Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated)

by Joseph Conrad

  “You do not want to go back there again?” she stammered out.

  He laughed a little. “No. That’s the blamed gold country. It gave me the shivers sometimes to look at it — and we were a big lot of men together, mind; but these Gambucinos wandered alone. They knew that country before anybody had ever heard of it. They had a sort of gift for prospecting, and the fever of it was on them too; and they did not seem to want the gold very much. They would find some rich spot, and then turn their backs on it; pick up perhaps a little — enough for a spree — and then be off again, looking for more. They never stopped long where there were houses; they had no wife, no chick, no home, never a chum. You couldn’t be friends with a Gambucino; they were too restless — here to-day, and gone, God knows where, to-morrow. They told no one of their finds, and there has never been a Gambucino well off. It was not for the gold they cared; it was the wandering about looking for it in the stony country that got into them and wouldn’t let them rest; so that no woman yet born could hold a Gambucino for more than a week. That’s what the song says. It’s all about a pretty girl that tried hard to keep hold of a Gambucino lover, so that he should bring her lots of gold. No fear! Off he went, and she never saw him again.”

  “What became of her?” she breathed out.

  “The song don’t tell. Cried a bit, I daresay. They were the fellows: kiss and go. But it’s the looking for a thing — a something... Sometimes I think I am a sort of Gambucino myself.”

  “No woman can hold you, then,” she began in a brazen voice, which quavered suddenly before the end.

  “No longer than a week,” he joked, playing upon her very heartstrings with the gay, tender note of his laugh; “and yet I am fond of them all. Anything for a woman of the right sort. The scrapes they got me into, and the scrapes they got me out of! I love them at first sight. I’ve fallen in love with you already, Miss — Bessie’s your name — eh?”

  She backed away a little, and with a trembling laugh:

  “You haven’t seen my face yet.”

  He bent forward gallantly. “A little pale: it suits some. But you are a fine figure of a girl, Miss Bessie.”

  She was all in a flutter. Nobody had ever said so much to her before.

  His tone changed. “I am getting middling hungry, though. Had no breakfast to-day. Couldn’t you scare up some bread from that tea for me, or — ”

  She was gone already. He had been on the point of asking her to let him come inside. No matter. Anywhere would do. Devil of a fix! What would his chum think?

  “I didn’t ask you as a beggar,” he said, jestingly, taking a piece of bread-and-butter from the plate she held before him. “I asked as a friend. My dad is rich, you know.”

  “He starves himself for your sake.”

  “And I have starved for his whim,” he said, taking up another piece.

  “All he has in the world is for you,” she pleaded.

  “Yes, if I come here to sit on it like a dam’ toad in a hole. Thank you; and what about the shovel, eh? He always had a queer way of showing his love.”

  “I could bring him round in a week,” she suggested, timidly.

  He was too hungry to answer her; and, holding the plate submissively to his hand, she began to whisper up to him in a quick, panting voice. He listened, amazed, eating slower and slower, till at last his jaws stopped altogether. “That’s his game, is it?” he said, in a rising tone of scathing contempt. An ungovernable movement of his arm sent the plate flying out of her fingers. He shot out a violent curse.

  She shrank from him, putting her hand against the wall.

  “No!” he raged. “He expects! Expects me — for his rotten money!... Who wants his home? Mad — not he! Don’t you think. He wants his own way. He wanted to turn me into a miserable lawyer’s clerk, and now he wants to make of me a blamed tame rabbit in a cage. Of me! Of me!” His subdued angry laugh frightened her now.

  “The whole world ain’t a bit too big for me to spread my elbows in, I can tell you — what’s your name — Bessie — let alone a dam’ parlour in a hutch. Marry! He wants me to marry and settle! And as likely as not he has looked out the girl too — dash my soul! And do you know the Judy, may I ask?”

  She shook all over with noiseless dry sobs; but he was fuming and fretting too much to notice her distress. He bit his thumb with rage at the mere idea. A window rattled up.

  “A grinning, information fellow,” pronounced old Hagberd dogmatically, in measured tones. And the sound of his voice seemed to Bessie to make the night itself mad — to pour insanity and disaster on the earth. “Now I know what’s wrong with the people here, my dear. Why, of course! With this mad chap going about. Don’t you have anything to do with him, Bessie. Bessie, I say!”

  They stood as if dumb. The old man fidgeted and mumbled to himself at the window. Suddenly he cried, piercingly: “Bessie — I see you. I’ll tell Harry.”

  She made a movement as if to run away, but stopped and raised her hands to her temples. Young Hagberd, shadowy and big, stirred no more than a man of bronze. Over their heads the crazy night whimpered and scolded in an old man’s voice.

  “Send him away, my dear. He’s only a vagabond. What you want is a good home of your own. That chap has no home — he’s not like Harry. He can’t be Harry. Harry is coming to-morrow. Do you hear? One day more,” he babbled more excitedly; “never you fear — Harry shall marry you.”

  His voice rose very shrill and mad against the regular deep soughing of the swell coiling heavily about the outer face of the sea-wall.

  “He will have to. I shall make him, or if not” — he swore a great oath — ”I’ll cut him off with a shilling to-morrow, and leave everything to you. I shall. To you. Let him starve.”

  The window rattled down.

  Harry drew a deep breath, and took one step toward Bessie. “So it’s you — the girl,” he said, in a lowered voice. She had not moved, and she remained half turned away from him, pressing her head in the palms of her hands. “My word!” he continued, with an invisible half-smile on his lips. “I have a great mind to stop....”

  Her elbows were trembling violently.

  “For a week,” he finished without a pause.

  She clapped her hands to her face.

  He came up quite close, and took hold of her wrists gently. She felt his breath on her ear.

  “It’s a scrape I am in — this, and it is you that must see me through.” He was trying to uncover her face. She resisted. He let her go then, and stepping back a little, “Have you got any money?” he asked. “I must be off now.”

  She nodded quickly her shamefaced head, and he waited, looking away from her, while, trembling all over and bowing her neck, she tried to find the pocket of her dress.

  “Here it is!” she whispered. “Oh, go away! go away for God’s sake! If I had more — more — I would give it all to forget — to make you forget.”

  He extended his hand. “No fear! I haven’t forgotten a single one of you in the world. Some gave me more than money — but I am a beggar now — and you women always had to get me out of my scrapes.”

  He swaggered up to the parlour window, and in the dim light filtering through the blind, looked at the coin lying in his palm. It was a half-sovereign. He slipped it into his pocket. She stood a little on one side, with her head drooping, as if wounded; with her arms hanging passive by her side, as if dead.

  “You can’t buy me in,” he said, “and you can’t buy yourself out.”

  He set his hat firmly with a little tap, and next moment she felt herself lifted up in the powerful embrace of his arms. Her feet lost the ground; her head hung back; he showered kisses on her face with a silent and over-mastering ardour, as if in haste to get at her very soul. He kissed her pale cheeks, her hard forehead, her heavy eyelids, her faded lips; and the measured blows and sighs of the rising tide accompanied the enfolding power of his arms, the overwhelming might of his caresses. It was as if the sea, breaking down the wall protecting all the
homes of the town, had sent a wave over her head. It passed on; she staggered backwards, with her shoulders against the wall, exhausted, as if she had been stranded there after a storm and a shipwreck.

  She opened her eyes after awhile; and listening to the firm, leisurely footsteps going away with their conquest, began to gather her skirts, staring all the time before her. Suddenly she darted through the open gate into the dark and deserted street.

  “Stop!” she shouted. “Don’t go!”

  And listening with an attentive poise of the head, she could not tell whether it was the beat of the swell or his fateful tread that seemed to fall cruelly upon her heart. Presently every sound grew fainter, as though she were slowly turning into stone. A fear of this awful silence came to her — worse than the fear of death. She called upon her ebbing strength for the final appeal:

  “Harry!”

  Not even the dying echo of a footstep. Nothing. The thundering of the surf, the voice of the restless sea itself, seemed stopped. There was not a sound — no whisper of life, as though she were alone and lost in that stony country of which she had heard, where madmen go looking for gold and spurn the find.

  Captain Hagberd, inside his dark house, had kept on the alert. A window ran up; and in the silence of the stony country a voice spoke above her head, high up in the black air — the voice of madness, lies and despair — the voice of inextinguishable hope. “Is he gone yet — that information fellow? Do you hear him about, my dear?”

  She burst into tears. “No! no! no! I don’t hear him any more,” she sobbed.

  He began to chuckle up there triumphantly. “You frightened him away. Good girl. Now we shall be all right. Don’t you be impatient, my dear. One day more.”

  In the other house old Carvil, wallowing regally in his arm-chair, with a globe lamp burning by his side on the table, yelled for her, in a fiendish voice: “Bessie! Bessie! you Bessie!”

  She heard him at last, and, as if overcome by fate, began to totter silently back toward her stuffy little inferno of a cottage. It had no lofty portal, no terrific inscription of forfeited hopes — she did not understand wherein she had sinned.

  Captain Hagberd had gradually worked himself into a state of noisy happiness up there.

  “Go in! Keep quiet!” she turned upon him tearfully, from the doorstep below.

  He rebelled against her authority in his great joy at having got rid at last of that “something wrong.” It was as if all the hopeful madness of the world had broken out to bring terror upon her heart, with the voice of that old man shouting of his trust in an everlasting to-morrow.

  THE END OF THE TETHER

  I

  For a long time after the course of the steamer Sofala had been altered for the land, the low swampy coast had retained its appearance of a mere smudge of darkness beyond a belt of glitter. The sunrays seemed to fall violently upon the calm sea — seemed to shatter themselves upon an adamantine surface into sparkling dust, into a dazzling vapor of light that blinded the eye and wearied the brain with its unsteady brightness.

  Captain Whalley did not look at it. When his Serang, approaching the roomy cane arm-chair which he filled capably, had informed him in a low voice that the course was to be altered, he had risen at once and had remained on his feet, face forward, while the head of his ship swung through a quarter of a circle. He had not uttered a single word, not even the word to steady the helm. It was the Serang, an elderly, alert, little Malay, with a very dark skin, who murmured the order to the helmsman. And then slowly Captain Whalley sat down again in the arm-chair on the bridge and fixed his eyes on the deck between his feet.

  He could not hope to see anything new upon this lane of the sea. He had been on these coasts for the last three years. From Low Cape to Malantan the distance was fifty miles, six hours’ steaming for the old ship with the tide, or seven against. Then you steered straight for the land, and by-and-by three palms would appear on the sky, tall and slim, and with their disheveled heads in a bunch, as if in confidential criticism of the dark mangroves. The Sofala would be headed towards the somber strip of the coast, which at a given moment, as the ship closed with it obliquely, would show several clean shining fractures — the brimful estuary of a river. Then on through a brown liquid, three parts water and one part black earth, on and on between the low shores, three parts black earth and one part brackish water, the Sofala would plow her way up-stream, as she had done once every month for these seven years or more, long before he was aware of her existence, long before he had ever thought of having anything to do with her and her invariable voyages. The old ship ought to have known the road better than her men, who had not been kept so long at it without a change; better than the faithful Serang, whom he had brought over from his last ship to keep the captain’s watch; better than he himself, who had been her captain for the last three years only. She could always be depended upon to make her courses. Her compasses were never out. She was no trouble at all to take about, as if her great age had given her knowledge, wisdom, and steadiness. She made her landfalls to a degree of the bearing, and almost to a minute of her allowed time. At any moment, as he sat on the bridge without looking up, or lay sleepless in his bed, simply by reckoning the days and the hours he could tell where he was — the precise spot of the beat. He knew it well too, this monotonous huckster’s round, up and down the Straits; he knew its order and its sights and its people. Malacca to begin with, in at daylight and out at dusk, to cross over with a rigid phosphorescent wake this highway of the Far East. Darkness and gleams on the water, clear stars on a black sky, perhaps the lights of a home steamer keeping her unswerving course in the middle, or maybe the elusive shadow of a native craft with her mat sails flitting by silently — and the low land on the other side in sight at daylight. At noon the three palms of the next place of call, up a sluggish river. The only white man residing there was a retired young sailor, with whom he had become friendly in the course of many voyages. Sixty miles farther on there was another place of call, a deep bay with only a couple of houses on the beach. And so on, in and out, picking up coastwise cargo here and there, and finishing with a hundred miles’ steady steaming through the maze of an archipelago of small islands up to a large native town at the end of the beat. There was a three days’ rest for the old ship before he started her again in inverse order, seeing the same shores from another bearing, hearing the same voices in the same places, back again to the Sofala’s port of registry on the great highway to the East, where he would take up a berth nearly opposite the big stone pile of the harbor office till it was time to start again on the old round of 1600 miles and thirty days. Not a very enterprising life, this, for Captain Whalley, Henry Whalley, otherwise Dare-devil Harry — Whalley of the Condor, a famous clipper in her day. No. Not a very enterprising life for a man who had served famous firms, who had sailed famous ships (more than one or two of them his own); who had made famous passages, had been the pioneer of new routes and new trades; who had steered across the unsurveyed tracts of the South Seas, and had seen the sun rise on uncharted islands. Fifty years at sea, and forty out in the East (“a pretty thorough apprenticeship,” he used to remark smilingly), had made him honorably known to a generation of shipowners and merchants in all the ports from Bombay clear over to where the East merges into the West upon the coast of the two Americas. His fame remained writ, not very large but plain enough, on the Admiralty charts. Was there not somewhere between Australia and China a Whalley Island and a Condor Reef? On that dangerous coral formation the celebrated clipper had hung stranded for three days, her captain and crew throwing her cargo overboard with one hand and with the other, as it were, keeping off her a flotilla of savage war-canoes. At that time neither the island nor the reef had any official existence. Later the officers of her Majesty’s steam vessel Fusilier, dispatched to make a survey of the route, recognized in the adoption of these two names the enterprise of the man and the solidity of the ship. Besides, as anyone who cares may see, the “General Dir
ectory,” vol. ii. p. 410, begins the description of the “Malotu or Whalley Passage” with the words: “This advantageous route, first discovered in 1850 by Captain Whalley in the ship Condor,” &c., and ends by recommending it warmly to sailing vessels leaving the China ports for the south in the months from December to April inclusive.

  This was the clearest gain he had out of life. Nothing could rob him of this kind of fame. The piercing of the Isthmus of Suez, like the breaking of a dam, had let in upon the East a flood of new ships, new men, new methods of trade. It had changed the face of the Eastern seas and the very spirit of their life; so that his early experiences meant nothing whatever to the new generation of seamen.

  In those bygone days he had handled many thousands of pounds of his employers’ money and of his own; he had attended faithfully, as by law a shipmaster is expected to do, to the conflicting interests of owners, charterers, and underwriters. He had never lost a ship or consented to a shady transaction; and he had lasted well, outlasting in the end the conditions that had gone to the making of his name. He had buried his wife (in the Gulf of Petchili), had married off his daughter to the man of her unlucky choice, and had lost more than an ample competence in the crash of the notorious Travancore and Deccan Banking Corporation, whose downfall had shaken the East like an earthquake. And he was sixty-five years old.

  II

  His age sat lightly enough on him; and of his ruin he was not ashamed. He had not been alone to believe in the stability of the Banking Corporation. Men whose judgment in matters of finance was as expert as his seamanship had commended the prudence of his investments, and had themselves lost much money in the great failure. The only difference between him and them was that he had lost his all. And yet not his all. There had remained to him from his lost fortune a very pretty little bark, Fair Maid, which he had bought to occupy his leisure of a retired sailor — ”to play with,” as he expressed it himself.