Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (800 page)

He landed with one leap in the middle of the floor, gasped once, then looked all round the room.  The window was shuttered and barred with an iron bar.  Again he ran his eyes slowly all round the bare walls, and even looked up at the ceiling, which was rather high.  Afterwards he went to the door to examine the fastenings.  They consisted of two enormous iron bolts sliding into holes made in the wall; and as the corridor outside was too narrow to admit of any battering arrangement or even to permit an axe to be swung, nothing could burst the door open — unless gunpowder.  But while he was still making sure that the lower bolt was pushed well home, he received the impression of somebody’s presence in the room.  It was so strong that he spun round quicker than lightning.  There was no one.  Who could there be?  And yet . . .

It was then that he lost the decorum and restraint a man keeps up for his own sake.  He got down on his hands and knees, with the lamp on the floor, to look under the bed, like a silly girl.  He saw a lot of dust and nothing else.  He got up, his cheeks burning, and walked about discontented with his own behaviour and unreasonably angry with Tom for not leaving him alone.  The words: “Mr. Byrne!  Look out, sir,” kept on repeating themselves in his head in a tone of warning.

“Hadn’t I better just throw myself on the bed and try to go to sleep,” he asked himself.  But his eyes fell on the tall wardrobe, and he went towards it feeling irritated with himself and yet unable to desist.  How he could explain to-morrow the burglarious misdeed to the two odious witches he had no idea.  Nevertheless he inserted the point of his hanger between the two halves of the door and tried to prize them open.  They resisted.  He swore, sticking now hotly to his purpose.  His mutter: “I hope you will be satisfied, confound you,” was addressed to the absent Tom.  Just then the doors gave way and flew open.

He was there.

He — the trusty, sagacious, and courageous Tom was there, drawn up shadowy and stiff, in a prudent silence, which his wide-open eyes by their fixed gleam seemed to command Byrne to respect.  But Byrne was too startled to make a sound.  Amazed, he stepped back a little — and on the instant the seaman flung himself forward headlong as if to clasp his officer round the neck.  Instinctively Byrne put out his faltering arms; he felt the horrible rigidity of the body and then the coldness of death as their heads knocked together and their faces came into contact.  They reeled, Byrne hugging Tom close to his breast in order not to let him fall with a crash.  He had just strength enough to lower the awful burden gently to the floor — then his head swam, his legs gave way, and he sank on his knees, leaning over the body with his hands resting on the breast of that man once full of generous life, and now as insensible as a stone.

“Dead! my poor Tom, dead,” he repeated mentally.  The light of the lamp standing near the edge of the table fell from above straight on the stony empty stare of these eyes which naturally had a mobile and merry expression.

Byrne turned his own away from them.  Tom’s black silk neckerchief was not knotted on his breast.  It was gone.  The murderers had also taken off his shoes and stockings.  And noticing this spoliation, the exposed throat, the bare up-turned feet, Byrne felt his eyes run full of tears.  In other respects the seaman was fully dressed; neither was his clothing disarranged as it must have been in a violent struggle.  Only his checked shirt had been pulled a little out the waistband in one place, just enough to ascertain whether he had a money belt fastened round his body.  Byrne began to sob into his handkerchief.

It was a nervous outburst which passed off quickly.  Remaining on his knees he contemplated sadly the athletic body of as fine a seaman as ever had drawn a cutlass, laid a gun, or passed the weather earring in a gale, lying stiff and cold, his cheery, fearless spirit departed — perhaps turning to him, his boy chum, to his ship out there rolling on the grey seas off an iron-bound coast, at the very moment of its flight.

He perceived that the six brass buttons of Tom’s jacket had been cut off.  He shuddered at the notion of the two miserable and repulsive witches busying themselves ghoulishly about the defenceless body of his friend.  Cut off.  Perhaps with the same knife which . . . The head of one trembled; the other was bent double, and their eyes were red and bleared, their infamous claws unsteady. . . It must have been in this very room too, for Tom could not have been killed in the open and brought in here afterwards.  Of that Byrne was certain.  Yet those devilish crones could not have killed him themselves even by taking him unawares — and Tom would be always on his guard of course.  Tom was a very wide awake wary man when engaged on any service. . . And in fact how did they murder him?  Who did?  In what way?

Byrne jumped up, snatched the lamp off the table, and stooped swiftly over the body.  The light revealed on the clothing no stain, no trace, no spot of blood anywhere.  Byrne’s hands began to shake so that he had to set the lamp on the floor and turn away his head in order to recover from this agitation.

Then he began to explore that cold, still, and rigid body for a stab, a gunshot wound, for the trace of some killing blow.  He felt all over the skull anxiously.  It was whole.  He slipped his hand under the neck.  It was unbroken.  With terrified eyes he peered close under the chin and saw no marks of strangulation on the throat.

There were no signs anywhere.  He was just dead.

Impulsively Byrne got away from the body as if the mystery of an incomprehensible death had changed his pity into suspicion and dread.  The lamp on the floor near the set, still face of the seaman showed it staring at the ceiling as if despairingly.  In the circle of light Byrne saw by the undisturbed patches of thick dust on the floor that there had been no struggle in that room.  “He has died outside,” he thought.  Yes, outside in that narrow corridor, where there was hardly room to turn, the mysterious death had come to his poor dear Tom.  The impulse of snatching up his pistols and rushing out of the room abandoned Byrne suddenly.  For Tom, too, had been armed — with just such powerless weapons as he himself possessed — pistols, a cutlass!  And Tom had died a nameless death, by incomprehensible means.

A new thought came to Byrne.  That stranger knocking at the door and fleeing so swiftly at his appearance had come there to remove the body.  Aha!  That was the guide the withered witch had promised would show the English officer the shortest way of rejoining his man.  A promise, he saw it now, of dreadful import.  He who had knocked would have two bodies to deal with.  Man and officer would go forth from the house together.  For Byrne was certain now that he would have to die before the morning — and in the same mysterious manner, leaving behind him an unmarked body.

The sight of a smashed head, of a throat cut, of a gaping gunshot wound, would have been an inexpressible relief.  It would have soothed all his fears.  His soul cried within him to that dead man whom he had never found wanting in danger.  “Why don’t you tell me what I am to look for, Tom?  Why don’t you?”  But in rigid immobility, extended on his back, he seemed to preserve an austere silence, as if disdaining in the finality of his awful knowledge to hold converse with the living.

Suddenly Byrne flung himself on his knees by the side of the body, and dry-eyed, fierce, opened the shirt wide on the breast, as if to tear the secret forcibly from that cold heart which had been so loyal to him in life!  Nothing!  Nothing!  He raised the lamp, and all the sign vouchsafed to him by that face which used to be so kindly in expression was a small bruise on the forehead — the least thing, a mere mark.  The skin even was not broken.  He stared at it a long time as if lost in a dreadful dream.  Then he observed that Tom’s hands were clenched as though he had fallen facing somebody in a fight with fists.  His knuckles, on closer view, appeared somewhat abraded.  Both hands.

The discovery of these slight signs was more appalling to Byrne than the absolute absence of every mark would have been.  So Tom had died striking against something which could be hit, and yet could kill one without leaving a wound — by a breath.

Terror, hot terror, began to play about Byrne’s heart like a tongue of flame that touches and withdraws before it turns a thing to ashes.  He backed away from the body as far as he could, then came forward stealthily casting fearful glances to steal another look at the bruised forehead.  There would perhaps be such a faint bruise on his own forehead — before the morning.

“I can’t bear it,” he whispered to himself.  Tom was for him now an object of horror, a sight at once tempting and revolting to his fear.  He couldn’t bear to look at him.

At last, desperation getting the better of his increasing horror, he stepped forward from the wall against which he had been leaning, seized the corpse under the armpits, and began to lug it over to the bed.  The bare heels of the seaman trailed on the floor noiselessly.  He was heavy with the dead weight of inanimate objects.  With a last effort Byrne landed him face downwards on the edge of the bed, rolled him over, snatched from under this stiff passive thing a sheet with which he covered it over.  Then he spread the curtains at head and foot so that joining together as he shook their folds they hid the bed altogether from his sight.

He stumbled towards a chair, and fell on it.  The perspiration poured from his face for a moment, and then his veins seemed to carry for a while a thin stream of half, frozen blood.  Complete terror had possession of him now, a nameless terror which had turned his heart to ashes.

He sat upright in the straight-backed chair, the lamp burning at his feet, his pistols and his hanger at his left elbow on the end of the table, his eyes turning incessantly in their sockets round the walls, over the ceiling, over the floor, in the expectation of a mysterious and appalling vision.  The thing which could deal death in a breath was outside that bolted door.  But Byrne believed neither in walls nor bolts now.  Unreasoning terror turning everything to account, his old time boyish admiration of the athletic Tom, the undaunted Tom (he had seemed to him invincible), helped to paralyse his faculties, added to his despair.

He was no longer Edgar Byrne.  He was a tortured soul suffering more anguish than any sinner’s body had ever suffered from rack or boot.  The depth of his torment may be measured when I say that this young man, as brave at least as the average of his kind, contemplated seizing a pistol and firing into his own head.  But a deadly, chilly, langour was spreading over his limbs.  It was as if his flesh had been wet plaster stiffening slowly about his ribs.  Presently, he thought, the two witches will be coming in, with crutch and stick — horrible, grotesque, monstrous — affiliated to the devil — to put a mark on his forehead, the tiny little bruise of death.  And he wouldn’t be able to do anything.  Tom had struck out at something, but he was not like Tom.  His limbs were dead already.  He sat still, dying the death over and over again; and the only part of him which moved were his eyes, turning round and round in their sockets, running over the walls, the floor, the ceiling, again and again till suddenly they became motionless and stony — starting out of his head fixed in the direction of the bed.

He had seen the heavy curtains stir and shake as if the dead body they concealed had turned over and sat up.  Byrne, who thought the world could hold no more terrors in store, felt his hair stir at the roots.  He gripped the arms of the chair, his jaw fell, and the sweat broke out on his brow while his dry tongue clove suddenly to the roof of his mouth.  Again the curtains stirred, but did not open.  “Don’t, Tom!” Byrne made effort to shout, but all he heard was a slight moan such as an uneasy sleeper may make.  He felt that his brain was going, for, now, it seemed to him that the ceiling over the bed had moved, had slanted, and came level again — and once more the closed curtains swayed gently as if about to part.

Byrne closed his eyes not to see the awful apparition of the seaman’s corpse coming out animated by an evil spirit.  In the profound silence of the room he endured a moment of frightful agony, then opened his eyes again.  And he saw at once that the curtains remained closed still, but that the ceiling over the bed had risen quite a foot.  With the last gleam of reason left to him he understood that it was the enormous baldaquin over the bed which was coming down, while the curtains attached to it swayed softly, sinking gradually to the floor.  His drooping jaw snapped to — and half rising in his chair he watched mutely the noiseless descent of the monstrous canopy.  It came down in short smooth rushes till lowered half way or more, when it took a run and settled swiftly its turtle-back shape with the deep border piece fitting exactly the edge of the bedstead.  A slight crack or two of wood were heard, and the overpowering stillness of the room resumed its sway.

Byrne stood up, gasped for breath, and let out a cry of rage and dismay, the first sound which he is perfectly certain did make its way past his lips on this night of terrors.  This then was the death he had escaped!  This was the devilish artifice of murder poor Tom’s soul had perhaps tried from beyond the border to warn him of.  For this was how he had died.  Byrne was certain he had heard the voice of the seaman, faintly distinct in his familiar phrase, “Mr. Byrne!  Look out, sir!” and again uttering words he could not make out.  But then the distance separating the living from the dead is so great!  Poor Tom had tried.  Byrne ran to the bed and attempted to lift up, to push off the horrible lid smothering the body.  It resisted his efforts, heavy as lead, immovable like a tombstone.  The rage of vengeance made him desist; his head buzzed with chaotic thoughts of extermination, he turned round the room as if he could find neither his weapons nor the way out; and all the time he stammered awful menaces. . .

A violent battering at the door of the inn recalled him to his soberer senses.  He flew to the window pulled the shutters open, and looked out.  In the faint dawn he saw below him a mob of men.  Ha!  He would go and face at once this murderous lot collected no doubt for his undoing.  After his struggle with nameless terrors he yearned for an open fray with armed enemies.  But he must have remained yet bereft of his reason, because forgetting his weapons he rushed downstairs with a wild cry, unbarred the door while blows were raining on it outside, and flinging it open flew with his bare hands at the throat of the first man he saw before him.  They rolled over together.  Byrne’s hazy intention was to break through, to fly up the mountain path, and come back presently with Gonzales’ men to exact an exemplary vengeance.  He fought furiously till a tree, a house, a mountain, seemed to crash down upon his head — and he knew no more.