Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated)

by Joseph Conrad

  “You didn’t make fun of him for that?” she said.

  Heyst made a brusque movement of protest

  “My dear girl, I am not a ruffian,” he cried. Then, returning to his usual tone: “I didn’t even have to conceal a smile. Somehow it didn’t look a smiling matter. No, it was not funny; it was rather pathetic; he was so representative of all the past victims of the Great Joke. But it is by folly alone that the world moves, and so it is a respectable thing upon the whole. And besides, he was what one would call a good man. I don’t mean especially because he had offered up a prayer. No! He was really a decent fellow, he was quite unfitted for this world, he was a failure, a good man cornered — a sight for the gods; for no decent mortal cares to look at that sort.” A thought seemed to occur to him. He turned his face to the girl. “And you, who have been cornered too — did you think of offering a prayer?”

  Neither her eyes nor a single one of her features moved the least bit. She only let fall the words:

  “I am not what they call a good girl.”

  “That sounds evasive,” said Heyst after a short silence. “Well, the good fellow did pray and after he had confessed to it I was struck by the comicality of the situation. No, don’t misunderstand me — I am not alluding to his act, of course. And even the idea of Eternity, Infinity, Omnipotence, being called upon to defeat the conspiracy of two miserable Portuguese half-castes did not move my mirth. From the point of view of the supplicant, the danger to be conjured was something like the end of the world, or worse. No! What captivated my fancy was that I, Axel Heyst, the most detached of creatures in this earthly captivity, the veriest tramp on this earth, an indifferent stroller going through the world’s bustle — that I should have been there to step into the situation of an agent of Providence. I, a man of universal scorn and unbelief. . . .”

  “You are putting it on,” she interrupted in her seductive voice, with a coaxing intonation.

  “No. I am not like that, born or fashioned, or both. I am not for nothing the son of my father, of that man in the painting. I am he, all but the genius. And there is even less in me than I make out, because the very scorn is falling away from me year after year. I have never been so amused as by that episode in which I was suddenly called to act such an incredible part. For a moment I enjoyed it greatly. It got him out of his corner, you know.”

  “You saved a man for fun — is that what you mean? Just for fun?”

  “Why this tone of suspicion?” remonstrated Heyst. “I suppose the sight of this particular distress was disagreeable to me. What you call fun came afterwards, when it dawned on me that I was for him a walking, breathing, incarnate proof of the efficacy of prayer. I was a little fascinated by it — and then, could I have argued with him? You don’t argue against such evidence, and besides it would have looked as if I had wanted to claim all the merit. Already his gratitude was simply frightful. Funny position, wasn’t it? The boredom came later, when we lived together on board his ship. I had, in a moment of inadvertence, created for myself a tie. How to define it precisely I don’t know. One gets attached in a way to people one has done something for. But is that friendship? I am not sure what it was. I only know that he who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered into his soul.”

  Heyst’s tone was light, with the flavour of playfulness which seasoned all his speeches and seemed to be of the very essence of his thoughts. The girl he had come across, of whom he had possessed himself, to whose presence he was not yet accustomed, with whom he did not yet know how to live; that human being so near and still so strange, gave him a greater sense of his own reality than he had ever known in all his life.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  With her knees drawn up, Lena rested her elbows on them and held her head in both her hands.

  “Are you tired of sitting here?” Heyst asked.

  An almost imperceptible negative movement of the head was all the answer she made.

  “Why are you looking so serious?” he pursued, and immediately thought that habitual seriousness, in the long run, was much more bearable than constant gaiety. “However, this expression suits you exceedingly,” he added, not diplomatically, but because, by the tendency of his taste, it was a true statement. “And as long as I can be certain that it is not boredom which gives you this severe air, I am willing to sit here and look at you till you are ready to go.”

  And this was true. He was still under the fresh sortilege of their common life, the surprise of novelty, the flattered vanity of his possession of this woman; for a man must feel that, unless he has ceased to be masculine. Her eyes moved in his direction, rested on him, then returned to their stare into the deeper gloom at the foot of the straight tree-trunks, whose spreading crowns were slowly withdrawing their shade. The warm air stirred slightly about her motionless head. She would not look at him, from some obscure fear of betraying herself. She felt in her innermost depths an irresistible desire to give herself up to him more completely, by some act of absolute sacrifice. This was something of which he did not seem to have an idea. He was a strange being without needs. She felt his eyes fixed upon her; and as he kept silent, she said uneasily — for she didn’t know what his silences might mean:

  “And so you lived with that friend — that good man?”

  “Excellent fellow,” Heyst responded, with a readiness that she did not expect. “But it was a weakness on my part. I really didn’t want to, only he wouldn’t let me off, and I couldn’t explain. He was the sort of man to whom you can’t explain anything. He was extremely sensitive, and it would have been a tigerish thing to do to mangle his delicate feelings by the sort of plain speaking that would have been necessary. His mind was like a white-walled, pure chamber, furnished with, say, six straw-bottomed chairs, and he was always placing and displacing them in various combinations. But they were always the same chairs. He was extremely easy to live with; but then he got hold of this coal idea — or, rather, the idea got hold of him, it entered into that scantily furnished chamber of which I have just spoken, and sat on all the chairs. There was no dislodging it, you know! It was going to make his fortune, my fortune, everybody’s fortune. In past years, in moments of doubt that will come to a man determined to remain free from absurdities of existence, I often asked myself, with a momentary dread, in what way would life try to get hold of me? And this was the way. He got it into his head that he could do nothing without me. And was I now, he asked me, to spurn and ruin him? Well, one morning — I wonder if he had gone down on his knees to pray that night! — one morning I gave in.”

  Heyst tugged violently at a tuft of dried grass, and cast it away from him with a nervous gesture.

  “I gave in,” he repeated.

  Looking towards him with a movement of her eyes only, the girl noticed the strong feeling on his face with that intense interest which his person awakened in her mind and in her heart. But it soon passed away, leaving only a moody expression.

  “It’s difficult to resist where nothing matters,” he observed. “And perhaps there is a grain of freakishness in my nature. It amused me to go about uttering silly, commonplace phrases. I was never so well thought of in the islands till I began to jabber commercial gibberish like the veriest idiot. Upon my word, I believe that I was actually respected for a time. I was as grave as an owl over it; I had to be loyal to the man. I have been, from first to last, completely, utterly loyal to the best of my ability. I thought he understood something about coal. And if I had been aware that he knew nothing of it, as in fact he didn’t, well — I don’t know what I could have done to stop him. In one way or another I should have had to be loyal. Truth, work, ambition, love itself, may be only counters in the lamentable or despicable game of life, but when one takes a hand one must play the game. No, the shade of Morrison needn’t haunt me. What’s the matter? I say, Lena, why are you staring like that? Do you feel ill?”

  Heyst made as if to get on his feet. The girl extended her arm to arrest him, and he remained staring in a
sitting posture, propped on one arm, observing her indefinable expression of anxiety, as if she were unable to draw breath.

  “What has come to you?” he insisted, feeling strangely unwilling to move, to touch her.

  “Nothing!” She swallowed painfully. “Of course it can’t be. What name did you say? I didn’t hear it properly.”

  “Name?” repeated Heyst dazedly. “I only mentioned Morrison. It’s the name of that man of whom I’ve been speaking. What of it?”

  “And you mean to say that he was your friend?”

  “You have heard enough to judge for yourself. You know as much of our connection as I know myself. The people in this part of the world went by appearances, and called us friends, as far as I can remember. Appearances — what more, what better can you ask for? In fact you can’t have better. You can’t have anything else.”

  “You are trying to confuse me with your talk,” she cried. “You can’t make fun of this.”

  “Can’t? Well, no I can’t. It’s a pity. Perhaps it would have been the best way,” said Heyst, in a tone which for him could be called gloomy. “Unless one could forget the silly business altogether.” His faint playfulness of manner and speech returned, like a habit one has schooled oneself into, even before his forehead had cleared completely. “But why are you looking so hard at me? Oh, I don’t object, and I shall try not to flinch. Your eyes — ”

  He was looking straight into them, and as a matter of fact had forgotten all about the late Morrison at that moment.

  “No,” he exclaimed suddenly. “What an impenetrable girl you are Lena, with those grey eyes of yours! Windows of the soul, as some poet has said. The fellow must have been a glazier by vocation. Well, nature has provided excellently for the shyness of your soul.”

  When he ceased speaking, the girl came to herself with a catch of her breath. He heard her voice, the varied charm of which he thought he knew so well, saying with an unfamiliar intonation:

  “And that partner of yours is dead?”

  “Morrison? Oh, yes, as I’ve told you, he — ”

  “You never told me.”

  “Didn’t I? I thought I did; or, rather, I thought you must know. It seems impossible that anybody with whom I speak should not know that Morrison is dead.”

  She lowered her eyelids, and Heyst was startled by something like an expression of horror on her face.

  “Morrison!” she whispered in an appalled tone. “Morrison!” Her head drooped. Unable to see her features, Heyst could tell from her voice that for some reason or other she was profoundly moved by the syllables of that unromantic name. A thought flashed through his head — could she have known Morrison? But the mere difference of their origins made it wildly improbable.

  “This is very extraordinary!” he said. “Have you ever heard the name before?”

  Her head moved quickly several times in tiny affirmative nods, as if she could not trust herself to speak, or even to look at him. She was biting her lower lip.

  “Did you ever know anybody of that name?” he asked.

  The girl answered by a negative sign; and then at last she spoke, jerkily, as if forcing herself against some doubt or fear. She had heard of that very man, she told Heyst.

  “Impossible!” he said positively. “You are mistaken. You couldn’t have heard of him, it’s — ”

  He stopped short, with the thought that to talk like this was perfectly useless; that one doesn’t argue against thin air.

  “But I did hear of him; only I didn’t know then, I couldn’t guess, that it was your partner they were talking about.”

  “Talking about my partner?” repeated Heyst slowly.

  “No.” Her mind seemed almost as bewildered, as full of incredulity, as his. “No. They were talking of you really; only I didn’t know it.”

  “Who were they?” Heyst raised his voice. “Who was talking of me? Talking where?”

  With the first question he had lifted himself from his reclining position; at the last he was on his knees before her, their heads on a level.

  “Why, in that town, in that hotel. Where else could it have been?” she said.

  The idea of being talked about was always novel to Heyst’s simplified conception of himself. For a moment he was as much surprised as if he had believed himself to be a mere gliding shadow among men. Besides, he had in him a half-unconscious notion that he was above the level of island gossip.

  “But you said first that it was of Morrison they talked,” he remarked to the girl, sinking on his heels, and no longer much interested. “Strange that you should have the opportunity to hear any talk at all! I was rather under the impression that you never saw anybody belonging to the town except from the platform.”

  “You forget that I was not living with the other girls,” she said. “After meals they used to go back to the Pavilion, but I had to stay in the hotel and do my sewing, or what not, in the room where they talked.”

  “I didn’t think of that. By the by, you never told me who they were.”

  “Why, that horrible red-faced beast,” she said, with all the energy of disgust which the mere thought of the hotel-keeper provoked in her.

  “Oh, Schomberg!” Heyst murmured carelessly.

  “He talked to the boss — to Zangiacomo, I mean. I had to sit there. That devil-woman sometimes wouldn’t let me go away. I mean Mrs. Zangiacomo.”

  “I guessed,” murmured Heyst. “She liked to torment you in a variety of ways. But it is really strange that the hotel-keeper should talk of Morrison to Zangiacomo. As far as I can remember he saw very little of Morrison professionally. He knew many others much better.”

  The girl shuddered slightly.

  “That was the only name I ever overheard. I would get as far away from them as I could, to the other end of the room, but when that beast started shouting I could not help hearing. I wish I had never heard anything. If I had got up and gone out of the room I don’t suppose the woman would have killed me for it; but she would have rowed me in a nasty way. She would have threatened me and called me names. That sort, when they know you are helpless, there’s nothing to stop them. I don’t know how it is, but bad people, real bad people that you can see are bad, they get over me somehow. It’s the way they set about downing one. I am afraid of wickedness.”

  Heyst watched the changing expressions of her face. He encouraged her, profoundly sympathetic, a little amused.

  “I quite understand. You needn’t apologize for your great delicacy in the perception of inhuman evil. I am a little like you.”

  “I am not very plucky,” she said.

  “Well! I don’t know myself what I would do, what countenance I would have before a creature which would strike me as being evil incarnate. Don’t you be ashamed!”

  She sighed, looked up with her pale, candid gaze and a timid expression on her face, and murmured:

  “You don’t seem to want to know what he was saying.”

  “About poor Morrison? It couldn’t have been anything bad, for the poor fellow was innocence itself. And then, you know, he is dead, and nothing can possibly matter to him now.”

  “But I tell you that it was of you he was talking!” she cried.

  “He was saying that Morrison’s partner first got all there was to get out of him, and then, and then — well, as good as murdered him — sent him out to die somewhere!”

  “You believe that of me?” said Heyst, after a moment of perfect silence.

  “I didn’t know it had anything to do with you. Schomberg was talking of some Swede. How was I to know? It was only when you began telling me about how you came here — ”

  “And now you have my version.” Heyst forced himself to speak quietly. “So that’s how the business looked from outside!” he muttered.

  “I remember him saying that everybody in these parts knew the story,” the girl added breathlessly.

  “Strange that it should hurt me!” mused Heyst to himself; “yet it does. I seem to be as much of a fool as th
ose everybodies who know the story and no doubt believe it. Can you remember any more?” he addressed the girl in a grimly polite tone. “I’ve often heard of the moral advantages of seeing oneself as others see one. Let us investigate further. Can’t you recall something else that everybody knows?”

  “Oh! Don’t laugh!” she cried.

  “Did I laugh? I assure you I was not aware of it. I won’t ask you whether you believe the hotel-keeper’s version. Surely you must know the value of human judgement!”

  She unclasped her hands, moved them slightly, and twined her fingers as before. Protest? Assent? Was there to be nothing more? He was relieved when she spoke in that warm and wonderful voice which in itself comforted and fascinated one’s heart, which made her lovable.

  “I heard this before you and I ever spoke to each other. It went out of my memory afterwards. Everything went out of my memory then; and I was glad of it. It was a fresh start for me, with you — and you know it. I wish I had forgotten who I was — that would have been best; and I very nearly did forget.”

  He was moved by the vibrating quality of the last words. She seemed to be talking low of some wonderful enchantment, in mysterious terms of special significance. He thought that if she only could talk to him in some unknown tongue, she would enslave him altogether by the sheer beauty of the sound, suggesting infinite depths of wisdom and feeling.

  “But,” she went on, “the name stuck in my head, it seems; and when you mentioned it — ”

  “It broke the spell,” muttered Heyst in angry disappointment as if he had been deceived in some hope.

  The girl, from her position a little above him, surveyed with still eyes the abstracted silence of the man on whom she now depended with a completeness of which she had not been vividly conscious before, because, till then, she had never felt herself swinging between the abysses of earth and heaven in the hollow of his arm. What if he should grow weary of the burden?

  “And, moreover, nobody had ever believed that tale!”

  Heyst came out with an abrupt burst of sound which made her open her steady eyes wider, with an effect of immense surprise. It was a purely mechanical effect, because she was neither surprised nor puzzled. In fact, she could understand him better then than at any moment since she first set eyes on him.