Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (22 page)

He made a step towards his daughter and laid hold of her by the shoulder, his other hand pointing down the path to the landing-place.

“Beware!” exclaimed Dain; “this woman belongs to me!”

Nina wrenched herself free and looked straight at Almayer’s angry face.

“No, I will not go,” she said with desperate energy.  “If he dies I shall die too!”

“You die!” said Almayer, contemptuously.  “Oh, no!  You shall live a life of lies and deception till some other vagabond comes along to sing; how did you say that?  The song of love to you!  Make up your mind quickly.”

He waited for a while, and then added meaningly —

“Shall I call out to Ali?”

“Call out,” she answered in Malay, “you that cannot be true to your own countrymen.  Only a few days ago you were selling the powder for their destruction; now you want to give up to them the man that yesterday you called your friend.  Oh, Dain,” she said, turning towards the motionless but attentive figure in the darkness, “instead of bringing you life I bring you death, for he will betray unless I leave you for ever!”

Dain came into the circle of light, and, throwing his arm around Nina’s neck, whispered in her ear — ”I can kill him where he stands, before a sound can pass his lips.  For you it is to say yes or no.  Babalatchi cannot be far now.”

He straightened himself up, taking his arm off her shoulder, and confronted Almayer, who looked at them both with an expression of concentrated fury.

“No!” she cried, clinging to Dain in wild alarm.  “No!  Kill me!  Then perhaps he will let you go.  You do not know the mind of a white man.  He would rather see me dead than standing where I am.  Forgive me, your slave, but you must not.”  She fell at his feet sobbing violently and repeating, “Kill me!  Kill me!”

“I want you alive,” said Almayer, speaking also in Malay, with sombre calmness.  “You go, or he hangs.  Will you obey?”

Dain shook Nina off, and, making a sudden lunge, struck Almayer full in the chest with the handle of his kriss, keeping the point towards himself.

“Hai, look!  It was easy for me to turn the point the other way,” he said in his even voice.  “Go, Tuan Putih,” he added with dignity.  “I give you your life, my life, and her life.  I am the slave of this woman’s desire, and she wills it so.”

There was not a glimmer of light in the sky now, and the tops of the trees were as invisible as their trunks, being lost in the mass of clouds that hung low over the woods, the clearing, and the river.

Every outline had disappeared in the intense blackness that seemed to have destroyed everything but space.  Only the fire glimmered like a star forgotten in this annihilation of all visible things, and nothing was heard after Dain ceased speaking but the sobs of Nina, whom he held in his arms, kneeling beside the fire.  Almayer stood looking down at them in gloomy thoughtfulness.  As he was opening his lips to speak they were startled by a cry of warning by the riverside, followed by the splash of many paddles and the sound of voices.

“Babalatchi!” shouted Dain, lifting up Nina as he got upon his feet quickly.

“Ada!  Ada!” came the answer from the panting statesman who ran up the path and stood amongst them.  “Run to my canoe,” he said to Dain excitedly, without taking any notice of Almayer.  “Run! we must go.  That woman has told them all!”

“What woman?” asked Dain, looking at Nina.  Just then there was only one woman in the whole world for him.

“The she-dog with white teeth; the seven times accursed slave of Bulangi.  She yelled at Abdulla’s gate till she woke up all Sambir.  Now the white officers are coming, guided by her and Reshid.  If you want to live, do not look at me, but go!”

“How do you know this?” asked Almayer.

“Oh, Tuan! what matters how I know!  I have only one eye, but I saw lights in Abdulla’s house and in his campong as we were paddling past.  I have ears, and while we lay under the bank I have heard the messengers sent out to the white men’s house.”

“Will you depart without that woman who is my daughter?” said Almayer, addressing Dain, while Babalatchi stamped with impatience, muttering, “Run!  Run at once!”

“No,” answered Dain, steadily, “I will not go; to no man will I abandon this woman.”

“Then kill me and escape yourself,” sobbed out Nina.

He clasped her close, looking at her tenderly, and whispered, “We will never part, O Nina!”

“I shall not stay here any longer,” broke in Babalatchi, angrily.  “This is great foolishness.  No woman is worth a man’s life.  I am an old man, and I know.”

He picked up his staff, and, turning to go, looked at Dain as if offering him his last chance of escape.  But Dain’s face was hidden amongst Nina’s black tresses, and he did not see this last appealing glance.

Babalatchi vanished in the darkness.  Shortly after his disappearance they heard the war canoe leave the landing-place in the swish of the numerous paddles dipped in the water together.  Almost at the same time Ali came up from the riverside, two paddles on his shoulder.

“Our canoe is hidden up the creek, Tuan Almayer,” he said, “in the dense bush where the forest comes down to the water.  I took it there because I heard from Babalatchi’s paddlers that the white men are coming here.”

“Wait for me there,” said Almayer, “but keep the canoe hidden.”

He remained silent, listening to Ali’s footsteps, then turned to Nina.

“Nina,” he said sadly, “will you have no pity for me?”

There was no answer.  She did not even turn her head, which was pressed close to Dain’s breast.

He made a movement as if to leave them and stopped.  By the dim glow of the burning-out fire he saw their two motionless figures.  The woman’s back turned to him with the long black hair streaming down over the white dress, and Dain’s calm face looking at him above her head.

“I cannot,” he muttered to himself.  After a long pause he spoke again a little lower, but in an unsteady voice, “It would be too great a disgrace.  I am a white man.”  He broke down completely there, and went on tearfully, “I am a white man, and of good family.  Very good family,” he repeated, weeping bitterly.  “It would be a disgrace . . . all over the islands, . . . the only white man on the east coast.  No, it cannot be . . . white men finding my daughter with this Malay.  My daughter!” he cried aloud, with a ring of despair in his voice.

He recovered his composure after a while and said distinctly —

“I will never forgive you, Nina — never!  If you were to come back to me now, the memory of this night would poison all my life.  I shall try to forget.  I have no daughter.  There used to be a half-caste woman in my house, but she is going even now.  You, Dain, or whatever your name may be, I shall take you and that woman to the island at the mouth of the river myself.  Come with me.”

He led the way, following the bank as far as the forest.  Ali answered to his call, and, pushing their way through the dense bush, they stepped into the canoe hidden under the overhanging branches.  Dain laid Nina in the bottom, and sat holding her head on his knees.  Almayer and Ali each took up a paddle.  As they were going to push out Ali hissed warningly.  All listened.

In the great stillness before the bursting out of the thunderstorm they could hear the sound of oars working regularly in their row-locks.  The sound approached steadily, and Dain, looking through the branches, could see the faint shape of a big white boat.  A woman’s voice said in a cautious tone —

“There is the place where you may land white men; a little higher — there!”

The boat was passing them so close in the narrow creek that the blades of the long oars nearly touched the canoe.

“Way enough!  Stand by to jump on shore!  He is alone and unarmed,” was the quiet order in a man’s voice, and in Dutch.

Somebody else whispered: “I think I can see a glimmer of a fire through the bush.”  And then the boat floated past them, disappearing instantly in the darkness.

“Now,” whispered Ali, eagerly, “let us push out and paddle away.”

The little canoe swung into the stream, and as it sprung forward in response to the vigorous dig of the paddles they could hear an angry shout.

“He is not by the fire.  Spread out, men, and search for him!”

Blue lights blazed out in different parts of the clearing, and the shrill voice of a woman cried in accents of rage and pain —

“Too late!  O senseless white men!  He has escaped!”

CHAPTER XII.

“That is the place,” said Dain, indicating with the blade of his paddle a small islet about a mile ahead of the canoe — ”that is the place where Babalatchi promised that a boat from the prau would come for me when the sun is overhead.  We will wait for that boat there.”

Almayer, who was steering, nodded without speaking, and by a slight sweep of his paddle laid the head of the canoe in the required direction.

They were just leaving the southern outlet of the Pantai, which lay behind them in a straight and long vista of water shining between two walls of thick verdure that ran downwards and towards each other, till at last they joined and sank together in the far-away distance.  The sun, rising above the calm waters of the Straits, marked its own path by a streak of light that glided upon the sea and darted up the wide reach of the river, a hurried messenger of light and life to the gloomy forests of the coast; and in this radiance of the sun’s pathway floated the black canoe heading for the islet which lay bathed in sunshine, the yellow sands of its encircling beach shining like an inlaid golden disc on the polished steel of the unwrinkled sea.  To the north and south of it rose other islets, joyous in their brilliant colouring of green and yellow, and on the main coast the sombre line of mangrove bushes ended to the southward in the reddish cliffs of Tanjong Mirrah, advancing into the sea, steep and shadowless under the clear, light of the early morning.

The bottom of the canoe grated upon the sand as the little craft ran upon the beach.  Ali leaped on shore and held on while Dain stepped out carrying Nina in his arms, exhausted by the events and the long travelling during the night.  Almayer was the last to leave the boat, and together with Ali ran it higher up on the beach.  Then Ali, tired out by the long paddling, laid down in the shade of the canoe, and incontinently fell asleep.  Almayer sat sideways on the gunwale, and with his arms crossed on his breast, looked to the southward upon the sea.

After carefully laying Nina down in the shade of the bushes growing in the middle of the islet, Dain threw himself beside her and watched in silent concern the tears that ran down from under her closed eyelids, and lost themselves in that fine sand upon which they both were lying face to face.  These tears and this sorrow were for him a profound and disquieting mystery.  Now, when the danger was past, why should she grieve?  He doubted her love no more than he would have doubted the fact of his own existence, but as he lay looking ardently in her face, watching her tears, her parted lips, her very breath, he was uneasily conscious of something in her he could not understand.  Doubtless she had the wisdom of perfect beings.  He sighed.  He felt something invisible that stood between them, something that would let him approach her so far, but no farther.  No desire, no longing, no effort of will or length of life could destroy this vague feeling of their difference.  With awe but also with great pride he concluded that it was her own incomparable perfection.  She was his, and yet she was like a woman from another world.  His!  His!  He exulted in the glorious thought; nevertheless her tears pained him.

With a wisp of her own hair which he took in his hand with timid reverence he tried in an access of clumsy tenderness to dry the tears that trembled on her eyelashes.  He had his reward in a fleeting smile that brightened her face for the short fraction of a second, but soon the tears fell faster than ever, and he could bear it no more.  He rose and walked towards Almayer, who still sat absorbed in his contemplation of the sea.  It was a very, very long time since he had seen the sea — that sea that leads everywhere, brings everything, and takes away so much.  He had almost forgotten why he was there, and dreamily he could see all his past life on the smooth and boundless surface that glittered before his eyes.

Dain’s hand laid on Almayer’s shoulder recalled him with a start from some country very far away indeed.  He turned round, but his eyes seemed to look rather at the place where Dain stood than at the man himself.  Dain felt uneasy under the unconscious gaze.

“What?” said Almayer.

“She is crying,” murmured Dain, softly.

“She is crying!  Why?” asked Almayer, indifferently.

“I came to ask you.  My Ranee smiles when looking at the man she loves.  It is the white woman that is crying now.  You would know.”

Almayer shrugged his shoulders and turned away again towards the sea.

“Go, Tuan Putih,” urged Dain.  “Go to her; her tears are more terrible to me than the anger of gods.”

“Are they?  You will see them more than once.  She told me she could not live without you,” answered Almayer, speaking without the faintest spark of expression in his face, “so it behoves you to go to her quick, for fear you may find her dead.”

He burst into a loud and unpleasant laugh which made Dain stare at him with some apprehension, but got off the gunwale of the boat and moved slowly towards Nina, glancing up at the sun as he walked.

“And you go when the sun is overhead?” he said.

“Yes, Tuan.  Then we go,” answered Dain.

“I have not long to wait,” muttered Almayer.  “It is most important for me to see you go.  Both of you.  Most important,” he repeated, stopping short and looking at Dain fixedly.

He went on again towards Nina, and Dain remained behind.  Almayer approached his daughter and stood for a time looking down on her.  She did not open her eyes, but hearing footsteps near her, murmured in a low sob, “Dain.”

Almayer hesitated for a minute and then sank on the sand by her side.  She, not hearing a responsive word, not feeling a touch, opened her eyes — saw her father, and sat up suddenly with a movement of terror.