Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (701 page)

“What are you? — a sailor?” said an agitated voice.

She had flitted out, a shadow herself, attracted by the reckless shadow waiting under the wall of her home.

“Anything. Enough of a sailor to be worth my salt before the mast. Came home that way this time.”

“Where do you come from?” she asked.

“Right away from a jolly good spree,” he said, “by the London train — see? Ough! I hate being shut up in a train. I don’t mind a house so much.”

“Ah,” she said; “that’s lucky.”

“Because in a house you can at any time open the blamed door and walk away straight before you.”

“And never come back?”

“Not for sixteen years at least,” he laughed. “To a rabbit hutch, and get a confounded old shovel...”

“A ship is not so very big,” she taunted.

“No, but the sea is great.”

She dropped her head, and as if her ears had been opened to the voices of the world, she heard, beyond the rampart of sea-wall, the swell of yesterday’s gale breaking on the beach with monotonous and solemn vibrations, as if all the earth had been a tolling bell.

“And then, why, a ship’s a ship. You love her and leave her; and a voyage isn’t a marriage.” He quoted the sailor’s saying lightly.

“It is not a marriage,” she whispered.

“I never took a false name, and I’ve never yet told a lie to a woman. What lie? Why, the lie — . Take me or leave me, I say: and if you take me, then it is...” He hummed a snatch very low, leaning against the wall.

    “Oh, ho, ho Rio!

     And fare thee well,

     My bonnie young girl,

     We’re bound to Rio Grande.”

“Capstan song,” he explained. Her teeth chattered.

“You are cold,” he said. “Here’s that affair of yours I picked up.” She felt his hands about her, wrapping her closely. “Hold the ends together in front,” he commanded.

“What did you come here for?” she asked, repressing a shudder.

“Five quid,” he answered, promptly. “We let our spree go on a little too long and got hard up.”

“You’ve been drinking?” she said.

“Blind three days; on purpose. I am not given that way — don’t you think. There’s nothing and nobody that can get over me unless I like. I can be as steady as a rock. My chum sees the paper this morning, and says he to me: ‘Go on, Harry: loving parent. That’s five quid sure.’ So we scraped all our pockets for the fare. Devil of a lark!”

“You have a hard heart, I am afraid,” she sighed.

“What for? For running away? Why! he wanted to make a lawyer’s clerk of me — just to please himself. Master in his own house; and my poor mother egged him on — for my good, I suppose. Well, then — so long; and I went. No, I tell you: the day I cleared out, I was all black and blue from his great fondness for me. Ah! he was always a bit of a character. Look at that shovel now. Off his chump? Not much. That’s just exactly like my dad. He wants me here just to have somebody to order about. However, we two were hard up; and what’s five quid to him — once in sixteen hard years?”

“Oh, but I am sorry for you. Did you never want to come back home?”

“Be a lawyer’s clerk and rot here — in some such place as this?” he cried in contempt. “What! if the old man set me up in a home to-day, I would kick it down about my ears — or else die there before the third day was out.”

“And where else is it that you hope to die?”

“In the bush somewhere; in the sea; on a blamed mountain-top for choice. At home? Yes! the world’s my home; but I expect I’ll die in a hospital some day. What of that? Any place is good enough, as long as I’ve lived; and I’ve been everything you can think of almost but a tailor or a soldier. I’ve been a boundary rider; I’ve sheared sheep; and humped my swag; and harpooned a whale. I’ve rigged ships, and prospected for gold, and skinned dead bullocks, — and turned my back on more money than the old man would have scraped in his whole life. Ha, ha!”

He overwhelmed her. She pulled herself together and managed to utter, “Time to rest now.”

He straightened himself up, away from the wall, and in a severe voice said, “Time to go.”

But he did not move. He leaned back again, and hummed thoughtfully a bar or two of an outlandish tune.

She felt as if she were about to cry. “That’s another of your cruel songs,” she said.

“Learned it in Mexico — in Sonora.” He talked easily. “It is the song of the Gambucinos. You don’t know? The song of restless men. Nothing could hold them in one place — not even a woman. You used to meet one of them now and again, in the old days, on the edge of the gold country, away north there beyond the Rio Gila. I’ve seen it. A prospecting engineer in Mazatlan took me along with him to help look after the waggons. A sailor’s a handy chap to have about you anyhow. It’s all a desert: cracks in the earth that you can’t see the bottom of; and mountains — sheer rocks standing up high like walls and church spires, only a hundred times bigger. The valleys are full of boulders and black stones. There’s not a blade of grass to see; and the sun sets more red over that country than I have seen it anywhere — blood-red and angry. It is fine.”

“You do not want to go back there again?” she stammered out.

He laughed a little. “No. That’s the blamed gold country. It gave me the shivers sometimes to look at it — and we were a big lot of men together, mind; but these Gambucinos wandered alone. They knew that country before anybody had ever heard of it. They had a sort of gift for prospecting, and the fever of it was on them too; and they did not seem to want the gold very much. They would find some rich spot, and then turn their backs on it; pick up perhaps a little — enough for a spree — and then be off again, looking for more. They never stopped long where there were houses; they had no wife, no chick, no home, never a chum. You couldn’t be friends with a Gambucino; they were too restless — here to-day, and gone, God knows where, to-morrow. They told no one of their finds, and there has never been a Gambucino well off. It was not for the gold they cared; it was the wandering about looking for it in the stony country that got into them and wouldn’t let them rest; so that no woman yet born could hold a Gambucino for more than a week. That’s what the song says. It’s all about a pretty girl that tried hard to keep hold of a Gambucino lover, so that he should bring her lots of gold. No fear! Off he went, and she never saw him again.”

“What became of her?” she breathed out.

“The song don’t tell. Cried a bit, I daresay. They were the fellows: kiss and go. But it’s the looking for a thing — a something... Sometimes I think I am a sort of Gambucino myself.”

“No woman can hold you, then,” she began in a brazen voice, which quavered suddenly before the end.

“No longer than a week,” he joked, playing upon her very heartstrings with the gay, tender note of his laugh; “and yet I am fond of them all. Anything for a woman of the right sort. The scrapes they got me into, and the scrapes they got me out of! I love them at first sight. I’ve fallen in love with you already, Miss — Bessie’s your name — eh?”

She backed away a little, and with a trembling laugh:

“You haven’t seen my face yet.”

He bent forward gallantly. “A little pale: it suits some. But you are a fine figure of a girl, Miss Bessie.”

She was all in a flutter. Nobody had ever said so much to her before.

His tone changed. “I am getting middling hungry, though. Had no breakfast to-day. Couldn’t you scare up some bread from that tea for me, or — ”

She was gone already. He had been on the point of asking her to let him come inside. No matter. Anywhere would do. Devil of a fix! What would his chum think?

“I didn’t ask you as a beggar,” he said, jestingly, taking a piece of bread-and-butter from the plate she held before him. “I asked as a friend. My dad is rich, you know.”

“He starves himself for your sake.”

“And I have starved for his whim,” he said, taking up another piece.

“All he has in the world is for you,” she pleaded.

“Yes, if I come here to sit on it like a dam’ toad in a hole. Thank you; and what about the shovel, eh? He always had a queer way of showing his love.”

“I could bring him round in a week,” she suggested, timidly.

He was too hungry to answer her; and, holding the plate submissively to his hand, she began to whisper up to him in a quick, panting voice. He listened, amazed, eating slower and slower, till at last his jaws stopped altogether. “That’s his game, is it?” he said, in a rising tone of scathing contempt. An ungovernable movement of his arm sent the plate flying out of her fingers. He shot out a violent curse.

She shrank from him, putting her hand against the wall.

“No!” he raged. “He expects! Expects me — for his rotten money!... Who wants his home? Mad — not he! Don’t you think. He wants his own way. He wanted to turn me into a miserable lawyer’s clerk, and now he wants to make of me a blamed tame rabbit in a cage. Of me! Of me!” His subdued angry laugh frightened her now.

“The whole world ain’t a bit too big for me to spread my elbows in, I can tell you — what’s your name — Bessie — let alone a dam’ parlour in a hutch. Marry! He wants me to marry and settle! And as likely as not he has looked out the girl too — dash my soul! And do you know the Judy, may I ask?”

She shook all over with noiseless dry sobs; but he was fuming and fretting too much to notice her distress. He bit his thumb with rage at the mere idea. A window rattled up.

“A grinning, information fellow,” pronounced old Hagberd dogmatically, in measured tones. And the sound of his voice seemed to Bessie to make the night itself mad — to pour insanity and disaster on the earth. “Now I know what’s wrong with the people here, my dear. Why, of course! With this mad chap going about. Don’t you have anything to do with him, Bessie. Bessie, I say!”

They stood as if dumb. The old man fidgeted and mumbled to himself at the window. Suddenly he cried, piercingly: “Bessie — I see you. I’ll tell Harry.”

She made a movement as if to run away, but stopped and raised her hands to her temples. Young Hagberd, shadowy and big, stirred no more than a man of bronze. Over their heads the crazy night whimpered and scolded in an old man’s voice.

“Send him away, my dear. He’s only a vagabond. What you want is a good home of your own. That chap has no home — he’s not like Harry. He can’t be Harry. Harry is coming to-morrow. Do you hear? One day more,” he babbled more excitedly; “never you fear — Harry shall marry you.”

His voice rose very shrill and mad against the regular deep soughing of the swell coiling heavily about the outer face of the sea-wall.

“He will have to. I shall make him, or if not” — he swore a great oath — ”I’ll cut him off with a shilling to-morrow, and leave everything to you. I shall. To you. Let him starve.”

The window rattled down.

Harry drew a deep breath, and took one step toward Bessie. “So it’s you — the girl,” he said, in a lowered voice. She had not moved, and she remained half turned away from him, pressing her head in the palms of her hands. “My word!” he continued, with an invisible half-smile on his lips. “I have a great mind to stop....”

Her elbows were trembling violently.

“For a week,” he finished without a pause.

She clapped her hands to her face.

He came up quite close, and took hold of her wrists gently. She felt his breath on her ear.

“It’s a scrape I am in — this, and it is you that must see me through.” He was trying to uncover her face. She resisted. He let her go then, and stepping back a little, “Have you got any money?” he asked. “I must be off now.”

She nodded quickly her shamefaced head, and he waited, looking away from her, while, trembling all over and bowing her neck, she tried to find the pocket of her dress.

“Here it is!” she whispered. “Oh, go away! go away for God’s sake! If I had more — more — I would give it all to forget — to make you forget.”

He extended his hand. “No fear! I haven’t forgotten a single one of you in the world. Some gave me more than money — but I am a beggar now — and you women always had to get me out of my scrapes.”

He swaggered up to the parlour window, and in the dim light filtering through the blind, looked at the coin lying in his palm. It was a half-sovereign. He slipped it into his pocket. She stood a little on one side, with her head drooping, as if wounded; with her arms hanging passive by her side, as if dead.

“You can’t buy me in,” he said, “and you can’t buy yourself out.”

He set his hat firmly with a little tap, and next moment she felt herself lifted up in the powerful embrace of his arms. Her feet lost the ground; her head hung back; he showered kisses on her face with a silent and over-mastering ardour, as if in haste to get at her very soul. He kissed her pale cheeks, her hard forehead, her heavy eyelids, her faded lips; and the measured blows and sighs of the rising tide accompanied the enfolding power of his arms, the overwhelming might of his caresses. It was as if the sea, breaking down the wall protecting all the homes of the town, had sent a wave over her head. It passed on; she staggered backwards, with her shoulders against the wall, exhausted, as if she had been stranded there after a storm and a shipwreck.

She opened her eyes after awhile; and listening to the firm, leisurely footsteps going away with their conquest, began to gather her skirts, staring all the time before her. Suddenly she darted through the open gate into the dark and deserted street.

“Stop!” she shouted. “Don’t go!”

And listening with an attentive poise of the head, she could not tell whether it was the beat of the swell or his fateful tread that seemed to fall cruelly upon her heart. Presently every sound grew fainter, as though she were slowly turning into stone. A fear of this awful silence came to her — worse than the fear of death. She called upon her ebbing strength for the final appeal:

“Harry!”

Not even the dying echo of a footstep. Nothing. The thundering of the surf, the voice of the restless sea itself, seemed stopped. There was not a sound — no whisper of life, as though she were alone and lost in that stony country of which she had heard, where madmen go looking for gold and spurn the find.