Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (570 page)

“See! She has followed him out on deck,” were Mr. Travers’ first words. “I hope you understand that it is a mere craze. You can’t help seeing that. Look at her costume. She simply has lost her head. Luckily the world needn’t know. But suppose that something similar had happened at home. It would have been extremely awkward. Oh! yes, I will come. I will go anywhere. I can’t stand this hulk, those people, this infernal Cage. I believe I should fall ill if I were to remain here.”

The inward detached voice of Jorgenson made itself heard near the gangway saying: “The boat has been waiting for this hour past, King Tom.”

“Let us make a virtue of necessity and go with a good grace,” said d’Alcacer, ready to take Mr. Travers under the arm persuasively, for he did not know what to make of that gentleman.

But Mr. Travers seemed another man. “I am afraid, d’Alcacer, that you, too, are not very strong-minded. I am going to take a blanket off this bedstead. . . .” He flung it hastily over his arm and followed d’Alcacer closely. “What I suffer mostly from, strange to say, is cold.”

Mrs. Travers and Lingard were waiting near the gangway. To everybody’s extreme surprise Mr. Travers addressed his wife first.

“You were always laughing at people’s crazes,” was what he said, “and now you have a craze of your own. But we won’t discuss that.”

D’Alcacer passed on, raising his cap to Mrs. Travers, and went down the ship’s side into the boat. Jorgenson had vanished in his own manner like an exorcised ghost, and Lingard, stepping back, left husband and wife face to face.

“Did you think I was going to make a fuss?” asked Mr. Travers in a very low voice. “I assure you I would rather go than stay here. You didn’t think that? You have lost all sense of reality, of probability. I was just thinking this evening that I would rather be anywhere than here looking on at you. At your folly. . . .”

Mrs. Travers’ loud, “Martin!” made Lingard wince, caused d’Alcacer to lift his head down there in the boat, and even Jorgenson, forward somewhere out of sight, ceased mumbling in his moustache. The only person who seemed not to have heard that exclamation was Mr. Travers himself, who continued smoothly:

“. . . at the aberration of your mind, you who seemed so superior to common credulities. You are not yourself, not at all, and some day you will admit to me that . . . No, the best thing will be to forget it, as you will soon see yourself. We shall never mention that subject in the future. I am certain you will be only too glad to agree with me on that point.”

“How far ahead are you looking?” asked Mrs. Travers, finding her voice and even the very tone in which she would have addressed him had they been about to part in the hall of their town house. She might have been asking him at what time he expected to be home, while a footman held the door open and the brougham waited in the street.

“Not very far. This can’t last much longer.” Mr. Travers made a movement as if to leave her exactly as though he were rather pressed to keep an appointment. “By the by,” he said, checking himself, “I suppose the fellow understands thoroughly that we are wealthy. He could hardly doubt that.”

“It’s the last thought that would enter his head,” said Mrs. Travers.

“Oh, yes, just so,” Mr. Travers allowed a little impatience to pierce under his casual manner. “But I don’t mind telling you that I have had enough of this. I am prepared to make — ah! — to make concessions. A large pecuniary sacrifice. Only the whole position is so absurd! He might conceivably doubt my good faith. Wouldn’t it be just as well if you, with your particular influence, would hint to him that with me he would have nothing to fear? I am a man of my word.”

“That is the first thing he would naturally think of any man,” said Mrs. Travers.

“Will your eyes never be opened?” Mr. Travers began, irritably, then gave it up. “Well, so much the better then. I give you a free hand.”

“What made you change your attitude like this?” asked Mrs. Travers, suspiciously.

“My regard for you,” he answered without hesitation.

“I intended to join you in your captivity. I was just trying to persuade him. . . .”

“I forbid you absolutely,” whispered Mr. Travers, forcibly. “I am glad to get away. I don’t want to see you again till your craze is over.”

She was confounded by his secret vehemence. But instantly succeeding his fierce whisper came a short, inane society laugh and a much louder, “Not that I attach any importance . . .”

He sprang away, as it were, from his wife, and as he went over the gangway waved his hand to her amiably.

Lighted dimly by the lantern on the roof of the deckhouse Mrs. Travers remained very still with lowered head and an aspect of profound meditation. It lasted but an instant before she moved off and brushing against Lingard passed on with downcast eyes to her deck cabin. Lingard heard the door shut. He waited awhile, made a movement toward the gangway but checked himself and followed Mrs. Travers into her cabin.

It was pitch dark in there. He could see absolutely nothing and was oppressed by the profound stillness unstirred even by the sound of breathing.

“I am going on shore,” he began, breaking the black and deathlike silence enclosing him and the invisible woman. “I wanted to say good-bye.”

“You are going on shore,” repeated Mrs. Travers. Her voice was emotionless, blank, unringing.

“Yes, for a few hours, or for life,” Lingard said in measured tones. “I may have to die with them or to die maybe for others. For you, if I only knew how to manage it, I would want to live. I am telling you this because it is dark. If there had been a light in here I wouldn’t have come in.”

“I wish you had not,” uttered the same unringing woman’s voice. “You are always coming to me with those lives and those deaths in your hand.”

“Yes, it’s too much for you,” was Lingard’s undertoned comment. “You could be no other than true. And you are innocent! Don’t wish me life, but wish me luck, for you are innocent — and you will have to take your chance.”

“All luck to you, King Tom,” he heard her say in the darkness in which he seemed now to perceive the gleam of her hair. “I will take my chance. And try not to come near me again for I am weary of you.”

“I can well believe it,” murmured Lingard, and stepped out of the cabin, shutting the door after him gently. For half a minute, perhaps, the stillness continued, and then suddenly the chair fell over in the darkness. Next moment Mrs. Travers’ head appeared in the light of the lamp left on the roof of the deckhouse. Her bare arms grasped the door posts.

“Wait a moment,” she said, loudly, into the shadows of the deck. She heard no footsteps, saw nothing moving except the vanishing white shape of the late Captain H. C. Jorgenson, who was indifferent to the life of men. “Wait, King Tom!” she insisted, raising her voice; then, “I didn’t mean it. Don’t believe me!” she cried, recklessly.

For the second time that night a woman’s voice startled the hearts of men on board the Emma. All except the heart of old Jorgenson. The Malays in the boat looked up from their thwarts. D’Alcacer, sitting in the stern sheets beside Lingard, felt a sinking of his heart.

“What’s this?” he exclaimed. “I heard your name on deck. You are wanted, I think.”

“Shove off,” ordered Lingard, inflexibly, without even looking at d’Alcacer. Mr. Travers was the only one who didn’t seem to be aware of anything. A long time after the boat left the Emma’s side he leaned toward d’Alcacer.

“I have a most extraordinary feeling,” he said in a cautious undertone. “I seem to be in the air — I don’t know. Are we on the water, d’Alcacer? Are you quite sure? But of course, we are on the water.”

“Yes,” said d’Alcacer, in the same tone. “Crossing the Styx — perhaps.” He heard Mr. Travers utter an unmoved “Very likely,” which he did not expect. Lingard, his hand on the tiller, sat like a man of stone.

“Then your point of view has changed,” whispered d’Alcacer.

“I told my wife to make an offer,” went on the earnest whisper of the other man. “A sum of money. But to tell you the truth I don’t believe very much in its success.”

D’Alcacer made no answer and only wondered whether he didn’t like better Mr. Travers’ other, unreasonable mood. There was no denying the fact that Mr. Travers was a troubling person. Now he suddenly gripped d’Alcacer’s fore-arm and added under his breath: “I doubt everything. I doubt whether the offer will ever be made.”

All this was not very impressive. There was something pitiful in it: whisper, grip, shudder, as of a child frightened in the dark. But the emotion was deep. Once more that evening, but this time aroused by the husband’s distress, d’Alcacer’s wonder approached the borders of awe.

PART VI. THE CLAIM OF LIFE AND THE TOLL OF DEATH

I

“Have you got King Tom’s watch in there?” said a voice that seemed not to attach the slightest importance to the question. Jorgenson, outside the door of Mrs. Travers’ part of the deckhouse, waited for the answer. He heard a low cry very much like a moan, the startled sound of pain that may be sometimes heard in sick rooms. But it moved him not at all. He would never have dreamt of opening the door unless told to do so, in which case he would have beheld, with complete indifference, Mrs. Travers extended on the floor with her head resting on the edge of the camp bedstead (on which Lingard had never slept), as though she had subsided there from a kneeling posture which is the attitude of prayer, supplication, or defeat. The hours of the night had passed Mrs. Travers by. After flinging herself on her knees, she didn’t know why, since she could think of nothing to pray for, had nothing to invoke, and was too far gone for such a futile thing as despair, she had remained there till the sense of exhaustion had grown on her to the point in which she lost her belief in her power to rise. In a half-sitting attitude, her head resting against the edge of the couch and her arms flung above her head, she sank into an indifference, the mere resignation of a worn-out body and a worn-out mind which often is the only sort of rest that comes to people who are desperately ill and is welcome enough in a way. The voice of Jorgenson roused her out of that state. She sat up, aching in every limb and cold all over.

Jorgenson, behind the door, repeated with lifeless obstinacy:

“Do you see King Tom’s watch in there?”

Mrs. Travers got up from the floor. She tottered, snatching at the air, and found the back of the armchair under her hand.

“Who’s there?”

She was also ready to ask: “Where am I?” but she remembered and at once became the prey of that active dread which had been lying dormant for a few hours in her uneasy and prostrate body. “What time is it?” she faltered out.

“Dawn,” pronounced the imperturbable voice at the door. It seemed to her that it was a word that could make any heart sink with apprehension. Dawn! She stood appalled. And the toneless voice outside the door insisted:

“You must have Tom’s watch there!”

“I haven’t seen it,” she cried as if tormented by a dream.

“Look in that desk thing. If you push open the shutter you will be able to see.”

Mrs. Travers became aware of the profound darkness of the cabin. Jorgenson heard her staggering in there. After a moment a woman’s voice, which struck even him as strange, said in faint tones:

“I have it. It’s stopped.”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to know the time. There should be a key about. See it anywhere?”

“Yes, it’s fastened to the watch,” the dazed voice answered from within. Jorgenson waited before making his request. “Will you pass it out to me? There’s precious little time left now!”

The door flew open, which was certainly something Jorgenson had not expected. He had expected but a hand with the watch protruded through a narrow crack, But he didn’t start back or give any other sign of surprise at seeing Mrs. Travers fully dressed. Against the faint clearness in the frame of the open shutter she presented to him the dark silhouette of her shoulders surmounted by a sleek head, because her hair was still in the two plaits. To Jorgenson Mrs. Travers in her un-European dress had always been displeasing, almost monstrous. Her stature, her gestures, her general carriage struck his eye as absurdly incongruous with a Malay costume, too ample, too free, too bold — offensive. To Mrs. Travers, Jorgenson, in the dusk of the passage, had the aspect of a dim white ghost, and he chilled her by his ghost’s aloofness.

He picked up the watch from her outspread palm without a word of thanks, only mumbling in his moustache, “H’m, yes, that’s it. I haven’t yet forgotten how to count seconds correctly, but it’s better to have a watch.”

She had not the slightest notion what he meant. And she did not care. Her mind remained confused and the sense of bodily discomfort oppressed her. She whispered, shamefacedly, “I believe I’ve slept.”

“I haven’t,” mumbled Jorgenson, growing more and more distinct to her eyes. The brightness of the short dawn increased rapidly as if the sun were impatient to look upon the Settlement. “No fear of that,” he added, boastfully.

It occurred to Mrs. Travers that perhaps she had not slept either. Her state had been more like an imperfect, half-conscious, quivering death. She shuddered at the recollection.

“What an awful night,” she murmured, drearily.

There was nothing to hope for from Jorgenson. She expected him to vanish, indifferent, like a phantom of the dead carrying off the appropriately dead watch in his hand for some unearthly purpose. Jorgenson didn’t move. His was an insensible, almost a senseless presence! Nothing could be extorted from it. But a wave of anguish as confused as all her other sensations swept Mrs. Travers off her feet.

“Can’t you tell me something?” she cried.

For half a minute perhaps Jorgenson made no sound; then: “For years I have been telling anybody who cared to ask,” he mumbled in his moustache. “Telling Tom, too. And Tom knew what he wanted to do. How’s one to know what you are after?”

She had never expected to hear so many words from that rigid shadow. Its monotonous mumble was fascinating, its sudden loquacity was shocking. And in the profound stillness that reigned outside it was as if there had been no one left in the world with her but the phantom of that old adventurer. He was heard again: “What I could tell you would be worse than poison.”