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my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human
animal, to the end of my days. Of the nigger I used to dream for years afterwards.
Of Pedro never. The impression was less vivid. I got away from him too quickly.
It seems to me but natural that those three buried in a corner of my memory
should suddenly get out into the light of the world—so natural that I offer no
excuse for their existence, They were there, they had to come out; and this is a
sufficient excuse for a writer of tales who had taken to his trade without
preparation, or premeditation, and without any moral intention but that which
pervades the whole scheme of this world of senses.
Since this Note is mostly concerned with personal contacts and the origins of the
persons in the tale, I am bound also to speak of Lena, because if I were to leave her
out it would look like a slight; and nothing would be further from my thoughts than
putting a slight on Lena. If of all the personages involved in the "mystery of
Samburan" I have lived longest with Heyst (or with him I call Heyst) it was at her,
whom I call Lena, that I have looked the longest and with a most sustained
attention. This attention originated in idleness for which I have a natural talent. One
evening I wandered into a cafe, in a town not of the tropics but of the South of
France. It was filled with tobacco smoke, the hum of voices, the rattling of
dominoes, and the sounds of strident music. The orchestra was rather smaller than
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the one that performed at Schomberg's hotel, had the air more of a family party
than of an enlisted band, and, I must confess, seemed rather more respectable than
the Zangiacomo musical enterprise. It was less pretentious also, more homely and
familiar, so to speak, insomuch that in the intervals when all the performers left the
platform one of them went amongst the marble tables collecting offerings of sous
and francs in a battered tin receptacle recalling the shape of a sauceboat. It was a
girl. Her detachment from her task seems to me now to have equalled or even
surpassed Heyst's aloofness from all the mental degradations to which a man's
intelligence is exposed in its way through life. Silent and wide-eyed she went from
table to table with the air of a sleep-walker and with no other sound but the slight
rattle of the coins to attract attention. It was long after the sea-chapter of my life
had been closed but it is difficult to discard completely the characteristics of half a
lifetime, and it was in something of the Jack-ashore spirit that I dropped a five-
franc piece into the sauceboat; whereupon the sleep-walker turned her head to gaze
at me and said "Merci, Monsieur" in a tone in which there was no gratitude but
only surprise. I must have been idle indeed to take the trouble to remark on such
slight evidence that the voice was very charming and when the performers resumed
their seats I shifted my position slightly in order not to have that particular
performer hidden from me by the little man with the beard who conducted, and
who might for all I know have been her father, but whose real mission in life was to
be a model for the Zangiacomo of Victory. Having got a clear line of sight I
naturally (being idle) continued to look at the girl through all the second part of the
programme. The shape of her dark head inclined over the violin was fascinating,
and, while resting between the pieces of that interminable programme she was, in
her white dress and with her brown hands reposing in her lap, the very image of
dreamy innocence. The mature, bad-tempered woman at the piano might have been
her mother, though there was not the slightest resemblance between them. All I am
certain of in their personal relation to each other is that cruel pinch on the upper
part of the arm. That I am sure I have seen! There could be no mistake. I was in too
idle a mood to imagine such a gratuitous barbarity. It may have been playfulness,
yet the girl jumped up as if she had been stung by a wasp. It may have been
playfulness. Yet I saw plainly poor "dreamy innocence" rub gently the affected
place as she filed off with the other performers down the middle aisle between the
marble tables in the uproar of voices, the rattling of dominoes through a blue
atmosphere of tobacco smoke. I believe that those people left the town next day.
Or perhaps they had only migrated to the other big cafe, on the other side of the
Place de la Comedie. It is very possible. I did not go across to find out. It was my
perfect idleness that had invested the girl with a peculiar charm, and I did not want
to destroy it by any superfluous exertion. The receptivity of my indolence made the
impression so permanent that when the moment came for her meeting with Heyst I
felt that she would be heroically equal to every demand of the risky and uncertain
future. I was so convinced of it that I let her go with Heyst, I won't say without a
pang but certainly without misgivings. And in view of her triumphant end what
more could I have done for her rehabilitation and her happiness?
1920. J. C.
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VICTORY: AN ISLAND TALE
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
There is, as every schoolboy knows in this scientific age, a very close chemical
relation between coal and diamonds. It is the reason, I believe, why some people
allude to coal as "black diamonds." Both these commodities represent wealth; but
coal is a much less portable form of property. There is, from that point of view, a
deplorable lack of concentration in coal. Now, if a coal-mine could be put into
one's waistcoat pocket—but it can't! At the same time, there is a fascination in coal,
the supreme commodity of the age in which we are camped like bewildered
travellers in a garish, unrestful hotel. And I suppose those two considerations, the
practical and the mystical, prevented Heyst—Axel Heyst—from going away.
The Tropical Belt Coal Company went into liquidation. The world of finance is a
mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may appear, evaporation precedes
liquidation. First the capital evaporates, and then the company goes into
liquidation. These are very unnatural physics, but they account for the persistent
inertia of Heyst, at which we "out there" used to laugh among ourselves—but not
inimically. An inert body can do no harm to anyone, provokes no hostility, is
scarcely worth derision. It may, indeed, be in the way sometimes; but this could not
be said of Axel Heyst. He was out of everybody's way, as if he were perched on the
highest peak of the Himalayas, and in a sense as conspicuous. Everyone in that part
of the world knew of him, dwelling on his little island. An island is but the top of a
mountain. Axel Heyst, perched on it immovably, was surrounded, instead of the
imponderable stormy and transparent ocean of air merging into infinity, by a tepid,
shallow sea; a passionless offshoot of the great waters which
embrace the
continents of this globe. His most frequent visitors were shadows, the shadows of
clouds, relieving the monotony of the inanimate, brooding sunshine of the tropics.
His nearest neighbour—I am speaking now of things showing some sort of
animation—was an indolent volcano which smoked faintly all day with its head
just above the northern horizon, and at night levelled at him, from amongst the
clear stars, a dull red glow, expanding and collapsing spasmodically like the end of
a gigantic cigar puffed at intermittently in the dark. Axel Heyst was also a smoker;
and when he lounged out on his veranda with his cheroot, the last thing before
going to bed, he made in the night the same sort of glow and of the same size as
that other one so many miles away.
In a sense, the volcano was company to him in the shades of the night—which
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were often too thick, one would think, to let a breath of air through. There was
seldom enough wind to blow a feather along. On most evenings of the year Heyst
could have sat outside with a naked candle to read one of the books left him by his
late father. It was not a mean store. But he never did that. Afraid of mosquitoes,
very likely. Neither was he ever tempted by the silence to address any casual
remarks to the companion glow of the volcano. He was not mad. Queer chap—yes,
that may have been said, and in fact was said; but there is a tremendous difference
between the two, you will allow.
On the nights of full moon the silence around Samburan—the "Round Island" of
the charts—was dazzling; and in the flood of cold light Heyst could see his
immediate surroundings, which had the aspect of an abandoned settlement invaded
by the jungle: vague roofs above low vegetation, broken shadows of bamboo fences
in the sheen of long grass, something like an overgrown bit of road slanting among
ragged thickets towards the shore only a couple of hundred yards away, with a
black jetty and a mound of some sort, quite inky on its unlighted side. But the most
conspicuous object was a gigantic blackboard raised on two posts and presenting to
Heyst, when the moon got over that side, the white letters "T. B. C. Co." in a row at
least two feet high. These were the initials of the Tropical Belt Coal Company, his
employers—his late employers, to be precise.
According to the unnatural mysteries of the financial world, the T. B. C.
Company's capital having evaporated in the course of two years, the company went
into liquidation—forced, I believe, not voluntary. There was nothing forcible in the
process, however. It was slow; and while the liquidation—in London and
Amsterdam—pursued its languid course, Axel Heyst, styled in the prospectus
"manager in the tropics," remained at his post on Samburan, the No. 1 coaling-
station of the company.
And it was not merely a coaling-station. There was a coal-mine there, with an
outcrop in the hillside less than five hundred yards from the rickety wharf and the
imposing blackboard. The company's object had been to get hold of all the outcrops
on tropical islands and exploit them locally. And, Lord knows, there were any
amount of outcrops. It was Heyst who had located most of them in this part of the
tropical belt during his rather aimless wanderings, and being a ready letter-writer
had written pages and pages about them to his friends in Europe. At least, so it was
said.
We doubted whether he had any visions of wealth—for himself, at any rate.
What he seemed mostly concerned for was the "stride forward," as he expressed it,
in the general organization of the universe, apparently. He was heard by more than
a hundred persons in the islands talking of a "great stride forward for these
regions." The convinced wave of the hand which accompanied the phrase
suggested tropical distances being impelled onward. In connection with the finished
courtesy of his manner, it was persuasive, or at any rate silencing—for a time, at
least. Nobody cared to argue with him when he talked in this strain. His earnestness
could do no harm to anybody. There was no danger of anyone taking seriously his
dream of tropical coal, so what was the use of hurting his feelings?
Thus reasoned men in reputable business offices where he had his entree as a
person who came out East with letters of introduction—and modest letters of credit,
too—some years before these coal-outcrops began to crop up in his playfully
courteous talk. From the first there was some difficulty in making him out. He was
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not a traveller. A traveller arrives and departs, goes on somewhere. Heyst did not
depart. I met a man once—the manager of the branch of the Oriental Banking
Corporation in Malacca—to whom Heyst exclaimed, in no connection with
anything in particular (it was in the billiard-room of the club):
"I am enchanted with these islands!"
He shot it out suddenly, a propos des bottes, as the French say, and while
chalking his cue. And perhaps it was some sort of enchantment. There are more
spells than your commonplace magicians ever dreamed of.
Roughly speaking, a circle with a radius of eight hundred miles drawn round a
point in North Borneo was in Heyst's case a magic circle. It just touched Manila,
and he had been seen there. It just touched Saigon, and he was likewise seen there
once. Perhaps these were his attempts to break out. If so, they were failures. The
enchantment must have been an unbreakable one. The manager—the man who
heard the exclamation—had been so impressed by the tone, fervour, rapture, what
you will, or perhaps by the incongruity of it that he had related the experience to
more than one person.
"Queer chap, that Swede," was his only comment; but this is the origin of the
name "Enchanted Heyst" which some fellows fastened on our man.
He also had other names. In his early years, long before he got so becomingly
bald on the top, he went to present a letter of introduction to Mr. Tesman of
Tesman Brothers, a Sourabaya firm—tip-top house. Well, Mr. Tesman was a
kindly, benevolent old gentleman. He did not know what to make of that caller.
After telling him that they wished to render his stay among the islands as pleasant
as possible, and that they were ready to assist him in his plans, and so on, and after
receiving Heyst's thanks—you know the usual kind of conversation—he proceeded
to query in a slow, paternal tone:
"And you are interested in—?"
"Facts," broke in Heyst in his courtly voice. "There's nothing worth knowing but
facts. Hard facts! Facts alone, Mr. Tesman."
I don't know if old Tesman agreed with him or not, but he must have spoken
about it, because, for a time, our man got the name of "Hard Facts." He had the
singular good fortune that his sayings stuck to him and became part of his name.
Thereafter he mooned about the Java Sea in some of the Tesmans' trading
; schooners, and then vanished, on board an Arab ship, in the direction of New
Guinea. He remained so long in that outlying part of his enchanted circle that he
was nearly forgotten before he swam into view again in a native proa full of Goram
vagabonds, burnt black by the sun, very lean, his hair much thinned, and a portfolio
of sketches under his arm. He showed these willingly, but was very reserved as to
anything else. He had had an "amusing time," he said. A man who will go to New
Guinea for fun—well!
Later, years afterwards, when the last vestiges of youth had gone off his face and
all the hair off the top of his head, and his red-gold pair of horizontal moustaches
had grown to really noble proportions, a certain disreputable white man fastened
upon him an epithet. Putting down with a shaking hand a long glass emptied of its
contents—paid for by Heyst—he said, with that deliberate sagacity which no mere
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water-drinker ever attained:
"Heyst's a puffect g'n'lman. Puffect! But he's a ut-uto-utopist."
Heyst had just gone out of the place of public refreshment where this
pronouncement was voiced. Utopist, eh? Upon my word, the only thing I heard him
say which might have had a bearing on the point was his invitation to old McNab
himself. Turning with that finished courtesy of attitude, movement voice, which
was his obvious characteristic, he had said with delicate playfulness:
"Come along and quench your thirst with us, Mr. McNab!"
Perhaps that was it. A man who could propose, even playfully, to quench old
McNab's thirst must have been a utopist, a pursuer of chimeras; for of downright
irony Heyst was not prodigal. And, may be, this was the reason why he was
generally liked. At that epoch in his life, in the fulness of his physical development,
of a broad, martial presence, with his bald head and long moustaches, he resembled
the portraits of Charles XII., of adventurous memory. However, there was no
reason to think that Heyst was in any way a fighting man.