Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated)

by Joseph Conrad

  “A lady?” said Lingard. “You say there is a lady on board. Are you armed?”

  “Not much,” replied Carter, negligently. “There are a few muskets and two sporting guns aft; that’s about all — I fancy it’s too much, or not enough,” he added with a faint smile.

  Lingard looked at him narrowly.

  “Did you come out from home in that craft?” he asked.

  “Not I! I am not one of them regular yacht hands. I came out of the hospital in Hongkong. I’ve been two years on the China coast.”

  He stopped, then added in an explanatory murmur:

  “Opium clippers — you know. Nothing of brass buttons about me. My ship left me behind, and I was in want of work. I took this job but I didn’t want to go home particularly. It’s slow work after sailing with old Robinson in the Ly-e-moon. That was my ship. Heard of her, Captain?”

  “Yes, yes,” said Lingard, hastily. “Look here, Mr. Carter, which way was your chief officer trying for Singapore? Through the Straits of Rhio?”

  “I suppose so,” answered Carter in a slightly surprised tone; “why do you ask?”

  “Just to know . . . What is it, Mr. Shaw?”

  “There’s a black cloud rising to the northward, sir, and we shall get a breeze directly,” said Shaw from the doorway.

  He lingered there with his eyes fixed on the decanters.

  “Will you have a glass?” said Lingard, leaving his seat. “I will go up and have a look.”

  He went on deck. Shaw approached the table and began to help himself, handling the bottles in profound silence and with exaggerated caution, as if he had been measuring out of fragile vessels a dose of some deadly poison. Carter, his hands in his pockets, and leaning back, examined him from head to foot with a cool stare. The mate of the brig raised the glass to his lips, and glaring above the rim at the stranger, drained the contents slowly.

  “You have a fine nose for finding ships in the dark, Mister,” he said, distinctly, putting the glass on the table with extreme gentleness.

  “Eh? What’s that? I sighted you just after sunset.”

  “And you knew where to look, too,” said Shaw, staring hard.

  “I looked to the westward where there was still some light, as any sensible man would do,” retorted the other a little impatiently. “What are you trying to get at?”

  “And you have a ready tongue to blow about yourself — haven’t you?”

  “Never saw such a man in my life,” declared Carter, with a return of his nonchalant manner. “You seem to be troubled about something.”

  “I don’t like boats to come sneaking up from nowhere in particular, alongside a ship when I am in charge of the deck. I can keep a lookout as well as any man out of home ports, but I hate to be circumvented by muffled oars and such ungentlemanlike tricks. Yacht officer — indeed. These seas must be full of such yachtsmen. I consider you played a mean trick on me. I told my old man there was nothing in sight at sunset — and no more there was. I believe you blundered upon us by chance — for all your boasting about sunsets and bearings. Gammon! I know you came on blindly on top of us, and with muffled oars, too. D’ye call that decent?”

  “If I did muffle the oars it was for a good reason. I wanted to slip past a cove where some native craft were moored. That was common prudence in such a small boat, and not armed — as I am. I saw you right enough, but I had no intention to startle anybody. Take my word for it.”

  “I wish you had gone somewhere else,” growled Shaw. “I hate to be put in the wrong through accident and untruthfulness — there! Here’s my old man calling me — ”

  He left the cabin hurriedly and soon afterward Lingard came down, and sat again facing Carter across the table. His face was grave but resolute.

  “We shall get the breeze directly,” he said.

  “Then, sir,” said Carter, getting up, “if you will give me back that letter I shall go on cruising about here to speak some other ship. I trust you will report us wherever you are going.”

  “I am going to the yacht and I shall keep the letter,” answered Lingard with decision. “I know exactly where she is, and I must go to the rescue of those people. It’s most fortunate you’ve fallen in with me, Mr. Carter. Fortunate for them and fortunate for me,” he added in a lower tone.

  “Yes,” drawled Carter, reflectively. “There may be a tidy bit of salvage money if you should get the vessel off, but I don’t think you can do much. I had better stay out here and try to speak some gunboat — ”

  “You must come back to your ship with me,” said Lingard, authoritatively. “Never mind the gunboats.”

  “That wouldn’t be carrying out my orders,” argued Carter. “I’ve got to speak a homeward-bound ship or a man-of-war — that’s plain enough. I am not anxious to knock about for days in an open boat, but — let me fill my fresh-water breaker, Captain, and I will be off.”

  “Nonsense,” said Lingard, sharply. “You’ve got to come with me to show the place and — and help. I’ll take your boat in tow.”

  Carter did not seem convinced. Lingard laid a heavy hand on his shoulder.

  “Look here, young fellow. I am Tom Lingard and there’s not a white man among these islands, and very few natives, that have not heard of me. My luck brought you into my ship — and now I’ve got you, you must stay. You must!”

  The last “must” burst out loud and sharp like a pistol-shot. Carter stepped back.

  “Do you mean you would keep me by force?” he asked, startled.

  “Force,” repeated Lingard. “It rests with you. I cannot let you speak any vessel. Your yacht has gone ashore in a most inconvenient place — for me; and with your boats sent off here and there, you would bring every infernal gunboat buzzing to a spot that was as quiet and retired as the heart of man could wish. You stranding just on that spot of the whole coast was my bad luck. And that I could not help. You coming upon me like this is my good luck. And that I hold!”

  He dropped his clenched fist, big and muscular, in the light of the lamp on the black cloth, amongst the glitter of glasses, with the strong fingers closed tight upon the firm flesh of the palm. He left it there for a moment as if showing Carter that luck he was going to hold. And he went on:

  “Do you know into what hornet’s nest your stupid people have blundered? How much d’ye think their lives are worth, just now? Not a brass farthing if the breeze fails me for another twenty-four hours. You may well open your eyes. It is so! And it may be too late now, while I am arguing with you here.”

  He tapped the table with his knuckles, and the glasses, waking up, jingled a thin, plaintive finale to his speech. Carter stood leaning against the sideboard. He was amazed by the unexpected turn of the conversation; his jaw dropped slightly and his eyes never swerved for a moment from Lingard’s face. The silence in the cabin lasted only a few seconds, but to Carter, who waited breathlessly, it seemed very long. And all at once he heard in it, for the first time, the cabin clock tick distinctly, in pulsating beats, as though a little heart of metal behind the dial had been started into sudden palpitation.

  “A gunboat!” shouted Lingard, suddenly, as if he had seen only in that moment, by the light of some vivid flash of thought, all the difficulties of the situation. “If you don’t go back with me there will be nothing left for you to go back to — very soon. Your gunboat won’t find a single ship’s rib or a single corpse left for a landmark. That she won’t. It isn’t a gunboat skipper you want. I am the man you want. You don’t know your luck when you see it, but I know mine, I do — and — look here — ”

  He touched Carter’s chest with his forefinger, and said with a sudden gentleness of tone:

  “I am a white man inside and out; I won’t let inoffensive people — and a woman, too — come to harm if I can help it. And if I can’t help, nobody can. You understand — nobody! There’s no time for it. But I am like any other man that is worth his salt: I won’t let the end of an undertaking go by the board while there is a chance to ho
ld on — and it’s like this — ”

  His voice was persuasive — almost caressing; he had hold now of a coat button and tugged at it slightly as he went on in a confidential manner:

  “As it turns out, Mr. Carter, I would — in a manner of speaking — I would as soon shoot you where you stand as let you go to raise an alarm all over this sea about your confounded yacht. I have other lives to consider — and friends — and promises — and — and myself, too. I shall keep you,” he concluded, sharply.

  Carter drew a long breath. On the deck above, the two men could hear soft footfalls, short murmurs, indistinct words spoken near the skylight. Shaw’s voice rang out loudly in growling tones:

  “Furl the royals, you tindal!”

  “It’s the queerest old go,” muttered Carter, looking down on to the floor. “You are a strange man. I suppose I must believe what you say — unless you and that fat mate of yours are a couple of escaped lunatics that got hold of a brig by some means. Why, that chap up there wanted to pick a quarrel with me for coming aboard, and now you threaten to shoot me rather than let me go. Not that I care much about that; for some time or other you would get hanged for it; and you don’t look like a man that will end that way. If what you say is only half true, I ought to get back to the yacht as quick as ever I can. It strikes me that your coming to them will be only a small mercy, anyhow — and I may be of some use — But this is the queerest. . . . May I go in my boat?”

  “As you like,” said Lingard. “There’s a rain squall coming.”

  “I am in charge and will get wet along of my chaps. Give us a good long line, Captain.”

  “It’s done already,” said Lingard. “You seem a sensible sailorman and can see that it would be useless to try and give me the slip.”

  “For a man so ready to shoot, you seem very trustful,” drawled Carter. “If I cut adrift in a squall, I stand a pretty fair chance not to see you again.”

  “You just try,” said Lingard, drily. “I have eyes in this brig, young man, that will see your boat when you couldn’t see the ship. You are of the kind I like, but if you monkey with me I will find you — and when I find you I will run you down as surely as I stand here.”

  Carter slapped his thigh and his eyes twinkled.

  “By the Lord Harry!” he cried. “If it wasn’t for the men with me, I would try for sport. You are so cocksure about the lot you can do, Captain. You would aggravate a saint into open mutiny.”

  His easy good humour had returned; but after a short burst of laughter, he became serious.

  “Never fear,” he said, “I won’t slip away. If there is to be any throat-cutting — as you seem to hint — mine will be there, too, I promise you, and. . . .”

  He stretched his arms out, glanced at them, shook them a little.

  “And this pair of arms to take care of it,” he added, in his old, careless drawl.

  But the master of the brig sitting with both his elbows on the table, his face in his hands, had fallen unexpectedly into a meditation so concentrated and so profound that he seemed neither to hear, see, nor breathe. The sight of that man’s complete absorption in thought was to Carter almost more surprising than any other occurrence of that night. Had his strange host vanished suddenly from before his eyes, it could not have made him feel more uncomfortably alone in that cabin where the pertinacious clock kept ticking off the useless minutes of the calm before it would, with the same steady beat, begin to measure the aimless disturbance of the storm.

  III

  After waiting a moment, Carter went on deck. The sky, the sea, the brig itself had disappeared in a darkness that had become impenetrable, palpable, and stifling. An immense cloud had come up running over the heavens, as if looking for the little craft, and now hung over it, arrested. To the south there was a livid trembling gleam, faint and sad, like a vanishing memory of destroyed starlight. To the north, as if to prove the impossible, an incredibly blacker patch outlined on the tremendous blackness of the sky the heart of the coming squall. The glimmers in the water had gone out and the invisible sea all around lay mute and still as if it had died suddenly of fright.

  Carter could see nothing. He felt about him people moving; he heard them in the darkness whispering faintly as if they had been exchanging secrets important or infamous. The night effaced even words, and its mystery had captured everything and every sound — had left nothing free but the unexpected that seemed to hover about one, ready to stretch out its stealthy hand in a touch sudden, familiar, and appalling. Even the careless disposition of the young ex-officer of an opium-clipper was affected by the ominous aspect of the hour. What was this vessel? What were those people? What would happen to-morrow? To the yacht? To himself? He felt suddenly without any additional reason but the darkness that it was a poor show, anyhow, a dashed poor show for all hands. The irrational conviction made him falter for a second where he stood and he gripped the slide of the companionway hard.

  Shaw’s voice right close to his ear relieved and cleared his troubled thoughts.

  “Oh! it’s you, Mister. Come up at last,” said the mate of the brig slowly. “It appears we’ve got to give you a tow now. Of all the rum incidents, this beats all. A boat sneaks up from nowhere and turns out to be a long-expected friend! For you are one of them friends the skipper was going to meet somewhere here. Ain’t you now? Come! I know more than you may think. Are we off to — you may just as well tell — off to — h’m ha . . . you know?”

  “Yes. I know. Don’t you?” articulated Carter, innocently.

  Shaw remained very quiet for a minute.

  “Where’s my skipper?” he asked at last.

  “I left him down below in a kind of trance. Where’s my boat?”

  “Your boat is hanging astern. And my opinion is that you are as uncivil as I’ve proved you to be untruthful. Egzz-actly.”

  Carter stumbled toward the taffrail and in the first step he made came full against somebody who glided away. It seemed to him that such a night brings men to a lower level. He thought that he might have been knocked on the head by anybody strong enough to lift a crow-bar. He felt strangely irritated. He said loudly, aiming his words at Shaw whom he supposed somewhere near:

  “And my opinion is that you and your skipper will come to a sudden bad end before — ”

  “I thought you were in your boat. Have you changed your mind?” asked Lingard in his deep voice close to Carter’s elbow.

  Carter felt his way along the rail, till his hand found a line that seemed, in the calm, to stream out of its own accord into the darkness. He hailed his boat, and directly heard the wash of water against her bows as she was hauled quickly under the counter. Then he loomed up shapeless on the rail, and the next moment disappeared as if he had fallen out of the universe. Lingard heard him say:

  “Catch hold of my leg, John.” There were hollow sounds in the boat; a voice growled, “All right.”

  “Keep clear of the counter,” said Lingard, speaking in quiet warning tones into the night. “The brig may get a lot of sternway on her should this squall not strike her fairly.”

  “Aye, aye. I will mind,” was the muttered answer from the water.

  Lingard crossed over to the port side, and looked steadily at the sooty mass of approaching vapours. After a moment he said curtly, “Brace up for the port tack, Mr. Shaw,” and remained silent, with his face to the sea. A sound, sorrowful and startling like the sigh of some immense creature, travelling across the starless space, passed above the vertical and lofty spars of the motionless brig.

  It grew louder, then suddenly ceased for a moment, and the taut rigging of the brig was heard vibrating its answer in a singing note to this threatening murmur of the winds. A long and slow undulation lifted the level of the waters, as if the sea had drawn a deep breath of anxious suspense. The next minute an immense disturbance leaped out of the darkness upon the sea, kindling upon it a livid clearness of foam, and the first gust of the squall boarded the brig in a stinging flick of rain an
d spray. As if overwhelmed by the suddenness of the fierce onset, the vessel remained for a second upright where she floated, shaking with tremendous jerks from trucks to keel; while high up in the night the invisible canvas was heard rattling and beating about violently.

  Then, with a quick double report, as of heavy guns, both topsails filled at once and the brig fell over swiftly on her side. Shaw was thrown headlong against the skylight, and Lingard, who had encircled the weather rail with his arm, felt the vessel under his feet dart forward smoothly, and the deck become less slanting — the speed of the brig running off a little now, easing the overturning strain of the wind upon the distended surfaces of the sails. It was only the fineness of the little vessel’s lines and the perfect shape of her hull that saved the canvas, and perhaps the spars, by enabling the ready craft to get way upon herself with such lightning-like rapidity. Lingard drew a long breath and yelled jubilantly at Shaw who was struggling up against wind and rain to his commander’s side.

  “She’ll do. Hold on everything.”

  Shaw tried to speak. He swallowed great mouthfuls of tepid water which the wind drove down his throat. The brig seemed to sail through undulating waves that passed swishing between the masts and swept over the decks with the fierce rush and noise of a cataract. From every spar and every rope a ragged sheet of water streamed flicking to leeward. The overpowering deluge seemed to last for an age; became unbearable — and, all at once, stopped. In a couple of minutes the shower had run its length over the brig and now could be seen like a straight grey wall, going away into the night under the fierce whispering of dissolving clouds. The wind eased. To the northward, low down in the darkness, three stars appeared in a row, leaping in and out between the crests of waves like the distant heads of swimmers in a running surf; and the retreating edge of the cloud, perfectly straight from east to west, slipped along the dome of the sky like an immense hemispheric, iron shutter pivoting down smoothly as if operated by some mighty engine. An inspiring and penetrating freshness flowed together with the shimmer of light, through the augmented glory of the heaven, a glory exalted, undimmed, and strangely startling as if a new world had been created during the short flight of the stormy cloud. It was a return to life, a return to space; the earth coming out from under a pall to take its place in the renewed and immense scintillation of the universe.