'Twixt Land & Sea
by
Joseph Conrad
Part 4 out of 5
CHAPTER IV
I suppose praiseworthy motives are a sufficient justification
almost for anything. What could be more commendable in the
abstract than a girl's determination that "poor papa" should not be
worried, and her anxiety that the man of her choice should be kept
by any means from every occasion of doing something rash, something
which might endanger the whole scheme of their happiness?
Nothing could be more tender and more prudent. We must also
remember the girl's self-reliant temperament, and the general
unwillingness of women--I mean women of sense--to make a fuss over
matters of that sort.
As has been said already, Heemskirk turned up some time after
Jasper's arrival at Nelson's Cove. The sight of the brig lying
right under the bungalow was very offensive to him. He did not fly
ashore before his anchor touched the ground as Jasper used to do.
On the contrary, he hung about his quarter-deck mumbling to
himself; and when he ordered his boat to be manned it was in an
angry voice. Freya's existence, which lifted Jasper out of himself
into a blissful elation, was for Heemskirk a cause of secret
torment, of hours of exasperated brooding.
While passing the brig he hailed her harshly and asked if the
master was on board. Schultz, smart and neat in a spotless white
suit, leaned over the taffrail, finding the question somewhat
amusing. He looked humorously down into Heemskirk's boat, and
answered, in the most amiable modulations of his beautiful voice:
"Captain Allen is up at the house, sir." But his expression
changed suddenly at the savage growl: "What the devil are you
grinning at?" which acknowledged that information.
He watched Heemskirk land and, instead of going to the house,
stride away by another path into the grounds.
The desire-tormented Dutchman found old Nelson (or Nielsen) at his
drying-sheds, very busy superintending the manipulation of his
tobacco crop, which, though small, was of excellent quality, and
enjoying himself thoroughly. But Heemskirk soon put a stop to this
simple happiness. He sat down by the old chap, and by the sort of
talk which he knew was best calculated for the purpose, reduced him
before long to a state of concealed and perspiring nervousness. It
was a horrid talk of "authorities," and old Nelson tried to defend
himself. If he dealt with English traders it was because he had to
dispose of his produce somehow. He was as conciliatory as he knew
how to be, and this very thing seemed to excite Heemskirk, who had
worked himself up into a heavily breathing state of passion.
"And the worst of them all is that Allen," he growled. "Your
particular friend--eh? You have let in a lot of these Englishmen
into this part. You ought never to have been allowed to settle
here. Never. What's he doing here now?"
Old Nelson (or Nielsen), becoming very agitated, declared that
Jasper Allen was no particular friend of his. No friend at all--at
all. He had bought three tons of rice from him to feed his
workpeople on. What sort of evidence of friendship was that?
Heemskirk burst out at last with the thought that had been gnawing
at his vitals:
"Yes. Sell three tons of rice and flirt three days with that girl
of yours. I am speaking to you as a friend, Nielsen. This won't
do. You are only on sufferance here."
Old Nelson was taken aback at first, but recovered pretty quickly.
Won't do! Certainly! Of course, it wouldn't do! The last man in
the world. But his girl didn't care for the fellow, and was too
sensible to fall in love with any one. He was very earnest in
impressing on Heemskirk his own feeling of absolute security. And
the lieutenant, casting doubting glances sideways, was yet willing
to believe him.
"Much you know about it," he grunted nevertheless.
"But I do know," insisted old Nelson, with the greater desperation
because he wanted to resist the doubts arising in his own mind.
"My own daughter! In my own house, and I not to know! Come! It
would be a good joke, lieutenant."
"They seem to be carrying on considerably," remarked Heemskirk
moodily. "I suppose they are together now," he added, feeling a
pang which changed what he meant for a mocking smile into a strange
grimace.
The harassed Nelson shook his hand at him. He was at bottom
shocked at this insistence, and was even beginning to feel annoyed
at the absurdity of it.
"Pooh! Pooh! I'll tell you what, lieutenant: you go to the house
and have a drop of gin-and-bitters before dinner. Ask for Freya.
I must see the last of this tobacco put away for the night, but
I'll be along presently."
Heemskirk was not insensible to this suggestion. It answered to
his secret longing, which was not a longing for drink, however.
Old Nelson shouted solicitously after his broad back a
recommendation to make himself comfortable, and that there was a
box of cheroots on the verandah.
It was the west verandah that old Nelson meant, the one which was
the living-room of the house, and had split-rattan screens of the
very finest quality. The east verandah, sacred to his own privacy,
puffing out of cheeks, and other signs of perplexed thinking, was
fitted with stout blinds of sailcloth. The north verandah was not
a verandah at all, really. It was more like a long balcony. It
did not communicate with the other two, and could only be
approached by a passage inside the house. Thus it had a privacy
which made it a convenient place for a maiden's meditations without
words, and also for the discourses, apparently without sense,
which, passing between a young man and a maid, become pregnant with
a diversity of transcendental meanings.
This north verandah was embowered with climbing plants. Freya,
whose room opened out on it, had furnished it as a sort of boudoir
for herself, with a few cane chairs and a sofa of the same kind.
On this sofa she and Jasper sat as close together as is possible in
this imperfect world where neither can a body be in two places at
once nor yet two bodies can be in one place at the same time. They
had been sitting together all the afternoon, and I won't say that
their talk had been without sense. Loving him with a little
judicious anxiety lest in his elation he should break his heart
over some mishap, Freya naturally would talk to him soberly. He,
nervous and brusque when away from her, appeared always as if
overcome by her visibility, by the great wonder of being palpably
loved. An old man's child, having lost his mother early, thrown
out to sea out of the way while very young, he had not much
experience of tenderness of any kind.
In this private, foliage-embowered verandah, and at this late hour
of the afternoon, he bent down a little, and, possessing himself of
Freya's hands, was kissing them one after another, while she smiled
and looked down at his head with the eyes of approving compassion.
At that same moment Heemskirk was approaching the house from the
north.
Antonia was on the watch on that side. But she did not keep a very
good watch. The sun was setting; she knew that her young mistress
and the captain of the Bonito were about to separate. She was
walking to and fro in the dusky grove with a flower in her hair,
and singing softly to herself, when suddenly, within a foot of her,
the lieutenant appeared from behind a tree. She bounded aside like
a startled fawn, but Heemskirk, with a lucid comprehension of what
she was there for, pounced upon her, and, catching her arm, clapped
his other thick hand over her mouth.
"If you try to make a noise I'll twist your neck!"
This ferocious figure of speech terrified the girl sufficiently.
Heemskirk had seen plainly enough on the verandah Freya's golden
head with another head very close to it. He dragged the
unresisting maid with him by a circuitous way into the compound,
where he dismissed her with a vicious push in the direction of the
cluster of bamboo huts for the servants.
She was very much like the faithful camerista of Italian comedy,
but in her terror she bolted away without a sound from that thick,
short, black-eyed man with a cruel grip of fingers like a vice.
Quaking all over at a distance, extremely scared and half inclined
to laugh, she saw him enter the house at the back.
The interior of the bungalow was divided by two passages crossing
each other in the middle. At that point Heemskirk, by turning his
head slightly to the left as he passed, secured the evidence of
"carrying on" so irreconcilable with old Nelson's assurances that
it made him stagger, with a rush of blood to his head. Two white
figures, distinct against the light, stood in an unmistakable
attitude. Freya's arms were round Jasper's neck. Their faces were
characteristically superimposed on each other, and Heemskirk went
on, his throat choked with a sudden rising of curses, till on the
west verandah he stumbled blindly against a chair and then dropped
into another as though his legs had been swept from under him. He
had indulged too long in the habit of appropriating Freya to
himself in his thoughts. "Is that how you entertain your visitors-
-you . . " he thought, so outraged that he could not find a
sufficiently degrading epithet.
Freya struggled a little and threw her head back.
"Somebody has come in," she whispered. Jasper, holding her clasped
closely to his breast, and looking down into her face, suggested
casually:
"Your father."
Freya tried to disengage herself, but she had not the heart
absolutely to push him away with her hands.
"I believe it's Heemskirk," she breathed out at him.
He, plunging into her eyes in a quiet rapture, was provoked to a
vague smile by the sound of the name.
"The ass is always knocking down my beacons outside the river," he
murmured. He attached no other meaning to Heemskirk's existence;
but Freya was asking herself whether the lieutenant had seen them.
"Let me go, kid," she ordered in a peremptory whisper. Jasper
obeyed, and, stepping back at once, continued his contemplation of
her face under another angle. "I must go and see," she said to
herself anxiously.
She instructed him hurriedly to wait a moment after she was gone
and then to slip on to the back verandah and get a quiet smoke
before he showed himself.
"Don't stay late this evening," was her last recommendation before
she left him.
Then Freya came out on the west verandah with her light, rapid
step. While going through the doorway she managed to shake down
the folds of the looped-up curtains at the end of the passage so as
to cover Jasper's retreat from the bower. Directly she appeared
Heemskirk jumped up as if to fly at her. She paused and he made
her an exaggerated low bow.
It irritated Freya.
"Oh! It's you, Mr. Heemskirk. How do you do?" She spoke in her
usual tone. Her face was not plainly visible to him in the dusk of
the deep verandah. He dared not trust himself to speak, his rage
at what he had seen was so great. And when she added with
serenity: "Papa will be coming in before long," he called her
horrid names silently, to himself, before he spoke with contorted
lips.
"I have seen your father already. We had a talk in the sheds. He
told me some very interesting things. Oh, very--"
Freya sat down. She thought: "He has seen us, for certain." She
was not ashamed. What she was afraid of was some foolish or
awkward complication. But she could not conceive how much her
person had been appropriated by Heemskirk (in his thoughts). She
tried to be conversational.
"You are coming now from Palembang, I suppose?"
"Eh? What? Oh, yes! I come from Palembang. Ha, ha, ha! You
know what your father said? He said he was afraid you were having
a very dull time of it here."
"And I suppose you are going to cruise in the Moluccas," continued
Freya, who wanted to impart some useful information to Jasper if
possible. At the same time she was always glad to know that those
two men were a few hundred miles apart when not under her eye.
Heemskirk growled angrily.
"Yes. Moluccas," glaring in the direction of her shadowy figure.
"Your father thinks it's very quiet for you here. I tell you what,
Miss Freya. There isn't such a quiet spot on earth that a woman
can't find an opportunity of making a fool of somebody."
Freya thought: "I mustn't let him provoke me." Presently the
Tamil boy, who was Nelson's head servant, came in with the lights.
She addressed him at once with voluble directions where to put the
lamps, told him to bring the tray with the gin and bitters, and to
send Antonia into the house.
"I will have to leave you to yourself, Mr. Heemskirk, for a while,"
she said.
And she went to her room to put on another frock. She made a quick
change of it because she wished to be on the verandah before her
father and the lieutenant met again. She relied on herself to
regulate that evening's intercourse between these two. But
Antonia, still scared and hysterical, exhibited a bruise on her arm
which roused Freya's indignation.
"He jumped on me out of the bush like a tiger," said the girl,
laughing nervously with frightened eyes.
"The brute!" thought Freya. "He meant to spy on us, then." She
was enraged, but the recollection of the thick Dutchman in white
trousers wide at the hips and narrow at the ankles, with his
shoulder-straps and black bullet head, glaring at her in the light
of the lamps, was so repulsively comical that she could not help a
smiling grimace. Then she became anxious. The absurdities of
three men were forcing this anxiety upon her: Jasper's
impetuosity, her father's fears, Heemskirk's infatuation. She was
very tender to the first two, and she made up her mind to display
all her feminine diplomacy. All this, she said to herself, will be
over and done with before very long now.
Heemskirk on the verandah, lolling in a chair, his legs extended
and his white cap reposing on his stomach, was lashing himself into
a fury of an atrocious character altogether incomprehensible to a
girl like Freya. His chin was resting on his chest, his eyes gazed
stonily at his shoes. Freya examined him from behind the curtain.
He didn't stir. He was ridiculous. But this absolute stillness
was impressive. She stole back along the passage to the east
verandah, where Jasper was sitting quietly in the dark, doing what
he was told, like a good boy.
"Psst," she hissed. He was by her side in a moment.
"Yes. What is it?" he murmured.
"It's that beetle," she whispered uneasily. Under the impression
of Heemskirk's sinister immobility she had half a mind to let
Jasper know that they had been seen. But she was by no means
certain that Heemskirk would tell her father--and at any rate not
that evening. She concluded rapidly that the safest thing would be
to get Jasper out of the way as soon as possible.
"What has he been doing?" asked Jasper in a calm undertone.
"Oh, nothing! Nothing. He sits there looking cross. But you know
how he's always worrying papa."
"Your father's quite unreasonable," pronounced Jasper judicially.
"I don't know," she said in a doubtful tone. Something of old
Nelson's dread of the authorities had rubbed off on the girl since
she had to live with it day after day. "I don't know. Papa's
afraid of being reduced to beggary, as he says, in his old days.
Look here, kid, you had better clear out to-morrow, first thing."
Jasper had hoped for another afternoon with Freya, an afternoon of
quiet felicity with the girl by his side and his eyes on his brig,
anticipating a blissful future. His silence was eloquent with
disappointment, and Freya understood it very well. She, too, was
disappointed. But it was her business to be sensible.
"We shan't have a moment to ourselves with that beetle creeping
round the house," she argued in a low, hurried voice. "So what's
the good of your staying? And he won't go while the brig's here.
You know he won't."
"He ought to be reported for loitering," murmured Jasper with a
vexed little laugh.
"Mind you get under way at daylight," recommended Freya under her
breath.
He detained her after the manner of lovers. She expostulated
without struggling because it was hard for her to repulse him. He
whispered into her ear while he put his arms round her.
"Next time we two meet, next time I hold you like this, it shall be
on board. You and I, in the brig--all the world, all the life--"
And then he flashed out: "I wonder I can wait! I feel as if I
must carry you off now, at once. I could run with you in my hands-
-down the path--without stumbling--without touching the earth--"
She was still. She listened to the passion in his voice. She was
saying to herself that if she were to whisper the faintest yes, if
she were but to sigh lightly her consent, he would do it. He was
capable of doing it--without touching the earth. She closed her
eyes and smiled in the dark, abandoning herself in a delightful
giddiness, for an instant, to his encircling arm. But before he
could be tempted to tighten his grasp she was out of it, a foot
away from him and in full possession of herself.
That was the steady Freya. She was touched by the deep sigh which
floated up to her from the white figure of Jasper, who did not
stir.
"You are a mad kid," she said tremulously. Then with a change of
tone: "No one could carry me off. Not even you. I am not the
sort of girl that gets carried off." His white form seemed to
shrink a little before the force of that assertion and she
relented. "Isn't it enough for you to know that you have--that you
have carried me away?" she added in a tender tone.
He murmured an endearing word, and she continued:
"I've promised you--I've said I would come--and I shall come of my
own free will. You shall wait for me on board. I shall get up the
side--by myself, and walk up to you on the deck and say: 'Here I
am, kid.' And then--and then I shall be carried off. But it will
be no man who will carry me off--it will be the brig, your brig--
our brig. . . . I love the beauty!"
She heard an inarticulate sound, something like a moan wrung out by
pain or delight, and glided away. There was that other man on the
other verandah, that dark, surly Dutchman who could make trouble
between Jasper and her father, bring about a quarrel, ugly words,
and perhaps a physical collision. What a horrible situation! But,
even putting aside that awful extremity, she shrank from having to
live for some three months with a wretched, tormented, angry,
distracted, absurd man. And when the day came, the day and the
hour, what should she do if her father tried to detain her by main
force--as was, after all, possible? Could she actually struggle
with him hand to hand? But it was of lamentations and entreaties
that she was really afraid. Could she withstand them? What an
odious, cruel, ridiculous position would that be!
"But it won't be. He'll say nothing," she thought as she came out
quickly on the west verandah, and, seeing that Heemskirk did not
move, sat down on a chair near the doorway and kept her eyes on
him. The outraged lieutenant had not changed his attitude; only
his cap had fallen off his stomach and was lying on the floor. His
thick black eyebrows were knitted by a frown, while he looked at
her out of the corners of his eyes. And their sideways glance in
conjunction with the hooked nose, the whole bulky, ungainly,
sprawling person, struck Freya as so comically moody that, inwardly
discomposed as she was, she could not help smiling. She did her
best to give that smile a conciliatory character. She did not want
to provoke Heemskirk needlessly.
And the lieutenant, perceiving that smile, was mollified. It never
entered his head that his outward appearance, a naval officer, in
uniform, could appear ridiculous to that girl of no position--the
daughter of old Nielsen. The recollection of her arms round
Jasper's neck still irritated and excited him. "The hussy!" he
thought. "Smiling--eh? That's how you are amusing yourself.
Fooling your father finely, aren't you? You have a taste for that
sort of fun--have you? Well, we shall see--" He did not alter his
position, but on his pursed-up lips there also appeared a smile of
surly and ill-omened amusement, while his eyes returned to the
contemplation of his boots.
Freya felt hot with indignation. She sat radiantly fair in the
lamplight, her strong, well-shaped hands lying one on top of the
other in her lap. . . "Odious creature," she thought. Her face
coloured with sudden anger. "You have scared my maid out of her
senses," she said aloud. "What possessed you?"
He was thinking so deeply of her that the sound of her voice,
pronouncing these unexpected words, startled him extremely. He
jerked up his head and looked so bewildered that Freya insisted
impatiently:
"I mean Antonia. You have bruised her arm. What did you do it
for?"
"Do you want to quarrel with me?" he asked thickly, with a sort of
amazement. He blinked like an owl. He was funny. Freya, like all
women, had a keen sense of the ridiculous in outward appearance.
"Well, no; I don't think I do." She could not help herself. She
laughed outright, a clear, nervous laugh in which Heemskirk joined
suddenly with a harsh "Ha, ha, ha!"
Voices and footsteps were heard in the passage, and Jasper, with
old Nelson, came out. Old Nelson looked at his daughter
approvingly, for he liked the lieutenant to be kept in good humour.
And he also joined sympathetically in the laugh. "Now, lieutenant,
we shall have some dinner," he said, rubbing his hands cheerily.
Jasper had gone straight to the balustrade. The sky was full of
stars, and in the blue velvety night the cove below had a denser
blackness, in which the riding-lights of the brig and of the
gunboat glimmered redly, like suspended sparks. "Next time this
riding-light glimmers down there, I'll be waiting for her on the
quarter-deck to come and say 'Here I am,'" Jasper thought; and his
heart seemed to grow bigger in his chest, dilated by an oppressive
happiness that nearly wrung out a cry from him. There was no wind.
Not a leaf below him stirred, and even the sea was but a still
uncomplaining shadow. Far away on the unclouded sky the pale
lightning, the heat-lightning of the tropics, played tremulously
amongst the low stars in short, faint, mysteriously consecutive
flashes, like incomprehensible signals from some distant planet.
The dinner passed off quietly. Freya sat facing her father, calm
but pale. Heemskirk affected to talk only to old Nelson. Jasper's
behaviour was exemplary. He kept his eyes under control, basking
in the sense of Freya's nearness, as people bask in the sun without
looking up to heaven. And very soon after dinner was over, mindful
of his instructions, he declared that it was time for him to go on
board his ship.
Heemskirk did not look up. Ensconced in the rocking-chair, and
puffing at a cheroot, he had the air of meditating surlily over
some odious outbreak. So at least it seemed to Freya. Old Nelson
said at once: "I'll stroll down with you." He had begun a
professional conversation about the dangers of the New Guinea
coast, and wanted to relate to Jasper some experience of his own
"over there." Jasper was such a good listener! Freya made as if
to accompany them, but her father frowned, shook his head, and
nodded significantly towards the immovable Heemskirk blotting out
smoke with half-closed eyes and protruded lips. The lieutenant
must not be left alone. Take offence, perhaps.
Freya obeyed these signs. "Perhaps it is better for me to stay,"
she thought. Women are not generally prone to review their own
conduct, still less to condemn it. The embarrassing masculine
absurdities are in the main responsible for its ethics. But,
looking at Heemskirk, Freya felt regret and even remorse. His
thick bulk in repose suggested the idea of repletion, but as a
matter of fact he had eaten very little. He had drunk a great
deal, however. The fleshy lobes of his unpleasant big ears with
deeply folded rims were crimson. They quite flamed in the
neighbourhood of the flat, sallow cheeks. For a considerable time
he did not raise his heavy brown eyelids. To be at the mercy of
such a creature was humiliating; and Freya, who always ended by
being frank with herself, thought regretfully: "If only I had been
open with papa from the first! But then what an impossible life he
would have led me!" Yes. Men were absurd in many ways; lovably
like Jasper, impracticably like her father, odiously like that
grotesquely supine creature in the chair. Was it possible to talk
him over? Perhaps it was not necessary? "Oh! I can't talk to
him," she thought. And when Heemskirk, still without looking at
her, began resolutely to crush his half-smoked cheroot on the
coffee-tray, she took alarm, glided towards the piano, opened it in
tremendous haste, and struck the keys before she sat down.
In an instant the verandah, the whole carpetless wooden bungalow
raised on piles, became filled with an uproarious, confused
resonance. But through it all she heard, she felt on the floor the
heavy, prowling footsteps of the lieutenant moving to and fro at
her back. He was not exactly drunk, but he was sufficiently primed
to make the suggestions of his excited imagination seem perfectly
feasible and even clever; beautifully, unscrupulously clever.
Freya, aware that he had stopped just behind her, went on playing
without turning her head. She played with spirit, brilliantly, a
fierce piece of music, but when his voice reached her she went cold
all over. It was the voice, not the words. The insolent
familiarity of tone dismayed her to such an extent that she could
not understand at first what he was saying. His utterance was
thick, too.
"I suspected. . . . Of course I suspected something of your little
goings on. I am not a child. But from suspecting to seeing--
seeing, you understand--there's an enormous difference. That sort
of thing. . . . Come! One isn't made of stone. And when a man has
been worried by a girl as I have been worried by you, Miss Freya--
sleeping and waking, then, of course. . . . But I am a man of the
world. It must be dull for you here . . . I say, won't you leave
off this confounded playing . . .?"
This last was the only sentence really which she made out. She
shook her head negatively, and in desperation put on the loud
pedal, but she could not make the sound of the piano cover his
raised voice.
"Only, I am surprised that you should. . . . An English trading
skipper, a common fellow. Low, cheeky lot, infesting these
islands. I would make short work of such trash! While you have
here a good friend, a gentleman ready to worship at your feet--your
pretty feet--an officer, a man of family. Strange, isn't it? But
what of that! You are fit for a prince."
Freya did not turn her head. Her face went stiff with horror and
indignation. This adventure was altogether beyond her conception
of what was possible. It was not in her character to jump up and
run away. It seemed to her, too, that if she did move there was no
saying what might happen. Presently her father would be back, and
then the other would have to leave off. It was best to ignore--to
ignore. She went on playing loudly and correctly, as though she
were alone, as if Heemskirk did not exist. That proceeding
irritated him.
"Come! You may deceive your father," he bawled angrily, "but I am
not to be made a fool of! Stop this infernal noise . . . Freya . .
. Hey! You Scandinavian Goddess of Love! Stop! Do you hear?
That's what you are--of love. But the heathen gods are only devils
in disguise, and that's what you are, too--a deep little devil.
Stop it, I say, or I will lift you off that stool!"
Standing behind her, he devoured her with his eyes, from the golden
crown of her rigidly motionless head to the heels of her shoes, the
line of her shapely shoulders, the curves of her fine figure
swaying a little before the keyboard. She had on a light dress;
the sleeves stopped short at the elbows in an edging of lace. A
satin ribbon encircled her waist. In an access of irresistible,
reckless hopefulness he clapped both his hands on that waist--and
then the irritating music stopped at last. But, quick as she was
in springing away from the contact (the round music-stool going
over with a crash), Heemskirk's lips, aiming at her neck, landed a
hungry, smacking kiss just under her ear. A deep silence reigned
for a time. And then he laughed rather feebly.
He was disconcerted somewhat by her white, still face, the big
light violet eyes resting on him stonily. She had not uttered a
sound. She faced him, steadying herself on the corner of the piano
with one extended hand. The other went on rubbing with mechanical
persistency the place his lips had touched.
"What's the trouble?" he said, offended. "Startled you? Look
here: don't let us have any of that nonsense. You don't mean to
say a kiss frightens you so much as all that. . . . I know better.
. . . I don't mean to be left out in the cold."
He had been gazing into her face with such strained intentness that
he could no longer see it distinctly. Everything round him was
rather misty. He forgot the overturned stool, caught his foot
against it, and lurched forward slightly, saying in an ingratiating
tone:
"I'm not bad fun, really. You try a few kisses to begin with--"
He said no more, because his head received a terrific concussion,
accompanied by an explosive sound. Freya had swung her round,
strong arm with such force that the impact of her open palm on his
flat cheek turned him half round. Uttering a faint, hoarse yell,
the lieutenant clapped both his hands to the left side of his face,
which had taken on suddenly a dusky brick-red tinge. Freya, very
erect, her violet eyes darkened, her palm still tingling from the
blow, a sort of restrained determined smile showing a tiny gleam of
her white teeth, heard her father's rapid, heavy tread on the path
below the verandah. Her expression lost its pugnacity and became
sincerely concerned. She was sorry for her father. She stooped
quickly to pick up the music-stool, as if anxious to obliterate the
traces. . . . But that was no good. She had resumed her attitude,
one hand resting lightly on the piano, before old Nelson got up to
the top of the stairs.
Poor father! How furious he will be--how upset! And afterwards,
what tremors, what unhappiness! Why had she not been open with him
from the first? His round, innocent stare of amazement cut her to
the quick. But he was not looking at her. His stare was directed
to Heemskirk, who, with his back to him and with his hands still up
to his face, was hissing curses through his teeth, and (she saw him
in profile) glaring at her balefully with one black, evil eye.
"What's the matter?" asked old Nelson, very much bewildered.
She did not answer him. She thought of Jasper on the deck of the
brig, gazing up at the lighted bungalow, and she felt frightened.
It was a mercy that one of them at least was on board out of the
way. She only wished he were a hundred miles off. And yet she was
not certain that she did. Had Jasper been mysteriously moved that
moment to reappear on the verandah she would have thrown her
consistency, her firmness, her self-possession, to the winds, and
flown into his arms.
"What is it? What is it?" insisted the unsuspecting Nelson,
getting quite excited. "Only this minute you were playing a tune,
and--"
Freya, unable to speak in her apprehension of what was coming (she
was also fascinated by that black, evil, glaring eye), only nodded
slightly at the lieutenant, as much as to say: "Just look at him!"
"Why, yes!" exclaimed old Nelson. "I see. What on earth--"
Meantime he had cautiously approached Heemskirk, who, bursting into
incoherent imprecations, was stamping with both feet where he
stood. The indignity of the blow, the rage of baffled purpose, the
ridicule of the exposure, and the impossibility of revenge maddened
him to a point when he simply felt he must howl with fury.
"Oh, oh, oh!" he howled, stamping across the verandah as though he
meant to drive his foot through the floor at every step.
"Why, is his face hurt?" asked the astounded old Nelson. The truth
dawned suddenly upon his innocent mind. "Dear me!" he cried,
enlightened. "Get some brandy, quick, Freya. . . . You are subject
to it, lieutenant? Fiendish, eh? I know, I know! Used to go
crazy all of a sudden myself in the time. . . . And the little
bottle of laudanum from the medicine-chest, too, Freya. Look
sharp. . . . Don't you see he's got a toothache?"
And, indeed, what other explanation could have presented itself to
the guileless old Nelson, beholding this cheek nursed with both
hands, these wild glances, these stampings, this distracted swaying
of the body? It would have demanded a preternatural acuteness to
hit upon the true cause. Freya had not moved. She watched
Heemskirk's savagely inquiring, black stare directed stealthily
upon herself. "Aha, you would like to be let off!" she said to
herself. She looked at him unflinchingly, thinking it out. The
temptation of making an end of it all without further trouble was
irresistible. She gave an almost imperceptible nod of assent, and
glided away.
"Hurry up that brandy!" old Nelson shouted, as she disappeared in
the passage.
Heemskirk relieved his deeper feelings by a sudden string of curses
in Dutch and English which he sent after her. He raved to his
heart's content, flinging to and fro the verandah and kicking
chairs out of his way; while Nelson (or Nielsen), whose sympathy
was profoundly stirred by these evidences of agonising pain,
hovered round his dear (and dreaded) lieutenant, fussing like an
old hen.
"Dear me, dear me! Is it so bad? I know well what it is. I used
to frighten my poor wife sometimes. Do you get it often like this,
lieutenant?"
Heemskirk shouldered him viciously out of his way, with a short,
insane laugh. But his staggering host took it in good part; a man
beside himself with excruciating toothache is not responsible.
"Go into my room, lieutenant," he suggested urgently. "Throw
yourself on my bed. We will get something to ease you in a
minute."
He seized the poor sufferer by the arm and forced him gently
onwards to the very bed, on which Heemskirk, in a renewed access of
rage, flung himself down with such force that he rebounded from the
mattress to the height of quite a foot.
"Dear me!" exclaimed the scared Nelson, and incontinently ran off
to hurry up the brandy and the laudanum, very angry that so little
alacrity was shown in relieving the tortures of his precious guest.
In the end he got these things himself.
Half an hour later he stood in the inner passage of the house,
surprised by faint, spasmodic sounds of a mysterious nature,
between laughter and sobs. He frowned; then went straight towards
his daughter's room and knocked at the door.
Freya, her glorious fair hair framing her white face and rippling
down a dark-blue dressing-gown, opened it partly.
The light in the room was dim. Antonia, crouching in a corner,
rocked herself backwards and forwards, uttering feeble moans. Old
Nelson had not much experience in various kinds of feminine
laughter, but he was certain there had been laughter there.
"Very unfeeling, very unfeeling!" he said, with weighty
displeasure. "What is there so amusing in a man being in pain? I
should have thought a woman--a young girl--"
"He was so funny," murmured Freya, whose eyes glistened strangely
in the semi-obscurity of the passage. "And then, you know, I don't
like him," she added, in an unsteady voice.
"Funny!" repeated old Nelson, amazed at this evidence of
callousness in one so young. "You don't like him! Do you mean to
say that, because you don't like him, you--Why, it's simply cruel!
Don't you know it's about the worst sort of pain there is? Dogs
have been known to go mad with it."
"He certainly seemed to have gone mad," Freya said with an effort,
as if she were struggling with some hidden feeling.
But her father was launched.
"And you know how he is. He notices everything. He is a fellow to
take offence for the least little thing--regular Dutchman--and I
want to keep friendly with him. It's like this, my girl: if that
rajah of ours were to do something silly--and you know he is a
sulky, rebellious beggar--and the authorities took into their heads
that my influence over him wasn't good, you would find yourself
without a roof over your head--"
She cried: "What nonsense, father!" in a not very assured tone,
and discovered that he was angry, angry enough to achieve irony;
yes, old Nelson (or Nielsen), irony! Just a gleam of it.
"Oh, of course, if you have means of your own--a mansion, a
plantation that I know nothing of--" But he was not capable of
sustained irony. "I tell you they would bundle me out of here," he
whispered forcibly; "without compensation, of course. I know these
Dutch. And the lieutenant's just the fellow to start the trouble
going. He has the ear of influential officials. I wouldn't offend
him for anything--for anything--on no consideration whatever. . . .
What did you say?"
It was only an inarticulate exclamation. If she ever had a half-
formed intention of telling him everything she had given it up now.
It was impossible, both out of regard for his dignity and for the
peace of his poor mind.
"I don't care for him myself very much," old Nelson's subdued
undertone confessed in a sigh. "He's easier now," he went on,
after a silence. "I've given him up my bed for the night. I shall
sleep on my verandah, in the hammock. No; I can't say I like him
either, but from that to laugh at a man because he's driven crazy
with pain is a long way. You've surprised me, Freya. That side of
his face is quite flushed."
Her shoulders shook convulsively under his hands, which he laid on
her paternally. His straggly, wiry moustache brushed her forehead
in a good-night kiss. She closed the door, and went away from it
to the middle of the room before she allowed herself a tired-out
sort of laugh, without buoyancy.
"Flushed! A little flushed!" she repeated to herself. "I hope so,
indeed! A little--"
Her eyelashes were wet. Antonia, in her corner, moaned and
giggled, and it was impossible to tell where the moans ended and
the giggles began.
The mistress and the maid had been somewhat hysterical, for Freya,
on fleeing into her room, had found Antonia there, and had told her
everything.
"I have avenged you, my girl," she exclaimed.
And then they had laughingly cried and cryingly laughed with
admonitions--"Ssh, not so loud! Be quiet!" on one part, and
interludes of "I am so frightened. . . . He's an evil man," on the
other.
Antonia was very much afraid of Heemskirk. She was afraid of him
because of his personal appearance: because of his eyes and his
eyebrows, and his mouth and his nose and his limbs. Nothing could
be more rational. And she thought him an evil man, because, to her
eyes, he looked evil. No ground for an opinion could be sounder.
In the dimness of the room, with only a nightlight burning at the
head of Freya's bed, the camerista crept out of her corner to
crouch at the feet of her mistress, supplicating in whispers:
"There's the brig. Captain Allen. Let us run away at once--oh,
let us run away! I am so frightened. Let us! Let us!"
"I! Run away!" thought Freya to herself, without looking down at
the scared girl. "Never."
Both the resolute mistress under the mosquito-net and the
frightened maid lying curled up on a mat at the foot of the bed did
not sleep very well that night. The person that did not sleep at
all was Lieutenant Heemskirk. He lay on his back staring
vindictively in the darkness. Inflaming images and humiliating
reflections succeeded each other in his mind, keeping up,
augmenting his anger. A pretty tale this to get about! But it
must not be allowed to get about. The outrage had to be swallowed
in silence. A pretty affair! Fooled, led on, and struck by the
girl--and probably fooled by the father, too. But no. Nielsen was
but another victim of that shameless hussy, that brazen minx, that
sly, laughing, kissing, lying . . .
"No; he did not deceive me on purpose," thought the tormented
lieutenant. "But I should like to pay him off, all the same, for
being such an imbecile--"
Well, some day, perhaps. One thing he was firmly resolved on: he
had made up his mind to steal early out of the house. He did not
think he could face the girl without going out of his mind with
fury.
"Fire and perdition! Ten thousand devils! I shall choke here
before the morning!" he muttered to himself, lying rigid on his
back on old Nelson's bed, his breast heaving for air.
He arose at daylight and started cautiously to open the door.
Faint sounds in the passage alarmed him, and remaining concealed he
saw Freya coming out. This unexpected sight deprived him of all
power to move away from the crack of the door. It was the
narrowest crack possible, but commanding the view of the end of the
verandah. Freya made for that end hastily to watch the brig
passing the point. She wore her dark dressing-gown; her feet were
bare, because, having fallen asleep towards the morning, she ran
out headlong in her fear of being too late. Heemskirk had never
seen her looking like this, with her hair drawn back smoothly to
the shape of her head, and hanging in one heavy, fair tress down
her back, and with that air of extreme youth, intensity, and
eagerness. And at first he was amazed, and then he gnashed his
teeth. He could not face her at all. He muttered a curse, and
kept still behind the door.
With a low, deep-breathed "Ah!" when she first saw the brig already
under way, she reached for Nelson's long glass reposing on brackets
high up the wall. The wide sleeve of the dressing-gown slipped
back, uncovering her white arm as far as the shoulder. Heemskirk
gripping the door-handle, as if to crush it, felt like a man just
risen to his feet from a drinking bout.
And Freya knew that he was watching her. She knew. She had seen
the door move as she came out of the passage. She was aware of his
eyes being on her, with scornful bitterness, with triumphant
contempt.
"You are there," she thought, levelling the long glass. "Oh, well,
look on, then!"
The green islets appeared like black shadows, the ashen sea was
smooth as glass, the clear robe of the colourless dawn, in which
even the brig appeared shadowy, had a hem of light in the east.
Directly Freya had made out Jasper on deck, with his own long glass
directed to the bungalow, she laid hers down and raised both her
beautiful white arms above her head. In that attitude of supreme
cry she stood still, glowing with the consciousness of Jasper's
adoration going out to her figure held in the field of his glass
away there, and warmed, too, by the feeling of evil passion, the
burning, covetous eyes of the other, fastened on her back. In the
fervour of her love, in the caprice of her mind, and with that
mysterious knowledge of masculine nature women seem to be born to,
she thought:
"You are looking on--you will--you must! Then you shall see
something."
She brought both her hands to her lips, then flung them out,
sending a kiss over the sea, as if she wanted to throw her heart
along with it on the deck of the brig. Her face was rosy, her eyes
shone. Her repeated, passionate gesture seemed to fling kisses by
the hundred again and again and again, while the slowly ascending
sun brought the glory of colour to the world, turning the islets
green, the sea blue, the brig below her white--dazzlingly white in
the spread of her wings--with the red ensign streaming like a tiny
flame from the peak.
And each time she murmured with a rising inflexion:
"Take this--and this--and this--" till suddenly her arms fell. She
had seen the ensign dipped in response, and next moment the point
below hid the hull of the brig from her view. Then she turned away
from the balustrade, and, passing slowly before the door of her
father's room with her eyelids lowered, and an enigmatic expression
on her face, she disappeared behind the curtain.
But instead of going along the passage, she remained concealed and
very still on the other side to watch what would happen. For some
time the broad, furnished verandah remained empty. Then the door
of old Nelson's room came open suddenly, and Heemskirk staggered
out. His hair was rumpled, his eyes bloodshot, his unshaven face
looked very dark. He gazed wildly about, saw his cap on a table,
snatched it up, and made for the stairs quietly, but with a
strange, tottering gait, like the last effort of waning strength.
Shortly after his head had sunk below the level of the floor, Freya
came out from behind the curtain, with compressed, scheming lips,
and no softness at all in her luminous eyes. He could not be
allowed to sneak off scot free. Never--never! She was excited,
she tingled all over, she had tasted blood! He must be made to
understand that she had been aware of having been watched; he must
know that he had been seen slinking off shamefully. But to run to
the front rail and shout after him would have been childish, crude-
-undignified. And to shout--what? What word? What phrase? No;
it was impossible. Then how? . . . She frowned, discovered it,
dashed at the piano, which had stood open all night, and made the
rosewood monster growl savagery in an irritated bass. She struck
chords as if firing shots after that straddling, broad figure in
ample white trousers and a dark uniform jacket with gold shoulder-
straps, and then she pursued him with the same thing she had played
the evening before--a modern, fierce piece of love music which had
been tried more than once against the thunderstorms of the group.
She accentuated its rhythm with triumphant malice, so absorbed in
her purpose that she did not notice the presence of her father,
who, wearing an old threadbare ulster of a check pattern over his
sleeping suit, had run out from the back verandah to inquire the
reason of this untimely performance. He stared at her.
"What on earth? . . . Freya!" His voice was nearly drowned by the
piano. "What's become of the lieutenant?" he shouted.
She looked up at him as if her soul were lost in her music, with
unseeing eyes.
"Gone."
"Wha-a-t? . . . Where?"
She shook her head slightly, and went on playing louder than
before. Old Nelson's innocently anxious gaze starting from the
open door of his room, explored the whole place high and low, as if
the lieutenant were something small which might have been crawling
on the floor or clinging to a wall. But a shrill whistle coming
somewhere from below pierced the ample volume of sound rolling out
of the piano in great, vibrating waves. The lieutenant was down at
the cove, whistling for the boat to come and take him off to his
ship. And he seemed to be in a terrific hurry, too, for he
whistled again almost directly, waited for a moment, and then sent
out a long, interminable, shrill call as distressful to hear as
though he had shrieked without drawing breath. Freya ceased
playing suddenly.
"Going on board," said old Nelson, perturbed by the event. "What
could have made him clear out so early? Queer chap. Devilishly
touchy, too! I shouldn't wonder if it was your conduct last night
that hurt his feelings? I noticed you, Freya. You as well as
laughed in his face, while he was suffering agonies from neuralgia.
It isn't the way to get yourself liked. He's offended with you."
Freya's hands now reposed passive on the keys; she bowed her fair
head, feeling a sudden discontent, a nervous lassitude, as though
she had passed through some exhausting crisis. Old Nelson (or
Nielsen), looking aggrieved, was revolving matters of policy in his
bald head.
"I think it would be right for me to go on board just to inquire,
some time this morning," he declared fussily. "Why don't they
bring me my morning tea? Do you hear, Freya? You have astonished
me, I must say. I didn't think a young girl could be so unfeeling.
And the lieutenant thinks himself a friend of ours, too! What?
No? Well, he calls himself a friend, and that's something to a
person in my position. Certainly! Oh, yes, I must go on board."
"Must you?" murmured Freya listlessly; then added, in her thought:
"Poor man!"
CHAPTER V
In respect of the next seven weeks, all that is necessary to say
is, first, that old Nelson (or Nielsen) failed in paying his
politic call. The Neptun gunboat of H.M. the King of the
Netherlands, commanded by an outraged and infuriated lieutenant,
left the cove at an unexpectedly early hour. When Freya's father
came down to the shore, after seeing his precious crop of tobacco
spread out properly in the sun, she was already steaming round the
point. Old Nelson regretted the circumstance for many days.
"Now, I don't know in what disposition the man went away," he
lamented to his hard daughter. He was amazed at her hardness. He
was almost frightened by her indifference.
Next, it must be recorded that the same day the gunboat Neptun,
steering east, passed the brig Bonito becalmed in sight of
Carimata, with her head to the eastward, too. Her captain, Jasper
Allen, giving himself up consciously to a tender, possessive
reverie of his Freya, did not get out of his long chair on the poop
to look at the Neptun which passed so close that the smoke belching
out suddenly from her short black funnel rolled between the masts
of the Bonito, obscuring for a moment the sunlit whiteness of her
sails, consecrated to the service of love. Jasper did not even
turn his head for a glance. But Heemskirk, on the bridge, had
gazed long and earnestly at the brig from the distance, gripping
hard the brass rail in front of him, till, the two ships closing,
he lost all confidence in himself, and retreating to the chartroom,
pulled the door to with a crash. There, his brows knitted, his
mouth drawn on one side in sardonic meditation, he sat through many
still hours--a sort of Prometheus in the bonds of unholy desire,
having his very vitals torn by the beak and claws of humiliated
passion.
That species of fowl is not to be shooed off as easily as a
chicken. Fooled, cheated, deceived, led on, outraged, mocked at--
beak and claws! A sinister bird! The lieutenant had no mind to
become the talk of the Archipelago, as the naval officer who had
had his face slapped by a girl. Was it possible that she really
loved that rascally trader? He tried not to think, but, worse than
thoughts, definite impressions beset him in his retreat. He saw
her--a vision plain, close to, detailed, plastic, coloured, lighted
up--he saw her hanging round the neck of that fellow. And he shut
his eyes, only to discover that this was no remedy. Then a piano
began to play near by, very plainly; and he put his fingers to his
ears with no better effect. It was not to be borne--not in
solitude. He bolted out of the chartroom, and talked of
indifferent things somewhat wildly with the officer of the watch on
the bridge, to the mocking accompaniment of a ghostly piano.
The last thing to be recorded is that Lieutenant Heemskirk instead
of pursuing his course towards Ternate, where he was expected, went
out of his way to call at Makassar, where no one was looking for
his arrival. Once there, he gave certain explanations and laid a
certain proposal before the governor, or some other authority, and
obtained permission to do what he thought fit in these matters.
Thereupon the Neptun, giving up Ternate altogether, steamed north
in view of the mountainous coast of Celebes, and then crossing the
broad straits took up her station on the low coast of virgin
forests, inviolate and mute, in waters phosphorescent at night;
deep blue in daytime with gleaming green patches over the submerged
reefs. For days the Neptun could be seen moving smoothly up and
down the sombre face of the shore, or hanging about with a watchful
air near the silvery breaks of broad estuaries, under the great
luminous sky never softened, never veiled, and flooding the earth
with the everlasting sunshine of the tropics--that sunshine which,
in its unbroken splendour, oppresses the soul with an inexpressible
melancholy more intimate, more penetrating, more profound than the
grey sadness of the northern mists.
The trading brig Bonito appeared gliding round a sombre forest-clad
point of land on the silvery estuary of a great river. The breath
of air that gave her motion would not have fluttered the flame of a
torch. She stole out into the open from behind a veil of
unstirring leaves, mysteriously silent, ghostly white, and solemnly
stealthy in her imperceptible progress; and Jasper, his elbow in
the main rigging, and his head leaning against his hand, thought of
Freya. Everything in the world reminded him of her. The beauty of
the loved woman exists in the beauties of Nature. The swelling
outlines of the hills, the curves of a coast, the free sinuosities
of a river are less suave than the harmonious lines of her body,
and when she moves, gliding lightly, the grace of her progress
suggests the power of occult forces which rule the fascinating
aspects of the visible world.
Dependent on things as all men are, Jasper loved his vessel--the
house of his dreams. He lent to her something of Freya's soul.
Her deck was the foothold of their love. The possession of his
brig appeased his passion in a soothing certitude of happiness
already conquered.
The full moon was some way up, perfect and serene, floating in air
as calm and limpid as the glance of Freya's eyes. There was not a
sound in the brig.
"Here she shall stand, by my side, on evenings like this," he
thought, with rapture.
And it was at that moment, in this peace, in this serenity, under
the full, benign gaze of the moon propitious to lovers, on a sea
without a wrinkle, under a sky without a cloud, as if all Nature
had assumed its most clement mood in a spirit of mockery, that the
gunboat Neptun, detaching herself from the dark coast under which
she had been lying invisible, steamed out to intercept the trading
brig Bonito standing out to sea.
Directly the gunboat had been made out emerging from her ambush,
Schultz, of the fascinating voice, had given signs of strange
agitation. All that day, ever since leaving the Malay town up the
river, he had shown a haggard face, going about his duties like a
man with something weighing on his mind. Jasper had noticed it,
but the mate, turning away, as though he had not liked being looked
at, had muttered shamefacedly of a headache and a touch of fever.
He must have had it very badly when, dodging behind his captain he
wondered aloud: "What can that fellow want with us?" . . . A naked
man standing in a freezing blast and trying not to shiver could not
have spoken with a more harshly uncertain intonation. But it might
have been fever--a cold fit.
"He wants to make himself disagreeable, simply," said Jasper, with
perfect good humour. "He has tried it on me before. However, we
shall soon see."
And, indeed, before long the two vessels lay abreast within easy
hail. The brig, with her fine lines and her white sails, looked
vaporous and sylph-like in the moonlight. The gunboat, short,
squat, with her stumpy dark spars naked like dead trees, raised
against the luminous sky of that resplendent night, threw a heavy
shadow on the lane of water between the two ships.
Freya haunted them both like an ubiquitous spirit, and as if she
were the only woman in the world. Jasper remembered her earnest
recommendation to be guarded and cautious in all his acts and words
while he was away from her. In this quite unforeseen encounter he
felt on his ear the very breath of these hurried admonitions
customary to the last moment of their partings, heard the half-
jesting final whisper of the "Mind, kid, I'd never forgive you!"
with a quick pressure on his arm, which he answered by a quiet,
confident smile. Heemskirk was haunted in another fashion. There
were no whispers in it; it was more like visions. He saw that girl
hanging round the neck of a low vagabond--that vagabond, the
vagabond who had just answered his hail. He saw her stealing bare-
footed across a verandah with great, clear, wide-open, eager eyes
to look at a brig--that brig. If she had shrieked, scolded, called
names! . . . But she had simply triumphed over him. That was all.
Led on (he firmly believed it), fooled, deceived, outraged, struck,
mocked at. . . . Beak and claws! The two men, so differently
haunted by Freya of the Seven Isles, were not equally matched.
In the intense stillness, as of sleep, which had fallen upon the
two vessels, in a world that itself seemed but a delicate dream, a
boat pulled by Javanese sailors crossing the dark lane of water
came alongside the brig. The white warrant officer in her, perhaps
the gunner, climbed aboard. He was a short man, with a rotund
stomach and a wheezy voice. His immovable fat face looked lifeless
in the moonlight, and he walked with his thick arms hanging away
from his body as though he had been stuffed. His cunning little
eyes glittered like bits of mica. He conveyed to Jasper, in broken
English, a request to come on board the Neptun.
Jasper had not expected anything so unusual. But after a short
reflection he decided to show neither annoyance, nor even surprise.
The river from which he had come had been politically disturbed for
a couple of years, and he was aware that his visits there were
looked upon with some suspicion. But he did not mind much the
displeasure of the authorities, so terrifying to old Nelson. He
prepared to leave the brig, and Schultz followed him to the rail as
if to say something, but in the end stood by in silence. Jasper
getting over the side, noticed his ghastly face. The eyes of the
man who had found salvation in the brig from the effects of his
peculiar psychology looked at him with a dumb, beseeching
expression.
"What's the matter?" Jasper asked.
"I wonder how this will end?" said he of the beautiful voice, which
had even fascinated the steady Freya herself. But where was its
charming timbre now? These words had sounded like a raven's croak.
"You are ill," said Jasper positively.
"I wish I were dead!" was the startling statement uttered by
Schultz talking to himself in the extremity of some mysterious
trouble. Jasper gave him a keen glance, but this was not the time
to investigate the morbid outbreak of a feverish man. He did not
look as though he were actually delirious, and that for the moment
must suffice. Schultz made a dart forward.
"That fellow means harm!" he said desperately. "He means harm to
you, Captain Allen. I feel it, and I--"
He choked with inexplicable emotion.
"All right, Schultz. I won't give him an opening." Jasper cut him
short and swung himself into the boat.
On board the Neptun Heemskirk, standing straddle-legs in the flood
of moonlight, his inky shadow falling right across the quarter-
deck, made no sign at his approach, but secretly he felt something
like the heave of the sea in his chest at the sight of that man.
Jasper waited before him in silence.
Brought face to face in direct personal contact, they fell at once
into the manner of their casual meetings in old Nelson's bungalow.
They ignored each other's existence--Heemskirk moodily; Jasper,
with a perfectly colourless quietness.
"What's going on in that river you've just come out of?" asked the
lieutenant straight away.
"I know nothing of the troubles, if you mean that," Jasper
answered. "I've landed there half a cargo of rice, for which I got
nothing in exchange, and went away. There's no trade there now,
but they would have been starving in another week--if I hadn't
turned up."
"Meddling! English meddling! And suppose the rascals don't
deserve anything better than to starve, eh?"
"There are women and children there, you know," observed Jasper, in
his even tone.
"Oh, yes! When an Englishman talks of women and children, you may
be sure there's something fishy about the business. Your doings
will have to be investigated."
They spoke in turn, as though they had been disembodied spirits--
mere voices in empty air; for they looked at each other as if there
had been nothing there, or, at most, with as much recognition as
one gives to an inanimate object, and no more. But now a silence
fell. Heemskirk had thought, all at once: "She will tell him all
about it. She will tell him while she hangs round his neck
laughing." And the sudden desire to annihilate Jasper on the spot
almost deprived him of his senses by its vehemence. He lost the
power of speech, of vision. For a moment he absolutely couldn't
see Jasper. But he heard him inquiring, as of the world at large:
"Am I, then, to conclude that the brig is detained?"
Heemskirk made a recovery in a flush of malignant satisfaction.
"She is. I am going to take her to Makassar in tow."
"The courts will have to decide on the legality of this," said
Jasper, aware that the matter was becoming serious, but with
assumed indifference.
"Oh, yes, the courts! Certainly. And as to you, I shall keep you
on board here."
Jasper's dismay at being parted from his ship was betrayed by a
stony immobility. It lasted but an instant. Then he turned away
and hailed the brig. Mr. Schultz answered:
"Yes, sir."
"Get ready to receive a tow-rope from the gunboat! We are going to
be taken to Makassar."
"Good God! What's that for, sir?" came an anxious cry faintly.
"Kindness, I suppose," Jasper, ironical, shouted with great
deliberation. "We might have been--becalmed in here--for days.
And hospitality. I am invited to stay--on board here."
The answer to this information was a loud ejaculation of distress.
Jasper thought anxiously: "Why, the fellow's nerve's gone to
pieces;" and with an awkward uneasiness of a new sort, looked
intently at the brig. The thought that he was parted from her--for
the first time since they came together--shook the apparently
careless fortitude of his character to its very foundations, which
were deep. All that time neither Heemskirk nor even his inky
shadow had stirred in the least.
"I am going to send a boat's crew and an officer on board your
vessel," he announced to no one in particular. Jasper, tearing
himself away from the absorbed contemplation of the brig, turned
round, and, without passion, almost without expression in his
voice, entered his protest against the whole of the proceedings.
What he was thinking of was the delay. He counted the days.
Makassar was actually on his way; and to be towed there really
saved time. On the other hand, there would be some vexing
formalities to go through. But the thing was too absurd. "The
beetle's gone mad," he thought. "I'll be released at once. And if
not, Mesman must enter into a bond for me." Mesman was a Dutch
merchant with whom Jasper had had many dealings, a considerable
person in Makassar.
"You protest? H'm!" Heemskirk muttered, and for a little longer
remained motionless, his legs planted well apart, and his head
lowered as though he were studying his own comical, deeply-split
shadow. Then he made a sign to the rotund gunner, who had kept at
hand, motionless, like a vilely-stuffed specimen of a fat man, with
a lifeless face and glittering little eyes. The fellow approached,
and stood at attention.
"You will board the brig with a boat's crew!"
"Ya, mynherr!"
"You will have one of your men to steer her all the time," went on
Heemskirk, giving his orders in English, apparently for Jasper's
edification. "You hear?"
"Ya, mynherr."
"You will remain on deck and in charge all the time."
"Ya, mynherr."
Jasper felt as if, together with the command of the brig, his very
heart were being taken out of his breast. Heemskirk asked, with a
change of tone:
"What weapons have you on board?"
At one time all the ships trading in the China Seas had a licence
to carry a certain quantity of firearms for purposes of defence.
Jasper answered:
"Eighteen rifles with their bayonets, which were on board when I
bought her, four years ago. They have been declared."
"Where are they kept?"
"Fore-cabin. Mate has the key."
"You will take possession of them," said Heemskirk to the gunner.
"Ya, mynherr."
"What is this for? What do you mean to imply?" cried out Jasper;
then bit his lip. "It's monstrous!" he muttered.
Heemskirk raised for a moment a heavy, as if suffering, glance.
"You may go," he said to his gunner. The fat man saluted, and
departed.
During the next thirty hours the steady towing was interrupted
once. At a signal from the brig, made by waving a flag on the
forecastle, the gunboat was stopped. The badly-stuffed specimen of
a warrant-officer, getting into his boat, arrived on board the
Neptun and hurried straight into his commander's cabin, his
excitement at something he had to communicate being betrayed by the
blinking of his small eyes. These two were closeted together for
some time, while Jasper at the taffrail tried to make out if
anything out of the common had occurred on board the brig.
But nothing seemed to be amiss on board. However, he kept a look-
out for the gunner; and, though he had avoided speaking to anybody
since he had finished with Heemskirk, he stopped that man when he
came out on deck again to ask how his mate was.
"He was feeling not very well when I left," he explained.
The fat warrant-officer, holding himself as though the effort of
carrying his big stomach in front of him demanded a rigid carriage,
understood with difficulty. Not a single one of his features
showed the slightest animation, but his little eyes blinked rapidly
at last.
"Oh, ya! The mate. Ya, ya! He is very well. But, mein Gott, he
is one very funny man!"
Jasper could get no explanation of that remark, because the
Dutchman got into the boat hurriedly, and went back on board the
brig. But he consoled himself with the thought that very soon all
this unpleasant and rather absurd experience would be over. The
roadstead of Makassar was in sight already. Heemskirk passed by
him going on the bridge. For the first time the lieutenant looked
at Jasper with marked intention; and the strange roll of his eyes
was so funny--it had been long agreed by Jasper and Freya that the
lieutenant was funny--so ecstatically gratified, as though he were
rolling a tasty morsel on his tongue, that Jasper could not help a
broad smile. And then he turned to his brig again.
To see her, his cherished possession, animated by something of his
Freya's soul, the only foothold of two lives on the wide earth, the
security of his passion, the companion of adventure, the power to
snatch the calm, adorable Freya to his breast, and carry her off to
the end of the world; to see this beautiful thing embodying
worthily his pride and his love, to see her captive at the end of a
tow-rope was not indeed a pleasant experience. It had something
nightmarish in it, as, for instance, the dream of a wild sea-bird
loaded with chains.
Yet what else could he want to look at? Her beauty would sometimes
come to his heart with the force of a spell, so that he would
forget where he was. And, besides, that sense of superiority which
the certitude of being loved gives to a young man, that illusion of
being set above the Fates by a tender look in a woman's eyes,
helped him, the first shock over, to go through these experiences
with an amused self-confidence. For what evil could touch the
elect of Freya?
It was now afternoon, the sun being behind the two vessels as they
headed for the harbour. "The beetle's little joke shall soon be
over," thought Jasper, without any great animosity. As a seaman
well acquainted with that part of the world, a casual glance was
enough to tell him what was being done. "Hallo," he thought, "he
is going through Spermonde Passage. We shall be rounding Tamissa
reef presently." And again he returned to the contemplation of his
brig, that main-stay of his material and emotional existence which
would be soon in his hands again. On a sea, calm like a millpond,
a heavy smooth ripple undulated and streamed away from her bows,
for the powerful Neptun was towing at great speed, as if for a
wager. The Dutch gunner appeared on the forecastle of the Bonito,
and with him a couple of men. They stood looking at the coast, and
Jasper lost himself in a loverlike trance.
The deep-toned blast of the gunboat's steam-whistle made him
shudder by its unexpectedness. Slowly he looked about. Swift as
lightning he leaped from where he stood, bounding forward along the
deck.
"You will be on Tamissa reef!" he yelled.
High up on the bridge Heemskirk looked back over his shoulder
heavily; two seamen were spinning the wheel round, and the Neptun
was already swinging rapidly away from the edge of the pale water
over the danger. Ha! just in time. Jasper turned about instantly
to watch his brig; and, even before he realised that--in obedience,
it appears, to Heemskirk's orders given beforehand to the gunner--
the tow-rope had been let go at the blast of the whistle, before he
had time to cry out or to move a limb, he saw her cast adrift and
shooting across the gunboat's stern with the impetus of her speed.
He followed her fine, gliding form with eyes growing big with
incredulity, wild with horror. The cries on board of her came to
him only as a dreadful and confused murmur through the loud
thumping of blood in his ears, while she held on. She ran upright
in a terrible display of her gift of speed, with an incomparable
air of life and grace. She ran on till the smooth level of water
in front of her bows seemed to sink down suddenly as if sucked
away; and, with a strange, violent tremor of her mast-heads she
stopped, inclined her lofty spars a little, and lay still. She lay
still on the reef, while the Neptun, fetching a wide circle,
continued at full speed up Spermonde Passage, heading for the town.
She lay still, perfectly still, with something ill-omened and
unnatural in her attitude. In an instant the subtle melancholy of
things touched by decay had fallen on her in the sunshine; she was
but a speck in the brilliant emptiness of space, already lonely,
already desolate.
"Hold him!" yelled a voice from the bridge.
Jasper had started to run to his brig with a headlong impulse, as a
man dashes forward to pull away with his hands a living, breathing,
loved creature from the brink of destruction. "Hold him! Stick to
him!" vociferated the lieutenant at the top of the bridge-ladder,
while Jasper struggled madly without a word, only his head emerging
from the heaving crowd of the Neptun's seamen, who had flung
themselves upon him obediently. "Hold--I would not have that
fellow drown himself for anything now!"
Jasper ceased struggling.
One by one they let go of him; they fell back gradually farther and
farther, in attentive silence, leaving him standing unsupported in
a widened, clear space, as if to give him plenty of room to fall
after the struggle. He did not even sway perceptibly. Half an
hour later, when the Neptun anchored in front of the town, he had
not stirred yet, had moved neither head nor limb as much as a
hair's breadth. Directly the rumble of the gunboat's cable had
ceased, Heemskirk came down heavily from the bridge.
"Call a sampan" he said, in a gloomy tone, as he passed the sentry
at the gangway, and then moved on slowly towards the spot where
Jasper, the object of many awed glances, stood looking at the deck,
as if lost in a brown study. Heemskirk came up close, and stared
at him thoughtfully, with his fingers over his lips. Here he was,
the favoured vagabond, the only man to whom that infernal girl was
likely to tell the story. But he would not find it funny. The
story how Lieutenant Heemskirk--No, he would not laugh at it. He
looked as though he would never laugh at anything in his life.
Suddenly Jasper looked up. His eyes, without any other expression
but bewilderment, met those of Heemskirk, observant and sombre.
"Gone on the reef!" he said, in a low, astounded tone. "On-the-
reef!" he repeated still lower, and as if attending inwardly to the
birth of some awful and amazing sensation.
"On the very top of high-water, spring tides," Heemskirk struck in,
with a vindictive, exulting violence which flashed and expired. He
paused, as if weary, fixing upon Jasper his arrogant eyes, over
which secret disenchantment, the unavoidable shadow of all passion,
seemed to pass like a saddening cloud. "On the very top," he
repeated, rousing himself in fierce reaction to snatch his laced
cap off his head with a horizontal, derisive flourish towards the
gangway. "And now you may go ashore to the courts, you damned
Englishman!" he said.
CHAPTER VI
The affair of the brig Bonito was bound to cause a sensation in
Makassar, the prettiest, and perhaps the cleanest-looking of all
the towns in the Islands; which however knows few occasions for
excitement. The "front," with its special population, was soon
aware that something had happened. A steamer towing a sailing
vessel had been observed far out to sea for some time, and when the
steamer came in alone, leaving the other outside, attention was
aroused. Why was that? Her masts only could be seen--with furled
sails--remaining in the same place to the southward. And soon the
rumour ran all along the crowded seashore street that there was a
ship on Tamissa reef. That crowd interpreted the appearance
correctly. Its cause was beyond their penetration, for who could
associate a girl nine hundred miles away with the stranding of a
ship on Tamissa reef, or look for the remote filiation of that
event in the psychology of at least three people, even if one of
them, Lieutenant Heemskirk, was at that very moment passing amongst
them on his way to make his verbal report?
No; the minds on the "front" were not competent for that sort of
investigation, but many hands there--brown hands, yellow hands,
white hands--were raised to shade the eyes gazing out to sea. The
rumour spread quickly. Chinese shopkeepers came to their doors,
more than one white merchant, even, rose from his desk to go to the
window. After all, a ship on Tamissa was not an everyday
occurrence. And presently the rumour took a more definite shape.
An English trader--detained on suspicion at sea by the Neptun--
Heemskirk was towing him in to test a case, and by some strange
accident--
Later on the name came out. "The Bonito--what! Impossible! Yes--
yes, the Bonito. Look! You can see from here; only two masts.
It's a brig. Didn't think that man would ever let himself be
caught. Heemskirk's pretty smart, too. They say she's fitted out
in her cabin like a gentleman's yacht. That Allen is a sort of
gentleman too. An extravagant beggar."
A young man entered smartly Messrs. Mesman Brothers' office on the
"front," bubbling with some further information.
"Oh, yes; that's the Bonito for certain! But you don't know the
story I've heard just now. The fellow must have been feeding that
river with firearms for the last year or two. Well, it seems he
has grown so reckless from long impunity that he has actually dared
to sell the very ship's rifles this time. It's a fact. The rifles
are not on board. What impudence! Only, he didn't know that there
was one of our warships on the coast. But those Englishmen are so
impudent that perhaps he thought that nothing would be done to him
for it. Our courts do let off these fellows too often, on some
miserable excuse or other. But, at any rate, there's an end of the
famous Bonito. I have just heard in the harbour-office that she
must have gone on at the very top of high-water; and she is in
ballast, too. No human power, they think, can move her from where
she is. I only hope it is so. It would be fine to have the
notorious Bonito stuck up there as a warning to others."
Mr. J. Mesman, a colonial-born Dutchman, a kind, paternal old
fellow, with a clean-shaven, quiet, handsome fade, and a head of
fine iron-grey hair curling a little on his collar, did not say a
word in defence of Jasper and the Bonito. He rose from his arm-
chair suddenly. His face was visibly troubled. It had so happened
that once, from a business talk of ways and means, island trade,
money matters, and so on, Jasper had been led to open himself to
him on the subject of Freya; and the excellent man, who had known
old Nelson years before and even remembered something of Freya, was
much astonished and amused by the unfolding of the tale.
"Well, well, well! Nelson! Yes; of course. A very honest sort of
man. And a little child with very fair hair. Oh, yes! I have a
distinct recollection. And so she has grown into such a fine girl,
so very determined, so very--" And he laughed almost boisterously.
"Mind, when you have happily eloped with your future wife, Captain
Allen, you must come along this way, and we shall welcome her here.
A little fair-headed child! I remember. I remember."
It was that knowledge which had brought trouble to his face at the
first news of the wreck. He took up his hat.
"Where are you going, Mr. Mesman?"
"I am going to look for Allen. I think he must be ashore. Does
anybody know?"
No one of those present knew. And Mr. Mesman went out on the
"front" to make inquiries.
The other part of the town, the part near the church and the fort,
got its information in another way. The first thing disclosed to
it was Jasper himself, walking rapidly, as though he were pursued.
And, as a matter of fact, a Chinaman, obviously a sampan man, was
following him at the same headlong pace. Suddenly, while passing
Orange House, Jasper swerved and went in, or, rather, rushed in,
startling Gomez, the hotel clerk, very much. But a Chinaman
beginning to make an unseemly noise at the door claimed the
immediate attention of Gomez. His grievance was that the white man
whom he had brought on shore from the gunboat had not paid him his
boat-fare. He had pursued him so far, asking for it all the way.
But the white man had taken no notice whatever of his just claim.
Gomez satisfied the coolie with a few coppers, and then went to
look for Jasper, whom he knew very well. He found him standing
stiffly by a little round table. At the other end of the verandah
a few men sitting there had stopped talking, and were looking at
him in silence. Two billiard-players, with cues in their hands,
had come to the door of the billiard-room and stared, too.
On Gomez coming up to him, Jasper raised one hand to point at his
own throat. Gomez noted the somewhat soiled state of his white
clothes, then took one look at his face, and fled away to order the
drink for which Jasper seemed to be asking.
Where he wanted to go--or what purpose--where he, perhaps, only
imagined himself to be going, when a sudden impulse or the sight of
a familiar place had made him turn into Orange House--it is
impossible to say. He was steadying himself lightly with the tips
of his fingers on the little table. There were on that verandah
two men whom he knew well personally, but his gaze roaming
incessantly as though he were looking for a way of escape, passed
and repassed over them without a sign of recognition. They, on
their side, looking at him, doubted the evidence of their own eyes.
It was not that his face was distorted. On the contrary, it was
still, it was set. But its expression, somehow, was
unrecognisable. Can that be him? they wondered with awe.
In his head there was a wild chaos of clear thoughts. Perfectly
clear. It was this clearness which was so terrible in conjunction
with the utter inability to lay hold of any single one of them all.
He was saying to himself, or to them: "Steady, steady." A China
boy appeared before him with a glass on a tray. He poured the
drink down his throat, and rushed out. His disappearance removed
the spell of wonder from the beholders. One of the men jumped up
and moved quickly to that side of the verandah from which almost
the whole of the roadstead could be seen. At the very moment when
Jasper, issuing from the door of the Orange House, was passing
under him in the street below, he cried to the others excitedly:
"That was Allen right enough! But where is his brig?"
Jasper heard these words with extraordinary loudness. The heavens
rang with them, as if calling him to account; for those were the
very words Freya would have to use. It was an annihilating
question; it struck his consciousness like a thunderbolt and
brought a sudden night upon the chaos of his thoughts even as he
walked. He did not check his pace. He went on in the darkness for
another three strides, and then fell.
The good Mesman had to push on as far as the hospital before he
found him. The doctor there talked of a slight heatstroke.
Nothing very much. Out in three days. . . . It must be admitted
that the doctor was right. In three days, Jasper Allen came out of
the hospital and became visible to the town--very visible indeed--
and remained so for quite a long time; long enough to become almost
one of the sights of the place; long enough to become disregarded
at last; long enough for the tale of his haunting visibility to be
remembered in the islands to this day.
The talk on the "front" and Jasper's appearance in the Orange House
stand at the beginning of the famous Bonito case, and give a view
of its two aspects--the practical and the psychological. The case
for the courts and the case for compassion; that last terribly
evident and yet obscure.
It has, you must understand, remained obscure even for that friend
of mine who wrote me the letter mentioned in the very first lines
of this narrative. He was one of those in Mr. Mesman's office, and
accompanied that gentleman in his search for Jasper. His letter
described to me the two aspects and some of the episodes of the
case. Heemskirk's attitude was that of deep thankfulness for not
having lost his own ship, and that was all. Haze over the land was
his explanation of having got so close to Tamissa reef. He saved
his ship, and for the rest he did not care. As to the fat gunner,
he deposed simply that he thought at the time that he was acting
for the best by letting go the tow-rope, but admitted that he was
greatly confused by the suddenness of the emergency.
As a matter of fact, he had acted on very precise instructions from
Heemskirk, to whom through several years' service together in the
East he had become a sort of devoted henchman. What was most
amazing in the detention of the Bonito was his story how,
proceeding to take possession of the firearms as ordered, he
discovered that there were no firearms on board. All he found in
the fore-cabin was an empty rack for the proper number of eighteen
rifles, but of the rifles themselves never a single one anywhere in
the ship. The mate of the brig, who looked rather ill and behaved
excitedly, as though he were perhaps a lunatic, wanted him to
believe that Captain Allen knew nothing of this; that it was he,
the mate, who had recently sold these rifles in the dead of night
to a certain person up the river. In proof of this story he
produced a bag of silver dollars and pressed it on his, the
gunner's, acceptance. Then, suddenly flinging it down on the deck,
he beat his own head with both his fists and started heaping
shocking curses upon his own soul for an ungrateful wretch not fit
to live.
All this the gunner reported at once to his commanding officer.
What Heemskirk intended by taking upon himself to detain the Bonito
it is difficult to say, except that he meant to bring some trouble
into the life of the man favoured by Freya. He had been looking at
Jasper with a desire to strike that man of kisses and embraces to
the earth. The question was: How could he do it without giving
himself away? But the report of the gunner created a serious case
enough. Yet Allen had friends--and who could tell whether he
wouldn't somehow succeed in wriggling out of it? The idea of
simply towing the brig so much compromised on to the reef came to
him while he was listening to the fat gunner in his cabin. There
was but little risk of being disapproved now. And it should be
made to appear an accident.
Going out on deck he had gloated upon his unconscious victim with
such a sinister roll of his eyes, such a queerly pursed mouth, that
Jasper could not help smiling. And the lieutenant had gone on the
bridge, saying to himself:
"You wait! I shall spoil the taste of those sweet kisses for you.
When you hear of Lieutenant Heemskirk in the future that name won't
bring a smile on your lips, I swear. You are delivered into my
hands."
And this possibility had come about without any planning, one could
almost say naturally, as if events had mysteriously shaped
themselves to fit the purposes of a dark passion. The most astute
scheming could not have served Heemskirk better. It was given to
him to taste a transcendental, an incredible perfection of
vengeance; to strike a deadly blow into that hated person's heart,
and to watch him afterwards walking about with the dagger in his
breast.
For that is what the state of Jasper amounted to. He moved, acted,
weary-eyed, keen-faced, lank and restless, with brusque movements
and fierce gestures; he talked incessantly in a frenzied and
fatigued voice, but within himself he knew that nothing would ever
give him back the brig, just as nothing can heal a pierced heart.
His soul, kept quiet in the stress of love by the unflinching
Freya's influence, was like a still but overwound string. The
shock had started it vibrating, and the string had snapped. He had
waited for two years in a perfectly intoxicated confidence for a
day that now would never come to a man disarmed for life by the
loss of the brig, and, it seemed to him, made unfit for love to
which he had no foothold to offer.
Day after day he would traverse the length of the town, follow the
coast, and, reaching the point of land opposite that part of the
reef on which his brig lay stranded, look steadily across the water
at her beloved form, once the home of an exulting hope, and now, in
her inclined, desolated immobility, towering above the lonely sea-
horizon, a symbol of despair.
The crew had left her in due course in her own boats which directly
they reached the town were sequestrated by the harbour authorities.
The vessel, too, was sequestrated pending proceedings; but these
same authorities did not take the trouble to set a guard on board.
For, indeed, what could move her from there? Nothing, unless a
miracle; nothing, unless Jasper's eyes, fastened on her tensely for
hours together, as though he hoped by the mere power of vision to
draw her to his breast.
All this story, read in my friend's very chatty letter, dismayed me
not a little. But it was really appalling to read his relation of
how Schultz, the mate, went about everywhere affirming with
desperate pertinacity that it was he alone who had sold the rifles.
"I stole them," he protested. Of course, no one would believe him.
My friend himself did not believe him, though he, of course,
admired this self-sacrifice. But a good many people thought it was
going too far to make oneself out a thief for the sake of a friend.
Only, it was such an obvious lie, too, that it did not matter,
perhaps.
I, who, in view of Schultz's psychology, knew how true that must
be, admit that I was appalled. So this was how a perfidious
destiny took advantage of a generous impulse! And I felt as though
I were an accomplice in this perfidy, since I did to a certain
extent encourage Jasper. Yet I had warned him as well.
"The man seemed to have gone crazy on this point," wrote my friend.
"He went to Mesman with his story. He says that some rascally
white man living amongst the natives up that river made him drunk
with some gin one evening, and then jeered at him for never having
any money. Then he, protesting to us that he was an honest man and
must be believed, described himself as being a thief whenever he
took a drop too much, and told us that he went on board and passed
the rifles one by one without the slightest compunction to a canoe
which came alongside that night, receiving ten dollars apiece for
them.
"Next day he was ill with shame and grief, but had not the courage
to confess his lapse to his benefactor. When the gunboat stopped
the brig he felt ready to die with the apprehension of the
consequences, and would have died happily, if he could have been
able to bring the rifles back by the sacrifice of his life. He
said nothing to Jasper, hoping that the brig would be released
presently. When it turned out otherwise and his captain was
detained on board the gunboat, he was ready to commit suicide from
despair; only he thought it his duty to live in order to let the
truth be known. 'I am an honest man! I am an honest man!' he
repeated, in a voice that brought tears to our eyes. 'You must
believe me when I tell you that I am a thief--a vile, low, cunning,
sneaking thief as soon as I've had a glass or two. Take me
somewhere where I may tell the truth on oath.'
"When we had at last convinced him that his story could be of no
use to Jasper--for what Dutch court, having once got hold of an
English trader, would accept such an explanation; and, indeed, how,
when, where could one hope to find proofs of such a tale?--he made
as if to tear his hair in handfuls, but, calming down, said:
'Good-bye, then, gentlemen,' and went out of the room so crushed
that he seemed hardly able to put one foot before the other. That
very night he committed suicide by cutting his throat in the house
of a half-caste with whom he had been lodging since he came ashore
from the wreck."
That throat, I thought with a shudder, which could produce the
tender, persuasive, manly, but fascinating voice which had aroused
Jasper's ready compassion and had secured Freya's sympathy! Who
could ever have supposed such an end in store for the impossible,
gentle Schultz, with his idiosyncrasy of naive pilfering, so
absurdly straightforward that, even in the people who had suffered
from it, it aroused nothing more than a sort of amused
exasperation? He was really impossible. His lot evidently should
have been a half-starved, mysterious, but by no means tragic
existence as a mild-eyed, inoffensive beachcomber on the fringe of
native life. There are occasions when the irony of fate, which
some people profess to discover in the working out of our lives,
wears the aspect of crude and savage jesting.
I shook my head over the manes of Schultz, and went on with my
friend's letter. It told me how the brig on the reef, looted by
the natives from the coast villages, acquired gradually the
lamentable aspect, the grey ghastliness of a wreck; while Jasper,
fading daily into a mere shadow of a man, strode brusquely all
along the "front" with horribly lively eyes and a faint, fixed
smile on his lips, to spend the day on a lonely spit of sand
looking eagerly at her, as though he had expected some shape on
board to rise up and make some sort of sign to him over the
decaying bulwarks. The Mesmans were taking care of him as far as
it was possible. The Bonito case had been referred to Batavia,
where no doubt it would fade away in a fog of official papers. . .
. It was heartrending to read all this. That active and zealous
officer, Lieutenant Heemskirk, his air of sullen, darkly-pained
self-importance not lightened by the approval of his action
conveyed to him unofficially, had gone on to take up his station in
the Moluccas. . . .
Then, at the end of the bulky, kindly-meant epistle, dealing with
the island news of half a year at least, my friend wrote: "A
couple of months ago old Nelson turned up here, arriving by the
mail-boat from Java. Came to see Mesman, it seems. A rather
mysterious visit, and extraordinarily short, after coming all that
way. He stayed just four days at the Orange House, with apparently
nothing in particular to do, and then caught the south-going
steamer for the Straits. I remember people saying at one time that
Allen was rather sweet on old Nelson's daughter, the girl that was
brought up by Mrs. Harley and then went to live with him at the
Seven Isles group. Surely you remember old Nelson--"
Remember old Nelson! Rather!
The letter went on to inform me further that old Nelson, at least,
remembered me, since some time after his flying visit to Makassar
he had written to the Mesmans asking for my address in London.
That old Nelson (or Nielsen), the note of whose personality was a
profound, echoless irresponsiveness to everything around him,
should wish to write, or find anything to write about to anybody,
was in itself a cause for no small wonder. And to me, of all
people! I waited with uneasy impatience for whatever disclosure
could come from that naturally benighted intelligence, but my
impatience had time to wear out before my eyes beheld old Nelson's
trembling, painfully-formed handwriting, senile and childish at the
same time, on an envelope bearing a penny stamp and the postal mark
of the Notting Hill office. I delayed opening it in order to pay
the tribute of astonishment due to the event by flinging my hands
above my head. So he had come home to England, to be definitely
Nelson; or else was on his way home to Denmark, where he would
revert for ever to his original Nielsen! But old Nelson (or
Nielsen) out of the tropics seemed unthinkable. And yet he was
there, asking me to call.
His address was at a boarding-house in one of those Bayswater
squares, once of leisure, which nowadays are reduced to earning
their living. Somebody had recommended him there. I started to
call on him on one of those January days in London, one of those
wintry days composed of the four devilish elements, cold, wet, mud,
and grime, combined with a particular stickiness of atmosphere that
clings like an unclean garment to one's very soul. Yet on
approaching his abode I saw, like a flicker far behind the soiled
veil of the four elements, the wearisome and splendid glitter of a
blue sea with the Seven Islets like minute specks swimming in my
eye, the high red roof of the bungalow crowning the very smallest
of them all. This visual reminiscence was profoundly disturbing.
I knocked at the door with a faltering hand.
Old Nelson (or Nielsen) got up from the table at which he was
sitting with a shabby pocket-book full of papers before him. He
took off his spectacles before shaking hands. For a moment neither
of us said a word; then, noticing me looking round somewhat
expectantly, he murmured some words, of which I caught only
"daughter" and "Hong Kong," cast his eyes down, and sighed.
His moustache, sticking all ways out, as of yore, was quite white
now. His old cheeks were softly rounded, with some colour in them;
strangely enough, that something childlike always noticeable in the
general contour of his physiognomy had become much more marked.
Like his handwriting, he looked childish and senile. He showed his
age most in his unintelligently furrowed, anxious forehead and in
his round, innocent eyes, which appeared to me weak and blinking
and watery; or was it that they were full of tears? . . .
To discover old Nelson fully informed upon any matter whatever was
a new experience. And after the first awkwardness had worn off he
talked freely, with, now and then, a question to start him going
whenever he lapsed into silence, which he would do suddenly,
clasping his hands on his waistcoat in an attitude which would
recall to me the east verandah, where he used to sit talking
quietly and puffing out his cheeks in what seemed now old, very old
days. He talked in a reasonable somewhat anxious tone.
"No, no. We did not know anything for weeks. Out of the way like
that, we couldn't, of course. No mail service to the Seven Isles.
But one day I ran over to Banka in my big sailing-boat to see
whether there were any letters, and saw a Dutch paper. But it
looked only like a bit of marine news: English brig Bonito gone
ashore outside Makassar roads. That was all. I took the paper
home with me and showed it to her. 'I will never forgive him!' she
cries with her old spirit. 'My dear,' I said, 'you are a sensible
girl. The best man may lose a ship. But what about your health?'
I was beginning to be frightened at her looks. She would not let
me talk even of going to Singapore before. But, really, such a
sensible girl couldn't keep on objecting for ever. 'Do what you
like, papa,' she says. Rather a job, that. Had to catch a steamer
at sea, but I got her over all right. There, doctors, of course.
Fever. Anaemia. Put her to bed. Two or three women very kind to
her. Naturally in our papers the whole story came out before long.
She reads it to the end, lying on the couch; then hands the
newspaper back to me, whispers 'Heemskirk,' and goes off into a
faint."
He blinked at me for quite a long time, his eyes running full of
tears again.
"Next day," he began, without any emotion in his voice, "she felt
stronger, and we had a long talk. She told me everything."
Here old Nelson, with his eyes cast down, gave me the whole story
of the Heemskirk episode in Freya's words; then went on in his
rather jerky utterance, and looking up innocently:
"'My dear,' I said, 'you have behaved in the main like a sensible
girl.' 'I have been horrid,' she cries, 'and he is breaking his
heart over there.' Well, she was too sensible not to see she
wasn't in a state to travel. But I went. She told me to go. She
was being looked after very well. Anaemia. Getting better, they
said."
He paused.
"You did see him?" I murmured.
"Oh, yes; I did see him," he started again, talking in that
reasonable voice as though he were arguing a point. "I did see
him. I came upon him. Eyes sunk an inch into his head; nothing
but skin on the bones of his face, a skeleton in dirty white
clothes. That's what he looked like. How Freya . . . But she
never did--not really. He was sitting there, the only live thing
for miles along that coast, on a drift-log washed up on the shore.
They had clipped his hair in the hospital, and it had not grown
again. He stared, holding his chin in his hand, and with nothing
on the sea between him and the sky but that wreck. When I came up
to him he just moved his head a bit. 'Is that you, old man?' says
he--like that.
"If you had seen him you would have understood at once how
impossible it was for Freya to have ever loved that man. Well,
well. I don't say. She might have--something. She was lonely,
you know. But really to go away with him! Never! Madness. She
was too sensible . . . I began to reproach him gently. And by and
by he turns on me. 'Write to you! What about? Come to her! What
with? If I had been a man I would have carried her off, but she
made a child, a happy child, of me. Tell her that the day the only
thing I had belonging to me in the world perished on this reef I
discovered that I had no power over her. . . Has she come here with
you?' he shouts, blazing at me suddenly with his hollow eyes. I
shook my head. Come with me, indeed! Anaemia! 'Aha! You see?
Go away, then, old man, and leave me alone here with that ghost,'
he says, jerking his head at the wreck of his brig.
"Mad! It was getting dusk. I did not care to stop any longer all
by myself with that man in that lonely place. I was not going to
tell him of Freya's illness. Anaemia! What was the good? Mad!
And what sort of husband would he have made, anyhow, for a sensible
girl like Freya? Why, even my little property I could not have
left them. The Dutch authorities would never have allowed an
Englishman to settle there. It was not sold then. My man Mahmat,
you know, was looking after it for me. Later on I let it go for a
tenth of its value to a Dutch half-caste. But never mind. It was
nothing to me then. Yes; I went away from him. I caught the
return mail-boat. I told everything to Freya. 'He's mad,' I said;
'and, my dear, the only thing he loved was his brig.'
"'Perhaps,' she says to herself, looking straight away--her eyes
were nearly as hollow as his--'perhaps it is true. Yes! I would
never allow him any power over me.'"
Old Nelson paused. I sat fascinated, and feeling a little cold in
that room with a blazing fire.
"So you see," he continued, "she never really cared for him. Much
too sensible. I took her away to Hong Kong. Change of climate,
they said. Oh, these doctors! My God! Winter time! There came
ten days of cold mists and wind and rain. Pneumonia. But look
here! We talked a lot together. Days and evenings. Who else had
she? . . . She talked a lot to me, my own girl. Sometimes she
would laugh a little. Look at me and laugh a little--"
I shuddered. He looked up vaguely, with a childish, puzzled
moodiness.
"She would say: 'I did not really mean to be a bad daughter to
you, papa.' And I would say: 'Of course, my dear. You could not
have meant it.' She would lie quiet and then say: 'I wonder?'
And sometimes, 'I've been really a coward,' she would tell me. You
know, sick people they say things. And so she would say too:
'I've been conceited, headstrong, capricious. I sought my own
gratification. I was selfish or afraid.' . . . But sick people,
you know, they say anything. And once, after lying silent almost
all day, she said: 'Yes; perhaps, when the day came I would not
have gone. Perhaps! I don't know,' she cried. 'Draw the curtain,
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