Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (757 page)

The grotesque image of a fat, pushing ship-chandler, enslaved by an unholy love-spell, fascinated me; and I listened rather open-mouthed to the tale as old as the world, a tale which had been the subject of legend, of moral fables, of poems, but which so ludicrously failed to fit the personality.  What a strange victim for the gods!

Meantime his deserted wife had died.  His daughter was taken care of by his brother, who married her as advantageously as was possible in the circumstances.

“Oh!  The Mrs. Doctor!” I exclaimed.

“You know that?  Yes.  A very able man.  He wanted a lift in the world, and there was a good bit of money from her mother, besides the expectations. . . Of course, they don’t know him,” he added.  “The doctor nods in the street, I believe, but he avoids speaking to him when they meet on board a ship, as must happen sometimes.”

I remarked that this surely was an old story by now.

My friend assented.  But it was Jacobus’s own fault that it was neither forgiven nor forgotten.  He came back ultimately.  But how?  Not in a spirit of contrition, in a way to propitiate his scandalised fellow-citizens.  He must needs drag along with him a child — a girl. . . .

“He spoke to me of a daughter who lives with him,” I observed, very much interested.

“She’s certainly the daughter of the circus-woman,” said my friend.  “She may be his daughter too; I am willing to admit that she is.  In fact I have no doubt — ”

But he did not see why she should have been brought into a respectable community to perpetuate the memory of the scandal.  And that was not the worst.  Presently something much more distressing happened.  That abandoned woman turned up.  Landed from a mail-boat. . . .

“What!  Here?  To claim the child perhaps,” I suggested.

“Not she!”  My friendly informant was very scornful.  “Imagine a painted, haggard, agitated, desperate hag.  Been cast off in Mozambique by somebody who paid her passage here.  She had been injured internally by a kick from a horse; she hadn’t a cent on her when she got ashore; I don’t think she even asked to see the child.  At any rate, not till the last day of her life.  Jacobus hired for her a bungalow to die in.  He got a couple of Sisters from the hospital to nurse her through these few months.  If he didn’t marry her in extremis as the good Sisters tried to bring about, it’s because she wouldn’t even hear of it.  As the nuns said: ‘The woman died impenitent.’  It was reported that she ordered Jacobus out of the room with her last breath.  This may be the real reason why he didn’t go into mourning himself; he only put the child into black.  While she was little she was to be seen sometimes about the streets attended by a negro woman, but since she became of age to put her hair up I don’t think she has set foot outside that garden once.  She must be over eighteen now.”

Thus my friend, with some added details; such as, that he didn’t think the girl had spoken to three people of any position in the island; that an elderly female relative of the brothers Jacobus had been induced by extreme poverty to accept the position of gouvernante to the girl.  As to Jacobus’s business (which certainly annoyed his brother) it was a wise choice on his part.  It brought him in contact only with strangers of passage; whereas any other would have given rise to all sorts of awkwardness with his social equals.  The man was not wanting in a certain tact — only he was naturally shameless.  For why did he want to keep that girl with him?  It was most painful for everybody.

I thought suddenly (and with profound disgust) of the other Jacobus, and I could not refrain from saying slily:

“I suppose if he employed her, say, as a scullion in his household and occasionally pulled her hair or boxed her ears, the position would have been more regular — less shocking to the respectable class to which he belongs.”

He was not so stupid as to miss my intention, and shrugged his shoulders impatiently.

“You don’t understand.  To begin with, she’s not a mulatto.  And a scandal is a scandal.  People should be given a chance to forget.  I dare say it would have been better for her if she had been turned into a scullion or something of that kind.  Of course he’s trying to make money in every sort of petty way, but in such a business there’ll never be enough for anybody to come forward.”

When my friend left me I had a conception of Jacobus and his daughter existing, a lonely pair of castaways, on a desert island; the girl sheltering in the house as if it were a cavern in a cliff, and Jacobus going out to pick up a living for both on the beach — exactly like two shipwrecked people who always hope for some rescuer to bring them back at last into touch with the rest of mankind.

But Jacobus’s bodily reality did not fit in with this romantic view.  When he turned up on board in the usual course, he sipped the cup of coffee placidly, asked me if I was satisfied — and I hardly listened to the harbour gossip he dropped slowly in his low, voice-saving enunciation.  I had then troubles of my own.  My ship chartered, my thoughts dwelling on the success of a quick round voyage, I had been suddenly confronted by a shortage of bags.  A catastrophe!  The stock of one especial kind, called pockets, seemed to be totally exhausted.  A consignment was shortly expected — it was afloat, on its way, but, meantime, the loading of my ship dead stopped, I had enough to worry about.  My consignees, who had received me with such heartiness on my arrival, now, in the character of my charterers, listened to my complaints with polite helplessness.  Their manager, the old-maidish, thin man, who so prudishly didn’t even like to speak about the impure Jacobus, gave me the correct commercial view of the position.

“My dear Captain” — he was retracting his leathery cheeks into a condescending, shark-like smile — ”we were not morally obliged to tell you of a possible shortage before you signed the charter-party.  It was for you to guard against the contingency of a delay — strictly speaking.  But of course we shouldn’t have taken any advantage.  This is no one’s fault really.  We ourselves have been taken unawares,” he concluded primly, with an obvious lie.

This lecture I confess had made me thirsty.  Suppressed rage generally produces that effect; and as I strolled on aimlessly I bethought myself of the tall earthenware pitcher in the captains’ room of the Jacobus “store.”

With no more than a nod to the men I found assembled there, I poured down a deep, cool draught on my indignation, then another, and then, becoming dejected, I sat plunged in cheerless reflections.  The others read, talked, smoked, bandied over my head some unsubtle chaff.  But my abstraction was respected.  And it was without a word to any one that I rose and went out, only to be quite unexpectedly accosted in the bustle of the store by Jacobus the outcast.

“Glad to see you, Captain.  What?  Going away?  You haven’t been looking so well these last few days, I notice.  Run down, eh?”

He was in his shirt-sleeves, and his words were in the usual course of business, but they had a human note.  It was commercial amenity, but I had been a stranger to amenity in that connection.  I do verily believe (from the direction of his heavy glance towards a certain shelf) that he was going to suggest the purchase of Clarkson’s Nerve Tonic, which he kept in stock, when I said impulsively:

“I am rather in trouble with my loading.”

Wide awake under his sleepy, broad mask with glued lips, he understood at once, had a movement of the head so appreciative that I relieved my exasperation by exclaiming:

“Surely there must be eleven hundred quarter-bags to be found in the colony.  It’s only a matter of looking for them.”

Again that slight movement of the big head, and in the noise and activity of the store that tranquil murmur:

“To be sure.  But then people likely to have a reserve of quarter-bags wouldn’t want to sell.  They’d need that size themselves.”

“That’s exactly what my consignees are telling me.  Impossible to buy.  Bosh!  They don’t want to.  It suits them to have the ship hung up.  But if I were to discover the lot they would have to — Look here, Jacobus!  You are the man to have such a thing up your sleeve.”

He protested with a ponderous swing of his big head.  I stood before him helplessly, being looked at by those heavy eyes with a veiled expression as of a man after some soul-shaking crisis.  Then, suddenly:

“It’s impossible to talk quietly here,” he whispered.  “I am very busy.  But if you could go and wait for me in my house.  It’s less than ten minutes’ walk.  Oh, yes, you don’t know the way.”

He called for his coat and offered to take me there himself.  He would have to return to the store at once for an hour or so to finish his business, and then he would be at liberty to talk over with me that matter of quarter-bags.  This programme was breathed out at me through slightly parted, still lips; his heavy, motionless glance rested upon me, placid as ever, the glance of a tired man — but I felt that it was searching, too.  I could not imagine what he was looking for in me and kept silent, wondering.

“I am asking you to wait for me in my house till I am at liberty to talk this matter over.  You will?”

“Why, of course!” I cried.

“But I cannot promise — ”

“I dare say not,” I said.  “I don’t expect a promise.”

“I mean I can’t even promise to try the move I’ve in my mind.  One must see first . . . h’m!”

“All right.  I’ll take the chance.  I’ll wait for you as long as you like.  What else have I to do in this infernal hole of a port!”

Before I had uttered my last words we had set off at a swinging pace.  We turned a couple of corners and entered a street completely empty of traffic, of semi-rural aspect, paved with cobblestones nestling in grass tufts.  The house came to the line of the roadway; a single story on an elevated basement of rough-stones, so that our heads were below the level of the windows as we went along.  All the jalousies were tightly shut, like eyes, and the house seemed fast asleep in the afternoon sunshine.  The entrance was at the side, in an alley even more grass-grown than the street: a small door, simply on the latch.

With a word of apology as to showing me the way, Jacobus preceded me up a dark passage and led me across the naked parquet floor of what I supposed to be the dining-room.  It was lighted by three glass doors which stood wide open on to a verandah or rather loggia running its brick arches along the garden side of the house.  It was really a magnificent garden: smooth green lawns and a gorgeous maze of flower-beds in the foreground, displayed around a basin of dark water framed in a marble rim, and in the distance the massed foliage of varied trees concealing the roofs of other houses.  The town might have been miles away.  It was a brilliantly coloured solitude, drowsing in a warm, voluptuous silence.  Where the long, still shadows fell across the beds, and in shady nooks, the massed colours of the flowers had an extraordinary magnificence of effect.  I stood entranced.  Jacobus grasped me delicately above the elbow, impelling me to a half-turn to the left.

I had not noticed the girl before.  She occupied a low, deep, wickerwork arm-chair, and I saw her in exact profile like a figure in a tapestry, and as motionless.  Jacobus released my arm.

“This is Alice,” he announced tranquilly; and his subdued manner of speaking made it sound so much like a confidential communication that I fancied myself nodding understandingly and whispering: “I see, I see.” . . . Of course, I did nothing of the kind.  Neither of us did anything; we stood side by side looking down at the girl.  For quite a time she did not stir, staring straight before her as if watching the vision of some pageant passing through the garden in the deep, rich glow of light and the splendour of flowers.

Then, coming to the end of her reverie, she looked round and up.  If I had not at first noticed her, I am certain that she too had been unaware of my presence till she actually perceived me by her father’s side.  The quickened upward movement of the heavy eyelids, the widening of the languid glance, passing into a fixed stare, put that beyond doubt.

Under her amazement there was a hint of fear, and then came a flash as of anger.  Jacobus, after uttering my name fairly loud, said: “Make yourself at home, Captain — I won’t be gone long,” and went away rapidly.  Before I had time to make a bow I was left alone with the girl — who, I remembered suddenly, had not been seen by any man or woman of that town since she had found it necessary to put up her hair.  It looked as though it had not been touched again since that distant time of first putting up; it was a mass of black, lustrous locks, twisted anyhow high on her head, with long, untidy wisps hanging down on each side of the clear sallow face; a mass so thick and strong and abundant that, nothing but to look at, it gave you a sensation of heavy pressure on the top of your head and an impression of magnificently cynical untidiness.  She leaned forward, hugging herself with crossed legs; a dingy, amber-coloured, flounced wrapper of some thin stuff revealed the young supple body drawn together tensely in the deep low seat as if crouching for a spring.  I detected a slight, quivering start or two, which looked uncommonly like bounding away.  They were followed by the most absolute immobility.

The absurd impulse to run out after Jacobus (for I had been startled, too) once repressed, I took a chair, placed it not very far from her, sat down deliberately, and began to talk about the garden, caring not what I said, but using a gentle caressing intonation as one talks to soothe a startled wild animal.  I could not even be certain that she understood me.  She never raised her face nor attempted to look my way.  I kept on talking only to prevent her from taking flight.  She had another of those quivering, repressed starts which made me catch my breath with apprehension.

Ultimately I formed a notion that what prevented her perhaps from going off in one great, nervous leap, was the scantiness of her attire.  The wicker armchair was the most substantial thing about her person.  What she had on under that dingy, loose, amber wrapper must have been of the most flimsy and airy character.  One could not help being aware of it.  It was obvious.  I felt it actually embarrassing at first; but that sort of embarrassment is got over easily by a mind not enslaved by narrow prejudices.  I did not avert my gaze from Alice.  I went on talking with ingratiating softness, the recollection that, most likely, she had never before been spoken to by a strange man adding to my assurance.  I don’t know why an emotional tenseness should have crept into the situation.  But it did.  And just as I was becoming aware of it a slight scream cut short my flow of urbane speech.