________________________________________________
_
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.
Content of PART THREE CHAPTER ONE [Joseph Conrad's novel: Victory]
_
Read next: PART THREE: CHAPTER TWO
Read previous: PART TWO: CHAPTER EIGHT
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
