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