. Domingo, thou art doomed. Dom... Señor!”

The change of tone, his effort to extend his hands towards me, surprised us all. I looked away.

“Hold hard! Hold him, mate!”

“Señor, condescend to behold my downfall. I am led here to the slaughter, Señor! To the slaughter, Señor! Pity! Grace! Mercy! And only a short while ago — behold. Slaughter... I... Manuel. Señor, I am universally admired — with a parched throat, Señor. I could compose a song that would make a priest weep.... A greatly parched throat, Señor,” he added piteously.

I could not help turning my head. I had not been used half as hard as he. It was enough to look at him to believe in the dryness of his throat. Under the matted mass of his hair, he was grinning in amiable agony, and his globular eyes yearned upon me with a motionless and glassy lustre.

“You have not forgotten me, Señor? Forget Manuel! Impossible! Manuel, Señor. For the love of God. Manuel. Manuel-del-Popolo. I did sing, deign to remember. I offered you my fidelity, Señor. As you are a caballero, I charge you to remember. Save me, Señor. Speak to those men.... For the sake of your honour, Señor.”

His voice was extraordinarily harsh — not his own. Apparently, he believed that he was going to be cut to pieces there and then by the sailors. He seemed to read it in their faces, shuddering and shrinking whenever he raised his eyes. But all these faces gaped with good-natured wonder, except the faces of his two guardians, and these expressed a state of conscientious worry. They were ridiculously anxious to suppress his sudden contortions, as one would some gross indecency. In the scuffle they hissed and swore under their breath. They were scandalized and made unhappy by his behaviour.

“Are you ready down there?” roared the bo’sun in the waist.

“Olla raight! Olla raight! Waita a leetle,” I heard Castro’s voice coming, as if from under the ship. I said coldly a few words about the certain punishment awaiting a pirate in Havana, and got on to my feet stiffly. But Manuel was too terrified to understand what I meant. He attempted to snatch at me with his imprisoned hands, and got for his pains a severe jerking, which made his head roll about his shoulders weirdly.

“Pity, Señor!” he screamed. And then, with low fervour, “Don’t go away. Listen! I am profound. Perhaps the Señor did not know that? Mercy! I am a man of intrigue. A politico. You have escaped, and I rejoice at it.”... He bared his fangs, and frothed like a mad dog.... “Señor, I am made happy because of the love I bore you from the first — and Domingo, who let you slip out of the Casa, is doomed. He is doomed. Thou art doomed, Domingo! But the excessive affection for your noble person inspires my intellect with a salutary combination. Wait, Señor! A moment! An instant!... A combination!...”

He gasped as though his heart had burst. The seamen, open-mouthed, were slowly narrowing their circle.

“Can’t he gabble!” remarked someone patiently.

His eyes were starting out of his head. He spoke with fearful rapidity.

“... There’s no refuge from the anger of the Juez but the grave — the grave — the grave!... Ha! ha! Go into thy grave, Domingo. But you, Señor — listen to my supplications — where will you go? To Havana. The Juez is there, and I call the malediction of the priests on my head if you, too, are not doomed. Life! Liberty! Señor, let me go, and I shall run — I shall ride, Señor — I shall throw myself at the feet of the Juez, and say... I shall say I killed you. I am greatly trusted by the reason of my superior intelligence. I shall say, ‘Domingo let him go — but he is dead. Think of him no more — of that Inglez who escaped — from Domingo. Do not look for him. I, your own Manuel, have killed him.’ Give me my life for yours, Señor. I shall swear I had killed you with this right hand! Ah!”

He hung on my lips breathless, with a face so distorted that, though it might have been death alone he hated, he looked, indeed, as if impatient to set to and tear me to pieces with his long teeth. Men clutching at straws must have faces thus convulsed by an eager and despairing hope. His silence removed the spell — the spell of his incredible loquacity. I heard the boatswain’s hoarse tones:

“Hold on well, ma’am. Right! Walk away steady with that whip!”

I ran limping forward.

“High enough,” he rumbled; and I received Seraphina into my arms.

CHAPTER FOUR

I said, “This is home, at last. It is all over”; and she stood by me on the deck. She pushed the heavy black cloak from over her head, and her white face appeared above the dim black shadow of her mourning. She looked silently round her on the mist, the groups of rough men, the spatterings of light that were like violence, too. She said nothing, but rested her hand on my arm.

She had her immense griefs, and this was the home I offered her. She looked back at the side. I thought she would have liked to be in the boat again. I said:

“The people in this ship are my old friends. You can trust them — and me.”

Tomas Castro, clambering leisurely over the side, followed. As soon as his feet touched the deck, he threw the corner of his cloak across his left shoulder, bent down half the rim of his hat, and assumed the appearance of a short, dark conspirator, overtopped by the stalwart sailors, who had abandoned Manuel to crowd, bare-armed, bare-chested, pushing, and craning their necks, round us.

She said, “I can trust you; it is my duty to trust you, and this is now my home.”

It was like a definite pronouncement of faith — and of a line of policy. She seemed, for that moment, quite apart from my love, a thing very much above me and mine; closed up in an immense grief, but quite whole-souledly determined to go unflinchingly into a new life, breaking quietly with all her past for the sake of the traditions of all that past.

The sailors fell back to make way for us. It was only by the touch of her hand on my arm that I had any hope that she trusted me, me personally, and apart from the commands of the dead Carlos; the dead father, and the great weight of her dead traditions that could be never anything any more for her — except a memory. Ah, she stood it very well; her head was erect and proud. The cabin door opened, and a rigid female figure with dry outlines, and a smooth head, stood out with severe simplicity against the light of the cabin door. The light falling on Seraphina seemed to show her for the first time. A lamentable voice bellowed:

“Señorita!... Señorita!” and then, in an insinuating, heart-breaking tone, “Señorita!...”

She walked quietly past the figure of the woman, and disappeared in the brilliant light of the cabin. The door closed. I remained standing there. Manuel, at her disappearance, raised his voice to a tremendous, incessant yell of despair, as if he expected to make her hear.

“Señorita... proteccion del opprimido; oh, hija de piedad... Señorita.”

His lamentable noise brought half the ship round us; the sailors fell back before the mate, Sebright, walking at the elbow of a stout man in loose trousers and jacket. They stopped.

“An unexpected meeting, Captain Williams,” was all I found to say to him. He had a constrained air, and shook hands in awkward silence.

“How do you do?” he said hurriedly. After a moment he added, with a sort of confused, as if official air, “I hope, Kemp, you’ll be able to explain satisfactorily...”

I said, rather off-handedly, “Why, the two men I killed ought to be credentials enough for all immediate purposes!”

“That isn’t what I meant,” he said. He spoke rather with a mumble, and apologetically. It was difficult to see in him any trace of the roystering Williams who had roared toasts to my health in Jamaica, after the episode at the Ferry Inn with the admiral. It was as if, now, he had a weight on his mind. I was tired. I said:

“Two dead men is more than you or any of your crew can show. And, as far as I can judge, you did no more than hold your own till I came.”

He positively stuttered, “Yes, yes. But...”

I got angry with what seemed stupid obstinacy.

“You’d be having a rope twisted tight round your head, or red-hot irons at the soles of your feet, at this very moment, if it had not been for us,” I said indignantly.

He wiped his forehead perplexedly. “Phew, how you do talk!” he remonstrated. “What I mean is that my wife...” He stopped again, then went on. “She took it into her head to come with me this voyage. For the first time.... And you two coming alone in an open boat like this! It’s what she isn’t used to.”

I simply couldn’t get at what he meant; I couldn’t even hear him very well, because Manuel-del-Popolo was still calling out to Seraphina in the cabin. Williams and I looked at each other — he embarrassed, and I utterly confounded.

“Mrs. Williams thinks it’s irregular,” Sebright broke in, “you and your young lady being alone — in an open boat at night, and that sort of thing. It isn’t what they approve of at Bristol.”

Manuel suddenly bellowed out, “Señorita — save me from their barbarity. I am a victim. Behold their bloody knives ready — and their eyes which gloat.”

He shrank convulsively from the fellow with the bundle of cutlasses under his arm, who innocently pushed his way close to him; he threw himself forward, the two sailors hung back on his arms, nearly sitting on the deck, and he strained dog-like in his intense fear of immediate death. Williams, however, really seemed to want an answer to his absurdity that I could not take very seriously. I said:

“What do you expect us to do? Go back to our boat, or what?”

It seemed to affect him a good deal. “Wait till you are caught by a good woman yourself,” he mumbled wretchedly.

Was this the roystering Williams? The jolly good fellow? I wanted to laugh, a little hysterically, because of the worry after great fatigue. Was his wife such a terrifying virago? “A good woman,” Williams insisted. I turned my eyes to Sebright, who looked on amusedly.

“It’s all right,” he answered my questioning look. “She’s a good soul, but she doesn’t see fellows like us in the congregation she worships with at home.” Then he whispered in my ear, “Owner’s niece. Older than the skipper. Married him for love. Suspects every woman — every man, too, by George, except me, perhaps. She’s learned life in some back chapel in Bristol. What can you expect? You go straight into the cabin,” he added.

At that moment the cabin door opened again, and the figure of the woman I had seen before reappeared against the light.

“I was allowed to stand under the gate of the Casa, Excellency, I was in very truth. Oh, turn not the light of your face from me.” Manuel, who had been silent for a minute, immediately recommenced his clamour in the hope, I suppose, that it would reach Seraphina’s ears, now the door was opened.

“What is to be done, Owen?” the woman asked, with a serenity I thought very merciless.

She had precisely the air of having someone “in the house,” someone rather questionable that you want, at home, to get rid of, as soon as a very small charity permitted.

“Madam,” I said rather coldly, “I appeal to your woman’s compassion....”

“Even thus the arch-enemy sets his snares,” she retorted on me a little tremulously.

“Señorita, I have seen you grow,” Manuel called again. “Your father, who is with the saints, gave me alms when I was a boy. Will you let them kill a man to whom your father...”

“Snares. All snares. Can she be blessed in going away from her natural guardians at night, alone, with a young man? How can we, consistently with our duty...”