Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (832 page)

For my part I was by no means certain that this
gabelou
(as our men alluded to her opprobriously) was after us at all.  There were nautical difficulties in such a view which made me express the sanguine opinion that she was in all innocence simply changing her station.  At this Dominic condescended to turn his head.

“I tell you she is in chase,” he affirmed moodily, after one short glance astern.

I never doubted his opinion.  But with all the ardour of a neophyte and the pride of an apt learner I was at that time a great nautical casuist.

“What I can’t understand,” I insisted subtly, “is how on earth, with this wind, she has managed to be just where she was when we first made her out.  It is clear that she could not, and did not, gain twelve miles on us during the night.  And there are other impossibilities. . . .”

Dominic had been sitting motionless, like an inanimate black cone posed on the stern deck, near the rudder-head, with a small tassel fluttering on its sharp point, and for a time he preserved the immobility of his meditation.  Then, bending over with a short laugh, he gave my ear the bitter fruit of it.  He understood everything now perfectly.  She was where we had seen her first, not because she had caught us up, but because we had passed her during the night while she was already waiting for us, hove-to, most likely, on our very track.

“Do you understand — already?” Dominic muttered in a fierce undertone.  “Already!  You know we left a good eight hours before we were expected to leave, otherwise she would have been in time to lie in wait for us on the other side of the Cape, and” — he snapped his teeth like a wolf close to my face — ”and she would have had us like — that.”

I saw it all plainly enough now.  They had eyes in their heads and all their wits about them in that craft.  We had passed them in the dark as they jogged on easily towards their ambush with the idea that we were yet far behind.  At daylight, however, sighting a balancelle ahead under a press of canvas, they had made sail in chase.  But if that was so, then —

Dominic seized my arm.

“Yes, yes!  She came out on an information — do you see, it? — on information. . . . We have been sold — betrayed.  Why?  How?  What for?  We always paid them all so well on shore. . . . No!  But it is my head that is going to burst.”

He seemed to choke, tugged at the throat button of the cloak, jumped up open-mouthed as if to hurl curses and denunciation, but instantly mastered himself, and, wrapping up the cloak closer about him, sat down on the deck again as quiet as ever.

“Yes, it must be the work of some scoundrel ashore,” I observed.

He pulled the edge of the hood well forward over his brow before he muttered:

“A scoundrel. . . . Yes. . . . It’s evident.”

“Well,” I said, “they can’t get us, that’s clear.”

“No,” he assented quietly, “they cannot.”

We shaved the Cape very close to avoid an adverse current.  On the other side, by the effect of the land, the wind failed us so completely for a moment that the
Tremolino’s
two great lofty sails hung idle to the masts in the thundering uproar of the seas breaking upon the shore we had left behind.  And when the returning gust filled them again, we saw with amazement half of the new mainsail, which we thought fit to drive the boat under before giving way, absolutely fly out of the bolt-ropes.  We lowered the yard at once, and saved it all, but it was no longer a sail; it was only a heap of soaked strips of canvas cumbering the deck and weighting the craft.  Dominic gave the order to throw the whole lot overboard.

I would have had the yard thrown overboard, too, he said, leading me aft again, “if it had not been for the trouble.  Let no sign escape you,” he continued, lowering his voice, “but I am going to tell you something terrible.  Listen: I have observed that the roping stitches on that sail have been cut!  You hear?  Cut with a knife in many places.  And yet it stood all that time.  Not enough cut.  That flap did it at last.  What matters it?  But look! there’s treachery seated on this very deck.  By the horns of the devil! seated here at our very backs.  Do not turn, signorine.”

We were facing aft then.

“What’s to be done?” I asked, appalled.

“Nothing.  Silence!  Be a man, signorine.”

“What else?” I said.

To show I could be a man, I resolved to utter no sound as long as Dominic himself had the force to keep his lips closed.  Nothing but silence becomes certain situations.  Moreover, the experience of treachery seemed to spread a hopeless drowsiness over my thoughts and senses.  For an hour or more we watched our pursuer surging out nearer and nearer from amongst the squalls that sometimes hid her altogether.  But even when not seen, we felt her there like a knife at our throats.  She gained on us frightfully.  And the
Tremolino
, in a fierce breeze and in much smoother water, swung on easily under her one sail, with something appallingly careless in the joyous freedom of her motion.  Another half-hour went by.  I could not stand it any longer.

“They will get the poor barky,” I stammered out suddenly, almost on the verge of tears.

Dominic stirred no more than a carving.  A sense of catastrophic loneliness overcame my inexperienced soul.  The vision of my companions passed before me.  The whole Royalist gang was in Monte Carlo now, I reckoned.  And they appeared to me clear-cut and very small, with affected voices and stiff gestures, like a procession of rigid marionettes upon a toy stage.  I gave a start.  What was this?  A mysterious, remorseless whisper came from within the motionless black hood at my side.

“
Il faul la tuer
.”

I heard it very well.

“What do you say, Dominic?” I asked, moving nothing but my lips.

And the whisper within the hood repeated mysteriously, “She must be killed.”

My heart began to beat violently.

“That’s it,” I faltered out.  “But how?”

“You love her well?”

“I do.”

“Then you must find the heart for that work too.  You must steer her yourself, and I shall see to it that she dies quickly, without leaving as much as a chip behind.”

“Can you?” I murmured, fascinated by the black hood turned immovably over the stern, as if in unlawful communion with that old sea of magicians, slave-dealers, exiles and warriors, the sea of legends and terrors, where the mariners of remote antiquity used to hear the restless shade of an old wanderer weep aloud in the dark.

“I know a rock,” whispered the initiated voice within the hood secretly.  “But — caution!  It must be done before our men perceive what we are about.  Whom can we trust now?  A knife drawn across the fore halyards would bring the foresail down, and put an end to our liberty in twenty minutes.  And the best of our men may be afraid of drowning.  There is our little boat, but in an affair like this no one can be sure of being saved.”

The voice ceased.  We had started from Barcelona with our dinghy in tow; afterwards it was too risky to try to get her in, so we let her take her chance of the seas at the end of a comfortable scope of rope.  Many times she had seemed to us completely overwhelmed, but soon we would see her bob up again on a wave, apparently as buoyant and whole as ever.

“I understand,” I said softly.  “Very well, Dominic.  When?”

“Not yet.  We must get a little more in first,” answered the voice from the hood in a ghostly murmur.

XLV.

It was settled.  I had now the courage to turn about.  Our men crouched about the decks here and there with anxious, crestfallen faces, all turned one way to watch the chaser.  For the first time that morning I perceived Cesar stretched out full length on the deck near the foremast and wondered where he had been skulking till then.  But he might in truth have been at my elbow all the time for all I knew.  We had been too absorbed in watching our fate to pay attention to each other.  Nobody had eaten anything that morning, but the men had been coming constantly to drink at the water-butt.

I ran down to the cabin.  I had there, put away in a locker, ten thousand francs in gold of whose presence on board, so far as I was aware, not a soul, except Dominic had the slightest inkling.  When I emerged on deck again Dominic had turned about and was peering from under his cowl at the coast.  Cape Creux closed the view ahead.  To the left a wide bay, its waters torn and swept by fierce squalls, seemed full of smoke.  Astern the sky had a menacing look.

Directly he saw me, Dominic, in a placid tone, wanted to know what was the matter.  I came close to him and, looking as unconcerned as I could, told him in an undertone that I had found the locker broken open and the money-belt gone.  Last evening it was still there.

“What did you want to do with it?” he asked me, trembling violently.

“Put it round my waist, of course,” I answered, amazed to hear his teeth chattering.

“Cursed gold!” he muttered.  “The weight of the money might have cost you your life, perhaps.”  He shuddered.  “There is no time to talk about that now.”

“I am ready.”

“Not yet.  I am waiting for that squall to come over,” he muttered.  And a few leaden minutes passed.

The squall came over at last.  Our pursuer, overtaken by a sort of murky whirlwind, disappeared from our sight.  The
Tremolino
quivered and bounded forward.  The land ahead vanished, too, and we seemed to be left alone in a world of water and wind.

“
Prenez la barre, monsieur
,” Dominic broke the silence suddenly in an austere voice.  “Take hold of the tiller.”  He bent his hood to my ear.  “The balancelle is yours.  Your own hands must deal the blow.  I — I have yet another piece of work to do.”  He spoke up loudly to the man who steered.  “Let the signorino take the tiller, and you with the others stand by to haul the boat alongside quickly at the word.”

The man obeyed, surprised, but silent.  The others stirred, and pricked up their ears at this.  I heard their murmurs.  “What now?  Are we going to run in somewhere and take to our heels?  The Padrone knows what he is doing.”

Dominic went forward.  He paused to look down at Cesar, who, as I have said before, was lying full length face down by the foremast, then stepped over him, and dived out of my sight under the foresail.  I saw nothing ahead.  It was impossible for me to see anything except the foresail open and still, like a great shadowy wing.  But Dominic had his bearings.  His voice came to me from forward, in a just audible cry:

“Now, signorino!”

I bore on the tiller, as instructed before.  Again I heard him faintly, and then I had only to hold her straight.  No ship ran so joyously to her death before.  She rose and fell, as if floating in space, and darted forward, whizzing like an arrow.  Dominic, stooping under the foot of the foresail, reappeared, and stood steadying himself against the mast, with a raised forefinger in an attitude of expectant attention.  A second before the shock his arm fell down by his side.  At that I set my teeth.  And then —

Talk of splintered planks and smashed timbers!  This shipwreck lies upon my soul with the dread and horror of a homicide, with the unforgettable remorse of having crushed a living, faithful heart at a single blow.  At one moment the rush and the soaring swing of speed; the next a crash, and death, stillness — a moment of horrible immobility, with the song of the wind changed to a strident wail, and the heavy waters boiling up menacing and sluggish around the corpse.  I saw in a distracting minute the foreyard fly fore and aft with a brutal swing, the men all in a heap, cursing with fear, and hauling frantically at the line of the boat.  With a strange welcoming of the familiar I saw also Cesar amongst them, and recognised Dominic’s old, well-known, effective gesture, the horizontal sweep of his powerful arm.  I recollect distinctly saying to myself, “Cesar must go down, of course,” and then, as I was scrambling on all fours, the swinging tiller I had let go caught me a crack under the ear, and knocked me over senseless.

I don’t think I was actually unconscious for more than a few minutes, but when I came to myself the dinghy was driving before the wind into a sheltered cove, two men just keeping her straight with their oars.  Dominic, with his arm round my shoulders, supported me in the stern-sheets.

We landed in a familiar part of the country.  Dominic took one of the boat’s oars with him.  I suppose he was thinking of the stream we would have presently to cross, on which there was a miserable specimen of a punt, often robbed of its pole.  But first of all we had to ascend the ridge of land at the back of the Cape.  He helped me up.  I was dizzy.  My head felt very large and heavy.  At the top of the ascent I clung to him, and we stopped to rest.

To the right, below us, the wide, smoky bay was empty.  Dominic had kept his word.  There was not a chip to be seen around the black rock from which the
Tremolino
, with her plucky heart crushed at one blow, had slipped off into deep water to her eternal rest.  The vastness of the open sea was smothered in driving mists, and in the centre of the thinning squall, phantom-like, under a frightful press of canvas, the unconscious guardacosta dashed on, still chasing to the northward.  Our men were already descending the reverse slope to look for that punt which we knew from experience was not always to be found easily.  I looked after them with dazed, misty eyes.  One, two, three, four.

“Dominic, where’s Cesar?” I cried.

As if repulsing the very sound of the name, the Padrone made that ample, sweeping, knocking-down gesture.  I stepped back a pace and stared at him fearfully.  His open shirt uncovered his muscular neck and the thick hair on his chest.  He planted the oar upright in the soft soil, and rolling up slowly his right sleeve, extended the bare arm before my face.

“This,” he began, with an extreme deliberation, whose superhuman restraint vibrated with the suppressed violence of his feelings, “is the arm which delivered the blow.  I am afraid it is your own gold that did the rest.  I forgot all about your money.”  He clasped his hands together in sudden distress.  “I forgot, I forgot,” he repeated disconsolately.