“It’s Wang, beyond a doubt,” he thought, staring into the night. “He has got hold of it for some reason.”
There was nothing to prevent that ghostly Chinaman from materializing suddenly at the foot of the stairs, or anywhere, at any moment, and toppling him over with a dead sure shot. The danger was so irremediable that it was not worth worrying about, any more than the general precariousness of human life. Heyst speculated on this added risk. How long had he been at the mercy of a slender yellow finger on the trigger? That is, if that was the fellow’s reason for purloining the revolver.
“Shoot and inherit,” thought Heyst. “Very simple.” Yet there was in his mind a marked reluctance to regard the domesticated grower of vegetables in the light of a murderer.
“No, it wasn’t that. For Wang could have done it any time this last twelve months or more — ”
Heyst’s mind had worked on the assumption that Wang had possessed himself of the revolver during his own absence from Samburan; but at that period of his speculation his point of view changed. It struck him with the force of manifest certitude that the revolver had been taken only late in the day, or on that very night. Wang, of course. But why? So there had been no danger in the past. It was all ahead.
“He has me at his mercy now,” thought Heyst, without particular excitement.
The sentiment he experienced was curiosity. He forgot himself in it: it was as if he were considering somebody else’s strange predicament. But even that sort of interest was dying out when, looking to his left, he saw the accustomed shapes of the other bungalows looming in the night, and remembered the arrival of the thirsty company in the boat. Wang would hardly risk such a crime in the presence of other white men. It was a peculiar instance of the “safety in numbers,” principle, which somehow was not much to Heyst’s taste.
He went in gloomily, and stood over the empty drawer in deep and unsatisfactory thought. He had just made up his mind that he must breathe nothing of this to the girl, when he heard her voice behind him. She had taken him by surprise, but he resisted the impulse to turn round at once under the impression that she might read his trouble in his face. Yes, she had taken him by surprise, and for that reason the conversation which began was not exactly as he would have conducted it if he had been prepared for her pointblank question. He ought to have said at once: “I’ve missed nothing.” It was a deplorable thing that he should have let it come so far as to have her ask what it was he missed. He closed the conversation by saying lightly:
“It’s an object of very small value. Don’t worry about it — it isn’t worth while. The best you can do is to go and lie down again, Lena.”
Reluctant she turned away, and only in the doorway asked: “And you?”
“I think I shall smoke a cheroot on the veranda. I don’t feel sleepy for the moment.”
“Well, don’t be long.”
He made no answer. She saw him standing there, very still, with a frown on his brow, and slowly dropped the curtain.
Heyst did really light a cheroot before going out again on the veranda. He glanced up from under the low eaves, to see by the stars how the night went on. It was going very slowly. Why it should have irked him he did not know, for he had nothing to expect from the dawn; but everything round him had become unreasonable, unsettled, and vaguely urgent, laying him under an obligation, but giving him no line of action. He felt contemptuously irritated with the situation. The outer world had broken upon him; and he did not know what wrong he had done to bring this on himself, any more than he knew what he had done to provoke the horrible calumny about his treatment of poor Morrison. For he could not forget this. It had reached the ears of one who needed to have the most perfect confidence in the rectitude of his conduct.
“And she only half disbelieves it,” he thought, with hopeless humiliation.
This moral stab in the back seemed to have taken some of his strength from him, as a physical wound would have done. He had no desire to do anything — neither to bring Wang to terms in the matter of the revolver nor to find out from the strangers who they were, and how their predicament had come about. He flung his glowing cigar away into the night. But Samburan was no longer a solitude wherein he could indulge in all his moods. The fiery parabolic path the cast-out stump traced in the air was seen from another veranda at a distance of some twenty yards. It was noted as a symptom of importance by an observer with his faculties greedy for signs, and in a state of alertness tense enough almost to hear the grass grow.
CHAPTER TEN
The observer was Martin Ricardo. To him life was not a matter of passive renunciation, but of a particularly active warfare. He was not mistrustful of it, he was not disgusted with it, still less was he inclined to be suspicious of its disenchantments; but he was vividly aware that it held many possibilities of failure. Though very far from being a pessimist, he was not a man of foolish illusions. He did not like failure, not only because of its unpleasant and dangerous consequences, but also because of its damaging effect upon his own appreciation of Martin Ricardo. And this was a special job, of his own contriving, and of considerable novelty. It was not, so to speak, in his usual line of business — except, perhaps, from a moral standpoint, about which he was not likely to trouble his head. For these reasons Martin Ricardo was unable to sleep.
Mr Jones, after repeated shivering fits, and after drinking much hot tea, had apparently fallen into deep slumber. He had very peremptorily discouraged attempts at conversation on the part of his faithful follower. Ricardo listened to his regular breathing. It was all very well for the governor. He looked upon it as a sort of sport. A gentleman naturally would. But this ticklish and important job had to be pulled off at all costs, both for honour and for safety. Ricardo rose quietly, and made his way on the veranda. He could not lie still. He wanted to go out for air, and he had a feeling that by the force of his eagerness even the darkness and the silence could be made to yield something to his eyes and ears.
He noted the stars, and stepped back again into the dense darkness. He resisted the growing impulse to go out and steal towards the other bungalow. It would have been madness to start prowling in the dark on unknown ground. And for what end? Unless to relieve the oppression. Immobility lay on his limbs like a leaden garment. And yet he was unwilling to give up. He persisted in his objectless vigil. The man of the island was keeping quiet.
It was at that moment that Ricardo’s eyes caught the vanishing red trail of light made by the cigar — a startling revelation of the man’s wakefulness. He could not suppress a low “Hallo!” and began to sidle along towards the door, with his shoulders rubbing the wall. For all he knew, the man might have been out in front by this time, observing the veranda. As a matter of fact, after flinging away the cheroot, Heyst had gone indoors with the feeling of a man who gives up an unprofitable occupation. But Ricardo fancied he could hear faint footfalls on the open ground, and dodged quickly into the room. There he drew breath, and meditated for a while. His next step was to feel for the matches on the tall desk, and to light the candle. He had to communicate to his governor views and reflections of such importance that it was absolutely necessary for him to watch their effect on the very countenance of the hearer. At first he had thought that these matters could have waited till daylight; but Heyst’s wakefulness, disclosed in that startling way, made him feel suddenly certain that there could be no sleep for him that night.
He said as much to his governor. When the little dagger-like flame had done its best to dispel the darkness, Mr. Jones was to be seen reposing on a camp bedstead, in a distant part of the room. A railway rug concealed his spare form up to his very head, which rested on the other railway rug rolled up for a pillow. Ricardo plumped himself down cross-legged on the floor, very close to the low bedstead; so that Mr. Jones — who perhaps had not been so very profoundly asleep — on opening his eyes found them conveniently levelled at the face of his secretary.
“Eh? What is it you say? No sleep for you tonight? But
why can’t you let me sleep? Confound your fussiness!”
“Because that there fellow can’t sleep — that’s why. Dash me if he hasn’t been doing a think just now! What business has he to think in the middle of the night?”
“How do you know?”
“He was out, sir — up in the middle of the night. My own eyes saw it.”
“But how do you know that he was up to think?” inquired Mr. Jones. “It might have been anything — toothache, for instance. And you may have dreamed it for all I know. Didn’t you try to sleep?”
“No, sir. I didn’t even try to go to sleep.”
Ricardo informed his patron of his vigil on the veranda, and of the revelation which put an end to it. He concluded that a man up with a cigar in the middle of the night must be doing a think.
Mr Jones raised himself on his elbow. This sign of interest comforted his faithful henchman.
“Seems to me it’s time we did a little think ourselves,” added Ricardo, with more assurance. Long as they had been together the moods of his governor were still a source of anxiety to his simple soul.
“You are always making a fuss,” remarked Mr. Jones, in a tolerant tone.
“Ay, but not for nothing, am I? You can’t say that, sir. Mine may not be a gentleman’s way of looking round a thing, but it isn’t a fool’s way, either. You’ve admitted that much yourself at odd times.”
Ricardo was growing warmly argumentative. Mr. Jones interrupted him without heat.
“You haven’t roused me to talk about yourself, I presume?”
“No, sir.” Ricardo remained silent for a minute, with the tip of his tongue caught between his teeth. “I don’t think I could tell you anything about myself that you don’t know,” he continued. There was a sort of amused satisfaction in his tone which changed completely as he went on. “It’s that man, over there, that’s got to be talked over. I don’t like him.”
He, failed to observe the flicker of a ghastly smile on his governor’s lips.
“Don’t you?” murmured Mr. Jones, whose face, as he reclined on his elbow, was on a level with the top of his follower’s head.
“No, sir,” said Ricardo emphatically. The candle from the other side of the room threw his monstrous black shadow on the wall. “He — I don’t know how to say it — he isn’t hearty-like.”
Mr Jones agreed languidly in his own manner:
“He seems to be a very self-possessed man.”
“Ay, that’s it. Self — ” Ricardo choked with indignation. “I would soon let out some of his self-possession through a hole between his ribs, if this weren’t a special job!”
Mr Jones had been making his own reflections, for he asked:
“Do you think he is suspicious?”
“I don’t see very well what he can be suspicious of,” pondered Ricardo. “Yet there he was doing a think. And what could be the object of it? What made him get out of his bed in the middle of the night. ‘Tain’t fleas, surely.”
“Bad conscience, perhaps,” suggested Mr. Jones jocularly.
His faithful secretary suffered from irritation, and did not see the joke. In a fretful tone he declared that there was no such thing as conscience. There was such a thing as funk; but there was nothing to make that fellow funky in any special way. He admitted, however, that the man might have been uneasy at the arrival of strangers, because of all that plunder of his put away somewhere.
Ricardo glanced here and there, as if he were afraid of being overheard by the heavy shadows cast by the dim light all over the room. His patron, very quiet, spoke in a calm whisper:
“And perhaps that hotel-keeper has been lying to you about him. He may be a very poor devil indeed.”
Ricardo shook his head slightly. The Schombergian theory of Heyst had become in him a profound conviction, which he had absorbed as naturally as a sponge takes up water. His patron’s doubts were a wanton denying of what was self-evident; but Ricardo’s voice remained as before, a soft purring with a snarling undertone.
“I am sup-prised at you, sir! It’s the very way them tame ones — the common ‘yporcrits of the world — get on. When it comes to plunder drifting under one’s very nose, there’s not one of them that would keep his hands off. And I don’t blame them. It’s the way they do it that sets my back up. Just look at the story of how he got rid of that pal of his! Send a man home to croak of a cold on the chest — that’s one of your tame tricks. And d’you mean to say, sir, that a man that’s up to it wouldn’t bag whatever he could lay his hands in his ‘yporcritical way? What was all that coal business? Tame citizen dodge; ‘yporcrisy — nothing else. No, no, sir! The thing is to extract it from him as neatly as possible. That’s the job; and it isn’t so simple as it looks. I reckon you have looked at it all round, sir, before you took up the notion of this trip.”
“No.” Mr. Jones was hardly audible, staring far away from his couch. “I didn’t think about it much. I was bored.”
“Ay, that you were — bad. I was feeling pretty desperate that afternoon, when that bearded softy of a landlord got talking to me about this fellow here. Quite accidentally, it was. Well, sir, here we are after a mighty narrow squeak. I feel all limp yet; but never mind — his swag will pay for the lot!”
“He’s all alone here,” remarked Mr. Jones in a hollow murmur.
“Ye-es, in a way. Yes, alone enough. Yes, you may say he is.”
“There’s that Chinaman, though.”
“Ay, there’s the Chink,” assented Ricardo rather absentmindedly.
He was debating in his mind the advisability of making a clean breast of his knowledge of the girl’s existence. Finally he concluded he wouldn’t. The enterprise was difficult enough without complicating it with an upset to the sensibilities of the gentleman with whom he had the honour of being associated. Let the discovery come of itself, he thought, and then he could swear that he had known nothing of that offensive presence.
He did not need to lie. He had only to hold his tongue.
“Yes,” he muttered reflectively, “there’s that Chink, certainly.”
At bottom, he felt a certain ambiguous respect for his governor’s exaggerated dislike of women, as if that horror of feminine presence were a sort of depraved morality; but still morality, since he counted it as an advantage. It prevented many undesirable complications. He did not pretend to understand it. He did not even try to investigate this idiosyncrasy of his chief. All he knew was that he himself was differently inclined, and that it did not make him any happier or safer. He did not know how he would have acted if he had been knocking about the world on his own. Luckily he was a subordinate, not a wage-slave but a follower — which was a restraint. Yes! The other sort of disposition simplified matters in general; it wasn’t to be gainsaid. But it was clear that it could also complicate them — as in this most important and, in Ricardo’s view, already sufficiently delicate case. And the worst of it was that one could not tell exactly in what precise manner it would act.
It was unnatural, he thought somewhat peevishly. How was one to reckon up the unnatural? There were no rules for that. The faithful henchman of plain Mr. Jones, foreseeing many difficulties of a material order, decided to keep the girl out of the governor’s knowledge, out of his sight, too, for as long a time as it could be managed. That, alas, seemed to be at most a matter of a few hours; whereas Ricardo feared that to get the affair properly going would take some days. Once well started, he was not afraid of his gentleman failing him. As is often the case with lawless natures, Ricardo’s faith in any given individual was of a simple, unquestioning character. For man must have some support in life.
Cross-legged, his head drooping a little and perfectly still, he might have been meditating in a bonze-like attitude upon the sacred syllable “Om.” It was a striking illustration of the untruth of appearances, for his contempt for the world was of a severely practical kind. There was nothing oriental about Ricardo but the amazing quietness of his pose. Mr. Jones was also very qui
et. He had let his head sink on the rolled-up rug, and lay stretched out on his side with his back to the light. In that position the shadows gathered in the cavities of his eyes made them look perfectly empty. When he spoke, his ghostly voice had only to travel a few inches straight into Ricardo’s left ear.
“Why don’t you say something, now that you’ve got me awake?”
“I wonder if you were sleeping as sound as you are trying to make out, sir,” said the unmoved Ricardo.
“I wonder,” repeated Mr. Jones. “At any rate, I was resting quietly!”
“Come, sir!” Ricardo’s whisper was alarmed. “You don’t mean to say you’re going to be bored?”
“No.”
“Quite right!” The secretary was very much relieved. “There’s no occasion to be, I can tell you, sir,” he whispered earnestly. “Anything but that! If I didn’t say anything for a bit, it ain’t because there isn’t plenty to talk about. Ay, more than enough.”
“What’s the matter with you?” breathed out his patron. “Are you going to turn pessimist?”
“Me turn? No, sir! I ain’t of those that turn. You may call me hard names, if you like, but you know very well that I ain’t a croaker.” Ricardo changed his tone. “If I said nothing for a while, it was because I was meditating over the Chink, sir.”
“You were? Waste of time, my Martin. A Chinaman is unfathomable.”
Ricardo admitted that this might be so. Anyhow, a Chink was neither here nor there, as a general thing, unfathomable as he might be; but a Swedish baron wasn’t — couldn’t be! The woods were full of such barons.
“I don’t know that he is so tame,” was Mr. Jones’s remark, in a sepulchral undertone.
“How do you mean, sir? He ain’t a rabbit, of course. You couldn’t hypnotize him, as I saw you do to more than one Dago, and other kinds of tame citizens, when it came to the point of holding them down to a game.”
Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) Page 365