________________________________________________
_
PART TWO: 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.
Content of PART TWO CHAPTER EIGHT [Joseph Conrad's novel: Victory]
_
Read next: PART THREE: CHAPTER ONE
Read previous: PART TWO: CHAPTER SEVEN
Table of content of Victory
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
