Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (451 page)

“There are no lies between you and me,” he said, more steadily than he thought he could speak.

“What’s the good now? He funks women. In that Mexican pueblo where we lay grounded on our beef-bones, so to speak, I used to go to dances of an evening. The girls there would ask me if the English caballero in the posada was a monk in disguise, or if he had taken a vow to the sancissima madre not to speak to a woman, or whether — You can imagine what fairly free-spoken girls will ask when they come to the point of not caring what they say; and it used to vex me. Yes, the governor funks facing women.”

“One woman?” interjected Schomberg in guttural tones.

“One may be more awkward to deal with than two, or two hundred, for that matter. In a place that’s full of women you needn’t look at them unless you like; but if you go into a room where there is only one woman, young or old, pretty or ugly, you have got to face her. And, unless you are after her, then — the governor is right enough — she’s in the way.”

“Why notice them?” muttered Schomberg. “What can they do?”

“Make a noise, if nothing else,” opined Mr. Ricardo curtly, with the distaste of a man whose path is a path of silence; for indeed, nothing is more odious than a noise when one is engaged in a weighty and absorbing card game. “Noise, noise, my friend,” he went on forcibly; “confounded screeching about something or other, and I like it no more than the governor does. But with the governor there’s something else besides. He can’t stand them at all.”

He paused to reflect on this psychological phenomenon, and as no philosopher was at hand to tell him that there is no strong sentiment without some terror, as there is no real religion without a little fetishism, he emitted his own conclusion, which surely could not go to the root of the matter.

“I’m hanged if I don’t think they are to him what liquor is to me. Brandy — pah!”

He made a disgusted face, and produced a genuine shudder. Schomberg listened to him in wonder. It looked as if the very scoundrelism, of that — that Swede would protect him; the spoil of his iniquity standing between the thief and the retribution.

“That’s so, old buck.” Ricardo broke the silence after contemplating Schomberg’s mute dejection with a sort of sympathy. “I don’t think this trick will work.”

“But that’s silly,” whispered the man deprived of the vengeance which he had seemed already to hold in his hand, by a mysterious and exasperating idiosyncrasy.

“Don’t you set yourself to judge a gentleman.” Ricardo without anger administered a moody rebuke. “Even I can’t understand the governor thoroughly. And I am an Englishman and his follower. No, I don’t think I care to put it before him, sick as I am of staying here.”

Ricardo could not be more sick of staying than Schomberg was of seeing him stay. Schomberg believed so firmly in the reality of Heyst as created by his own power of false inferences, of his hate, of his love of scandal, that he could not contain a stifled cry of conviction as sincere as most of our convictions, the disguised servants of our passions, can appear at a supreme moment.

“It would have been like going to pick up a nugget of a thousand pounds, or two or three times as much, for all I know. No trouble, no — ”

“The petticoat’s the trouble,” Ricardo struck in.

He had resumed his noiseless, feline, oblique prowling, in which an observer would have detected a new character of excitement, such as a wild animal of the cat species, anxious to make a spring, might betray. Schomberg saw nothing. It would probably have cheered his drooping spirits; but in a general way he preferred not to look at Ricardo. Ricardo, however, with one of his slanting, gliding, restless glances, observed the bitter smile on Schomberg’s bearded lips — the unmistakable smile of ruined hopes.

“You are a pretty unforgiving sort of chap,” he said, stopping for a moment with an air of interest. “Hang me if I ever saw anybody look so disappointed! I bet you would send black plague to that island if you only knew how — eh, what? Plague too good for them? Ha, ha, ha!”

He bent down to stare at Schomberg who sat unstirring with stony eyes and set features, and apparently deaf to the rasping derision of that laughter so close to his red fleshy ear.

“Black plague too good for them, ha, ha!” Ricardo pressed the point on the tormented hotel-keeper. Schomberg kept his eyes down obstinately.

“I don’t wish any harm to the girl — ” he muttered.

“But did she bolt from you? A fair bilk? Come!”

“Devil only knows what that villainous Swede had done to her — what he promised her, how he frightened her. She couldn’t have cared for him, I know.” Schomberg’s vanity clung to the belief in some atrocious, extraordinary means of seduction employed by Heyst. “Look how he bewitched that poor Morrison,” he murmured.

“Ah, Morrison — got all his money, what?”

“Yes — and his life.”

“Terrible fellow, that Swedish baron! How is one to get at him?”

Schomberg exploded.

“Three against one! Are you shy? Do you want me to give you a letter of introduction?”

“You ought to look at yourself in a glass,” Ricardo said quietly. “Dash me if you don’t get a stroke of some kind presently. And this is the fellow who says women can do nothing! That one will do for you, unless you manage to forget her.”

“I wish I could,” Schomberg admitted earnestly. “And it’s all the doing of that Swede. I don’t get enough sleep, Mr. Ricardo. And then, to finish me off, you gentlemen turn up . . . as if I hadn’t enough worry.”

“That’s done you good,” suggested the secretary with ironic seriousness. “Takes your mind off that silly trouble. At your age too.”

He checked himself, as if in pity, and changing his tone:

“I would really like to oblige you while doing a stroke of business at the same time.”

“A good stroke,” insisted Schomberg, as if it were mechanically. In his simplicity he was not able to give up the idea which had entered his head. An idea must be driven out by another idea, and with Schomberg ideas were rare and therefore tenacious. “Minted gold,” he murmured with a sort of anguish.

Such an expressive combination of words was not without effect upon Ricardo. Both these men were amenable to the influence of verbal suggestions. The secretary of “plain Mr. Jones” sighed and murmured.

“Yes. But how is one to get at it?”

“Being three to one,” said Schomberg, “I suppose you could get it for the asking.”

“One would think the fellow lived next door,” Ricardo growled impatiently. “Hang it all, can’t you understand a plain question? I have asked you the way.”

Schomberg seemed to revive.

“The way?”

The torpor of deceived hopes underlying his superficial changes of mood had been pricked by these words which seemed pointed with purpose.

“The way is over the water, of course,” said the hotel-keeper. “For people like you, three days in a good, big boat is nothing. It’s no more than a little outing, a bit of a change. At this season the Java Sea is a pond. I have an excellent, safe boat — a ship’s life-boat — carry thirty, let alone three, and a child could handle her. You wouldn’t get a wet face at this time of the year. You might call it a pleasure-trip.”

“And yet, having this boat, you didn’t go after her yourself — or after him? Well, you are a fine fellow for a disappointed lover.”

Schomberg gave a start at the suggestion.

“I am not three men,” he said sulkily, as the shortest answer of the several he could have given.

“Oh, I know your sort,” Ricardo let fall negligently. “You are like most people — or perhaps just a little more peaceable than the rest of the buying and selling gang that bosses this rotten show. Well, well, you respectable citizen,” he went on, “let us go thoroughly into the matter.”

When Schomberg had been made to understand that Mr. Jones’s henchman was ready to discuss, in his own words, “this boat of yours, with courses and distances,” and such concrete matters of no good augury to that villainous Swede, he recovered his soldierly bearing, squared his shoulders, and asked in his military manner:

“You wish, then, to proceed with the business?”

Ricardo nodded. He had a great mind to, he said. A gentleman had to be humoured as much as possible; but he must be managed, too, on occasions, for his own good. And it was the business of the right sort of “follower” to know the proper time and the proper methods of that delicate part of his duty. Having exposed this theory Ricardo proceeded to the application.

“I’ve never actually lied to him,” he said, “and I ain’t going to now. I shall just say nothing about the girl. He will have to get over the shock the best he can. Hang it all! Too much humouring won’t do here.”

“Funny thing,” Schomberg observed crisply.

“Is it? Ay, you wouldn’t mind taking a woman by the throat in some dark corner and nobody by, I bet!”

Ricardo’s dreadful, vicious, cat-like readiness to get his claws out at any moment startled Schomberg as usual. But it was provoking too.

“And you?” he defended himself. “Don’t you want me to believe you are up to anything?”

“I, my boy? Oh, yes. I am not that gentleman; neither are you. Take ‘em by the throat or chuck ‘em under the chin is all one to me — almost,” affirmed Ricardo, with something obscurely ironical in his complacency. “Now, as to this business. A three days’ jaunt in a good boat isn’t a thing to frighten people like us. You are right, so far; but there are other details.”

Schomberg was ready enough to enter into details. He explained that he had a small plantation, with a fairly habitable hut on it, on Madura. He proposed that his guest should start from town in his boat, as if going for an excursion to that rural spot. The custom-house people on the quay were used to see his boat go off on such trips.

From Madura, after some repose and on a convenient day, Mr. Jones and party would make the real start. It would all be plain sailing. Schomberg undertook to provision the boat. The greatest hardship the voyagers need apprehend would be a mild shower of rain. At that season of the year there were no serious thunderstorms.

Schomberg’s heart began to thump as he saw himself nearing his vengeance. His speech was thick but persuasive.

“No risk at all — none whatever.”

Ricardo dismissed these assurances of safety with an impatient gesture. He was thinking of other risks.

“The getting away from here is all right; but we may be sighted at sea, and that may bring awkwardness later on. A ship’s boat with three white men in her, knocking about out of sight of land, is bound to make talk. Are we likely to be seen on our way?”

“No, unless by native craft,” said Schomberg.

Ricardo nodded, satisfied. Both these white men looked on native life as a mere play of shadows. A play of shadows the dominant race could walk through unaffected and disregarded in the pursuit of its incomprehensible aims and needs. No. Native craft did not count, of course. It was an empty, solitary part of the sea, Schomberg expounded further. Only the Ternate mail-boat crossed that region about the eighth of every month, regularly — nowhere near the island though. Rigid, his voice hoarse, his heart thumping, his mind concentrated on the success of his plan, the hotel-keeper multiplied words, as if to keep as many of them as possible between himself and the murderous aspect of his purpose.

“So, if you gentlemen depart from my plantation quietly at sunset on the eighth — always best to make a start at night, with a land breeze — it’s a hundred to one — What am I saying? — it’s a thousand to one that no human eye will see you on the passage. All you’ve got to do is keep her heading north-east for, say, fifty hours; perhaps not quite so long. There will always be draft enough to keep a boat moving; you may reckon on that; and then — ”

The muscles about his waist quivered under his clothes with eagerness, with impatience, and with something like apprehension, the true nature of which was not clear to him. And he did not want to investigate it. Ricardo regarded him steadily, with those dry eyes of his shining more like polished stones than living tissue.

“And then what?” he asked.

“And then — why, you will astonish der herr baron — ha, ha!”

Schomberg seemed to force the words and the laugh out of himself in a hoarse bass.

“And you believe he has all that plunder by him?” asked Ricardo, rather perfunctorily, because the fact seemed to him extremely probable when looked at all round by his acute mind.

Schomberg raised his hands and lowered them slowly.

“How can it be otherwise? He was going home, he was on his way, in this hotel. Ask people. Was it likely he would leave it behind him?”

Ricardo was thoughtful. Then, suddenly raising his head, he remarked:

“Steer north-east for fifty hours, eh? That’s not much of a sailing direction. I’ve heard of a port being missed before on better information. Can’t you say what sort of landfall a fellow may expect? But I suppose you have never seen that island yourself?”

Schomberg admitted that he had not seen it, in a tone in which a man congratulates himself on having escaped the contamination of an unsavoury experience. No, certainly not. He had never had any business to call there. But what of that? He could give Mr. Ricardo as good a sea-mark as anybody need wish for. He laughed nervously. Miss it! He defied anyone that came within forty miles of it to miss the retreat of that villainous Swede.

“What do you think of a pillar of smoke by day and a loom of fire at night? There’s a volcano in full blast near that island — enough to guide almost a blind man. What more do you want? An active volcano to steer by?”

These last words he roared out exultingly, then jumped up and glared. The door to the left of the bar had swung open, and Mrs. Schomberg, dressed for duty, stood facing him down the whole length of the room. She clung to the handle for a moment, then came in and glided to her place, where she sat down to stare straight before her, as usual.

PART THREE

CHAPTER ONE

Tropical nature had been kind to the failure of the commercial enterprise. The desolation of the headquarters of the Tropical Belt Coal Company had been screened from the side of the sea; from the side where prying eyes — if any were sufficiently interested, either in malice or in sorrow — could have noted the decaying bones of that once sanguine enterprise.