Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (773 page)

Old Nelson (or Nielsen), becoming very agitated, declared that Jasper Allen was no particular friend of his.  No friend at all — at all.  He had bought three tons of rice from him to feed his workpeople on.  What sort of evidence of friendship was that?  Heemskirk burst out at last with the thought that had been gnawing at his vitals:

“Yes.  Sell three tons of rice and flirt three days with that girl of yours.  I am speaking to you as a friend, Nielsen.  This won’t do.  You are only on sufferance here.”

Old Nelson was taken aback at first, but recovered pretty quickly.  Won’t do!  Certainly!  Of course, it wouldn’t do!  The last man in the world.  But his girl didn’t care for the fellow, and was too sensible to fall in love with any one.  He was very earnest in impressing on Heemskirk his own feeling of absolute security.  And the lieutenant, casting doubting glances sideways, was yet willing to believe him.

“Much you know about it,” he grunted nevertheless.

“But I do know,” insisted old Nelson, with the greater desperation because he wanted to resist the doubts arising in his own mind.  “My own daughter!  In my own house, and I not to know!  Come!  It would be a good joke, lieutenant.”

“They seem to be carrying on considerably,” remarked Heemskirk moodily.  “I suppose they are together now,” he added, feeling a pang which changed what he meant for a mocking smile into a strange grimace.

The harassed Nelson shook his hand at him.  He was at bottom shocked at this insistence, and was even beginning to feel annoyed at the absurdity of it.

“Pooh!  Pooh!  I’ll tell you what, lieutenant: you go to the house and have a drop of gin-and-bitters before dinner.  Ask for Freya.  I must see the last of this tobacco put away for the night, but I’ll be along presently.”

Heemskirk was not insensible to this suggestion.  It answered to his secret longing, which was not a longing for drink, however.  Old Nelson shouted solicitously after his broad back a recommendation to make himself comfortable, and that there was a box of cheroots on the verandah.

It was the west verandah that old Nelson meant, the one which was the living-room of the house, and had split-rattan screens of the very finest quality.  The east verandah, sacred to his own privacy, puffing out of cheeks, and other signs of perplexed thinking, was fitted with stout blinds of sailcloth.  The north verandah was not a verandah at all, really.  It was more like a long balcony.  It did not communicate with the other two, and could only be approached by a passage inside the house.  Thus it had a privacy which made it a convenient place for a maiden’s meditations without words, and also for the discourses, apparently without sense, which, passing between a young man and a maid, become pregnant with a diversity of transcendental meanings.

This north verandah was embowered with climbing plants.  Freya, whose room opened out on it, had furnished it as a sort of boudoir for herself, with a few cane chairs and a sofa of the same kind.  On this sofa she and Jasper sat as close together as is possible in this imperfect world where neither can a body be in two places at once nor yet two bodies can be in one place at the same time.  They had been sitting together all the afternoon, and I won’t say that their talk had been without sense.  Loving him with a little judicious anxiety lest in his elation he should break his heart over some mishap, Freya naturally would talk to him soberly.  He, nervous and brusque when away from her, appeared always as if overcome by her visibility, by the great wonder of being palpably loved.  An old man’s child, having lost his mother early, thrown out to sea out of the way while very young, he had not much experience of tenderness of any kind.

In this private, foliage-embowered verandah, and at this late hour of the afternoon, he bent down a little, and, possessing himself of Freya’s hands, was kissing them one after another, while she smiled and looked down at his head with the eyes of approving compassion.  At that same moment Heemskirk was approaching the house from the north.

Antonia was on the watch on that side.  But she did not keep a very good watch.  The sun was setting; she knew that her young mistress and the captain of the Bonito were about to separate.  She was walking to and fro in the dusky grove with a flower in her hair, and singing softly to herself, when suddenly, within a foot of her, the lieutenant appeared from behind a tree.  She bounded aside like a startled fawn, but Heemskirk, with a lucid comprehension of what she was there for, pounced upon her, and, catching her arm, clapped his other thick hand over her mouth.

“If you try to make a noise I’ll twist your neck!”

This ferocious figure of speech terrified the girl sufficiently.  Heemskirk had seen plainly enough on the verandah Freya’s golden head with another head very close to it.  He dragged the unresisting maid with him by a circuitous way into the compound, where he dismissed her with a vicious push in the direction of the cluster of bamboo huts for the servants.

She was very much like the faithful camerista of Italian comedy, but in her terror she bolted away without a sound from that thick, short, black-eyed man with a cruel grip of fingers like a vice.  Quaking all over at a distance, extremely scared and half inclined to laugh, she saw him enter the house at the back.

The interior of the bungalow was divided by two passages crossing each other in the middle.  At that point Heemskirk, by turning his head slightly to the left as he passed, secured the evidence of “carrying on” so irreconcilable with old Nelson’s assurances that it made him stagger, with a rush of blood to his head.  Two white figures, distinct against the light, stood in an unmistakable attitude.  Freya’s arms were round Jasper’s neck.  Their faces were characteristically superimposed on each other, and Heemskirk went on, his throat choked with a sudden rising of curses, till on the west verandah he stumbled blindly against a chair and then dropped into another as though his legs had been swept from under him.  He had indulged too long in the habit of appropriating Freya to himself in his thoughts.  “Is that how you entertain your visitors — you . . “ he thought, so outraged that he could not find a sufficiently degrading epithet.

Freya struggled a little and threw her head back.

“Somebody has come in,” she whispered.  Jasper, holding her clasped closely to his breast, and looking down into her face, suggested casually:

“Your father.”

Freya tried to disengage herself, but she had not the heart absolutely to push him away with her hands.

“I believe it’s Heemskirk,” she breathed out at him.

He, plunging into her eyes in a quiet rapture, was provoked to a vague smile by the sound of the name.

“The ass is always knocking down my beacons outside the river,” he murmured.  He attached no other meaning to Heemskirk’s existence; but Freya was asking herself whether the lieutenant had seen them.

“Let me go, kid,” she ordered in a peremptory whisper.  Jasper obeyed, and, stepping back at once, continued his contemplation of her face under another angle.  “I must go and see,” she said to herself anxiously.

She instructed him hurriedly to wait a moment after she was gone and then to slip on to the back verandah and get a quiet smoke before he showed himself.

“Don’t stay late this evening,” was her last recommendation before she left him.

Then Freya came out on the west verandah with her light, rapid step.  While going through the doorway she managed to shake down the folds of the looped-up curtains at the end of the passage so as to cover Jasper’s retreat from the bower.  Directly she appeared Heemskirk jumped up as if to fly at her.  She paused and he made her an exaggerated low bow.

It irritated Freya.

“Oh!  It’s you, Mr. Heemskirk.  How do you do?”  She spoke in her usual tone.  Her face was not plainly visible to him in the dusk of the deep verandah.  He dared not trust himself to speak, his rage at what he had seen was so great.  And when she added with serenity: “Papa will be coming in before long,” he called her horrid names silently, to himself, before he spoke with contorted lips.

“I have seen your father already.  We had a talk in the sheds.  He told me some very interesting things.  Oh, very — ”

Freya sat down.  She thought: “He has seen us, for certain.”  She was not ashamed.  What she was afraid of was some foolish or awkward complication.  But she could not conceive how much her person had been appropriated by Heemskirk (in his thoughts).  She tried to be conversational.

“You are coming now from Palembang, I suppose?”

“Eh?  What?  Oh, yes!  I come from Palembang.  Ha, ha, ha!  You know what your father said?  He said he was afraid you were having a very dull time of it here.”

“And I suppose you are going to cruise in the Moluccas,” continued Freya, who wanted to impart some useful information to Jasper if possible.  At the same time she was always glad to know that those two men were a few hundred miles apart when not under her eye.

Heemskirk growled angrily.

“Yes.  Moluccas,” glaring in the direction of her shadowy figure.  “Your father thinks it’s very quiet for you here.  I tell you what, Miss Freya.  There isn’t such a quiet spot on earth that a woman can’t find an opportunity of making a fool of somebody.”

Freya thought: “I mustn’t let him provoke me.”  Presently the Tamil boy, who was Nelson’s head servant, came in with the lights.  She addressed him at once with voluble directions where to put the lamps, told him to bring the tray with the gin and bitters, and to send Antonia into the house.

“I will have to leave you to yourself, Mr. Heemskirk, for a while,” she said.

And she went to her room to put on another frock.  She made a quick change of it because she wished to be on the verandah before her father and the lieutenant met again.  She relied on herself to regulate that evening’s intercourse between these two.  But Antonia, still scared and hysterical, exhibited a bruise on her arm which roused Freya’s indignation.

“He jumped on me out of the bush like a tiger,” said the girl, laughing nervously with frightened eyes.

“The brute!” thought Freya.  “He meant to spy on us, then.”  She was enraged, but the recollection of the thick Dutchman in white trousers wide at the hips and narrow at the ankles, with his shoulder-straps and black bullet head, glaring at her in the light of the lamps, was so repulsively comical that she could not help a smiling grimace.  Then she became anxious.  The absurdities of three men were forcing this anxiety upon her: Jasper’s impetuosity, her father’s fears, Heemskirk’s infatuation.  She was very tender to the first two, and she made up her mind to display all her feminine diplomacy.  All this, she said to herself, will be over and done with before very long now.

Heemskirk on the verandah, lolling in a chair, his legs extended and his white cap reposing on his stomach, was lashing himself into a fury of an atrocious character altogether incomprehensible to a girl like Freya.  His chin was resting on his chest, his eyes gazed stonily at his shoes.  Freya examined him from behind the curtain.  He didn’t stir.  He was ridiculous.  But this absolute stillness was impressive.  She stole back along the passage to the east verandah, where Jasper was sitting quietly in the dark, doing what he was told, like a good boy.

“Psst,” she hissed.  He was by her side in a moment.

“Yes.  What is it?” he murmured.

“It’s that beetle,” she whispered uneasily.  Under the impression of Heemskirk’s sinister immobility she had half a mind to let Jasper know that they had been seen.  But she was by no means certain that Heemskirk would tell her father — and at any rate not that evening.  She concluded rapidly that the safest thing would be to get Jasper out of the way as soon as possible.

“What has he been doing?” asked Jasper in a calm undertone.

“Oh, nothing!  Nothing.  He sits there looking cross.  But you know how he’s always worrying papa.”

“Your father’s quite unreasonable,” pronounced Jasper judicially.

“I don’t know,” she said in a doubtful tone.  Something of old Nelson’s dread of the authorities had rubbed off on the girl since she had to live with it day after day.  “I don’t know.  Papa’s afraid of being reduced to beggary, as he says, in his old days.  Look here, kid, you had better clear out to-morrow, first thing.”

Jasper had hoped for another afternoon with Freya, an afternoon of quiet felicity with the girl by his side and his eyes on his brig, anticipating a blissful future.  His silence was eloquent with disappointment, and Freya understood it very well.  She, too, was disappointed.  But it was her business to be sensible.

“We shan’t have a moment to ourselves with that beetle creeping round the house,” she argued in a low, hurried voice.  “So what’s the good of your staying?  And he won’t go while the brig’s here.  You know he won’t.”

“He ought to be reported for loitering,” murmured Jasper with a vexed little laugh.

“Mind you get under way at daylight,” recommended Freya under her breath.

He detained her after the manner of lovers.  She expostulated without struggling because it was hard for her to repulse him.  He whispered into her ear while he put his arms round her.

“Next time we two meet, next time I hold you like this, it shall be on board.  You and I, in the brig — all the world, all the life — ”  And then he flashed out: “I wonder I can wait!  I feel as if I must carry you off now, at once.  I could run with you in my hands — down the path — without stumbling — without touching the earth — ”

She was still.  She listened to the passion in his voice.  She was saying to herself that if she were to whisper the faintest yes, if she were but to sigh lightly her consent, he would do it.  He was capable of doing it — without touching the earth.  She closed her eyes and smiled in the dark, abandoning herself in a delightful giddiness, for an instant, to his encircling arm.  But before he could be tempted to tighten his grasp she was out of it, a foot away from him and in full possession of herself.

That was the steady Freya.  She was touched by the deep sigh which floated up to her from the white figure of Jasper, who did not stir.

“You are a mad kid,” she said tremulously.  Then with a change of tone: “No one could carry me off.  Not even you.  I am not the sort of girl that gets carried off.”  His white form seemed to shrink a little before the force of that assertion and she relented.  “Isn’t it enough for you to know that you have — that you have carried me away?” she added in a tender tone.