Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (467 page)

The Chinaman’s departure altered the situation. Heyst reflected on what would be best to do in view of that fact. For a long time he hesitated; then, shrugging his shoulders wearily, he walked out on the veranda, down the steps, and continued at a steady gait, with a thoughtful mien, in the direction of his guests’ bungalow. He wanted to make an important communication to them, and he had no other object — least of all to give them the shock of a surprise call. Nevertheless, their brutish henchman not being on watch, it was Heyst’s fate to startle Mr. Jones and his secretary by his sudden appearance in the doorway. Their conversation must have been very interesting to prevent them from hearing the visitor’s approach. In the dim room — the shutters were kept constantly closed against the heat — Heyst saw them start apart. It was Mr. Jones who spoke:

“Ah, here you are again! Come in, come in!”

Heyst, taking his hat off in the doorway, entered the room.

CHAPTER FIVE

Waking up suddenly, Lena looked, without raising her head from the pillow, at the room in which she was alone. She got up quickly, as if to counteract the awful sinking of her heart by the vigorous use of her limbs. But this sinking was only momentary. Mistress of herself from pride, from love, from necessity, and also because of a woman’s vanity in self-sacrifice, she met Heyst, returning from the strangers’ bungalow, with a clear glance and a smile.

The smile he managed to answer, but, noticing that he avoided her eyes, she composed her lips and lowered her gaze. For the same reason she hastened to speak to him in a tone of indifference, which she put on without effort, as if she had grown adept in duplicity since sunrise.

“You have been over there again?”

“I have. I thought — but you had better know first that we have lost Wang for good.”

She repeated “For good?” as if she had not understood.

“For good or evil — I shouldn’t know which if you were to ask me. He has dismissed himself. He’s gone.”

“You expected him to go, though, didn’t you?”

Heyst sat down on the other side of the table.

“Yes. I expected it as soon as I discovered that he had annexed my revolver. He says he hasn’t taken it. That’s untrue of course. A Chinaman would not see the sense of confessing under any circumstances. To deny any charge is a principle of right conduct; but he hardly expected to be believed. He was a little enigmatic at the last, Lena. He startled me.”

Heyst paused. The girl seemed absorbed in her own thoughts.

“He startled me,” repeated Heyst. She noted the anxiety in his tone, and turned her head slightly to look at him across the table.

“It must have been something — to startle you,” she said. In the depth of her parted lips, like a ripe pomegranate, there was a gleam of white teeth.

“It was only a single word — and some of his gestures. He had been making a good deal of noise. I wonder we didn’t wake you up. How soundly you can sleep! I say, do you feel all right now?”

“As fresh as can be,” she said, treating him to another deep gleam of a smile. “I heard no noise, and I’m glad of it. The way he talks in his harsh voice frightens me. I don’t like all these foreign people.”

“It was just before he went away — bolted out, I should say. He nodded and pointed at the curtain to our room. He knew you were there, of course. He seemed to think — he seemed to try to give me to understand that you were in special — well, danger. You know how he talks.”

She said nothing; she made no sound, only the faint tinge of colour ebbed out of her cheek.

“Yes,” Heyst went on. “He seemed to try to warn me. That must have been it Did he imagine I had forgotten your existence? The only word he said was ‘two’. It sounded so, at least. Yes, ‘two’ — and that he didn’t like it.”

“What does that mean?” she whispered.

“We know what the word two means, don’t we, Lena? We are two. Never were such a lonely two out of the world, my dear! He might have tried to remind me that he himself has a woman to look after. Why are you so pale, Lena?”

“Am I pale?” she asked negligently.

“You are.” Heyst was really anxious.

“Well, it isn’t from fright,” she protested truthfully.

Indeed, what she felt was a sort of horror which left her absolutely in the full possession of all her faculties; more difficult to bear, perhaps, for that reason, but not paralysing to her fortitude.

Heyst in his turn smiled at her.

“I really don’t know that there is any reason to be frightened.”

“I mean I am not frightened for myself.”

“I believe you are very plucky,” he said. The colour had returned to her face. “I” continued Heyst, “am so rebellious to outward impressions that I can’t say that much about myself. I don’t react with sufficient distinctness.” He changed his tone. “You know I went to see those men first thing this morning.”

“I know. Be careful!” she murmured.

“I wonder how one can be careful! I had a long talk with — but I don’t believe you have seen them. One of them is a fantastically thin, long person, apparently ailing; I shouldn’t wonder if he were really so. He makes rather a point of it in a mysterious manner. I imagine he must have suffered from tropical fevers, but not so much as he tries to make out. He’s what people would call a gentleman. He seemed on the point of volunteering a tale of his adventures — for which I didn’t ask him — but remarked that it was a long story; some other time, perhaps.

“‘I suppose you would like to know who I am?’ he asked me.

“I told him I would leave it to him, in a tone which, between gentlemen, could have left no doubt in his mind. He raised himself on his elbow — he was lying down on the camp-bed — and said:

“‘I am he who is — ’“

Lena seemed not to be listening; but when Heyst paused, she turned her head quickly to him. He took it for a movement of inquiry, but in this he was wrong. A great vagueness enveloped her impressions, but all her energy was concentrated on the struggle that she wanted to take upon herself, in a great exaltation of love and self-sacrifice, which is woman’s sublime faculty; altogether on herself, every bit of it, leaving him nothing, not even the knowledge of what she did, if that were possible. She would have liked to lock him up by some stratagem. Had she known of some means to put him to sleep for days she would have used incantations or philtres without misgivings. He seemed to her too good for such contacts, and not sufficiently equipped. This last feeling had nothing to do with the material fact of the revolver being stolen. She could hardly appreciate that fact at its full value.

Observing her eyes fixed and as if sightless — for the concentration on her purpose took all expression out of them — Heyst imagined it to be the effect of a great mental effort.

“No use asking me what he meant, Lena; I don’t know, and I did not ask him. The gentleman, as I have told you before, seems devoted to mystification. I said nothing, and he laid down his head again on the bundle of rugs he uses for a pillow. He affects a state of great weakness, but I suspect that he’s perfectly capable of leaping to his feet if he likes. Having been ejected, he said, from his proper social sphere because he had refused to conform to certain usual conventions, he was a rebel now, and was coming and going up and down the earth. As I really did not want to listen to all this nonsense, I told him that I had heard that sort of story about somebody else before. His grin is really ghastly. He confessed that I was very far from the sort of man he expected to meet. Then he said:

“‘As to me, I am no blacker than the gentleman you are thinking of, and I have neither more nor less determination.’“

Heyst looked across the table at Lena. Propped on her elbows, and holding her head in both hands, she moved it a little with an air of understanding.

“Nothing could be plainer, eh?” said Heyst grimly. “Unless, indeed, this is his idea of a pleasant joke; for, when he finished speaking, he burst into a loud long laugh. I didn’t join him!”

“I wish you had,” she breathed out.

“I didn’t join him. It did not occur to me. I am not much of a diplomatist. It would probably have been wise, for, indeed, I believe he had said more than he meant to say, and was trying to take it back by this affected jocularity. Yet when one thinks of it, diplomacy without force in the background is but a rotten reed to lean upon. And I don’t know whether I could have done it if I had thought of it. I don’t know. It would have been against the grain. Could I have done it? I have lived too long within myself, watching the mere shadows and shades of life. To deceive a man on some issue which could be decided quicker, by his destruction while one is disarmed, helpless, without even the power to run away — no! That seems to me too degrading. And yet I have you here. I have your very existence in my keeping. What do you say, Lena? Would I be capable of throwing you to the lions to save my dignity?”

She got up, walked quickly round the table, posed herself on his knees lightly, throwing one arm round his neck, and whispered in his ear:

“You may if you like. And may be that’s the only way I would consent to leave you. For something like that. If it were something no bigger than your little finger.”

She gave him a light kiss on the lips and was gone before he could detain her. She regained her seat and propped her elbows again on the table. It was hard to believe that she had moved from the spot at all. The fleeting weight of her body on his knees, the hug round his neck, the whisper in his ear, the kiss on his lips, might have been the unsubstantial sensations of a dream invading the reality of waking life; a sort of charming mirage in the barren aridity of his thoughts. He hesitated to speak till she said, businesslike:

“Well. And what then?”

Heyst gave a start.

“Oh, yes. I didn’t join him. I let him have his laugh out by himself. He was shaking all over, like a merry skeleton, under a cotton sheet he was covered with — I believe in order to conceal the revolver that he had in his right hand. I didn’t see it, but I have a distinct impression it was there in his fist. As he had not been looking at me for some time, but staring into a certain part of the room, I turned my head and saw a hairy, wild sort of creature which they take about with them, squatting on its heels in the angle of the walls behind me. He wasn’t there when I came in. I didn’t like the notion of that watchful monster behind my back. If I had been less at their mercy, I should certainly have changed my position. As things are now, to move would have been a mere weakness. So I remained where I was. The gentleman on the bed said he could assure me of one thing; and that was that his presence here was no more morally reprehensible than mine.

“‘We pursue the same ends,’ he said, ‘only perhaps I pursue them with more openness than you — with more simplicity.’

“That’s what he said,” Heyst went on, after looking at Lena in a sort of inquiring silence. “I asked him if he knew beforehand that I was living here; but he only gave me a ghastly grin. I didn’t press him for an answer, Lena. I thought I had better not.”

On her smooth forehead a ray of light always seemed to rest. Her loose hair, parted in the middle, covered the hands sustaining her head. She seemed spellbound by the interest of the narrative. Heyst did not pause long. He managed to continue his relation smoothly enough, beginning afresh with a piece of comment.

“He would have lied impudently — and I detest being told a lie. It makes me uncomfortable. It’s pretty clear that I am not fitted for the affairs of the wide world. But I did not want him to think that I accepted his presence too meekly, so I said that his comings or goings on the earth were none of my business, of course, except that I had a natural curiosity to know when he would find it convenient to resume them.

“He asked me to look at the state he was in. Had I been all alone here, as they think I am, I should have laughed at him. But not being alone — I say, Lena, you are sure you haven’t shown yourself where you could be seen?”

“Certain,” she said promptly.

He looked relieved.

“You understand, Lena, that when I ask you to keep so strictly out of sight, it is because you are not for them to look at — to talk about. My poor Lena! I can’t help that feeling. Do you understand it?”

She moved her head slightly in a manner that was neither affirmative nor negative.

“People will have to see me some day,” she said.

“I wonder how long it will be possible for you to keep out of sight?” murmured Heyst thoughtfully. He bent over the table. “Let me finish telling you. I asked him point blank what it was he wanted with me; he appeared extremely unwilling to come to the point. It was not really so pressing as all that, he said. His secretary, who was in fact his partner, was not present, having gone down to the wharf to look at their boat. Finally the fellow proposed that he should put off a certain communication he had to make till the day after tomorrow. I agreed; but I also told him that I was not at all anxious to hear it. I had no conception in what way his affairs could concern me.

“‘Ah, Mr. Heyst,’ he said, ‘you and I have much more in common than you think.’“

Heyst struck the table with his fist unexpectedly.

“It was a jeer; I am sure it was!”

He seemed ashamed of this outburst and smiled faintly into the motionless eyes of the girl.

“What could I have done — even if I had had my pockets full of revolvers?”

She made an appreciative sign.

“Killing’s a sin, sure enough,” she murmured.

“I went away,” Heyst continued. “I left him there, lying on his side with his eyes shut. When I got back here, I found you looking ill. What was it, Lena? You did give me a scare! Then I had the interview with Wang while you rested. You were sleeping quietly. I sat here to consider all these things calmly, to try to penetrate their inner meaning and their outward bearing. It struck me that the two days we have before us have the character of a sort of truce. The more I thought of it, the more I felt that this was tacitly understood between Jones and myself. It was to our advantage, if anything can be of advantage to people caught so completely unawares as we are. Wang was gone. He, at any rate, had declared himself, but as I did not know what he might take it into his head to do, I thought I had better warn these people that I was no longer responsible for the Chinaman. I did not want Mr. Wang making some move which would precipitate the action against us. Do you see my point of view?”