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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.
Content of PART ONE CHAPTER ONE [Joseph Conrad's novel: Victory]
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