Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (777 page)

The answer to this information was a loud ejaculation of distress.  Jasper thought anxiously: “Why, the fellow’s nerve’s gone to pieces;” and with an awkward uneasiness of a new sort, looked intently at the brig.  The thought that he was parted from her — for the first time since they came together — shook the apparently careless fortitude of his character to its very foundations, which were deep.  All that time neither Heemskirk nor even his inky shadow had stirred in the least.

“I am going to send a boat’s crew and an officer on board your vessel,” he announced to no one in particular.  Jasper, tearing himself away from the absorbed contemplation of the brig, turned round, and, without passion, almost without expression in his voice, entered his protest against the whole of the proceedings.  What he was thinking of was the delay.  He counted the days.  Makassar was actually on his way; and to be towed there really saved time.  On the other hand, there would be some vexing formalities to go through.  But the thing was too absurd.  “The beetle’s gone mad,” he thought.  “I’ll be released at once.  And if not, Mesman must enter into a bond for me.”  Mesman was a Dutch merchant with whom Jasper had had many dealings, a considerable person in Makassar.

“You protest?  H’m!” Heemskirk muttered, and for a little longer remained motionless, his legs planted well apart, and his head lowered as though he were studying his own comical, deeply-split shadow.  Then he made a sign to the rotund gunner, who had kept at hand, motionless, like a vilely-stuffed specimen of a fat man, with a lifeless face and glittering little eyes.  The fellow approached, and stood at attention.

“You will board the brig with a boat’s crew!”

“Ya, mynherr!”

“You will have one of your men to steer her all the time,” went on Heemskirk, giving his orders in English, apparently for Jasper’s edification.  “You hear?”

“Ya, mynherr.”

“You will remain on deck and in charge all the time.”

“Ya, mynherr.”

Jasper felt as if, together with the command of the brig, his very heart were being taken out of his breast.  Heemskirk asked, with a change of tone:

“What weapons have you on board?”

At one time all the ships trading in the China Seas had a licence to carry a certain quantity of firearms for purposes of defence.  Jasper answered:

“Eighteen rifles with their bayonets, which were on board when I bought her, four years ago.  They have been declared.”

“Where are they kept?”

“Fore-cabin.  Mate has the key.”

“You will take possession of them,” said Heemskirk to the gunner.

“Ya, mynherr.”

“What is this for?  What do you mean to imply?” cried out Jasper; then bit his lip.  “It’s monstrous!” he muttered.

Heemskirk raised for a moment a heavy, as if suffering, glance.

“You may go,” he said to his gunner.  The fat man saluted, and departed.

During the next thirty hours the steady towing was interrupted once.  At a signal from the brig, made by waving a flag on the forecastle, the gunboat was stopped.  The badly-stuffed specimen of a warrant-officer, getting into his boat, arrived on board the Neptun and hurried straight into his commander’s cabin, his excitement at something he had to communicate being betrayed by the blinking of his small eyes.  These two were closeted together for some time, while Jasper at the taffrail tried to make out if anything out of the common had occurred on board the brig.

But nothing seemed to be amiss on board.  However, he kept a look-out for the gunner; and, though he had avoided speaking to anybody since he had finished with Heemskirk, he stopped that man when he came out on deck again to ask how his mate was.

“He was feeling not very well when I left,” he explained.

The fat warrant-officer, holding himself as though the effort of carrying his big stomach in front of him demanded a rigid carriage, understood with difficulty.  Not a single one of his features showed the slightest animation, but his little eyes blinked rapidly at last.

“Oh, ya!  The mate.  Ya, ya!  He is very well.  But, mein Gott, he is one very funny man!”

Jasper could get no explanation of that remark, because the Dutchman got into the boat hurriedly, and went back on board the brig.  But he consoled himself with the thought that very soon all this unpleasant and rather absurd experience would be over.  The roadstead of Makassar was in sight already.  Heemskirk passed by him going on the bridge.  For the first time the lieutenant looked at Jasper with marked intention; and the strange roll of his eyes was so funny — it had been long agreed by Jasper and Freya that the lieutenant was funny — so ecstatically gratified, as though he were rolling a tasty morsel on his tongue, that Jasper could not help a broad smile.  And then he turned to his brig again.

To see her, his cherished possession, animated by something of his Freya’s soul, the only foothold of two lives on the wide earth, the security of his passion, the companion of adventure, the power to snatch the calm, adorable Freya to his breast, and carry her off to the end of the world; to see this beautiful thing embodying worthily his pride and his love, to see her captive at the end of a tow-rope was not indeed a pleasant experience.  It had something nightmarish in it, as, for instance, the dream of a wild sea-bird loaded with chains.

Yet what else could he want to look at?  Her beauty would sometimes come to his heart with the force of a spell, so that he would forget where he was.  And, besides, that sense of superiority which the certitude of being loved gives to a young man, that illusion of being set above the Fates by a tender look in a woman’s eyes, helped him, the first shock over, to go through these experiences with an amused self-confidence.  For what evil could touch the elect of Freya?

It was now afternoon, the sun being behind the two vessels as they headed for the harbour.  “The beetle’s little joke shall soon be over,” thought Jasper, without any great animosity.  As a seaman well acquainted with that part of the world, a casual glance was enough to tell him what was being done.  “Hallo,” he thought, “he is going through Spermonde Passage.  We shall be rounding Tamissa reef presently.”  And again he returned to the contemplation of his brig, that main-stay of his material and emotional existence which would be soon in his hands again.  On a sea, calm like a millpond, a heavy smooth ripple undulated and streamed away from her bows, for the powerful Neptun was towing at great speed, as if for a wager.  The Dutch gunner appeared on the forecastle of the Bonito, and with him a couple of men.  They stood looking at the coast, and Jasper lost himself in a loverlike trance.

The deep-toned blast of the gunboat’s steam-whistle made him shudder by its unexpectedness.  Slowly he looked about.  Swift as lightning he leaped from where he stood, bounding forward along the deck.

“You will be on Tamissa reef!” he yelled.

High up on the bridge Heemskirk looked back over his shoulder heavily; two seamen were spinning the wheel round, and the Neptun was already swinging rapidly away from the edge of the pale water over the danger.  Ha! just in time.  Jasper turned about instantly to watch his brig; and, even before he realised that — in obedience, it appears, to Heemskirk’s orders given beforehand to the gunner — the tow-rope had been let go at the blast of the whistle, before he had time to cry out or to move a limb, he saw her cast adrift and shooting across the gunboat’s stern with the impetus of her speed.  He followed her fine, gliding form with eyes growing big with incredulity, wild with horror.  The cries on board of her came to him only as a dreadful and confused murmur through the loud thumping of blood in his ears, while she held on.  She ran upright in a terrible display of her gift of speed, with an incomparable air of life and grace.  She ran on till the smooth level of water in front of her bows seemed to sink down suddenly as if sucked away; and, with a strange, violent tremor of her mast-heads she stopped, inclined her lofty spars a little, and lay still.  She lay still on the reef, while the Neptun, fetching a wide circle, continued at full speed up Spermonde Passage, heading for the town.  She lay still, perfectly still, with something ill-omened and unnatural in her attitude.  In an instant the subtle melancholy of things touched by decay had fallen on her in the sunshine; she was but a speck in the brilliant emptiness of space, already lonely, already desolate.

“Hold him!” yelled a voice from the bridge.

Jasper had started to run to his brig with a headlong impulse, as a man dashes forward to pull away with his hands a living, breathing, loved creature from the brink of destruction.  “Hold him!  Stick to him!” vociferated the lieutenant at the top of the bridge-ladder, while Jasper struggled madly without a word, only his head emerging from the heaving crowd of the Neptun’s seamen, who had flung themselves upon him obediently.  “Hold — I would not have that fellow drown himself for anything now!”

Jasper ceased struggling.

One by one they let go of him; they fell back gradually farther and farther, in attentive silence, leaving him standing unsupported in a widened, clear space, as if to give him plenty of room to fall after the struggle.  He did not even sway perceptibly.  Half an hour later, when the Neptun anchored in front of the town, he had not stirred yet, had moved neither head nor limb as much as a hair’s breadth.  Directly the rumble of the gunboat’s cable had ceased, Heemskirk came down heavily from the bridge.

“Call a sampan” he said, in a gloomy tone, as he passed the sentry at the gangway, and then moved on slowly towards the spot where Jasper, the object of many awed glances, stood looking at the deck, as if lost in a brown study.  Heemskirk came up close, and stared at him thoughtfully, with his fingers over his lips.  Here he was, the favoured vagabond, the only man to whom that infernal girl was likely to tell the story.  But he would not find it funny.  The story how Lieutenant Heemskirk — No, he would not laugh at it.  He looked as though he would never laugh at anything in his life.

Suddenly Jasper looked up.  His eyes, without any other expression but bewilderment, met those of Heemskirk, observant and sombre.

“Gone on the reef!” he said, in a low, astounded tone.  “On-the-reef!” he repeated still lower, and as if attending inwardly to the birth of some awful and amazing sensation.

“On the very top of high-water, spring tides,” Heemskirk struck in, with a vindictive, exulting violence which flashed and expired.  He paused, as if weary, fixing upon Jasper his arrogant eyes, over which secret disenchantment, the unavoidable shadow of all passion, seemed to pass like a saddening cloud.  “On the very top,” he repeated, rousing himself in fierce reaction to snatch his laced cap off his head with a horizontal, derisive flourish towards the gangway.  “And now you may go ashore to the courts, you damned Englishman!” he said.

CHAPTER VI

The affair of the brig Bonito was bound to cause a sensation in Makassar, the prettiest, and perhaps the cleanest-looking of all the towns in the Islands; which however knows few occasions for excitement.  The “front,” with its special population, was soon aware that something had happened.  A steamer towing a sailing vessel had been observed far out to sea for some time, and when the steamer came in alone, leaving the other outside, attention was aroused.  Why was that?  Her masts only could be seen — with furled sails — remaining in the same place to the southward.  And soon the rumour ran all along the crowded seashore street that there was a ship on Tamissa reef.  That crowd interpreted the appearance correctly.  Its cause was beyond their penetration, for who could associate a girl nine hundred miles away with the stranding of a ship on Tamissa reef, or look for the remote filiation of that event in the psychology of at least three people, even if one of them, Lieutenant Heemskirk, was at that very moment passing amongst them on his way to make his verbal report?

No; the minds on the “front” were not competent for that sort of investigation, but many hands there — brown hands, yellow hands, white hands — were raised to shade the eyes gazing out to sea.  The rumour spread quickly.  Chinese shopkeepers came to their doors, more than one white merchant, even, rose from his desk to go to the window.  After all, a ship on Tamissa was not an everyday occurrence.  And presently the rumour took a more definite shape.  An English trader — detained on suspicion at sea by the Neptun — Heemskirk was towing him in to test a case, and by some strange accident —

Later on the name came out.  “The Bonito — what!  Impossible!  Yes — yes, the Bonito.  Look!  You can see from here; only two masts.  It’s a brig.  Didn’t think that man would ever let himself be caught.  Heemskirk’s pretty smart, too.  They say she’s fitted out in her cabin like a gentleman’s yacht.  That Allen is a sort of gentleman too.  An extravagant beggar.”

A young man entered smartly Messrs. Mesman Brothers’ office on the “front,” bubbling with some further information.

“Oh, yes; that’s the Bonito for certain!  But you don’t know the story I’ve heard just now.  The fellow must have been feeding that river with firearms for the last year or two.  Well, it seems he has grown so reckless from long impunity that he has actually dared to sell the very ship’s rifles this time.  It’s a fact.  The rifles are not on board.  What impudence!  Only, he didn’t know that there was one of our warships on the coast.  But those Englishmen are so impudent that perhaps he thought that nothing would be done to him for it.  Our courts do let off these fellows too often, on some miserable excuse or other.  But, at any rate, there’s an end of the famous Bonito.  I have just heard in the harbour-office that she must have gone on at the very top of high-water; and she is in ballast, too.  No human power, they think, can move her from where she is.  I only hope it is so.  It would be fine to have the notorious Bonito stuck up there as a warning to others.”

Mr. J. Mesman, a colonial-born Dutchman, a kind, paternal old fellow, with a clean-shaven, quiet, handsome fade, and a head of fine iron-grey hair curling a little on his collar, did not say a word in defence of Jasper and the Bonito.  He rose from his arm-chair suddenly.  His face was visibly troubled.  It had so happened that once, from a business talk of ways and means, island trade, money matters, and so on, Jasper had been led to open himself to him on the subject of Freya; and the excellent man, who had known old Nelson years before and even remembered something of Freya, was much astonished and amused by the unfolding of the tale.