Victory (Dover Thrift Editions)

by Joseph Conrad

  Schomberg came in, silk dress, long neck, ringlets, scared eyes, and silly grin—all

  complete. Probably that lazy beast had sent her out to see who was the thirsty

  customer waking up the echoes of the house at this quiet hour. Bow, nod—and she

  clambered up to her post behind the raised counter, looking so helpless, so inane, as

  she sat there, that if it hadn't been for the parcel, Davidson declared, he would have

  thought he had merely dreamed all that had passed between them. He ordered

  another drink, to get the Chinaman out of the room, and then seized the parcel,

  which was reposing on a chair near him, and with no more than a mutter—"this is

  something of yours"—he rammed it swiftly into a recess in the counter, at her feet.

  There! The rest was her affair. And just in time, too. Schomberg turned up,

  yawning affectedly, almost before Davidson had regained his seat. He cast about

  suspicious and irate glances. An invincible placidity of expression helped Davidson

  wonderfully at the moment, and the other, of course, could have no grounds for the

  slightest suspicion of any sort of understanding between his wife and this customer.

  As to Mrs. Schomberg, she sat there like a joss. Davidson was lost in admiration.

  He believed, now, that the woman had been putting it on for years. She never even

  winked. It was immense! The insight he had obtained almost frightened him; he

  couldn't get over his wonder at knowing more of the real Mrs. Schomberg than

  anybody in the Islands, including Schomberg himself. She was a miracle of

  dissimulation. No wonder Heyst got the girl away from under two men's noses, if

  he had her to help with the job!

  The greatest wonder, after all, was Heyst getting mixed up with petticoats. The

  fellow's life had been open to us for years and nothing could have been more

  detached from feminine associations. Except that he stood drinks to people on

  suitable occasions, like any other man, this observer of facts seemed to have no

  connection with earthly affairs and passions. The very courtesy of his manner, the

  flavour of playfulness in the voice set him apart. He was like a feather floating

  lightly in the workaday atmosphere which was the breath of our nostrils. For this

  reason whenever this looker-on took contact with things he attracted attention.

  First, it was the Morrison partnership of mystery, then came the great sensation of

  the Tropical Belt Coal where indeed varied interests were involved: a real business

  matter. And then came this elopement, this incongruous phenomenon of self-

  assertion, the greatest wonder of all, astonishing and amusing.

  Davidson admitted to me that, the hubbub was subsiding; and the affair would

  have been already forgotten, perhaps, if that ass Schomberg had not kept on

  gnashing his teeth publicly about it. It was really provoking that Davidson should

  not be able to give one some idea of the girl. Was she pretty? He didn't know. He

  had stayed the whole afternoon in Schomberg's hotel, mainly for the purpose of

  finding out something about her. But the story was growing stale. The parties at the

  tables on the veranda had other, fresher, events to talk about and Davidson shrank

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  from making direct inquiries. He sat placidly there, content to be disregarded and

  hoping for some chance word to turn up. I shouldn't wonder if the good fellow

  hadn't been dozing. It's difficult to give you an adequate idea of Davidson's

  placidity.

  Presently Schomberg, wandering about, joined a party that had taken the table

  next to Davidson's.

  "A man like that Swede, gentlemen, is a public danger," he began. "I remember

  him for years. I won't say anything of his spying—well, he used to say himself he

  was looking for out-of-the-way facts and what is that if not spying? He was spying

  into everybody's business. He got hold of Captain Morrison, squeezed him dry, like

  you would an orange, and scared him off to Europe to die there. Everybody knows

  that Captain Morrison had a weak chest. Robbed first and murdered afterwards! I

  don't mince words—not I. Next he gets up that swindle of the Belt Coal. You know

  all about it. And now, after lining his pockets with other people's money, he

  kidnaps a white girl belonging to an orchestra which is performing in my public

  room for the benefit of my patrons, and goes off to live like a prince on that island,

  where nobody can get at him. A damn silly girl . . . It's disgusting—tfui!"

  He spat. He choked with rage—for he saw visions, no doubt. He jumped up from

  his chair, and went away to flee from them—perhaps. He went into the room where

  Mrs. Schomberg sat. Her aspect could not have been very soothing to the sort of

  torment from which he was suffering.

  Davidson did not feel called upon to defend Heyst. His proceeding was to enter

  into conversation with one and another, casually, and showing no particular

  knowledge of the affair, in order to discover something about the girl. Was she

  anything out of the way? Was she pretty? She couldn't have been markedly so. She

  had not attracted special notice. She was young—on that everybody agreed. The

  English clerk of Tesmans remembered that she had a sallow face. He was

  respectable and highly proper. He was not the sort to associate with such people.

  Most of these women were fairly battered specimens. Schomberg had them housed

  in what he called the Pavilion, in the grounds, where they were hard at it mending

  and washing their white dresses, and could be seen hanging them out to dry

  between the trees, like a lot of washerwomen. They looked very much like middle-

  aged washerwomen on the platform, too. But the girl had been living in the main

  building along with the boss, the director, the fellow with the black beard, and a

  hard-bitten, oldish woman who took the piano and was understood to be the

  fellow's wife.

  This was not a very satisfactory result. Davidson stayed on, and even joined the

  table d'hote dinner, without gleaning any more information. He was resigned.

  "I suppose," he wheezed placidly, "I am bound to see her some day."

  He meant to take the Samburan channel every trip, as before of course.

  "Yes," I said. "No doubt you will. Some day Heyst will be signalling to you

  again; and I wonder what it will be for."

  Davidson made no reply. He had his own ideas about that, and his silence

  concealed a good deal of thought. We spoke no more of Heyst's girl. Before we

  separated, he gave me a piece of unrelated observation.

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  "It's funny," he said, "but I fancy there's some gambling going on in the evening

  at Schomberg's place, on the quiet. I've noticed men strolling away in twos and

  threes towards that hall where the orchestra used to play. The windows must be

  specially well shuttered, because I could not spy the smallest gleam of light from

  that direction; but I can't believe that those beggars would go in there only to sit

  and think of their sins in the dark."


  "That's strange. It's incredible that Schomberg should risk that sort of thing," I

  said.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER ONE

  As we know, Heyst had gone to stay in Schomberg's hotel in complete ignorance

  that his person was odious to that worthy. When he arrived, Zangiacomo's Ladies'

  Orchestra had been established there for some time.

  The business which had called him out from his seclusion in his lost corner of

  the Eastern seas was with the Tesmans, and it had something to do with money. He

  transacted it quickly, and then found himself with nothing to do while he awaited

  Davidson, who was to take him back to his solitude; for back to his solitude Heyst

  meant to go. He whom we used to refer to as the Enchanted Heyst was suffering

  from thorough disenchantment. Not with the islands, however. The Archipelago

  has a lasting fascination. It is not easy to shake off the spell of island life. Heyst

  was disenchanted with life as a whole. His scornful temperament, beguiled into

  action, suffered from failure in a subtle way unknown to men accustomed to

  grapple with the realities of common human enterprise. It was like the gnawing

  pain of useless apostasy, a sort of shame before his own betrayed nature; and in

  addition, he also suffered from plain, downright remorse. He deemed himself guilty

  of Morrison's death. A rather absurd feeling, since no one could possibly have

  foreseen the horrors of the cold, wet summer lying in wait for poor Morrison at

  home.

  It was not in Heyst's character to turn morose; but his mental state was not

  compatible with a sociable mood. He spent his evenings sitting apart on the

  veranda of Schomberg's hotel. The lamentations of string instruments issued from

  the building in the hotel compound, the approaches to which were decorated with

  Japanese paper lanterns strung up between the trunks of several big trees. Scraps of

  tunes more or less plaintive reached his ears. They pursued him even into his

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  bedroom, which opened into an upstairs veranda. The fragmentary and rasping

  character of these sounds made their intrusion inexpressibly tedious in the long run.

  Like most dreamers, to whom it is given sometimes to hear the music of the

  spheres, Heyst, the wanderer of the Archipelago, had a taste for silence which he

  had been able to gratify for years. The islands are very quiet. One sees them lying

  about, clothed in their dark garments of leaves, in a great hush of silver and azure,

  where the sea without murmurs meets the sky in a ring of magic stillness. A sort of

  smiling somnolence broods over them; the very voices of their people are soft and

  subdued, as if afraid to break some protecting spell.

  Perhaps this was the very spell which had enchanted Heyst in the early days. For

  him, however, that was broken. He was no longer enchanted, though he was still a

  captive of the islands. He had no intention to leave them ever. Where could he have

  gone to, after all these years? Not a single soul belonging to him lived anywhere on

  earth. Of this fact—not such a remote one, after all—he had only lately become

  aware; for it is failure that makes a man enter into himself and reckon up his

  resources. And though he had made up his mind to retire from the world in hermit

  fashion, yet he was irrationally moved by this sense of loneliness which had come

  to him in the hour of renunciation. It hurt him. Nothing is more painful than the

  shock of sharp contradictions that lacerate our intelligence and our feelings.

  Meantime Schomberg watched Heyst out of the corner of his eye. Towards the

  unconscious object of his enmity he preserved a distant lieutenant-of-the-Reserve

  demeanour. Nudging certain of his customers with his elbow, he begged them to

  observe what airs "that Swede" was giving himself.

  "I really don't know why he has come to stay in my house. This place isn't good

  enough for him. I wish to goodness he had gone somewhere else to show off his

  superiority. Here I have got up this series of concerts for you gentlemen, just to

  make things a little brighter generally; and do you think he'll condescend to step in

  and listen to a piece or two of an evening? Not he. I know him of old. There he sits

  at the dark end of the piazza, all the evening long—planning some new swindle, no

  doubt. For two-pence I would ask him to go and look for quarters somewhere else;

  only one doesn't like to treat a white man like that out in the tropics. I don't know

  how long he means to stay, but I'm willing to bet a trifle that he'll never work

  himself up to the point of spending the fifty cents of entrance money for the sake of

  a little good music."

  Nobody cared to bet, or the hotel-keeper would have lost. One evening Heyst

  was driven to desperation by the rasped, squeaked, scraped snatches of tunes

  pursuing him even to his hard couch, with a mattress as thin as a pancake and a

  diaphanous mosquito net. He descended among the trees, where the soft glow of

  Japanese lanterns picked out parts of their great rugged trunks, here and there, in

  the great mass of darkness under the lofty foliage. More lanterns, of the shape of

  cylindrical concertinas, hanging in a row from a slack string, decorated the

  doorway of what Schomberg called grandiloquently "my concert-hall." In his

  desperate mood Heyst ascended three steps, lifted a calico curtain, and went in.

  The uproar in that small, barn-like structure, built of imported pine boards, and

  raised clear of the ground, was simply stunning. An instrumental uproar,

  screaming, grunting, whining, sobbing, scraping, squeaking some kind of lively air;

  while a grand piano, operated upon by a bony, red-faced woman with bad-tempered

  nostrils, rained hard notes like hail through the tempest of fiddles. The small

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  platform was filled with white muslin dresses and crimson sashes slanting from

  shoulders provided with bare arms, which sawed away without respite.

  Zangiacomo conducted. He wore a white mess-jacket, a black dress waistcoat, and

  white trousers. His longish, tousled hair and his great beard were purple-black. He

  was horrible. The heat was terrific. There were perhaps thirty people having drinks

  at several little tables. Heyst, quite overcome by the volume of noise, dropped into

  a chair. In the quick time of that music, in the varied, piercing clamour of the

  strings, in the movements of the bare arms, in the low dresses, the coarse faces, the

  stony eyes of the executants, there was a suggestion of brutality—something cruel,

  sensual and repulsive.

  "This is awful!" Heyst murmured to himself.

  But there is an unholy fascination in systematic noise. He did not flee from it

  incontinently, as one might have expected him to do. He remained, astonished at

  himself for remaining, since nothing could have been more repulsive to his tastes,

  more painful to his senses, and, so to speak, more contrary to his genius, than this

  rude exhibition of vigour. The
Zangiacomo band was not making music; it was

  simply murdering silence with a vulgar, ferocious energy. One felt as if witnessing

  a deed of violence; and that impression was so strong that it seemed marvellous to

  see the people sitting so quietly on their chairs, drinking so calmly out of their

  glasses, and giving no signs of distress, anger, or fear. Heyst averted his gaze from

  the unnatural spectacle of their indifference.

  When the piece of music came to an end the relief was so great that he felt

  slightly dizzy, as if a chasm of silence had yawned at his feet. When he raised his

  eyes, the audience, most perversely, was exhibiting signs of animation and interest

  in their faces, and the women in white muslin dresses were coming down in pairs

  from the platform into the body of Schomberg's "concert-hall." They dispersed

  themselves all over the place. The male creature with the hooked nose and purple-

  black beard disappeared somewhere. This was the interval during which, as the

  astute Schomberg had stipulated, the members of the orchestra were encouraged to

  favour the members of the audience with their company—that is, such members as

  seemed inclined to fraternize with the arts in a familiar and generous manner; the

  symbol of familiarity and generosity consisting in offers of refreshment.

  The procedure struck Heyst as highly incorrect. However, the impropriety of

  Schomberg's ingenious scheme was defeated by the circumstance that most of the

  women were no longer young, and that none of them had ever been beautiful. Their

  more or less worn checks were slightly rouged, but apart from that fact, which

  might have been simply a matter of routine, they did not seem to take the success of

  the scheme unduly to heart. The impulse to fraternize with the arts being obviously

  weak in the audience, some of the musicians sat down listlessly at unoccupied

  tables, while others went on perambulating the central passage: arm in arm, glad

  enough, no doubt, to stretch their legs while resting their arms. Their crimson

  sashes gave a factitious touch of gaiety to the smoky atmosphere of the concert-

  hall; and Heyst felt a sudden pity for these beings, exploited, hopeless, devoid of

  charm and grace, whose fate of cheerless dependence invested their coarse and