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