Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (581 page)

“I intend to go,” she declared after a time.

“You intend to go,” repeated Mr. Travers in a feeble, deliberate voice. “Really, it doesn’t matter what you decide to do. All this is of so little importance. It seems to me that there can be no possible object.”

“Perhaps not,” she admitted. “But don’t you think that the uttermost farthing should always be paid?”

Mr. Travers’ head rolled over on the pillow and gave a covertly scared look at that outspoken woman. But it rolled back again at once and the whole man remained passive, the very embodiment of helpless exhaustion. Mrs. Travers noticed this, and had the unexpected impression that Mr. Travers was not so ill as he looked. “He’s making the most of it. It’s a matter of diplomacy,” she thought. She thought this without irony, bitterness, or disgust. Only her heart sank a little lower and she felt that she could not remain in the cabin with that man for the rest of the evening. For all life — yes! But not for that evening.

“It’s simply monstrous,” murmured the man, who was either very diplomatic or very exhausted, in a languid manner. “There is something abnormal in you.”

Mrs. Travers got up swiftly.

“One comes across monstrous things. But I assure you that of all the monsters that wait on what you would call a normal existence the one I dread most is tediousness. A merciless monster without teeth or claws. Impotent. Horrible!”

She left the stateroom, vanishing out of it with noiseless resolution. No power on earth could have kept her in there for another minute. On deck she found a moonless night with a velvety tepid feeling in the air, and in the sky a mass of blurred starlight, like the tarnished tinsel of a worn-out, very old, very tedious firmament. The usual routine of the yacht had been already resumed, the awnings had been stretched aft, a solitary round lamp had been hung as usual under the main boom. Out of the deep gloom behind it d’Alcacer, a long, loose figure, lounged in the dim light across the deck. D’Alcacer had got promptly in touch with the store of cigarettes he owed to the Governor General’s generosity. A large, pulsating spark glowed, illuminating redly the design of his lips under the fine dark moustache, the tip of his nose, his lean chin. D’Alcacer reproached himself for an unwonted light-heartedness which had somehow taken possession of him. He had not experienced that sort of feeling for years. Reprehensible as it was he did not want anything to disturb it. But as he could not run away openly from Mrs. Travers he advanced to meet her.

“I do hope you have nothing to tell me,” he said with whimsical earnestness.

“I? No! Have you?”

He assured her he had not, and proffered a request. “Don’t let us tell each other anything, Mrs. Travers. Don’t let us think of anything. I believe it will be the best way to get over the evening.” There was real anxiety in his jesting tone.

“Very well,” Mrs. Travers assented, seriously. “But in that case we had better not remain together.” She asked, then, d’Alcacer to go below and sit with Mr. Travers who didn’t like to be left alone. “Though he, too, doesn’t seem to want to be told anything,” she added, parenthetically, and went on: “But I must ask you something else, Mr. d’Alcacer. I propose to sit down in this chair and go to sleep — if I can. Will you promise to call me about five o’clock? I prefer not to speak to any one on deck, and, moreover, I can trust you.”

He bowed in silence and went away slowly. Mrs. Travers, turning her head, perceived a steady light at the brig’s yard-arm, very bright among the tarnished stars. She walked aft and looked over the taffrail. It was exactly like that other night. She half expected to hear presently the low, rippling sound of an advancing boat. But the universe remained without a sound. When she at last dropped into the deck chair she was absolutely at the end of her power of thinking. “I suppose that’s how the condemned manage to get some sleep on the night before the execution,” she said to herself a moment before her eyelids closed as if under a leaden hand.

She woke up, with her face wet with tears, out of a vivid dream of Lingard in chain-mail armour and vaguely recalling a Crusader, but bare-headed and walking away from her in the depths of an impossible landscape. She hurried on to catch up with him but a throng of barbarians with enormous turbans came between them at the last moment and she lost sight of him forever in the flurry of a ghastly sand-storm. What frightened her most was that she had not been able to see his face. It was then that she began to cry over her hard fate. When she woke up the tears were still rolling down her cheeks and she perceived in the light of the deck-lamp d’Alcacer arrested a little way off.

“Did you have to speak to me?” she asked.

“No,” said d’Alcacer. “You didn’t give me time. When I came as far as this I fancied I heard you sobbing. It must have been a delusion.”

“Oh, no. My face is wet yet. It was a dream. I suppose it is five o’clock. Thank you for being so punctual. I have something to do before sunrise.”

D’Alcacer moved nearer. “I know. You have decided to keep an appointment on the sandbank. Your husband didn’t utter twenty words in all these hours but he managed to tell me that piece of news.”

“I shouldn’t have thought,” she murmured, vaguely.

“He wanted me to understand that it had no importance,” stated d’Alcacer in a very serious tone.

“Yes. He knows what he is talking about,” said Mrs. Travers in such a bitter tone as to disconcert d’Alcacer for a moment. “I don’t see a single soul about the decks,” Mrs. Travers continued, almost directly.

“The very watchmen are asleep,” said d’Alcacer.

“There is nothing secret in this expedition, but I prefer not to call any one. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind pulling me off yourself in our small boat.”

It seemed to her that d’Alcacer showed some hesitation. She added: “It has no importance, you know.”

He bowed his assent and preceded her down the side in silence. When she entered the boat he had the sculls ready and directly she sat down he shoved off. It was so dark yet that but for the brig’s yard-arm light he could not have kept his direction. He pulled a very deliberate stroke, looking over his shoulder frequently. It was Mrs. Travers who saw first the faint gleam of the uncovered sandspit on the black, quiet water.

“A little more to the left,” she said. “No, the other way. . . .” D’Alcacer obeyed her directions but his stroke grew even slower than before. She spoke again. “Don’t you think that the uttermost farthing should always be paid, Mr. d’Alcacer?”

D’Alcacer glanced over his shoulder, then: “It would be the only honourable way. But it may be hard. Too hard for our common fearful hearts.”

“I am prepared for anything.”

He ceased pulling for a moment . . . “Anything that may be found on a sandbank,” Mrs. Travers went on. “On an arid, insignificant, and deserted sandbank.”

D’Alcacer gave two strokes and ceased again.

“There is room for a whole world of suffering on a sandbank, for all the bitterness and resentment a human soul may be made to feel.”

“Yes, I suppose you would know,” she whispered while he gave a stroke or two and again glanced over his shoulder. She murmured the words:

“Bitterness, resentment,” and a moment afterward became aware of the keel of the boat running up on the sand. But she didn’t move, and d’Alcacer, too, remained seated on the thwart with the blades of his sculls raised as if ready to drop them and back the dinghy out into deep water at the first sign.

Mrs. Travers made no sign, but she asked, abruptly: “Mr. d’Alcacer, do you think I shall ever come back?”

Her tone seemed to him to lack sincerity. But who could tell what this abruptness covered — sincere fear or mere vanity? He asked himself whether she was playing a part for his benefit, or only for herself.

“I don’t think you quite understand the situation, Mrs. Travers. I don’t think you have a clear idea, either of his simplicity or of his visionary’s pride.”

She thought, contemptuously, that there were other things which d’Alcacer didn’t know and surrendered to a sudden temptation to enlighten him a little.

“You forget his capacity for passion and that his simplicity doesn’t know its own strength.”

There was no mistaking the sincerity of that murmur. “She has felt it,” d’Alcacer said to himself with absolute certitude. He wondered when, where, how, on what occasion? Mrs. Travers stood up in the stern sheets suddenly and d’Alcacer leaped on the sand to help her out of the boat.

“Hadn’t I better hang about here to take you back again?” he suggested, as he let go her hand.

“You mustn’t!” she exclaimed, anxiously. “You must return to the yacht. There will be plenty of light in another hour. I will come to this spot and wave my handkerchief when I want to be taken off.”

At their feet the shallow water slept profoundly, the ghostly gleam of the sands baffled the eye by its lack of form. Far off, the growth of bushes in the centre raised a massive black bulk against the stars to the southward. Mrs. Travers lingered for a moment near the boat as if afraid of the strange solitude of this lonely sandbank and of this lone sea that seemed to fill the whole encircling universe of remote stars and limitless shadows. “There is nobody here,” she whispered to herself.

“He is somewhere about waiting for you, or I don’t know the man,” affirmed d’Alcacer in an undertone. He gave a vigorous shove which sent the little boat into the water.

D’Alcacer was perfectly right. Lingard had come up on deck long before Mrs. Travers woke up with her face wet with tears. The burial party had returned hours before and the crew of the brig were plunged in sleep, except for two watchmen, who at Lingard’s appearance retreated noiselessly from the poop. Lingard, leaning on the rail, fell into a sombre reverie of his past. Reproachful spectres crowded the air, animated and vocal, not in the articulate language of mortals but assailing him with faint sobs, deep sighs, and fateful gestures. When he came to himself and turned about they vanished, all but one dark shape without sound or movement. Lingard looked at it with secret horror.

“Who’s that?” he asked in a troubled voice.

The shadow moved closer: “It’s only me, sir,” said Carter, who had left orders to be called directly the Captain was seen on deck.

“Oh, yes, I might have known,” mumbled Lingard in some confusion. He requested Carter to have a boat manned and when after a time the young man told him that it was ready, he said “All right!” and remained leaning on his elbow.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” said Carter after a longish silence, “but are you going some distance?”

“No, I only want to be put ashore on the sandbank.”

Carter was relieved to hear this, but also surprised. “There is nothing living there, sir,” he said.

“I wonder,” muttered Lingard.

“But I am certain,” Carter insisted. “The last of the women and children belonging to those cut-throats were taken off by the sampans which brought you and the yacht-party out.”

He walked at Lingard’s elbow to the gangway and listened to his orders.

“Directly there is enough light to see flags by, make a signal to the schooner to heave short on her cable and loose her sails. If there is any hanging back give them a blank gun, Mr. Carter. I will have no shilly-shallying. If she doesn’t go at the word, by heavens, I will drive her out. I am still master here — for another day.”

The overwhelming sense of immensity, of disturbing emptiness, which affects those who walk on the sands in the midst of the sea, intimidated Mrs. Travers. The world resembled a limitless flat shadow which was motionless and elusive. Then against the southern stars she saw a human form that isolated and lone appeared to her immense: the shape of a giant outlined amongst the constellations. As it approached her it shrank to common proportions, got clear of the stars, lost its awesomeness, and became menacing in its ominous and silent advance. Mrs. Travers hastened to speak.

“You have asked for me. I am come. I trust you will have no reason to regret my obedience.”

He walked up quite close to her, bent down slightly to peer into her face. The first of the tropical dawn put its characteristic cold sheen into the sky above the Shore of Refuge.

Mrs. Travers did not turn away her head.

“Are you looking for a change in me? No. You won’t see it. Now I know that I couldn’t change even if I wanted to. I am made of clay that is too hard.”

“I am looking at you for the first time,” said Lingard. “I never could see you before. There were too many things, too many thoughts, too many people. No, I never saw you before. But now the world is dead.”

He grasped her shoulders, approaching his face close to hers. She never flinched.

“Yes, the world is dead,” she said. “Look your fill then. It won’t be for long.”

He let her go as suddenly as though she had struck him. The cold white light of the tropical dawn had crept past the zenith now and the expanse of the shallow waters looked cold, too, without stir or ripple within the enormous rim of the horizon where, to the west, a shadow lingered still.

“Take my arm,” he said.

She did so at once, and turning their backs on the two ships they began to walk along the sands, but they had not made many steps when Mrs. Travers perceived an oblong mound with a board planted upright at one end. Mrs. Travers knew that part of the sands. It was here she used to walk with her husband and d’Alcacer every evening after dinner, while the yacht lay stranded and her boats were away in search of assistance — which they had found — which they had found! This was something that she had never seen there before. Lingard had suddenly stopped and looked at it moodily. She pressed his arm to rouse him and asked, “What is this?”

“This is a grave,” said Lingard in a low voice, and still gazing at the heap of sand. “I had him taken out of the ship last night. Strange,” he went on in a musing tone, “how much a grave big enough for one man only can hold. His message was to forget everything.”

“Never, never,” murmured Mrs. Travers. “I wish I had been on board the Emma. . . . You had a madman there,” she cried out, suddenly. They moved on again, Lingard looking at Mrs. Travers who was leaning on his arm.