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VICTORY: AN ISLAND TALE

NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION

The last word of this novel was written on 29 May 1914. And that
last word was the single word of the title.

Those were the times of peace. Now that the moment of publication
approaches I have been considering the discretion of altering the
title-page. The word "Victory" the shining and tragic goal of noble
effort, appeared too great, too august, to stand at the head of a
mere novel. There was also the possibility of falling under the
suspicion of commercial astuteness deceiving the public into the
belief that the book had something to do with war.

Of that, however, I was not afraid very much. What influenced my
decision most were the obscure promptings of that pagan residuum of
awe and wonder which lurks still at the bottom of our old humanity.
"Victory" was the last word I had written in peace-time. It was the
last literary thought which had occurred to me before the doors of
the Temple of Janus flying open with a crash shook the minds, the
hearts, the consciences of men all over the world. Such coincidence
could not be treated lightly. And I made up my mind to let the word
stand, in the same hopeful spirit in which some simple citizen of
Old Rome would have "accepted the Omen."

The second point on which I wish to offer a remark is the existence
(in the novel) of a person named Schomberg.

That I believe him to be true goes without saying. I am not likely
to offer pinchbeck wares to my public consciously. Schomberg is an
old member of my company. A very subordinate personage in Lord Jim
as far back as the year 1899, he became notably active in a certain
short story of mine published in 1902. Here he appears in a still
larger part, true to life (I hope), but also true to himself. Only,
in this instance, his deeper passions come into play, and thus his
grotesque psychology is completed at last.

I don't pretend to say that this is the entire Teutonic psychology;
but it is indubitably the psychology of a Teuton. My object in
mentioning him here is to bring out the fact that, far from being
the incarnation of recent animosities, he is the creature of my old
deep-seated, and, as it were, impartial conviction.

J. C.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

On approaching the task of writing this Note for Victory, the first
thing I am conscious of is the actual nearness of the book, its
nearness to me personally, to the vanished mood in which it was
written, and to the mixed feelings aroused by the critical notices
the book obtained when first published almost exactly a year after
the beginning of the war. The writing of it was finished in 1914
long before the murder of an Austrian Archduke sounded the first
note of warning for a world already full of doubts and fears.

The contemporaneous very short Author's Note which is preserved in
this edition bears sufficient witness to the feelings with which I
consented to the publication of the book. The fact of the book
having been published in the United States early in the year made it
difficult to delay its appearance in England any longer. It came
out in the thirteenth month of the war, and my conscience was
troubled by the awful incongruity of throwing this bit of imagined
drama into the welter of reality, tragic enough in all conscience,
but even more cruel than tragic and more inspiring than cruel. It
seemed awfully presumptuous to think there would be eyes to spare
for those pages in a community which in the crash of the big guns
and in the din of brave words expressing the truth of an indomitable
faith could not but feel the edge of a sharp knife at its throat.

The unchanging Man of history is wonderfully adaptable both by his
power of endurance and in his capacity for detachment. The fact
seems to be that the play of his destiny is too great for his fears
and too mysterious for his understanding. Were the trump of the
Last Judgement to sound suddenly on a working day the musician at
his piano would go on with his performance of Beethoven's sonata and
the cobbler at his stall stick to his last in undisturbed confidence
in the virtues of the leather. And with perfect propriety. For
what are we to let ourselves be disturbed by an angel's vengeful
music too mighty our ears and too awful for our terrors? Thus it
happens to us to be struck suddenly by the lightning of wrath. The
reader will go on reading if the book pleases him and the critic
will go on criticizing with that faculty of detachment born perhaps
from a sense of infinite littleness and which is yet the only
faculty that seems to assimilate man to the immortal gods.

It is only when the catastrophe matches the natural obscurity of our
fate that even the best representative of the race is liable to lose
his detachment. It is very obvious that on the arrival of the
gentlemanly Mr. Jones, the single-minded Ricardo, and the faithful
Pedro, Heyst, the man of universal detachment, loses his mental
self-possession, that fine attitude before the universally
irremediable which wears the name of stoicism. It is all a matter
of proportion. There should have been a remedy for that sort of
thing. And yet there is no remedy. Behind this minute instance of
life's hazards Heyst sees the power of blind destiny. Besides,
Heyst in his fine detachment had lost the habit asserting himself.
I don't mean the courage of self-assertion, either moral or
physical, but the mere way of it, the trick of the thing, the
readiness of mind and the turn of the hand that come without
reflection and lead the man to excellence in life, in art, in crime,
in virtue, and, for the matter of that, even in love. Thinking is
the great enemy of perfection. The habit of profound reflection, I
am compelled to say, is the most pernicious of all the habits formed
by the civilized man.

But I wouldn't be suspected even remotely of making fun of Axel
Heyst. I have always liked him. The flesh-and-blood individual who
stands behind the infinitely more familiar figure of the book I
remember as a mysterious Swede right enough. Whether he was a
baron, too, I am not so certain. He himself never laid claim to
that distinction. His detachment was too great to make any claims,
big or small, on one's credulity. I will not say where I met him
because I fear to give my readers a wrong impression, since a marked
incongruity between a man and his surroundings is often a very
misleading circumstance. We became very friendly for a time, and I
would not like to expose him to unpleasant suspicions though,
personally, I am sure he would have been indifferent to suspicions
as he was indifferent to all the other disadvantages of life. He
was not the whole Heyst of course; he is only the physical and moral
foundation of my Heyst laid on the ground of a short acquaintance.
That it was short was certainly not my fault for he had charmed me
by the mere amenity of his detachment which, in this case, I cannot
help thinking he had carried to excess. He went away from his rooms
without leaving a trace. I wondered where he had gone to--but now I
know. He vanished from my ken only to drift into this adventure
that, unavoidable, waited for him in a world which he persisted in
looking upon as a malevolent shadow spinning in the sunlight. Often
in the course of years an expressed sentiment, the particular sense
of a phrase heard casually, would recall him to my mind so that I
have fastened on to him many words heard on other men's lips and
belonging to other men's less perfect, less pathetic moods.

The same observation will apply mutatis mutandis to Mr. Jones, who
is built on a much slenderer connection. Mr. Jones (or whatever his
name was) did not drift away from me. He turned his back on me and
walked out of the room. It was in a little hotel in the island of
St. Thomas in the West Indies (in the year '75) where we found him
one hot afternoon extended on three chairs, all alone in the loud
buzzing of flies to which his immobility and his cadaverous aspect
gave a most gruesome significance. Our invasion must have
displeased him because he got off the chairs brusquely and walked
out, leaving with me an indelibly weird impression of his thin
shanks. One of the men with me said that the fellow was the most
desperate gambler he had ever come across. I said: "A professional
sharper?" and got for an answer: "He's a terror; but I must say
that up to a certain point he will play fair. . . " I wonder what
the point was. I never saw him again because I believe he went
straight on board a mail-boat which left within the hour for other
ports of call in the direction of Aspinall. Mr. Jones's
characteristic insolence belongs to another man of a quite different
type. I will say nothing as to the origins of his mentality because
I don't intend to make any damaging admissions.

It so happened that the very same year Ricardo--the physical
Ricardo--was a fellow passenger of mine on board an extremely small
and extremely dirty little schooner, during a four days' passage
between two places in the Gulf of Mexico whose names don't matter.
For the most part he lay on deck aft as it were at my feet, and
raising himself from time to time on his elbow would talk about
himself and go on talking, not exactly to me or even at me (he would
not even look up but kept his eyes fixed on the deck) but more as if
communing in a low voice with his familiar devil. Now and then he
would give me a glance and make the hairs of his stiff little
moustache stir quaintly. His eyes were green and every cat I see to
this day reminds me of the exact contour of his face. What he was
travelling for or what was his business in life he never confided to
me. Truth to say, the only passenger on board that schooner who
could have talked openly about his activities and purposes was a
very snuffy and conversationally delightful friar, the superior of a
convent, attended by a very young lay brother, of a particularly
ferocious countenance. We had with us also, lying prostrate in the
dark and unspeakable cuddy of that schooner, an old Spanish
gentleman, owner of much luggage and, as Ricardo assured me, very
ill indeed. Ricardo seemed to be either a servant or the confidant
of that aged and distinguished-looking invalid, who early on the
passage held a long murmured conversation with the friar, and after
that did nothing but groan feebly, smoke cigarettes, and now and
then call for Martin in a voice full of pain. Then he who had
become Ricardo in the book would go below into that beastly and
noisome hole, remain there mysteriously, and coming up on deck again
with a face on which nothing could be read, would as likely as not
resume for my edification the exposition of his moral attitude
towards life illustrated by striking particular instances of the
most atrocious complexion. Did he mean to frighten me? Or seduce
me? Or astonish me? Or arouse my admiration? All he did was to
arouse my amused incredulity. As scoundrels go he was far from
being a bore. For the rest my innocence was so great then that I
could not take his philosophy seriously. All the time he kept one
ear turned to the cuddy in the manner of a devoted servant, but I
had the idea that in some way or other he had imposed the connection
on the invalid for some end of his own. The reader, therefore,
won't be surprised to hear that one morning I was told without any
particular emotion by the padrone of the schooner that the "rich
man" down there was dead: He had died in the night. I don't
remember ever being so moved by the desolate end of a complete
stranger. I looked down the skylight, and there was the devoted
Martin busy cording cowhide trunks belonging to the deceased whose
white beard and hooked nose were the only parts I could make out in
the dark depths of a horrible stuffy bunk.

As it fell calm in the course of the afternoon and continued calm
during all that night and the terrible, flaming day, the late "rich
man" had to be thrown overboard at sunset, though as a matter of
fact we were in sight of the low pestilential mangrove-lined coast
of our destination. The excellent Father Superior mentioned to me
with an air of immense commiseration: "The poor man has left a
young daughter." Who was to look after her I don't know, but I saw
the devoted Martin taking the trunks ashore with great care just
before I landed myself. I would perhaps have tracked the ways of
that man of immense sincerity for a little while, but I had some of
my own very pressing business to attend to, which in the end got
mixed up with an earthquake and so I had no time to give to Ricardo.
The reader need not be told that I have not forgotten him, though.

My contact with the faithful Pedro was much shorter and my
observation of him was less complete but incomparably more anxious.
It ended in a sudden inspiration to get out of his way. It was in a
hovel of sticks and mats by the side of a path. As I went in there
only to ask for a bottle of lemonade I have not to this day the
slightest idea what in my appearance or actions could have roused
his terrible ire. It became manifest to me less than two minutes
after I had set eyes on him for the first time, and though immensely
surprised of course I didn't stop to think it out I took the nearest
short cut--through the wall. This bestial apparition and a certain
enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti only a couple of months
afterwards, have fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning
rage, as manifested in the human animal, to the end of my days. Of
the nigger I used to dream for years afterwards. Of Pedro never.
The impression was less vivid. I got away from him too quickly.

It seems to me but natural that those three buried in a corner of my
memory should suddenly get out into the light of the world--so
natural that I offer no excuse for their existence, They were there,
they had to come out; and this is a sufficient excuse for a writer
of tales who had taken to his trade without preparation, or
premeditation, and without any moral intention but that which
pervades the whole scheme of this world of senses.

Since this Note is mostly concerned with personal contacts and the
origins of the persons in the tale, I am bound also to speak of
Lena, because if I were to leave her out it would look like a
slight; and nothing would be further from my thoughts than putting a
slight on Lena. If of all the personages involved in the "mystery
of Samburan" I have lived longest with Heyst (or with him I call
Heyst) it was at her, whom I call Lena, that I have looked the
longest and with a most sustained attention. This attention
originated in idleness for which I have a natural talent. One
evening I wandered into a cafe, in a town not of the tropics but of
the South of France. It was filled with tobacco smoke, the hum of
voices, the rattling of dominoes, and the sounds of strident music.
The orchestra was rather smaller than the one that performed at
Schomberg's hotel, had the air more of a family party than of an
enlisted band, and, I must confess, seemed rather more respectable
than the Zangiacomo musical enterprise. It was less pretentious
also, more homely and familiar, so to speak, insomuch that in the
intervals when all the performers left the platform one of them went
amongst the marble tables collecting offerings of sous and francs in
a battered tin receptacle recalling the shape of a sauceboat. It
was a girl. Her detachment from her task seems to me now to have
equalled or even surpassed Heyst's aloofness from all the mental
degradations to which a man's intelligence is exposed in its way
through life. Silent and wide-eyed she went from table to table
with the air of a sleep-walker and with no other sound but the
slight rattle of the coins to attract attention. It was long after
the sea-chapter of my life had been closed but it is difficult to
discard completely the characteristics of half a lifetime, and it
was in something of the Jack-ashore spirit that I dropped a five-
franc piece into the sauceboat; whereupon the sleep-walker turned
her head to gaze at me and said "Merci, Monsieur" in a tone in which
there was no gratitude but only surprise. I must have been idle
indeed to take the trouble to remark on such slight evidence that
the voice was very charming and when the performers resumed their
seats I shifted my position slightly in order not to have that
particular performer hidden from me by the little man with the beard
who conducted, and who might for all I know have been her father,
but whose real mission in life was to be a model for the Zangiacomo
of Victory. Having got a clear line of sight I naturally (being
idle) continued to look at the girl through all the second part of
the programme. The shape of her dark head inclined over the violin
was fascinating, and, while resting between the pieces of that
interminable programme she was, in her white dress and with her
brown hands reposing in her lap, the very image of dreamy innocence.
The mature, bad-tempered woman at the piano might have been her
mother, though there was not the slightest resemblance between them.
All I am certain of in their personal relation to each other is that
cruel pinch on the upper part of the arm. That I am sure I have
seen! There could be no mistake. I was in too idle a mood to
imagine such a gratuitous barbarity. It may have been playfulness,
yet the girl jumped up as if she had been stung by a wasp. It may
have been playfulness. Yet I saw plainly poor "dreamy innocence"
rub gently the affected place as she filed off with the other
performers down the middle aisle between the marble tables in the
uproar of voices, the rattling of dominoes through a blue atmosphere
of tobacco smoke. I believe that those people left the town next
day.

Or perhaps they had only migrated to the other big cafe, on the
other side of the Place de la Comedie. It is very possible. I did
not go across to find out. It was my perfect idleness that had
invested the girl with a peculiar charm, and I did not want to
destroy it by any superfluous exertion. The receptivity of my
indolence made the impression so permanent that when the moment came
for her meeting with Heyst I felt that she would be heroically equal
to every demand of the risky and uncertain future. I was so
convinced of it that I let her go with Heyst, I won't say without a
pang but certainly without misgivings. And in view of her
triumphant end what more could I have done for her rehabilitation
and her happiness?

1920.
J. C.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

There is, as every schoolboy knows in this scientific age, a very
close chemical relation between coal and diamonds. It is the
reason, I believe, why some people allude to coal as "black
diamonds." Both these commodities represent wealth; but coal is a
much less portable form of property. There is, from that point of
view, a deplorable lack of concentration in coal. Now, if a coal-
mine could be put into one's waistcoat pocket--but it can't! At the
same time, there is a fascination in coal, the supreme commodity of
the age in which we are camped like bewildered travellers in a
garish, unrestful hotel. And I suppose those two considerations,
the practical and the mystical, prevented Heyst--Axel Heyst--from
going away.

The Tropical Belt Coal Company went into liquidation. The world of
finance is a mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may
appear, evaporation precedes liquidation. First the capital
evaporates, and then the company goes into liquidation. These are
very unnatural physics, but they account for the persistent inertia
of Heyst, at which we "out there" used to laugh among ourselves--but
not inimically. An inert body can do no harm to anyone, provokes no
hostility, is scarcely worth derision. It may, indeed, be in the
way sometimes; but this could not be said of Axel Heyst. He was out
of everybody's way, as if he were perched on the highest peak of the
Himalayas, and in a sense as conspicuous. Everyone in that part of
the world knew of him, dwelling on his little island. An island is
but the top of a mountain. Axel Heyst, perched on it immovably, was
surrounded, instead of the imponderable stormy and transparent ocean
of air merging into infinity, by a tepid, shallow sea; a passionless
offshoot of the great waters which embrace the continents of this
globe. His most frequent visitors were shadows, the shadows of
clouds, relieving the monotony of the inanimate, brooding sunshine
of the tropics. His nearest neighbour--I am speaking now of things
showing some sort of animation--was an indolent volcano which smoked
faintly all day with its head just above the northern horizon, and
at night levelled at him, from amongst the clear stars, a dull red
glow, expanding and collapsing spasmodically like the end of a
gigantic cigar puffed at intermittently in the dark. Axel Heyst was
also a smoker; and when he lounged out on his veranda with his
cheroot, the last thing before going to bed, he made in the night
the same sort of glow and of the same size as that other one so many
miles away.

In a sense, the volcano was company to him in the shades of the
night--which were often too thick, one would think, to let a breath
of air through. There was seldom enough wind to blow a feather
along. On most evenings of the year Heyst could have sat outside
with a naked candle to read one of the books left him by his late
father. It was not a mean store. But he never did that. Afraid of
mosquitoes, very likely. Neither was he ever tempted by the silence
to address any casual remarks to the companion glow of the volcano.
He was not mad. Queer chap--yes, that may have been said, and in
fact was said; but there is a tremendous difference between the two,
you will allow.

On the nights of full moon the silence around Samburan--the "Round
Island" of the charts--was dazzling; and in the flood of cold light
Heyst could see his immediate surroundings, which had the aspect of
an abandoned settlement invaded by the jungle: vague roofs above
low vegetation, broken shadows of bamboo fences in the sheen of long
grass, something like an overgrown bit of road slanting among ragged
thickets towards the shore only a couple of hundred yards away, with
a black jetty and a mound of some sort, quite inky on its unlighted
side. But the most conspicuous object was a gigantic blackboard
raised on two posts and presenting to Heyst, when the moon got over
that side, the white letters "T. B. C. Co." in a row at least two
feet high. These were the initials of the Tropical Belt Coal
Company, his employers--his late employers, to be precise.

According to the unnatural mysteries of the financial world, the T.
B. C. Company's capital having evaporated in the course of two
years, the company went into liquidation--forced, I believe, not
voluntary. There was nothing forcible in the process, however. It
was slow; and while the liquidation--in London and Amsterdam--
pursued its languid course, Axel Heyst, styled in the prospectus
"manager in the tropics," remained at his post on Samburan, the No.
1 coaling-station of the company.

And it was not merely a coaling-station. There was a coal-mine
there, with an outcrop in the hillside less than five hundred yards
from the rickety wharf and the imposing blackboard. The company's
object had been to get hold of all the outcrops on tropical islands
and exploit them locally. And, Lord knows, there were any amount of
outcrops. It was Heyst who had located most of them in this part of
the tropical belt during his rather aimless wanderings, and being a
ready letter-writer had written pages and pages about them to his
friends in Europe. At least, so it was said.

We doubted whether he had any visions of wealth--for himself, at any
rate. What he seemed mostly concerned for was the "stride forward,"
as he expressed it, in the general organization of the universe,
apparently. He was heard by more than a hundred persons in the
islands talking of a "great stride forward for these regions." The
convinced wave of the hand which accompanied the phrase suggested
tropical distances being impelled onward. In connection with the
finished courtesy of his manner, it was persuasive, or at any rate
silencing--for a time, at least. Nobody cared to argue with him
when he talked in this strain. His earnestness could do no harm to
anybody. There was no danger of anyone taking seriously his dream
of tropical coal, so what was the use of hurting his feelings?

Thus reasoned men in reputable business offices where he had his
entree as a person who came out East with letters of introduction--
and modest letters of credit, too--some years before these coal-
outcrops began to crop up in his playfully courteous talk. From the
first there was some difficulty in making him out. He was not a
traveller. A traveller arrives and departs, goes on somewhere.
Heyst did not depart. I met a man once--the manager of the branch
of the Oriental Banking Corporation in Malacca--to whom Heyst
exclaimed, in no connection with anything in particular (it was in
the billiard-room of the club):

"I am enchanted with these islands!"

He shot it out suddenly, a propos des bottes, as the French say, and
while chalking his cue. And perhaps it was some sort of
enchantment. There are more spells than your commonplace magicians
ever dreamed of.

Roughly speaking, a circle with a radius of eight hundred miles
drawn round a point in North Borneo was in Heyst's case a magic
circle. It just touched Manila, and he had been seen there. It
just touched Saigon, and he was likewise seen there once. Perhaps
these were his attempts to break out. If so, they were failures.
The enchantment must have been an unbreakable one. The manager--the
man who heard the exclamation--had been so impressed by the tone,
fervour, rapture, what you will, or perhaps by the incongruity of it
that he had related the experience to more than one person.

"Queer chap, that Swede," was his only comment; but this is the
origin of the name "Enchanted Heyst" which some fellows fastened on
our man.

He also had other names. In his early years, long before he got so
becomingly bald on the top, he went to present a letter of
introduction to Mr. Tesman of Tesman Brothers, a Sourabaya firm--
tip-top house. Well, Mr. Tesman was a kindly, benevolent old
gentleman. He did not know what to make of that caller. After
telling him that they wished to render his stay among the islands as
pleasant as possible, and that they were ready to assist him in his
plans, and so on, and after receiving Heyst's thanks--you know the
usual kind of conversation--he proceeded to query in a slow,
paternal tone:

"And you are interested in--?"

"Facts," broke in Heyst in his courtly voice. "There's nothing
worth knowing but facts. Hard facts! Facts alone, Mr. Tesman."

I don't know if old Tesman agreed with him or not, but he must have
spoken about it, because, for a time, our man got the name of "Hard
Facts." He had the singular good fortune that his sayings stuck to
him and became part of his name. Thereafter he mooned about the
Java Sea in some of the Tesmans' trading schooners, and then
vanished, on board an Arab ship, in the direction of New Guinea. He
remained so long in that outlying part of his enchanted circle that
he was nearly forgotten before he swam into view again in a native
proa full of Goram vagabonds, burnt black by the sun, very lean, his
hair much thinned, and a portfolio of sketches under his arm. He
showed these willingly, but was very reserved as to anything else.
He had had an "amusing time," he said. A man who will go to New
Guinea for fun--well!

Later, years afterwards, when the last vestiges of youth had gone
off his face and all the hair off the top of his head, and his red-
gold pair of horizontal moustaches had grown to really noble
proportions, a certain disreputable white man fastened upon him an
epithet. Putting down with a shaking hand a long glass emptied of
its contents--paid for by Heyst--he said, with that deliberate
sagacity which no mere water-drinker ever attained:

"Heyst's a puffect g'n'lman. Puffect! But he's a ut-uto-utopist."

Heyst had just gone out of the place of public refreshment where
this pronouncement was voiced. Utopist, eh? Upon my word, the only
thing I heard him say which might have had a bearing on the point
was his invitation to old McNab himself. Turning with that finished
courtesy of attitude, movement voice, which was his obvious
characteristic, he had said with delicate playfulness:

"Come along and quench your thirst with us, Mr. McNab!"

Perhaps that was it. A man who could propose, even playfully, to
quench old McNab's thirst must have been a utopist, a pursuer of
chimeras; for of downright irony Heyst was not prodigal. And, may
be, this was the reason why he was generally liked. At that epoch
in his life, in the fulness of his physical development, of a broad,
martial presence, with his bald head and long moustaches, he
resembled the portraits of Charles XII, of adventurous memory.
However, there was no reason to think that Heyst was in any way a
fighting man.

CHAPTER TWO

It was about this time that Heyst became associated with Morrison on
terms about which people were in doubt. Some said he was a partner,
others said he was a sort of paying guest, but the real truth of the
matter was more complex. One day Heyst turned up in Timor. Why in
Timor, of all places in the world, no one knows. Well, he was
mooning about Delli, that highly pestilential place, possibly in
search of some undiscovered facts, when he came in the street upon
Morrison, who, in his way, was also an "enchanted" man. When you
spoke to Morrison of going home--he was from Dorsetshire--he
shuddered. He said it was dark and wet there; that it was like
living with your head and shoulders in a moist gunny-bag. That was
only his exaggerated style of talking. Morrison was "one of us."
He was owner and master of the Capricorn, trading brig, and was
understood to be doing well with her, except for the drawback of too
much altruism. He was the dearly beloved friend of a quantity of
God-forsaken villages up dark creeks and obscure bays, where he
traded for produce. He would often sail , through awfully dangerous
channels up to some miserable settlement, only to find a very hungry
population clamorous for rice, and without so much "produce" between
them as would have filled Morrison's suitcase. Amid general
rejoicings, he would land the rice all the same, explain to the
people that it was an advance, that they were in debt to him now;
would preach to them energy and industry, and make an elaborate note
in a pocket-diary which he always carried; and this would be the end
of that transaction. I don't know if Morrison thought so, but the
villagers had no doubt whatever about it. Whenever a coast village
sighted the brig it would begin to beat all its gongs and hoist all
its streamers, and all its girls would put flowers in their hair and
the crowd would line the river bank, and Morrison would beam and
glitter at all this excitement through his single eyeglass with an
air of intense gratification. He was tall and lantern-jawed, and
clean-shaven, and looked like a barrister who had thrown his wig to
the dogs.

We used to remonstrate with him:

"You will never see any of your advances if you go on like this,
Morrison."

He would put on a knowing air.

"I shall squeeze them yet some day--never you fear. And that
reminds me"--pulling out his inseparable pocketbook--"there's that
So-and-So village. They are pretty well off again; I may just as
well squeeze them to begin with."

He would make a ferocious entry in the pocketbook.

Memo: Squeeze the So-and-So village at the first time of calling.

Then he would stick the pencil back and snap the elastic on with
inflexible finality; but he never began the squeezing. Some men
grumbled at him. He was spoiling the trade. Well, perhaps to a
certain extent; not much. Most of the places he traded with were
unknown not only to geography but also to the traders' special lore
which is transmitted by word of mouth, without ostentation, and
forms the stock of mysterious local knowledge. It was hinted also
that Morrison had a wife in each and every one of them, but the
majority of us repulsed these innuendoes with indignation. He was a
true humanitarian and rather ascetic than otherwise.

When Heyst met him in Delli, Morrison was walking along the street,
his eyeglass tossed over his shoulder, his head down, with the
hopeless aspect of those hardened tramps one sees on our roads
trudging from workhouse to workhouse. Being hailed on the street he
looked up with a wild worried expression. He was really in trouble.
He had come the week before into Delli and the Portuguese
authorities, on some pretence of irregularity in his papers, had
inflicted a fine upon him and had arrested his brig.

Morrison never had any spare cash in hand. With his system of
trading it would have been strange if he had; and all these debts
entered in the pocketbook weren't good enough to raise a millrei on-
-let alone a shilling. The Portuguese officials begged him not to
distress himself. They gave him a week's grace, and then proposed
to sell the brig at auction. This meant ruin for Morrison; and when
Heyst hailed him across the street in his usual courtly tone, the
week was nearly out.

Heyst crossed over, and said with a slight bow, and in the manner of
a prince addressing another prince on a private occasion:

"What an unexpected pleasure. Would you have any objection to drink
something with me in that infamous wine-shop over there? The sun is
really too strong to talk in the street."

The haggard Morrison followed obediently into a sombre, cool hovel
which he would have distained to enter at any other time. He was
distracted. He did not know what he was doing. You could have led
him over the edge of a precipice just as easily as into that wine-
shop. He sat down like an automaton. He was speechless, but he saw
a glass full of rough red wine before him, and emptied it. Heyst
meantime, politely watchful, had taken a seat opposite.

"You are in for a bout of fever, I fear," he said sympathetically.

Poor Morrison's tongue was loosened at that.

"Fever!" he cried. "Give me fever. Give me plague. They are
diseases. One gets over them. But I am being murdered. I am being
murdered by the Portuguese. The gang here downed me at last among
them. I am to have my throat cut the day after tomorrow."

In the face of this passion Heyst made, with his eyebrows, a slight
motion of surprise which would not have been misplaced in a drawing-
room. Morrison's despairing reserve had broken down. He had been
wandering with a dry throat all over that miserable town of mud
hovels, silent, with no soul to turn to in his distress, and
positively maddened by his thoughts; and suddenly he had stumbled on
a white man, figuratively and actually white--for Morrison refused
to accept the racial whiteness of the Portuguese officials. He let
himself go for the mere relief of violent speech, his elbows planted
on the table, his eyes blood-shot, his voice nearly gone, the brim
of his round pith hat shading an unshaven, livid face. His white
clothes, which he had not taken off for three days, were dingy. He
had already gone to the bad, past redemption. The sight was
shocking to Heyst; but he let nothing of it appear in his hearing,
concealing his impression under that consummate good-society manner
of his. Polite attention, what's due from one gentleman listening
to another, was what he showed; and, as usual, it was catching; so
that Morrison pulled himself together and finished his narrative in
a conversational tone, with a man-of-the-world air.

"It's a villainous plot. Unluckily, one is helpless. That
scoundrel Cousinho--Andreas, you know--has been coveting the brig
for years. Naturally, I would never sell. She is not only my
livelihood; she's my life. So he has hatched this pretty little
plot with the chief of the customs. The sale, of course, will be a
farce. There's no one here to bid. He will get the brig for a
song--no, not even that--a line of a song. You have been some years
now in the islands, Heyst. You know us all; you have seen how we
live. Now you shall have the opportunity to see how some of us end;
for it is the end, for me. I can't deceive myself any longer. You
see it--don't your?"

Morrison had pulled himself together, but one felt the snapping
strain on his recovered self-possession. Heyst was beginning to say
that he "could very well see all the bearings of this unfortunate--"
when Morrison interrupted him jerkily.

"Upon my word, I don't know why I have been telling you all this. I
suppose seeing a thoroughly white man made it impossible to keep my
trouble to myself. Words can't do it justice; but since I've told
you so much I may as well tell you more. Listen. This morning on
board, in my cabin I went down on my knees and prayed for help. I
went down on my knees!"

"You are a believer, Morrison?" asked Heyst with a distinct note of
respect.

"Surely I am not an infidel."

Morrison was swiftly reproachful in his answer, and there came a
pause, Morrison perhaps interrogating his conscience, and Heyst
preserving a mien of unperturbed, polite interest.

"I prayed like a child, of course. I believe in children praying--
well, women, too, but I rather think God expects men to be more
self-reliant. I don't hold with a man everlastingly bothering the
Almighty with his silly troubles. It seems such cheek. Anyhow,
this morning I--I have never done any harm to any God's creature
knowingly--I prayed. A sudden impulse--I went flop on my knees; so
you may judge--"

They were gazing earnestly into each other's eyes. Poor Morrison
added, as a discouraging afterthought:

"Only this is such a God-forsaken spot."

Heyst inquired with a delicate intonation whether he might know the
amount for which the brig was seized.

Morrison suppressed an oath, and named curtly a sum which was in
itself so insignificant that any other person than Heyst would have
exclaimed at it. And even Heyst could hardly keep incredulity out
of his politely modulated voice as he asked if it was a fact that
Morrison had not that amount in hand.

Morrison hadn't. He had only a little English gold, a few
sovereigns, on board. He had left all his spare cash with the
Tesmans, in Samarang, to meet certain bills which would fall due
while he was away on his cruise. Anyhow, that money would not have
been any more good to him than if it had been in the innermost
depths of the infernal regions. He said all this brusquely. He
looked with sudden disfavour at that noble forehead, at those great
martial moustaches, at the tired eyes of the man sitting opposite
him. Who the devil was he? What was he, Morrison, doing there,
talking like this? Morrison knew no more of Heyst than the rest of
us trading in the Archipelago did. Had the Swede suddenly risen and
hit him on the nose, he could not have been taken more aback than
when this stranger, this nondescript wanderer, said with a little
bow across the table:

"Oh! If that's the case I would be very happy if you'd allow me to
be of use!"

Morrison didn't understand. This was one of those things that don't
happen--unheard of things. He had no real inkling of what it meant,
till Heyst said definitely:

"I can lend you the amount."

"You have the money?" whispered Morrison. "Do you mean here, in
your pocket?"

"Yes, on me. Glad to be of use."

Morrison, staring open-mouthed, groped over his shoulder for the
cord of the eyeglass hanging down his back. When he found it, he
stuck it in his eye hastily. It was as if he expected Heyst's usual
white suit of the tropics to change into a shining garment, flowing
down to his toes, and a pair of great dazzling wings to sprout out
on the Swede's shoulders--and didn't want to miss a single detail of
the transformation. But if Heyst was an angle from on high, sent in
answer to prayer, he did not betray his heavenly origin by outward
signs. So, instead of going on his knees, as he felt inclined to
do, Morrison stretched out his hand, which Heyst grasped with formal
alacrity and a polite murmur in which "Trifle--delighted--of
service," could just be distinguished.

"Miracles do happen," thought the awestruck Morrison. To him, as to
all of us in the Islands, this wandering Heyst, who didn't toil or
spin visibly, seemed the very last person to be the agent of
Providence in an affair concerned with money. The fact of his
turning up in Timor or anywhere else was no more wonderful than the
settling of a sparrow on one's window-sill at any given moment. But
that he should carry a sum of money in his pocket seemed somehow
inconceivable.

So inconceivable that as they were trudging together through the
sand of the roadway to the custom-house--another mud hovel--to pay
the fine, Morrison broke into a cold sweat, stopped short, and
exclaimed in faltering accents:

"I say! You aren't joking, Heyst?"

"Joking!" Heyst's blue eyes went hard as he turned them on the
discomposed Morrison. "In what way, may I ask?" he continued with
austere politeness.

Morrison was abashed.

"Forgive me, Heyst. You must have been sent by God in answer to my
prayer. But I have been nearly off my chump for three days with
worry; and it suddenly struck me: 'What if it's the Devil who has
sent him?'"

"I have no connection with the supernatural," said Heyst graciously,
moving on. "Nobody has sent me. I just happened along."

"I know better," contradicted Morrison. "I may be unworthy, but I
have been heard. I know it. I feel it. For why should you offer--
"

Heyst inclined his head, as from respect for a conviction in which
he could not share. But he stuck to his point by muttering that in
the presence of an odious fact like this, it was natural -

Later in the day, the fine paid, and the two of them on board the
brig, from which the guard had been removed, Morrison who, besides,
being a gentleman was also an honest fellow began to talk about
repayment. He knew very well his inability to lay by any sum of
money. It was partly the fault of circumstances and partly of his
temperament; and it would have been very difficult to apportion the
responsibility between the two. Even Morrison himself could not
say, while confessing to the fact. With a worried air he ascribed
it to fatality:

"I don't know how it is that I've never been able to save. It's
some sort of curse. There's always a bill or two to meet."

He plunged his hand into his pocket for the famous notebook so well
known in the islands, the fetish of his hopes, and fluttered the
pages feverishly.

"And yet--look," he went on. "There it is--more than five thousand
dollars owing. Surely that's something."

He ceased suddenly. Heyst, who had been all the time trying to look
as unconcerned as he could, made reassuring noises in his throat.
But Morrison was not only honest. He was honourable, too; and on
this stressful day, before this amazing emissary of Providence and
in the revulsion of his feelings, he made his great renunciation.
He cast off the abiding illusion of his existence.

"No. No. They are not good. I'll never be able to squeeze them.
Never. I've been saying for years I would, but I give it up. I
never really believed I could. Don't reckon on that, Heyst. I have
robbed you."

Poor Morrison actually laid his head on the cabin table, and
remained in that crushed attitude while Heyst talked to him
soothingly with the utmost courtesy. The Swede was as much
distressed as Morrison; for he understood the other's feelings
perfectly. No decent feeling was ever scorned by Heyst. But he was
incapable of outward cordiality of manner, and he felt acutely his
defect. Consummate politeness is not the right tonic for an
emotional collapse. They must have had, both of them, a fairly
painful time of it in the cabin of the brig. In the end Morrison,
casting desperately for an idea in the blackness of his despondency,
hit upon the notion of inviting Heyst to travel with him in his brig
and have a share in his trading ventures up to the amount of his
loan.

It is characteristic of Heyst's unattached, floating existence that
he was in a position to accept this proposal. There is no reason to
think that he wanted particularly just then to go poking aboard the
brig into all the holes and corners of the Archipelago where
Morrison picked up most of his trade. Far from it; but he would
have consented to almost any arrangement in order to put an end to
the harrowing scene in the cabin. There was at once a great
transformation act: Morrison raising his diminished head, and
sticking the glass in his eye to looked affectionately at Heyst, a
bottle being uncorked, and so on. It was agreed that nothing should
be said to anyone of this transaction. Morrison, you understand,
was not proud of the episode, and he was afraid of being
unmercifully chaffed.

"An old bird like me! To let myself be trapped by those damned
Portuguese rascals! I should never hear the last of it. We must
keep it dark."

From quite other motives, among which his native delicacy was the
principal, Heyst was even more anxious to bind himself to silence.
A gentleman would naturally shrink from the part of heavenly
messenger that Morrison would force upon him. It made Heyst
uncomfortable, as it was. And perhaps he did not care that it
should be known that he had some means, whatever they might have
been--sufficient, at any rate, to enable him to lend money to
people. These two had a duet down there, like conspirators in a
comic opera, of "Sh--ssh, shssh! Secrecy! Secrecy!" It must have
been funny, because they were very serious about it.

And for a time the conspiracy was successful in so far that we all
concluded that Heyst was boarding with the good-natured --some said:
sponging on the imbecile--Morrison, in his brig. But you know how
it is with all such mysteries. There is always a leak somewhere.
Morrison himself, not a perfect vessel by any means, was bursting
with gratitude, and under the stress he must have let out something
vague--enough to give the island gossip a chance. And you know how
kindly the world is in its comments on what it does not understand.
A rumour sprang out that Heyst, having obtained some mysterious hold
on Morrison, had fastened himself on him and was sucking him dry.
Those who had traced these mutters back to their origin were very
careful not to believe them. The originator, it seems, was a
certain Schomberg, a big, manly, bearded creature of the Teutonic
persuasion, with an ungovernable tongue which surely must have
worked on a pivot. Whether he was a Lieutenant of the Reserve, as
he declared, I don't know. Out there he was by profession a hotel-
keeper, first in Bangkok, then somewhere else, and ultimately in
Sourabaya. He dragged after him up and down that section of the
tropical belt a silent, frightened, little woman with long ringlets,
who smiled at one stupidly, showing a blue tooth. I don't know why
so many of us patronized his various establishments. He was a
noxious ass, and he satisfied his lust for silly gossip at the cost
of his customers. It was he who, one evening, as Morrison and Heyst
went past the hotel--they were not his regular patrons--whispered
mysteriously to the mixed company assembled on the veranda:

"The spider and the fly just gone by, gentlemen." Then, very
important and confidential, his thick paw at the side of his mouth:
"We are among ourselves; well, gentlemen, all I can say is, I don't
you ever get mixed up with that Swede. Don't you ever get caught in
his web."

CHAPTER THREE

Human nature being what it is, having a silly side to it as well as
a mean side, there were not a few who pretended to be indignant on
no better authority than a general propensity to believe every evil
report; and a good many others who found it simply funny to call
Heyst the Spider--behind his back, of course. He was as serenely
unconscious of this as of his several other nicknames. But soon
people found other things to say of Heyst; not long afterwards he
came very much to the fore in larger affairs. He blossomed out into
something definite. He filled the public eye as the manager on the
spot of the Tropical Belt Coal Company with offices in London and
Amsterdam, and other things about it that sounded and looked
grandiose. The offices in the two capitals may have consisted--and
probably did--of one room in each; but at that distance, out East
there, all this had an air. We were more puzzled than dazzled, it
is true; but even the most sober-minded among us began to think that
there was something in it. The Tesmans appointed agents, a contract
for government mail-boats secured, the era of steam beginning for
the islands--a great stride forward--Heyst's stride!

And all this sprang from the meeting of the cornered Morrison and of
the wandering Heyst, which may or may not have been the direct
outcome of a prayer. Morrison was not an imbecile, but he seemed to
have got himself into a state of remarkable haziness as to his exact
position towards Heyst. For, if Heyst had been sent with money in
his pocket by a direct decree of the Almighty in answer to
Morrison's prayer then there was no reason for special gratitude,
since obviously he could not help himself. But Morrison believed
both, in the efficacy of prayer and in the infinite goodness of
Heyst. He thanked God with awed sincerity for his mercy, and could
not thank Heyst enough for the service rendered as between man and
man. In this (highly creditable) tangle of strong feelings
Morrison's gratitude insisted on Heyst's partnership in the great
discovery. Ultimately we heard that Morrison had gone home through
the Suez Canal in order to push the magnificent coal idea personally
in London. He parted from his brig and disappeared from our ken;
but we heard that he had written a letter or letters to Heyst,
saying that London was cold and gloomy; that he did not like either
the men or things, that he was "as lonely as a crow in a strange
country." In truth, he pined after the Capricorn--I don't mean only
the tropic; I mean the ship too. Finally he went into Dorsetshire
to see his people, caught a bad cold, and died with extraordinary
precipitation in the bosom of his appalled family. Whether his
exertions in the City of London had enfeebled his vitality I don't
know; but I believe it was this visit which put life into the coal
idea. Be it as it may, the Tropical Belt Coal Company was born very
shortly after Morrison, the victim of gratitude and his native
climate, had gone to join his forefathers in a Dorsetshire
churchyard.

Heyst was immensely shocked. He got the news in the Moluccas
through the Tesmans, and then disappeared for a time. It appears
that he stayed with a Dutch government doctor in Amboyna, a friend
of his who looked after him for a bit in his bungalow. He became
visible again rather suddenly, his eyes sunk in his head, and with a
sort of guarded attitude, as if afraid someone would reproach him
with the death of Morrison.

Naive Heyst! As if anybody would . . . Nobody amongst us had any
interest in men who went home. They were all right; they did not
count any more. Going to Europe was nearly as final as going to
Heaven. It removed a man from the world of hazard and adventure.

As a matter of fact, many of us did not hear of this death till
months afterwards--from Schomberg, who disliked Heyst gratuitously
and made up a piece of sinister whispered gossip:

"That's what comes of having anything to do with that fellow. He
squeezes you dry like a lemon, then chucks you out--sends you home
to die. Take warning by Morrison!"

Of course, we laughed at the innkeeper's suggestions of black
mystery. Several of us heard that Heyst was prepared to go to
Europe himself, to push on his coal enterprise personally; but he
never went. It wasn't necessary. The company was formed without
him, and his nomination of manager in the tropics came out to him by
post.

From the first he had selected Samburan, or Round Island, for the
central station. Some copies of the prospectus issued in Europe,
having found their way out East, were passed from hand to hand. We
greatly admired the map which accompanied them for the edification
of the shareholders. On it Samburan was represented as the central
spot of the Eastern Hemisphere with its name engraved in enormous
capitals. Heavy lines radiated from it in all directions through
the tropics, figuring a mysterious and effective star--lines of
influence or lines of distance, or something of that sort. Company
promoters have an imagination of their own. There's no more
romantic temperament on earth than the temperament of a company
promoter. Engineers came out, coolies were imported, bungalows were
put up on Samburan, a gallery driven into the hillside, and actually
some coal got out.

These manifestations shook the soberest minds. For a time everybody
in the islands was talking of the Tropical Belt Coal, and even those
who smiled quietly to themselves were only hiding their uneasiness.
Oh, yes; it had come, and anybody could see what would be the
consequences--the end of the individual trader, smothered under a
great invasion of steamers. We could not afford to buy steamers.
Not we. And Heyst was the manager.

"You know, Heyst, enchanted Heyst."

"Oh, come! He has been no better than a loafer around here as far
back as any of us can remember."

"Yes, he said he was looking for facts. Well, he's got hold of one
that will do for all of us," commented a bitter voice.

"That's what they call development--and be hanged to it!" muttered
another.

Never was Heyst talked about so much in the tropical belt before.

"Isn't he a Swedish baron or something?"

"He, a baron? Get along with you!"

For my part I haven't the slightest doubt that he was. While he was
still drifting amongst the islands, enigmatical and disregarded like
an insignificant ghost, he told me so himself on a certain occasion.
It was a long time before he materialized in this alarming way into
the destroyer of our little industry--Heyst the Enemy.

It became the fashion with a good many to speak of Heyst as the
Enemy. He was very concrete, very visible now. He was rushing all
over the Archipelago, jumping in and out of local mail-packets as if
they had been tram-cars, here, there, and everywhere--organizing
with all his might. This was no mooning about. This was business.
And this sudden display of purposeful energy shook the incredulity
of the most sceptical more than any scientific demonstration of the
value of these coal-outcrops could have done. It was impressive.
Schomberg was the only one who resisted the infection. Big, manly
in a portly style, and profusely bearded, with a glass of beer in
his thick paw, he would approach some table where the topic of the
hour was being discussed, would listen for a moment, and then come
out with his invariable declaration:

"All this is very well, gentlemen; but he can't throw any of his
coal-dust in my eyes. There's nothing in it. Why, there can't be
anything in it. A fellow like that for manager? Phoo!"

Was it the clairvoyance of imbecile hatred, or mere stupid tenacity
of opinion, which ends sometimes by scoring against the world in a
most astonishing manner? Most of us can remember instances of
triumphant folly; and that ass Schomberg triumphed. The T.B.C.
Company went into liquidation, as I began by telling you. The
Tesmans washed their hands of it. The Government cancelled those
famous contracts, the talk died out, and presently it was remarked
here and there that Heyst had faded completely away. He had become
invisible, as in those early days when he used to make a bolt clear
out of sight in his attempts to break away from the enchantment of
"these isles," either in the direction of New Guinea or in the
direction of Saigon--to cannibals or to cafes. The enchanted Heyst!
Had he at last broken the spell? Had he died? We were too
indifferent to wonder overmuch. You see we had on the whole liked
him well enough. And liking is not sufficient to keep going the
interest one takes in a human being. With hatred, apparently, it is
otherwise. Schomberg couldn't forget Heyst. The keen, manly
Teutonic creature was a good hater. A fool often is.

"Good evening, gentlemen. Have you got everything you want? So!
Good! You see? What was I always telling you? Aha! There was
nothing in it. I knew it. But what I would like to know is what
became of that--Swede."

He put a stress on the word Swede as if it meant scoundrel. He
detested Scandinavians generally. Why? Goodness only knows. A
fool like that is unfathomable. He continued:

"It's five months or more since I have spoken to anybody who has
seen him."

As I have said, we were not much interested; but Schomberg, of
course, could not understand that. He was grotesquely dense.
Whenever three people came together in his hotel, he took good care
that Heyst should be with them.

"I hope the fellow did not go and drown himself," he would add with
a comical earnestness that ought to have made us shudder; only our
crowd was superficial, and did not apprehend the psychology of this
pious hope.

"Why? Heyst isn't in debt to you for drinks is he?" somebody asked
him once with shallow scorn.

"Drinks! Oh, dear no!"

The innkeeper was not mercenary. Teutonic temperament seldom is.
But he put on a sinister expression to tell us that Heyst had not
paid perhaps three visits altogether to his "establishment." This
was Heyst's crime, for which Schomberg wished him nothing less than
a long and tormented existence. Observe the Teutonic sense of
proportion and nice forgiving temper.

At last, one afternoon, Schomberg was seen approaching a group of
his customers. He was obviously in high glee. He squared his manly
chest with great importance.

"Gentlemen, I have news of him. Who? why, that Swede. He is still
on Samburan. He's never been away from it. The company is gone,
the engineers are gone, the clerks are gone, the coolies are gone,
everything's gone; but there he sticks. Captain Davidson, coming by
from the westward, saw him with his own eyes. Something white on
the wharf, so he steamed in and went ashore in a small boat. Heyst,
right enough. Put a book into his pocket, always very polite. Been
strolling on the wharf and reading. 'I remain in possession here,'
he told Captain Davidson. What I want to know is what he gets to
eat there. A piece of dried fish now and then--what? That's coming
down pretty low for a man who turned up his nose at my table
d'hote!"

He winked with immense malice. A bell started ringing, and he led
the way to the dining-room as if into a temple, very grave, with the
air of a benefactor of mankind. His ambition was to feed it at a
profitable price, and his delight was to talk of it behind its back.
It was very characteristic of him to gloat over the idea of Heyst
having nothing decent to eat.

CHAPTER FOUR

A few of us who were sufficiently interested went to Davidson for
details. These were not many. He told us that he passed to the
north of Samburan on purpose to see what was going on. At first, it
looked as if that side of the island had been altogether abandoned.
This was what he expected. Presently, above the dense mass of
vegetation that Samburan presents to view, he saw the head of the
flagstaff without a flag. Then, while steaming across the slight
indentation which for a time was known officially as Black Diamond
Bay, he made out with his glass the white figure on the coaling-
wharf. It could be no one but Heyst.

"I thought for certain he wanted to be taken off, so I steamed in.
He made no signs. However, I lowered a boat. I could not see
another living being anywhere. Yes. He had a book in his hand. He
looked exactly as we have always seen him--very neat, white shoes,
cork helmet. He explained to me that he had always had a taste for
solitude. It was the first I ever heard of it, I told him. He only
smiled. What could I say? He isn't the sort of man one can speak
familiarly to. There's something in him. One doesn't care to.

"'But what's the object? Are you thinking of keeping possession of
the mine?' I asked him.

"'Something of the sort,' he says. 'I am keeping hold.'

"'But all this is as dead as Julius Caesar,' I cried. 'In fact, you
have nothing worth holding on to, Heyst.'

"'Oh, I am done with facts,' says he, putting his hand to his helmet
sharply with one of his short bows."

Thus dismissed, Davidson went on board his ship, swung her out, and
as he was steaming away he watched from the bridge Heyst walking
shoreward along the wharf. He marched into the long grass and
vanished--all but the top of his white cork helmet, which seemed to
swim in a green sea. Then that too disappeared, as if it had sunk
into the living depths of the tropical vegetation, which is more
jealous of men's conquests than the ocean, and which was about to
close over the last vestiges of the liquidated Tropical Belt Coal
Company--A. Heyst, manager in the East.

Davidson, a good, simple fellow in his way, was strangely affected.
It is to be noted that he knew very little of Heyst. He was one of
those whom Heyst's finished courtesy of attitude and intonation most
strongly disconcerted. He himself was a fellow of fine feeling, I
think, though of course he had no more polish than the rest of us.
We were naturally a hail-fellow-well-met crowd, with standards of
our own--no worse, I daresay, than other people's; but polish was
not one of them. Davidson's fineness was real enough to alter the
course of the steamer he commanded. Instead of passing to the south
of Samburan, he made it his practice to take the passage along the
north shore, within about a mile of the wharf.

"He can see us if he likes to see us," remarked Davidson. Then he
had an afterthought: "I say! I hope he won't think I am intruding,
eh?"

We reassured him on the point of correct behaviour. The sea is open
to all.

This slight deviation added some ten miles to Davidson's round trip,
but as that was sixteen hundred miles it did not matter much.

"I have told my owner of it," said the conscientious commander of
the Sissie.

His owner had a face like an ancient lemon. He was small and
wizened--which was strange, because generally a Chinaman, as he
grows in prosperity, puts on inches of girth and stature. To serve
a Chinese firm is not so bad. Once they become convinced you deal
straight by them, their confidence becomes unlimited. You can do no
wrong. So Davidson's old Chinaman squeaked hurriedly:

"All right, all right, all right. You do what you like, captain--"

And there was an end of the matter; not altogether, though. From
time to time the Chinaman used to ask Davidson about the white man.
He was still there, eh?

"I never see him," Davidson had to confess to his owner, who would
peer at him silently through round, horn-rimmed spectacles, several
sizes too large for his little old face. "I never see him."

To me, on occasions he would say:

"I haven't a doubt he's there. He hides. It's very unpleasant."
Davidson was a little vexed with Heyst. "Funny thing," he went on.
"Of all the people I speak to, nobody ever asks after him but that
Chinaman of mine--and Schomberg," he added after a while.

Yes, Schomberg, of course. He was asking everybody about
everything, and arranging the information into the most scandalous
shape his imagination could invent. From time to time he would step
up, his blinking, cushioned eyes, his thick lips, his very chestnut
beard, looking full of malice.

"Evening, gentlemen. Have you got all you want? So! Good! Well,
I am told the jungle has choked the very sheds in Black Diamond Bay.
Fact. He's a hermit in the wilderness now. But what can this
manager get to eat there? It beats me."

Sometimes a stranger would inquire with natural curiosity:

"Who? What manager?"

"Oh, a certain Swede,"--with a sinister emphasis, as if he were
saying "a certain brigand." "Well known here. He's turned hermit
from shame. That's what the devil does when he's found out."

Hermit. This was the latest of the more or less witty labels
applied to Heyst during his aimless pilgrimage in this section of
the tropical belt, where the inane clacking of Schomberg's tongue
vexed our ears.

But apparently Heyst was not a hermit by temperament. The sight of
his land was not invincibly odious to him. We must believe this,
since for some reason or other he did come out from his retreat for
a while. Perhaps it was only to see whether there were any letters
for him at the Tesmans. I don't know. No one knows. But this
reappearance shows that his detachment from the world was not
complete. And incompleteness of any sort leads to trouble. Axel
Heyst ought not to have cared for his letters--or whatever it was
that brought him out after something more than a year and a half in
Samburan. But it was of no use. He had not the hermit's vocation!
That was the trouble, it seems.

Be this as it may, he suddenly reappeared in the world, broad chest,
bald forehead, long moustaches, polite manner, and all--the complete
Heyst, even to the kindly sunken eyes on which there still rested
the shadow of Morrison's death. Naturally, it was Davidson who had
given him a lift out of his forsaken island. There were no other
opportunities, unless some native craft were passing by--a very
remote and unsatisfactory chance to wait for. Yes, he came out with
Davidson, to whom he volunteered the statement that it was only for
a short time--a few days, no more. He meant to go back to Samburan.

Davidson expressing his horror and incredulity of such foolishness,
Heyst explained that when the company came into being he had his few
belongings sent out from Europe.

To Davidson, as to any of us, the idea of Heyst, the wandering
drifting, unattached Heyst, having any belongings of the sort that
can furnish a house was startlingly novel. It was grotesquely
fantastic. It was like a bird owning real property.

"Belongings? Do you mean chairs and tables?" Davidson asked with
unconcealed astonishment.

Heyst did mean that. "My poor father died in London. It has been
all stored there ever since," he explained.

"For all these years?" exclaimed Davidson, thinking how long we all
had known Heyst flitting from tree to tree in a wilderness.

"Even longer," said Heyst, who had understood very well.

This seemed to imply that he had been wandering before he came under
our observation. In what regions? And what early age? Mystery.
Perhaps he was a bird that had never had a nest.

"I left school early," he remarked once to Davidson, on the passage.
"It was in England. A very good school. I was not a shining
success there."

The confessions of Heyst. Not one of us--with the probable
exception of Morrison, who was dead--had ever heard so much of his
history. It looks as if the experience of hermit life had the power
to loosen one's tongue, doesn't it?

During that memorable passage, in the Sissie, which took about two
days, he volunteered other hints--for you could not call it
information--about his history. And Davidson was interested. He
was interested not because the hints were exciting but because of
that innate curiosity about our fellows which is a trait of human
nature. Davidson's existence, too, running the Sissie along the
Java Sea and back again, was distinctly monotonous and, in a sense,
lonely. He never had any sort of company on board. Native deck-
passengers in plenty, of course, but never a white man, so the
presence of Heyst for two days must have been a godsend. Davidson
was telling us all about it afterwards. Heyst said that his father
had written a lot of books. He was a philosopher.

"Seems to me he must have been something of a crank, too," was
Davidson's comment. "Apparently he had quarrelled with his people
in Sweden. Just the sort of father you would expect Heyst to have.
Isn't he a bit of a crank himself? He told me that directly his
father died he lit out into the wide world on his own, and had been
on the move till he fetched up against this famous coal business.
Fits the son of the father somehow, don't you think?"

For the rest, Heyst was as polite as ever. He offered to pay for
his passage; but when Davidson refused to hear of it he seized him
heartily by the hand, gave one of his courtly bows, and declared
that he was touched by his friendly proceedings.

"I am not alluding to this trifling amount which you decline to
take," he went on, giving a shake to Davidson's hand. "But I am
touched by your humanity." Another shake. "Believe me, I am
profoundly aware of having been an object of it." Final shake of
the hand. All this meant that Heyst understood in a proper sense
the little Sissie's periodic appearance in sight of his hermitage.

"He's a genuine gentleman," Davidson said to us. "I was really
sorry when he went ashore."

We asked him where he had left Heyst.

"Why, in Sourabaya--where else?"

The Tesmans had their principal counting-house in Sourabaya. There
had long existed a connection between Heyst and the Tesmans. The
incongruity of a hermit having agents did not strike us, nor yet the
absurdity of a forgotten cast-off, derelict manager of a wrecked,
collapsed, vanished enterprise, having business to attend to. We
said Sourabaya, of course, and took it for granted that he would
stay with one of the Tesmans. One of us even wondered what sort of
reception he would get; for it was known that Julius Tesman was
unreasonably bitter about the Tropical Belt Coal fiasco. But
Davidson set us right. It was nothing of the kind. Heyst went to
stay in Schomberg's hotel, going ashore in the hotel launch. Not
that Schomberg would think of sending his launch alongside a mere
trader like the Sissie. But she had been meeting a coastal mail-
packet, and had been signalled to. Schomberg himself was steering
her.

"You should have seen Schomberg's eyes bulge out when Heyst jumped
in with an ancient brown leather bag!" said Davidson. "He pretended
not to know who it was--at first, anyway. I didn't go ashore with
them. We didn't stay more than a couple of hours altogether.
Landed two thousand coconuts and cleared out. I have agreed to pick
him up again on my next trip in twenty days' time."

CHAPTER FIVE

Davidson happened to be two days late on his return trip; no great
matter, certainly, but he made a point of going ashore at once,
during the hottest hour of the afternoon, to look for Heyst.
Schomberg's hotel stood back in an extensive enclosure containing a
garden, some large trees, and, under their spreading boughs, a
detached "hall available for concerts and other performances," as
Schomberg worded it in his advertisements. Torn, and fluttering
bills, intimating in heavy red capitals CONCERTS EVERY NIGHT, were
stuck on the brick pillars on each side of the gateway.

The walk had been long and confoundedly sunny. Davidson stood
wiping his wet neck and face on what Schomberg called "the piazza."
Several doors opened on to it, but all the screens were down. Not a
soul was in sight, not even a China boy--nothing but a lot of
painted iron chairs and tables. Solitude, shade, and gloomy
silence--and a faint, treacherous breeze which came from under the
trees and quite unexpectedly caused the melting Davidson to shiver
slightly--the little shiver of the tropics which in Sourabaya,
especially, often means fever and the hospital to the incautious
white man.

The prudent Davidson sought shelter in the nearest darkened room.
In the artificial dusk, beyond the levels of shrouded billiard-
tables, a white form heaved up from two chairs on which it had been
extended. The middle of the day, table d'hote tiffin once over, was
Schomberg's easy time. He lounged out, portly, deliberate, on the
defensive, the great fair beard like a cuirass over his manly chest.
He did not like Davidson, never a very faithful client of his. He
hit a bell on one of the tables as he went by, and asked in a
distant, Officer-in-Reserve manner:

"You desire?"

The good Davidson, still sponging his wet neck, declared with
simplicity that he had come to fetch away Heyst, as agreed.

"Not here!"

A Chinaman appeared in response to the bell. Schomberg turned to
him very severely:

"Take the gentleman's order."

Davidson had to be going. Couldn't wait--only begged that Heyst
should be informed that the Sissie would leave at midnight.

"Not--here, I am telling you!"

Davidson slapped his thigh in concern.

"Dear me! Hospital, I suppose." A natural enough surmise in a very
feverish locality.

The Lieutenant of the Reserve only pursed up his mouth and raised
his eyebrows without looking at him. It might have meant anything,
but Davidson dismissed the hospital idea with confidence. However,
he had to get hold of Heyst between this and midnight:

"He has been staying here?" he asked.

"Yes, he was staying here."

"Can you tell me where he is now?" Davidson went on placidly.
Within himself he was beginning to grow anxious, having developed
the affection of a self-appointed protector towards Heyst. The
answer he got was:

"Can't tell. It's none of my business," accompanied by majestic
oscillations of the hotel-keeper's head, hinting at some awful
mystery.

Davidson was placidity itself. It was his nature. He did not
betray his sentiments, which were not favourable to Schomberg.

"I am sure to find out at the Tesmans' office," he thought. But it
was a very hot hour, and if Heyst was down at the port he would have
learned already that the Sissie was in. It was even possible that
Heyst had already gone on board, where he could enjoy a coolness
denied to the town. Davidson, being stout, was much preoccupied
with coolness and inclined to immobility. He lingered awhile, as if
irresolute. Schomberg, at the door, looking out, affected perfect
indifference. He could not keep it up, though. Suddenly he turned
inward and asked with brusque rage:

"You wanted to see him?"

"Why, yes," said Davidson. "We agreed to meet--"

"Don't you bother. He doesn't care about that now."

"Doesn't he?"

"Well, you can judge for yourself. He isn't here, is he? You take
my word for it. Don't you bother about him. I am advising you as a
friend."

"Thank you," said, Davidson, inwardly startled at the savage tone.
"I think I will sit down for a moment and have a drink, after all."

This was not what Schomberg had expected to hear. He called
brutally:

"Boy!"

The Chinaman approached, and after referring him to the white man by
a nod the hotel-keeper departed, muttering to himself. Davidson
heard him gnash his teeth as he went.

Davidson sat alone with the billiard-tables as if there had been not
a soul staying in the hotel. His placidity was so genuine that he
was not unduly, fretting himself over the absence of Heyst, or the
mysterious manners Schomberg had treated him to. He was considering
these things in his own fairly shrewd way. Something had happened;
and he was loath to go away to investigate, being restrained by a
presentiment that somehow enlightenment would come to him there. A
poster of CONCERTS EVERY EVENING, like those on the gate, but in a
good state of preservation, hung on the wall fronting him. He
looked at it idly and was struck by the fact--then not so very
common--that it was a ladies' orchestra; "Zangiacomo's eastern tour-
-eighteen performers." The poster stated that they had had the
honour of playing their select repertoire before various colonial
excellencies, also before pashas, sheiks, chiefs, H. H. the Sultan
of Mascate, etc., etc.

Davidson felt sorry for the eighteen lady-performers. He knew what
that sort of life was like, the sordid conditions and brutal
incidents of such tours led by such Zangiacomos who often were
anything but musicians by profession. While he was staring at the
poster, a door somewhere at his back opened, and a woman came in who
was looked upon as Schomberg's wife, no doubt with truth. As
somebody remarked cynically once, she was too unattractive to be
anything else. The opinion that he treated her abominably was based
on her frightened expression. Davidson lifted his hat to her. Mrs.
Schomberg gave him an inclination of her sallow head and
incontinently sat down behind a sort of raised counter, facing the
door, with a mirror and rows of bottles at her back. Her hair was
very elaborately done with two ringlets on the left side of her
scraggy neck; her dress was of silk, and she had come on duty for
the afternoon. For some reason or other Schomberg exacted this from
her, though she added nothing to the fascinations of the place. She
sat there in the smoke and noise, like an enthroned idol, smiling
stupidly over the billiards from time to time, speaking to no one,
and no one speaking to her. Schomberg himself took no more interest
in her than may be implied in a sudden and totally unmotived scowl.
Otherwise the very Chinamen ignored her existence.

She had interrupted Davidson in his reflections. Being alone with
her, her silence and open-mouthed immobility made him uncomfortable.
He was easily sorry for people. It seemed rude not to take any
notice of her. He said, in allusion to the poster:

"Are you having these people in the house?"

She was so unused to being addressed by customers that at the sound
of his voice she jumped in her seat. Davidson was telling us
afterwards that she jumped exactly like a figure made of wood,
without losing her rigid immobility. She did not even move her
eyes; but she answered him freely, though her very lips seemed made
of wood.

"They stayed here over a month. They are gone now. They played
every evening."

"Pretty good, were they?"

To this she said nothing; and as she kept on staring fixedly in
front of her, her silence disconcerted Davidson. It looked as if
she had not heard him--which was impossible. Perhaps she drew the
line of speech at the expression of opinions. Schomberg might have
trained her, for domestic reasons, to keep them to herself. But
Davidson felt in honour obliged to converse; so he said, putting his
own interpretation on this surprising silence:

"I see--not much account. Such bands hardly ever are. An Italian
lot, Mrs. Schomberg, to judge by the name of the boss?"

She shook her head negatively.

"No. He is a German really; only he dyes his hair and beard black
for business. Zangiacomo is his business name."

"That's a curious fact," said Davidson. His head being full of
Heyst, it occurred to him that she might be aware of other facts.
This was a very amazing discovery to anyone who looked at Mrs.
Schomberg. Nobody had ever suspected her of having a mind. I mean
even a little of it, I mean any at all. One was inclined to think
of her as an It--an automaton, a very plain dummy, with an
arrangement for bowing the head at times and smiling stupidly now
and then. Davidson viewed her profile with a flattened nose, a
hollow cheek, and one staring, unwinking, goggle eye. He asked
himself: Did that speak just now? Will it speak again? It was as
exciting, for the mere wonder of it, as trying to converse with a
mechanism. A smile played about the fat features of Davidson; the
smile of a man making an amusing experiment. He spoke again to her:

"But the other members of that orchestra were real Italians, were
they not?"

Of course, he didn't care. He wanted to see whether the mechanism
would work again. It did. It said they were not. They were of all
sorts, apparently. It paused, with the one goggle eye immovably
gazing down the whole length of the room and through the door
opening on to the "piazza." It paused, then went on in the same low
pitch:

"There was even one English girl."

"Poor devil!"--said Davidson, "I suppose these women are not much
better than slaves really. Was that fellow with the dyed beard
decent in his way?"

The mechanism remained silent. The sympathetic soul of Davidson
drew its own conclusions.

"Beastly life for these women!" he said. "When you say an English
girl, Mrs. Schomberg, do you really mean a young girl? Some of
these orchestra girls are no chicks."

"Young enough," came the low voice out of Mrs. Schomberg's unmoved
physiognomy.

Davidson, encouraged, remarked that he was sorry for her. He was
easily sorry for people.

"Where did they go to from here?" he asked.

"She did not go with them. She ran away."

This was the pronouncement Davidson obtained next. It introduced a
new sort of interest.

"Well! Well!" he exclaimed placidly; and then, with the air of a
man who knows life: "Who with?" he inquired with assurance.

Mrs. Schomberg's immobility gave her an appearance of listening
intently. Perhaps she was really listening; but Schomberg must have
been finishing his sleep in some distant part of the house. The
silence was profound, and lasted long enough to become startling.
Then, enthroned above Davidson, she whispered at last:

"That friend of yours."

"Oh, you know I am here looking for a friend," said Davidson
hopefully. "Won't you tell me--"

"I've told you"

"Eh?"

A mist seemed to roll away from before Davidson's eyes, disclosing
something he could not believe.

"You can't mean it!" he cried. "He's not the man for it." But the
last words came out in a faint voice. Mrs. Schomberg never moved
her head the least bit. Davidson, after the shock which made him
sit up, went slack all over.

"Heyst! Such a perfect gentleman!" he exclaimed weakly.

Mrs. Schomberg did not seem to have heard him. This startling fact
did not tally somehow with the idea Davidson had of Heyst. He never
talked of women, he never seemed to think of them, or to remember
that they existed; and then all at once--like this! Running off
with a casual orchestra girl!

"You might have knocked me down with a feather," Davidson told us
some time afterwards.

By then he was taking an indulgent view of both the parties to that
amazing transaction. First of all, on reflection, he was by no
means certain that it prevented Heyst from being a perfect
gentleman, as before. He confronted our open grins or quiet smiles
with a serious round face. Heyst had taken the girl away to
Samburan; and that was no joking matter. The loneliness, the ruins
of the spot, had impressed Davidson's simple soul. They were
incompatible with the frivolous comments of people who had not seen
it. That black jetty, sticking out of the jungle into the empty
sea; these roof-ridges of deserted houses peeping dismally above the
long grass! Ough! The gigantic and funeral blackboard sign of the
Tropical Belt Coal Company, still emerging from a wild growth of
bushes like an inscription stuck above a grave figured by the tall
heap of unsold coal at the shore end of the wharf, added to the
general desolation.

Thus the sensitive Davidson. The girl must have been miserable
indeed to follow such a strange man to such a spot. Heyst had, no
doubt, told her the truth. He was a gentleman. But no words could
do justice to the conditions of life on Samburan. A desert island
was nothing to it. Moreover, when you were cast away on a desert
island--why, you could not help yourself; but to expect a fiddle-
playing girl out of an ambulant ladies' orchestra to remain content
there for a day, for one single day, was inconceivable. She would
be frightened at the first sight of it. She would scream.

The capacity for sympathy in these stout, placid men! Davidson was
stirred to the depths; and it was easy to see that it was about
Heyst that he was concerned. We asked him if he had passed that way
lately.

"Oh, yes. I always do--about half a mile off."

"Seen anybody about?"

"No, not a soul. Not a shadow."

"Did you blow your whistle?"

"Blow the whistle? You think I would do such a thing?"

He rejected the mere possibility of such an unwarrantable intrusion.
Wonderfully delicate fellow, Davidson!

"Well, but how do you know that they are there?" he was naturally
asked.

Heyst had entrusted Mrs. Schomberg with a message for Davidson--a
few lines in pencil on a scrap of crumpled paper. It was to the
effect: that an unforeseen necessity was driving him away before
the appointed time. He begged Davidson's indulgence for the
apparent discourtesy. The woman of the house--meaning Mrs.
Schomberg--would give him the facts, though unable to explain them,
of course.

"What was there to explain?" wondered Davidson dubiously.

"He took a fancy to that fiddle-playing girl, and--"

"And she to him, apparently," I suggested.

"Wonderfully quick work," reflected Davidson. "What do you think
will come of it?"

"Repentance, I should say. But how is it that Mrs. Schomberg has
been selected for a confidante?"

For indeed a waxwork figure would have seemed more useful than that
woman whom we all were accustomed to see sitting elevated above the
two billiard-tables--without expression, without movement, without
voice, without sight.

"Why, she helped the girl to bolt," said Davidson turning at me his
innocent eyes, rounded by the state of constant amazement in which
this affair had left him, like those shocks of terror or sorrow
which sometimes leave their victim afflicted by nervous trembling.
It looked as though he would never get over it.

"Mrs. Schomberg jerked Heyst's note, twisted like a pipe-light, into
my lap while I sat there unsuspecting," Davidson went on. "Directly
I had recovered my senses, I asked her what on earth she had to do
with it that Heyst should leave it with her. And then, behaving
like a painted image rather than a live woman, she whispered, just
loud enough for me to hear:

"I helped them. I got her things together, tied them up in my own
shawl, and threw them into the compound out of a back window. I did
it."

"That woman that you would say hadn't the pluck to lift her little
finger!" marvelled Davidson in his quiet, slightly panting voice.
"What do you think of that?"

I thought she must have had some interest of her own to serve. She
was too lifeless to be suspected of impulsive compassion. It was
impossible to think that Heyst had bribed her. Whatever means he
had, he had not the means to do that. Or could it be that she was
moved by that disinterested passion for delivering a woman to a man
which in respectable spheres is called matchmaking?--a highly
irregular example of it!

"It must have been a very small bundle," remarked Davidson further.

"I imagine the girl must have been specially attractive," I said.

"I don't know. She was miserable. I don't suppose it was more than
a little linen and a couple of those white frocks they wear on the
platform."

Davidson pursued his own train of thought. He supposed that such a
thing had never been heard of in the history of the tropics. For
where could you find anyone to steal a girl out of an orchestra? No
doubt fellows here and there took a fancy to some pretty one--but it
was not for running away with her. Oh dear no! It needed a lunatic
like Heyst.

"Only think what it means," wheezed Davidson, imaginative under his
invincible placidity. "Just only try to think! Brooding alone on
Samburan has upset his brain. He never stopped to consider, or he
couldn't have done it. No sane man . . . How is a thing like that
to go on? What's he going to do with her in the end? It's
madness."

"You say that he's mad. Schomberg tells us that he must be starving
on his island; so he may end yet by eating her," I suggested.

Mrs. Schomberg had had no time to enter into details, Davidson told
us. Indeed, the wonder was that they had been left alone so long.
The drowsy afternoon was slipping by. Footsteps and voices
resounded on the veranda--I beg pardon, the piazza; the scraping of
chairs, the ping of a smitten bell. Customers were turning up.
Mrs. Schomberg was begging Davidson hurriedly, but without looking
at him, to say nothing to anyone, when on a half-uttered word her
nervous whisper was cut short. Through a small inner door Schomberg
came in, his hair brushed, his beard combed neatly, but his eyelids
still heavy from his nap. He looked with suspicion at Davidson, and
even glanced at his wife; but he was baffled by the natural
placidity of the one and the acquired habit of immobility in the
other.

"Have you sent out the drinks?" he asked surlily.

She did not open her lips, because just then the head boy appeared
with a loaded tray, on his way out. Schomberg went to the door and
greeted the customers outside, but did not join them. He remained
blocking half the doorway, with his back to the room, and was still
there when Davidson, after sitting still for a while, rose to go.
At the noise he made Schomberg turned his head, watched him lift his
hat to Mrs. Schomberg and receive her wooden bow accompanied by a
stupid grin, and then looked away. He was loftily dignified.
Davidson stopped at the door, deep in his simplicity.

"I am sorry you won't tell me anything about my friend's absence,"
he said. "My friend Heyst, you know. I suppose the only course for
me now is to make inquiries down at the port. I shall hear
something there, I don't doubt."

"Make inquiries of the devil!" replied Schomberg in a hoarse mutter.

Davidson's purpose in addressing the hotel-keeper had been mainly to
make Mrs. Schomberg safe from suspicion; but he would fain have
heard something more of Heyst's exploit from another point of view.
It was a shrewd try. It was successful in a rather startling way,
because the hotel-keeper's point of view was horribly abusive. All
of a sudden, in the same hoarse sinister tone, he proceeded to call
Heyst many names, of which "pig-dog" was not the worst, with such
vehemence that he actually choked himself. Profiting from the
pause, Davidson, whose temperament could withstand worse shocks,
remonstrated in an undertone:

"It's unreasonable to get so angry as that. Even if he had run off
with your cash-box--"

The big hotel-keeper bent down and put his infuriated face close to
Davidson's.

"My cash-box! My--he--look here, Captain Davidson! He ran off with
a girl. What do I care for the girl? The girl is nothing to me."

He shot out an infamous word which made Davidson start. That's what
the girl was; and he reiterated the assertion that she was nothing
to him. What he was concerned for was the good name of his house.
Wherever he had been established, he had always had "artist parties"
staying in his house. One recommended him to the others; but what
would happen now, when it got about that leaders ran the risk in his
house--his house--of losing members of their troupe? And just now,
when he had spent seven hundred and thirty-four guilders in building
a concert-hall in his compound. Was that a thing to do in a
respectable hotel? The cheek, the indecency, the impudence, the
atrocity! Vagabond, impostor, swindler, ruffian, schwein-hund!

He had seized Davidson by a button of his coat, detaining him in the
doorway, and exactly in the line of Mrs. Schomberg's stony gaze.
Davidson stole a glance in that direction and thought of making some
sort of reassuring sign to her, but she looked so bereft of senses,
and almost of life, perched up there, that it seemed not worth
while. He disengaged his button with firm placidity. Thereupon,
with a last stifled curse, Schomberg vanished somewhere within, to
try and compose his spirits in solitude. Davidson stepped out on
the veranda. The party of customers there had become aware of the
explosive interlude in the doorway. Davidson knew one of these men,
and nodded to him in passing; but his acquaintance called out:

"Isn't he in a filthy temper? He's been like that ever since."

The speaker laughed aloud, while all the others sat smiling.
Davidson stopped.

"Yes, rather." His feelings were, he told us, those of bewildered
resignation; but of course that was no more visible to the others
than the emotions of a turtle when it withdraws into its shell.

"It seems unreasonable," he murmured thoughtfully.

"Oh, but they had a scrap!" the other said.

"What do you mean? Was there a fight!--a fight with Heyst?" asked
Davidson, much perturbed, if somewhat incredulous.

"Heyst? No, these two--the bandmaster, the fellow who's taking
these women about and our Schomberg. Signor Zangiacomo ran amuck in
the morning, and went for our worthy friend. I tell you, they were
rolling on the floor together on this very veranda, after chasing
each other all over the house, doors slamming, women screaming,
seventeen of them, in the dining-room; Chinamen up the trees. Hey,
John? You climb tree to see the fight, eh?"

The boy, almond-eyed and impassive, emitted a scornful grunt,
finished wiping the table, and withdrew.

"That's what it was--a real, go-as-you-please scrap. And Zangiacomo
began it. Oh, here's Schomberg. Say, Schomberg, didn't he fly at
you, when the girl was missed, because it was you who insisted that
the artists should go about the audience during the interval?"

Schomberg had reappeared in the doorway. He advanced. His bearing
was stately, but his nostrils were extraordinarily expanded, and he
controlled his voice with apparent effort.

"Certainly. That was only business. I quoted him special terms and
all for your sake, gentlemen. I was thinking of my regular
customers. There's nothing to do in the evenings in this town. I
think, gentlemen, you were all pleased at the opportunity of hearing
a little good music; and where's the harm of offering a grenadine,
or what not, to a lady artist? But that fellow--that Swede--he got
round the girl. He got round all the people out here. I've been
watching him for years. You remember how he got round Morrison."

He changed front abruptly, as if on parade, and marched off. The
customers at the table exchanged glances silently. Davidson's
attitude was that of a spectator. Schomberg's moody pacing of the
billiard-room could be heard on the veranda.

"And the funniest part is," resumed the man who had been speaking
before--an English clerk in a Dutch house--"the funniest part is
that before nine o'clock that same morning those two were driving
together in a gharry down to the port, to look for Heyst and the
girl. I saw them rushing around making inquiries. I don't know
what they would have done to the girl, but they seemed quite ready
to fall upon your Heyst, Davidson, and kill him on the quay."

He had never, he said, seen anything so queer. Those two
investigators working feverishly to the same end were glaring at
each other with surprising ferocity. In hatred and mistrust they
entered a steam-launch, and went flying from ship to ship all over
the harbour, causing no end of sensation. The captains of vessels,
coming on shore later in the day, brought tales of a strange
invasion, and wanted to know who were the two offensive lunatics in
a steam-launch, apparently after a man and a girl, and telling a
story of which one could make neither head nor tail. Their
reception by the roadstead was generally unsympathetic, even to the
point of the mate of an American ship bundling them out over the
rail with unseemly precipitation.

Meantime Heyst and the girl were a good few miles away, having gone
in the night on board one of the Tesman schooners bound to the
eastward. This was known afterwards from the Javanese boatmen whom
Heyst hired for the purpose at three o'clock in the morning. The
Tesman schooner had sailed at daylight with the usual land breeze,
and was probably still in sight in the offing at the time. However,
the two pursuers after their experience with the American mate, made
for the shore. On landing, they had another violent row in the
German language. But there was no second fight; and finally, with
looks of fierce animosity, they got together into a gharry--
obviously with the frugal view of sharing expenses--and drove away,
leaving an astonished little crowd of Europeans and natives on the
quay.

After hearing this wondrous tale, Davidson went away from the hotel
veranda, which was filling with Schomberg's regular customers.
Heyst's escapade was the general topic of conversation. Never
before had that unaccountable individual been the cause of so much
gossip, he judged. No! Not even in the beginnings of the Tropical
Belt Coal Company when becoming for a moment a public character was
he the object of a silly criticism and unintelligent envy for every
vagabond and adventurer in the islands. Davidson concluded that
people liked to discuss that sort of scandal better than any other.

I asked him if he believed that this was such a great scandal after
all.

"Heavens, no!" said that excellent man who, himself, was incapable
of any impropriety of conduct. "But it isn't a thing I would have
done myself; I mean even if I had not been married."

There was no implied condemnation in the statement; rather something
like regret. Davidson shared my suspicion that this was in its
essence the rescue of a distressed human being. Not that we were
two romantics, tingeing the world to the hue of our temperament, but
that both of us had been acute enough to discover a long time ago
that Heyst was.

"I shouldn't have had the pluck," he continued. "I see a thing all
round, as it were; but Heyst doesn't, or else he would have been
scared. You don't take a woman into a desert jungle without being
made sorry for it sooner or later, in one way or another; and Heyst
being a gentleman only makes it worse."

CHAPTER SIX

We said no more about Heyst on that occasion, and it so happened
that I did not meet Davidson again for some three months. When we
did come together, almost the first thing he said to me was:

"I've seen him."

Before I could exclaim, he assured me that he had taken no liberty,
that he had not intruded. He was called in. Otherwise he would not
have dreamed of breaking in upon Heyst's privacy.

"I am certain you wouldn't," I assured him, concealing my amusement
at his wonderful delicacy. He was the most delicate man that ever
took a small steamer to and fro among the islands. But his
humanity, which was not less strong and praiseworthy, had induced
him to take his steamer past Samburan wharf (at an average distance
of a mile) every twenty-three days--exactly. Davidson was delicate,
humane, and regular.

"Heyst called you in?" I asked, interested.

Yes, Heyst had called him in as he was going by on his usual date.
Davidson was examining the shore through his glasses with his
unwearied and punctual humanity as he steamed past Samburan.

I saw a man in white. It could only have been Heyst. He had
fastened some sort of enormous flag to a bamboo pole, and was waving
it at the end of the old wharf.

Davidson didn't like to take his steamer alongside--for fear of
being indiscreet, I suppose; but he steered close inshore, stopped
his engines, and lowered a boat. He went himself in that boat,
which was manned, of course, by his Malay seamen.

Heyst, when he saw the boat pulling towards him, dropped his
signalling-pole; and when Davidson arrived, he was kneeling down
engaged busily in unfastening the flag from it.

"Was there anything wrong?" I inquired, Davidson having paused in
his narrative and my curiosity being naturally aroused. You must
remember that Heyst as the Archipelago knew him was not--what shall
I say--was not a signalling sort of man.

"The very words that came out of my mouth," said Davidson, "before I
laid the boat against the piles. I could not help it!"

Heyst got up from his knees and began carefully folding up the flag
thing, which struck Davidson as having the dimensions of a blanket.

"No, nothing wrong," he cried. His white teeth flashed agreeably
below the coppery horizontal bar of his long moustaches.

I don't know whether it was his delicacy or his obesity which
prevented Davidson from clambering upon the wharf. He stood up in
the boat, and, above him, Heyst stooped low with urbane smiles,
thanking him and apologizing for the liberty, exactly in his usual
manner. Davidson had expected some change in the man, but there was
none. Nothing in him betrayed the momentous fact that within that
jungle there was a girl, a performer in a ladies' orchestra, whom he
had carried straight off the concert platform into the wilderness.
He was not ashamed or defiant or abashed about it. He might have
been a shade confidential when addressing Davidson. And his words
were enigmatical.

"I took this course of signalling to you," he said to Davidson,
"because to preserve appearances might be of the utmost importance.
Not to me, of course. I don't care what people may say, and of
course no one can hurt me. I suppose I have done a certain amount
of harm, since I allowed myself to be tempted into action. It
seemed innocent enough, but all action is bound to be harmful. It
is devilish. That is why this world is evil upon the whole. But I
have done with it! I shall never lift a little finger again. At
one time I thought that intelligent observation of facts was the
best way of cheating the time which is allotted to us whether we
want it or not; but now I, have done with observation, too."

Imagine poor, simple Davidson being addressed in such terms
alongside an abandoned, decaying wharf jutting out of tropical bush.
He had never heard anybody speak like this before; certainly not
Heyst, whose conversation was concise, polite, with a faint ring of
playfulness in the cultivated tones of his voice.

"He's gone mad," Davidson thought to himself.

But, looking at the physiognomy above him on the wharf, he was
obliged to dismiss the notion of common, crude lunacy. It was truly
most unusual talk. Then he remembered--in his surprise he had lost
sight of it--that Heyst now had a girl there. This bizarre
discourse was probably the effect of the girl. Davidson shook off
the absurd feeling, and asked, wishing to make clear his
friendliness, and not knowing what else to say:

"You haven't run short of stores or anything like that?"

Heyst smiled and shook his head:

"No, no. Nothing of the kind. We are fairly well off here.
Thanks, all the same. If I have taken the liberty to detain you, it
is I not from any uneasiness for myself and my--companion. The
person I was thinking of when I made up my mind to invoke your
assistance is Mrs. Schomberg."

"I have talked with her," interjected Davidson.

"Oh! You? Yes, I hoped she would find means to--"

"But she didn't tell me much," interrupted Davidson, who was not
averse from hearing something--he hardly knew what.

"H'm--Yes. But that note of mine? Yes? She found an opportunity
to give it to you? That's good, very good. She's more resourceful
than one would give her credit for."

"Women often are--" remarked Davidson. The strangeness from which
he had suffered, merely because his interlocutor had carried off a
girl, wore off as the minutes went by. "There's a lot of
unexpectedness about women," he generalized with a didactic aim
which seemed to miss its mark; for the next thing Heyst said was:

"This is Mrs. Schomberg's shawl." He touched the stuff hanging over
his arm. "An Indian thing, I believe," he added, glancing at his
arm sideways.

"It isn't of particular value," said Davidson truthfully.

"Very likely. The point is that it belongs to Schomberg's wife.
That Schomberg seems to be an unconscionable ruffian--don't you
think so?"

Davidson smiled faintly.

"We out here have got used to him," he said, as if excusing a
universal and guilty toleration of a manifest nuisance. "I'd hardly
call him that. I only know him as a hotel-keeper."

"I never knew him even as that--not till this time, when you were so
obliging as to take me to Sourabaya, I went to stay there from
economy. The Netherlands House is very expensive, and they expect
you to bring your own servant with you. It's a nuisance."

"Of course, of course," protested Davidson hastily.

After a short silence Heyst returned to the matter of the shawl. He
wanted to send it back to Mrs. Schomberg. He said that it might be
very awkward for her if she were unable, if asked, to produce it.
This had given him, Heyst, much uneasiness. She was terrified of
Schomberg. Apparently she had reason to be.

Davidson had remarked that, too. Which did not prevent her, he
pointed out, from making a fool of him, in a way, for the sake of a
stranger.

"Oh! You know!" said Heyst. "Yes, she helped me--us."

"She told me so. I had quite a talk with her," Davidson informed
him. "Fancy anyone having a talk with Mrs. Schomberg! If I were to
tell the fellows they wouldn't believe me. How did you get round
her, Heyst? How did you think of it? Why, she looks too stupid to
understand human speech and too scared to shoo a chicken away. Oh,
the women, the women! You don't know what there may be in the
quietest of them."

"She was engaged in the task of defending her position in life,"
said Heyst. "It's a very respectable task."

"Is that it? I had some idea it was that," confessed Davidson.

He then imparted to Heyst the story of the violent proceedings
following on the discovery of his flight. Heyst's polite attention
to the tale took on a sombre cast; but he manifested no surprise,
and offered no comment. When Davidson had finished he handed down
the shawl into the boat, and Davidson promised to do his best to
return it to Mrs. Schomberg in some secret fashion. Heyst expressed
his thanks in a few simple words, set off by his manner of finished
courtesy. Davidson prepared to depart. They were not looking at
each other. Suddenly Heyst spoke:

"You understand that this was a case of odious persecution, don't
you? I became aware of it and--"

It was a view which the sympathetic Davidson was capable of
appreciating.

"I am not surprised to hear it," he said placidly. "Odious enough,
I dare say. And you, of course--not being a married man--were free
to step in. Ah, well!"

He sat down in the stern-sheets, and already had the steering lines
in his hands when Heyst observed abruptly:

"The world is a bad dog. It will bite you if you give it a chance;
but I think that here we can safely defy the fates."

When relating all this to me, Davidson's only comment was:

"Funny notion of defying the fates--to take a woman in tow!"

CHAPTER SEVEN

Some considerable time afterwards--we did not meet very often--I
asked Davidson how he had managed about the shawl and heard that he
had tackled his mission in a direct way, and had found it easy
enough. At the very first call he made in Samarang he rolled the
shawl as tightly as he could into the smallest possible brown-paper
parcel, which he carried ashore with him. His business in the town
being transacted, he got into a gharry with the parcel and drove to
the hotel. With his precious experience, he timed his arrival
accurately for the hour of Schomberg's siesta. Finding the place
empty as on the former occasion, he marched into the billiard-room,
took a seat at the back, near the sort of dais which Mrs. Schomberg
would in due course come to occupy, and broke the slumbering silence
of the house by thumping a bell vigorously. Of course a Chinaman
appeared promptly. Davidson ordered a drink and sat tight.

"I would have ordered twenty drinks one after another, if
necessary," he said--Davidson's a very abstemious man--"rather than
take that parcel out of the house again. Couldn't leave it in a
corner without letting the woman know it was there. It might have
turned out worse for her than not bringing the thing back at all."

And so he waited, ringing the bell again and again, and swallowing
two or three iced drinks which he did not want. Presently, as he
hoped it would happen, Mrs. Schomberg came in, silk dress, long
neck, ringlets, scared eyes, and silly grin--all complete. Probably
that lazy beast had sent her out to see who was the thirsty customer
waking up the echoes of the house at this quiet hour. Bow, nod--and
she clambered up to her post behind the raised counter, looking so
helpless, so inane, as she sat there, that if it hadn't been for the
parcel, Davidson declared, he would have thought he had merely
dreamed all that had passed between them. He ordered another drink,
to get the Chinaman out of the room, and then seized the parcel,
which was reposing on a chair near him, and with no more than a
mutter--"this is something of yours"--he rammed it swiftly into a
recess in the counter, at her feet. There! The rest was her
affair. And just in time, too. Schomberg turned up, yawning
affectedly, almost before Davidson had regained his seat. He cast
about suspicious and irate glances. An invincible placidity of
expression helped Davidson wonderfully at the moment, and the other,
of course, could have no grounds for the slightest suspicion of any
sort of understanding between his wife and this customer.

As to Mrs. Schomberg, she sat there like a joss. Davidson was lost
in admiration. He believed, now, that the woman had been putting it
on for years. She never even winked. It was immense! The insight
he had obtained almost frightened him; he couldn't get over his
wonder at knowing more of the real Mrs. Schomberg than anybody in
the Islands, including Schomberg himself. She was a miracle of
dissimulation. No wonder Heyst got the girl away from under two
men's noses, if he had her to help with the job!

The greatest wonder, after all, was Heyst getting mixed up with
petticoats. The fellow's life had been open to us for years and
nothing could have been more detached from feminine associations.
Except that he stood drinks to people on suitable occasions, like
any other man, this observer of facts seemed to have no connection
with earthly affairs and passions. The very courtesy of his manner,
the flavour of playfulness in the voice set him apart. He was like
a feather floating lightly in the workaday atmosphere which was the
breath of our nostrils. For this reason whenever this looker-on
took contact with things he attracted attention. First, it was the
Morrison partnership of mystery, then came the great sensation of
the Tropical Belt Coal where indeed varied interests were involved:
a real business matter. And then came this elopement, this
incongruous phenomenon of self-assertion, the greatest wonder of
all, astonishing and amusing.

Davidson admitted to me that, the hubbub was subsiding; and the
affair would have been already forgotten, perhaps, if that ass
Schomberg had not kept on gnashing his teeth publicly about it. It
was really provoking that Davidson should not be able to give one
some idea of the girl. Was she pretty? He didn't know. He had
stayed the whole afternoon in Schomberg's hotel, mainly for the
purpose of finding out something about her. But the story was
growing stale. The parties at the tables on the veranda had other,
fresher, events to talk about and Davidson shrank from making direct
inquiries. He sat placidly there, content to be disregarded and
hoping for some chance word to turn up. I shouldn't wonder if the
good fellow hadn't been dozing. It's difficult to give you an
adequate idea of Davidson's placidity.

Presently Schomberg, wandering about, joined a party that had taken
the table next to Davidson's.

"A man like that Swede, gentlemen, is a public danger," he began.
"I remember him for years. I won't say anything of his spying--
well, he used to say himself he was looking for out-of-the-way facts
and what is that if not spying? He was spying into everybody's
business. He got hold of Captain Morrison, squeezed him dry, like
you would an orange, and scared him off to Europe to die there.
Everybody knows that Captain Morrison had a weak chest. Robbed
first and murdered afterwards! I don't mince words--not I. Next he
gets up that swindle of the Belt Coal. You know all about it. And
now, after lining his pockets with other people's money, he kidnaps
a white girl belonging to an orchestra which is performing in my
public room for the benefit of my patrons, and goes off to live like
a prince on that island, where nobody can get at him. A damn silly
girl . . . It's disgusting--tfui!"

He spat. He choked with rage--for he saw visions, no doubt. He
jumped up from his chair, and went away to flee from them--perhaps.
He went into the room where Mrs. Schomberg sat. Her aspect could
not have been very soothing to the sort of torment from which he was
suffering.

Davidson did not feel called upon to defend Heyst. His proceeding
was to enter into conversation with one and another, casually, and
showing no particular knowledge of the affair, in order to discover
something about the girl. Was she anything out of the way? Was she
pretty? She couldn't have been markedly so. She had not attracted
special notice. She was young--on that everybody agreed. The
English clerk of Tesmans remembered that she had a sallow face. He
was respectable and highly proper. He was not the sort to associate
with such people. Most of these women were fairly battered
specimens. Schomberg had them housed in what he called the
Pavilion, in the grounds, where they were hard at it mending and
washing their white dresses, and could be seen hanging them out to
dry between the trees, like a lot of washerwomen. They looked very
much like middle-aged washerwomen on the platform, too. But the
girl had been living in the main building along with the boss, the
director, the fellow with the black beard, and a hard-bitten, oldish
woman who took the piano and was understood to be the fellow's wife.

This was not a very satisfactory result. Davidson stayed on, and
even joined the table d'hote dinner, without gleaning any more
information. He was resigned.

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

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

"Yes," I said. "No doubt you will. Some day Heyst will be
signalling to you again; and I wonder what it will be for."

Davidson made no reply. He had his own ideas about that, and his
silence concealed a good deal of thought. We spoke no more of
Heyst's girl. Before we separated, he gave me a piece of unrelated
observation.

"It's funny," he said, "but I fancy there's some gambling going on
in the evening at Schomberg's place, on the quiet. I've noticed men
strolling away in twos and threes towards that hall where the
orchestra used to play. The windows must be specially well
shuttered, because I could not spy the smallest gleam of light from
that direction; but I can't believe that those beggars would go in
there only to sit and think of their sins in the dark."

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

PART TWO

CHAPTER ONE

As we know, Heyst had gone to stay in Schomberg's hotel in complete
ignorance that his person was odious to that worthy. When he
arrived, Zangiacomo's Ladies' Orchestra had been established there
for some time.

The business which had called him out from his seclusion in his lost
corner of the Eastern seas was with the Tesmans, and it had
something to do with money. He transacted it quickly, and then
found himself with nothing to do while he awaited Davidson, who was
to take him back to his solitude; for back to his solitude Heyst
meant to go. He whom we used to refer to as the Enchanted Heyst was
suffering from thorough disenchantment. Not with the islands,
however. The Archipelago has a lasting fascination. It is not easy
to shake off the spell of island life. Heyst was disenchanted with
life as a whole. His scornful temperament, beguiled into action,
suffered from failure in a subtle way unknown to men accustomed to
grapple with the realities of common human enterprise. It was like
the gnawing pain of useless apostasy, a sort of shame before his own
betrayed nature; and in addition, he also suffered from plain,
downright remorse. He deemed himself guilty of Morrison's death. A
rather absurd feeling, since no one could possibly have foreseen the
horrors of the cold, wet summer lying in wait for poor Morrison at
home.

It was not in Heyst's character to turn morose; but his mental state
was not compatible with a sociable mood. He spent his evenings
sitting apart on the veranda of Schomberg's hotel. The lamentations
of string instruments issued from the building in the hotel
compound, the approaches to which were decorated with Japanese paper
lanterns strung up between the trunks of several big trees. Scraps
of tunes more or less plaintive reached his ears. They pursued him
even into his bedroom, which opened into an upstairs veranda. The
fragmentary and rasping character of these sounds made their
intrusion inexpressibly tedious in the long run. Like most
dreamers, to whom it is given sometimes to hear the music of the
spheres, Heyst, the wanderer of the Archipelago, had a taste for
silence which he had been able to gratify for years. The islands
are very quiet. One sees them lying about, clothed in their dark
garments of leaves, in a great hush of silver and azure, where the
sea without murmurs meets the sky in a ring of magic stillness. A
sort of smiling somnolence broods over them; the very voices of
their people are soft and subdued, as if afraid to break some
protecting spell.

Perhaps this was the very spell which had enchanted Heyst in the
early days. For him, however, that was broken. He was no longer
enchanted, though he was still a captive of the islands. He had no
intention to leave them ever. Where could he have gone to, after
all these years? Not a single soul belonging to him lived anywhere
on earth. Of this fact--not such a remote one, after all--he had
only lately become aware; for it is failure that makes a man enter
into himself and reckon up his resources. And though he had made up
his mind to retire from the world in hermit fashion, yet he was
irrationally moved by this sense of loneliness which had come to him
in the hour of renunciation. It hurt him. Nothing is more painful
than the shock of sharp contradictions that lacerate our
intelligence and our feelings.

Meantime Schomberg watched Heyst out of the comer of his eye.
Towards the unconscious object of his enmity he preserved a distant
lieutenant-of-the-Reserve demeanour. Nudging certain of his
customers with his elbow, he begged them to observe what airs "that
Swede" was giving himself.

"I really don't know why he has come to stay in my house. This
place isn't good enough for him. I wish to goodness he had gone
somewhere else to show off his superiority. Here I have got up this
series of concerts for you gentlemen, just to make things a little
brighter generally; and do you think he'll condescend to step in and
listen to a piece or two of an evening? Not he. I know him of old.
There he sits at the dark end of the piazza, all the evening long--
planning some new swindle, no doubt. For two-pence I would ask him
to go and look for quarters somewhere else; only one doesn't like to
treat a white man like that out in the tropics. I don't know how
long he means to stay, but I'm willing to bet a trifle that he'll
never work himself up to the point of spending the fifty cents of
entrance money for the sake of a little good music."

Nobody cared to bet, or the hotel-keeper would have lost. One
evening Heyst was driven to desperation by the rasped, squeaked,
scraped snatches of tunes pursuing him even to his hard couch, with
a mattress as thin as a pancake and a diaphanous mosquito net. He
descended among the trees, where the soft glow of Japanese lanterns
picked out parts of their great rugged trunks, here and there, in
the great mass of darkness under the lofty foliage. More lanterns,
of the shape of cylindrical concertinas, hanging in a row from a
slack string, decorated the doorway of what Schomberg called
grandiloquently "my concert-hall." In his desperate mood Heyst
ascended three steps, lifted a calico curtain, and went in.

The uproar in that small, barn-like structure, built of imported
pine boards, and raised clear of the ground, was simply stunning.
An instrumental uproar, screaming, grunting, whining, sobbing,
scraping, squeaking some kind of lively air; while a grand piano,
operated upon by a bony, red-faced woman with bad-tempered nostrils,
rained hard notes like hail through the tempest of fiddles. The
small platform was filled with white muslin dresses and crimson
sashes slanting from shoulders provided with bare arms, which sawed
away without respite. Zangiacomo conducted. He wore a white mess-
jacket, a black dress waistcoat, and white trousers. His longish,
tousled hair and his great beard were purple-black. He was
horrible. The heat was terrific. There were perhaps thirty people
having drinks at several little tables. Heyst, quite overcome by
the volume of noise, dropped into a chair. In the quick time of
that music, in the varied, piercing clamour of the strings, in the
movements of the bare arms, in the low dresses, the coarse faces,
the stony eyes of the executants, there was a suggestion of
brutality--something cruel, sensual and repulsive.

"This is awful!" Heyst murmured to himself.

But there is an unholy fascination in systematic noise. He did not
flee from it incontinently, as one might have expected him to do.
He remained, astonished at himself for remaining, since nothing
could have been more repulsive to his tastes, more painful to his
senses, and, so to speak, more contrary to his genius, than this
rude exhibition of vigour. The Zangiacomo band was not making
music; it was simply murdering silence with a vulgar, ferocious
energy. One felt as if witnessing a deed of violence; and that
impression was so strong that it seemed marvellous to see the people
sitting so quietly on their chairs, drinking so calmly out of their
glasses, and giving no signs of distress, anger, or fear. Heyst
averted his gaze from the unnatural spectacle of their indifference.

When the piece of music came to an end the relief was so great that
he felt slightly dizzy, as if a chasm of silence had yawned at his
feet. When he raised his eyes, the audience, most perversely, was
exhibiting signs of animation and interest in their faces, and the
women in white muslin dresses were coming down in pairs from the
platform into the body of Schomberg's "concert-hall." They
dispersed themselves all over the place. The male creature with the
hooked nose and purple-black beard disappeared somewhere. This was
the interval during which, as the astute Schomberg had stipulated,
the members of the orchestra were encouraged to favour the members
of the audience with their company--that is, such members as seemed
inclined to fraternize with the arts in a familiar and generous
manner; the symbol of familiarity and generosity consisting in
offers of refreshment.

The procedure struck Heyst as highly incorrect. However, the
impropriety of Schomberg's ingenious scheme was defeated by the
circumstance that most of the women were no longer young, and that
none of them had ever been beautiful. Their more or less worn
checks were slightly rouged, but apart from that fact, which might
have been simply a matter of routine, they did not seem to take the
success of the scheme unduly to heart. The impulse to fraternize
with the arts being obviously weak in the audience, some of the
musicians sat down listlessly at unoccupied tables, while others
went on perambulating the central passage: arm in arm, glad enough,
no doubt, to stretch their legs while resting their arms. Their
crimson sashes gave a factitious touch of gaiety to the smoky
atmosphere of the concert-hall; and Heyst felt a sudden pity for
these beings, exploited, hopeless, devoid of charm and grace, whose
fate of cheerless dependence invested their coarse and joyless
features with a touch of pathos.

Heyst was temperamentally sympathetic. To have them passing and
repassing close to his little table was painful to him. He was
preparing to rise and go out when he noticed that two white muslin
dresses and crimson sashes had not yet left the platform. One of
these dresses concealed the raw-boned frame of the woman with the
bad-tempered curve to her nostrils. She was no less a personage
than Mrs. Zangiacomo. She had left the piano, and, with her back to
the hall, was preparing the parts for the second half of the
concert, with a brusque, impatient action of her ugly elbow. This
task done, she turned, and, perceiving the other white muslin dress
motionless on a chair in the second row, she strode towards it
between the music-stands with an aggressive and masterful gait. On
the lap of that dress there lay, unclasped and idle, a pair of small
hands, not very white, attached to well-formed arms. The next
detail Heyst was led to observe was the arrangement of the hair--two
thick, brown tresses rolled round an attractively shaped head.

"A girl, by Jove!" he exclaimed mentally.

It was evident that she was a girl. It was evident in the outline
of the shoulders, in the slender white bust springing up, barred
slantwise by the crimson sash, from the bell-shaped spread of muslin
skirt hiding the chair on which she sat averted a little from the
body of the hall. Her feet, in low white shoes, were crossed
prettily.

She had captured Heyst's awakened faculty of observation; he had the
sensation of a new experience. That was because his faculty of
observation had never before been captured by any feminine creature
in that marked and exclusive fashion. He looked at her anxiously,
as no man ever looks at another man; and he positively forgot where
he was. He had lost touch with his surroundings. The big woman,
advancing, concealed the girl from his sight for a moment. She bent
over the seated youthful figure, in passing it very close, as if to
drop a word into its ear. Her lips did certainly move. But what
sort of word could it have been to make the girl jump up so swiftly?
Heyst, at his table, was surprised into a sympathetic start. He
glanced quickly round. Nobody was looking towards the platform; and
when his eyes swept back there again, the girl, with the big woman
treading at her heels, was coming down the three steps from the
platform to the floor of the hall. There she paused, stumbled one
pace forward, and stood still again, while the other--the escort,
the dragoon, the coarse big woman of the piano--passed her roughly,
and, marching truculently down the centre aisle between the chairs
and tables, went out to rejoin the hook-nosed Zangiacomo somewhere
outside. During her extraordinary transit, as if everything in the
hall were dirt under her feet, her scornful eyes met the upward
glance of Heyst, who looked away at once towards the girl. She had
not moved. Her arms hung down; her eyelids were lowered.

Heyst laid down his half-smoked cigar and compressed his lips. Then
he got up. It was the same sort of impulse which years ago had made
him cross the sandy street of the abominable town of Delli in the
island of Timor and accost Morrison, practically a stranger to him
then, a man in trouble, expressively harassed, dejected, lonely.

It was the same impulse. But he did not recognize it. He was not
thinking of Morrison then. It may be said that, for the first time
since the final abandonment of the Samburan coal mine, he had
completely forgotten the late Morrison. It is true that to a
certain extent he had forgotten also where he was. Thus, unchecked
by any sort of self consciousness, Heyst walked up the central
passage.

Several of the women, by this time, had found anchorage here and
there among the occupied tables. They talked to the men, leaning on
their elbows, and suggesting funnily--if it hadn't been for the
crimson sashes--in their white dresses an assembly of middle-aged
brides with free and easy manners and hoarse voices. The murmuring
noise of conversations carried on with some spirit filled
Schomberg's concert-room. Nobody remarked Heyst's movements; for
indeed he was not the only man on his legs there. He had been
confronting the girl for some time before she became aware of his
presence. She was looking down, very still, without colour, without
glances, without voice, without movement. It was only when Heyst
addressed her in his courteous tone that she raised her eyes.

"Excuse me," he said in English, "but that horrible female has done
something to you. She has pinched you, hasn't she? I am sure she
pinched you just now, when she stood by your chair."

The girl received this overture with the wide, motionless stare of
profound astonishment. Heyst, vexed with himself, suspected that
she did not understand what he said. One could not tell what
nationality these women were, except that they were of all sorts.
But she was astonished almost more by the near presence of the man
himself, by his largely bald head, by the white brow, the sunburnt
cheeks, the long, horizontal moustaches of crinkly bronze hair, by
the kindly expression of the man's blue eyes looking into her own.
He saw the stony amazement in hers give way to a momentary alarm,
which was succeeded by an expression of resignation.

"I am sure she pinched your arm most cruelly," he murmured, rather
disconcerted now at what he had done.

It was a great comfort to hear her say:

"It wouldn't have been the first time. And suppose she did--what
are you going to do about it?"

"I don't know," he said with a faint, remote playfulness in his tone
which had not been heard in it lately, and which seemed to catch her
ear pleasantly. "I am grieved to say that I don't know. But can I
do anything? What would you wish me to do? Pray command me."

Again, the greatest astonishment became visible in her face; for she
now perceived how different he was from the other men in the room.
He was as different from them as she was different from the other
members of the ladies' orchestra.

"Command you?" she breathed, after a time, in a bewildered tone.
"Who are you?" she asked a little louder.

"I am staying in this hotel for a few days. I just dropped in
casually here. This outrage--"

"Don't you try to interfere," she said so earnestly that Heyst
asked, in his faintly playful tone:

"Is it your wish that I should leave you?"

"I haven't said that," the girl answered. "She pinched me because I
didn't get down here quick enough--"

"I can't tell you how indignant I am--" said Heyst. "But since you
are down here now," he went on, with the ease of a man of the world
speaking to a young lady in a drawing-room, "hadn't we better sit
down?"

She obeyed his inviting gesture, and they sat down on the nearest
chairs. They looked at each other across a little round table with
a surprised, open gaze, self-consciousness growing on them so slowly
that it was a long time before they averted their eyes; and very
soon they met again, temporarily, only to rebound, as it were. At
last they steadied in contact, but by that time, say some fifteen
minutes from the moment when they sat down, the "interval" came to
an end.

So much for their eyes. As to the conversation, it had been
perfectly insignificant because naturally they had nothing to say to
each other. Heyst had been interested by the girl's physiognomy.
Its expression was neither simple nor yet very clear. It was not
distinguished--that could not be expected--but the features had more
fineness than those of any other feminine countenance he had ever
had the opportunity to observe so closely. There was in it
something indefinably audacious and infinitely miserable--because
the temperament and the existence of that girl were reflected in it.
But her voice! It seduced Heyst by its amazing quality. It was a
voice fit to utter the most exquisite things, a voice which would
have made silly chatter supportable and the roughest talk
fascinating. Heyst drank in its charm as one listens to the tone of
some instrument without heeding the tune.

"Do you sing as well as play?" he asked her abruptly.

"Never sang a note in my life," she said, obviously surprised by the
irrelevant question; for they had not been discoursing of sweet
sounds. She was clearly unaware of her voice. "I don't remember
that I ever had much reason to sing since I was little," she added.

That inelegant phrase, by the mere vibrating, warm nobility of the
sound, found its way into Heyst's heart. His mind, cool, alert,
watched it sink there with a sort of vague concern at the absurdity
of the occupation, till it rested at the bottom, deep down, where
our unexpressed longings lie.

"You are English, of course?" he said.

"What do you think?" she answered in the most charming accents.
Then, as if thinking that it was her turn to place a question: "Why
do you always smile when you speak?"

It was enough to make anyone look grave, but her good faith was so
evident that Heyst recovered himself at once.

"It's my unfortunate manner--" he said with his delicate, polished
playfulness. "It is very objectionable to you?"

She was very serious.

"No. I only noticed it. I haven't come across so many pleasant
people as all that, in my life."

"It's certain that this woman who plays the piano is infinitely more
disagreeable than any cannibal I have ever had to do with."

"I believe you!" She shuddered. "How did you come to have anything
to do with cannibals?"

"It would be too long a tale," said Heyst with a faint smile.
Heyst's smiles were rather melancholy, and accorded badly with his
great moustaches, under which his mere playfulness lurked as
comfortable as a shy bird in its native thicket. "Much too long.
How did you get amongst this lot here?"

"Bad luck," she answered briefly.

"No doubt, no doubt," Heyst assented with slight nods. Then, still
indignant at the pinch which he had divined rather than actually
seen inflicted: "I say, couldn't you defend yourself somehow?"

She had risen already. The ladies of the orchestra were slowly
regaining their places. Some were already seated, idle stony-eyed,
before the music-stands. Heyst was standing up, too.

"They are too many for me," she said.

These few words came out of the common experience of mankind; yet by
virtue of her voice, they thrilled Heyst like a revelation. His
feelings were in a state of confusion, but his mind was clear.

"That's bad. But it isn't actual ill-usage that this girl is
complaining of," he thought lucidly after she left him.

CHAPTER TWO

That was how it began. How it was that it ended, as we know it did
end, is not so easy to state precisely. It is very clear that Heyst
was not indifferent, I won't say to the girl, but to the girl's
fate. He was the same man who had plunged after the submerged
Morrison whom he hardly knew otherwise than by sight and through the
usual gossip of the islands. But this was another sort of plunge
altogether, and likely to lead to a very different kind of
partnership.

Did he reflect at all? Probably. He was sufficiently reflective.
But if he did, it was with insufficient knowledge. For there is no
evidence that he paused at any time between the date of that evening
and the morning of the flight. Truth to say, Heyst was not one of
those men who pause much. Those dreamy spectators of the world's
agitation are terrible once the desire to act gets hold of them.
They lower their heads and charge a wall with an amazing serenity
which nothing but an indisciplined imagination can give.

He was not a fool. I suppose he knew--or at least he felt--where
this was leading him. But his complete inexperience gave him the
necessary audacity. The girl's voice was charming when she spoke to
him of her miserable past, in simple terms, with a sort of
unconscious cynicism inherent in the truth of the ugly conditions of
poverty. And whether because he was humane or because her voice
included all the modulations of pathos, cheerfulness, and courage in
its compass, it was not disgust that the tale awakened in him, but
the sense of an immense sadness.

On a later evening, during the interval between the two parts of the
concert, the girl told Heyst about herself. She was almost a child
of the streets. Her father was a musician in the orchestras of
small theatres. Her mother ran away from him while she was little,
and the landladies of various poor lodging-houses had attended
casually to her abandoned childhood. It was never positive
starvation and absolute rags, but it was the hopeless grip of
poverty all the time. It was her father who taught her to play the
violin. It seemed that he used to get drunk sometimes, but without
pleasure, and only because he was unable to forget his fugitive
wife. After he had a paralytic stroke, falling over with a crash in
the well of a music-hall orchestra during the performance, she had
joined the Zangiacomo company. He was now in a home for incurables.

"And I am here," she finished, "with no one to care if I make a hole
in the water the next chance I get or not."

Heyst told her that he thought she could do a little better than
that, if it was only a question of getting out of the world. She
looked at him with special attention, and with a puzzled expression
which gave to her face an air of innocence.

This was during one of the "intervals" between the two parts of the
concert. She had come down that time without being incited thereto
by a pinch from the awful Zangiacomo woman. It is difficult to
suppose that she was seduced by the uncovered intellectual forehead
and the long reddish moustaches of her new friend. New is not the
right word. She had never had a friend before; and the sensation of
this friendliness going out to her was exciting by its novelty
alone. Besides, any man who did not resemble Schomberg appeared for
that very reason attractive. She was afraid of the hotel-keeper,
who, in the daytime, taking advantage of the fact that she lived in
the hotel itself, and not in the Pavilion with the other "artists"
prowled round her, mute, hungry, portentous behind his great beard,
or else assailed her in quiet corners and empty passages with deep,
mysterious murmurs from behind, which, not withstanding their clear
import, sounded horribly insane somehow.

The contrast of Heyst's quiet, polished manner gave her special
delight and filled her with admiration. She had never seen anything
like that before. If she had, perhaps, known kindness in her life,
she had never met the forms of simple courtesy. She was interested
by it as a very novel experience, not very intelligible, but
distinctly pleasurable.

"I tell you they are too many for me," she repeated, sometimes
recklessly, but more often shaking her head with ominous dejection.

She had, of course, no money at all. The quantities of "black men"
all about frightened her. She really had no definite idea where she
was on the surface of the globe. The orchestra was generally taken
from the steamer to some hotel, and kept shut up there till it was
time to go on board another steamer. She could not remember the
names she heard.

"How do you call this place again?" she used to ask Heyst.

"Sourabaya," he would say distinctly, and would watch the
discouragement at the outlandish sound coming into her eyes, which
were fastened on his face.

He could not defend himself from compassion. He suggested that she
might go to the consul, but it was his conscience that dictated this
advice, not his conviction. She had never heard of the animal or of
its uses. A consul! What was it? Who was he? What could he do?
And when she learned that perhaps he could be induced to send her
home, her head dropped on her breast.

"What am I to do when I get there?" she murmured with an intonation
so just, with an accent so penetrating--the charm of her voice did
not fail her even in whispering--that Heyst seemed to see the
illusion of human fellowship on earth vanish before the naked truth
of her existence, and leave them both face to face in a moral desert
as arid as the sands of Sahara, without restful shade, without
refreshing water.

She leaned slightly over the little table, the same little table at
which they had sat when they first met each other; and with no other
memories but of the stones in the streets her childhood had known,
in the distress of the incoherent, confused, rudimentary impressions
of her travels inspiring her with a vague terror of the world she
said rapidly, as one speaks in desperation:

"YOU do something! You are a gentleman. It wasn't I who spoke to
you first, was it? I didn't begin, did I? It was you who came
along and spoke to me when I was standing over there. What did you
want to speak to me for? I don't care what it is, but you must do
something."

Her attitude was fierce and entreating at the same time--clamorous,
in fact though her voice had hardly risen above a breath. It was
clamorous enough to be noticed. Heyst, on purpose, laughed aloud.
She nearly choked with indignation at this brutal heartlessness.

"What did you mean, then, by saying 'command me!'?" she almost
hissed.

Something hard in his mirthless stare, and a quiet final "All
right," steadied her.

"I am not rich enough to buy you out," he went on, speaking with an
extraordinary detached grin, "even if it were to be done; but I can
always steal you."

She looked at him profoundly, as though these words had a hidden and
very complicated meaning.

"Get away now," he said rapidly, "and try to smile as you go."

She obeyed with unexpected readiness; and as she had a set of very
good white teeth, the effect of the mechanical, ordered smile was
joyous, radiant. It astonished Heyst. No wonder, it flashed
through his mind, women can deceive men so completely. The faculty
was inherent in them; they seemed to be created with a special
aptitude. Here was a smile the origin of which was well known to
him; and yet it had conveyed a sensation of warmth, had given him a
sort of ardour to live which was very new to his experience.

By this time she was gone from the table, and had joined the other
"ladies of the orchestra." They trooped towards the platform,
driven in truculently by the haughty mate of Zangiacomo, who looked
as though she were restraining herself with difficulty from punching
their backs. Zangiacomo followed, with his great, pendulous dyed
beard and short mess-jacket, with an aspect of hang-dog
concentration imparted by his drooping head and the uneasiness of
his eyes, which were set very close together. He climbed the steps
last of all, turned about, displaying his purple beard to the hall,
and tapped with his bow. Heyst winced in anticipation of the
horrible racket. It burst out immediately unabashed and awful. At
the end of the platform the woman at the piano, presenting her cruel
profile, her head tilted back, banged the keys without looking at
the music.

Heyst could not stand the uproar for more than a minute. He went
out, his brain racked by the rhythm of some more or less Hungarian
dance music. The forests inhabited by the New Guinea cannibals
where he had encountered the most exciting of his earlier futile
adventures were silent. And this adventure, not in its execution,
perhaps, but in its nature, required even more nerve than anything
he had faced before. Walking among the paper lanterns suspended to
trees he remembered with regret the gloom and the dead stillness of
the forests at the back of Geelvink Bay, perhaps the wildest, the
unsafest, the most deadly spot on earth from which the sea can be
seen. Oppressed by his thoughts, he sought the obscurity and peace
of his bedroom; but they were not complete. The distant sounds of
the concert reached his ear, faint indeed, but still disturbing.
Neither did he feel very safe in there; for that sentiment depends
not on extraneous circumstances but on our inward conviction. He
did not attempt to go to sleep; he did not even unbutton the top
button of his tunic. He sat in a chair and mused. Formerly, in
solitude and in silence, he had been used to think clearly and
sometimes even profoundly, seeing life outside the flattering
optical delusion of everlasting hope, of conventional self-
deceptions, of an ever-expected happiness. But now he was troubled;
a light veil seemed to hang before his mental vision; the awakening
of a tenderness, indistinct and confused as yet, towards an unknown
woman.

Gradually silence, a real silence, had established itself round him.
The concert was over; the audience had gone; the concert-hall was
dark; and even the Pavilion, where the ladies' orchestra slept after
its noisy labours, showed not a gleam of light. Heyst suddenly felt
restless in all his limbs, as this reaction from the long immobility
would not be denied, he humoured it by passing quietly along the
back veranda and out into the grounds at the side of the house, into
the black shadows under the trees, where the extinguished paper
lanterns were gently swinging their globes like withered fruit.

He paced there to and fro for a long time, a calm, meditative ghost
in his white drill-suit, revolving in his head thoughts absolutely
novel, disquieting, and seductive; accustoming his mind to the
contemplation of his purpose, in order that by being faced steadily
it should appear praiseworthy and wise. For the use of reason is to
justify the obscure desires that move our conduct, impulses,
passions, prejudices, and follies, and also our fears.

He felt that he had engaged himself by a rash promise to an action
big with incalculable consequences. And then he asked himself if
the girl had understood what he meant. Who could tell? He was
assailed by all sorts of doubts. Raising his head, he perceived
something white flitting between the trees. It vanished almost at
once; but there could be no mistake. He was vexed at being detected
roaming like this in the middle of the night. Who could that be?
It never occurred to him that perhaps the girl, too, would not be
able to sleep. He advanced prudently. Then he saw the white,
phantom-like apparition again; and the next moment all his doubts as
to the state of her mind were laid at rest, because he felt her
clinging to him after the manner of supplicants all the world over.
Her whispers were so incoherent that he could not understand
anything; but this did not prevent him from being profoundly moved.
He had no illusions about her; but his sceptical mind was dominated
by the fulness of his heart.

"Calm yourself, calm yourself," he murmured in her ear, returning
her clasp at first mechanically, and afterwards with a growing
appreciation of her distressed humanity. The heaving of her breast
and the trembling of all her limbs, in the closeness of his embrace,
seemed to enter his body, to infect his very heart. While she was
growing quieter in his arms, he was becoming more agitated, as if
there were only a fixed quantity of violent emotion on this earth.
The very night seemed more dumb, more still, and the immobility of
the vague, black shapes, surrounding him more perfect.

"It will be all right," he tried to reassure her, with a tone of
conviction, speaking into her ear, and of necessity clasping her
more closely than before.

Either the words or the action had a very good effect. He heard a
light sigh of relief. She spoke with a calmed ardour.

"Oh, I knew it would be all right from the first time you spoke to
me! Yes, indeed, I knew directly you came up to me that evening. I
knew it would be all right, if you only cared to make it so; but of
course I could not tell if you meant it. 'Command me,' you said.
Funny thing for a man like you to say. Did you really mean it? You
weren't making fun of me?"

He protested that he had been a serious person all his life.

"I believe you," she said ardently. He was touched by this
declaration. "It's the way you have of speaking as if you were
amused with people," she went on. "But I wasn't deceived. I could
see you were angry with that beast of a woman. And you are clever.
You spotted something at once. You saw it in my face, eh? It isn't
a bad face--say? You'll never be sorry. Listen--I'm not twenty
yet. It's the truth, and I can't be so bad looking, or else--I will
tell you straight that I have been worried and pestered by fellows
like this before. I don't know what comes to them--"

She was speaking hurriedly. She choked, and then exclaimed, with an
accent of despair:

"What is it? What's the matter?"

Heyst had removed his arms from her suddenly, and had recoiled a
little. "Is it my fault? I didn't even look at them, I tell you
straight. Never! Have I looked at you? Tell me. It was you that
began it."

In truth, Heyst had shrunk from the idea of competition with fellows
unknown, with Schomberg the hotel-keeper. The vaporous white figure
before him swayed pitifully in the darkness. He felt ashamed of his
fastidiousness.

"I am afraid we have been detected," he murmured. "I think I saw
somebody on the path between the house and the bushes behind you."

He had seen no one. It was a compassionate lie, if there ever was
one. His compassion was as genuine as his shrinking had been, and
in his judgement more honourable.

She didn't turn her head. She was obviously relieved.

"Would it be that brute?" she breathed out, meaning Schomberg, of
course. "He's getting too forward with me now. What can you
expect? Only this evening, after supper, he--but I slipped away.
You don't mind him, do you? Why, I could face him myself now that I
know you care for me. A girl can always put up a fight. You
believe me? Only it isn't easy to stand up for yourself when you
feel there's nothing and nobody at your back. There's nothing so
lonely in the world as a girl who has got to look after herself.
When I left poor dad in that home--it was in the country, near a
village--I came out of the gates with seven shillings and threepence
in my old purse, and my railway ticket. I tramped a mile, and got
into a train--"

She broke off, and was silent for a moment.

"Don't you throw me over now," she went on. "If you did, what
should I do? I should have to live, to be sure, because I'd be
afraid to kill myself, but you would have done a thousand times
worse than killing a body. You told me you had been always alone,
you had never had a dog even. Well, then, I won't be in anybody's
way if I live with you--not even a dog's. And what else did you
mean when you came up and looked at me so close?"

"Close? Did I?" he murmured unstirring before her in the profound
darkness. "So close as that?"

She had an outbreak of anger and despair in subdued tones.

"Have you forgotten, then? What did you expect to find? I know
what sort of girl I am; but all the same I am not the sort that men
turn their backs on--and you ought to know it, unless you aren't
made like the others. Oh, forgive me! You aren't like the others;
you are like no one in the world I ever spoke to. Don't you care
for me? Don't you see--?"

What he saw was that, white and spectral, she was putting out her
arms to him out of the black shadows like an appealing ghost. He
took her hands, and was affected, almost surprised, to find them so
warm, so real, so firm, so living in his grasp. He drew her to him,
and she dropped her head on his shoulder with a deep-sigh.

"I am dead tired," she whispered plaintively.

He put his arms around her, and only by the convulsive movements of
her body became aware that she was sobbing without a sound.
Sustaining her, he lost himself in the profound silence of the
night. After a while she became still, and cried quietly. Then,
suddenly, as if waking up, she asked:

"You haven't seen any more of that somebody you thought was spying
about?"

He started at her quick, sharp whisper, and answered that very
likely he had been mistaken.

"If it was anybody at all," she reflected aloud, "it wouldn't have
been anyone but that hotel woman--the landlord's wife."

"Mrs. Schomberg," Heyst said, surprised.

"Yes. Another one that can't sleep o' nights. Why? Don't you see
why? Because, of course, she sees what's going on. That beast
doesn't even try to keep it from her. If she had only the least bit
of spirit! She knows how I feel, too, only she's too frightened
even to look him in the face, let alone open her mouth. He would
tell her to go hang herself."

For some time Heyst said nothing. A public, active contest with the
hotel-keeper was not to be thought of. The idea was horrible.
Whispering gently to the girl, he tried to explain to her that as
things stood, an open withdrawal from the company would be probably
opposed. She listened to his explanation anxiously, from time to
time pressing the hand she had sought and got hold of in the dark.

"As I told you, I am not rich enough to buy you out so I shall steal
you as soon as I can arrange some means of getting away from here.
Meantime it would be fatal to be seen together at night. We mustn't
give ourselves away. We had better part at once. I think I was
mistaken just now; but if, as you say, that poor Mrs. Schomberg
can't sleep of nights, we must be more careful. She would tell the
fellow."

The girl had disengaged herself from his loose hold while he talked,
and now stood free of him, but still clasping his hand firmly.

"Oh, no," she said with perfect assurance. "I tell you she daren't
open her mouth to him. And she isn't as silly as she looks. She
wouldn't give us away. She knows a trick worth two of that. She'll
help--that's what she'll do, if she dares do anything at all."

"You seem to have a very clear view of the situation," said Heyst,
and received a warm, lingering kiss for this commendation.

He discovered that to-part from her was not such an easy matter as
he had supposed it would be.

"Upon my word," he said before they separated, "I don't even know
your name."

"Don't you? They call me Alma. I don't know why. Silly name!
Magdalen too. It doesn't matter; you can call me by whatever name
you choose. Yes, you give me a name. Think of one you would like
the sound of--something quite new. How I should like to forget
everything that has gone before, as one forgets a dream that's done
with, fright and all! I would try."

"Would you really?" he asked in a murmur. "But that's not
forbidden. I understand that women easily forget whatever in their
past diminishes them in their eyes."

"It's your eyes that I was thinking of, for I'm sure I've never
wished to forget anything till you came up to me that night and
looked me through and through. I know I'm not much account; but I
know how to stand by a man. I stood by father ever since I could
understand. He wasn't a bad chap. Now that I can't be of any use
to him, I would just as soon forget all that and make a fresh start.
But these aren't things that I could talk to you about. What could
I ever talk to you about?"

"Don't let it trouble you," Heyst said. "Your voice is enough. I
am in love with it, whatever it says."

She remained silent for a while, as if rendered breathless by this
quiet statement.

"Oh! I wanted to ask you--"

He remembered that she probably did not know his name, and expected
the question to be put to him now; but after a moment of hesitation
she went on:

"Why was it that you told me to smile this evening in the concert-
room there--you remember?"

"I thought we were being observed. A smile is the best of masks.
Schomberg was at a table next but one to us, drinking with some
Dutch clerks from the town. No doubt he was watching us--watching
you, at least. That's why I asked you to smile."

"Ah, that's why. It never came into my head!"

"And you did it very well, too--very readily, as if you had
understood my intention."

"Readily!" she repeated. "Oh, I was ready enough to smile then.
That's the truth. It was the first time for years I may say that I
felt disposed to smile. I've not had many chances to smile in my
life, I can tell you; especially of late."

"But you do it most charmingly--in a perfectly fascinating way."

He paused. She stood still, waiting for more with the stillness of
extreme delight, wishing to prolong the sensation.

"It astonished me," he added. "It went as straight to my heart as
though you had smiled for the purpose of dazzling me. I felt as if
I had never seen a smile before in my life. I thought of it after I
left you. It made me restless."

"It did all that?" came her voice, unsteady, gentle, and
incredulous.

"If you had not smiled as you did, perhaps I should not have come
out here tonight," he said, with his playful earnestness of tone.
"It was your triumph."

He felt her lips touch his lightly, and the next moment she was
gone. Her white dress gleamed in the distance, and then the opaque
darkness of the house seemed to swallow it. Heyst waited a little
before he went the same way, round the comer, up the steps of the
veranda, and into his room, where he lay down at last--not to sleep,
but to go over in his mind all that had been said at their meeting.

"It's exactly true about that smile," he thought. There he had
spoken the truth to her; and about her voice, too. For the rest--
what must be must be.

A great wave of heat passed over him. He turned on his back, flung
his arms crosswise on the broad, hard bed, and lay still, open-eyed
under the mosquito net, till daylight entered his room, brightened
swiftly, and turned to unfailing sunlight. He got up then, went to
a small looking-glass hanging on the wall, and stared at himself
steadily. It was not a new-born vanity which induced this long
survey. He felt so strange that he could not resist the suspicion
of his personal appearance having changed during the night. What he
saw in the glass, however, was the man he knew before. It was
almost a disappointment--a belittling of his recent experience. And
then he smiled at his naiveness; for, being over five and thirty
years of age, he ought to have known that in most cases the body is
the unalterable mask of the soul, which even death itself changes
but little, till it is put out of sight where no changes matter any
more, either to our friends or to our enemies.

Heyst was not conscious of either friends or of enemies. It was the
very essence of his life to be a solitary achievement, accomplished
not by hermit-like withdrawal with its silence and immobility, but
by a system of restless wandering, by the detachment of an
impermanent dweller amongst changing scenes. In this scheme he had
perceived the means of passing through life without suffering and
almost without a single care in the world--invulnerable because
elusive.

CHAPTER THREE

For fifteen years Heyst had wandered, invariably courteous and
unapproachable, and in return was generally considered a "queer
chap." He had started off on these travels of his after the death
of his father, an expatriated Swede who died in London, dissatisfied
with his country and angry with all the world, which had
instinctively rejected his wisdom.

Thinker, stylist, and man of the world in his time, the elder Heyst
had begun by coveting all the joys, those of the great and those of
the humble, those of the fools and those of the sages. For more
than sixty years he had dragged on this painful earth of ours the
most weary, the most uneasy soul that civilization had ever
fashioned to its ends of disillusion and regret. One could not
refuse him a measure of greatness, for he was unhappy in a way
unknown to mediocre souls. His mother Heyst had never known, but he
kept his father's pale, distinguished face in affectionate memory.
He remembered him mainly in an ample blue dressing-gown in a large
house of a quiet London suburb. For three years, after leaving
school at the age of eighteen, he had lived with the elder Heyst,
who was then writing his last book. In this work, at the end of his
life, he claimed for mankind that right to absolute moral and
intellectual liberty of which he no longer believed them worthy.

Three years of such companionship at that plastic and impressionable
age were bound to leave in the boy a profound mistrust of life. The
young man learned to reflect, which is a destructive process, a
reckoning of the cost. It is not the clear-sighted who lead the
world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm
mental fog, which the pitiless cold blasts of the father's analysis
had blown away from the son.

"I'll drift," Heyst had said to himself deliberately.

He did not mean intellectually or sentimentally or morally. He
meant to drift altogether and literally, body and soul, like a
detached leaf drifting in the wind-currents under the immovable
trees of a forest glade; to drift without ever catching on to
anything.

"This shall be my defence against life," he had said to himself with
a sort of inward consciousness that for the son of his father there
was no other worthy alternative.

He became a waif and stray, austerely, from conviction, as others do
through drink, from vice, from some weakness of character--with
deliberation, as others do in despair. This, stripped of its facts,
had been Heyst's life up to that disturbing night. Next day, when
he saw the girl called Alma, she managed to give him a glance of
frank tenderness, quick as lightning and leaving a profound
impression, a secret touch on the heart. It was in the grounds of
the hotel, about tiffin time, while the Ladies of the orchestra were
strolling back to their pavilion after rehearsal, or practice, or
whatever they called their morning musical exercises in the hall.
Heyst, returning from the town, where he had discovered that there
would be difficulties in the way of getting away at once, was
crossing the compound, disappointed and worried. He had walked
almost unwittingly into the straggling group of Zangiacomo's
performers. It was a shock to him, on coming out of his brown
study, to find the girl so near to him, as if one waking suddenly
should see the figure of his dream turned into flesh and blood. She
did not raise her shapely head, but her glance was no dream thing.
It was real, the most real impression of his detached existence--so
far.

Heyst had not acknowledged it in any way, though it seemed to him
impossible that its effect on him should not be visible to anyone
who happened to be looking on. And there were several men on the
veranda, steady customers of Schomberg's table d'hote, gazing in his
direction--at the ladies of the orchestra, in fact. Heyst's dread
arose, not out of shame or timidity, but from his fastidiousness.
On getting amongst them, however, he noticed no signs of interest or
astonishment in their faces, any more than if they had been blind
men. Even Schomberg himself, who had to make way for him at the top
of the stairs, was completely unperturbed, and continued the
conversation he was carrying on with a client.

Schomberg, indeed, had observed "that Swede" talking with the girl
in the intervals. A crony of his had nudged him; and he had thought
that it was so much the better; the silly fellow would keep
everybody else off. He was rather pleased than otherwise and
watched them out of the corner of his eye with a malicious enjoyment
of the situation--a sort of Satanic glee. For he had little doubt
of his personal fascination, and still less of his power to get hold
of the girl, who seemed too ignorant to know how to help herself,
and who was worse than friendless, since she had for some reason
incurred the animosity of Mrs. Zangiacomo, a woman with no
conscience. The aversion she showed him as far as she dared (for it
is not always safe for the helpless to display the delicacy of their
sentiments), Schomberg pardoned on the score of feminine
conventional silliness. He had told Alma, as an argument, that she
was a clever enough girl to see that she could do no better than to
put her trust in a man of substance, in the prime of life, who knew
his way about. But for the excited trembling of his voice, and the
extraordinary way in which his eyes seemed to be starting out of his
crimson, hirsute countenance, such speeches had every character of
calm, unselfish advice--which, after the manner of lovers, passed
easily into sanguine plans for the future.

"We'll soon get rid of the old woman," he whispered to her
hurriedly, with panting ferocity. "Hang her! I've never cared for
her. The climate don't suit her; I shall tell her to go to her
people in Europe. She will have to go, too! I will see to it.
Eins, zwei, march! And then we shall sell this hotel and start
another somewhere else."

He assured her that he didn't care what he did for her sake; and it
was true. Forty-five is the age of recklessness for many men, as if
in defiance of the decay and death waiting with open arms in the
sinister valley at the bottom of the inevitable hill. Her shrinking
form, her downcast eyes, when she had to listen to him, cornered at
the end of an empty corridor, he regarded as signs of submission to
the overpowering force of his will, the recognition of his personal
fascinations. For every age is fed on illusions, lest men should
renounce life early and the human race come to an end.

It's easy to imagine Schomberg's humiliation, his shocked fury, when
he discovered that the girl who had for weeks resisted his attacks,
his prayers, and his fiercest protestations, had been snatched from
under his nose by "that Swede," apparently without any trouble worth
speaking of. He refused to believe the fact. He would have it, at
first, that the Zangiacomos, for some unfathomable reason, had
played him a scurvy trick, but when no further doubt was possible,
he changed his view of Heyst. The despised Swede became for
Schomberg the deepest, the most dangerous, the most hateful of
scoundrels. He could not believe that the creature he had coveted
with so much force and with so little effect, was in reality tender,
docile to her impulse, and had almost offered herself to Heyst
without a sense of guilt, in a desire of safety, and from a profound
need of placing her trust where her woman's instinct guided her
ignorance. Nothing would serve Schomberg but that she must have
been circumvented by some occult exercise of force or craft, by the
laying of some subtle trap. His wounded vanity wondered ceaselessly
at the means "that Swede" had employed to seduce her away from a man
like him--Schomberg--as though those means were bound to have been
extraordinary, unheard of, inconceivable. He slapped his forehead
openly before his customers; he would sit brooding in silence or
else would burst out unexpectedly declaiming against Heyst without
measure, discretion, or prudence, with swollen features and an
affectation of outraged virtue which could not have deceived the
most childlike of moralists for a moment--and greatly amused his
audience.

It became a recognized entertainment to go and hear his abuse of
Heyst, while sipping iced drinks on the veranda of the hotel. It
was, in a manner, a more successful draw than the Zangiacomo
concerts had ever been--intervals and all. There was never any
difficulty in starting the performer off. Anybody could do it, by
almost any distant allusion. As likely as not he would start his
endless denunciations in the very billiard-room where Mrs. Schomberg
sat enthroned as usual, swallowing her sobs, concealing her tortures
of abject humiliation and terror under her stupid, set, everlasting
grin, which, having been provided for her by nature, was an
excellent mask, in as much as nothing--not even death itself,
perhaps--could tear it away.

But nothing lasts in this world, at least without changing its
physiognomy. So, after a few weeks, Schomberg regained his outward
calm, as if his indignation had dried up within him. And it was
time. He was becoming a bore with his inability to talk of anything
else but Heyst's unfitness to be at large, Heyst's wickedness, his
wiles, his astuteness, and his criminality. Schomberg no longer
pretended to despise him. He could not have done it. After what
had happened he could not pretend, even to himself. But his
bottled-up indignation was fermenting venomously. At the time of
his immoderate loquacity one of his customers, an elderly man, had
remarked one evening:

"If that ass keeps on like this, he will end by going crazy."

And this belief was less than half wrong. Schomberg had Heyst on
the brain. Even the unsatisfactory state of his affairs, which had
never been so unpromising since he came out East directly after the
Franco-Prussian War, he referred to some subtly noxious influence of
Heyst. It seemed to him that he could never be himself again till
he had got even with that artful Swede. He was ready to swear that
Heyst had ruined his life. The girl so unfairly, craftily, basely
decoyed away would have inspired him to success in a new start.
Obviously Mrs. Schomberg, whom he terrified by savagely silent moods
combined with underhand, poisoned glances, could give him no
inspiration. He had grown generally neglectful, but with a
partiality for reckless expedients, as if he did not care when and
how his career as a hotel-keeper was to be brought to an end. This
demoralized state accounted for what Davidson had observed on his
last visit to the Schomberg establishment, some two months after
Heyst's secret departure with the girl to the solitude of Samburan.

The Schomberg of a few years ago--the Schomberg of the Bangkok days,
for instance, when he started the first of his famed table d'hote
dinners--would never have risked anything of the sort. His genius
ran to catering, "white man for white men" and to the inventing,
elaborating, and retailing of scandalous gossip with asinine unction
and impudent delight. But now his mind was perverted by the pangs
of wounded vanity and of thwarted passion. In this state of moral
weakness Schomberg allowed himself to be corrupted.

CHAPTER FOUR

The business was done by a guest who arrived one fine morning by
mail-boat--immediately from Celebes, having boarded her in Macassar,
but generally, Schomberg understood, from up China Sea way; a
wanderer clearly, even as Heyst was, but not alone and of quite
another kind.

Schomberg, looking up from the stern-sheets of his steam-launch,
which he used for boarding passenger ships on arrival, discovered a
dark sunken stare plunging down on him over the rail of the first-
class part of the deck. He was no great judge of physiognomy.
Human beings, for him, were either the objects of scandalous gossip
or else recipients of narrow strips of paper, with proper bill-heads
stating the name of his hotel--"W. Schomberg, proprietor, accounts
settled weekly."

So in the clean-shaven, extremely thin face hanging over the mail-
boat's rail Schomberg saw only the face of a possible "account."
The steam-launches of other hotels were also alongside, but he
obtained the preference.

"You are Mr. Schomberg, aren't you?" the face asked quite
unexpectedly.

"I am at your service," he answered from below; for business is
business, and its forms and formulas must be observed, even if one's
manly bosom is tortured by that dull rage which succeeds the fury of
baffled passion, like the glow of embers after a fierce blaze.

Presently the possessor of the handsome but emaciated face was
seated beside Schomberg in the stern-sheets of the launch. His body
was long and loose-jointed, his slender fingers, intertwined,
clasped the leg resting on the knee, as he lolled back in a careless
yet tense attitude. On the other side of Schomberg sat another
passenger, who was introduced by the clean-shaven man as -

"My secretary. He must have the room next to mine."

"We can manage that easily for you."

Schomberg steered with dignity, staring straight ahead, but very
much interested by these two promising "accounts." Their
belongings, a couple of large leather trunks browned by age and a
few smaller packages, were piled up in the bows. A third
individual--a nondescript, hairy creature--had modestly made his way
forward and had perched himself on the luggage. The lower part of
his physiognomy was over-developed; his narrow and low forehead,
unintelligently furrowed by horizontal wrinkles, surmounted wildly
hirsute cheeks and a flat nose with wide, baboon-like nostrils.
There was something equivocal in the appearance of his shaggy, hair-
smothered humanity. He, too, seemed to be a follower of the clean-
shaven man, and apparently had travelled on deck with native
passengers, sleeping under the awnings. His broad, squat frame
denoted great strength. Grasping the gunwales of the launch, he
displayed a pair of remarkably long arms, terminating in thick,
brown hairy paws of simian aspect.

"What shall we do with the fellow of mine?" the chief of the party
asked Schomberg. "There must be a boarding-house somewhere near the
port--some grog-shop where they could let him have a mat to sleep
on?"

Schomberg said there was a place kept by a Portuguese half-caste.

"A servant of yours?" he asked.

"Well, he hangs on to me. He is an alligator-hunter. I picked him
up in Colombia, you know. Ever been in Colombia?"

"No," said Schomberg, very much surprised. "An alligator-hunter?
Funny trade! Are you coming from Colombia, then?"

"Yes, but I have been coming for a long time. I come from a good
many places. I am travelling west, you see."

"For sport, perhaps?" suggested Schomberg.

"Yes. Sort of sport. What do you say to chasing the sun?"

"I see--a gentleman at large," said Schomberg, watching a sailing
canoe about to cross his bow, and ready to clear it by a touch of
the helm.

The other passenger made himself heard suddenly.

"Hang these native craft! They always get in the way."

He was a muscular, short man with eyes that gleamed and blinked, a
harsh voice, and a round, toneless, pock-marked face ornamented by a
thin, dishevelled moustache, sticking out quaintly under the tip of
a rigid nose. Schomberg made the reflection that there was nothing
secretarial about him. Both he and his long, lank principal wore
the usual white suit of the tropics, cork helmets, pipe-clayed white
shoes--all correct. The hairy nondescript creature perched on their
luggage in the bow had a check shirt and blue dungaree trousers. He
gazed in their direction from forward in an expectant, trained-
animal manner.

"You spoke to me first," said Schomberg in his manly tones. "You
were acquainted with my name. Where did you hear of me, gentlemen,
may I ask?"

"In Manila," answered the gentleman at large, readily. "From a man
with whom I had a game of cards one evening in the Hotel Castille."

"What man? I've no friends in Manila that I know of," wondered
Schomberg with a severe frown.

"I can't tell you his name. I've clean forgotten it; but don't you
worry. He was anything but a friend of yours. He called you all
the names he could think of. He said you set a lot of scandal going
about him once, somewhere--in Bangkok, I think. Yes, that's it.
You were running a table d'hote in Bangkok at one time, weren't
you?"

Schomberg, astounded by the turn of the information, could only
throw out his chest more and exaggerate his austere Lieutenant-of-
the-Reserve manner. A table d'hote? Yes, certainly. He always--
for the sake of white men. And here in this place, too? Yes, in
this place, too.

"That's all right, then." The stranger turned his black, cavernous,
mesmerizing glance away from the bearded Schomberg, who sat gripping
the brass tiller in a sweating palm. "Many people in the evening at
your place?"

Schomberg had recovered somewhat.

"Twenty covers or so, take one day with another," he answered
feelingly, as befitted a subject on which he was sensitive. "Ought
to be more, if only people would see that it's for their own good.
Precious little profit I get out of it. You are partial to tables
d'hote, gentlemen?"

The new guest made answer that he liked a hotel where one could find
some local people in the evening. It was infernally dull otherwise.
The secretary, in sign of approval, emitted a grunt of astonishing
ferocity, as if proposing to himself to eat the local people. All
this sounded like a longish stay, thought Schomberg, satisfied under
his grave air; till, remembering the girl snatched away from him by
the last guest who had made a prolonged stay in his hotel, he ground
his teeth so audibly that the other two looked at him in wonder.
The momentary convulsion of his florid physiognomy seemed to strike
them dumb. They exchanged a quick glance. Presently the clean-
shaven man fired out another question in his curt, unceremonious
manner:

"You have no women in your hotel, eh?"

"Women!" Schomberg exclaimed indignantly, but also as if a little
frightened. "What on earth do you mean by women? What women?
There's Mrs. Schomberg, of course," he added, suddenly appeased,
with lofty indifference.

"If she knows how to keep her place, then it will do. I can't stand
women near me. They give me the horrors," declared the other.
"They are a perfect curse!"

During this outburst the secretary wore a savage grin. The chief
guest closed his sunken eyes, as if exhausted, and leaned the back
of his head against the stanchion of the awning. In this pose, his
long, feminine eyelashes were very noticeable, and his regular
features, sharp line of the jaw, and well-cut chin were brought into
prominence, giving him a used-up, weary, depraved distinction. He
did not open his eyes till the steam-launch touched the quay. Then
he and the other man got ashore quickly, entered a carriage, and
drove away to the hotel, leaving Schomberg to look after their
luggage and take care of their strange companion. The latter,
looking more like a performing bear abandoned by his show men than a
human being, followed all Schomberg's movements step by step, close
behind his back, muttering to himself in a language that sounded
like some sort of uncouth Spanish. The hotel-keeper felt
uncomfortable till at last he got rid of him at an obscure den where
a very clean, portly Portuguese half-caste, standing serenely in the
doorway, seemed to understand exactly how to deal with clients of
every kind. He took from the creature the strapped bundle it had
been hugging closely through all its peregrinations in that strange
town, and cut short Schomberg's attempts at explanation by a most
confident -

"I comprehend very well, sir."

"It's more than I do," thought Schomberg, going away thankful at
being relieved of the alligator-hunter's company. He wondered what
these fellows were, without being able to form a guess of sufficient
probability. Their names he learned that very day by direct inquiry
"to enter in my books," he explained in his formal military manner,
chest thrown out, beard very much in evidence.

The shaven man, sprawling in a long chair, with his air of withered
youth, raised his eyes languidly.

"My name? Oh, plain Mr. Jones--put that down--a gentleman at large.
And this is Ricardo." The pock-marked man, lying prostrate in
another long chair, made a grimace, as if something had tickled the
end of his nose, but did not come out of his supineness. "Martin
Ricardo, secretary. You don't want any more of our history, do you?
Eh, what? Occupation? Put down, well--tourists. We've been called
harder names before now; it won't hurt our feelings. And that
fellow of mine--where did you tuck him away? Oh, he will be all
right. When he wants anything he'll take it. He's Peter. Citizen
of Colombia. Peter, Pedro--I don't know that he ever had any other
name. Pedro, alligator hunter. Oh, yes--I'll pay his board with
the half-caste. Can't help myself. He's so confoundedly devoted to
me that if I were to give him the sack he would be at my throat.
Shall I tell you how I killed his brother in the wilds of Colombia?
Well, perhaps some other time--it's a rather long story. What I
shall always regret is that I didn't kill him, too. I could have
done it without any extra trouble then; now it's too late. Great
nuisance; but he's useful sometimes. I hope you are not going to
put all this in your book?"

The offhand, hard manner and the contemptuous tone of "plain Mr.
Jones" disconcerted Schomberg utterly. He had never been spoken to
like this in his life. He shook his head in silence and withdrew,
not exactly scared--though he was in reality of a timid disposition
under his manly exterior--but distinctly mystified and impressed.

CHAPTER FIVE

Three weeks later, after putting his cash-box away in the safe which
filled with its iron bulk a corner of their room, Schomberg turned
towards his wife, but without looking at her exactly, and said:

"I must get rid of these two. It won't do!"

Mrs. Schomberg had entertained that very opinion from the first; but
she had been broken years ago into keeping her opinions to herself.
Sitting in her night attire in the light of a single candle, she was
careful not to make a sound, knowing from experience that her very
assent would be resented. With her eyes she followed the figure of
Schomberg, clad in his sleeping suit, and moving restlessly about
the room.

He never glanced her way, for the reason that Mrs. Schomberg, in her
night attire, looked the most unattractive object in existence--
miserable, insignificant, faded, crushed, old. And the contrast
with the feminine form he had ever in his mind's eye made his wife's
appearance painful to his aesthetic sense.

Schomberg walked about swearing and fuming for the purpose of
screwing his courage up to the sticking point.

"Hang me if I ought not to go now, at once, this minute, into his
bedroom, and tell him to be off--him and that secretary of his--
early in the morning. I don't mind a round game of cards, but to
make a decoy of my table d'hote--my blood boils! He came here
because some lying rascal in Manila told him I kept a table d'hote."

He said these things, not for Mrs. Schomberg's information, but
simply thinking aloud, and trying to work his fury up to a point
where it would give him courage enough to face "plain Mr. Jones."

"Impudent overbearing, swindling sharper," he went on. "I have a
good mind to--"

He was beside himself in his lurid, heavy, Teutonic manner, so
unlike the picturesque, lively rage of the Latin races; and though
his eyes strayed about irresolutely, yet his swollen, angry features
awakened in the miserable woman over whom he had been tyrannizing
for years a fear for his precious carcass, since the poor creature
had nothing else but that to hold on to in the world. She knew him
well; but she did not know him altogether. The last thing a woman
will consent to discover in a man whom she loves, or on whom she
simply depends, is want of courage. And, timid in her comer, she
ventured to say pressingly:

"Be careful, Wilhelm! Remember the knives and revolvers in their
trunks."

In guise of thanks for that anxious reminder, he swore horribly in
the direction of her shrinking person. In her scanty nightdress,
and barefooted, she recalled a mediaeval penitent being reproved for
her sins in blasphemous terms. Those lethal weapons were always
present to Schomberg's mind. Personally, he had never seen them.
His part, ten days after his guests' arrival, had been to lounge in
manly, careless attitudes on the veranda--keeping watch--while Mrs.
Schomberg, provided with a bunch of assorted keys, her discoloured
teeth chattering and her globular eyes absolutely idiotic with
fright, was "going through" the luggage of these strange clients.
Her terrible Wilhelm had insisted on it.

"I'll be on the look-out, I tell you," he said. "I shall give you a
whistle when I see them coming back. You couldn't whistle. And if
he were to catch you at it, and chuck you out by the scruff of the
neck, it wouldn't hurt you much; but he won't touch a woman. Not
he! He has told me so. Affected beast. I must find out something
about their little game, and so there's an end of it. Go in! Go
now! Quick march!"

It had been an awful job; but she did go in, because she was much
more afraid of Schomberg than of any possible consequences of the
act. Her greatest concern was lest no key of the bunch he had
provided her with should fit the locks. It would have been such a
disappointment for Wilhelm. However, the trunks, she found, had
been left open; but her investigation did not last long. She was
frightened of firearms, and generally of all weapons, not from
personal cowardice, but as some women are, almost superstitiously,
from an abstract horror of violence and murder. She was out again
on the veranda long before Wilhelm had any occasion for a warning
whistle. The instinctive, motiveless fear being the most difficult
to overcome, nothing could induce her to return to her
investigations, neither threatening growls nor ferocious hisses, nor
yet a poke or two in the ribs.

"Stupid female!" muttered the hotel-keeper, perturbed by the notion
of that armoury in one of his bedrooms. This was from no abstract
sentiment, with him it was constitutional. "Get out of my sight,"
he snarled. "Go and dress yourself for the table d'hote."

Left to himself, Schomberg had meditated. What the devil did this
mean? His thinking processes were sluggish and spasmodic; but
suddenly the truth came to him.

"By heavens, they are desperadoes!" he thought.

Just then he beheld "plain Mr. Jones" and his secretary with the
ambiguous name of Ricardo entering the grounds of the hotel. They
had been down to the port on some business, and now were returning;
Mr. Jones lank, spare, opening his long legs with angular regularity
like a pair of compasses, the other stepping out briskly by his
side. Conviction entered Schomberg's heart. They WERE two
desperadoes--no doubt about it. But as the funk which he
experienced was merely a general sensation, he managed to put on his
most severe Officer-of-the-Reserve manner, long before they had
closed with him.

"Good morning, gentlemen."

Being answered with derisive civility, he became confirmed in his
sudden conviction of their desperate character. The way Mr. Jones
turned his hollow eyes on one, like an incurious spectre, and the
way the other, when addressed, suddenly retracted his lips and
exhibited his teeth without looking round--here was evidence enough
to settle that point. Desperadoes! They passed through the
billiard-room, inscrutably mysterious, to the back of the house, to
join their violated trunks.

"Tiffin bell will ring in five minutes, gentlemen." Schomberg
called after them, exaggerating the deep manliness of his tone.

He had managed to upset himself very much. He expected to see them
come back infuriated and begin to bully him with an odious lack of
restraint. Desperadoes! However they didn't; they had not noticed
anything unusual about their trunks and Schomberg recovered his
composure and said to himself that he must get rid of this deadly
incubus as soon as practicable. They couldn't possibly want to stay
very long; this was not the town--the colony--for desperate
characters. He shrank from action. He dreaded any kind of
disturbance--"fracas" he called it--in his hotel. Such things were
not good for business. Of course, sometimes one had to have a
"fracas;" but it had been a comparatively trifling task to seize the
frail Zangiacomo--whose bones were no larger than a chicken's--round
the ribs, lift him up bodily, dash him to the ground, and fall on
him. It had been easy. The wretched, hook-nosed creature lay
without movement, buried under its purple beard.

Suddenly, remembering the occasion of that "fracas," Schomberg
groaned with the pain as of a hot coal under his breastbone, and
gave himself up to desolation. Ah, if he only had that girl with
him he would have been masterful and resolute and fearless--fight
twenty desperadoes--care for nobody on earth! Whereas the
possession of Mrs. Schomberg was no incitement to a display of manly
virtues. Instead of caring for no one, he felt that he cared for
nothing. Life was a hollow sham; he wasn't going to risk a shot
through his lungs or his liver in order to preserve its integrity.
It had no savour--damn it!

In his state of moral decomposition, Schomberg, master as he was of
the art of hotel-keeping, and careful of giving no occasion for
criticism to the powers regulating that branch of human activity,
let things take their course; though he saw very well where that
course was tending. It began first with a game or two after dinner-
-for the drinks, apparently--with some lingering customer, at one of
the little tables ranged against the walls of the billiard-room.
Schomberg detected the meaning of it at once. "That's what it was!
This was what they were! And, moving about restlessly (at that time
his morose silent period had set in), he cast sidelong looks at the
game; but he said nothing. It was not worth while having a row with
men who were so overbearing. Even when money appeared in connection
with these postprandial games, into which more and more people were
being drawn, he still refrained from raising the question; he was
reluctant to draw unduly the attention of "plain Mr. Jones" and of
the equivocal Ricardo, to his person. One evening, however, after
the public rooms of the hotel had become empty, Schomberg made an
attempt to grapple with the problem in an indirect way.

In a distant corner the tired China boy dozed on his heels, his back
against the wall. Mrs. Schomberg had disappeared, as usual, between
ten and eleven. Schomberg walked about slowly in and out of the
room and the veranda, thoughtful, waiting for his two guests to go
to bed. Then suddenly he approached them, militarily, his chest
thrown out, his voice curt and soldierly.

"Hot night, gentlemen."

Mr Jones, lolling back idly in a chair, looked up. Ricardo, as
idle, but more upright, made no sign.

"Won't you have a drink with me before retiring?" went on Schomberg,
sitting down by the little table.

"By all means," said Mr. Jones lazily.

Ricardo showed his teeth in a strange, quick grin. Schomberg felt
painfully how difficult it was to get in touch with these men, both
so quiet, so deliberate, so menacingly unceremonious. He ordered
the Chinaman to bring in the drinks. His purpose was to discover
how long these guests intended to stay. Ricardo displayed no
conversational vein, but Mr. Jones appeared communicative enough.
His voice somehow matched his sunken eyes. It was hollow without
being in the least mournful; it sounded distant, uninterested, as
though he were speaking from the bottom of a well. Schomberg
learned that he would have the privilege of lodging and boarding
these gentlemen for at least a month more. He could not conceal his
discomfiture at this piece of news.

"What's the matter? Don't you like to have people in your house?"
asked plain Mr. Jones languidly. "I should have thought the owner
of a hotel would be pleased."

He lifted his delicate and beautifully pencilled eyebrows.
Schomberg muttered something about the locality being dull and
uninteresting to travellers--nothing going on--too quiet altogether,
but he only provoked the declaration that quiet had its charm
sometimes, and even dullness was welcome as a change.

"We haven't had time to be dull for the last three years," added
plain Mr. Jones, his eyes fixed darkly on Schomberg whom he further
more invited to have another drink, this time with him, and not to
worry himself about things he did not understand; and especially not
to be inhospitable--which in a hotel-keeper is highly
unprofessional.

"I don't understand," grumbled Schomberg. "Oh, yes, I understand
perfectly well. I--"

"You are frightened," interrupted Mr. Jones. "What is the matter?"

"I don't want any scandal in my place. That's what's the matter."

Schomberg tried to face the situation bravely, but that steady,
black stare affected him. And when he glanced aside uncomfortably,
he met Ricardo's grin uncovering a lot of teeth, though the man
seemed absorbed in his thoughts all the time.

"And, moreover," went on Mr. Jones in that distant tone of his, "you
can't help yourself. Here we are and here we stay. Would you try
to put us out? I dare say you could do it; but you couldn't do it
without getting hurt--very badly hurt. We can promise him that,
can't we, Martin?"

The secretary retracted his lips and looked up sharply at Schomberg,
as if only too anxious to leap upon him with teeth and claws.

Schomberg managed to produce a deep laugh.

"Ha! Ha! Ha!"

Mr Jones closed his eyes wearily, as if the light hurt them, and
looked remarkably like a corpse for a moment. This was bad enough;
but when he opened them again, it was almost a worse trial for
Schomberg's nerves. The spectral intensity of that glance, fixed on
the hotel-keeper (and this was most frightful) without any definite
expression, seemed to dissolve the last grain of resolution in his
character.

"You don't think, by any chance, that you have to do with ordinary
people, do you?" inquired Mr. Jones, in his lifeless manner, which
seemed to imply some sort of menace from beyond the grave.

"He's a gentleman," testified Martin Ricardo with a sudden snap of
the lips, after which his moustaches stirred by themselves in an
odd, feline manner.

"Oh, I wasn't thinking of that," said plain Mr. Jones, while
Schomberg, dumb and planted heavily in his chair looked from one to
the other, leaning forward a little. "Of course I am that; but
Ricardo attaches too much importance to a social advantage. What I
mean, for instance, is that he, quiet and inoffensive as you see him
sitting here, would think nothing of setting fire to this house of
entertainment of yours. It would blaze like a box of matches.
Think of that! It wouldn't advance your affairs much, would it?--
whatever happened to us."

"Come, come gentlemen," remonstrated Schomberg, in a murmur. "This
is very wild talk!"

"And you have been used to deal with tame people, haven't you? But
we aren't tame. We once kept a whole angry town at bay for two
days, and then we got away with our plunder. It was in Venezuela.
Ask Martin here--he can tell you."

Instinctively Schomberg looked at Ricardo, who only passed the tip
of his tongue over his lips with an uncanny sort of gusto, but did
not offer to begin.

"Well, perhaps it would be a rather long story," Mr. Jones conceded
after a short silence.

"I have no desire to hear it, I am sure," said Schomberg. "This
isn't Venezuela. You wouldn't get away from here like that. But
all this is silly talk of the worst sort. Do you mean to say you
would make deadly trouble for the sake of a few guilders that you
and that other"--eyeing Ricardo suspiciously, as one would look at a
strange animal--"gentleman can win of an evening? Isn't as if my
customers were a lot of rich men with pockets full of cash. I
wonder you take so much trouble and risk for so little money."

Schomberg's argument was met by Mr. Jones's statement that one must
do something to kill time. Killing time was not forbidden. For the
rest, being in a communicative mood, Mr. Jones said languidly and in
a voice indifferent, as if issuing from a tomb, that he depended on
himself, as if the world were still one great, wild jungle without
law. Martin was something like that, too--for reasons of his own.

All these statements Ricardo confirmed by short, inhuman grins.
Schomberg lowered his eyes, for the sight of these two men
intimidated him; but he was losing patience.

"Of course, I could see at once that you were two desperate
characters--something like what you say. But what would you think
if I told you that I am pretty near as desperate as you two
gentlemen? 'Here's that Schomberg has an easy time running his
hotel,' people think; and yet it seems to me I would just as soon
let you rip me open and burn the whole show as not. There!"

A low whistle was heard. It came from Ricardo, and was derisive.
Schomberg, breathing heavily, looked on the floor. He was really
desperate. Mr. Jones remained languidly sceptical.

"Tut, tut! You have a tolerable business. You are perfectly tame;
you--" He paused, then added in a tone of disgust: "You have a
wife."

Schomberg tapped the floor angrily with his foot and uttered an
indistinct, laughing curse.

"What do you mean by flinging that damned trouble at my head?" he
cried. "I wish you would carry her off with you some where to the
devil! I wouldn't run after you."

The unexpected outburst affected Mr. Jones strangely. He had a
horrified recoil, chair and all, as if Schomberg had thrust a
wriggling viper in his face.

"What's this infernal nonsense?" he muttered thickly. "What do you
mean? How dare you?"

Ricardo chuckled audibly.

"I tell you I am desperate," Schomberg repeated. "I am as desperate
as any man ever was. I don't care a hang what happens to me!"

"Well, then"--Mr. Jones began to speak with a quietly threatening
effect, as if the common words of daily use had some other deadly
meaning to his mind--"well, then, why should you make yourself
ridiculously disagreeable to us? If you don't care, as you say, you
might just as well let us have the key of that music-shed of yours
for a quiet game; a modest bank--a dozen candles or so. It would be
greatly appreciated by your clients, as far as I can judge from the
way they betted on a game of ecarte I had with that fair, baby-faced
man--what's his name? They just yearn for a modest bank. And I am
afraid Martin here would take it badly if you objected; but of
course you won't. Think of the calls for drinks!"

Schomberg, raising his eyes, at last met the gleams in two dark
caverns under Mr. Jones's devilish eyebrows, directed upon him
impenetrably. He shuddered as if horrors worse than murder had been
lurking there, and said, nodding towards Ricardo:

"I dare say he wouldn't think twice about sticking me, if he had you
at his back! I wish I had sunk my launch, and gone to the bottom
myself in her, before I boarded the steamer you came by. Ah, well,
I've been already living in hell for weeks, so you don't make much
difference. I'll let you have the concert-room--and hang the
consequences. But what about the boy on late duty? If he sees the
cards and actual money passing, he will be sure to blab, and it will
be all over the town in no time."

A ghastly smile stirred the lips of Mr. Jones.

"Ah, I see you want to make a success of it. Very good. That's the
way to get on. Don't let it disturb you. You chase all the
Chinamen to bed early, and we'll get Pedro here every evening. He
isn't the conventional waiter's cut, but he will do to run to and
fro with the tray, while you sit here from nine to eleven serving
out drinks and gathering the money."

"There will be three of them now," thought the unlucky Schomberg.

But Pedro, at any rate, was just a simple, straightforward brute, if
a murderous one. There was no mystery about him, nothing uncanny,
no suggestion of a stealthy, deliberate wildcat turned into a man,
or of an insolent spectre on leave from Hades, endowed with skin and
bones and a subtle power of terror. Pedro with his fangs, his
tangled beard, and queer stare of his little bear's eyes was, by
comparison, delightfully natural. Besides, Schomberg could no
longer help himself.

"That will do very well," he asserted mournfully. "But if you
gentlemen, if you had turned up here only three months ago--ay, less
than three months ago--you would have found somebody very different
from what I am now to talk to you. It's true. What do you think of
that?"

"I scarcely know what to think. I should think it was a lie. You
were probably as tame three months ago as you are now. You were
born tame, like most people in the world."

Mr Jones got up spectrally, and Ricardo imitated him with a snarl
and a stretch. Schomberg, in a brown study, went on, as if to
himself:

"There has been an orchestra here--eighteen women."

Mr Jones let out an exclamation of dismay, and looked about as if
the walls around him and the whole house had been infected with
plague. Then he became very angry, and swore violently at Schomberg
for daring to bring up such subjects. The hotel-keeper was too much
surprised to get up. He gazed from his chair at Mr. Jones's anger,
which had nothing spectral in it but was not the more comprehensible
for that.

"What's the matter?" he stammered out. "What subject? Didn't you
hear me say it was an orchestra? There's nothing wrong in that.
Well, there was a girl amongst them--" Schomberg's eyes went stony;
he clasped his hands in front of his breast with such force that his
knuckles came out white. "Such a girl! Tame, am I? I would have
kicked everything to pieces about me for her. And she, of course .
. . I am in the prime of life . . . then a fellow bewitched her--a
vagabond, a false, bring, swindling, underhand, stick-at-nothing
brute. Ah!"

His entwined fingers cracked as he tore his hands apart, flung out
his arms, and leaned his forehead on them in a passion of fury. The
other two looked at his shaking back--the attenuated Mr. Jones with
mingled scorn and a sort of fear, Ricardo with the expression of a
cat which sees a piece of fish in the pantry out of reach.
Schomberg flung himself backwards. He was dry-eyed, but he gulped
as if swallowing sobs.

"No wonder you can do with me what you like. You have no idea--just
let me tell you of my trouble--"

"I don't want to know anything of your beastly trouble," said Mr.
Jones, in his most lifelessly positive voice.

He stretched forth an arresting hand, and, as Schomberg remained
open-mouthed, he walked out of the billiard-room in all the
uncanniness of his thin shanks. Ricardo followed at his leader's
heels; but he showed his teeth to Schomberg over his shoulder.

CHAPTER SIX

From that evening dated those mysterious but significant phenomena
in Schomberg's establishment which attracted Captain Davidson's
casual notice when he dropped in, placid yet astute, in order to
return Mrs. Schomberg's Indian shawl. And strangely enough, they
lasted some considerable time. It argued either honesty and bad
luck or extraordinary restraint on the part of "plain Mr. Jones and
Co." in their discreet operations with cards.

It was a curious and impressive sight, the inside of Schomberg's
concert-hall, encumbered at one end by a great stack of chairs piled
up on and about the musicians' platform, and lighted at the other by
two dozen candles disposed about a long trestle table covered with
green cloth. In the middle, Mr. Jones, a starved spectre turned
into a banker, faced Ricardo, a rather nasty, slow-moving cat turned
into a croupier. By contrast, the other faces round that table,
anything between twenty and thirty, must have looked like collected
samples of intensely artless, helpless humanity--pathetic in their
innocent watch for the small turns of luck which indeed might have
been serious enough for them. They had no notice to spare for the
hairy Pedro, carrying a tray with the clumsiness of a creature
caught in the woods and taught to walk on its hind legs.

As to Schomberg, he kept out of the way. He remained in the
billiard-room, serving out drinks to the unspeakable Pedro with an
air of not seeing the growling monster, of not knowing where the
drinks went, of ignoring that there was such a thing as a music-room
over there under the trees within fifty yards of the hotel. He
submitted himself to the situation with a low-spirited stoicism
compounded of fear and resignation. Directly the party had broken
up, (he could see dark shapes of the men drifting singly and in
knots through the gate of the compound), he would withdraw out of
sight behind a door not quit closed, in order to avoid meeting his
two extraordinary guests; but he would watch through the crack their
contrasted forms pass through the billiard-room and disappear on
their way to bed. Then he would hear doors being slammed upstairs;
and a profound silence would fall upon the whole house, upon his
hotel appropriated, haunted by those insolently outspoken men
provided with a whole armoury of weapons in their trunks. A
profound silence. Schomberg sometimes could not resist the notion
that he must be dreaming. Shuddering, he would pull himself
together, and creep out, with movements strangely inappropriate to
the Lieutenant-of-the-Reserve bearing by which he tried to keep up
his self-respect before the world.

A great loneliness oppressed him. One after another he would
extinguish the lamps, and move softly towards his bedroom, where
Mrs. Schomberg waited for him--no fit companion for a man of his
ability and "in the prime of life." But that life, alas, was
blighted. He felt it; and never with such force as when on opening
the door he perceived that woman sitting patiently in a chair, her
toes peeping out under the edge of her night-dress, an amazingly
small amount of hair on her head drooping on the long stalk of
scraggy neck, with that everlasting scared grin showing a blue tooth
and meaning nothing--not even real fear. For she was used to him.

Sometimes he was tempted to screw the head off the stalk. He
imagined himself doing it--with one hand, a twisting movement. Not
seriously, of course. Just a simple indulgence for his exasperated
feelings. He wasn't capable of murder. He was certain of that.
And, remembering suddenly the plain speeches of Mr. Jones, he would
think: "I suppose I am too tame for that"--quite unaware that he
had murdered the poor woman morally years ago. He was too
unintelligent to have the notion of such a crime. Her bodily
presence was bitterly offensive, because of its contrast with a very
different feminine image. And it was no use getting rid of her.
She was a habit of years, and there would be nothing to put in her
place. At any rate, he could talk to that idiot half the night if
he chose.

That night he had been vapouring before her as to his intention to
face his two guests and, instead of that inspiration he needed, had
merely received the usual warning: "Be careful, Wilhelm." He did
not want to be told to be careful by an imbecile female. What he
needed was a pair of woman's arms which, flung round his neck, would
brace him up for the encounter. Inspire him, he called it to
himself.

He lay awake a long time; and his slumbers, when they came, were
unsatisfactory and short. The morning light had no joy for his
eyes. He listened dismally to the movements in the house. The
Chinamen were unlocking and flinging wide the doors of the public
rooms which opened on the veranda. Horrors! Another poisoned day
to get through somehow! The recollection of his resolve made him
feel actually sick for a moment. First of all the lordly, abandoned
attitudes of Mr. Jones disconcerted him. Then there was his
contemptuous silence. Mr. Jones never addressed himself to
Schomberg with any general remarks, never opened his lips to him
unless to say "Good morning"--two simple words which, uttered by
that man, seemed a mockery of a threatening character. And, lastly,
it was not a frank physical fear he inspired--for as to that, even a
cornered rat will fight--but a superstitious shrinking awe,
something like an invincible repugnance to seek speech with a wicked
ghost. That it was a daylight ghost surprisingly angular in his
attitudes, and for the most part spread out on three chairs, did not
make it any easier. Daylight only made him a more weird, a more
disturbing and unlawful apparition. Strangely enough in the evening
when he came out of his mute supineness, this unearthly side of him
was less obtrusive. At the gaming-table, when actually handling the
cards, it was probably sunk quite out of sight; but Schomberg,
having made up his mind in ostrich-like fashion to ignore what was
going on, never entered the desecrated music-room. He had never
seen Mr. Jones in the exercise of his vocation--or perhaps it was
only his trade.

"I will speak to him tonight," Schomberg said to himself, while he
drank his morning tea, in pyjamas, on the veranda, before the rising
sun had topped the trees of the compound, and while the undried dew
still lay silvery on the grass, sparkled on the blossoms of the
central flower-bed, and darkened the yellow gravel of the drive.
"That's what I'll do. I won't keep out of sight tonight. I shall
come out and catch him as he goes to bed carrying the cash-box."

After all, what was the fellow but common desperado? Murderous?
Oh, yes; murderous enough, perhaps--and the muscles of Schomberg's
stomach had a quivering contraction under his airy attire. But even
a common desperado would think twice or, more likely, a hundred
times, before openly murdering an inoffensive citizen in a
civilized, European-ruled town. He jerked his shoulders. Of
course! He shuddered again, and paddled back to his room to dress
himself. His mind was made up, and he would think no more about it;
but still he had his doubts. They grew and unfolded themselves with
the progress of the day, as some plants do. At times they made him
perspire more than usual, and they did away with the possibility of
his afternoon siesta. After turning over on his couch more than a
dozen times, he gave up this mockery of repose, got up, and went
downstairs.

It was between three and four o'clock, the hour of profound peace.
The very flowers seemed to doze on their stalks set with sleepy
leaves. Not even the air stirred, for the sea-breeze was not due
till later. The servants were out of sight, catching naps in the
shade somewhere behind the house. Mrs. Schomberg in a dim up-stair
room with closed jalousies, was elaborating those two long pendant
ringlets which were such a feature of her hairdressing for her
afternoon duties. At that time no customers ever troubled the
repose of the establishment. Wandering about his premises in
profound solitude, Schomberg recoiled at the door of the billiard-
room, as if he had seen a snake in his path. All alone with the
billiards, the bare little tables, and a lot of untenanted chairs,
Mr. Secretary Ricardo sat near the wall, performing with lightning
rapidity something that looked like tricks with his own personal
pack of cards, which he always carried about in his pocket.
Schomberg would have backed out quietly if Ricardo had not turned
his head. Having been seen, the hotel-keeper elected to walk in as
the lesser risk of the two. The consciousness of his inwardly
abject attitude towards these men caused him always to throw his
chest out and assume a severe expression. Ricardo watched his
approach, clasping the pack of cards in both hands.

"You want something, perhaps?" suggested Schomberg in his
lieutenant-of-the-Reserve voice.

Ricardo shook his head in silence and looked expectant. With him
Schomberg exchanged at least twenty words every day. He was
infinitely more communicative than his patron. At times he looked
very much like an ordinary human being of his class; and he seemed
to be in an amiable mood at that moment. Suddenly spreading some
ten cards face downward in the form of a fan, he thrust them towards
Schomberg.

"Come, man, take one quick!"

Schomberg was so surprised that he took one hurriedly, after a very
perceptible start. The eyes of Martin Ricardo gleamed
phosphorescent in the half-light of the room screened from the heat
and glare of the tropics.

"That's the king of hearts you've got," he chuckled, showing his
teeth in a quick flash.

Schomberg, after looking at the card, admitted that it was, and laid
it down on the table.

"I can make you take any card I like nine times out of ten," exulted
the secretary, with a strange curl of his lips and a green flicker
in his raised eyes.

Schomberg looked down at him dumbly. For a few seconds neither of
them stirred; then Ricardo lowered his glance, and, opening his
fingers, let the whole pack fall on the table. Schomberg sat down.
He sat down because of the faintness in his legs, and for no other
reason. His mouth was dry. Having sat down, he felt that he must
speak. He squared his shoulders in parade style.

"You are pretty good at that sort of thing," he said.

"Practice makes perfect," replied the secretary.

His precarious amiability made it impossible for Schomberg to get
away. Thus, from his very timidity, the hotel-keeper found himself
engaged in a conversation the thought of which filled him with
apprehension. It must be said, in justice to Schomberg, that he
concealed his funk very creditably. The habit of throwing out his
chest and speaking in a severe voice stood him in good stead. With
him, too, practice made perfect; and he would probably have kept it
up to the end, to the very last moment, to the ultimate instant of
breaking strain which would leave him grovelling on the floor. To
add to his secret trouble, he was at a loss what to say. He found
nothing else but the remark:

"I suppose you are fond of cards."

"What would you expect?" asked Ricardo in a simple, philosophical
tone. "It is likely I should not be?" Then, with sudden fire:
"Fond of cards? Ay, passionately!"

The effect of this outburst was augmented by the quiet lowering of
the eyelids, by a reserved pause as though this had been a
confession of another kind of love. Schomberg cudgelled his brains
for a new topic, but he could not find one. His usual scandalous
gossip would not serve this turn. That desperado did not know
anyone anywhere within a thousand miles. Schomberg was almost
compelled to keep to the subject.

"I suppose you've always been so--from your early youth."

Ricardo's eyes remained cast down. His fingers toyed absently with
the pack on the table.

"I don't know that it was so early. I first got in the way of it
playing for tobacco--in forecastles of ships, you know--common
sailor games. We used to spend whole watches below at it, round a
chest, under a slush lamp. We would hardly spare the time to get a
bite of salt horse--neither eat nor sleep. We could hardly stand
when the watches were mustered on deck. Talk of gambling!" He
dropped the reminiscent tone to add the information, "I was bred to
the sea from a boy, you know."

Schomberg had fallen into a reverie, but without losing the sense of
impending calamity. The next words he heard were:

"I got on all right at sea, too. Worked up to be mate. I was mate
of a schooner--a yacht, you might call her--a special good berth
too, in the Gulf of Mexico, a soft job that you don't run across
more than once in a lifetime. Yes, I was mate of her when I left
the sea to follow him."

Ricardo tossed up his chin to indicate the room above; from which
Schomberg, his wits painfully aroused by this reminder of Mr.
Jones's existence, concluded that the latter had withdrawn into his
bedroom. Ricardo, observing him from under lowered eyelids, went
on:

"It so happened that we were shipmates."

"Mr Jones, you mean? Is he a sailor too?"

Ricardo raised his eyelids at that.

"He's no more Mr. Jones than you are," he said with obvious pride.
"He a sailor! That just shows your ignorance. But there! A
foreigner can't be expected to know any better. I am an Englishman,
and I know a gentleman at sight. I should know one drunk, in the
gutter, in jail, under the gallows. There's a something--it isn't
exactly the appearance, it's a--no use me trying to tell you. You
ain't an Englishman, and if you were, you wouldn't need to be told."

An unsuspected stream of loquacity had broken its dam somewhere deep
within the man, had diluted his fiery blood and softened his
pitiless fibre. Schomberg experienced mingled relief and
apprehension, as if suddenly an enormous savage cat had begun to
wind itself about his legs in inexplicable friendliness. No prudent
man under such circumstances would dare to stir. Schomberg didn't
stir. Ricardo assumed an easy attitude, with an elbow on the table.
Schomberg squared his shoulders afresh.

"I was employed, in that there yacht--schooner, whatever you call
it--by ten gentlemen at once. That surprises you, eh? Yes, yes,
ten. Leastwise there were nine of them gents good enough in their
way, and one downright gentleman, and that was . . . "

Ricardo gave another upward jerk of his chin as much as to say: He!
The only one.

"And no mistake," he went on. "I spotted him from the first day.
How? Why? Ay, you may ask. Hadn't seen that many gentlemen in my
life. Well, somehow I did. If you were an Englishman, you would--"

"What was your yacht?" Schomberg interrupted as impatiently as he
dared; for this harping on nationality jarred on his already tried
nerves. "What was the game?"

"You have a headpiece on you! Game! 'Xactly. That's what it was--
the sort of silliness gentlemen will get up among themselves to play
at adventure. A treasure-hunting expedition. Each of them put down
so much money, you understand, to buy the schooner. Their agent in
the city engaged me and the skipper. The greatest secrecy and all
that. I reckon he had a twinkle in his eye all the time--and no
mistake. But that wasn't our business. Let them bust their money
as they like. The pity of it was that so little of it came our way.
Just fair pay and no more. And damn any pay, much or little,
anyhow--that's what I say!"

He blinked his eyes greenishly in the dim light. The heat seemed to
have stilled everything in the world but his voice. He swore at
large, abundantly, in snarling undertones, it was impossible to say
why, then calmed down as inexplicably, and went on, as a sailor
yarns.

"At first there were only nine of them adventurous sparks, then,
just a day or two before the sailing date, he turned up. Heard of
it somehow, somewhere--I would say from some woman, if I didn't know
him as I do. He would give any woman a ten-mile berth. He can't
stand them. Or maybe in a flash bar. Or maybe in one of them grand
clubs in Pall Mall. Anyway, the agent netted him in all right--cash
down, and only about four and twenty hours for him to get ready; but
he didn't miss his ship. Not he! You might have called it a pier-
head jump--for a gentleman. I saw him come along. Know the West
India Docks, eh?"

Schomberg did not know the West India Docks. Ricardo looked at him
pensively for a while, and then continued, as if such ignorance had
to be disregarded.

"Our tug was already alongside. Two loafers were carrying his
dunnage behind him. I told the dockman at our moorings to keep all
fast for a minute. The gangway was down already; but he made
nothing of it. Up he jumps, one leap, swings his long legs over the
rail, and there he is on board. They pass up his swell dunnage, and
he puts his hand in his trousers pocket and throws all his small
change on the wharf for them chaps to pick up. They were still
promenading that wharf on all fours when we cast off. It was only
then that he looked at me--quietly, you know; in a slow way. He
wasn't so thin then as he is now; but I noticed he wasn't so young
as he looked--not by a long chalk. He seemed to touch me inside
somewhere. I went away pretty quick from there; I was wanted
forward anyhow. I wasn't frightened. What should I be frightened
for? I only felt touched--on the very spot. But Jee-miny, if
anybody had told me we should be partners before the year was out--
well, I would have--"

He swore a variety of strange oaths, some common, others quaintly
horrible to Schomberg's ears, and all mere innocent exclamations of
wonder at the shifts and changes of human fortune. Schomberg moved
slightly in his chair. But the admirer and partner of "plain Mr.
Jones" seemed to have forgotten Schomberg's existence for the
moment. The stream of ingenuous blasphemy--some of it in bad
Spanish--had run dry, and Martin Ricardo, connoisseur in gentlemen,
sat dumb with a stony gaze as if still marvelling inwardly at the
amazing elections, conjunctions, and associations of events which
influence man's pilgrimage on this earth.

At last Schomberg spoke tentatively:

"And so the--the gentleman, up there, talked you over into leaving a
good berth?"

Ricardo started.

"Talked me over! Didn't need to talk me over. Just beckoned to me,
and that was enough. By that time we were in the Gulf of Mexico.
One night we were lying at anchor, close to a dry sandbank--to this
day I am not sure where it was--off the Colombian coast or
thereabouts. We were to start digging the next morning, and all
hands had turned in early, expecting a hard day with the shovels.
Up he comes, and in his quiet, tired way of speaking--you can tell a
gentleman by that as much as by anything else almost--up he comes
behind me and says, just like that into my ear, in a manner: 'Well,
what do you think of our treasure hunt now?'

"I didn't even turn my head; 'xactly as I stood, I remained, and I
spoke no louder than himself:

"'If you want to know, sir, it's nothing but just damned tom-
foolery.'

"We had, of course, been having short talks together at one time or
another during the passage. I dare say he had read me like a book.
There ain't much to me, except that I have never been tame, even
when walking the pavement and cracking jokes and standing drinks to
chums--ay, and to strangers, too. I would watch them lifting their
elbows at my expense, or splitting their side at my fun--I CAN be
funny when I like, you bet!"

A pause for self-complacent contemplation of his own fun and
generosity checked the flow of Ricardo's speech. Schomberg was
concerned to keep within bounds the enlargement of his eyes, which
he seemed to feel growing bigger in his head.

"Yes, yes," he whispered hastily.

"I would watch them and think: 'You boys don't know who I am. If
you did--!' With girls, too. Once I was courting a girl. I used
to kiss her behind the ear and say to myself: 'If you only knew
who's kissing you, my dear, you would scream and bolt!' Ha! ha!
Not that I wanted to do them any harm; but I felt the power in
myself. Now, here we sit, friendly like, and that's all right. You
aren't in my way. But I am not friendly to you. I just don't care.
Some men do say that; but I really don't. You are no more to me one
way or another than that fly there. Just so. I'd squash you or
leave you alone. I don't care what I do."

If real force of character consists in overcoming our sudden
weaknesses, Schomberg displayed plenty of that quality. At the
mention of the fly, he re-enforced the severe dignity of his
attitude as one inflates a collapsing toy balloon with a great
effort of breath. The easy-going, relaxed attitude of Ricardo was
really appalling.

"That's so," he went on. "I am that sort of fellow. You wouldn't
think it, would you? No. You have to be told. So I am telling
you, and I dare say you only half believe it. But you can't say to
yourself that I am drunk, stare at me as you may. I haven't had
anything stronger than a glass of iced water all day. Takes a real
gentleman to see through a fellow. Oh, yes--he spotted me. I told
you we had a few talks at sea about one thing or another. And I
used to watch him down the skylight, playing cards in the cuddy with
the others. They had to pass the time away somehow. By the same
token he caught me at it once, and it was then that I told him I was
fond of cards--and generally lucky in gambling, too. Yes, he had
sized me up. Why not? A gentleman's just like any other man--and
something more."

It flashed through Schomberg's mind: that these two were indeed
well matched in their enormous dissimilarity, identical souls in
different disguises.

"Says he to me"--Ricardo started again in a gossiping manner--'I'm
packed up. It's about time to go, Martin.'

"It was the first time he called me Martin. Says I:

"'Is that it, sir?'

"'You didn't think I was after that sort of treasure, did you? I
wanted to clear out from home quietly. It's a pretty expensive way
of getting a passage across, but it has served my turn.'

"I let him know very soon that I was game for anything, from pitch
and toss to wilful murder, in his company.

"'Wilful murder?' says he in his quiet way. 'What the deuce is
that? What are you talking about? People do get killed sometimes
when they get in one's way, but that's self-defence--you
understand?'

"I told him I did. And then I said I would run below for a minute,
to ram a few of my things into a sailor's bag I had. I've never
cared for a lot of dunnage; I believed in going about flying light
when I was at sea. I came back and found him strolling up and down
the deck, as if he were taking a breath of fresh air before turning
in, like any other evening.

"'Ready?'

"'Yes, sir.'

"He didn't even look at me. We had had a boat in the water astern
ever since we came to anchor in the afternoon. He throws the stump
of his cigar overboard.

"'Can you get the captain out on deck?' he asks.

"That was the last thing in the world I should have thought of
doing. I lost my tongue for a moment.

"'I can try,' says I.

"'Well, then, I am going below. You get him up and keep him with
you till I come back on deck. Mind! Don't let him go below till I
return.'

"I could not help asking why he told me to rouse a sleeping man,
when we wanted everybody on board to sleep sweetly till we got clear
of the schooner. He laughs a little and says that I didn't see all
the bearings of this business.

"'Mind,' he says, 'don't let him leave you till you see me come up
again.' He puts his eyes close to mine. 'Keep him with you at all
costs.'

"'And that means?' says I.

"'All costs to him--by every possible or impossible means. I don't
want to be interrupted in my business down below. He would give me
lots of trouble. I take you with me to save myself trouble in
various circumstances; and you've got to enter on your work right
away.'

"'Just so, sir,' says I; and he slips down the companion.

"With a gentleman you know at once where you are; but it was a
ticklish job. The skipper was nothing to me one way or another, any
more than you are at this moment, Mr. Schomberg. You may light your
cigar or blow your brains out this minute, and I don't care a hang
which you do, both or neither. To bring the skipper up was easy
enough. I had only to stamp on the deck a few times over his head.
I stamped hard. But how to keep him up when he got there?

"'Anything the matter; Mr. Ricardo?' I heard his voice behind me.

"There he was, and I hadn't thought of anything to say to him; so I
didn't turn round. The moonlight was brighter than many a day I
could remember in the North Sea.

"'Why did you call me? What are you staring at out there, Mr.
Ricardo?'

"He was deceived by my keeping my back to him. I wasn't staring at
anything, but his mistake gave me a notion.

"'I am staring at something that looks like a canoe over there,' I
said very slowly.

"The skipper got concerned at once. It wasn't any danger from the
inhabitants, whoever they were.

"'Oh, hang it!' says he. 'That's very unfortunate.' He had hoped
that the schooner being on the coast would not get known so very
soon. 'Dashed awkward, with the business we've got in hand, to have
a lot of niggers watching operations. But are you certain this is a
canoe?'

"'It may be a drift-log,' I said; 'but I thought you had better have
a look with your own eyes. You may make it out better than I can.'

"His eyes weren't anything as good as mine. But he says:

"'Certainly. Certainly. You did quite right.'

"And it's a fact I had seen some drift-logs at sunset. I saw what
they were then and didn't trouble my head about them, forgot all
about it till that very moment. Nothing strange in seeing drift-
logs off a coast like that; and I'm hanged if the skipper didn't
make one out in the wake of the moon. Strange what a little thing a
man's life hangs on sometimes--a single word! Here you are, sitting
unsuspicious before me, and you may let out something unbeknown to
you that would settle your hash. Not that I have any ill-feeling.
I have no feelings. If the skipper had said, 'O, bosh!' and had
turned his back on me, he would not have gone three steps towards
his bed; but he stood there and stared. And now the job was to get
him off the deck when he was no longer wanted there.

"'We are just trying to make out if that object there is a canoe or
a log,' says he to Mr. Jones.

"Mr Jones had come up, lounging as carelessly as when he went below.
While the skipper was jawing about boats and drifting logs. I asked
by signs, from behind, if I hadn't better knock him on the head and
drop him quietly overboard. The night was slipping by, and we had
to go. It couldn't be put off till next night no more. No. No
more. And do you know why?"

Schomberg made a slight negative sign with his head. This direct
appeal annoyed him, jarred on the induced quietude of a great talker
forced into the part of a listener and sunk in it as a man sinks
into slumber. Mr. Ricardo struck a note of scorn.

"Don't know why? Can't you guess? No? Because the boss had got
hold of the skipper's cash-box by then. See?"

CHAPTER SEVEN

"A common thief!"

Schomberg bit his tongue just too late, and woke up completely as he
saw Ricardo retract his lips in a cat-like grin; but the companion
of "plain Mr. Jones" didn't alter his comfortable, gossiping
attitude.

"Garn! What if he did want to see his money back, like any tame
shopkeeper, hash-seller, gin-slinger, or ink-spewer does? Fancy a
mud turtle like you trying to pass an opinion on a gentleman! A
gentleman isn't to be sized up so easily. Even I ain't up to it
sometimes. For instance, that night, all he did was to waggle his
finger at me. The skipper stops his silly chatter, surprised.

"'Eh? What's the matter?' asks he.

"The matter! It was his reprieve--that's what was the matter.

"'O, nothing, nothing,' says my gentleman. 'You are perfectly
right. A log--nothing but a log.'

"Ha, ha! Reprieve, I call it, because if the skipper had gone on
with his silly argument much longer he would have had to be knocked
out of the way. I could hardly hold myself in on account of the
precious minutes. However, his guardian angel put it into his head
to shut up and go back to his bed. I was ramping mad about the lost
time."

"'Why didn't you let me give him one on his silly coconut sir?' I
asks.

"'No ferocity, no ferocity,' he says, raising his finger at me as
calm as you please.

"You can't tell how a gentleman takes that sort of thing. They
don't lost their temper. It's bad form. You'll never see him lose
his temper--not for anybody to see anyhow. Ferocity ain't good
form, either--that much I've learned by this time, and more, too.
I've had that schooling that you couldn't tell by my face if I meant
to rip you up the next minute--as of course I could do in less than
a jiffy. I have a knife up the leg of my trousers."

"You haven't!" exclaimed Schomberg incredulously.

Mr Ricardo was as quick as lightning in changing his lounging, idle
attitude for a stooping position, and exhibiting the weapon with one
jerk at the left leg of his trousers. Schomberg had just a view of
it, strapped to a very hairy limb, when Mr. Ricardo, jumping up,
stamped his foot to get the trouser-leg down, and resumed his
careless pose with one elbow on the table.

"It's a more handy way to carry a tool than you would think," he
went on, gazing abstractedly into Schomberg's wide-open eyes.
"Suppose some little difference comes up during a game. Well, you
stoop to pick up a dropped card, and when you come up--there you are
ready to strike, or with the thing up you sleeve ready to throw. Or
you just dodge under the table when there's some shooting coming.
You wouldn't believe the damage a fellow with a knife under the
table can do to ill-conditioned skunks that want to raise trouble,
before they begin to understand what the screaming's about, and make
a bolt--those that can, that is."

The roses of Schomberg's cheek at the root of his chestnut beard
faded perceptibly. Ricardo chuckled faintly.

"But no ferocity--no ferocity! A gentleman knows. What's the good
of getting yourself into a state? And no shirking necessity,
either. No gentleman ever shirks. What I learn I don't forget.
Why! We gambled on the plains, with a damn lot of cattlemen in
ranches; played fair, mind--and then had to fight for our winnings
afterwards as often as not. We've gambled on the hills and in the
valleys and on the sea-shore, and out of sight of land--mostly fair.
Generally it's good enough. We began in Nicaragua first, after we
left that schooner and her fool errand. There were one hundred and
twenty-seven sovereigns and some Mexican dollars in that skipper's
cash-box. Hardly enough to knock a man on the head for from behind,
I must confess; but that the skipper had a narrow escape the
governor himself could not deny afterwards.

"'Do you want me to understand, sir, that you mind there being one
life more or less on this earth?' I asked him, a few hours after we
got away.

"'Certainly not,' says he.

"'Well, then, why did you stop me?'

"'There's a proper way of doing things. You'll have to learn to be
correct. There's also unnecessary exertion. That must be avoided,
too--if only for the look of the thing.' A gentleman's way of
putting things to you--and no mistake!

"At sunrise we got into a creek, to lie hidden in case the treasure
hunt party had a mind to take a spell hunting for us. And dash me
if they didn't! We saw the schooner away out, running to leeward,
with ten pairs of binoculars sweeping the sea, no doubt on all
sides. I advised the governor to give her time to beat back again
before we made a start. So we stayed up that creek something like
ten days, as snug as can be. On the seventh day we had to kill a
man, though--the brother of this Pedro here. They were alligator-
hunters, right enough. We got our lodgings in their hut. Neither
the boss nor I could habla Espanol--speak Spanish, you know--much
then. Dry bank, nice shade, jolly hammocks, fresh fish, good game,
everything lovely. The governor chucked them a few dollars to begin
with; but it was like boarding with a pair of savage apes, anyhow.
By and by we noticed them talking a lot together. They had twigged
the cash-box, and the leather portmanteaus, and my bag--a jolly lot
of plunder to look at. They must have been saying to each other:

"'No one's ever likely to come looking for these two fellows, who
seem to have fallen from the moon. Let's cut their throats.'

"Why, of course! Clear as daylight. I didn't need to spy one of
them sharpening a devilish long knife behind some bushes, while
glancing right and left with his wild eyes, to know what was in the
wind. Pedro was standing by, trying the edge of another long knife.
They thought we were away on our lookout at the mouth of the river,
as was usual with us during the day. Not that we expected to see
much of the schooner, but it was just as well to make certain, if
possible; and then it was cooler out of the woods, in the breeze.
Well, the governor was there right enough, lying comfortable on a
rug, where he could watch the offing, but I had gone back to the hut
to get a chew of tobacco out of my bag. I had not broken myself of
the habit then, and I couldn't be happy unless I had a lump as big
as a baby's fist in my cheek."

At the cannibalistic comparison, Schomberg muttered a faint, sickly
"don't." Ricardo hitched himself up in his seat and glanced down
his outstretched legs complacently.

"I am tolerably light on my feet, as a general thing," he went on.
"Dash me if I don't think I could drop a pinch of salt on a
sparrow's tail, if I tried. Anyhow, they didn't hear me. I watched
them two brown, hairy brutes not ten yards off. All they had on was
white linen drawers rolled up on their thighs. Not a word they said
to each other. Antonio was down on his thick hams, busy rubbing a
knife on a flat stone; Pedro was leaning against a small tree and
passing his thumb along the edge of his blade. I got away quieter
than a mouse, you bet."

"I didn't say anything to the boss then. He was leaning on his
elbow on his rug, and didn't seem to want to be spoken to. He's
like that--sometimes that familiar you might think he would eat out
of your hand, and at others he would snub you sharper than a devil--
but always quiet. Perfect gentleman, I tell you. I didn't bother
him, then; but I wasn't likely to forget them two fellows, so
businesslike with their knives. At that time we had only one
revolver between us two--the governor's six-shooter, but loaded only
in five chambers; and we had no more cartridges. He had left the
box behind in a drawer in his cabin. Awkward! I had nothing but an
old clasp-knife--no good at all for anything serious.

"In the evening we four sat round a bit of fire outside the
sleeping-shed, eating broiled fish off plantain leaves, with roast
yams for bread--the usual thing. The governor and I were on one
side, and these two beauties cross-legged on the other, grunting a
word or two to each other, now and then, hardly human speech at all,
and their eyes down, fast on the ground. For the last three days we
couldn't get them to look us in the face. Presently I began to talk
to the boss quietly, just as I am talking to you now, careless like,
and I told him all I had observed. He goes on picking up pieces of
fish and putting them into his mouth as calm as anything. It's a
pleasure to have anything to do with a gentleman. Never looked
across at them once.

"'And now,' says I, yawning on purpose, 'we've got to stand watch at
night, turn about, and keep our eyes skinned all day, too, and mind
we don't get jumped upon suddenly.'

"'It's perfectly intolerable,' says the governor. 'And you with no
weapon of any sort!'

"'I mean to stick pretty close to you, sir, from this on, if you
don't mind,' says I.

"He just nods the least bit, wipes his fingers on the plantain leaf,
puts his hand behind his back, as if to help himself to rise from
the ground, snatches his revolver from under his jacket and plugs a
bullet plumb centre into Mr. Antonio's chest. See what it is to
have to do with a gentleman. No confounded fuss, and things done
out of hand. But he might have tipped me a wink or something. I
nearly jumped out of my skin. Scared ain't in it! I didn't even
know who had fired. Everything had been so still just before that
the bang of the shot seemed the loudest noise I had ever heard. The
honourable Antonio pitches forward--they always do, towards the
shot; you must have noticed that yourself--yes, he pitches forward
on to the embers, and all that lot of hair on his face and head
flashes up like a pinch of gunpowder. Greasy, I expect; always
scraping the fat off them alligators' hides--"

"Look here," exclaimed Schomberg violently, as if trying to burst
some invisible bonds, "do you mean to say that all this happened?"

"No," said Ricardo coolly. "I am making it all up as I go along,
just to help you through the hottest part of the afternoon. So down
he pitches his nose on the red embers, and up jumps our handsome
Pedro and I at the same time, like two Jacks-in-the-box. He starts
to bolt away, with his head over his shoulder, and I, hardly knowing
what I was doing, spring on his back. I had the sense to get my
hands round his neck at once, and it's about all I could do to lock
my fingers tight under his jaw. You saw the beauty's neck, didn't
you? Hard as iron, too. Down we both went. Seeing this the
governor puts his revolver in his pocket.

"'Tie his legs together, sir,' I yell. 'I'm trying to strangle
him.'

"There was a lot of their fibre-lines lying about. I gave him a
last squeeze and then got up.

"'I might have shot you,' says the governor, quite concerned.

"'But you are glad to have saved a cartridge, sir,' I tell him.

"My jump did save it. It wouldn't have done to let him get away in
the dark like that, and have the beauty dodging around in the
bushes, perhaps, with the rusty flint-lock gun they had. The
governor owned up that the jump was the correct thing.

"'But he isn't dead,' says he, bending over him.

"Might as well hope to strangle an ox. We made haste to tie his
elbows back, and then, before he came to himself, we dragged him to
a small tree, sat him up, and bound him to it, not by the waist but
by the neck--some twenty turns of small line round his throat and
the trunk, finished off with a reef-knot under his ear. Next thing
we did was to attend to the honourable Antonio, who was making a
great smell frizzling his face on the red coals. We pushed and
rolled him into the creek, and left the rest to the alligators.

"I was tired. That little scrap took it out of me something awful.
The governor hadn't turned a hair. That's where a gentleman has the
pull of you. He don't get excited. No gentleman does--or hardly
ever. I fell asleep all of a sudden and left him smoking by the
fire I had made up, his railway rug round his legs, as calm as if he
were sitting in a first-class carriage. We hardly spoke ten words
to each other after it was over, and from that day to this we have
never talked of the business. I wouldn't have known he remembered
it if he hadn't alluded to it when talking with you the other day--
you know, with regard to Pedro."

"It surprised you, didn't it? That's why I am giving you this yarn
of how he came to be with us, like a sort of dog--dashed sight more
useful, though. You know how he can trot around with trays? Well,
he could bring down an ox with his fist, at a word from the boss,
just as cleverly. And fond of the governor! Oh, my word! More
than any dog is of any man."

Schomberg squared his chest.

"Oh, and that's one of the things I wanted to mention to Mr. Jones,"
he said. "It's unpleasant to have that fellow round the house so
early. He sits on the stairs at the back for hours before he is
needed here, and frightens people so that the service suffers. The
Chinamen--"

Ricardo nodded and raised his hand.

"When I first saw him he was fit to frighten a grizzly bear, let
alone a Chinaman. He's become civilized now to what he once was.
Well, that morning, first thing on opening my eyes, I saw him
sitting there, tied up by the neck to the tree. He was blinking.
We spend the day watching the sea, and we actually made out the
schooner working to windward, which showed that she had given us up.
Good! When the sun rose again, I took a squint at our Pedro. He
wasn't blinking. He was rolling his eyes, all white one minute and
black the next, and his tongue was hanging out a yard. Being tied
up short by the neck like this would daunt the arch devil himself--
in time--in time, mind! I don't know but that even a real gentleman
would find it difficult to keep a stiff lip to the end. Presently
we went to work getting our boat ready. I was busying myself
setting up the mast, when the governor passes the remark:

"'I think he wants to say something.'

"I had heard a sort of croaking going on for some time, only I
wouldn't take any notice; but then I got out of the boat and went up
to him, with some water. His eyes were red--red and black and half
out of his head. He drank all the water I gave him, but he hadn't
much to say for himself. I walked back to the governor.

"'He asks for a bullet in his head before we go,' I said. I wasn't
at all pleased.

"'Oh, that's out of the question altogether,' says the governor.

"He was right there. Only four shots left, and ninety miles of wild
coast to put behind us before coming to the first place where you
could expect to buy revolver cartridges.

"'Anyhow,' I tells him, 'he wants to be killed some way or other, as
a favour.'

"And then I go on setting up the boat's mast. I didn't care much
for the notion of butchering a man bound hand and foot and fastened
by the neck besides. I had a knife then--the honourable Antonio's
knife; and that knife is this knife.

Ricardo gave his leg a resounding slap.

"First spoil in my new life," he went on with harsh joviality. "The
dodge of carrying it down there I learned later. I carried it stuck
in my belt that day. No, I hadn't much stomach for the job; but
when you work with a gentleman of the real right sort you may depend
on your feelings being seen through your skin. Says the governor
suddenly:

"'It may even be looked upon as his right'--you hear a gentleman
speaking there?--'but what do you think of taking him with us in the
boat?'

"And the governor starts arguing that the beggar would be useful in
working our way along the coast. We could get rid of him before
coming to the first place that was a little civilized. I didn't
want much talking over. Out I scrambled from the boat.

"'Ay, but will he be manageable, sir?'

"'Oh, yes. He's daunted. Go on, cut him loose--I take the
responsibility.'

"'Right you are, sir.'

"He sees me come along smartly with his brother's knife in my hand--
I wasn't thinking how it looked from his side of the fence, you
know--and jiminy, it nearly killed him! He stared like a crazed
bullock and began to sweat and twitch all over, something amazing.
I was so surprised, that I stopped to look at him. The drops were
pouring over his eyebrows, down his beard, off his nose--and he
gurgled. Then it struck me that he couldn't see what was in my
mind. By favour or by right he didn't like to die when it came to
it; not in that way, anyhow. When I stepped round to get at the
lashing, he let out a sort of soft bellow. Thought I was going to
stick him from behind, I guess. I cut all the turns with one slash,
and he went over on his side, flop, and started kicking with his
tied legs. Laugh! I don't know what there was so funny about it,
but I fairly shouted. What between my laughing and his wriggling, I
had a job in cutting him free. As soon as he could feel his limbs
he makes for the bank, where the governor was standing, crawls up to
him on his hands and knees, and embraces his legs. Gratitude, eh?
You could see that being allowed to live suited that chap down to
the ground. The governor gets his legs away from him gently and
just mutters to me:

"'Let's be off. Get him into the boat.'

"It was not difficult," continued Ricardo, after eyeing Schomberg
fixedly for a moment. "He was ready enough to get into the boat,
and--here he is. He would let himself be chopped into small pieces-
-with a smile, mind; with a smile!--for the governor. I don't know
about him doing that much for me; but pretty near, pretty near. I
did the tying up and the untying, but he could see who was the boss.
And then he knows a gentleman. A dog knows a gentleman--any dog.
It's only some foreigners that don't know; and nothing can teach
them, either."

"And you mean to say," asked Schomberg, disregarding what might have
been annoying for himself in the emphasis of the final remark, "you
mean to say that you left steady employment at good wages for a life
like this?"

"There!" began Ricardo quietly. "That's just what a man like you
would say. You are that tame! I follow a gentleman. That ain't
the same thing as to serve an employer. They give you wages as
they'd fling a bone to a dog, and they expect you to be grateful.
It's worse than slavery. You don't expect a slave that's bought for
money to be grateful. And if you sell your work--what is it but
selling your own self? You've got so many days to live and you sell
them one after another. Hey? Who can pay me enough for my life?
Ay! But they throw at you your week's money and expect you to say
'thank you' before you pick it up."

He mumbled some curses, directed at employers generally, as it
seemed, then blazed out:

"Work be damned! I ain't a dog walking on its hind legs for a bone;
I am a man who's following a gentleman. There's a difference which
you will never understand, Mr. Tame Schomberg."

He yawned slightly. Schomberg, preserving a military stiffness
reinforced by a slight frown, had allowed his thoughts to stray
away. They were busy detailing the image of a young girl--absent--
gone--stolen from him. He became enraged. There was that rascal
looking at him insolently. If the girl had not been shamefully
decoyed away from him, he would not have allowed anyone to look at
him insolently. He would have made nothing of hitting that rogue
between the eyes. Afterwards he would have kicked the other without
hesitation. He saw himself doing it; and in sympathy with this
glorious vision Schomberg's right foot, and arm moved convulsively.

At this moment he came out of his sudden reverie to note with alarm
the wide-awake curiosity of Mr. Ricardo's stare.

"And so you go like this about the world, gambling," he remarked
inanely, to cover his confusion. But Ricardo's stare did not change
its character, and he continued vaguely:

"Here and there and everywhere." He pulled himself together,
squared his shoulders. "Isn't it very precarious?" he said firmly.

The word precarious--seemed to be effective, because Ricardo's eyes
lost their dangerously interested expression.

"No, not so bad," Ricardo said, with indifference. "It's my opinion
that men will gamble as long as they have anything to put on a card.
Gamble? That's nature. What's life itself? You never know what
may turn up. The worst of it is that you never can tell exactly
what sort of cards you are holding yourself. What's trumps?--that
is the question. See? Any man will gamble if only he's given a
chance, for anything or everything. You too--"

"I haven't touched a card now for twenty years," said Schomberg in
an austere tone.

"Well, if you got your living that way you would be no worse than
you are now, selling drinks to people--beastly beer and spirits,
rotten stuff fit to make an old he-goat yell if you poured it down
its throat. Pooh! I can't stand the confounded liquor. Never
could. A whiff of neat brandy in a glass makes me feel sick.
Always did. If everybody was like me, liquor would be going a-
begging. You think it's funny in a man, don't you?"

Schomberg made a vague gesture of toleration. Ricardo hitched up
his chair and settled his elbow afresh on the table.

"French siros I must say I do like. Saigon's the place for them. I
see you have siros in the bar. Hang me if I ain't getting dry,
conversing like this with you. Come, Mr. Schomberg, be hospitable,
as the governor says."

Schomberg rose and walked with dignity to the counter. His
footsteps echoed loudly on the floor of polished boards. He took
down a bottle, labelled "Sirop de Groseille." The little sounds he
made, the clink of glass, the gurgling of the liquid, the pop of the
soda-water cork had a preternatural sharpness. He came back
carrying a pink and glistening tumbler. Mr. Ricardo had followed
his movements with oblique, coyly expectant yellow eyes, like a cat
watching the preparation of a saucer of milk, and the satisfied
sound after he had drunk might have been a slightly modified form of
purring, very soft and deep in his throat. It affected Schomberg
unpleasantly as another example of something inhuman in those men
wherein lay the difficulty of dealing with them. A spectre, a cat,
an ape--there was a pretty association for a mere man to remonstrate
with, he reflected with an inward shudder; for Schomberg had been
overpowered, as it were, by his imagination, and his reason could
not react against that fanciful view of his guests. And it was not
only their appearance. The morals of Mr. Ricardo seemed to him to
be pretty much the morals of a cat. Too much. What sort of
argument could a mere man offer to a . . . or to a spectre, either!
What the morals of a spectre could be, Schomberg had no idea.
Something dreadful, no doubt. Compassion certainly had no place in
them. As to the ape--well, everybody knew what an ape was. It had
no morals. Nothing could be more hopeless.

Outwardly, however, having picked up the cigar which he had laid
aside to get the drink, with his thick fingers, one of them
ornamented by a gold ring, Schomberg smoked with moody composure.
Facing him, Ricardo blinked slowly for a time, then closed his eyes
altogether, with the placidity of the domestic cat dozing on the
hearth-rug. In another moment he opened them very wide, and seemed
surprised to see Schomberg there.

"You're having a very slack time today, aren't you?" he observed.
"But then this whole town is confoundedly slack, anyhow; and I've
never faced such a slack party at a table before. Come eleven
o'clock, they begin to talk of breaking up. What's the matter with
them? Want to go to bed so early, or what?"

"I reckon you don't lose a fortune by their wanting to go to bed,"
said Schomberg, with sombre sarcasm.

"No," admitted Ricardo, with a grin that stretched his thin mouth
from ear to ear, giving a sudden glimpse of his white teeth. "Only,
you see, when I once start, I would play for nuts, for parched peas,
for any rubbish. I would play them for their souls. But these
Dutchmen aren't any good. They never seem to get warmed up
properly, win or lose. I've tried them both ways, too. Hang them
for a beggarly, bloodless lot of animated cucumbers!"

"And if anything out of the way was to happen, they would be just as
cool in locking you and your gentleman up," Schomberg snarled
unpleasantly.

"Indeed!" said Ricardo slowly, taking Schomberg's measure with his
eyes. "And what about you?"

"You talk mighty big," burst out the hotel-keeper. "You talk of
ranging all over the world, and doing great things, and taking
fortune by the scruff of the neck, but here you stick at this
miserable business!"

"It isn't much of a lay--that's a fact," admitted Ricardo
unexpectedly.

Schomberg was red in the face with audacity.

"I call it paltry," he spluttered.

"That's how it looks. Can't call it anything else." Ricardo seemed
to be in an accommodating mood. "I should be ashamed of it myself,
only you see the governor is subject to fits--"

"Fits!" Schomberg cried out, but in a low tone. "You don't say so!"
He exulted inwardly, as if this disclosure had in some way
diminished the difficulty of the situation. "Fits! That's a
serious thing, isn't it? You ought to take him to the civil
hospital--a lovely place."

Ricardo nodded slightly, with a faint grin.

"Serious enough. Regular fits of laziness, I call them. Now and
then he lays down on me like this, and there's no moving him. If
you think I like it, you're a long way out. Generally speaking, I
can talk him over. I know how to deal with a gentleman. I am no
daily-bread slave. But when he has said, 'Martin, I am bored,' then
look out! There's nothing to do but to shut up, confound it!"

Schomberg, very much cast down, had listened open-mouthed.

"What's the cause of it?" he asked. "Why is he like this? I don't
understand."

"I think I do," said Ricardo. "A gentleman, you know, is not such a
simple person as you or I; and not so easy to manage, either. If
only I had something to lever him out with!"

"What do you mean, to lever him out with?" muttered Schomberg
hopelessly.

Ricardo was impatient with this denseness.

"Don't you understand English? Look here! I couldn't make this
billiard table move an inch if I talked to it from now till the end
of days--could I? Well, the governor is like that, too, when the
fits are on him. He's bored. Nothing's worthwhile, nothing's good
enough, that's mere sense. But if I saw a capstan bar lying about
here, I would soon manage to shift that billiard table of yours a
good many inches. And that's all there is to it."

He rose noiselessly, stretched himself, supple and stealthy, with
curious sideways movements of his head and unexpected elongations of
his thick body, glanced out of the corners of his eyes in the
direction of the door, and finally leaned back against the table,
folding his arms on his breast comfortably, in a completely human
attitude.

"That's another thing you can tell a gentleman by--his freakishness.
A gentleman ain't accountable to nobody, any more than a tramp on
the roads. He ain't got to keep time. The governor got like this
once in a one-horse Mexican pueblo on the uplands, away from
everywhere. He lay all day long in a dark room--"

"Drunk?" This word escaped Schomberg by inadvertence at which he
became frightened. But the devoted secretary seemed to find it
natural.

"No, that never comes on together with this kind of fit. He just
lay there full length on a mat, while a ragged, bare-legged boy that
he had picked up in the street sat in the patio, between two
oleanders near the open door of his room, strumming on a guitar and
singing tristes to him from morning to night. You know tristes--
twang, twang, twang, aouh, hoo! Chroo, yah!"

Schomberg uplifted his hands in distress. This tribute seemed to
flatter Ricardo. His mouth twitched grimly.

"Like that--enough to give colic to an ostrich, eh? Awful. Well,
there was a cook there who loved me--an old fat, Negro woman with
spectacles. I used to hide in the kitchen and turn her to, to make
me dulces--sweet things, you know, mostly eggs and sugar--to pass
the time away. I am like a kid for sweet things. And, by the way,
why don't you ever have a pudding at your tablydott, Mr. Schomberg?
Nothing but fruit, morning, noon, and night. Sickening! What do
you think a fellow is--a wasp?"

Schomberg disregarded the injured tone.

"And how long did that fit, as you call it, last?" he asked
anxiously.

"Weeks, months, years, centuries, it seemed to me," returned Mr.
Ricardo with feeling. "Of an evening the governor would stroll out
into the sala and fritter his life away playing cards with the juez
of the place--a little Dago with a pair of black whiskers--ekarty,
you know, a quick French game, for small change. And the
comandante, a one-eyed, half-Indian, flat-nosed ruffian, and I, we
had to stand around and bet on their hands. It was awful!"

"Awful," echoed Schomberg, in a Teutonic throaty tone of despair.
"Look here, I need your rooms."

"To be sure. I have been thinking that for some time past," said
Ricardo indifferently.

"I was mad when I listened to you. This must end!"

"I think you are mad yet," said Ricardo, not even unfolding his arms
or shifting his attitude an inch. He lowered his voice to add:
"And if I thought you had been to the police, I would tell Pedro to
catch you round the waist and break your fat neck by jerking your
head backward--snap! I saw him do it to a big buck nigger who was
flourishing a razor in front of the governor. It can be done. You
hear a low crack, that's all--and the man drops down like a limp
rag."

Not even Ricardo's head, slightly inclined on the left shoulder, had
moved; but when he ceased the greenish irises which had been staring
out of doors glided into the corners of his eyes nearest to
Schomberg and stayed there with a coyly voluptuous expression.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Schomberg felt desperation, that lamentable substitute for courage,
ooze out of him. It was not so much the threat of death as the
weirdly circumstantial manner of its declaration which affected him.
A mere "I'll murder you," however ferocious in tone, and earnest, in
purpose, he could have faced; but before this novel mode of speech
and procedure, his imagination being very sensitive to the unusual,
he collapsed as if indeed his moral neck had been broken--snap!

"Go to the police? Of course not. Never dreamed of it. Too late
now. I've let myself be mixed up in this. You got my consent while
I wasn't myself. I explained it to you at the time."

Ricardo's eye glided gently off Schomberg to stare far away.

"Ay! Some trouble with a girl. But that's nothing to us."

"Naturally. What I say is, what's the good of all that savage talk
to me?" A bright argument occurred to him. "It's out of
proportion; for even if I were fool enough to go to the police now,
there's nothing serious to complain about. It would only mean
deportation for you. They would put you on board the first west-
bound steamer to Singapore." He had become animated. "Out of this
to the devil," he added between his teeth for his own private
satisfaction.

Ricardo made no comment, and gave no sign of having heard a single
word. This discouraged Schomberg, who had looked up hopefully.

"Why do you want to stick here?" he cried. "It can't pay you people
to fool around like this. Didn't you worry just now about moving
your governor? Well, the police would move him for you; and from
Singapore you can go on to the east coast of Africa."

"I'll be hanged if the fellow isn't up to that silly trick!" was
Ricardo's comment, spoken in an ominous tone which recalled
Schomberg to the realities of his position.

"No! No!" he protested. "It's a manner of speaking. Of course I
wouldn't."

"I think that trouble about the girl has really muddled your brains,
Mr. Schomberg. Believe me, you had better part friends with us;
for, deportation or no deportation, you'll be seeing one of us
turning up before long to pay you off for any nasty dodge you may be
hatching in that fat head of yours."

"Gott im Himmel!" groaned Schomberg. "Will nothing move him out?
Will he stop here immer--I mean always? Suppose I were to make it
worth your while, couldn't you--"

"No," Ricardo interrupted. "I couldn't, unless I had something to
lever him out with. I've told you that before."

"An inducement?" muttered Schomberg.

"Ay. The east coast of Africa isn't good enough. He told me the
other day that it will have to wait till he is ready for it; and he
may not be ready for a long time, because the east coast can't run
away, and no one is likely to run off with it."

These remarks, whether considered as truisms or as depicting Mr.
Jones's mental state, were distinctly discouraging to the long-
suffering Schomberg; but there is truth in the well-known saying
that places the darkest hour before the dawn. The sound of words,
apart from the context, has its power; and these two words, 'run
off,' had a special affinity to the hotel-keeper's, haunting idea.
It was always present in his brain, and now it came forward evoked
by a purely fortuitous expression. No, nobody could run off with a
continent; but Heyst had run off with the girl!

Ricardo could have had no conception of the cause of Schomberg's
changed expression. Yet it was noticeable enough to interest him so
much that he stopped the careless swinging of his leg and said,
looking at the hotel-keeper:

"There's not much use arguing against that sort of talk--is there?"

Schomberg was not listening.

"I could put you on another track," he said slowly, and stopped, as
if suddenly choked by an unholy emotion of intense eagerness
combined with fear of failure. Ricardo waited, attentive, yet not
without a certain contempt.

"On the track of a man!" Schomberg uttered convulsively, and paused
again, consulting his rage and his conscience.

"The man in the moon, eh?" suggested Ricardo, in a jeering murmur.

Schomberg shook his head.

"It would be nearly as safe to rook him as if he were the Man in the
moon. You go and try. It isn't so very far."

He reflected. These men were thieves and murderers as well as
gamblers. Their fitness for purposes of vengeance was appallingly
complete. But he preferred not to think of it in detail. He put it
to himself summarily that he would be paying Heyst out and would, at
the same time, relieve himself of these men's oppression. He had
only to let loose his natural gift for talking scandalously about
his fellow creatures. And in this case his great practice in it was
assisted by hate, which, like love, has an eloquence of its own.
With the utmost ease he portrayed for Ricardo, now seriously
attentive, a Heyst fattened by years of private and public rapines,
the murderer of Morrison, the swindler of many shareholders, a
wonderful mixture of craft and impudence, of deep purposes and
simple wiles, of mystery and futility. In this exercise of his
natural function Schomberg revived, the colour coming back to his
face, loquacious, florid, eager, his manliness set off by the
military bearing.

"That's the exact story. He was seen hanging about this part of the
world for years, spying into everybody's business: but I am the
only one who has seen through him from the first--contemptible,
double-faced, stick-at-nothing, dangerous fellow."

"Dangerous, is he?"

Schomberg came to himself at the sound of Ricardo's voice.

"Well, you know what I mean," he said uneasily. "A lying,
circumventing, soft-spoken, polite, stuck-up rascal. Nothing open
about him."

Mr Ricardo had slipped off the table, and was prowling about the
room in an oblique, noiseless manner. He flashed a grin at
Schomberg in passing, and a snarling:

"Ah! H'm!"

"Well, what more dangerous do you want?" argued Schomberg. "He's in
no way a fighting man, I believe," he added negligently.

"And you say he has been living alone there?"

"Like the man in the moon," answered Schomberg readily. "There's no
one that cares a rap what becomes of him. He has been lying low,
you understand, after bagging all that plunder.

"Plunder, eh? Why didn't he go home with it?" inquired Ricardo.

The henchman of plain Mr. Jones was beginning to think that this was
something worth looking into. And he was pursuing truth in the
manner of men of sounder morality and purer intentions than his own;
that is he pursued it in the light of his own experience and
prejudices. For facts, whatever their origin (and God only knows
where they come from), can be only tested by our own particular
suspicions. Ricardo was suspicious all round. Schomberg, such is
the tonic of recovered self-esteem, Schomberg retorted fearlessly:

"Go home? Why don't you go home? To hear your talk, you must have
made a pretty considerable pile going round winning people's money.
You ought to be ready by this time."

Ricardo stopped to look at Schomberg with surprise.

"You think yourself very clever, don't you?" he said.

Schomberg just then was so conscious of being clever that the
snarling irony left him unmoved. There was positively a smile in
his noble Teutonic beard, the first smile for weeks. He was in a
felicitous vein.

"How do you know that he wasn't thinking of going home? As a matter
of fact, he was on his way home."

"And how do I know that you are not amusing yourself by spinning out
a blamed fairy tale?" interrupted Ricardo roughly. "I wonder at
myself listening to the silly rot!"

Schomberg received this turn of temper unmoved. He did not require
to be very subtly observant to notice that he had managed to arouse
some sort of feeling, perhaps of greed, in Ricardo's breast.

"You won't believe me? Well! You can ask anybody that comes here
if that--that Swede hadn't got as far as this house on his way home.
Why should he turn up here if not for that? You ask anybody."

"Ask, indeed!" returned the other. "Catch me asking at large about
a man I mean to drop on! Such jobs must be done on the quiet--or
not at all."

The peculiar intonation of the last phrase touched the nape of
Schomberg's neck with a chill. He cleared his throat slightly and
looked away as though he had heard something indelicate. Then, with
a jump as it were:

"Of course he didn't tell me. Is it likely? But haven't I got
eyes? Haven't I got my common sense to tell me? I can see through
people. By the same token, he called on the Tesmans. Why did he
call on the Tesmans two days running, eh? You don't know? You
can't tell?"

He waited complacently till Ricardo had finished swearing quite
openly at him for a confounded chatterer, and then went on:

"A fellow doesn't go to a counting-house in business hours for a
chat about the weather, two days running. Then why? To close his
account with them one day, and to get his money out the next!
Clear, what?"

Ricardo, with his trick of looking one way and moving another
approached Schomberg slowly.

"To get his money?" he purred.

"Gewiss," snapped Schomberg with impatient superiority. "What else?
That is, only the money he had with the Tesmans. What he has buried
or put away on the island, devil only knows. When you think of the
lot of hard cash that passed through that man's hands, for wages and
stores and all that--and he's just a cunning thief, I tell you."
Ricardo's hard stare discomposed the hotel-keeper, and he added in
an embarrassed tone: "I mean a common, sneaking thief--no account
at all. And he calls himself a Swedish baron, too! Tfui!"

"He's a baron, is he? That foreign nobility ain't much," commented
Mr. Ricardo seriously. "And then what? He hung about here!"

"Yes, he hung about," said Schomberg, making a wry mouth. "He--hung
about. That's it. Hung--"

His voice died out. Curiosity was depicted in Ricardo's
countenance.

"Just like that; for nothing? And then turned about and went back
to that island again?"

"And went back to that island again," Schomberg echoed lifelessly,
fixing his gaze on the floor.

"What's the matter with you?" asked Ricardo with genuine surprise.
"What is it?"

Schomberg, without looking up, made an impatient gesture. His face
was crimson, and he kept it lowered. Ricardo went back to the
point.

"Well, but how do you account for it? What was his reason? What
did he go back to the island for?"

"Honeymoon!" spat out Schomberg viciously.

Perfectly still, his eyes downcast, he suddenly, with no preliminary
stir, hit the table with his fist a blow which caused the utterly
unprepared Ricardo to leap aside. And only then did Schomberg look
up with a dull, resentful expression.

Ricardo stared hard for a moment, spun on his heel, walked to the
end of the room, came back smartly, and muttered a profound "Ay!
Ay!" above Schomberg's rigid head. That the hotel-keeper was
capable of a great moral effort was proved by a gradual return of
his severe, Lieutenant-of-the-Reserve manner.

"Ay, ay!" repeated Ricardo more deliberately than before, and as if
after a further survey of the circumstances, "I wish I hadn't asked
you, or that you had told me a lie. It don't suit me to know that
there's a woman mixed up in this affair. What's she like? It's the
girl you--"

"Leave off!" muttered Schomberg, utterly pitiful behind his stiff
military front.

"Ay, ay!" Ricardo ejaculated for the third time, more and more
enlightened and perplexed. "Can't bear to talk about it--so bad as
that? And yet I would bet she isn't a miracle to look at."

Schomberg made a gesture as if he didn't know, as if he didn't care.
Then he squared his shoulders and frowned at vacancy.

"Swedish baron--h'm!" Ricardo continued meditatively. "I believe
the governor would think that business worth looking up, quite, if I
put it to him properly. The governor likes a duel, if you will call
it so; but I don't know a man that can stand up to him on the
square. Have you ever seen a cat play with a mouse? It's a pretty
sight!"

Ricardo, with his voluptuously gleaming eyes and the coy expression,
looked so much like a cat that Schomberg would have felt all the
alarm of a mouse if other feelings had not had complete possession
of his breast.

"There are no lies between you and me," he said, more steadily than
he thought he could speak.

"What's the good now? He funks women. In that Mexican pueblo where
we lay grounded on our beef-bones, so to speak, I used to go to
dances of an evening. The girls there would ask me if the English
caballero in the posada was a monk in disguise, or if he had taken a
vow to the sancissima madre not to speak to a woman, or whether--You
can imagine what fairly free-spoken girls will ask when they come to
the point of not caring what they say; and it used to vex me. Yes,
the governor funks facing women."

"One woman?" interjected Schomberg in guttural tones.

"One may be more awkward to deal with than two, or two hundred, for
that matter. In a place that's full of women you needn't look at
them unless you like; but if you go into a room where there is only
one woman, young or old, pretty or ugly, you have got to face her.
And, unless you are after her, then--the governor is right enough--
she's in the way."

"Why notice them?" muttered Schomberg. "What can they do?"

"Make a noise, if nothing else," opined Mr. Ricardo curtly, with the
distaste of a man whose path is a path of silence; for indeed,
nothing is more odious than a noise when one is engaged in a weighty
and absorbing card game. "Noise, noise, my friend," he went on
forcibly; "confounded screeching about something or other, and I
like it no more than the governor does. But with the governor
there's something else besides. He can't stand them at all."

He paused to reflect on this psychological phenomenon, and as no
philosopher was at hand to tell him that there is no strong
sentiment without some terror, as there is no real religion without
a little fetishism, he emitted his own conclusion, which surely
could not go to the root of the matter.

"I'm hanged if I don't think they are to him what liquor is to me.
Brandy--pah!"

He made a disgusted face, and produced a genuine shudder. Schomberg
listened to him in wonder. It looked as if the very scoundrelism,
of that--that Swede would protect him; the spoil of his iniquity
standing between the thief and the retribution.

"That's so, old buck." Ricardo broke the silence after
contemplating Schomberg's mute dejection with a sort of sympathy.
"I don't think this trick will work."

"But that's silly," whispered the man deprived of the vengeance
which he had seemed already to hold in his hand, by a mysterious and
exasperating idiosyncrasy.

"Don't you set yourself to judge a gentleman." Ricardo without
anger administered a moody rebuke. "Even I can't understand the
governor thoroughly. And I am an Englishman and his follower. No,
I don't think I care to put it before him, sick as I am of staying
here."

Ricardo could not be more sick of staying than Schomberg was of
seeing him stay. Schomberg believed so firmly in the reality of
Heyst as created by his own power of false inferences, of his hate,
of his love of scandal, that he could not contain a stifled cry of
conviction as sincere as most of our convictions, the disguised
servants of our passions, can appear at a supreme moment.

"It would have been like going to pick up a nugget of a thousand
pounds, or two or three times as much, for all I know. No trouble,
no--"

"The petticoat's the trouble," Ricardo struck in.

He had resumed his noiseless, feline, oblique prowling, in which an
observer would have detected a new character of excitement, such as
a wild animal of the cat species, anxious to make a spring, might
betray. Schomberg saw nothing. It would probably have cheered his
drooping spirits; but in a general way he preferred not to look at
Ricardo. Ricardo, however, with one of his slanting, gliding,
restless glances, observed the bitter smile on Schomberg's bearded
lips--the unmistakable smile of ruined hopes.

"You are a pretty unforgiving sort of chap," he said, stopping for a
moment with an air of interest. "Hang me if I ever saw anybody look
so disappointed! I bet you would send black plague to that island
if you only knew how--eh, what? Plague too good for them? Ha, ha,
ha!"

He bent down to stare at Schomberg who sat unstirring with stony
eyes and set features, and apparently deaf to the rasping derision
of that laughter so close to his red fleshy ear.

"Black plague too good for them, ha, ha!" Ricardo pressed the point
on the tormented hotel-keeper. Schomberg kept his eyes down
obstinately.

"I don't wish any harm to the girl--" he muttered.

"But did she bolt from you? A fair bilk? Come!"

"Devil only knows what that villainous Swede had done to her--what
he promised her, how he frightened her. She couldn't have cared for
him, I know." Schomberg's vanity clung to the belief in some
atrocious, extraordinary means of seduction employed by Heyst.
"Look how he bewitched that poor Morrison," he murmured.

"Ah, Morrison--got all his money, what?"

"Yes--and his life."

"Terrible fellow, that Swedish baron! How is one to get at him?"

Schomberg exploded.

"Three against one! Are you shy? Do you want me to give you a
letter of introduction?"

"You ought to look at yourself in a glass," Ricardo said quietly.
"Dash me if you don't get a stroke of some kind presently. And this
is the fellow who says women can do nothing! That one will do for
you, unless you manage to forget her."

"I wish I could," Schomberg admitted earnestly. "And it's all the
doing of that Swede. I don't get enough sleep, Mr. Ricardo. And
then, to finish me off, you gentlemen turn up . . . as if I hadn't
enough worry."

"That's done you good," suggested the secretary with ironic
seriousness. "Takes your mind off that silly trouble. At your age
too."

He checked himself, as if in pity, and changing his tone:

"I would really like to oblige you while doing a stroke of business
at the same time."

"A good stroke," insisted Schomberg, as if it were mechanically. In
his simplicity he was not able to give up the idea which had entered
his head. An idea must be driven out by another idea, and with
Schomberg ideas were rare and therefore tenacious. "Minted gold,"
he murmured with a sort of anguish.

Such an expressive combination of words was not without effect upon
Ricardo. Both these men were amenable to the influence of verbal
suggestions. The secretary of "plain Mr. Jones" sighed and
murmured.

"Yes. But how is one to get at it?"

"Being three to one," said Schomberg, "I suppose you could get it
for the asking."

"One would think the fellow lived next door," Ricardo growled
impatiently. "Hang it all, can't you understand a plain question?
I have asked you the way."

Schomberg seemed to revive.

"The way?"

The torpor of deceived hopes underlying his superficial changes of
mood had been pricked by these words which seemed pointed with
purpose.

"The way is over the water, of course," said the hotel-keeper. "For
people like you, three days in a good, big boat is nothing. It's no
more than a little outing, a bit of a change. At this season the
Java Sea is a pond. I have an excellent, safe boat--a ship's life-
boat--carry thirty, let alone three, and a child could handle her.
You wouldn't get a wet face at this time of the year. You might
call it a pleasure-trip."

"And yet, having this boat, you didn't go after her yourself--or
after him? Well, you are a fine fellow for a disappointed lover."

Schomberg gave a start at the suggestion.

"I am not three men," he said sulkily, as the shortest answer of the
several he could have given.

"Oh, I know your sort," Ricardo let fall negligently. "You are like
most people--or perhaps just a little more peaceable than the rest
of the buying and selling gang that bosses this rotten show. Well,
well, you respectable citizen," he went on, "let us go thoroughly
into the matter."

When Schomberg had been made to understand that Mr. Jones's henchman
was ready to discuss, in his own words, "this boat of yours, with
courses and distances," and such concrete matters of no good augury
to that villainous Swede, he recovered his soldierly bearing,
squared his shoulders, and asked in his military manner:

"You wish, then, to proceed with the business?"

Ricardo nodded. He had a great mind to, he said. A gentleman had
to be humoured as much as possible; but he must be managed, too, on
occasions, for his own good. And it was the business of the right
sort of "follower" to know the proper time and the proper methods of
that delicate part of his duty. Having exposed this theory Ricardo
proceeded to the application.

"I've never actually lied to him," he said, "and I ain't going to
now. I shall just say nothing about the girl. He will have to get
over the shock the best he can. Hang it all! Too much humouring
won't do here."

"Funny thing," Schomberg observed crisply.

"Is it? Ay, you wouldn't mind taking a woman by the throat in some
dark corner and nobody by, I bet!"

Ricardo's dreadful, vicious, cat-like readiness to get his claws out
at any moment startled Schomberg as usual. But it was provoking
too.

"And you?" he defended himself. "Don't you want me to believe you
are up to anything?"

"I, my boy? Oh, yes. I am not that gentleman; neither are you.
Take 'em by the throat or chuck 'em under the chin is all one to me-
-almost," affirmed Ricardo, with something obscurely ironical in his
complacency. "Now, as to this business. A three days' jaunt in a
good boat isn't a thing to frighten people like us. You are right,
so far; but there are other details."

Schomberg was ready enough to enter into details. He explained that
he had a small plantation, with a fairly habitable hut on it, on
Madura. He proposed that his guest should start from town in his
boat, as if going for an excursion to that rural spot. The custom-
house people on the quay were used to see his boat go off on such
trips.

From Madura, after some repose and on a convenient day, Mr. Jones
and party would make the real start. It would all be plain sailing.
Schomberg undertook to provision the boat. The greatest hardship
the voyagers need apprehend would be a mild shower of rain. At that
season of the year there were no serious thunderstorms.

Schomberg's heart began to thump as he saw himself nearing his
vengeance. His speech was thick but persuasive.

"No risk at all--none whatever."

Ricardo dismissed these assurances of safety with an impatient
gesture. He was thinking of other risks.

"The getting away from here is all right; but we may be sighted at
sea, and that may bring awkwardness later on. A ship's boat with
three white men in her, knocking about out of sight of land, is
bound to make talk. Are we likely to be seen on our way?"

"No, unless by native craft," said Schomberg.

Ricardo nodded, satisfied. Both these white men looked on native
life as a mere play of shadows. A play of shadows the dominant race
could walk through unaffected and disregarded in the pursuit of its
incomprehensible aims and needs. No. Native craft did not count,
of course. It was an empty, solitary part of the sea, Schomberg
expounded further. Only the Ternate mail-boat crossed that region
about the eighth of every month, regularly--nowhere near the island
though. Rigid, his voice hoarse, his heart thumping, his mind
concentrated on the success of his plan, the hotel-keeper multiplied
words, as if to keep as many of them as possible between himself and
the murderous aspect of his purpose.

"So, if you gentlemen depart from my plantation quietly at sunset on
the eighth--always best to make a start at night, with a land
breeze--it's a hundred to one--What am I saying?--it's a thousand to
one that no human eye will see you on the passage. All you've got
to do is keep her heading north-east for, say, fifty hours; perhaps
not quite so long. There will always be draft enough to keep a boat
moving; you may reckon on that; and then--"

The muscles about his waist quivered under his clothes with
eagerness, with impatience, and with something like apprehension,
the true nature of which was not clear to him. And he did not want
to investigate it. Ricardo regarded him steadily, with those dry
eyes of his shining more like polished stones than living tissue.

"And then what?" he asked.

"And then--why, you will astonish der herr baron--ha, ha!"

Schomberg seemed to force the words and the laugh out of himself in
a hoarse bass.

"And you believe he has all that plunder by him?" asked Ricardo,
rather perfunctorily, because the fact seemed to him extremely
probable when looked at all round by his acute mind.

Schomberg raised his hands and lowered them slowly.

"How can it be otherwise? He was going home, he was on his way, in
this hotel. Ask people. Was it likely he would leave it behind
him?"

Ricardo was thoughtful. Then, suddenly raising his head, he
remarked:

"Steer north-east for fifty hours, eh? That's not much of a sailing
direction. I've heard of a port being missed before on better
information. Can't you say what sort of landfall a fellow may
expect? But I suppose you have never seen that island yourself?"

Schomberg admitted that he had not seen it, in a tone in which a man
congratulates himself on having escaped the contamination of an
unsavoury experience. No, certainly not. He had never had any
business to call there. But what of that? He could give Mr.
Ricardo as good a sea-mark as anybody need wish for. He laughed
nervously. Miss it! He defied anyone that came within forty miles
of it to miss the retreat of that villainous Swede.

"What do you think of a pillar of smoke by day and a loom of fire at
night? There's a volcano in full blast near that island--enough to
guide almost a blind man. What more do you want? An active volcano
to steer by?"

These last words he roared out exultingly, then jumped up and
glared. The door to the left of the bar had swung open, and Mrs.
Schomberg, dressed for duty, stood facing him down the whole length
of the room. She clung to the handle for a moment, then came in and
glided to her place, where she sat down to stare straight before
her, as usual.

PART THREE

CHAPTER ONE

Tropical nature had been kind to the failure of the commercial
enterprise. The desolation of the headquarters of the Tropical Belt
Coal Company had been screened from the side of the sea; from the
side where prying eyes--if any were sufficiently interested, either
in malice or in sorrow--could have noted the decaying bones of that
once sanguine enterprise.

Heyst had been sitting among the bones buried so kindly in the grass
of two wet seasons' growth. The silence of his surroundings, broken
only by such sounds as a distant roll of thunder, the lash of rain
through the foliage of some big trees, the noise of the wind tossing
the leaves of the forest, and of the short seas breaking against the
shore, favoured rather than hindered his solitary meditation.

A meditation is always--in a white man, at least--more or less an
interrogative exercise. Heyst meditated in simple terms on the
mystery of his actions; and he answered himself with the honest
reflection:

"There must be a lot of the original Adam in me, after all."

He reflected, too, with the sense of making a discovery, that his
primeval ancestor is not easily suppressed. The oldest voice in the
world is just the one that never ceases to speak. If anybody could
have silenced its imperative echoes, it should have been Heyst's
father, with his contemptuous, inflexible negation of all effort;
but apparently he could not. There was in the son a lot of that
first ancestor who, as soon as he could uplift his muddy frame from
the celestial mould, started inspecting and naming the animals of
that paradise which he was so soon to lose.

Action--the first thought, or perhaps the first impulse, on earth!
The barbed hook, baited with the illusions of progress, to bring out
of the lightless void the shoals of unnumbered generations!

"And I, the son of my father, have been caught too, like the
silliest fish of them all." Heyst said to himself.

He suffered. He was hurt by the sight of his own life, which ought
to have been a masterpiece of aloofness. He remembered always his
last evening with his father. He remembered the thin features, the
great mass of white hair, and the ivory complexion. A five-branched
candlestick stood on a little table by the side of the easy chair.
They had been talking a long time. The noises of the street had
died out one by one, till at last, in the moonlight, the London
houses began to look like the tombs of an unvisited, unhonoured,
cemetery of hopes.

He had listened. Then, after a silence, he had asked--for he was
really young then:

"Is there no guidance?"

His father was in an unexpectedly soft mood on that night, when the
moon swam in a cloudless sky over the begrimed shadows of the town.

"You still believe in something, then?" he said in a clear voice,
which had been growing feeble of late. "You believe in flesh and
blood, perhaps? A full and equable contempt would soon do away with
that, too. But since you have not attained to it, I advise you to
cultivate that form of contempt which is called pity. It is perhaps
the least difficult--always remembering that you, too, if you are
anything, are as pitiful as the rest, yet never expecting any pity
for yourself."

"What is one to do, then?" sighed the young man, regarding his
father, rigid in the high-backed chair.

"Look on--make no sound," were the last words of the man who had
spent his life in blowing blasts upon a terrible trumpet which
filled heaven and earth with ruins, while mankind went on its way
unheeding.

That very night he died in his bed, so quietly that they found him
in his usual attitude of sleep, lying on his side, one hand under
his cheek, and his knees slightly bent. He had not even
straightened his legs.

His son buried the silenced destroyer of systems, of hopes, of
beliefs. He observed that the death of that bitter contemner of
life did not trouble the flow of life's stream, where men and women
go by thick as dust, revolving and jostling one another like figures
cut out of cork and weighted with lead just sufficiently to keep
them in their proudly upright posture.

After the funeral, Heyst sat alone, in the dusk, and his meditation
took the form of a definite vision of the stream, of the fatuously
jostling, nodding, spinning figures hurried irresistibly along, and
giving no sign of being aware that the voice on the bank had been
suddenly silenced . . . Yes. A few obituary notices generally
insignificant and some grossly abusive. The son had read them all
with mournful detachment.

"This is the hate and rage of their fear," he thought to himself,
"and also of wounded vanity. They shriek their little shriek as
they fly past. I suppose I ought to hate him too . . . "

He became aware of his eyes being wet. It was not that the man was
his father. For him it was purely a matter of hearsay which could
not in itself cause this emotion. No! It was because he had looked
at him so long that he missed him so much. The dead man had kept
him on the bank by his side. And now Heyst felt acutely that he was
alone on the bank of the stream. In his pride he determined not to
enter it.

A few slow tears rolled down his face. The rooms, filling with
shadows, seemed haunted by a melancholy, uneasy presence which could
not express itself. The young man got up with a strange sense of
making way for something impalpable that claimed possession, went
out of the house, and locked the door. A fortnight later he started
on his travels--to "look on and never make a sound."

The elder Heyst had left behind him a little money and a certain
quantity of movable objects, such as books, tables, chairs, and
pictures, which might have complained of heartless desertion after
many years of faithful service; for there is a soul in things.
Heyst, our Heyst, had often thought of them, reproachful and mute,
shrouded and locked up in those rooms, far away in London with the
sounds of the street reaching them faintly, and sometimes a little
sunshine, when the blinds were pulled up and the windows opened from
time to time in pursuance of his original instructions and later
reminders. It seemed as if in his conception of a world not worth
touching, and perhaps not substantial enough to grasp, these objects
familiar to his childhood and his youth, and associated with the
memory of an old man, were the only realities, something having an
absolute existence. He would never have them sold, or even moved
from the places they occupied when he looked upon them last. When
he was advised from London that his lease had expired, and that the
house, with some others as like it as two peas, was to be
demolished, he was surprisingly distressed.

He had entered by then the broad, human path of inconsistencies.
Already the Tropical Belt Coal Company was in existence. He sent
instructions to have some of the things sent out to him at Samburan,
just as any ordinary, credulous person would have done. They came,
torn out from their long repose--a lot of books, some chairs and
tables, his father's portrait in oils, which surprised Heyst by its
air of youth, because he remembered his father as a much older man;
a lot of small objects, such as candlesticks, inkstands, and
statuettes from his father's study, which surprised him because they
looked so old and so much worn.

The manager of the Tropical Belt Coal Company, unpacking them on the
veranda in the shade besieged by a fierce sunshine, must have felt
like a remorseful apostate before these relics. He handled them
tenderly; and it was perhaps their presence there which attached him
to the island when he woke up to the failure of his apostasy.
Whatever the decisive reason, Heyst had remained where another would
have been glad to be off. The excellent Davidson had discovered the
fact without discovering the reason, and took a humane interest in
Heyst's strange existence, while at the same time his native
delicacy kept him from intruding on the other's whim of solitude.
He could not possibly guess that Heyst, alone on the island, felt
neither more nor less lonely than in any other place, desert or
populous. Davidson's concern was, if one may express it so, the
danger of spiritual starvation; but this was a spirit which had
renounced all outside nourishment, and was sustaining itself proudly
on its own contempt of the usual coarse ailments which life offers
to the common appetites of men.

Neither was Heyst's body in danger of starvation, as Schomberg had
so confidently asserted. At the beginning of the company's
operations the island had been provisioned in a manner which had
outlasted the need. Heyst did not need to fear hunger; and his very
loneliness had not been without some alleviation. Of the crowd of
imported Chinese labourers, one at least had remained in Samburan,
solitary and strange, like a swallow left behind at the migrating
season of his tribe.

Wang was not a common coolie. He had been a servant to white men
before. The agreement between him and Heyst consisted in the
exchange of a few words on the day when the last batch of the mine
coolies was leaving Samburan. Heyst, leaning over the balustrade of
the veranda, was looking on, as calm in appearance as though he had
never departed from the doctrine that this world, for the wise, is
nothing but an amusing spectacle. Wang came round the house, and
standing below, raised up his yellow, thin face.

"All finished?" he asked. Heyst nodded slightly from above,
glancing towards the jetty. A crowd of blue-clad figures with
yellow faces and calves was being hustled down into the boats of the
chartered steamer lying well out, like a painted ship on a painted
sea; painted in crude colours, without shadows, without feeling,
with brutal precision.

"You had better hurry up if you don't want to be left behind."

But the Chinaman did not move.

"We stop," he declared. Heyst looked down at him for the first
time.

"You want to stop here?"

"Yes."

"What were you? What was your work here?"

"Mess-loom boy."

"Do you want to stay with me here as my boy?" inquired Heyst,
surprised.

The Chinaman unexpectedly put on a deprecatory expression, and said,
after a marked pause:

"Can do."

"You needn't," said Heyst, "unless you like. I propose to stay on
here--it may be for a very long time. I have no power to make you
go if you wish to remain, but I don't see why you should."

"Catchee one piecee wife," remarked Wang unemotionally, and marched
off, turning his back on the wharf and the great world beyond,
represented by the steamer waiting for her boats.

Heyst learned presently that Wang had persuaded one of the women of
Alfuro village, on the west shore of the island, beyond the central
ridge, to come over to live with him in a remote part of the
company's clearing. It was a curious case, inasmuch as the Alfuros,
having been frightened by the sudden invasion of Chinamen, had
blocked the path over the ridge by felling a few trees, and had kept
strictly on their own side. The coolies, as a body, mistrusting the
manifest mildness of these harmless fisher-folk, had kept to their
lines, without attempting to cross the island. Wang was the
brilliant exception. He must have been uncommonly fascinating, in a
way that was not apparent to Heyst, or else uncommonly persuasive.
The woman's services to Heyst were limited to the fact that she had
anchored Wang to the spot by her charms, which remained unknown to
the white man, because she never came near the houses. The couple
lived at the edge of the forest, and she could sometimes be seen
gazing towards the bungalow shading her eyes with her hand. Even
from a distance she appeared to be a shy, wild creature, and Heyst,
anxious not to try her primitive nerves unduly, scrupulously avoided
that side of the clearing in his strolls.

The day--or rather the first night--after his hermit life began, he
was aware of vague sounds of revelry in that direction. Emboldened
by the departure of the invading strangers, some Alfuros, the
woman's friends and relations, had ventured over the ridge to attend
something in the nature of a wedding feast. Wang had invited them.
But this was the only occasion when any sound louder than the
buzzing of insects had troubled the profound silence of the
clearing. The natives were never invited again. Wang not, only
knew how to live according to conventional proprieties, but had
strong personal views as to the manner of arranging his domestic
existence. After a time Heyst perceived that Wang had annexed all
the keys. Any keys left lying about vanished after Wang had passed
that way. Subsequently some of them--those that did not belong to
the store-rooms and the empty bungalows, and could not be regarded
as the common property of this community of two--were returned to
Heyst, tied in a bunch with a piece of string. He found them one
morning lying by the side of his plate. He had not been
inconvenienced by their absence, because he never locked up anything
in the way of drawers and boxes. Heyst said nothing. Wang also
said nothing. Perhaps he had always been a taciturn man; perhaps he
was influenced by the genius of the locality, which was certainly
that of silence. Till Heyst and Morrison had landed in Black
Diamond Bay, and named it, that side of Samburan had hardly ever
heard the sound of human speech. It was easy to be taciturn with
Heyst, who had plunged himself into an abyss of meditation over
books, and remained in it till the shadow of Wang falling across the
page, and the sound of a rough, low voice uttering the Malay word
"makan," would force him to climb out to a meal.

Wang in his native province in China might have been an
aggressively, sensitively genial person; but in Samburan he had
clothed himself in a mysterious stolidity and did not seem to resent
not being spoken to except in single words, at a rate which did not
average half a dozen per day. And he gave no more than he got. It
is to be presumed that if he suffered he made up for it with the
Alfuro woman. He always went back to her at the first fall of dusk,
vanishing from the bungalow suddenly at this hour, like a sort of
topsy-turvy, day-hunting, Chinese ghost with a white jacket and a
pigtail. Presently, giving way to a Chinaman's ruling passion, he
could be observed breaking the ground near his hut, between the
mighty stumps of felled trees, with a miner's pickaxe. After a
time, he discovered a rusty but serviceable spade in one of the
empty store-rooms, and it is to be supposed that he got on famously;
but nothing of it could be seen, because he went to the trouble of
pulling to pieces one of the company's sheds in order to get
materials for making a high and very close fence round his patch, as
if the growing of vegetables were a patented process, or an awful
and holy mystery entrusted to the keeping of his race.

Heyst, following from a distance the progress of Wang's gardening
and of these precautions--there was nothing else to look at--was
amused at the thought that he, in his own person, represented the
market for its produce. The Chinaman had found several packets of
seeds in the store-rooms, and had surrendered to an irresistible
impulse to put them into the ground. He would make his master pay
for the vegetables which he was raising to satisfy his instinct.
And, looking silently at the silent Wang going about his work in the
bungalow in his unhasty, steady way; Heyst envied the Chinaman's
obedience to his instincts, the powerful simplicity of purpose which
made his existence appear almost automatic in the mysterious
precision of its facts.

CHAPTER TWO

During his master's absence at Sourabaya, Wang had busied himself
with the ground immediately in front of the principal bungalow.
Emerging from the fringe of grass growing across the shore end of
the coal-jetty, Heyst beheld a broad, clear space, black and level,
with only one or two clumps of charred twigs, where the flame had
swept from the front of his house to the nearest trees of the
forest.

"You took the risk of firing the grass?" Heyst asked.

Wang nodded. Hanging on the arm of the white man before whom he
stood was the girl called Alma; but neither from the Chinaman's eyes
nor from his expression could anyone have guessed that he was in the
slightest degree aware of the fact.

"He has been tidying the place in his labour-saving way," explained
Heyst, without looking at the girl, whose hand rested on his
forearm. "He's the whole establishment, you see. I told you I
hadn't even a dog to keep me company here."

Wang had marched off towards the wharf.

"He's like those waiters in that place," she said. That place was
Schomberg's hotel.

"One Chinaman looks very much like another," Heyst remarked. "We
shall find it useful to have him here. This is the house."

They faced, at some distance, the six shallow steps leading up to
the veranda. The girl had abandoned Heyst's arm.

"This is the house," he repeated.

She did not offer to budge away from his side, but stood staring
fixedly at the steps, as if they had been something unique and
impracticable. He waited a little, but she did not move.

"Don't you want to go in?" he asked, without turning his head to
look at her. "The sun's too heavy to stand about here." He tried
to overcome a sort of fear, a sort of impatient faintness, and his
voice sounded rough. "You had better go in," he concluded.

They both moved then, but at the foot of the stairs Heyst stopped,
while the girl went on rapidly, as if nothing could stop her now.
She crossed the veranda swiftly, and entered the twilight of the big
central room opening upon it, and then the deeper twilight of the
room beyond. She stood still in the dusk, in which her dazzled eyes
could scarcely make out the forms of objects, and sighed a sigh of
relief. The impression of the sunlight, of sea and sky, remained
with her like a memory of a painful trial gone through--done with at
last!

Meanwhile Heyst had walked back slowly towards the jetty; but he did
not get so far as that. The practical and automatic Wang had got
hold of one of the little trucks that had been used for running
baskets of coal alongside ships. He appeared pushing it before him,
loaded lightly with Heyst's bag and the bundle of the girl's
belongings, wrapped in Mrs. Schomberg's shawl. Heyst turned about
and walked by the side of the rusty rails on which the truck ran.
Opposite the house Wang stopped, lifted the bag to his shoulder,
balanced it carefully, and then took the bundle in his hand.

"Leave those things on the table in the big room--understand?"

"Me savee," grunted Wang, moving off.

Heyst watched the Chinaman disappear from the veranda. It was not
till he had seen Wang come out that he himself entered the twilight
of the big room. By that time Wang was out of sight at the back of
the house, but by no means out of hearing. The Chinaman could hear
the voice of him who, when there were many people there, was
generally referred to as "Number One." Wang was not able to
understand the words, but the tone interested him.

"Where are you?" cried Number One.

Then Wang heard, much more faint, a voice he had never heard before-
-a novel impression which he acknowledged by cocking his head
slightly to one side.

"I am here--out of the sun."

The new voice sounded remote and uncertain. Wang heard nothing
more, though he waited for some time, very still, the top of his
shaven poll exactly level with the floor of the back veranda. His
face meanwhile preserved an inscrutable immobility. Suddenly he
stooped to pick up the lid of a deal candle-box which was lying on
the ground by his foot. Breaking it up with his fingers, he
directed his steps towards the cook-shed, where, squatting on his
heels, he proceeded to kindle a small fire under a very sooty
kettle, possibly to make tea. Wang had some knowledge of the more
superficial rites and ceremonies of white men's existence, otherwise
so enigmatically remote to his mind, and containing unexpected
possibilities of good and evil, which had to be watched for with
prudence and care.

CHAPTER THREE

That morning, as on all the others of the full tale of mornings
since his return with the girl to Samburan, Heyst came out on the
veranda and spread his elbows on the railing, in an easy attitude of
proprietorship. The bulk of the central ridge of the island cut off
the bungalow from sunrises, whether glorious or cloudy, angry or
serene. The dwellers therein were debarred from reading early the
fortune of the new-born day. It sprang upon them in its fulness
with a swift retreat of the great shadow when the sun, clearing the
ridge, looked down, hot and dry, with a devouring glare like the eye
of an enemy. But Heyst, once the Number One of this locality, while
it was comparatively teeming with mankind, appreciated the
prolongation of early coolness, the subdued, lingering half-light,
the faint ghost of the departed night, the fragrance of its dewy,
dark soul captured for a moment longer between the great glow of the
sky and the intense blaze of the uncovered sea.

It was naturally difficult for Heyst to keep his mind from dwelling
on the nature and consequences of this, his latest departure from
the part of an unconcerned spectator. Yet he had retained enough of
his wrecked philosophy to prevent him from asking himself
consciously how it would end. But at the same time he could not
help being temperamentally, from long habit and from set purpose, a
spectator still, perhaps a little less naive but (as he discovered
with some surprise) not much more far sighted than the common run of
men. Like the rest of us who act, all he could say to himself, with
a somewhat affected grimness, was:

"We shall see!"

This mood of grim doubt intruded on him only when he was alone.
There were not many such moments in his day now; and he did not like
them when they came. On this morning he had no time to grow uneasy.
Alma came out to join him long before the sun, rising above the
Samburan ridge, swept the cool shadow of the early morning and the
remnant of the night's coolness clear off the roof under which they
had dwelt for more than three months already. She came out as on
other mornings. He had heard her light footsteps in the big room--
the room where he had unpacked the cases from London; the room now
lined with the backs of books halfway up on its three sides. Above
the cases the fine matting met the ceiling of tightly stretched
white calico. In the dusk and coolness nothing gleamed except the
gilt frame of the portrait of Heyst's father, signed by a famous
painter, lonely in the middle of a wall.

Heyst did not turn round.

"Do you know what I was thinking of?" he asked.

"No," she said. Her tone betrayed always a shade of anxiety, as
though she were never certain how a conversation with him would end.
She leaned on the guard-rail by his side.

"No," she repeated. "What was it?" She waited. Then, rather with
reluctance than shyness, she asked:

"Were you thinking of me?"

"I was wondering when you would come out," said Heyst, still without
looking at the girl--to whom, after several experimental essays in
combining detached letters and loose syllables, he had given the
name of Lena.

She remarked after a pause:

"I was not very far from you."

"Apparently you were not near enough for me."

"You could have called if you wanted me," she said. "And I wasn't
so long doing my hair."

"Apparently it was too long for me."

"Well, you were thinking of me, anyhow. I am glad of it. Do you
know, it seems to me, somehow, that if you were to stop thinking of
me I shouldn't be in the world at all!"

He turned round and looked at her. She often said things which
surprised him. A vague smile faded away on her lips before his
scrutiny.

"What is it?" he asked. "It is a reproach?"

"A reproach! Why, how could it be?" she defended herself.

"Well, what did it mean?" he insisted.

"What I said--just what I said. Why aren't you fair?"

"Ah, this is at least a reproach!"

She coloured to the roots of her hair.

"It looks as if you were trying to make out that I am disagreeable,"
she murmured. "Am I? You will make me afraid to open my mouth
presently. I shall end by believing I am no good."

Her head drooped a little. He looked at her smooth, low brow, the
faintly coloured checks, and the red lips parted slightly, with the
gleam of her teeth within.

"And then I won't be any good," she added with conviction. "That I
won't! I can only be what you think I am."

He made a slight movement. She put her hand on his arm, without
raising her head, and went on, her voice animated in the stillness
of her body:

"It is so. It couldn't be any other way with a girl like me and a
man like you. Here we are, we two alone, and I can't even tell
where we are."

"A very well-known spot of the globe," Heyst uttered gently. "There
must have been at least fifty thousand circulars issued at the time-
-a hundred and fifty thousand, more likely. My friend was looking
after that, and his ideas were large and his belief very strong. Of
us two it was he who had the faith. A hundred and fifty thousand,
certainly."

"What is it you mean?" she asked in a low tone.

"What should I find fault with you for?" Heyst went on. "For being
amiable, good, gracious--and pretty?"

A silence fell. Then she said:

"It's all right that you should think that of me. There's no one
here to think anything of us, good or bad."

The rare timbre of her voice gave a special value to what she
uttered. The indefinable emotion which certain intonations gave
him, he was aware, was more physical than moral. Every time she
spoke to him she seemed to abandon to him something of herself--
something excessively subtle and inexpressible, to which he was
infinitely sensible, which he would have missed horribly if she were
to go away. While he was looking into her eyes she raised her bare
forearm, out of the short sleeve, and held it in the air till he
noticed it and hastened to pose his great bronze moustaches on the
whiteness of the skin. Then they went in.

Wang immediately appeared in front, and, squatting on his heels,
began to potter mysteriously about some plants at the foot of the
veranda. When Heyst and the girl came out again, the Chinaman had
gone in his peculiar manner, which suggested vanishing out of
existence rather than out of sight, a process of evaporation rather
than of movement. They descended the steps, looking at each other,
and started off smartly across the cleared ground; but they were not
ten yards away when, without perceptible stir or sound, Wang
materialized inside the empty room. The Chinaman stood still with
roaming eyes, examining the walls as if for signs, for inscriptions;
exploring the floor as if for pitfalls, for dropped coins. Then he
cocked his head slightly at the profile of Heyst's father, pen in
hand above a white sheet of paper on a crimson tablecloth; and,
moving forward noiselessly, began to clear away the breakfast
things.

Though he proceeded without haste, the unerring precision of his
movements, the absolute soundlessness of the operation, gave it
something of the quality of a conjuring trick. And, the trick
having been performed, Wang vanished from the scene, to materialize
presently in front of the house. He materialized walking away from
it, with no visible or guessable intention; but at the end of some
ten paces he stopped, made a half turn, and put his hand up to shade
his eyes. The sun had topped the grey ridge of Samburan. The great
morning shadow was gone; and far away in the devouring sunshine Wang
was in time to see Number One and the woman, two remote white specks
against the sombre line of the forest. In a moment they vanished.
With the smallest display of action, Wang also vanished from the
sunlight of the clearing.

Heyst and Lena entered the shade of the forest path which crossed
the island, and which, near its highest point had been blocked by
felled trees. But their intention was not to go so far. After
keeping to the path for some distance, they left it at a point where
the forest was bare of undergrowth, and the trees, festooned with
creepers, stood clear of one another in the gloom of their own
making. Here and there great splashes of light lay on the ground.
They moved, silent in the great stillness, breathing the calmness,
the infinite isolation, the repose of a slumber without dreams.
They emerged at the upper limit of vegetation, among some rocks; and
in a depression of the sharp slope, like a small platform, they
turned about and looked from on high over the sea, lonely, its
colour effaced by sunshine, its horizon a heat mist, a mere
unsubstantial shimmer in the pale and blinding infinity overhung by
the darker blaze of the sky.

"It makes my head swim," the girl murmured, shutting her eyes and
putting her hand on his shoulder.

Heyst, gazing fixedly to the southward, exclaimed:

"Sail ho!"

A moment of silence ensued.

"It must be very far away," he went on. "I don't think you could
see it. Some native craft making for the Moluccas, probably. Come,
we mustn't stay here."

With his arm round her waist, he led her down a little distance, and
they settled themselves in the shade; she, seated on the ground, he
a little lower, reclining at her feet.

"You don't like to look at the sea from up there?" he said after a
time.

She shook her head. That empty space was to her the abomination of
desolation. But she only said again:

"It makes my head swim."

"Too big?" he inquired.

"Too lonely. It makes my heart sink, too," she added in a low
voice, as if confessing a secret.

"I'm am afraid," said Heyst, "that you would be justified in
reproaching me for these sensations. But what would you have?"

His tone was playful, but his eyes, directed at her face, were
serious. She protested.

"I am not feeling lonely with you--not a bit. It is only when we
come up to that place, and I look at all that water and all that
light--"

"We will never come here again, then," he interrupted her.

She remained silent for a while, returning his gaze till he removed
it.

"It seems as if everything that there is had gone under," she said.

"Reminds you of the story of the deluge," muttered the man,
stretched at her feet and looking at them. "Are you frightened at
it?"

"I should be rather frightened to be left behind alone. When I say,
I, of course I mean we."

"Do you?" . . . Heyst remained silent for a while. "The vision of a
world destroyed," he mused aloud. "Would you be sorry for it?"

"I should be sorry for the happy people in it," she said simply.

His gaze travelled up her figure and reached her face, where he
seemed to detect the veiled glow of intelligence, as one gets a
glimpse of the sun through the clouds.

"I should have thought it's they specially who ought to have been
congratulated. Don't you?"

"Oh, yes--I understand what you mean; but there were forty days
before it was all over."

"You seem to be in possession of all the details."

Heyst spoke just to say something rather than to gaze at her in
silence. She was not looking at him.

"Sunday school," she murmured. "I went regularly from the time I
was eight till I was thirteen. We lodged in the north of London,
off Kingsland Road. It wasn't a bad time. Father was earning good
money then. The woman of the house used to pack me off in the
afternoon with her own girls. She was a good woman. Her husband
was in the post office. Sorter or something. Such a quiet man. He
used to go off after supper for night-duty, sometimes. Then one day
they had a row, and broke up the home. I remember I cried when we
had to pack up all of a sudden and go into other lodgings. I never
knew what it was, though--"

"The deluge," muttered Heyst absently.

He felt intensely aware of her personality, as if this were the
first moment of leisure he had found to look at her since they had
come together. The peculiar timbre of her voice, with its
modulations of audacity and sadness, would have given interest to
the most inane chatter. But she was no chatterer. She was rather
silent, with a capacity for immobility, an upright stillness, as
when resting on the concert platform between the musical numbers,
her feet crossed, her hands reposing on her lap. But in the
intimacy of their life her grey, unabashed gaze forced upon him the
sensation of something inexplicable reposing within her; stupidity
or inspiration, weakness or force--or simply an abysmal emptiness,
reserving itself even in the moments of complete surrender.

During a long pause she did not look at him. Then suddenly, as if
the word "deluge" had stuck in her mind, she asked, looking up at
the cloudless sky:

"Does it ever rain here?"

"There is a season when it rains almost every day," said Heyst,
surprised. "There are also thunderstorms. We once had a 'mud-
shower.'"

"Mud-shower?"

"Our neighbour there was shooting up ashes. He sometimes clears his
red-hot gullet like that; and a thunderstorm came along at the same
time. It was very messy; but our neighbour is generally well
behaved--just smokes quietly, as he did that day when I first showed
you the smudge in the sky from the schooner's deck. He's a good-
natured, lazy fellow of a volcano."

"I saw a mountain smoking like that before," she said, staring at
the slender stem of a tree-fern some dozen feet in front of her.
"It wasn't very long after we left England--some few days, though.
I was so ill at first that I lost count of days. A smoking
mountain--I can't think how they called it."

"Vesuvius, perhaps," suggested Heyst.

"That's the name."

"I saw it, too, years, ages ago," said Heyst.

"On your way here?"

"No, long before I ever thought of coming into this part of the
world. I was yet a boy."

She turned and looked at him attentively, as if seeking to discover
some trace of that boyhood in the mature face of the man with the
hair thin at the top and the long, thick moustaches. Heyst stood
the frank examination with a playful smile, hiding the profound
effect these veiled grey eyes produced--whether on his heart or on
his nerves, whether sensuous or spiritual, tender or irritating, he
was unable to say.

"Well, princess of Samburan," he said at last, "have I found favour
in your sight?"

She seemed to wake up, and shook her head.

"I was thinking," she murmured very low.

"Thought, action--so many snares! If you begin to think you will be
unhappy."

"I wasn't thinking of myself!" she declared with a simplicity which
took Heyst aback somewhat.

"On the lips of a moralist this would sound like a rebuke," he said,
half seriously; "but I won't suspect you of being one. Moralists
and I haven't been friends for many years."

She had listened with an air of attention.

"I understood you had no friends," she said. "I am pleased that
there's nobody to find fault with you for what you have done. I
like to think that I am in no one's way."

Heyst would have said something, but she did not give him time.
Unconscious of the movement he made she went on:

"What I was thinking to myself was, why are you here?"

Heyst let himself sink on his elbow again.

"If by 'you' you mean 'we'--well, you know why we are here."

She bent her gaze down at him.

"No, it isn't that. I meant before--all that time before you came
across me and guessed at once that I was in trouble, with no one to
turn to. And you know it was desperate trouble too."

Her voice fell on the last words, as if she would end there; but
there was something so expectant in Heyst's attitude as he sat at
her feet, looking up at her steadily, that she continued, after
drawing a short, quick breath:

"It was, really. I told you I had been worried before by bad
fellows. It made me unhappy, disturbed--angry, too. But oh, how I
hated, hated, HATED that man!"

"That man" was the florid Schomberg with the military bearing,
benefactor of white men ('decent food to eat in decent company')--
mature victim of belated passion. The girl shuddered. The
characteristic harmoniousness of her face became, as it were,
decomposed for an instant. Heyst was startled.

"Why think of it now?" he cried.

"It's because I was cornered that time. It wasn't as before. It
was worse, ever so much. I wished I could die of my fright--and yet
it's only now that I begin to understand what a horror it might have
been. Yes, only now, since we--"

Heyst stirred a little.

"Came here," he finished.

Her tenseness relaxed, her flushed face went gradually back to its
normal tint.

"Yes," she said indifferently, but at the same time she gave him a
stealthy glance of passionate appreciation; and then her face took
on a melancholy cast, her whole figure drooped imperceptibly.

"But you were coming back here anyhow?" she asked.

"Yes. I was only waiting for Davidson. Yes, I was coming back
here, to these ruins--to Wang, who perhaps did not expect to see me
again. It's impossible to guess at the way that Chinaman draws his
conclusions, and how he looks upon one."

"Don't talk about him. He makes me feel uncomfortable. Talk about
yourself!"

"About myself? I see you are still busy with the mystery of my
existence here; but it isn't at all mysterious. Primarily the man
with the quill pen in his hand in that picture you so often look at
is responsible for my existence. He is also responsible for what my
existence is, or rather has been. He was a great man in his way. I
don't know much of his history. I suppose he began like other
people; took fine words for good, ringing coin and noble ideals for
valuable banknotes. He was a great master of both, himself, by the
way. Later he discovered--how am I to explain it to you? Suppose
the world were a factory and all mankind workmen in it. Well, he
discovered that the wages were not good enough. That they were paid
in counterfeit money."

"I see!" the girl said slowly.

"Do you?"

Heyst, who had been speaking as if to himself, looked up curiously.

"It wasn't a new discovery, but he brought his capacity for scorn to
bear on it. It was immense. It ought to have withered this globe.
I don't know how many minds he convinced. But my mind was very
young then, and youth I suppose can be easily seduced--even by a
negation. He was very ruthless, and yet he was not without pity.
He dominated me without difficulty. A heartless man could not have
done so. Even to fools he was not utterly merciless. He could be
indignant, but he was too great for flouts and jeers. What he said
was not meant for the crowd; it could not be; and I was flattered to
find myself among the elect. They read his books, but I have heard
his living word. It was irresistible. It was as if that mind were
taking me into its confidence, giving me a special insight into its
mastery of despair. Mistake, no doubt. There is something of my
father in every man who lives long enough. But they don't say
anything. They can't. They wouldn't know how, or perhaps, they
wouldn't speak if they could. Man on this earth is an unforeseen
accident which does not stand close investigation. However, that
particular man died as quietly as a child goes to sleep. But, after
listening to him, I could not take my soul down into the street to
fight there. I started off to wander about, an independent
spectator--if that is possible."

For a long time the girl's grey eyes had been watching his face.
She discovered that, addressing her, he was really talking to
himself. Heyst looked up, caught sight of her as it were, and
caught himself up, with a low laugh and a change of tone.

"All this does not tell you why I ever came here. Why, indeed?
It's like prying into inscrutable mysteries which are not worth
scrutinizing. A man drifts. The most successful men have drifted
into their successes. I don't want to tell you that this is a
success. You wouldn't believe me if I did. It isn't; neither is it
the ruinous failure it looks. It proves nothing, unless perhaps
some hidden weakness in my character--and even that is not certain."

He looked fixedly at her, and with such grave eyes that she felt
obliged to smile faintly at him, since she did not understand what
he meant. Her smile was reflected, still fainter, on his lips.

"This does not advance you much in your inquiry," he went on. "And
in truth your question is unanswerable; but facts have a certain
positive value, and I will tell you a fact. One day I met a
cornered man. I use the word because it expresses the man's
situation exactly, and because you just used it yourself. You know
what that means?"

"What do you say?" she whispered, astounded. "A man!"

Heyst laughed at her wondering eyes.

"No! No! I mean in his own way."

"I knew very well it couldn't be anything like that," she observed
under her breath.

"I won't bother you with the story. It was a custom-house affair,
strange as it may sound to you. He would have preferred to be
killed outright--that is, to have his soul dispatched to another
world, rather than to be robbed of his substance, his very
insignificant substance, in this. I saw that he believed in another
world because, being cornered, as I have told you, he went down on
his knees and prayed. What do you think of that?"

Heyst paused. She looked at him earnestly.

"You didn't make fun of him for that?" she said.

Heyst made a brusque movement of protest

"My dear girl, I am not a ruffian," he cried. Then, returning to
his usual tone: "I didn't even have to conceal a smile. Somehow it
didn't look a smiling matter. No, it was not funny; it was rather
pathetic; he was so representative of an the past victims of the
Great Joke. But it is by folly alone that the world moves, and so
it is a respectable thing upon the whole. And besides, he was what
one would call a good man. I don't mean especially because he had
offered up a prayer. No! He was really a decent fellow, he was
quite unfitted for this world, he was a failure, a good man
cornered--a sight for the gods; for no decent mortal cares to look
at that sort." A thought seemed to occur to him. He turned his
face to the girl. "And you, who have been cornered too--did you
think of offering a prayer?"

Neither her eyes nor a single one of her features moved the least
bit. She only let fall the words:

"I am not what they call a good girl."

"That sounds evasive," said Heyst after a short silence. "Well, the
good fellow did pray and after he had confessed to it I was struck
by the comicality of the situation. No, don't misunderstand me--I
am not alluding to his act, of course. And even the idea of
Eternity, Infinity, Omnipotence, being called upon to defeat the
conspiracy of two miserable Portuguese half-castes did not move my
mirth. From the point of view of the supplicant, the danger to be
conjured was something like the end of the world, or worse. No!
What captivated my fancy was that I, Axel Heyst, the most detached
of creatures in this earthly captivity, the veriest tramp on this
earth, an indifferent stroller going through the world's bustle--
that I should have been there to step into the situation of an agent
of Providence. _I_, a man of universal scorn and unbelief . . . "

"You are putting it on," she interrupted in her seductive voice,
with a coaxing intonation.

"No. I am not like that, born or fashioned, or both. I am not for
nothing the son of my father, of that man in the painting. I am he,
all but the genius. And there is even less in me than I make out,
because the very scorn is falling away from me year after year. I
have never been so amused as by that episode in which I was suddenly
called to act such an incredible part. For a moment I enjoyed it
greatly. It got him out of his corner, you know."

"You saved a man for fun--is that what you mean? Just for fun?"

"Why this tone of suspicion?" remonstrated Heyst. "I suppose the
sight of this particular distress was disagreeable to me. What you
call fun came afterwards, when it dawned on me that I was for him a
walking, breathing, incarnate proof of the efficacy of prayer. I
was a little fascinated by it--and then, could I have argued with
him? You don't argue against such evidence, and besides it would
have looked as if I had wanted to claim all the merit. Already his
gratitude was simply frightful. Funny position, wasn't it? The
boredom came later, when we lived together on board his ship. I
had, in a moment of inadvertence, created for myself a tie. How to
define it precisely I don't know. One gets attached in a way to
people one has done something for. But is that friendship? I am
not sure what it was. I only know that he who forms a tie is lost.
The germ of corruption has entered into his soul."

Heyst's tone was light, with the flavour of playfulness which
seasoned all his speeches and seemed to be of the very essence of
his thoughts. The girl he had come across, of whom he had possessed
himself, to whose presence he was not yet accustomed, with whom he
did not yet know how to live; that human being so near and still so
strange, gave him a greater sense of his own reality than he had
ever known in all his life.

CHAPTER FOUR

With her knees drawn up, Lena rested her elbows on them and held her
head in both her hands.

"Are you tired of sitting here?" Heyst asked.

An almost imperceptible negative movement of the head was all the
answer she made.

"Why are you looking so serious?" he pursued, and immediately
thought that habitual seriousness, in the long run, was much more
bearable than constant gaiety. "However, this expression suits you
exceedingly," he added, not diplomatically, but because, by the
tendency of his taste, it was a true statement. "And as long as I
can be certain that it is not boredom which gives you this severe
air, I am willing to sit here and look at you till you are ready to
go."

And this was true. He was still under the fresh sortilege of their
common life, the surprise of novelty, the flattered vanity of his
possession of this woman; for a man must feel that, unless he has
ceased to be masculine. Her eyes moved in his direction, rested on
him, then returned to their stare into the deeper gloom at the foot
of the straight tree-trunks, whose spreading crowns were slowly
withdrawing their shade. The warm air stirred slightly about her
motionless head. She would not look at him, from some obscure fear
of betraying herself. She felt in her innermost depths an
irresistible desire to give herself up to him more completely, by
some act of absolute sacrifice. This was something of which he did
not seem to have an idea. He was a strange being without needs.
She felt his eyes fixed upon her; and as he kept silent, she said
uneasily--for she didn't know what his silences might mean:

"And so you lived with that friend--that good man?"

"Excellent fellow," Heyst responded, with a readiness that she did
not expect. "But it was a weakness on my part. I really didn't
want to, only he wouldn't let me off, and I couldn't explain. He
was the sort of man to whom you can't explain anything. He was
extremely sensitive, and it would have been a tigerish thing to do
to mangle his delicate feelings by the sort of plain speaking that
would have been necessary. His mind was like a white-walled, pure
chamber, furnished with, say, six straw-bottomed chairs, and he was
always placing and displacing them in various combinations. But
they were always the same chairs. He was extremely easy to live
with; but then he got hold of this coal idea--or, rather, the idea
got hold of him, it entered into that scantily furnished chamber of
which I have just spoken, and sat on all the chairs. There was no
dislodging it, you know! It was going to make his fortune, my
fortune, everybody's fortune. In past years, in moments of doubt
that will come to a man determined to remain free from absurdities
of existence, I often asked myself, with a momentary dread, in what
way would life try to get hold of me? And this was the way. He got
it into his head that he could do nothing without me. And was I
now, he asked me, to spurn and ruin him? Well, one morning--I
wonder if he had gone down on his knees to pray that night!--one
morning I gave in."

Heyst tugged violently at a tuft of dried grass, and cast it away
from him with a nervous gesture.

"I gave in," he repeated.

Looking towards him with a movement of her eyes only, the girl
noticed the strong feeling on his face with that intense interest
which his person awakened in her mind and in her heart. But it soon
passed away, leaving only a moody expression.

"It's difficult to resist where nothing matters," he observed. "And
perhaps there is a grain of freakishness in my nature. It amused me
to go about uttering silly, commonplace phrases. I was never so
well thought of in the islands till I began to jabber commercial
gibberish like the veriest idiot. Upon my word, I believe that I
was actually respected for a time. I was as grave as an owl over
it; I had to be loyal to the man. I have been, from first to last,
completely, utterly loyal to the best of my ability. I thought he
understood something about coal. And if I had been aware that he
knew nothing of it, as in fact he didn't, well--I don't know what I
could have done to stop him. In one way or another I should have
had to be loyal. Truth, work, ambition, love itself, may be only
counters in the lamentable or despicable game of life, but when one
takes a hand one must play the game. No, the shade of Morrison
needn't haunt me. What's the matter? I say, Lena, why are you
staring like that? Do you feel ill?"

Heyst made as if to get on his feet. The girl extended her arm to
arrest him, and he remained staring in a sitting posture, propped on
one arm, observing her indefinable expression of anxiety, as if she
were unable to draw breath.

"What has come to you?" he insisted, feeling strangely unwilling to
move, to touch her.

"Nothing!" She swallowed painfully. "Of course it can't be. What
name did you say? I didn't hear it properly."

"Name?" repeated Heyst dazedly. "I only mentioned Morrison. It's
the name of that man of whom I've been speaking. What of it?"

"And you mean to say that he was your friend?"

"You have heard enough to judge for yourself. You know as much of
our connection as I know myself. The people in this part of the
world went by appearances, and called us friends, as far as I can
remember. Appearances--what more, what better can you ask for? In
fact you can't have better. You can't have anything else."

"You are trying to confuse me with your talk," she cried. "You
can't make fun of this."

"Can't? Well, no I can't. It's a pity. Perhaps it would have been
the best way," said Heyst, in a tone which for him could be called
gloomy. "Unless one could forget the silly business altogether."
His faint playfulness of manner and speech returned, like a habit
one has schooled oneself into, even before his forehead had cleared
completely. "But why are you looking so hard at me? Oh, I don't
object, and I shall try not to flinch. Your eyes--"

He was looking straight into them, and as a matter of fact had
forgotten all about the late Morrison at that moment.

"No," he exclaimed suddenly. "What an impenetrable girl you are
Lena, with those grey eyes of yours! Windows of the soul, as some
poet has said. The fellow must have been a glazier by vocation.
Well, nature has provided excellently for the shyness of your soul."

When he ceased speaking, the girl came to herself with a catch of
her breath. He heard her voice, the varied charm of which he
thought he knew so well, saying with an unfamiliar intonation:

"And that partner of yours is dead?"

"Morrison? Oh, yes, as I've told you, he--"

"You never told me."

"Didn't I? I thought I did; or, rather, I thought you must know.
It seems impossible that anybody with whom I speak should not know
that Morrison is dead."

She lowered her eyelids, and Heyst was startled by something like an
expression of horror on her face.

"Morrison!" she whispered in an appalled tone. "Morrison!" Her
head drooped. Unable to see her features, Heyst could tell from her
voice that for some reason or other she was profoundly moved by the
syllables of that unromantic name. A thought flashed through his
head--could she have known Morrison? But the mere difference of
their origins made it wildly improbable.

"This is very extraordinary!" he said. "Have you ever heard the
name before?"

Her head moved quickly several times in tiny affirmative nods, as if
she could not trust herself to speak, or even to look at him. She
was biting her lower lip.

"Did you ever know anybody of that name?" he asked.

The girl answered by a negative sign; and then at last she spoke,
jerkily, as if forcing herself against some doubt or fear. She had
heard of that very man, she told Heyst.

"Impossible!" he said positively. "You are mistaken. You couldn't
have heard of him, it's--"

He stopped short, with the thought that to talk like this was
perfectly useless; that one doesn't argue against thin air.

"But I did hear of him; only I didn't know then, I couldn't guess,
that it was your partner they were talking about."

"Talking about my partner?" repeated Heyst slowly.

"No." Her mind seemed almost as bewildered, as full of incredulity,
as his. "No. They were talking of you really; only I didn't know
it."

"Who were they?" Heyst raised his voice. "Who was talking of me?
Talking where?"

With the first question he had lifted himself from his reclining
position; at the last he was on his knees before her, their heads on
a level.

"Why, in that town, in that hotel. Where else could it have been?"
she said.

The idea of being talked about was always novel to Heyst's
simplified conception of himself. For a moment he was as much
surprised as if he had believed himself to be a mere gliding shadow
among men. Besides, he had in him a half-unconscious notion that he
was above the level of island gossip.

"But you said first that it was of Morrison they talked," he
remarked to the girl, sinking on his heels, and no longer much
interested. "Strange that you should have the opportunity to hear
any talk at all! I was rather under the impression that you never
saw anybody belonging to the town except from the platform."

"You forget that I was not living with the other girls," she said.
"After meals they used to go back to the Pavilion, but I had to stay
in the hotel and do my sewing, or what not, in the room where they
talked."

"I didn't think of that. By the by, you never told me who they
were."

"Why, that horrible red-faced beast," she said, with all the energy
of disgust which the mere thought of the hotel-keeper provoked in
her.

"Oh, Schomberg!" Heyst murmured carelessly.

"He talked to the boss--to Zangiacomo, I mean. I had to sit there.
That devil-woman sometimes wouldn't let me go away. I mean Mrs.
Zangiacomo."

"I guessed," murmured Heyst. "She liked to torment you in a variety
of ways. But it is really strange that the hotel-keeper should talk
of Morrison to Zangiacomo. As far as I can remember he saw very
little of Morrison professionally. He knew many others much
better."

The girl shuddered slightly.

"That was the only name I ever overheard. I would get as far away
from them as I could, to the other end of the room, but when that
beast started shouting I could not help hearing. I wish I had never
heard anything. If I had got up and gone out of the room I don't
suppose the woman would have killed me for it; but she would have
rowed me in a nasty way. She would have threatened me and called me
names. That sort, when they know you are helpless, there's nothing
to stop them. I don't know how it is, but bad people, real bad
people that you can see are bad, they get over me somehow. It's the
way they set about downing one. I am afraid of wickedness."

Heyst watched the changing expressions of her face. He encouraged
her, profoundly sympathetic, a little amused.

"I quite understand. You needn't apologize for your great delicacy
in the perception of inhuman evil. I am a little like you."

"I am not very plucky," she said.

"Well! I don't know myself what I would do, what countenance I
would have before a creature which would strike me as being evil
incarnate. Don't you be ashamed!"

She sighed, looked up with her pale, candid gaze and a timid
expression on her face, and murmured:

"You don't seem to want to know what he was saying."

"About poor Morrison? It couldn't have been anything bad, for the
poor fellow was innocence itself. And then, you know, he is dead,
and nothing can possibly matter to him now."

"But I tell you that it was of you he was talking!" she cried.

"He was saying that Morrison's partner first got all there was to
get out of him, and then, and then--well, as good as murdered him--
sent him out to die somewhere!"

"You believe that of me?" said Heyst, after a moment of perfect
silence.

"I didn't know it had anything to do with you. Schomberg was
talking of some Swede. How was I to know? It was only when you
began telling me about how you came here--"

"And now you have my version." Heyst forced himself to speak
quietly. "So that's how the business looked from outside!" he
muttered.

"I remember him saying that everybody in these parts knew the
story," the girl added breathlessly.

"Strange that it should hurt me!" mused Heyst to himself; "yet it
does. I seem to be as much of a fool as those everybodies who know
the story and no doubt believe it. Can you remember any more?" he
addressed the girl in a grimly polite tone. "I've often heard of
the moral advantages of seeing oneself as others see one. Let us
investigate further. Can't you recall something else that everybody
knows?"

"Oh! Don't laugh!" she cried.

"Did I laugh? I assure you I was not aware of it. I won't ask you
whether you believe the hotel-keeper's version. Surely you must
know the value of human judgement!"

She unclasped her hands, moved them slightly, and twined her fingers
as before. Protest? Assent? Was there to be nothing more? He was
relieved when she spoke in that warm and wonderful voice which in
itself comforted and fascinated one's heart, which made her lovable.

"I heard this before you and I ever spoke to each other. It went
out of my memory afterwards. Everything went out of my memory then;
and I was glad of it. It was a fresh start for me, with you--and
you know it. I wish I had forgotten who I was--that would have been
best; and I very nearly did forget."

He was moved by the vibrating quality of the last words. She seemed
to be talking low of some wonderful enchantment, in mysterious terms
of special significance. He thought that if she only could talk to
him in some unknown tongue, she would enslave him altogether by the
sheer beauty of the sound, suggesting infinite depths of wisdom and
feeling.

"But," she went on, "the name stuck in my head, it seems; and when
you mentioned it--"

"It broke the spell," muttered Heyst in angry disappointment as if
he had been deceived in some hope.

The girl, from her position a little above him, surveyed with still
eyes the abstracted silence of the man on whom she now depended with
a completeness of which she had not been vividly conscious before,
because, till then, she had never felt herself swinging between the
abysses of earth and heaven in the hollow of his arm. What if he
should grow weary of the burden?

"And, moreover, nobody had ever believed that tale!"

Heyst came out with an abrupt burst of sound which made her open her
steady eyes wider, with an effect of immense surprise. It was a
purely mechanical effect, because she was neither surprised nor
puzzled. In fact, she could understand him better then than at any
moment since she first set eyes on him.

He laughed scornfully.

"What am I thinking of?" he cried. "As if it could matter to me
what anybody had ever said or believed, from the beginning of the
world till the crack of doom!"

"I never heard you laugh till today," she observed. "This is the
second time!"

He scrambled to his feet and towered above her.

"That's because, when one's heart has been broken into in the way
you have broken into mine, all sorts of weaknesses are free to
enter--shame, anger, stupid indignation, stupid fears--stupid
laughter, too. I wonder what interpretation you are putting on it?"

"It wasn't gay, certainly," she said. "But why are you angry with
me? Are you sorry you took me away from those beasts? I told you
who I was. You could see it."

"Heavens!" he muttered. He had regained his command of himself. "I
assure you I could see much more than you could tell me. I could
see quite a lot that you don't even suspect yet, but you can't be
seen quite through."

He sank to the ground by her side and took her hand. She asked
gently:

"What more do you want from me?"

He made no sound for a time.

"The impossible, I suppose," he said very low, as one makes a
confidence, and pressing the hand he grasped.

It did not return the pressure. He shook his head as if to drive
away the thought of this, and added in a louder, light tone:

"Nothing less. And it isn't because I think little of what I've got
already. Oh, no! It is because I think so much of this possession
of mine that I can't have it complete enough. I know it's
unreasonable. You can't hold back anything--now."

"Indeed I couldn't," she whispered, letting her hand lie passive in
his tight grasp. "I only wish I could give you something more, or
better, or whatever it is you want."

He was touched by the sincere accent of these simple words.

"I tell you what you can do--you can tell me whether you would have
gone with me like this if you had known of whom that abominable
idiot of a hotel-keeper was speaking. A murderer--no less!"

"But I didn't know you at all then," she cried. "And I had the
sense to understand what he was saying. It wasn't murder, really.
I never thought it was."

"What made him invent such an atrocity?" Heyst exclaimed. "He seems
a stupid animal. He IS stupid. How did he manage to hatch that
pretty tale? Have I a particularly vile countenance? Is black
selfishness written all over my face? Or is that sort of thing so
universally human that it might be said of anybody?"

"It wasn't murder," she insisted earnestly.

"I know. I understand. It was worse. As to killing a man, which
would be a comparatively decent thing to do, well--I have never done
that."

"Why should you do it?" she asked in a frightened voice.

"My dear girl, you don't know the sort of life I have been leading
in unexplored countries, in the wilds; it's difficult to give you an
idea. There are men who haven't been in such tight places as I have
found myself in who have had to--to shed blood, as the saying is.
Even the wilds hold prizes which tempt some people; but I had no
schemes, no plans--and not even great firmness of mind to make me
unduly obstinate. I was simply moving on, while the others,
perhaps, were going somewhere. An indifference as to roads and
purposes makes one meeker, as it were. And I may say truly, too,
that I never did care, I won't say for life--I had scorned what
people call by that name from the first--but for being alive. I
don't know if that is what men call courage, but I doubt it very
much."

"You! You have no courage?" she protested.

"I really don't know. Not the sort that always itches for a weapon,
for I have never been anxious to use one in the quarrels that a man
gets into in the most innocent way sometimes. The differences for
which men murder each other are, like everything else they do, the
most contemptible, the most pitiful things to look back upon. No,
I've never killed a man or loved a woman--not even in my thoughts,
not even in my dreams."

He raised her hand to his lips, and let them rest on it for a space,
during which she moved a little closer to him. After the lingering
kiss he did not relinquish his hold.

"To slay, to love--the greatest enterprises of life upon a man! And
I have no experience of either. You must forgive me anything that
may have appeared to you awkward in my behaviour, inexpressive in my
speeches, untimely in my silences."

He moved uneasily, a little disappointed by her attitude, but
indulgent to it, and feeling, in this moment of perfect quietness,
that in holding her surrendered hand he had found a closer communion
than they had ever achieved before. But even then there still
lingered in him a sense of incompleteness not altogether overcome--
which, it seemed, nothing ever would overcome--the fatal
imperfection of all the gifts of life, which makes of them a
delusion and a snare.

All of a sudden he squeezed her hand angrily. His delicately
playful equanimity, the product of kindness and scorn, had perished
with the loss of his bitter liberty.

"Not murder, you say! I should think not. But when you led me to
talk just now, when the name turned up, when you understood that it
was of me that these things had been said, you showed a strange
emotion. I could see it."

"I was a bit startled," she said.

"At the baseness of my conduct?" he asked.

"I wouldn't judge you, not for anything."

"Really?"

"It would be as if I dared to judge everything that there is." With
her other hand she made a gesture that seemed to embrace in one
movement the earth and the heaven. "I wouldn't do such a thing."

Then came a silence, broken at last by Heyst:

"I! I! do a deadly wrong to my poor Morrison!" he cried. "I, who
could not bear to hurt his feelings. I, who respected his very
madness! Yes, this madness, the wreck of which you can see lying
about the jetty of Diamond Bay. What else could I do? He insisted
on regarding me as his saviour; he was always restraining the
eternal obligation on the tip of his tongue, till I was burning with
shame at his gratitude. What could I do? He was going to repay me
with this infernal coal, and I had to join him as one joins a
child's game in a nursery. One would no more have thought of
humiliating him than one would think of humiliating a child. What's
the use of talking of all this! Of course, the people here could
not understand the truth of our relation to each other. But what
business of theirs was it? Kill old Morrison! Well, it is less
criminal, less base--I am not saying it is less difficult--to kill a
man than to cheat him in that way. You understand that?"

She nodded slightly, but more than once and with evident conviction.
His eyes rested on her, inquisitive, ready for tenderness.

"But it was neither one nor the other," he went on. "Then, why I
your emotion? All you confess is that you wouldn't judge me."

She turned upon him her veiled, unseeing grey eyes in which nothing
of her wonder could be read.

"I said I couldn't," she whispered.

"But you thought that there was no smoke without fire!" the
playfulness of tone hardly concealed his irritation. "What power
there must be in words, only imperfectly heard--for you did not
listen with particular care, did you? What were they? What evil
effort of invention drove them into that idiot's mouth out of his
lying throat? If you were to try to remember, they would perhaps
convince me, too."

"I didn't listen," she protested. "What was it to me what they said
of anybody? He was saying that there never were such loving friends
to look at as you two; then, when you got all you wanted out of him
and got thoroughly tired of him, too, you kicked him out to go home
and die."

Indignation, with an undercurrent of some other feeling, rang in
these quoted words, uttered in her pure and enchanting voice. She
ceased abruptly and lowered her long, dark lashes, as if mortally
weary, sick at heart.

"Of course, why shouldn't you get tired of that or any other--
company? You aren't like anyone else, and--and the thought of it
made me unhappy suddenly; but indeed, I did not believe anything bad
of you. I--"

A brusque movement of his arm, flinging her hand away, stopped her
short. Heyst had again lost control of himself. He would have
shouted, if shouting had been in his character.

"No, this earth must be the appointed hatching planet of calumny
enough to furnish the whole universe. I feel a disgust at my own
person, as if I had tumbled into some filthy hole. Pah! And you--
all you can say is that you won't judge me; that you--"

She raised her head at this attack, though indeed he had not turned
to her.

"I don't believe anything bad of you," she repeated. "I couldn't."

He made a gesture as if to say:

"That's sufficient."

In his soul and in his body he experienced a nervous reaction from
tenderness. All at once, without transition, he detested her. But
only for a moment. He remembered that she was pretty, and, more,
that she had a special grace in the intimacy of life. She had the
secret of individuality which excites--and escapes.

He jumped up and began to walk to and fro. Presently his hidden
fury fell into dust within him, like a crazy structure, leaving
behind emptiness, desolation, regret. His resentment was not
against the girl, but against life itself--that commonest of snares,
in which he felt himself caught, seeing clearly the plot of plots
and unconsoled by the lucidity of his mind.

He swerved and, stepping up to her, sank to the ground by her side.
Before she could make a movement or even turn her head his way, he
took her in his arms and kissed her lips. He tasted on them the
bitterness of a tear fallen there. He had never seen her cry. It
was like another appeal to his tenderness--a new seduction. The
girl glanced round, moved suddenly away, and averted her face. With
her hand she signed imperiously to him to leave her alone--a command
which Heyst did not obey.

CHAPTER FIVE

When she opened her eyes at last and sat up, Heyst scrambled quickly
to his feet and went to pick up her cork helmet, which had rolled a
little way off. Meanwhile she busied herself in doing up her hair,
plaited on the top of her head in two heavy, dark tresses, which had
come loose. He tendered her the helmet in silence, and waited as if
unwilling to hear the sound of his own voice.

"We had better go down now," he suggested in a low tone.

He extended his hand to help her up. He had the intention to smile,
but abandoned it at the nearer sight of her still face, in which was
depicted the infinite lassitude of her soul. On their way to regain
the forest path they had to pass through the spot from which the
view of the sea could be obtained. The flaming abyss of emptiness,
the liquid, undulating glare, the tragic brutality of the light,
made her long for the friendly night, with its stars stilled by an
austere spell; for the velvety dark sky and the mysterious great
shadow of the sea, conveying peace to the day-weary heart. She put
her hand to her eyes. Behind her back Heyst spoke gently.

"Let us get on, Lena."

She walked ahead in silence. Heyst remarked that they had never
been out before during the hottest hours. It would do her no good,
he feared. This solicitude pleased and soothed her. She felt more
and more like herself--a poor London girl playing in an orchestra,
and snatched out from the humiliations, the squalid dangers of a
miserable existence, by a man like whom there was not, there could
not be, another in this world. She felt this with elation, with
uneasiness, with an intimate pride--and with a peculiar sinking of
the heart.

"I am not easily knocked out by any such thing as heat," she said
decisively.

"Yes, but I don't forget that you're not a tropical bird."

"You weren't born in these parts, either," she returned.

"No, and perhaps I haven't even your physique. I am a transplanted
being. Transplanted! I ought to call myself uprooted--an unnatural
state of existence; but a man is supposed to stand anything."

She looked back at him and received a smile. He told her to keep in
the shelter of the forest path, which was very still and close, full
of heat if free from glare. Now and then they had glimpses of the
company's old clearing blazing with light, in which the black stumps
of trees stood charred, without shadows, miserable and sinister.
They crossed the open in a direct line for the bungalow. On the
veranda they fancied they had a glimpse of the vanishing Wang,
though the girl was not at all sure that she had seen anything move.
Heyst had no doubts.

"Wang has been looking out for us. We are late."

"Was he? I thought I saw something white for a moment, and then I
did not see it any more."

"That's it--he vanishes. It's a very remarkable gift in that
Chinaman."

"Are they all like that?" she asked with naive curiosity and
uneasiness.

"Not in such perfection," said Heyst, amused.

He noticed with approval that she was not heated by the walk. The
drops of perspiration on her forehead were like dew on the cool,
white petal of a flower. He looked at her figure of grace and
strength, solid and supple, with an ever-growing appreciation.

"Go in and rest yourself for a quarter of an hour; and then Mr. Wang
will give us something to eat," he said.

They had found the table laid. When they came together again and
sat down to it, Wang materialized without a sound, unheard,
uncalled, and did his office. Which being accomplished, at a given
moment he was not.

A great silence brooded over Samburan--the silence of the great heat
that seems pregnant with fatal issues, like the silence of ardent
thought. Heyst remained alone in the big room. The girl seeing him
take up a book, had retreated to her chamber. Heyst sat down under
his father's portrait; and the abominable calumny crept back into
his recollection. The taste of it came on his lips, nauseating and
corrosive like some kinds of poison. He was tempted to spit on the
floor, naively, in sheer unsophisticated disgust of the physical
sensation. He shook his head, surprised at himself. He was not
used to receive his intellectual impressions in that way--reflected
in movements of carnal emotion. He stirred impatiently in his
chair, and raised the book to his eyes with both hands. It was one
of his father's. He opened it haphazard, and his eyes fell on the
middle of the page. The elder Heyst had written of everything in
many books--of space and of time, of animals and of stars; analysing
ideas and actions, the laughter and the frowns of men, and the
grimaces of their agony. The son read, shrinking into himself,
composing his face as if under the author's eye, with a vivid
consciousness of the portrait on his right hand, a little above his
head; a wonderful presence in its heavy frame on the flimsy wall of
mats, looking exiled and at home, out of place and masterful, in the
painted immobility of profile.

And Heyst, the son, read:

Of the stratagems of life the most cruel is the consolation of love-
-the most subtle, too; for the desire is the bed of dreams.

He turned the pages of the little volume, "Storm and Dust," glancing
here and there at the broken text of reflections, maxims, short
phrases, enigmatical sometimes and sometimes eloquent. It seemed to
him that he was hearing his father's voice, speaking and ceasing to
speak again. Startled at first, he ended by finding a charm in the
illusion. He abandoned himself to the half-belief that something of
his father dwelt yet on earth--a ghostly voice, audible to the ear
of his own flesh and blood. With what strange serenity, mingled
with terrors, had that man considered the universal nothingness! He
had plunged into it headlong, perhaps to render death, the answer
that faced one at every inquiry, more supportable.

Heyst stirred, and the ghostly voice ceased; but his eyes followed
the words on the last page of the book:

Men of tormented conscience, or of a criminal imagination, are aware
of much that minds of a peaceful, resigned cast do not even suspect.
It is not poets alone who dare descend into the abyss of infernal
regions, or even who dream of such a descent. The most inexpressive
of human beings must have said to himself, at one time or another:
"Anything but this!" . . .

We all have our instants of clairvoyance. They are not very
helpful. The character of the scheme does not permit that or
anything else to be helpful. Properly speaking its character,
judged by the standards established by its victims, is infamous. It
excuses every violence of protest and at the same time never fails
to crush it, just as it crushes the blindest assent. The so-called
wickedness must be, like the so-called virtue, its own reward--to be
anything at all . . .

Clairvoyance or no clairvoyance, men love their captivity. To the
unknown force of negation they prefer the miserably tumbled bed of
their servitude. Man alone can give one the disgust of pity; yet I
find it easier to believe in the misfortune of mankind than in its
wickedness.

These were the last words. Heyst lowered the book to his knees.
Lena's voice spoke above his drooping head:

"You sit there as if you were unhappy."

"I thought you were asleep," he said.

"I was lying down right enough, but I never closed my eyes."

"The rest would have done you good after our walk. Didn't you try?"

"I was lying down, I tell you, but sleep I couldn't."

"And you made no sound! What want of sincerity. Or did you want to
be alone for a time?"

"I--alone?" she murmured.

He noticed her eyeing the book, and got up to put it back in the
bookcase. When he turned round, he saw that she had dropped into
the chair--it was the one she always used--and looked as if her
strength had suddenly gone from her, leaving her only her youth,
which seemed very pathetic, very much at his mercy. He moved
quickly towards the chair.

"Tired, are you? It's my fault, taking you up so high and keeping
you out so long. Such a windless day, too!"

She watched his concern, her pose languid, her eyes raised to him,
but as unreadable as ever. He avoided looking into them for that
very reason. He forgot himself in the contemplation of those
passive arms, of these defenceless lips, and--yes, one had to go
back to them--of these wide-open eyes. Something wild in their grey
stare made him think of sea-birds in the cold murkiness of high
latitudes. He started when she spoke, all the charm of physical
intimacy revealed suddenly in that voice.

"You should try to love me!" she said.

He made a movement of astonishment.

"Try," he muttered. "But it seems to me--" He broke off, saying to
himself that if he loved her, he had never told her so in so many
words. Simple words! They died on his lips. "What makes you say
that?" he asked.

She lowered her eyelids and turned her head a little.

"I have done nothing," she said in a low voice. "It's you who have
been good, helpful, and tender to me. Perhaps you love me for that-
-just for that; or perhaps you love me for company, and because--
well! But sometimes it seems to me that you can never love me for
myself, only for myself, as people do love each other when it is to
be for ever." Her head drooped. "Forever," she breathed out again;
then, still more faintly, she added an entreating: "Do try!"

These last words went straight to his heart--the sound of them more
than the sense. He did not know what to say, either from want of
practice in dealing with women or simply from his innate honesty of
thought. All his defences were broken now. Life had him fairly by
the throat. But he managed a smile, though she was not looking at
him; yes, he did manage it--the well-known Heyst smile of playful
courtesy, so familiar to all sorts and conditions of men in the
islands.

"My dear Lena," he said, "it looks as if you were trying to pick a
very unnecessary quarrel with me--of all people!"

She made no movement. With his elbows spread out he was twisting
the ends of his long moustaches, very masculine and perplexed,
enveloped in the atmosphere of femininity as in a cloud, suspecting
pitfalls, and as if afraid to move.

"I must admit, though," he added, "that there is no one else; and I
suppose a certain amount of quarrelling is necessary for existence
in this world."

That girl, seated in her chair in graceful quietude, was to him like
a script in an unknown language, or even more simply mysterious,
like any writing to the illiterate. As far as women went he was
altogether uninstructed and he had not the gift of intuition which
is fostered in the days of youth by dreams and visions, exercises of
the heart fitting it for the encounters of a world, in which love
itself rests as much on antagonism as on attraction. His mental
attitude was that of a man looking this way and that on a piece of
writing which he is unable to decipher, but which may be big with
some revelation. He didn't know what to say. All he found to add
was:

"I don't even understand what I have done or left undone to distress
you like this."

He stopped, struck afresh by the physical and moral sense of the
imperfections of their relations--a sense which made him desire her
constant nearness, before his eyes, under his hand, and which, when
she was out of his sight, made her so vague, so elusive and
illusory, a promise that could not be embraced and held.

"No! I don't see clearly what you mean. Is your mind turned
towards the future?" he interpellated her with marked playfulness,
because he was ashamed to let such a word pass his lips. But all
his cherished negations were falling off him one by one.

"Because if it is so there is nothing easier than to dismiss it. In
our future, as in what people call the other life, there is nothing
to be frightened of."

She raised her eyes to him; and if nature had formed them to express
anything else but blank candour he would have learned how terrified
she was by his talk and the fact that her sinking heart loved him
more desperately than ever. He smiled at her.

"Dismiss all thought of it," he insisted. "Surely you don't suspect
after what I have heard from you, that I am anxious to return to
mankind. I! I! murder my poor Morrison! It's possible that I may
be really capable of that which they say I have done. The point is
that I haven't done it. But it is an unpleasant subject to me. I
ought to be ashamed to confess it--but it is! Let us forget it.
There's that in you, Lena, which can console me for worse things,
for uglier passages. And if we forget, there are no voices here to
remind us."

She had raised her head before he paused.

"Nothing can break in on us here," he went on and, as if there had
been an appeal or a provocation in her upward glance, he bent down
and took her under the arms, raising her straight out of the chair
into a sudden and close embrace. Her alacrity to respond, which
made her seem as light as a feather, warmed his heart at that moment
more than closer caresses had done before. He had not expected that
ready impulse towards himself which had been dormant in her passive
attitude. He had just felt the clasp of her arms round his neck,
when, with a slight exclamation--"He's here!"--she disengaged
herself and bolted, away into her room.

CHAPTER SIX

Heyst was astounded. Looking all round, as if to take the whole
room to witness of this outrage, he became aware of Wang
materialized in the doorway. The intrusion was as surprising as
anything could be, in view of the strict regularity with which Wang
made himself visible. Heyst was tempted to laugh at first. This
practical comment on his affirmation that nothing could break in on
them relieved the strain of his feelings. He was a little vexed,
too. The Chinaman preserved a profound silence.

"What do you want?" asked Heyst sternly.

"Boat out there," said the Chinaman.

"Where? What do you mean? Boat adrift in the straits?"

Some subtle change in Wang's bearing suggested his being out of
breath; but he did not pant, and his voice was steady.

"No--row."

It was Heyst now who was startled and raised his voice.

"Malay man, eh?"

Wang made a slight negative movement with his head.

"Do you hear, Lena?" Heyst called out. "Wang says there is a boat
in sight--somewhere near apparently. Where's that boat Wang?"

"Round the point," said Wang, leaping into Malay unexpectedly, and
in a loud voice. "White men three."

"So close as that?" exclaimed Heyst, moving out on the veranda
followed by Wang. "White men? Impossible!"

Over the clearing the shadows were already lengthening. The sun
hung low; a ruddy glare lay on the burnt black patch in front of the
bungalow, and slanted on the ground between the straight, tall,
mast-like trees soaring a hundred feet or more without a branch.
The growth of bushes cut off all view of the jetty from the veranda.
Far away to the right Wang's hut, or rather its dark roof of mats,
could be seen above the bamboo fence which insured the privacy of
the Alfuro woman. The Chinaman looked that way swiftly. Heyst
paused, and then stepped back a pace into the room.

"White men, Lena, apparently. What are you doing?"

"I am just bathing my eyes a little," the girl's voice said from the
inner room.

"Oh, yes; all right!"

"Do you want me?"

"No. You had better--I am going down to the jetty. Yes, you had
better stay in. What an extraordinary thing!"

It was so extraordinary that nobody could possibly appreciate how
extraordinary it was but himself. His mind was full of mere
exclamations, while his feet were carrying him in the direction of
the jetty. He followed the line of the rails, escorted by Wang.

"Where were you when you first saw the boat?" he asked over his
shoulder.

Wang explained in Malay that he had gone to the shore end of the
wharf, to get a few lumps of coal from the big heap, when, happening
to raise his eyes from the ground, he saw the boat--a white man
boat, not a canoe. He had good eyes. He had seen the boat, with
the men at the oars; and here Wang made a particular gesture over
his eyes, as if his vision had received a blow. He had turned at
once and run to the house to report.

"No mistake, eh?" said Heyst, moving on. At the very outer edge of
the belt he stopped short. Wang halted behind him on the path, till
the voice of Number One called him sharply forward into the open.
He obeyed.

"Where's that boat?" asked Heyst forcibly. "I say--where is it?"

Nothing whatever was to be seen between the point and the jetty.
The stretch of Diamond Bay was like a piece of purple shadow,
lustrous and empty, while beyond the land, the open sea lay blue and
opaque under the sun. Heyst's eyes swept all over the offing till
they met, far off, the dark cone of the volcano, with its faint
plume of smoke broadening and vanishing everlastingly at the top,
without altering its shape in the glowing transparency of the
evening.

"The fellow has been dreaming," he muttered to himself.

He looked hard at the Chinaman. Wang seemed turned into stone.
Suddenly, as if he had received a shock, he started, flung his arm
out with a pointing forefinger, and made guttural noises to the
effect that there, there, there, he had seen a boat.

It was very uncanny. Heyst thought of some strange hallucination.
Unlikely enough; but that a boat with three men in it should have
sunk between the point and the jetty, suddenly, like a stone,
without leaving as much on the surface as a floating oar, was still
more unlikely. The theory of a phantom boat would have been more
credible than that.

"Confound it!" he muttered to himself.

He was unpleasantly affected by this mystery; but now a simple
explanation occurred to him. He stepped hastily out on the wharf.
The boat, if it had existed and had retreated, could perhaps be seen
from the far end of the long jetty.

Nothing was to be seen. Heyst let his eyes roam idly over the sea.
He was so absorbed in his perplexity that a hollow sound, as of
somebody tumbling about in a boat, with a clatter of oars and spars,
failed to make him move for a moment. When his mind seized its
meaning, he had no difficulty in locating the sound. It had come
from below--under the jetty!

He ran back for a dozen yards or so, and then looked over. His
sight plunged straight into the stern-sheets of a big boat, the
greater part of which was hidden from him by the planking of the
jetty. His eyes fell on the thin back of a man doubled up over the
tiller in a queer, uncomfortable attitude of drooping sorrow.
Another man, more directly below Heyst, sprawled on his back from
gunwale to gunwale, half off the after thwart, his head lower than
his feet. This second man glared wildly upward, and struggled to
raise himself, but to all appearance was much too drunk to succeed.
The visible part of the boat contained also a flat, leather trunk,
on which the first man's long legs were tucked up nervelessly. A
large earthenware jug, with its wide mouth uncorked, rolled out on
the bottom-boards from under the sprawling man.

Heyst had never been so much astonished in his life. He stared
dumbly at the strange boat's crew. From the first he was positive
that these men were not sailors. They wore the white drill-suit of
tropical civilization; but their apparition in a boat Heyst could
not connect with anything plausible. The civilization of the
tropics could have had nothing to do with it. It was more like
those myths, current in Polynesia, of amazing strangers, who arrive
at an island, gods or demons, bringing good or evil to the innocence
of the inhabitants--gifts of unknown things, words never heard
before.

Heyst noticed a cork helmet floating alongside the boat, evidently
fallen from the head of the man doubled over the tiller, who
displayed a dark, bony poll. An oar, too, had been knocked
overboard, probably by the sprawling man, who was still struggling,
between the thwarts. By this time Heyst regarded the visitation no
longer with surprise, but with the sustained attention demanded by a
difficult problem. With one foot poised on the string-piece, and
leaning on his raised knee, he was taking in everything. The
sprawling man rolled off the thwart, collapsed, and, most
unexpectedly, got on his feet. He swayed dizzily, spreading his
arms out and uttered faintly a hoarse, dreamy "Hallo!" His upturned
face was swollen, red, peeling all over the nose and cheeks. His
stare was irrational. Heyst perceived stains of dried blood all
over the front of his dirty white coat, and also on one sleeve.

"What's the matter? Are you wounded?"

The other glanced down, reeled--one of his feet was inside a large
pith hat--and, recovering himself, let out a dismal, grating sound
in the manner of a grim laugh.

"Blood--not mine. Thirst's the matter. Exhausted's the matter.
Done up. Drink, man! Give us water!"

Thirst was in the very tone of his words, alternating a broken croak
and a faint, throaty rustle which just reached Heyst's ears. The
man in the boat raised his hands to be helped up on the jetty,
whispering:

"I tried. I am too weak. I tumbled down."

Wang was coming along the jetty slowly, with intent, straining eyes.

"Run back and bring a crowbar here. There's one lying by the coal-
heap," Heyst shouted to him.

The man standing in the boat sat down on the thwart behind him. A
horrible coughing laugh came through his swollen lips.

"Crowbar? What's that for?" he mumbled, and his head dropped on his
chest mournfully.

Meantime, Heyst, as if he had forgotten the boat, started kicking
hard at a large brass tap projecting above the planks. To
accommodate ships that came for coal and happened to need water as
well, a stream had been tapped in the interior and an iron pipe led
along the jetty. It terminated with a curved end almost exactly
where the strangers' boat had been driven between the piles; but the
tap was set fast.

"Hurry up!" Heyst yelled to the Chinaman, who was running with the
crowbar in his hand.

Heyst snatched it from him and, obtaining a leverage against the
string-piece, wrung the stiff tap round with a mighty jerk. "I hope
that pipe hasn't got choked!" he muttered to himself anxiously.

It hadn't; but it did not yield a strong gush. The sound of a thin
stream, partly breaking on the gunwale of the boat and partly
splashing alongside, became at once audible. It was greeted by a
cry of inarticulate and savage joy. Heyst knelt on the string-piece
and peered down. The man who had spoken was already holding his
open mouth under the bright trickle. Water ran over his eyelids and
over his nose, gurgled down his throat, flowed over his chin. Then
some obstruction in the pipe gave way, and a sudden thick jet broke
on his face. In a moment his shoulders were soaked, the front of
his coat inundated; he streamed and dripped; water ran into his
pockets, down his legs, into his shoes; but he had clutched the end
of the pipe, and, hanging on with both hands, swallowed, spluttered,
choked, snorted with the noises of a swimmer. Suddenly a curious
dull roar reached Heyst's ears. Something hairy and black flew from
under the jetty. A dishevelled head, coming on like a cannonball,
took the man at the pipe in flank, with enough force to tear his
grip loose and fling him headlong into the stern-sheets. He fell
upon the folded legs of the man at the tiller, who, roused by the
commotion in the boat, was sitting up, silent, rigid, and very much
like a corpse. His eyes were but two black patches, and his teeth
glistened with a death's head grin between his retracted lips, no
thicker than blackish parchment glued over the gums.

From him Heyst's eyes wandered to the creature who had replaced the
first man at the end of the water-pipe. Enormous brown paws
clutched it savagely; the wild, big head hung back, and in a face
covered with a wet mass of hair there gaped crookedly a wide mouth
full of fangs. The water filled it, welled up in hoarse coughs, ran
down on each side of the jaws and down the hairy throat, soaked the
black pelt of the enormous chest, naked under a torn check shirt,
heaving convulsively with a play of massive muscles carved in red
mahogany.

As soon as the first man had recovered the breath knocked out of him
by the irresistible charge, a scream of mad cursing issued from the
stern-sheets. With a rigid, angular crooking of the elbow, the man
at the tiller put his hand back to his hip.

"Don't shoot him, sir!" yelled the first man. "Wait! Let me have
that tiller. I will teach him to shove himself in front of a
caballero!"

Martin Ricardo flourished the heavy piece of wood, leaped forward
with astonishing vigour, and brought it down on Pedro's head with a
crash that resounded all over the quiet sweep of Black Diamond Bay.
A crimson patch appeared on the matted hair, red veins appeared in
the water flowing all over his face, and it dripped in rosy drops
off his head. But the man hung on. Not till a second furious blow
descended did the hairy paws let go their grip and the squirming
body sink limply. Before it could touch the bottom-boards, a
tremendous kick in the ribs from Ricardo's foot shifted it forward
out of sight, whence came the noise of a heavy thud, a clatter of
spars, and a pitiful grunt. Ricardo stooped to look under the
jetty.

"Aha, dog! This will teach you to keep back where you belong, you
murdering brute, you slaughtering savage, you! You infidel, you
robber of churches! Next time I will rip you open from neck to
heel, you carrion-cater! Esclavo!"

He backed a little and straightened himself up.

"I don't mean it really," he remarked to Heyst, whose steady eyes
met his from above. He ran aft briskly.

"Come along, sir. It's your turn. I oughtn't to have drunk first.
'S truth, I forgot myself! A gentleman like you will overlook that,
I know." As he made these apologies, Ricardo extended his hand.
"Let me steady you, sir."

Slowly Mr. Jones unfolded himself in all his slenderness, rocked,
staggered, and caught Ricardo's shoulder. His henchman assisted him
to the pipe, which went on gushing a clear stream of water,
sparkling exceedingly against the black piles and the gloom under
the jetty.

"Catch hold, sir," Ricardo advised solicitously. "All right?"

He stepped back, and, while Mr. Jones revelled in the abundance of
water, he addressed himself to Heyst with a sort of justificatory
speech, the tone of which, reflecting his feelings, partook of
purring and spitting. They had been thirty hours tugging at the
oars, he explained, and they had been more than forty hours without
water, except that the night before they had licked the dew off the
gunwales.

Ricardo did not explain to Heyst how it happened. At that precise
moment he had no explanation ready for the man on the wharf, who, he
guessed, must be wondering much more at the presence of his visitors
than at their plight.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The explanation lay in the two simple facts that the light winds and
strong currents of the Java Sea had drifted the boat about until
they partly lost their bearings; and that by some extra-ordinary
mistake one of the two jars put into the boat by Schomberg's man
contained salt water. Ricardo tried to put some pathos into his
tones. Pulling for thirty hours with eighteen-foot oars! And the
sun! Ricardo relieved his feelings by cursing the sun. They had
felt their hearts and lungs shrivel within them. And then, as if
all that hadn't been trouble enough, he complained bitterly, he had
had to waste his fainting strength in beating their servant about
the head with a stretcher. The fool had wanted to drink sea water,
and wouldn't listen to reason. There was no stopping him otherwise.
It was better to beat him into insensibility than to have him go
crazy in the boat, and to be obliged to shoot him. The preventive,
administered with enough force to brain an elephant, boasted
Ricardo, had to be applied on two occasions--the second time all but
in sight of the jetty.

"You have seen the beauty," Ricardo went on expansively, hiding his
lack of some sort of probable story under this loquacity. "I had to
hammer him away from the spout. Opened afresh all the old broken
spots on his head. You saw how hard I had to hit. He has no
restraint, no restraint at all. If it wasn't that he can be made
useful in one way or another, I would just as soon have let the
governor shoot him."

He smiled up at Heyst in his peculiar lip-retracting manner, and
added by way of afterthought:

"That's what will happen to him in the end, if he doesn't learn to
restrain himself. But I've taught him to mind his manners for a
while, anyhow!"

And again he addressed his quick grin up to the man on the wharf.
His round eyes had never left Heyst's face ever since he began to
deliver his account of the voyage.

"So that's how he looks!" Ricardo was saying to himself.

He had not expected Heyst to be like this. He had formed for
himself a conception containing the helpful suggestion of a
vulnerable point. These solitary men were often tipplers. But no!-
-this was not a drinking man's face; nor could he detect the
weakness of alarm, or even the weakness of surprise, on these
features, in those steady eyes.

"We were too far gone to climb out," Ricardo went on. "I heard you
walking along though. I thought I shouted; I tried to. You didn't
hear me shout?"

Heyst made an almost imperceptible negative sign, which the greedy
eyes of Ricardo--greedy for all signs--did not miss.

"Throat too parched. We didn't even care to whisper to each other
lately. Thirst chokes one. We might have died there under this
wharf before you found us."

"I couldn't think where you had gone to." Heyst was heard at last,
addressing directly the newcomers from the sea. "You were seen as
soon as you cleared that point."

"We were seen, eh?" grunted Mr. Ricardo. "We pulled like machines -
-daren't stop. The governor sat at the tiller, but he couldn't
speak to us. She drove in between the piles till she hit something,
and we all tumbled off the thwarts as if we had been drunk. Drunk--
ha, ha! Too dry, by George! We fetched in here with the very last
of our strength, and no mistake. Another mile would have done for
us. When I heard your footsteps, above, I tried to get up, and I
fell down."

"That was the first sound I heard," said Heyst.

Mr Jones, the front of his soiled white tunic soaked and plastered
against his breast-bone, staggered away from the water-pipe.
Steadying himself on Ricardo's shoulder, he drew a long breath,
raised his dripping head, and produced a smile of ghastly
amiability, which was lost upon the thoughtful Heyst. Behind his
back the sun, touching the water, was like a disc of iron cooled to
a dull red glow, ready to start rolling round the circular steel
plate of the sea, which, under the darkening sky, looked more solid
than the high ridge of Samburan; more solid than the point, whose
long outlined slope melted into its own unfathomable shadow blurring
the dim sheen on the bay. The forceful stream from the pipe broke
like shattered glass on the boat's gunwale. Its loud, fitful, and
persistent splashing revealed the depths of the world's silence.

"Great notion, to lead the water out here," pronounced Ricardo
appreciatively.

Water was life. He felt now as if he could run a mile, scale a ten-
foot wall, sing a song. Only a few minutes ago he was next door to
a corpse, done up, unable to stand, to lift a hand; unable to groan.
A drop of water had done that miracle.

"Didn't you feel life itself running and soaking into you, sir?" he
asked his principal, with deferential but forced vivacity.

Without a word, Mr. Jones stepped off the thwart and sat down in the
stern-sheets.

"Isn't that man of yours bleeding to death in the bows under there?"
inquired Heyst.

Ricardo ceased his ecstasies over the life-giving water and answered
in a tone of innocence:

"He? You may call him a man, but his hide is a jolly sight tougher
than the toughest alligator he ever skinned in the good old days.
You don't know how much he can stand: I do. We have tried him a
long time ago. Ola, there! Pedro! Pedro!" he yelled, with a force
of lung testifying to the regenerative virtues of water.

A weak "Senor?" came from under the wharf.

"What did I tell you?" said Ricardo triumphantly. "Nothing can hurt
him. He's all right. But, I say, the boat's getting swamped.
Can't you turn this water off before you sink her under us? She's
half full already."

At a sign from Heyst, Wang hammered at the brass tap on the wharf,
then stood behind Number One, crowbar in hand, motionless as before.
Ricardo was perhaps not so certain of Pedro's toughness as he
affirmed; for he stooped, peering under the wharf, then moved
forward out of sight. The gush of water ceasing suddenly, made a
silence which became complete when the after-trickle stopped. Afar,
the sun was reduced to a red spark, glowing very low in the
breathless immensity of twilight. Purple gleams lingered on the
water all round the boat. The spectral figure in the stern-sheets
spoke in a languid tone:

"That--er--companion--er--secretary of mine is a queer chap. I am
afraid we aren't presenting ourselves in a very favourable light."

Heyst listened. It was the conventional voice of an educated man,
only strangely lifeless. But more strange yet was this concern for
appearances, expressed, he did not know, whether in jest or in
earnest. Earnestness was hardly to be supposed under the
circumstances, and no one had ever jested in such dead tones. It
was something which could not be answered, and Heyst said nothing.
The other went on:

"Travelling as I do, I find a man of his sort extremely useful. He
has his little weaknesses, no doubt."

"Indeed!" Heyst was provoked into speaking. "Weakness of the arm is
not one of them; neither is an exaggerated humanity, as far as I can
judge."

"Defects of temper," explained Mr. Jones from the stern-sheets.

The subject of this dialogue, coming out just then from under the
wharf into the visible part of the boat, made himself heard in his
own defence, in a voice full of life, and with nothing languid in
his manner on the contrary, it was brisk, almost jocose. He begged
pardon for contradicting. He was never out of temper with "our
Pedro." The fellow was a Dago of immense strength and of no sense
whatever. This combination made him dangerous, and he had to be
treated accordingly, in a manner which he could understand.
Reasoning was beyond him.

"And so"--Ricardo addressed Heyst with animation--"you mustn't be
surprised if--"

"I assure you," Heyst interrupted, "that my wonder at your arrival
in your boat here is so great that it leaves no room for minor
astonishments. But hadn't you better land?"

"That's the talk, sir!" Ricardo began to bustle about the boat,
talking all the time. Finding himself unable to "size up" this man,
he was inclined to credit him with extraordinary powers of
penetration, which, it seemed to him, would be favoured by silence.
Also, he feared some pointblank question. He had no ready-made
story to tell. He and his patron had put off considering that
rather important detail too long. For the last two days, the
horrors of thirst, coming on them unexpectedly, had prevented
consultation. They had had to pull for dear life. But the man on
the wharf, were he in league with the devil himself, would pay for
all their sufferings, thought Ricardo with an unholy joy.

Meantime, splashing in the water which covered the bottom-boards,
Ricardo congratulated himself aloud on the luggage being out of the
way of the wet. He had piled it up forward. He had roughly tied up
Pedro's head. Pedro had nothing to grumble about. On the contrary,
he ought to be mighty thankful to him, Ricardo, for being alive at
all.

"Well, now, let me give you a leg up, sir," he said cheerily to his
motionless principal in the stern-sheets. "All our troubles are
over--for a time, anyhow. Ain't it luck to find a white man on this
island? I would have just as soon expected to meet an angel from
heaven--eh, Mr. Jones? Now then--ready, sir? one, two, three, up
you go!"

Helped from below by Ricardo, and from above by the man more
unexpected than an angel, Mr. Jones scrambled up and stood on the
wharf by the side of Heyst. He swayed like a reed. The night
descending on Samburan turned into dense shadow the point of land
and the wharf itself, and gave a dark solidity to the unshimmering
water extending to the last faint trace of light away to the west.
Heyst stared at the guests whom the renounced world had sent him
thus at the end of the day. The only other vestige of light left on
earth lurked in the hollows of the thin man's eyes. They gleamed,
mobile and languidly evasive. The eyelids fluttered.

"You are feeling weak," said Heyst.

"For the moment, a little," confessed the other.

With loud panting, Ricardo scrambled on his hands and knees upon the
wharf, energetic and unaided. He rose up at Heyst's elbow and
stamped his foot on the planks, with a sharp, provocative, double
beat, such as is heard sometimes in fencing-schools before the
adversaries engage their foils. Not that the renegade seaman
Ricardo knew anything of fencing. What he called "shooting-irons,"
were his weapons, or the still less aristocratic knife, such as was
even then ingeniously strapped to his leg. He thought of it, at
that moment. A swift stooping motion, then, on the recovery, a
ripping blow, a shove off the wharf, and no noise except a splash in
the water that would scarcely disturb the silence. Heyst would have
no time for a cry. It would be quick and neat, and immensely in
accord with Ricardo's humour. But he repressed this gust of
savagery. The job was not such a simple one. This piece had to be
played to another tune, and in much slower time. He returned to his
note of talkative simplicity.

"Ay; and I too don't feel as strong as I thought I was when the
first drink set me up. Great wonder-worker water is! And to get it
right here on the spot! It was heaven--hey, sir?"

Mr Jones, being directly addressed, took up his part in the
concerted piece:

"Really, when I saw a wharf on what might have been an uninhabited
island, I couldn't believe my eyes. I doubted its existence. I
thought it was a delusion till the boat actually drove between the
piles, as you see her lying now."

While he was speaking faintly, in a voice which did not seem to
belong to the earth, his henchman, in extremely loud and terrestrial
accents, was fussing about their belongings in the boat, addressing
himself to Pedro:

"Come, now--pass up the dunnage there! Move, yourself, hombre, or
I'll have to get down again and give you a tap on those bandages of
yours, you growling bear, you!"

"Ah! You didn't believe in the reality of the wharf?" Heyst was
saying to Mr. Jones.

"You ought to kiss my hands!"

Ricardo caught hold of an ancient Gladstone bag and swung it on the
wharf with a thump.

"Yes! You ought to burn a candle before me as they do before the
saints in your country. No saint has ever done so much for you as I
have, you ungrateful vagabond. Now then! Up you get!"

Helped by the talkative Ricardo, Pedro scrambled up on the wharf,
where he remained for some time on all fours, swinging to and fro
his shaggy head tied up in white rags. Then he got up clumsily,
like a bulky animal in the dusk, balancing itself on its hind legs.

Mr Jones began to explain languidly to Heyst that they were in a
pretty bad state that morning, when they caught sight of the smoke
of the volcano. It nerved them to make an effort for their lives.
Soon afterwards they made out the island.

"I had just wits enough left in my baked brain to alter the
direction of the boat," the ghostly voice went on. "As to finding
assistance, a wharf, a white man--nobody would have dreamed of it.
Simply preposterous!"

"That's what I thought when my Chinaman came and told me he had seen
a boat with white men pulling up," said Heyst.

"Most extraordinary luck," interjected Ricardo, standing by
anxiously attentive to every word. "Seems a dream," he added. "A
lovely dream!"

A silence fell on that group of three, as if everyone had become
afraid to speak, in an obscure sense of an impending crisis. Pedro
on one side of them and Wang on the other had the air of watchful
spectators. A few stars had come out pursuing the ebbing twilight.
A light draught of air tepid enough in the thickening twilight after
the scorching day, struck a chill into Mr. Jones in his soaked
clothes.

"I may infer, then, that there is a settlement of white people
here?" he murmured, shivering visibly.

Heyst roused himself.

"Oh, abandoned, abandoned. I am alone here--practically alone; but
several empty houses are still standing. No lack of accommodation.
We may just as well--here, Wang, go back to the shore and run the
trolley out here."

The last words having been spoken in Malay, he explained courteously
that he had given directions for the transport of the luggage. Wang
had melted into the night--in his soundless manner.

"My word! Rails laid down and all," exclaimed Ricardo softly, in a
tone of admiration. "Well, I never!"

"We were working a coal-mine here," said the late manager of the
Tropical Belt Coal Company. "These are only the ghosts of things
that have been."

Mr Jones's teeth were suddenly started chattering by another faint
puff of wind, a mere sigh from the west, where Venus cast her rays
on the dark edge of the horizon, like a bright lamp hung above the
grave of the sun.

"We might be moving on," proposed Heyst. "My Chinaman and that--ah-
-ungrateful servant of yours, with the broken head, can load the
things and come along after us."

The suggestion was accepted without words. Moving towards the
shore, the three men met the trolley, a mere metallic rustle which
whisked past them, the shadowy Wang running noiselessly behind.
Only the sound of their footsteps accompanied them. It was a long
time since so many footsteps had rung together on that jetty.
Before they stepped on to the path trodden through the grass, Heyst
said:

"I am prevented from offering you a share of my own quarters." The
distant courtliness of this beginning arrested the other two
suddenly, as if amazed by some manifest incongruity. "I should
regret it more," he went on, "if I were not in a position to give
you the choice of those empty bungalows for a temporary home."

He turned round and plunged into the narrow track, the two others
following in single file.

"Queer start!" Ricardo took the opportunity for whispering, as he
fell behind Mr. Jones, who swayed in the gloom, enclosed by the
stalks of tropical grass, almost as slender as a stalk of grass
himself.

In this order they emerged into the open space kept clear of
vegetation by Wang's judicious system of periodic firing. The
shapes of buildings, unlighted, high-roofed, looked mysteriously
extensive and featureless against the increasing glitter of the
stars. Heyst was pleased at the absence of light in his bungalow.
It looked as uninhabited as the others. He continued to lead the
way, inclining to the right. His equable voice was heard:

"This one would be the best. It was our counting-house. There is
some furniture in it yet. I am pretty certain that you'll find a
couple of camp bedsteads in one of the rooms."

The high-pitched roof of the bungalow towered up very close,
eclipsing the sky.

"Here we are. Three steps. As you see, there's a wide veranda.
Sorry to keep you waiting for a moment; the door is locked, I
think."

He was heard trying it. Then he leaned against the rail, saying:

"Wang will get the keys."

The others waited, two vague shapes nearly mingled together in the
darkness of the veranda, from which issued a sudden chattering of
Mr. Jones's teeth, directly suppressed, and a slight shuffle of
Ricardo's feet. Their guide and host, his back against the rail,
seemed to have forgotten their existence. Suddenly he moved, and
murmured:

"Ah, here's the trolley."

Then he raised his voice in Malay, and was answered, "Ya tuan," from
an indistinct group that could be made out in the direction of the
track.

"I have sent Wang for the key and a light," he said, in a voice that
came out without any particular direction--a peculiarity which
disconcerted Ricardo.

Wang did not tarry long on his mission. Very soon from the distant
recesses of obscurity appeared the swinging lantern he carried. It
cast a fugitive ray on the arrested trolley with the uncouth figure
of the wild Pedro drooping over the load; then it moved towards the
bungalow and ascended the stairs. After working at the stiff lock,
Wang applied his shoulder to the door. It came open with explosive
suddenness, as if in a passion at being thus disturbed after two
years' repose. From the dark slope of a tall stand-up writing-desk
a forgotten, solitary sheet of paper flew up and settled gracefully
on the floor.

Wang and Pedro came and went through the offended door, bringing the
things off the trolley, one flitting swiftly in and out, the other
staggering heavily. Later, directed by a few quiet words from
Number One, Wang made several journeys with the lantern to the
store-rooms, bringing in blankets, provisions in tins, coffee,
sugar, and a packet of candles. He lighted one, and stuck it on the
ledge of the stand-up desk. Meantime Pedro, being introduced to
some kindling-wood and a bundle of dry sticks, had busied himself
outside in lighting a fire, on which he placed a ready-filled kettle
handed to him by Wang impassively, at arm's length, as if across a
chasm. Having received the thanks of his guests, Heyst wished them
goodnight and withdrew, leaving them to their repose.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Heyst walked away slowly. There was still no light in his bungalow,
and he thought that perhaps it was just as well. By this time he
was much less perturbed. Wang had preceded him with the lantern, as
if in a hurry to get away from the two white men and their hairy
attendant. The light was not dancing along any more; it was
standing perfectly still by the steps of the veranda.

Heyst, glancing back casually, saw behind him still another light--
the light of the strangers' open fire. A black, uncouth form,
stooping over it monstrously, staggered away into the outlying
shadows. The kettle had boiled, probably.

With that weird vision of something questionably human impressed
upon his senses, Heyst moved on a pace or two. What could the
people be who had such a creature for their familiar attendant? He
stopped. The vague apprehension, of a distant future, in which he
saw Lena unavoidably separated from him by profound and subtle
differences; the sceptical carelessness which had accompanied every
one of his attempts at action, like a secret reserve of his soul,
fell away from him. He no longer belonged to himself. There was a
call far more imperious and august. He came up to the bungalow, and
at the very limit of the lantern's light, on the top step, he saw
her feet and the bottom part of her dress. The rest of her person
was suggested dimly as high as her waist. She sat on a chair, and
the gloom of the low eaves descended upon her head and shoulders.
She didn't stir.

"You haven't gone to sleep here?" he asked.

"Oh, no! I was waiting for you--in the dark."

Heyst, on the top step, leaned against a wooden pillar, after moving
the lantern to one side.

"I have been thinking that it is just as well you had no light. But
wasn't it dull for you to sit in the dark?"

"I don't need a light to think of you." Her charming voice gave a
value to this banal answer, which had also the merit of truth.
Heyst laughed a little, and said that he had had a curios
experience. She made no remark. He tried to figure to himself the
outlines of her easy pose. A spot of dim light here and there
hinted at the unfailing grace of attitude which was one of her
natural possessions.

She had thought of him, but not in connection with the strangers.
She had admired him from the first; she had been attracted by his
warm voice, his gentle eye, but she had felt him too wonderfully
difficult to know. He had given to life a savour, a movement, a
promise mingled with menaces, which she had not suspected were to be
found in it--or, at any rate, not by a girl wedded to misery as she
was. She said to herself that she must not be irritated because he
seemed too self-contained, and as if shut up in a world of his own.
When he took her in his arms, she felt that his embrace had a great
and compelling force, that he was moved deeply, and that perhaps he
would not get tired of her so very soon. She thought that he had
opened to her the feelings of delicate joy, that the very uneasiness
he caused her was delicious in its sadness, and that she would try
to hold him as long as she could--till her fainting arms, her
sinking soul, could cling to him no more.

"Wang's not here, of course?" Heyst said suddenly. She answered as
if in her sleep.

"He put this light down here without stopping, and ran."

"Ran, did he? H'm! Well, it's considerably later than his usual
time to go home to his Alfuro wife; but to be seen running is a sort
of degradation for Wang, who has mastered the art of vanishing. Do
you think he was startled out of his perfection by something?"

"Why should he be startled?"

Her voice remained dreamy, a little uncertain.

"I have been startled," Heyst said.

She was not listening to him. The lantern at their feet threw the
shadows of her face upward. Her eyes glistened, as if frightened
and attentive, above a lighted chin and a very white throat.

"Upon my word," mused Heyst, "now that I don't see them, I can
hardly believe that those fellows exist!"

"And what about me?" she asked, so swiftly that he made a movement
like somebody pounced upon from an ambush. "When you don't see me,
do you believe that I exist?"

"Exist? Most charmingly! My dear Lena, you don't know your own
advantages. Why, your voice alone would be enough to make you
unforgettable!"

"Oh, I didn't mean forgetting in that way. I dare say if I were to
die you would remember me right enough. And what good would that be
to anybody? It's while I am alive that I want--"

Heyst stood by her chair, a stalwart figure imperfectly lighted.
The broad shoulders, the martial face that was like a disguise of
his disarmed soul, were lost in the gloom above the plane of light
in which his feet were planted. He suffered from a trouble with
which she had nothing to do. She had no general conception of the
conditions of the existence he had offered to her. Drawn into its
peculiar stagnation she remained unrelated to it because of her
ignorance.

For instance, she could never perceive the prodigious improbability
of the arrival of that boat. She did not seem to be thinking of it.
Perhaps she had already forgotten the fact herself. And Heyst
resolved suddenly to say nothing more of it. It was not that he
shrank from alarming her. Not feeling anything definite himself he
could not imagine a precise effect being produced on her by any
amount of explanation. There is a quality in events which is
apprehended differently by different minds or even by the same mind
at different times. Any man living at all consciously knows that
embarrassing truth. Heyst was aware that this visit could bode
nothing pleasant. In his present soured temper towards all mankind
he looked upon it as a visitation of a particularly offensive kind.

He glanced along the veranda in the direction of the other bungalow.
The fire of sticks in front of it had gone out. No faint glow of
embers, not the slightest thread of light in that direction, hinted
at the presence of strangers. The darker shapes in the obscurity,
the dead silence, betrayed nothing of that strange intrusion. The
peace of Samburan asserted itself as on any other night. Everything
was as before, except--Heyst became aware of it suddenly--that for a
whole minute, perhaps, with his hand on the back of the girl's chair
and within a foot of her person, he had lost the sense of her
existence, for the first time since he had brought her over to share
this invincible, this undefiled peace. He picked up the lantern,
and the act made a silent stir all along the veranda. A spoke of
shadow swung swiftly across her face, and the strong light rested on
the immobility of her features, as of a woman looking at a vision.
Her eyes were still, her lips serious. Her dress, open at the neck,
stirred slightly to her even breathing.

"We had better go in, Lena," suggested Heyst, very low, as if
breaking a spell cautiously.

She rose without a word. Heyst followed her indoors. As they
passed through the living-room, he left the lantern burning on the
centre table.

CHAPTER NINE

That night the girl woke up, for the first time in her new
experience, with the sensation of having been abandoned to her own
devices. She woke up from a painful dream of separation brought
about in a way which she could not understand, and missed the relief
of the waking instant. The desolate feeling of being alone
persisted. She was really alone. A night-light made it plain
enough, in the dim, mysterious manner of a dream; but this was
reality. It startled her exceedingly.

In a moment she was at the curtain that hung in the doorway, and
raised it with a steady hand. The conditions of their life in
Samburan would have made peeping absurd; nor was such a thing in her
character. This was not a movement of curiosity, but of downright
alarm--the continued distress and fear of the dream. The night
could not have been very far advanced. The light of the lantern was
burning strongly, striping the floor and walls of the room with
thick black bands. She hardly knew whether she expected to see
Heyst or not; but she saw him at once, standing by the table in his
sleeping-suit, his back to the doorway. She stepped in noiselessly
with her bare feet, and let the curtain fall behind her. Something
characteristic in Heyst's attitude made her say, almost in a
whisper:

"You are looking for something."

He could not have heard her before; but he didn't start at the
unexpected whisper. He only pushed the drawer of the table in and,
without even looking over his shoulder, asked quietly, accepting her
presence as if he had been aware of all her movements:

"I say, are you certain that Wang didn't go through this room this
evening?"

"Wang? When?"

"After leaving the lantern, I mean."

"Oh, no. He ran on. I watched him."

"Or before, perhaps--while I was with these boat people? Do you
know? Can you tell?"

"I hardly think so. I came out as the sun went down, and sat
outside till you came back to me."

"He could have popped in for an instant through the back veranda."

"I heard nothing in here," she said. "What is the matter?"

"Naturally you wouldn't hear. He can be as quiet as a shadow, when
he likes. I believe he could steal the pillows from under our
heads. He might have been here ten minutes ago."

"What woke you up? Was it a noise?"

"Can't say that. Generally one can't tell, but is it likely, Lena?
You are, I believe, the lighter sleeper of us two. A noise loud
enough to wake me up would have awakened you, too. I tried to be as
quiet as I could. What roused you?"

"I don't know--a dream, perhaps. I woke up crying."

"What was the dream?"

Heyst, with one hand resting on the table, had turned in her
direction, his round, uncovered head set on a fighter's muscular
neck. She left his question unanswered, as if she had not heard it.

"What is it you have missed?" she asked in her turn, very grave.

Her dark hair, drawn smoothly back, was done in two thick tresses
for the night. Heyst noticed the good form of her brow, the dignity
of its width, its unshining whiteness. It was a sculptural
forehead. He had a moment of acute appreciation intruding upon
another order of thoughts. It was as if there could be no end of
his discoveries about that girl, at the most incongruous moments.

She had on nothing but a hand-woven cotton sarong--one of Heyst's
few purchases, years ago, in Celebes, where they are made. He had
forgotten all about it till she came, and then had found it at the
bottom of an old sandalwood trunk dating back to pre-Morrison days.
She had quickly learned to wind it up under her armpits with a safe
twist, as Malay village girls do when going down to bathe in a
river. Her shoulders and arms were bare; one of her tresses,
hanging forward, looked almost black against the white skin. As she
was taller than the average Malay woman, the sarong ended a good way
above her ankles. She stood poised firmly, half-way between the
table and the curtained doorway, the insteps of her bare feet
gleaming like marble on the overshadowed matting of the floor. The
fall of her lighted shoulders, the strong and fine modelling of her
arms hanging down her sides, her immobility, too, had something
statuesque, the charm of art tense with life. She was not very big-
-Heyst used to think of her, at first, as "that poor little girl,"--
but revealed free from the shabby banality of a white platform
dress, in the simple drapery of the sarong, there was that in her
form and in the proportions of her body which suggested a reduction
from a heroic size.

She moved forward a step.

"What is it you have missed?" she asked again.

Heyst turned his back altogether on the table. The black spokes of
darkness over the floor and the walls, joining up on the ceiling in
a path of shadow, were like the bars of a cage about them. It was
his turn to ignore a question.

"You woke up in a fright, you say?" he said.

She walked up to him, exotic yet familiar, with her white woman's
face and shoulders above the Malay sarong, as if it were an airy
disguise, but her expression was serious.

"No," she replied. "It was distress, rather. You see, you weren't
there, and I couldn't tell why you had gone away from me. A nasty
dream--the first I've had, too, since--"

"You don't believe in dreams, do you?" asked Heyst.

"I once knew a woman who did. Leastwise, she used to tell people
what dreams mean, for a shilling."

"Would you go now and ask her what this dream means?" inquired Heyst
jocularly.

"She lived in Camberwell. She was a nasty old thing!"

Heyst laughed a little uneasily.

"Dreams are madness, my dear. It's things that happen in the waking
world, while one is asleep, that one would be glad to know the
meaning of."

"You have missed something out of this drawer," she said positively.

"This or some other. I have looked into every single one of them
and come back to this again, as people do. It's difficult to
believe the evidence of my own senses; but it isn't there. Now,
Lena, are you sure that you didn't--"

"I have touched nothing in the house but what you have given me."

"Lena!" he cried.

He was painfully affected by this disclaimer of a charge which he
had not made. It was what a servant might have said--an inferior
open to suspicion--or, at any rate, a stranger. He was angry at
being so wretchedly misunderstood; disenchanted at her not being
instinctively aware of the place he had secretly given her in his
thoughts.

"After all," he said to himself, "we are strangers to each other."

And then he felt sorry for her. He spoke calmly:

"I was about to say, are you sure you have no reason to think that
the Chinaman has been in this room tonight?"

"You suspect him?" she asked, knitting her eyebrows.

"There is no one else to suspect. You may call it a certitude."

"You don't want to tell me what it is?" she inquired, in the equable
tone in which one takes a fact into account.

Heyst only smiled faintly.

"Nothing very precious, as far as value goes," he replied.

"I thought it might have been money," she said.

"Money!" exclaimed Heyst, as if the suggestion had been altogether
preposterous. She was so visibly surprised that he hastened to add:
"Of course, there is some money in the house--there, in that
writing-desk, the drawer on the left. It's not locked. You can
pull it right out. There is a recess, and the board at the back
pivots: a very simple hiding-place, when you know the way to it. I
discovered it by accident, and I keep our store of sovereigns in
there. The treasure, my dear, is not big enough to require a
cavern."

He paused, laughed very low, and returned her steady stare.

"The loose silver, some guilders and dollars, I have always kept in
that unlocked left drawer. I have no doubt Wang knows what there is
in it, but he isn't a thief, and that's why I--no, Lena, what I've
missed is not gold or jewels; and that's what makes the fact
interesting--which the theft of money cannot be."

She took a long breath, relieved to hear that it was not money. A
great curiosity was depicted on her face, but she refrained from
pressing him with questions. She only gave him one of her deep-
gleaming smiles.

"It isn't me so it must be Wang. You ought to make him give it back
to you."

Heyst said nothing to that naive and practical suggestion, for the
object that he missed from the drawer was his revolver.

It was a heavy weapon which he had owned for many years and had
never used in his life. Ever since the London furniture had arrived
in Samburan, it had been reposing in the drawer of the table. The
real dangers of life, for him, were not those which could be
repelled by swords or bullets. On the other hand neither his manner
nor his appearance looked sufficiently inoffensive to expose him to
light-minded aggression.

He could not have explained what had induced him to go to the drawer
in the middle of the night. He had started up suddenly--which was
very unusual with him. He had found himself sitting up and
extremely wide awake all at once, with the girl reposing by his
side, lying with her face away from him, a vague, characteristically
feminine form in the dim light. She was perfectly still.

At that season of the year there were no mosquitoes in Samburan, and
the sides of the mosquito net were looped up. Heyst swung his feet
to the floor, and found himself standing there, almost before he had
become aware of his intention to get up.

Why he did this he did not know. He didn't wish to wake her up, and
the slight creak of the broad bedstead had sounded very loud to him.
He turned round apprehensively and waited for her to move, but she
did not stir. While he looked at her, he had a vision of himself
lying there too, also fast asleep, and--it occurred to him for the
first time in his life--very defenceless. This quite novel
impression of the dangers of slumber made him think suddenly of his
revolver. He left the bedroom with noiseless footsteps. The
lightness of the curtain he had to lift as he passed out, and the
outer door, wide open on the blackness of the veranda--for the roof
eaves came down low, shutting out the starlight--gave him a sense of
having been dangerously exposed, he could not have said to what. He
pulled the drawer open. Its emptiness cut his train of self-
communion short. He murmured to the assertive fact:

"Impossible! Somewhere else!"

He tried to remember where he had put the thing; but those provoked
whispers of memory were not encouraging. Foraging in every
receptacle and nook big enough to contain a revolver, he came slowly
to the conclusion that it was not in that room. Neither was it in
the other. The whole bungalow consisted of the two rooms and a
profuse allowance of veranda all round. Heyst stepped out on the
veranda.

"It's Wang, beyond a doubt," he thought, staring into the night.
"He has got hold of it for some reason."

There was nothing to prevent that ghostly Chinaman from
materializing suddenly at the foot of the stairs, or anywhere, at
any moment, and toppling him over with a dead sure shot. The danger
was so irremediable that it was not worth worrying about, any more
than the general precariousness of human life. Heyst speculated on
this added risk. How long had he been at the mercy of a slender
yellow finger on the trigger? That is, if that was the fellow's
reason for purloining the revolver.

"Shoot and inherit," thought Heyst. "Very simple." Yet there was
in his mind a marked reluctance to regard the domesticated grower of
vegetables in the light of a murderer.

"No, it wasn't that. For Wang could have done it any time this last
twelve months or more--"

Heyst's mind had worked on the assumption that Wang had possessed
himself of the revolver during his own absence from Samburan; but at
that period of his speculation his point of view changed. It struck
him with the force of manifest certitude that the revolver had been
taken only late in the day, or on that very night. Wang, of course.
But why? So there had been no danger in the past. It was all
ahead.

"He has me at his mercy now," thought Heyst, without particular
excitement.

The sentiment he experienced was curiosity. He forgot himself in
it: it was as if he were considering somebody else's strange
predicament. But even that sort of interest was dying out when,
looking to his left, he saw the accustomed shapes of the other
bungalows looming in the night, and remembered the arrival of the
thirsty company in the boat. Wang would hardly risk such a crime in
the presence of other white men. It was a peculiar instance of the
"safety in numbers," principle, which somehow was not much to
Heyst's taste.

He went in gloomily, and stood over the empty drawer in deep and
unsatisfactory thought. He had just made up his mind that he must
breathe nothing of this to the girl, when he heard her voice behind
him. She had taken him by surprise, but he resisted the impulse to
turn round at once under the impression that she might read his
trouble in his face. Yes, she had taken him by surprise, and for
that reason the conversation which began was not exactly as he would
have conducted it if he had been prepared for her pointblank
question. He ought to have said at once: "I've missed nothing."
It was a deplorable thing that he should have let it come so far as
to have her ask what it was he missed. He closed the conversation
by saying lightly:

"It's an object of very small value. Don't worry about it--it isn't
worth while. The best you can do is to go and lie down again,
Lena."

Reluctant she turned away, and only in the doorway asked: "And
you?"

"I think I shall smoke a cheroot on the veranda. I don't feel
sleepy for the moment."

"Well, don't be long."

He made no answer. She saw him standing there, very still, with a
frown on his brow, and slowly dropped the curtain.

Heyst did really light a cheroot before going out again on the
veranda. He glanced up from under the low eaves, to see by the
stars how the night went on. It was going very slowly. Why it
should have irked him he did not know, for he had nothing to expect
from the dawn; but everything round him had become unreasonable,
unsettled, and vaguely urgent, laying him under an obligation, but
giving him no line of action. He felt contemptuously irritated with
the situation. The outer world had broken upon him; and he did not
know what wrong he had done to bring this on himself, any more than
he knew what he had done to provoke the horrible calumny about his
treatment of poor Morrison. For he could not forget this. It had
reached the ears of one who needed to have the most perfect
confidence in the rectitude of his conduct.

"And she only half disbelieves it," he thought, with hopeless
humiliation.

This moral stab in the back seemed to have taken some of his
strength from him, as a physical wound would have done. He had no
desire to do anything--neither to bring Wang to terms in the matter
of the revolver nor to find out from the strangers who they were,
and how their predicament had come about. He flung his glowing
cigar away into the night. But Samburan was no longer a solitude
wherein he could indulge in all his moods. The fiery parabolic path
the cast-out stump traced in the air was seen from another veranda
at a distant of some twenty yards. It was noted as a symptom of
importance by an observer with his faculties greedy for signs, and
in a state of alertness tense enough almost to hear the grass grow.

CHAPTER TEN

The observer was Martin Ricardo. To him life was not a matter of
passive renunciation, but of a particularly active warfare. He was
not mistrustful of it, he was not disgusted with it, still less was
he inclined to be suspicious of its disenchantments; but he was
vividly aware that it held many possibilities of failure. Though
very far from being a pessimist, he was not a man of foolish
illusions. He did not like failure, not only because of its
unpleasant and dangerous consequences, but also because of its
damaging effect upon his own appreciation of Martin Ricardo. And
this was a special job, of his own contriving, and of considerable
novelty. It was not, so to speak, in his usual line of business--
except, perhaps, from a moral standpoint, about which he was not
likely to trouble his head. For these reasons Martin Ricardo was
unable to sleep.

Mr Jones, after repeated shivering fits, and after drinking much hot
tea, had apparently fallen into deep slumber. He had very
peremptorily discouraged attempts at conversation on the part of his
faithful follower. Ricardo listened to his regular breathing. It
was all very well for the governor. He looked upon it as a sort of
sport. A gentleman naturally would. But this ticklish and
important job had to be pulled off at all costs, both for honour and
for safety. Ricardo rose quietly, and made his way on the veranda.
He could not lie still. He wanted to go out for air, and he had a
feeling that by the force of his eagerness even the darkness and the
silence could be made to yield something to his eyes and ears.

He noted the stars, and stepped back again into the dense darkness.
He resisted the growing impulse to go out and steal towards the
other bungalow. It would have been madness to start prowling in the
dark on unknown ground. And for what end? Unless to relieve the
oppression. Immobility lay on his limbs like a leaden garment. And
yet he was unwilling to give up. He persisted in his objectless
vigil. The man of the island was keeping quiet.

It was at that moment that Ricardo's eyes caught the vanishing red
trail of light made by the cigar--a startling revelation of the
man's wakefulness. He could not suppress a low "Hallo!" and began
to sidle along towards the door, with his shoulders rubbing the
wall. For all he knew, the man might have been out in front by this
time, observing the veranda. As a matter of fact, after flinging
away the cheroot, Heyst had gone indoors with the feeling of a man
who gives up an unprofitable occupation. But Ricardo fancied he
could hear faint footfalls on the open ground, and dodged quickly
into the room. There he drew breath, and meditated for a while.
His next step was to feel for the matches on the tall desk, and to
light the candle. He had to communicate to his governor views and
reflections of such importance that it was absolutely necessary for
him to watch their effect on the very countenance of the hearer. At
first he had thought that these matters could have waited till
daylight; but Heyst's wakefulness, disclosed in that startling way,
made him feel suddenly certain that there could be no sleep for him
that night.

He said as much to his governor. When the little dagger-like flame
had done its best to dispel the darkness, Mr. Jones was to be seen
reposing on a camp bedstead, in a distant part of the room. A
railway rug concealed his spare form up to his very head, which
rested on the other railway rug rolled up for a pillow. Ricardo
plumped himself down cross-legged on the floor, very close to the
low bedstead; so that Mr. Jones--who perhaps had not been so very
profoundly asleep--on opening his eyes found them conveniently
levelled at the face of his secretary.

"Eh? What is it you say? No sleep for you tonight? But why can't
you let ME sleep? Confound your fussiness!"

"Because that there fellow can't sleep--that's why. Dash me if he
hasn't been doing a think just now! What business has he to think
in the middle of the night?"

"How do you know?"

"He was out, sir--up in the middle of the night. My own eyes saw
it."

"But how do you know that he was up to think?" inquired Mr. Jones.
"It might have been anything--toothache, for instance. And you may
have dreamed it for all I know. Didn't you try to sleep?"

"No, sir. I didn't even try to go to sleep."

Ricardo informed his patron of his vigil on the veranda, and of the
revelation which put an end to it. He concluded that a man up with
a cigar in the middle of the night must be doing a think.

Mr Jones raised himself on his elbow. This sign of interest
comforted his faithful henchman.

"Seems to me it's time we did a little think ourselves," added
Ricardo, with more assurance. Long as they had been together the
moods of his governor were still a source of anxiety to his simple
soul.

"You are always making a fuss," remarked Mr. Jones, in a tolerant
tone.

"Ay, but not for nothing, am I? You can't say that, sir. Mine may
not be a gentleman's way of looking round a thing, but it isn't a
fool's way, either. You've admitted that much yourself at odd
times."

Ricardo was growing warmly argumentative. Mr. Jones interrupted him
without heat.

"You haven't roused me to talk about yourself, I presume?"

"No, sir." Ricardo remained silent for a minute, with the tip of
his tongue caught between his teeth. "I don't think I could tell
you anything about myself that you don't know," he continued. There
was a sort of amused satisfaction in his tone which changed
completely as he went on. "It's that man, over there, that's got to
be talked over. I don't like him."

He, failed to observe the flicker of a ghastly smile on his
governor's lips.

"Don't you?" murmured Mr. Jones, whose face, as he reclined on his
elbow, was on a level with the top of his follower's head.

"No, sir," said Ricardo emphatically. The candle from the other
side of the room threw his monstrous black shadow on the wall. "He-
-I don't know how to say it--he isn't hearty-like."

Mr Jones agreed languidly in his own manner:

"He seems to be a very self-possessed man."

"Ay, that's it. Self--" Ricardo choked with indignation. "I would
soon let out some of his self-possession through a hole between his
ribs, if this weren't a special job!"

Mr Jones had been making his own reflections, for he asked:

"Do you think he is suspicious?"

"I don't see very well what he can be suspicious of," pondered
Ricardo. "Yet there he was doing a think. And what could be the
object of it? What made him get out of his bed in the middle of the
night. 'Tain't fleas, surely."

"Bad conscience, perhaps," suggested Mr. Jones jocularly.

His faithful secretary suffered from irritation, and did not see the
joke. In a fretful tone he declared that there was no such thing as
conscience. There was such a thing as funk; but there was nothing
to make that fellow funky in any special way. He admitted, however,
that the man might have been uneasy at the arrival of strangers,
because of all that plunder of his put away somewhere.

Ricardo glanced here and there, as if he were afraid of being
overheard by the heavy shadows cast by the dim light all over the
room. His patron, very quiet, spoke in a calm whisper:

"And perhaps that hotel-keeper has been lying to you about him. He
may be a very poor devil indeed."

Ricardo shook his head slightly. The Schombergian theory of Heyst
had become in him a profound conviction, which he had absorbed as
naturally as a sponge takes up water. His patron's doubts were a
wanton denying of what was self-evident; but Ricardo's voice
remained as before, a soft purring with a snarling undertone.

"I am sup-prised at you, sir! It's the very way them tame ones--the
common 'yporcrits of the world--get on. When it comes to plunder
drifting under one's very nose, there's not one of them that would
keep his hands off. And I don't blame them. It's the way they do
it that sets my back up. Just look at the story of how he got rid
of that pal of his! Send a man home to croak of a cold on the
chest--that's one of your tame tricks. And d'you mean to say, sir,
that a man that's up to it wouldn't bag whatever he could lay his
hands in his 'yporcritical way? What was all that coal business?
Tame citizen dodge; 'yporcrisy--nothing else. No, no, sir! The
thing is to extract it from him as neatly as possible. That's the
job; and it isn't so simple as it looks. I reckon you have looked
at it all round, sir, before you took up the notion of this trip."

"No." Mr. Jones was hardly audible, staring far away from his
couch. "I didn't think about it much. I was bored."

"Ay, that you were--bad. I was feeling pretty desperate that
afternoon, when that bearded softy of a landlord got talking to me
about this fellow here. Quite accidentally, it was. Well, sir,
here we are after a mighty narrow squeak. I feel all limp yet; but
never mind--his swag will pay for the lot!"

"He's all alone here," remarked Mr. Jones in a hollow murmur.

"Ye-es, in a way. Yes, alone enough. Yes, you may say he is."

"There's that Chinaman, though."

"Ay, there's the Chink," assented Ricardo rather absentmindedly.

He was debating in his mind the advisability of making a clean
breast of his knowledge of the girl's existence. Finally he
concluded he wouldn't. The enterprise was difficult enough without
complicating it with an upset to the sensibilities of the gentleman
with whom he had the honour of being associated. Let the discovery
come of itself, he thought, and then he could swear that he had
known nothing of that offensive presence.

He did not need to lie. He had only to hold his tongue.

"Yes," he muttered reflectively, "there's that Chink, certainly."

At bottom, he felt a certain ambiguous respect for his governor's
exaggerated dislike of women, as if that horror of feminine presence
were a sort of depraved morality; but still morality, since he
counted it as an advantage. It prevented many undesirable
complications. He did not pretend to understand it. He did not
even try to investigate this idiosyncrasy of his chief. All he knew
was that he himself was differently inclined, and that it did not
make him any happier or safer. He did not know how he would have
acted if he had been knocking about the world on his own. Luckily
he was a subordinate, not a wage-slave but a follower--which was a
restraint. Yes! The other sort of disposition simplified matters
in general; it wasn't to be gainsaid. But it was clear that it
could also complicate them--as in this most important and, in
Ricardo's view, already sufficiently delicate case. And the worst
of it was that one could not tell exactly in what precise manner it
would act.

It was unnatural, he thought somewhat peevishly. How was one to
reckon up the unnatural? There were no rules for that. The
faithful henchman of plain Mr. Jones, foreseeing many difficulties
of a material order, decided to keep the girl out of the governor's
knowledge, out of his sight, too, for as long a time as it could be
managed. That, alas, seemed to be at most a matter of a few hours;
whereas Ricardo feared that to get the affair properly going would
take some days. Once well started, he was not afraid of his
gentleman failing him. As is often the case with lawless natures,
Ricardo's faith in any given individual was of a simple,
unquestioning character. For man must have some support in life.

Cross-legged, his head drooping a little and perfectly still, he
might have been meditating in a bonze-like attitude upon the sacred
syllable "Om." It was a striking illustration of the untruth of
appearances, for his contempt for the world was of a severely
practical kind. There was nothing oriental about Ricardo but the
amazing quietness of his pose. Mr. Jones was also very quiet. He
had let his head sink on the rolled-up rug, and lay stretched out on
his side with his back to the light. In that position the shadows
gathered in the cavities of his eyes made them look perfectly empty.
When he spoke, his ghostly voice had only to travel a few inches
straight into Ricardo's left ear.

"Why don't you say something, now that you've got me awake?"

"I wonder if you were sleeping as sound as you are trying to make
out, sir," said the unmoved Ricardo.

"I wonder," repeated Mr. Jones. "At any rate, I was resting
quietly!"

"Come, sir!" Ricardo's whisper was alarmed. "You don't mean to say
you're going to be bored?"

"No."

"Quite right!" The secretary was very much relieved. "There's no
occasion to be, I can tell you, sir," he whispered earnestly.
"Anything but that! If I didn't say anything for a bit, it ain't
because there isn't plenty to talk about. Ay, more than enough."

"What's the matter with you?" breathed out his patron. "Are you
going to turn pessimist?"

"Me turn? No, sir! I ain't of those that turn. You may call me
hard names, if you like, but you know very well that I ain't a
croaker." Ricardo changed his tone. "If I said nothing for a
while, it was because I was meditating over the Chink, sir."

"You were? Waste of time, my Martin. A Chinaman is unfathomable."

Ricardo admitted that this might be so. Anyhow, a Chink was neither
here nor there, as a general thing, unfathomable as he might be; but
a Swedish baron wasn't--couldn't be! The woods were full of such
barons.

"I don't know that he is so tame," was Mr. Jones's remark, in a
sepulchral undertone.

"How do you mean, sir? He ain't a rabbit, of course. You couldn't
hypnotize him, as I saw you do to more than one Dago, and other
kinds of tame citizens, when it came to the point of holding them
down to a game."

"Don't you reckon on that," murmured plain Mr. Jones seriously.

"No, sir, I don't, though you have a wonderful power of the eye.
It's a fact."

"I have a wonderful patience," remarked Mr. Jones dryly.

A dim smile flitted over the lips of the faithful Ricardo who never
raised his head.

"I don't want to try you too much, sir, but this is like no other
job we ever turned our minds to."

"Perhaps not. At any rate let us think so."

A weariness with the monotony of life was reflected in the tone of
this qualified assent. It jarred on the nerves of the sanguine
Ricardo.

"Let us think of the way to go to work," he retorted a little
impatiently. "He's a deep one. Just look at the way he treated
that chum of his. Did you ever hear of anything so low? And the
artfulness of the beast--the dirty, tame artfulness!"

"Don't you start moralizing, Martin," said Mr. Jones warningly. "As
far as I can make out the story that German hotel-keeper told you,
it seems to show a certain amount of character;--and independence
from common feelings which is not usual. It's very remarkable, if
true."

"Ay, ay! Very remarkable. It's mighty low down, all the same,"
muttered, Ricardo obstinately. "I must say I am glad to think he
will be paid off for it in a way that'll surprise him!"

The tip of his tongue appeared lively for an instant, as if trying
for the taste of that ferocious retribution on his compressed lips.
For Ricardo was sincere in his indignation before the elementary
principle of loyalty to a chum violated in cold blood, slowly, in a
patient duplicity of years. There are standards in villainy as in
virtue, and the act as he pictured it to himself acquired an
additional horror from the slow pace of that treachery so atrocious
and so tame. But he understood too the educated judgement of his
governor, a gentleman looking on all this with the privileged
detachment of a cultivated mind, of an elevated personality.

"Ay, he's deep--he's artful," he mumbled between his sharp teeth.

"Confound you!" Mr. Jones's calm whisper crept into his ear. "Come
to the point."

Obedient, the secretary shook off his thoughtfulness. There was a
similarity of mind between these two--one the outcast of his vices,
the other inspired by a spirit of scornful defiance, the
aggressiveness of a beast of prey looking upon all the tame
creatures of the earth as its natural victim. Both were astute
enough, however, and both were aware that they had plunged into this
adventure without a sufficient scrutiny of detail. The figure of a
lonely man far from all assistance had loomed up largely,
fascinating and defenceless in the middle of the sea, filling the
whole field of their vision. There had not seemed to be any need
for thinking. As Schomberg had been saying: "Three to one."

But it did not look so simple now in the face of that solitude which
was like an armour for this man. The feeling voiced by the henchman
in his own way--"We don't seem much forwarder now we are here" was
acknowledged by the silence of the patron. It was easy enough to
rip a fellow up or drill a hole in him, whether he was alone or not,
Ricardo reflected in low, confidential tones, but -

"He isn't alone," Mr. Jones said faintly, in his attitude of