Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (574 page)

The low tones of Jaffir’s voice stole into it quietly telling the men to cease paddling, and the long canoe came to a rest slowly, no more than ten yards from the beach. The party had been provided with a torch which was to be lighted before the canoe touched the shore, thus giving a character of openness to this desperate expedition. “And if it draws fire on us,” Jaffir had commented to Jorgenson, “well, then, we shall see whose fate it is to die on this night.”

“Yes,” had muttered Jorgenson. “We shall see.”

Jorgenson saw at last the small light of the torch against the blackness of the stockade. He strained his hearing for a possible volley of musketry fire but no sound came to him over the broad surface of the lagoon. Over there the man with the torch, the other paddler, and Jaffir himself impelling with a gentle motion of his paddle the canoe toward the shore, had the glistening eyeballs and the tense faces of silent excitement. The ruddy glare smote Mrs. Travers’ closed eyelids but she didn’t open her eyes till she felt the canoe touch the strand. The two men leaped instantly out of it. Mrs. Travers rose, abruptly. Nobody made a sound. She stumbled out of the canoe on to the beach and almost before she had recovered her balance the torch was thrust into her hand. The heat, the nearness of the blaze confused and blinded her till, instinctively, she raised the torch high above her head. For a moment she stood still, holding aloft the fierce flame from which a few sparks were falling slowly.

A naked bronze arm lighted from above pointed out the direction and Mrs. Travers began to walk toward the featureless black mass of the stockade. When after a few steps she looked back over her shoulder, the lagoon, the beach, the canoe, the men she had just left had become already invisible. She was alone bearing up a blazing torch on an earth that was a dumb shadow shifting under her feet. At last she reached firmer ground and the dark length of the palisade untouched as yet by the light of the torch seemed to her immense, intimidating. She felt ready to drop from sheer emotion. But she moved on.

“A little more to the left,” shouted a strong voice.

It vibrated through all her fibres, rousing like the call of a trumpet, went far beyond her, filled all the space. Mrs. Travers stood still for a moment, then casting far away from her the burning torch ran forward blindly with her hands extended toward the great sound of Lingard’s voice, leaving behind her the light flaring and spluttering on the ground. She stumbled and was only saved from a fall by her hands coming in contact with the rough stakes. The stockade rose high above her head and she clung to it with widely open arms, pressing her whole body against the rugged surface of that enormous and unscalable palisade. She heard through it low voices inside, heavy thuds; and felt at every blow a slight vibration of the ground under her feet. She glanced fearfully over her shoulder and saw nothing in the darkness but the expiring glow of the torch she had thrown away and the sombre shimmer of the lagoon bordering the opaque darkness of the shore. Her strained eyeballs seemed to detect mysterious movements in the darkness and she gave way to irresistible terror, to a shrinking agony of apprehension. Was she to be transfixed by a broad blade, to the high, immovable wall of wood against which she was flattening herself desperately, as though she could hope to penetrate it by the mere force of her fear? She had no idea where she was, but as a matter of fact she was a little to the left of the principal gate and almost exactly under one of the loopholes of the stockade. Her excessive anguish passed into insensibility. She ceased to hear, to see, and even to feel the contact of the surface to which she clung. Lingard’s voice somewhere from the sky above her head was directing her, distinct, very close, full of concern.

“You must stoop low. Lower yet.”

The stagnant blood of her body began to pulsate languidly. She stooped low — lower yet — so low that she had to sink on her knees, and then became aware of a faint smell of wood smoke mingled with the confused murmur of agitated voices. This came to her through an opening no higher than her head in her kneeling posture, and no wider than the breadth of two stakes. Lingard was saying in a tone of distress:

“I couldn’t get any of them to unbar the gate.”

She was unable to make a sound. — ”Are you there?” Lingard asked, anxiously, so close to her now that she seemed to feel the very breath of his words on her face. It revived her completely; she understood what she had to do. She put her head and shoulders through the opening, was at once seized under the arms by an eager grip and felt herself pulled through with an irresistible force and with such haste that her scarf was dragged off her head, its fringes having caught in the rough timber. The same eager grip lifted her up, stood her on her feet without her having to make any exertion toward that end. She became aware that Lingard was trying to say something, but she heard only a confused stammering expressive of wonder and delight in which she caught the words “You . . . you . . .” deliriously repeated. He didn’t release his hold of her; his helpful and irresistible grip had changed into a close clasp, a crushing embrace, the violent taking possession by an embodied force that had broken loose and was not to be controlled any longer. As his great voice had done a moment before, his great strength, too, seemed able to fill all space in its enveloping and undeniable authority. Every time she tried instinctively to stiffen herself against its might, it reacted, affirming its fierce will, its uplifting power. Several times she lost the feeling of the ground and had a sensation of helplessness without fear, of triumph without exultation. The inevitable had come to pass. She had foreseen it — and all the time in that dark place and against the red glow of camp fires within the stockade the man in whose arms she struggled remained shadowy to her eyes — to her half-closed eyes. She thought suddenly, “He will crush me to death without knowing it.”

He was like a blind force. She closed her eyes altogether. Her head fell back a little. Not instinctively but with wilful resignation and as it were from a sense of justice she abandoned herself to his arms. The effect was as though she had suddenly stabbed him to the heart. He let her go so suddenly and completely that she would have fallen down in a heap if she had not managed to catch hold of his forearm. He seemed prepared for it and for a moment all her weight hung on it without moving its rigidity by a hair’s breadth. Behind her Mrs. Travers heard the heavy thud of blows on wood, the confused murmurs and movements of men.

A voice said suddenly, “It’s done,” with such emphasis that though, of course, she didn’t understand the words it helped her to regain possession of herself; and when Lingard asked her very little above a whisper: “Why don’t you say something?” she answered readily, “Let me get my breath first.”

Round them all sounds had ceased. The men had secured again the opening through which those arms had snatched her into a moment of self-forgetfulness which had left her out of breath but uncrushed. As if something imperative had been satisfied she had a moment of inward serenity, a period of peace without thought while, holding to that arm that trembled no more than an arm of iron, she felt stealthily over the ground for one of the sandals which she had lost. Oh, yes, there was no doubt of it, she had been carried off the earth, without shame, without regret. But she would not have let him know of that dropped sandal for anything in the world. That lost sandal was as symbolic as a dropped veil. But he did not know of it. He must never know. Where was that thing? She felt sure that they had not moved an inch from that spot. Presently her foot found it and still gripping Lingard’s forearm she stooped to secure it properly. When she stood up, still holding his arm, they confronted each other, he rigid in an effort of self-command but feeling as if the surges of the heaviest sea that he could remember in his life were running through his heart; and the woman as if emptied of all feeling by her experience, without thought yet, but beginning to regain her sense of the situation and the memory of the immediate past.

“I have been watching at that loophole for an hour, ever since they came running to me with that story of the rockets,” said Lingard. “I was shut up with Belarab then. I was looking out when the torch blazed and you stepped ashore. I thought I was dreaming. But what could I do? I felt I must rush to you but I dared not. That clump of palms is full of men. So are the houses you saw that time you came ashore with me. Full of men. Armed men. A trigger is soon pulled and when once shooting begins. . . . And you walking in the open with that light above your head! I didn’t dare. You were safer alone. I had the strength to hold myself in and watch you come up from the shore. No! No man that ever lived had seen such a sight. What did you come for?”

“Didn’t you expect somebody? I don’t mean me, I mean a messenger?”

“No!” said Lingard, wondering at his own self-control. “Why did he let you come?”

“You mean Captain Jorgenson? Oh, he refused at first. He said that he had your orders.”

“How on earth did you manage to get round him?” said Lingard in his softest tones.

“I did not try,” she began and checked herself. Lingard’s question, though he really didn’t seem to care much about an answer, had aroused afresh her suspicion of Jorgenson’s change of front. “I didn’t have to say very much at the last,” she continued, gasping yet a little and feeling her personality, crushed to nothing in the hug of those arms, expand again to its full significance before the attentive immobility of that man. “Captain Jorgenson has always looked upon me as a nuisance. Perhaps he had made up his mind to get rid of me even against your orders. Is he quite sane?”

She released her firm hold of that iron forearm which fell slowly by Lingard’s side. She had regained fully the possession of her personality. There remained only a fading, slightly breathless impression of a short flight above that earth on which her feet were firmly planted now. “And is that all?” she asked herself, not bitterly, but with a sort of tender contempt.

“He is so sane,” sounded Lingard’s voice, gloomily, “that if I had listened to him you would not have found me here.”

“What do you mean by here? In this stockade?”

“Anywhere,” he said.

“And what would have happened then?”

“God knows,” he answered. “What would have happened if the world had not been made in seven days? I have known you for just about that time. It began by me coming to you at night — like a thief in the night. Where the devil did I hear that? And that man you are married to thinks I am no better than a thief.”

“It ought to be enough for you that I never made a mistake as to what you are, that I come to you in less than twenty-four hours after you left me contemptuously to my distress. Don’t pretend you didn’t hear me call after you. Oh, yes, you heard. The whole ship heard me for I had no shame.”

“Yes, you came,” said Lingard, violently. “But have you really come? I can’t believe my eyes! Are you really here?”

“This is a dark spot, luckily,” said Mrs. Travers. “But can you really have any doubt?” she added, significantly.

He made a sudden movement toward her, betraying so much passion that Mrs. Travers thought, “I shan’t come out alive this time,” and yet he was there, motionless before her, as though he had never stirred. It was more as though the earth had made a sudden movement under his feet without being able to destroy his balance. But the earth under Mrs. Travers’ feet had made no movement and for a second she was overwhelmed by wonder not at this proof of her own self-possession but at the man’s immense power over himself. If it had not been for her strange inward exhaustion she would perhaps have surrendered to that power. But it seemed to her that she had nothing in her worth surrendering, and it was in a perfectly even tone that she said, “Give me your arm, Captain Lingard. We can’t stay all night on this spot.”

As they moved on she thought, “There is real greatness in that man.” He was great even in his behaviour. No apologies, no explanations, no abasement, no violence, and not even the slightest tremor of the frame holding that bold and perplexed soul. She knew that for certain because her fingers were resting lightly on Lingard’s arm while she walked slowly by his side as though he were taking her down to dinner. And yet she couldn’t suppose for a moment, that, like herself, he was emptied of all emotion. She never before was so aware of him as a dangerous force. “He is really ruthless,” she thought. They had just left the shadow of the inner defences about the gate when a slightly hoarse, apologetic voice was heard behind them repeating insistently, what even Mrs. Travers’ ear detected to be a sort of formula. The words were: “There is this thing — there is this thing — there is this thing.” They turned round.

“Oh, my scarf,” said Mrs. Travers.

A short, squat, broad-faced young fellow having for all costume a pair of white drawers was offering the scarf thrown over both his arms, as if they had been sticks, and holding it respectfully as far as possible from his person. Lingard took it from him and Mrs. Travers claimed it at once. “Don’t forget the proprieties,” she said. “This is also my face veil.”

She was arranging it about her head when Lingard said, “There is no need. I am taking you to those gentlemen.” — ”I will use it all the same,” said Mrs. Travers. “This thing works both ways, as a matter of propriety or as a matter of precaution. Till I have an opportunity of looking into a mirror nothing will persuade me that there isn’t some change in my face.” Lingard swung half round and gazed down at her. Veiled now she confronted him boldly. “Tell me, Captain Lingard, how many eyes were looking at us a little while ago?”

“Do you care?” he asked.

“Not in the least,” she said. “A million stars were looking on, too, and what did it matter? They were not of the world I know. And it’s just the same with the eyes. They are not of the world I live in.”

Lingard thought: “Nobody is.” Never before had she seemed to him more unapproachable, more different and more remote. The glow of a number of small fires lighted the ground only, and brought out the black bulk of men lying down in the thin drift of smoke. Only one of these fires, rather apart and burning in front of the house which was the quarter of the prisoners, might have been called a blaze and even that was not a great one. It didn’t penetrate the dark space between the piles and the depth of the verandah above where only a couple of heads and the glint of a spearhead could be seen dimly in the play of the light. But down on the ground outside, the black shape of a man seated on a bench had an intense relief. Another intensely black shadow threw a handful of brushwood on the fire and went away. The man on the bench got up. It was d’Alcacer. He let Lingard and Mrs. Travers come quite close up to him. Extreme surprise seemed to have made him dumb.