Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (475 page)

“I kept her out of sight as long as I could,” said Heyst. “Perhaps, with your bringing up, traditions, and so on; you will understand my reason for it.”

“He knew. He knew before!” Mr. Jones mourned in a hollow voice. “He knew of her from the first!”

Backed hard against the wall he no longer watched Heyst. He had the air of a man who had seen an abyss yawning under his feet.

“If I want to kill him, this is my time,” thought Heyst; but he did not move.

Next moment Mr. Jones jerked his head up, glaring with sardonic fury.

“I have a good mind to shoot you, you woman-ridden hermit, you man in the moon, that can’t exist without — no, it won’t be you that I’ll shoot. It’s the other woman-lover — the prevaricating, sly, low-class, amorous cuss! And he shaved — shaved under my very nose. I’ll shoot him!”

“He’s gone mad,” thought Heyst, startled by the spectre’s sudden fury.

He felt himself more in danger, nearer death, than ever since he had entered that room. An insane bandit is a deadly combination. He did not, could not know that Mr. Jones was quick-minded enough to see already the end of his reign over his excellent secretary’s thoughts and feelings; the coming failure of Ricardo’s fidelity. A woman had intervened! A woman, a girl, who apparently possessed the power to awaken men’s disgusting folly. Her power had been proved in two instances already — the beastly innkeeper, and that man with moustaches, upon whom Mr. Jones, his deadly right hand twitching in his pocket, glared more in repulsion than in anger. The very object of the expedition was lost from view in his sudden and overwhelming sense of utter insecurity. And this made Mr. Jones feel very savage; but not against the man with the moustaches. Thus, while Heyst was really feeling that his life was not worth two minutes, purchase, he heard himself addressed with no affectation of languid impertinence but with a burst of feverish determination.

“Here! Let’s call a truce!” said Mr. Jones.

Heyst’s heart was too sick to allow him to smile.

“Have I been making war on you?” he asked wearily. “How do you expect me to attach any meaning to your words?” he went on. “You seem to be a morbid, senseless sort of bandit. We don’t speak the same language. If I were to tell you why I am here, talking to you, you wouldn’t believe me, because you would not understand me. It certainly isn’t the love of life, from which I have divorced myself long ago — not sufficiently, perhaps; but if you are thinking of yours, then I repeat to you that it has never been in danger from me. I am unarmed.”

Mr Jones was biting his lower lip, in a deep meditation. It was only towards the last that he looked at Heyst.

“Unarmed, eh?” Then he burst out violently: “I tell you, a gentleman is no match for the common herd. And yet one must make use of the brutes. Unarmed, eh? And I suppose that creature is of the commonest sort. You could hardly have got her out of a drawing-room. Though they’re all alike, for that matter. Unarmed! It’s a pity. I am in much greater danger than you are or were — or I am much mistaken. But I am not — I know my man!”

He lost his air of mental vacancy and broke out into shrill exclamations. To Heyst they seemed madder than anything that had gone before.

“On the track! On the scent!” he cried, forgetting himself to the point of executing a dance of rage in the middle of the floor.

Heyst looked on, fascinated by this skeleton in a gay dressing-gown, jerkily agitated like a grotesque toy on the end of an invisible string. It became quiet suddenly.

“I might have smelt a rat! I always knew that this would be the danger.” He changed suddenly to a confidential tone, fixing his sepulchral stare on Heyst. “And yet here I am, taken in by the fellow, like the veriest fool. I’ve been always on the watch for some beastly influence, but here I am, fairly caught. He shaved himself right in front of me and I never guessed!”

The shrill laugh, following on the low tone of secrecy, sounded so convincingly insane that Heyst got up as if moved by a spring. Mr. Jones stepped back two paces, but displayed no uneasiness.

“It’s as clear as daylight!” he uttered mournfully, and fell silent.

Behind him the doorway flickered lividly, and the sound as of a naval action somewhere away on the horizon filled the breathless pause. Mr. Jones inclined his head on his shoulder. His mood had completely changed.

“What do you say, unarmed man? Shall we go and see what is detaining my trusted Martin so long? He asked me to keep you engaged in friendly conversation till he made a further examination of that track. Ha, ha, ha!”

“He is no doubt ransacking my house,” said Heyst.

He was bewildered. It seemed to him that all this was an incomprehensible dream, or perhaps an elaborate other-world joke, contrived by that spectre in a gorgeous dressing gown.

Mr Jones looked at him with a horrible, cadaverous smile of inscrutable mockery, and pointed to the door. Heyst passed through it first. His feelings had become so blunted that he did not care how soon he was shot in the back.

“How oppressive the air is!” the voice of Mr. Jones said at his elbow. “This stupid storm gets on my nerves. I would welcome some rain, though it would be unpleasant to get wet. On the other hand, this exasperating thunder has the advantage of covering the sound of our approach. The lightning’s not so convenient. Ah, your house is fully illuminated! My clever Martin is punishing your stock of candles. He belongs to the unceremonious classes, which are also unlovely, untrustworthy, and so on.”

“I left the candles burning,” said Heyst, “to save him trouble.”

“You really believed he would go to your house?” asked Mr. Jones with genuine interest.

“I had that notion, strongly. I do believe he is there now.”

“And you don’t mind?”

“No!”

“You don’t!” Mr. Jones stopped to wonder. “You are an extraordinary man,” he said suspiciously, and moved on, touching elbows with Heyst.

In the latter’s breast dwelt a deep silence, the complete silence of unused faculties. At this moment, by simply shouldering Mr. Jones, he could have thrown him down and put himself, by a couple of leaps, beyond the certain aim of the revolver; but he did not even think of that. His very will seemed dead of weariness. He moved automatically, his head low, like a prisoner captured by the evil power of a masquerading skeleton out of a grave. Mr. Jones took charge of the direction. They fetched a wide sweep. The echoes of distant thunder seemed to dog their footsteps.

“By the by,” said Mr. Jones, as if unable to restrain his curiosity, “aren’t you anxious about that — ouch! — that fascinating creature to whom you owe whatever pleasure you can find in our visit?”

“I have placed her in safety,” said Heyst. “I — I took good care of that.”

Mr Jones laid a hand on his arm.

“You have? Look! is that what you mean?”

Heyst raised his head. In the flicker of lightning the desolation of the cleared ground on his left leaped out and sank into the night, together with the elusive forms of things distant, pale, unearthly. But in the brilliant square of the door he saw the girl — the woman he had longed to see once more as if enthroned, with her hands on the arms of the chair. She was in black; her face was white, her head dreamily inclined on her breast. He saw her only as low as her knees. He saw her — there, in the room, alive with a sombre reality. It was no mocking vision. She was not in the forest — but there! She sat there in the chair, seemingly without strength, yet without fear, tenderly stooping.

“Can you understand their power?” whispered the hot breath of Mr. Jones into his ear. “Can there be a more disgusting spectacle? It’s enough to make the earth detestable. She seems to have found her affinity. Move on closer. If I have to shoot you in the end, then perhaps you will die cured.”

Heyst obeyed the pushing pressure of a revolver barrel between his shoulders. He felt it distinctly, but he did not feel the ground under his feet. They found the steps, without his being aware that he was ascending them — slowly, one by one. Doubt entered into him — a doubt of a new kind, formless, hideous. It seemed to spread itself all over him, enter his limbs, and lodge in his entrails. He stopped suddenly, with a thought that he who experienced such a feeling had no business to live — or perhaps was no longer living.

Everything — the bungalow, the forest, the open ground — trembled incessantly, the earth, the sky itself, shivered all the time, and the only thing immovable in the shuddering universe was the interior of the lighted room and the woman in black sitting in the light of the eight candle-flames. They flung around her an intolerable brilliance which hurt his eyes, seemed to sear his very brain with the radiation of infernal heat. It was some time before his scorched eyes made out Ricardo seated on the floor at some little distance, his back to the doorway, but only partly so; one side of his upturned face showing the absorbed, all forgetful rapture of his contemplation.

The grip of Mr. Jones’s hard claw drew Heyst back a little. In the roll of thunder, swelling and subsiding, he whispered in his ear a sarcastic: “Of course!”

A great shame descended upon Heyst — the shame of guilt, absurd and maddening. Mr. Jones drew him still farther back into the darkness of the veranda.

“This is serious,” he went on, distilling his ghostly venom into Heyst’s very ear. “I had to shut my eyes many times to his little flings; but this is serious. He has found his soul-mate. Mud souls, obscene and cunning! Mud bodies, too — the mud of the gutter! I tell you, we are no match for the vile populace. I, even I, have been nearly caught. He asked me to detain you till he gave me the signal. It won’t be you that I’ll have to shoot, but him. I wouldn’t trust him near me for five minutes after this!”

He shook Heyst’s arm a little.

“If you had not happened to mention the creature, we should both have been dead before morning. He would have stabbed you as you came down the steps after leaving me and then he would have walked up to me and planted the same knife between my ribs. He has no prejudices. The viler the origin, the greater the freedom of these simple souls!”

He drew a cautious, hissing breath and added in an agitated murmur: “I can see right into his mind, I have been nearly caught napping by his cunning.”

He stretched his neck to peer into the room from the side. Heyst, too, made a step forward, under the slight impulse of that slender hand clasping his hand with a thin, bony grasp.

“Behold!” the skeleton of the crazy bandit jabbered thinly into his ear in spectral fellowship. “Behold the simple, Acis kissing the sandals of the nymph, on the way to her lips, all forgetful, while the menacing fife of Polyphemus already sounds close at hand — if he could only hear it! Stoop a little.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

On returning to the Heyst bungalow, rapid as if on wings, Ricardo found Lena waiting for him. She was dressed in black; and at once his uplifting exultation was replaced by an awed and quivering patience before her white face, before the immobility of her reposeful pose, the more amazing to him who had encountered the strength of her limbs and the indomitable spirit in her body. She had come out after Heyst’s departure, and had sat down under the portrait to wait for the return of the man of violence and death. While lifting the curtain, she felt the anguish of her disobedience to her lover, which was soothed by a feeling she had known before — a gentle flood of penetrating sweetness. She was not automatically obeying a momentary suggestion, she was under influences more deliberate, more vague, and of greater potency. She had been prompted, not by her will, but by a force that was outside of her and more worthy. She reckoned upon nothing definite; she had calculated nothing. She saw only her purpose of capturing death — savage, sudden, irresponsible death, prowling round the man who possessed her, death embodied in the knife ready to strike into his heart. No doubt it had been a sin to throw herself into his arms. With that inspiration that descends at times from above for the good or evil of our common mediocrity, she had a sense of having been for him only a violent and sincere choice of curiosity and pity — a thing that passes. She did not know him. If he were to go away from her and disappear, she would utter no reproach, she would not resent it; for she would hold in herself the impress of something most rare and precious — his embraces made her own by her courage in saving his life.

All she thought of — the essence of her tremors, her flushes of heat, and her shudders of cold — was the question how to get hold of that knife, the mark and sign of stalking death. A tremor of impatience to clutch the frightful thing, glimpsed once and unforgettable, agitated her hands.

The instinctive flinging forward of these hands stopped Ricardo dead short between the door and her chair, with the ready obedience of a conquered man who can bide his time. Her success disconcerted her. She listened to the man’s impassioned transports of terrible eulogy and even more awful declarations of love. She was even able to meet his eyes, oblique, apt to glide away, throwing feral gleams of desire.

“No!” he was saying, after a fiery outpouring of words in which the most ferocious phrases of love were mingled with wooing accents of entreaty. “I will have no more of it! Don’t you mistrust me. I am sober in my talk. Feel how quietly my heart beats. Ten times today when you, you, you, swam in my eye, I thought it would burst one of my ribs or leap out of my throat. It has knocked itself dead and tired, waiting for this evening, for this very minute. And now it can do no more. Feel how quiet it is!”

He made a step forward, but she raised her clear voice commandingly:

“No nearer!”

He stopped with a smile of imbecile worship on his lips, and with the delighted obedience of a man who could at any moment seize her in his hands and dash her to the ground.

“Ah! If I had taken you by the throat this morning and had my way with you, I should never have known what you are. And now I do. You are a wonder! And so am I, in my way. I have nerve, and I have brains, too. We should have been lost many times but for me. I plan — I plot for my gentleman. Gentleman — pah! I am sick of him. And you are sick of yours, eh? You, you!”