Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (758 page)

The scream did not proceed from the girl.  It was emitted behind me, and caused me to turn my head sharply.  I understood at once that the apparition in the doorway was the elderly relation of Jacobus, the companion, the gouvernante.  While she remained thunderstruck, I got up and made her a low bow.

The ladies of Jacobus’s household evidently spent their days in light attire.  This stumpy old woman with a face like a large wrinkled lemon, beady eyes, and a shock of iron-grey hair, was dressed in a garment of some ash-coloured, silky, light stuff.  It fell from her thick neck down to her toes with the simplicity of an unadorned nightgown.  It made her appear truly cylindrical.  She exclaimed: “How did you get here?”

Before I could say a word she vanished and presently I heard a confusion of shrill protestations in a distant part of the house.  Obviously no one could tell her how I got there.  In a moment, with great outcries from two negro women following her, she waddled back to the doorway, infuriated.

“What do you want here?”

I turned to the girl.  She was sitting straight up now, her hands posed on the arms of the chair.  I appealed to her.

“Surely, Miss Alice, you will not let them drive me out into the street?”

Her magnificent black eyes, narrowed, long in shape, swept over me with an indefinable expression, then in a harsh, contemptuous voice she let fall in French a sort of explanation:

“C’est papa.”

I made another low bow to the old woman.

She turned her back on me in order to drive away her black henchwomen, then surveying my person in a peculiar manner with one small eye nearly closed and her face all drawn up on that side as if with a twinge of toothache, she stepped out on the verandah, sat down in a rocking-chair some distance away, and took up her knitting from a little table.  Before she started at it she plunged one of the needles into the mop of her grey hair and stirred it vigorously.

Her elementary nightgown-sort of frock clung to her ancient, stumpy, and floating form.  She wore white cotton stockings and flat brown velvet slippers.  Her feet and ankles were obtrusively visible on the foot-rest.  She began to rock herself slightly, while she knitted.  I had resumed my seat and kept quiet, for I mistrusted that old woman.  What if she ordered me to depart?  She seemed capable of any outrage.  She had snorted once or twice; she was knitting violently.  Suddenly she piped at the young girl in French a question which I translate colloquially:

“What’s your father up to, now?”

The young creature shrugged her shoulders so comprehensively that her whole body swayed within the loose wrapper; and in that unexpectedly harsh voice which yet had a seductive quality to the senses, like certain kinds of natural rough wines one drinks with pleasure:

“It’s some captain.  Leave me alone — will you!”

The chair rocked quicker, the old, thin voice was like a whistle.

“You and your father make a pair.  He would stick at nothing — that’s well known.  But I didn’t expect this.”

I thought it high time to air some of my own French.  I remarked modestly, but firmly, that this was business.  I had some matters to talk over with Mr. Jacobus.

At once she piped out a derisive “Poor innocent!”  Then, with a change of tone: “The shop’s for business.  Why don’t you go to the shop to talk with him?”

The furious speed of her fingers and knitting-needles made one dizzy; and with squeaky indignation:

“Sitting here staring at that girl — is that what you call business?”

“No,” I said suavely.  “I call this pleasure — an unexpected pleasure.  And unless Miss Alice objects — ”

I half turned to her.  She flung at me an angry and contemptuous “Don’t care!” and leaning her elbow on her knees took her chin in her hand — a Jacobus chin undoubtedly.  And those heavy eyelids, this black irritated stare reminded me of Jacobus, too — the wealthy merchant, the respected one.  The design of her eyebrows also was the same, rigid and ill-omened.  Yes!  I traced in her a resemblance to both of them.  It came to me as a sort of surprising remote inference that both these Jacobuses were rather handsome men after all.  I said:

“Oh!  Then I shall stare at you till you smile.”

She favoured me again with an even more viciously scornful “Don’t care!”

The old woman broke in blunt and shrill:

“Hear his impudence!  And you too!  Don’t care!  Go at least and put some more clothes on.  Sitting there like this before this sailor riff-raff.”

The sun was about to leave the Pearl of the Ocean for other seas, for other lands.  The walled garden full of shadows blazed with colour as if the flowers were giving up the light absorbed during the day.  The amazing old woman became very explicit.  She suggested to the girl a corset and a petticoat with a cynical unreserve which humiliated me.  Was I of no more account than a wooden dummy?  The girl snapped out: “Shan’t!”

It was not the naughty retort of a vulgar child; it had a note of desperation.  Clearly my intrusion had somehow upset the balance of their established relations.  The old woman knitted with furious accuracy, her eyes fastened down on her work.

“Oh, you are the true child of your father!  And that talks of entering a convent!  Letting herself be stared at by a fellow.”

“Leave off.”

“Shameless thing!”

“Old sorceress,” the girl uttered distinctly, preserving her meditative pose, chin in hand, and a far-away stare over the garden.

It was like the quarrel of the kettle and the pot.  The old woman flew out of the chair, banged down her work, and with a great play of thick limb perfectly visible in that weird, clinging garment of hers, strode at the girl — who never stirred.  I was experiencing a sort of trepidation when, as if awed by that unconscious attitude, the aged relative of Jacobus turned short upon me.

She was, I perceived, armed with a knitting-needle; and as she raised her hand her intention seemed to be to throw it at me like a dart.  But she only used it to scratch her head with, examining me the while at close range, one eye nearly shut and her face distorted by a whimsical, one-sided grimace.

“My dear man,” she asked abruptly, “do you expect any good to come of this?”

 “I do hope so indeed, Miss Jacobus.”  I tried to speak in the easy tone of an afternoon caller.  “You see, I am here after some bags.”

“Bags!  Look at that now!  Didn’t I hear you holding forth to that graceless wretch?”

“You would like to see me in my grave,” uttered the motionless girl hoarsely.

“Grave!  What about me?  Buried alive before I am dead for the sake of a thing blessed with such a pretty father!” she cried; and turning to me: “You’re one of these men he does business with.  Well — why don’t you leave us in peace, my good fellow?”

It was said in a tone — this “leave us in peace!”  There was a sort of ruffianly familiarity, a superiority, a scorn in it.  I was to hear it more than once, for you would show an imperfect knowledge of human nature if you thought that this was my last visit to that house — where no respectable person had put foot for ever so many years.  No, you would be very much mistaken if you imagined that this reception had scared me away.  First of all I was not going to run before a grotesque and ruffianly old woman.

And then you mustn’t forget these necessary bags.  That first evening Jacobus made me stay to dinner; after, however, telling me loyally that he didn’t know whether he could do anything at all for me.  He had been thinking it over.  It was too difficult, he feared. . . . But he did not give it up in so many words.

We were only three at table; the girl by means of repeated “Won’t!” “Shan’t!” and “Don’t care!” having conveyed and affirmed her intention not to come to the table, not to have any dinner, not to move from the verandah.  The old relative hopped about in her flat slippers and piped indignantly, Jacobus towered over her and murmured placidly in his throat; I joined jocularly from a distance, throwing in a few words, for which under the cover of the night I received secretly a most vicious poke in the ribs from the old woman’s elbow or perhaps her fist.  I restrained a cry.  And all the time the girl didn’t even condescend to raise her head to look at any of us.  All this may sound childish — and yet that stony, petulant sullenness had an obscurely tragic flavour.

And so we sat down to the food around the light of a good many candles while she remained crouching out there, staring in the dark as if feeding her bad temper on the heavily scented air of the admirable garden.

Before leaving I said to Jacobus that I would come next day to hear if the bag affair had made any progress.  He shook his head slightly at that.

“I’ll haunt your house daily till you pull it off.  You’ll be always finding me here.”

His faint, melancholy smile did not part his thick lips.

“That will be all right, Captain.”

Then seeing me to the door, very tranquil, he murmured earnestly the recommendation: “Make yourself at home,” and also the hospitable hint about there being always “a plate of soup.”  It was only on my way to the quay, down the ill-lighted streets, that I remembered I had been engaged to dine that very evening with the S- family.  Though vexed with my forgetfulness (it would be rather awkward to explain) I couldn’t help thinking that it had procured me a more amusing evening.  And besides — business.  The sacred business — .

In a barefooted negro who overtook me at a run and bolted down the landing-steps I recognised Jacobus’s boatman, who must have been feeding in the kitchen.  His usual “Good-night, sah!” as I went up my ship’s ladder had a more cordial sound than on previous occasions.

CHAPTER V

I kept my word to Jacobus.  I haunted his home.  He was perpetually finding me there of an afternoon when he popped in for a moment from the “store.”  The sound of my voice talking to his Alice greeted him on his doorstep; and when he returned for good in the evening, ten to one he would hear it still going on in the verandah.  I just nodded to him; he would sit down heavily and gently, and watch with a sort of approving anxiety my efforts to make his daughter smile.

I called her often “Alice,” right before him; sometimes I would address her as Miss “Don’t Care,” and I exhausted myself in nonsensical chatter without succeeding once in taking her out of her peevish and tragic self.  There were moments when I felt I must break out and start swearing at her till all was blue.  And I fancied that had I done so Jacobus would not have moved a muscle.  A sort of shady, intimate understanding seemed to have been established between us.

I must say the girl treated her father exactly in the same way she treated me.

And how could it have been otherwise?  She treated me as she treated her father.  She had never seen a visitor.  She did not know how men behaved.  I belonged to the low lot with whom her father did business at the port.  I was of no account.  So was her father.  The only decent people in the world were the people of the island, who would have nothing to do with him because of something wicked he had done.  This was apparently the explanation Miss Jacobus had given her of the household’s isolated position.  For she had to be told something!  And I feel convinced that this version had been assented to by Jacobus.  I must say the old woman was putting it forward with considerable gusto.  It was on her lips the universal explanation, the universal allusion, the universal taunt.

One day Jacobus came in early and, beckoning me into the dining-room, wiped his brow with a weary gesture and told me that he had managed to unearth a supply of quarter-bags.

“It’s fourteen hundred your ship wanted, did you say, Captain?”

“Yes, yes!” I replied eagerly; but he remained calm.  He looked more tired than I had ever seen him before.

“Well, Captain, you may go and tell your people that they can get that lot from my brother.”

As I remained open-mouthed at this, he added his usual placid formula of assurance:

“You’ll find it correct, Captain.”

“You spoke to your brother about it?”  I was distinctly awed.  “And for me?  Because he must have known that my ship’s the only one hung up for bags.  How on earth — ”

He wiped his brow again.  I noticed that he was dressed with unusual care, in clothes in which I had never seen him before.  He avoided my eye.

“You’ve heard people talk, of course. . . . That’s true enough.  He . . . I . . . We certainly. . . for several years . . .”  His voice declined to a mere sleepy murmur.  “You see I had something to tell him of, something which — ”

His murmur stopped.  He was not going to tell me what this something was.  And I didn’t care.  Anxious to carry the news to my charterers, I ran back on the verandah to get my hat.

At the bustle I made the girl turned her eyes slowly in my direction, and even the old woman was checked in her knitting.  I stopped a moment to exclaim excitedly:

“Your father’s a brick, Miss Don’t Care.  That’s what he is.”

She beheld my elation in scornful surprise.  Jacobus with unwonted familiarity seized my arm as I flew through the dining-room, and breathed heavily at me a proposal about “A plate of soup” that evening.  I answered distractedly: “Eh?  What?  Oh, thanks!  Certainly.  With pleasure,” and tore myself away.  Dine with him?  Of course.  The merest gratitude

But some three hours afterwards, in the dusky, silent street, paved with cobble-stones, I became aware that it was not mere gratitude which was guiding my steps towards the house with the old garden, where for years no guest other than myself had ever dined.  Mere gratitude does not gnaw at one’s interior economy in that particular way.  Hunger might; but I was not feeling particularly hungry for Jacobus’s food.

On that occasion, too, the girl refused to come to the table.

My exasperation grew.  The old woman cast malicious glances at me.  I said suddenly to Jacobus: “Here!  Put some chicken and salad on that plate.”  He obeyed without raising his eyes.  I carried it with a knife and fork and a serviette out on the verandah.  The garden was one mass of gloom, like a cemetery of flowers buried in the darkness, and she, in the chair, seemed to muse mournfully over the extinction of light and colour.  Only whiffs of heavy scent passed like wandering, fragrant souls of that departed multitude of blossoms.  I talked volubly, jocularly, persuasively, tenderly; I talked in a subdued tone.  To a listener it would have sounded like the murmur of a pleading lover.  Whenever I paused expectantly there was only a deep silence.  It was like offering food to a seated statue.