Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (560 page)

“He was trying to make it up between me and your husband, wasn’t he? I was too angry to pay much attention, but I liked him well enough. What pleased me most was the way in which he gave it up. That was done like a gentleman. Do you understand what I mean, Mrs. Travers?”

“I quite understand.”

“Yes, you would,” he commented, simply. “But just then I was too angry to talk to anybody. And so I cleared out on board my own ship and stayed there, not knowing what to do and wishing you all at the bottom of the sea. Don’t mistake me, Mrs. Travers; it’s you, the people aft, that I wished at the bottom of the sea. I had nothing against the poor devils on board, They would have trusted me quick enough. So I fumed there till — till. . . .”

“Till nine o’clock or a little after,” suggested Mrs. Travers, impenetrably.

“No. Till I remembered you,” said Lingard with the utmost innocence.

“Do you mean to say that you forgot my existence so completely till then? You had spoken to me on board the yacht, you know.”

“Did I? I thought I did. What did I say?”

“You told me not to touch a dusky princess,” answered Mrs. Travers with a short laugh. Then with a visible change of mood as if she had suddenly out of a light heart been recalled to the sense of the true situation: “But indeed I meant no harm to this figure of your dream. And, look over there. She is pursuing you.” Lingard glanced toward the north shore and suppressed an exclamation of remorse. For the second time he discovered that he had forgotten the existence of Hassim and Immada. The canoe was now near enough for its occupants to distinguish plainly the heads of three people above the low bulwark of the Emma. Immada let her paddle trail suddenly in the water, with the exclamation, “I see the white woman there.” Her brother looked over his shoulder and the canoe floated, arrested as if by the sudden power of a spell. — ”They are no dream to me,” muttered Lingard, sturdily. Mrs. Travers turned abruptly away to look at the further shore. It was still and empty to the naked eye and seemed to quiver in the sunshine like an immense painted curtain lowered upon the unknown.

“Here’s Rajah Hassim coming, Jorgenson. I had an idea he would perhaps stay outside.” Mrs. Travers heard Lingard’s voice at her back and the answering grunt of Jorgenson. She raised deliberately the long glass to her eye, pointing it at the shore.

She distinguished plainly now the colours in the flutter of the streamers above the brown roofs of the large Settlement, the stir of palm groves, the black shadows inland and the dazzling white beach of coral sand all ablaze in its formidable mystery. She swept the whole range of the view and was going to lower the glass when from behind the massive angle of the stockade there stepped out into the brilliant immobility of the landscape a man in a long white gown and with an enormous black turban surmounting a dark face. Slow and grave he paced the beach ominously in the sunshine, an enigmatical figure in an Oriental tale with something weird and menacing in its sudden emergence and lonely progress.

With an involuntary gasp Mrs. Travers lowered the glass. All at once behind her back she heard a low musical voice beginning to pour out incomprehensible words in a tone of passionate pleading. Hassim and Immada had come on board and had approached Lingard. Yes! It was intolerable to feel that this flow of soft speech which had no meaning for her could make its way straight into that man’s heart.

PART V. THE POINT OF HONOUR AND THE POINT OF PASSION

I

“May I come in?”

“Yes,” said a voice within. “The door is open.” It had a wooden latch. Mr. Travers lifted it while the voice of his wife continued as he entered. “Did you imagine I had locked myself in? Did you ever know me lock myself in?”

Mr. Travers closed the door behind him. “No, it has never come to that,” he said in a tone that was not conciliatory. In that place which was a room in a wooden hut and had a square opening without glass but with a half-closed shutter he could not distinguish his wife very well at once. She was sitting in an armchair and what he could see best was her fair hair all loose over the back of the chair. There was a moment of silence. The measured footsteps of two men pacing athwart the quarter-deck of the dead ship Emma commanded by the derelict shade of Jorgenson could be heard outside.

Jorgenson, on taking up his dead command, had a house of thin boards built on the after deck for his own accommodation and that of Lingard during his flying visits to the Shore of Refuge. A narrow passage divided it in two and Lingard’s side was furnished with a camp bedstead, a rough desk, and a rattan armchair. On one of his visits Lingard had brought with him a black seaman’s chest and left it there. Apart from these objects and a small looking-glass worth about half a crown and nailed to the wall there was nothing else in there whatever. What was on Jorgenson’s side of the deckhouse no one had seen, but from external evidence one could infer the existence of a set of razors.

The erection of that primitive deckhouse was a matter of propriety rather than of necessity. It was proper that the white men should have a place to themselves on board, but Lingard was perfectly accurate when he told Mrs. Travers that he had never slept there once. His practice was to sleep on deck. As to Jorgenson, if he did sleep at all he slept very little. It might have been said that he haunted rather than commanded the Emma. His white form flitted here and there in the night or stood for hours, silent, contemplating the sombre glimmer of the lagoon. Mr. Travers’ eyes accustomed gradually to the dusk of the place could now distinguish more of his wife’s person than the great mass of honey-coloured hair. He saw her face, the dark eyebrows and her eyes that seemed profoundly black in the half light. He said:

“You couldn’t have done so here. There is neither lock nor bolt.”

“Isn’t there? I didn’t notice. I would know how to protect myself without locks and bolts.”

“I am glad to hear it,” said Mr. Travers in a sullen tone and fell silent again surveying the woman in the chair. “Indulging your taste for fancy dress,” he went on with faint irony.

Mrs. Travers clasped her hands behind her head. The wide sleeves slipping back bared her arms to her shoulders. She was wearing a Malay thin cotton jacket, cut low in the neck without a collar and fastened with wrought silver clasps from the throat downward. She had replaced her yachting skirt by a blue check sarong embroidered with threads of gold. Mr. Travers’ eyes travelling slowly down attached themselves to the gleaming instep of an agitated foot from which hung a light leather sandal.

“I had no clothes with me but what I stood in,” said Mrs. Travers. “I found my yachting costume too heavy. It was intolerable. I was soaked in dew when I arrived. So when these things were produced for my inspection. . . .”

“By enchantment,” muttered Mr. Travers in a tone too heavy for sarcasm.

“No. Out of that chest. There are very fine stuffs there.”

“No doubt,” said Mr. Travers. “The man wouldn’t be above plundering the natives. . . .” He sat down heavily on the chest. “A most appropriate costume for this farce,” he continued. “But do you mean to wear it in open daylight about the decks?”

“Indeed I do,” said Mrs. Travers. “D’Alcacer has seen me already and he didn’t seem shocked.”

“You should,” said Mr. Travers, “try to get yourself presented with some bangles for your ankles so that you may jingle as you walk.”

“Bangles are not necessities,” said Mrs. Travers in a weary tone and with the fixed upward look of a person unwilling to relinquish her dream. Mr. Travers dropped the subject to ask:

“And how long is this farce going to last?”

Mrs. Travers unclasped her hands, lowered her glance, and changed her whole pose in a moment.

“What do you mean by farce? What farce?”

“The one which is being played at my expense.”

“You believe that?”

“Not only believe. I feel deeply that it is so. At my expense. It’s a most sinister thing,” Mr. Travers pursued, still with downcast eyes and in an unforgiving tone. “I must tell you that when I saw you in that courtyard in a crowd of natives and leaning on that man’s arm, it gave me quite a shock.”

“Did I, too, look sinister?” said Mrs. Travers, turning her head slightly toward her husband. “And yet I assure you that I was glad, profoundly glad, to see you safe from danger for a time at least. To gain time is everything. . . .”

“I ask myself,” Mr. Travers meditated aloud, “was I ever in danger? Am I safe now? I don’t know. I can’t tell. No! All this seems an abominable farce.”

There was that in his tone which made his wife continue to look at him with awakened interest. It was obvious that he suffered from a distress which was not the effect of fear; and Mrs. Travers’ face expressed real concern till he added in a freezing manner: “The question, however, is as to your discretion.”

She leaned back again in the chair and let her hands rest quietly in her lap. “Would you have preferred me to remain outside, in the yacht, in the near neighbourhood of these wild men who captured you? Or do you think that they, too, were got up to carry on a farce?”

“Most decidedly.” Mr. Travers raised his head, though of course not his voice. “You ought to have remained in the yacht amongst white men, your servants, the sailing-master, the crew whose duty it was to. . . . Who would have been ready to die for you.”

“I wonder why they should have — and why I should have asked them for that sacrifice. However, I have no doubt they would have died. Or would you have preferred me to take up my quarters on board that man’s brig? We were all fairly safe there. The real reason why I insisted on coming in here was to be nearer to you — to see for myself what could be or was being done. . . . But really if you want me to explain my motives then I may just as well say nothing. I couldn’t remain outside for days without news, in a state of horrible doubt. We couldn’t even tell whether you and d’Alcacer were still alive till we arrived here. You might have been actually murdered on the sandbank, after Rajah Hassim and that girl had gone away; or killed while going up the river. And I wanted to know at once, as soon as possible. It was a matter of impulse. I went off in what I stood in without delaying a moment.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Travers. “And without even thinking of having a few things put up for me in a bag. No doubt you were in a state of excitement. Unless you took such a tragic view that it seemed to you hardly worth while to bother about my clothes.”

“It was absolutely the impulse of the moment. I could have done nothing else. Won’t you give me credit for it?”

Mr. Travers raised his eyes again to his wife’s face. He saw it calm, her attitude reposeful. Till then his tone had been resentful, dull, without sarcasm. But now he became slightly pompous.

“No. As a matter of fact, as a matter of experience, I can’t credit you with the possession of feelings appropriate to your origin, social position, and the ideas of the class to which you belong. It was the heaviest disappointment of my life. I had made up my mind not to mention it as long as I lived. This, however, seems an occasion which you have provoked yourself. It isn’t at all a solemn occasion. I don’t look upon it as solemn at all. It’s very disagreeable and humiliating. But it has presented itself. You have never taken a serious interest in the activities of my life which of course are its distinction and its value. And why you should be carried away suddenly by a feeling toward the mere man I don’t understand.”

“Therefore you don’t approve,” Mrs. Travers commented in an even tone. “But I assure you, you may safely. My feeling was of the most conventional nature, exactly as if the whole world were looking on. After all, we are husband and wife. It’s eminently fitting that I should be concerned about your fate. Even the man you distrust and dislike so much (the warmest feeling, let me tell you, that I ever saw you display) even that man found my conduct perfectly proper. His own word. Proper. So eminently proper that it altogether silenced his objections.”

Mr. Travers shifted uneasily on his seat.

“It’s my belief, Edith, that if you had been a man you would have led a most irregular life. You would have been a frank adventurer. I mean morally. It has been a great grief to me. You have a scorn in you for the serious side of life, for the ideas and the ambitions of the social sphere to which you belong.”

He stopped because his wife had clasped again her hands behind her head and was no longer looking at him.

“It’s perfectly obvious,” he began again. “We have been living amongst most distinguished men and women and your attitude to them has been always so — so negative! You would never recognize the importance of achievements, of acquired positions. I don’t remember you ever admiring frankly any political or social success. I ask myself what after all you could possibly have expected from life.”

“I could never have expected to hear such a speech from you. As to what I did expect! . . . I must have been very stupid.”

“No, you are anything but that,” declared Mr. Travers, conscientiously. “It isn’t stupidity.” He hesitated for a moment. “It’s a kind of wilfulness, I think. I preferred not to think about this grievous difference in our points of view, which, you will admit, I could not have possibly foreseen before we. . . .”

A sort of solemn embarrassment had come over Mr. Travers. Mrs. Travers, leaning her chin on the palm of her hand, stared at the bare matchboard side of the hut.

“Do you charge me with profound girlish duplicity?” she asked, very softly.

The inside of the deckhouse was full of stagnant heat perfumed by a slight scent which seemed to emanate from the loose mass of Mrs. Travers’ hair. Mr. Travers evaded the direct question which struck him as lacking fineness even to the point of impropriety.

“I must suppose that I was not in the calm possession of my insight and judgment in those days,” he said. “I — I was not in a critical state of mind at the time,” he admitted further; but even after going so far he did not look up at his wife and therefore missed something like the ghost of a smile on Mrs. Travers’ lips. That smile was tinged with scepticism which was too deep-seated for anything but the faintest expression. Therefore she said nothing, and Mr. Travers went on as if thinking aloud: