For indeed a waxwork figure would have seemed more useful than that woman whom we all were accustomed to see sitting elevated above the two billiard-tables — without expression, without movement, without voice, without sight.
“Why, she helped the girl to bolt,” said Davidson turning at me his innocent eyes, rounded by the state of constant amazement in which this affair had left him, like those shocks of terror or sorrow which sometimes leave their victim afflicted by nervous trembling. It looked as though he would never get over it.
“Mrs. Schomberg jerked Heyst’s note, twisted like a pipe-light, into my lap while I sat there unsuspecting,” Davidson went on. “Directly I had recovered my senses, I asked her what on earth she had to do with it that Heyst should leave it with her. And then, behaving like a painted image rather than a live woman, she whispered, just loud enough for me to hear:
“I helped them. I got her things together, tied them up in my own shawl, and threw them into the compound out of a back window. I did it.”
“That woman that you would say hadn’t the pluck to lift her little finger!” marvelled Davidson in his quiet, slightly panting voice. “What do you think of that?”
I thought she must have had some interest of her own to serve. She was too lifeless to be suspected of impulsive compassion. It was impossible to think that Heyst had bribed her. Whatever means he had, he had not the means to do that. Or could it be that she was moved by that disinterested passion for delivering a woman to a man which in respectable spheres is called matchmaking? — a highly irregular example of it!
“It must have been a very small bundle,” remarked Davidson further.
“I imagine the girl must have been specially attractive,” I said.
“I don’t know. She was miserable. I don’t suppose it was more than a little linen and a couple of those white frocks they wear on the platform.”
Davidson pursued his own train of thought. He supposed that such a thing had never been heard of in the history of the tropics. For where could you find anyone to steal a girl out of an orchestra? No doubt fellows here and there took a fancy to some pretty one — but it was not for running away with her. Oh dear no! It needed a lunatic like Heyst.
“Only think what it means,” wheezed Davidson, imaginative under his invincible placidity. “Just only try to think! Brooding alone on Samburan has upset his brain. He never stopped to consider, or he couldn’t have done it. No sane man . . . How is a thing like that to go on? What’s he going to do with her in the end? It’s madness.”
“You say that he’s mad. Schomberg tells us that he must be starving on his island; so he may end yet by eating her,” I suggested.
Mrs. Schomberg had had no time to enter into details, Davidson told us. Indeed, the wonder was that they had been left alone so long. The drowsy afternoon was slipping by. Footsteps and voices resounded on the veranda — I beg pardon, the piazza; the scraping of chairs, the ping of a smitten bell. Customers were turning up. Mrs. Schomberg was begging Davidson hurriedly, but without looking at him, to say nothing to anyone, when on a half-uttered word her nervous whisper was cut short. Through a small inner door Schomberg came in, his hair brushed, his beard combed neatly, but his eyelids still heavy from his nap. He looked with suspicion at Davidson, and even glanced at his wife; but he was baffled by the natural placidity of the one and the acquired habit of immobility in the other.
“Have you sent out the drinks?” he asked surlily.
She did not open her lips, because just then the head boy appeared with a loaded tray, on his way out. Schomberg went to the door and greeted the customers outside, but did not join them. He remained blocking half the doorway, with his back to the room, and was still there when Davidson, after sitting still for a while, rose to go. At the noise he made Schomberg turned his head, watched him lift his hat to Mrs. Schomberg and receive her wooden bow accompanied by a stupid grin, and then looked away. He was loftily dignified. Davidson stopped at the door, deep in his simplicity.
“I am sorry you won’t tell me anything about my friend’s absence,” he said. “My friend Heyst, you know. I suppose the only course for me now is to make inquiries down at the port. I shall hear something there, I don’t doubt.”
“Make inquiries of the devil!” replied Schomberg in a hoarse mutter.
Davidson’s purpose in addressing the hotel-keeper had been mainly to make Mrs. Schomberg safe from suspicion; but he would fain have heard something more of Heyst’s exploit from another point of view. It was a shrewd try. It was successful in a rather startling way, because the hotel-keeper’s point of view was horribly abusive. All of a sudden, in the same hoarse sinister tone, he proceeded to call Heyst many names, of which “pig-dog” was not the worst, with such vehemence that he actually choked himself. Profiting from the pause, Davidson, whose temperament could withstand worse shocks, remonstrated in an undertone:
“It’s unreasonable to get so angry as that. Even if he had run off with your cash-box — ”
The big hotel-keeper bent down and put his infuriated face close to Davidson’s.
“My cash-box! My — he — look here, Captain Davidson! He ran off with a girl. What do I care for the girl? The girl is nothing to me.”
He shot out an infamous word which made Davidson start. That’s what the girl was; and he reiterated the assertion that she was nothing to him. What he was concerned for was the good name of his house. Wherever he had been established, he had always had “artist parties” staying in his house. One recommended him to the others; but what would happen now, when it got about that leaders ran the risk in his house — his house — of losing members of their troupe? And just now, when he had spent seven hundred and thirty-four guilders in building a concert-hall in his compound. Was that a thing to do in a respectable hotel? The cheek, the indecency, the impudence, the atrocity! Vagabond, impostor, swindler, ruffian, schwein-hund!
He had seized Davidson by a button of his coat, detaining him in the doorway, and exactly in the line of Mrs. Schomberg’s stony gaze. Davidson stole a glance in that direction and thought of making some sort of reassuring sign to her, but she looked so bereft of senses, and almost of life, perched up there, that it seemed not worth while. He disengaged his button with firm placidity. Thereupon, with a last stifled curse, Schomberg vanished somewhere within, to try and compose his spirits in solitude. Davidson stepped out on the veranda. The party of customers there had become aware of the explosive interlude in the doorway. Davidson knew one of these men, and nodded to him in passing; but his acquaintance called out:
“Isn’t he in a filthy temper? He’s been like that ever since.”
The speaker laughed aloud, while all the others sat smiling. Davidson stopped.
“Yes, rather.” His feelings were, he told us, those of bewildered resignation; but of course that was no more visible to the others than the emotions of a turtle when it withdraws into its shell.
“It seems unreasonable,” he murmured thoughtfully.
“Oh, but they had a scrap!” the other said.
“What do you mean? Was there a fight! — a fight with Heyst?” asked Davidson, much perturbed, if somewhat incredulous.
“Heyst? No, these two — the bandmaster, the fellow who’s taking these women about and our Schomberg. Signor Zangiacomo ran amuck in the morning, and went for our worthy friend. I tell you, they were rolling on the floor together on this very veranda, after chasing each other all over the house, doors slamming, women screaming, seventeen of them, in the dining-room; Chinamen up the trees. Hey, John? You climb tree to see the fight, eh?”
The boy, almond-eyed and impassive, emitted a scornful grunt, finished wiping the table, and withdrew.
“That’s what it was — a real, go-as-you-please scrap. And Zangiacomo began it. Oh, here’s Schomberg. Say, Schomberg, didn’t he fly at you, when the girl was missed, because it was you who insisted that the artists should go about the audience during the interval?”
Schomberg ha
d reappeared in the doorway. He advanced. His bearing was stately, but his nostrils were extraordinarily expanded, and he controlled his voice with apparent effort.
“Certainly. That was only business. I quoted him special terms and all for your sake, gentlemen. I was thinking of my regular customers. There’s nothing to do in the evenings in this town. I think, gentlemen, you were all pleased at the opportunity of hearing a little good music; and where’s the harm of offering a grenadine, or what not, to a lady artist? But that fellow — that Swede — he got round the girl. He got round all the people out here. I’ve been watching him for years. You remember how he got round Morrison.”
He changed front abruptly, as if on parade, and marched off. The customers at the table exchanged glances silently. Davidson’s attitude was that of a spectator. Schomberg’s moody pacing of the billiard-room could be heard on the veranda.
“And the funniest part is,” resumed the man who had been speaking before — an English clerk in a Dutch house — ”the funniest part is that before nine o’clock that same morning those two were driving together in a gharry down to the port, to look for Heyst and the girl. I saw them rushing around making inquiries. I don’t know what they would have done to the girl, but they seemed quite ready to fall upon your Heyst, Davidson, and kill him on the quay.”
He had never, he said, seen anything so queer. Those two investigators working feverishly to the same end were glaring at each other with surprising ferocity. In hatred and mistrust they entered a steam-launch, and went flying from ship to ship all over the harbour, causing no end of sensation. The captains of vessels, coming on shore later in the day, brought tales of a strange invasion, and wanted to know who were the two offensive lunatics in a steam-launch, apparently after a man and a girl, and telling a story of which one could make neither head nor tail. Their reception by the roadstead was generally unsympathetic, even to the point of the mate of an American ship bundling them out over the rail with unseemly precipitation.
Meantime Heyst and the girl were a good few miles away, having gone in the night on board one of the Tesman schooners bound to the eastward. This was known afterwards from the Javanese boatmen whom Heyst hired for the purpose at three o’clock in the morning. The Tesman schooner had sailed at daylight with the usual land breeze, and was probably still in sight in the offing at the time. However, the two pursuers after their experience with the American mate, made for the shore. On landing, they had another violent row in the German language. But there was no second fight; and finally, with looks of fierce animosity, they got together into a gharry — obviously with the frugal view of sharing expenses — and drove away, leaving an astonished little crowd of Europeans and natives on the quay.
After hearing this wondrous tale, Davidson went away from the hotel veranda, which was filling with Schomberg’s regular customers. Heyst’s escapade was the general topic of conversation. Never before had that unaccountable individual been the cause of so much gossip, he judged. No! Not even in the beginnings of the Tropical Belt Coal Company when becoming for a moment a public character was he the object of a silly criticism and unintelligent envy for every vagabond and adventurer in the islands. Davidson concluded that people liked to discuss that sort of scandal better than any other.
I asked him if he believed that this was such a great scandal after all.
“Heavens, no!” said that excellent man who, himself, was incapable of any impropriety of conduct. “But it isn’t a thing I would have done myself; I mean even if I had not been married.”
There was no implied condemnation in the statement; rather something like regret. Davidson shared my suspicion that this was in its essence the rescue of a distressed human being. Not that we were two romantics, tingeing the world to the hue of our temperament, but that both of us had been acute enough to discover a long time ago that Heyst was.
“I shouldn’t have had the pluck,” he continued. “I see a thing all round, as it were; but Heyst doesn’t, or else he would have been scared. You don’t take a woman into a desert jungle without being made sorry for it sooner or later, in one way or another; and Heyst being a gentleman only makes it worse.”
CHAPTER SIX
We said no more about Heyst on that occasion, and it so happened that I did not meet Davidson again for some three months. When we did come together, almost the first thing he said to me was:
“I’ve seen him.”
Before I could exclaim, he assured me that he had taken no liberty, that he had not intruded. He was called in. Otherwise he would not have dreamed of breaking in upon Heyst’s privacy.
“I am certain you wouldn’t,” I assured him, concealing my amusement at his wonderful delicacy. He was the most delicate man that ever took a small steamer to and fro among the islands. But his humanity, which was not less strong and praiseworthy, had induced him to take his steamer past Samburan wharf (at an average distance of a mile) every twenty-three days — exactly. Davidson was delicate, humane, and regular.
“Heyst called you in?” I asked, interested.
Yes, Heyst had called him in as he was going by on his usual date. Davidson was examining the shore through his glasses with his unwearied and punctual humanity as he steamed past Samburan.
I saw a man in white. It could only have been Heyst. He had fastened some sort of enormous flag to a bamboo pole, and was waving it at the end of the old wharf.
Davidson didn’t like to take his steamer alongside — for fear of being indiscreet, I suppose; but he steered close inshore, stopped his engines, and lowered a boat. He went himself in that boat, which was manned, of course, by his Malay seamen.
Heyst, when he saw the boat pulling towards him, dropped his signalling-pole; and when Davidson arrived, he was kneeling down engaged busily in unfastening the flag from it.
“Was there anything wrong?” I inquired, Davidson having paused in his narrative and my curiosity being naturally aroused. You must remember that Heyst as the Archipelago knew him was not — what shall I say — was not a signalling sort of man.
“The very words that came out of my mouth,” said Davidson, “before I laid the boat against the piles. I could not help it!”
Heyst got up from his knees and began carefully folding up the flag thing, which struck Davidson as having the dimensions of a blanket.
“No, nothing wrong,” he cried. His white teeth flashed agreeably below the coppery horizontal bar of his long moustaches.
I don’t know whether it was his delicacy or his obesity which prevented Davidson from clambering upon the wharf. He stood up in the boat, and, above him, Heyst stooped low with urbane smiles, thanking him and apologizing for the liberty, exactly in his usual manner. Davidson had expected some change in the man, but there was none. Nothing in him betrayed the momentous fact that within that jungle there was a girl, a performer in a ladies’ orchestra, whom he had carried straight off the concert platform into the wilderness. He was not ashamed or defiant or abashed about it. He might have been a shade confidential when addressing Davidson. And his words were enigmatical.
“I took this course of signalling to you,” he said to Davidson, “because to preserve appearances might be of the utmost importance. Not to me, of course. I don’t care what people may say, and of course no one can hurt me. I suppose I have done a certain amount of harm, since I allowed myself to be tempted into action. It seemed innocent enough, but all action is bound to be harmful. It is devilish. That is why this world is evil upon the whole. But I have done with it! I shall never lift a little finger again. At one time I thought that intelligent observation of facts was the best way of cheating the time which is allotted to us whether we want it or not; but now I, have done with observation, too.”
Imagine poor, simple Davidson being addressed in such terms alongside an abandoned, decaying wharf jutting out of tropical bush. He had never heard anybody speak like this before; certainly not Heyst, whose conversation was concise, polite, with a faint ring of playfulness in the
cultivated tones of his voice.
“He’s gone mad,” Davidson thought to himself.
But, looking at the physiognomy above him on the wharf, he was obliged to dismiss the notion of common, crude lunacy. It was truly most unusual talk. Then he remembered — in his surprise he had lost sight of it — that Heyst now had a girl there. This bizarre discourse was probably the effect of the girl. Davidson shook off the absurd feeling, and asked, wishing to make clear his friendliness, and not knowing what else to say:
“You haven’t run short of stores or anything like that?”
Heyst smiled and shook his head:
“No, no. Nothing of the kind. We are fairly well off here. Thanks, all the same. If I have taken the liberty to detain you, it is not from any uneasiness for myself and my — companion. The person I was thinking of when I made up my mind to invoke your assistance is Mrs. Schomberg.”
“I have talked with her,” interjected Davidson.
“Oh! You? Yes, I hoped she would find means to — ”
“But she didn’t tell me much,” interrupted Davidson, who was not averse from hearing something — he hardly knew what.
“H’m — Yes. But that note of mine? Yes? She found an opportunity to give it to you? That’s good, very good. She’s more resourceful than one would give her credit for.”
“Women often are — ” remarked Davidson. The strangeness from which he had suffered, merely because his interlocutor had carried off a girl, wore off as the minutes went by. “There’s a lot of unexpectedness about women,” he generalized with a didactic aim which seemed to miss its mark; for the next thing Heyst said was:
“This is Mrs. Schomberg’s shawl.” He touched the stuff hanging over his arm. “An Indian thing, I believe,” he added, glancing at his arm sideways.
“It isn’t of particular value,” said Davidson truthfully.
“Very likely. The point is that it belongs to Schomberg’s wife. That Schomberg seems to be an unconscionable ruffian — don’t you think so?”
Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) Page 347