________________________________________________
_
PART THREE: CHAPTER NINE
That night the girl woke up, for the first time in her new
experience, with the sensation of having been abandoned to her own
devices. She woke up from a painful dream of separation brought
about in a way which she could not understand, and missed the relief
of the waking instant. The desolate feeling of being alone
persisted. She was really alone. A night-light made it plain
enough, in the dim, mysterious manner of a dream; but this was
reality. It startled her exceedingly.
In a moment she was at the curtain that hung in the doorway, and
raised it with a steady hand. The conditions of their life in
Samburan would have made peeping absurd; nor was such a thing in her
character. This was not a movement of curiosity, but of downright
alarm--the continued distress and fear of the dream. The night
could not have been very far advanced. The light of the lantern was
burning strongly, striping the floor and walls of the room with
thick black bands. She hardly knew whether she expected to see
Heyst or not; but she saw him at once, standing by the table in his
sleeping-suit, his back to the doorway. She stepped in noiselessly
with her bare feet, and let the curtain fall behind her. Something
characteristic in Heyst's attitude made her say, almost in a
whisper:
"You are looking for something."
He could not have heard her before; but he didn't start at the
unexpected whisper. He only pushed the drawer of the table in and,
without even looking over his shoulder, asked quietly, accepting her
presence as if he had been aware of all her movements:
"I say, are you certain that Wang didn't go through this room this
evening?"
"Wang? When?"
"After leaving the lantern, I mean."
"Oh, no. He ran on. I watched him."
"Or before, perhaps--while I was with these boat people? Do you
know? Can you tell?"
"I hardly think so. I came out as the sun went down, and sat
outside till you came back to me."
"He could have popped in for an instant through the back veranda."
"I heard nothing in here," she said. "What is the matter?"
"Naturally you wouldn't hear. He can be as quiet as a shadow, when
he likes. I believe he could steal the pillows from under our
heads. He might have been here ten minutes ago."
"What woke you up? Was it a noise?"
"Can't say that. Generally one can't tell, but is it likely, Lena?
You are, I believe, the lighter sleeper of us two. A noise loud
enough to wake me up would have awakened you, too. I tried to be as
quiet as I could. What roused you?"
"I don't know--a dream, perhaps. I woke up crying."
"What was the dream?"
Heyst, with one hand resting on the table, had turned in her
direction, his round, uncovered head set on a fighter's muscular
neck. She left his question unanswered, as if she had not heard it.
"What is it you have missed?" she asked in her turn, very grave.
Her dark hair, drawn smoothly back, was done in two thick tresses
for the night. Heyst noticed the good form of her brow, the dignity
of its width, its unshining whiteness. It was a sculptural
forehead. He had a moment of acute appreciation intruding upon
another order of thoughts. It was as if there could be no end of
his discoveries about that girl, at the most incongruous moments.
She had on nothing but a hand-woven cotton sarong--one of Heyst's
few purchases, years ago, in Celebes, where they are made. He had
forgotten all about it till she came, and then had found it at the
bottom of an old sandalwood trunk dating back to pre-Morrison days.
She had quickly learned to wind it up under her armpits with a safe
twist, as Malay village girls do when going down to bathe in a
river. Her shoulders and arms were bare; one of her tresses,
hanging forward, looked almost black against the white skin. As she
was taller than the average Malay woman, the sarong ended a good way
above her ankles. She stood poised firmly, half-way between the
table and the curtained doorway, the insteps of her bare feet
gleaming like marble on the overshadowed matting of the floor. The
fall of her lighted shoulders, the strong and fine modelling of her
arms hanging down her sides, her immobility, too, had something
statuesque, the charm of art tense with life. She was not very big-
-Heyst used to think of her, at first, as "that poor little girl,"--
but revealed free from the shabby banality of a white platform
dress, in the simple drapery of the sarong, there was that in her
form and in the proportions of her body which suggested a reduction
from a heroic size.
She moved forward a step.
"What is it you have missed?" she asked again.
Heyst turned his back altogether on the table. The black spokes of
darkness over the floor and the walls, joining up on the ceiling in
a path of shadow, were like the bars of a cage about them. It was
his turn to ignore a question.
"You woke up in a fright, you say?" he said.
She walked up to him, exotic yet familiar, with her white woman's
face and shoulders above the Malay sarong, as if it were an airy
disguise, but her expression was serious.
"No," she replied. "It was distress, rather. You see, you weren't
there, and I couldn't tell why you had gone away from me. A nasty
dream--the first I've had, too, since--"
"You don't believe in dreams, do you?" asked Heyst.
"I once knew a woman who did. Leastwise, she used to tell people
what dreams mean, for a shilling."
"Would you go now and ask her what this dream means?" inquired Heyst
jocularly.
"She lived in Camberwell. She was a nasty old thing!"
Heyst laughed a little uneasily.
"Dreams are madness, my dear. It's things that happen in the waking
world, while one is asleep, that one would be glad to know the
meaning of."
"You have missed something out of this drawer," she said positively.
"This or some other. I have looked into every single one of them
and come back to this again, as people do. It's difficult to
believe the evidence of my own senses; but it isn't there. Now,
Lena, are you sure that you didn't--"
"I have touched nothing in the house but what you have given me."
"Lena!" he cried.
He was painfully affected by this disclaimer of a charge which he
had not made. It was what a servant might have said--an inferior
open to suspicion--or, at any rate, a stranger. He was angry at
being so wretchedly misunderstood; disenchanted at her not being
instinctively aware of the place he had secretly given her in his
thoughts.
"After all," he said to himself, "we are strangers to each other."
And then he felt sorry for her. He spoke calmly:
"I was about to say, are you sure you have no reason to think that
the Chinaman has been in this room tonight?"
"You suspect him?" she asked, knitting her eyebrows.
"There is no one else to suspect. You may call it a certitude."
"You don't want to tell me what it is?" she inquired, in the equable
tone in which one takes a fact into account.
Heyst only smiled faintly.
"Nothing very precious, as far as value goes," he replied.
"I thought it might have been money," she said.
"Money!" exclaimed Heyst, as if the suggestion had been altogether
preposterous. She was so visibly surprised that he hastened to add:
"Of course, there is some money in the house--there, in that
writing-desk, the drawer on the left. It's not locked. You can
pull it right out. There is a recess, and the board at the back
pivots: a very simple hiding-place, when you know the way to it. I
discovered it by accident, and I keep our store of sovereigns in
there. The treasure, my dear, is not big enough to require a
cavern."
He paused, laughed very low, and returned her steady stare.
"The loose silver, some guilders and dollars, I have always kept in
that unlocked left drawer. I have no doubt Wang knows what there is
in it, but he isn't a thief, and that's why I--no, Lena, what I've
missed is not gold or jewels; and that's what makes the fact
interesting--which the theft of money cannot be."
She took a long breath, relieved to hear that it was not money. A
great curiosity was depicted on her face, but she refrained from
pressing him with questions. She only gave him one of her deep-
gleaming smiles.
"It isn't me so it must be Wang. You ought to make him give it back
to you."
Heyst said nothing to that naive and practical suggestion, for the
object that he missed from the drawer was his revolver.
It was a heavy weapon which he had owned for many years and had
never used in his life. Ever since the London furniture had arrived
in Samburan, it had been reposing in the drawer of the table. The
real dangers of life, for him, were not those which could be
repelled by swords or bullets. On the other hand neither his manner
nor his appearance looked sufficiently inoffensive to expose him to
light-minded aggression.
He could not have explained what had induced him to go to the drawer
in the middle of the night. He had started up suddenly--which was
very unusual with him. He had found himself sitting up and
extremely wide awake all at once, with the girl reposing by his
side, lying with her face away from him, a vague, characteristically
feminine form in the dim light. She was perfectly still.
At that season of the year there were no mosquitoes in Samburan, and
the sides of the mosquito net were looped up. Heyst swung his feet
to the floor, and found himself standing there, almost before he had
become aware of his intention to get up.
Why he did this he did not know. He didn't wish to wake her up, and
the slight creak of the broad bedstead had sounded very loud to him.
He turned round apprehensively and waited for her to move, but she
did not stir. While he looked at her, he had a vision of himself
lying there too, also fast asleep, and--it occurred to him for the
first time in his life--very defenceless. This quite novel
impression of the dangers of slumber made him think suddenly of his
revolver. He left the bedroom with noiseless footsteps. The
lightness of the curtain he had to lift as he passed out, and the
outer door, wide open on the blackness of the veranda--for the roof
eaves came down low, shutting out the starlight--gave him a sense of
having been dangerously exposed, he could not have said to what. He
pulled the drawer open. Its emptiness cut his train of self-
communion short. He murmured to the assertive fact:
"Impossible! Somewhere else!"
He tried to remember where he had put the thing; but those provoked
whispers of memory were not encouraging. Foraging in every
receptacle and nook big enough to contain a revolver, he came slowly
to the conclusion that it was not in that room. Neither was it in
the other. The whole bungalow consisted of the two rooms and a
profuse allowance of veranda all round. Heyst stepped out on the
veranda.
"It's Wang, beyond a doubt," he thought, staring into the night.
"He has got hold of it for some reason."
There was nothing to prevent that ghostly Chinaman from
materializing suddenly at the foot of the stairs, or anywhere, at
any moment, and toppling him over with a dead sure shot. The danger
was so irremediable that it was not worth worrying about, any more
than the general precariousness of human life. Heyst speculated on
this added risk. How long had he been at the mercy of a slender
yellow finger on the trigger? That is, if that was the fellow's
reason for purloining the revolver.
"Shoot and inherit," thought Heyst. "Very simple." Yet there was
in his mind a marked reluctance to regard the domesticated grower of
vegetables in the light of a murderer.
"No, it wasn't that. For Wang could have done it any time this last
twelve months or more--"
Heyst's mind had worked on the assumption that Wang had possessed
himself of the revolver during his own absence from Samburan; but at
that period of his speculation his point of view changed. It struck
him with the force of manifest certitude that the revolver had been
taken only late in the day, or on that very night. Wang, of course.
But why? So there had been no danger in the past. It was all
ahead.
"He has me at his mercy now," thought Heyst, without particular
excitement.
The sentiment he experienced was curiosity. He forgot himself in
it: it was as if he were considering somebody else's strange
predicament. But even that sort of interest was dying out when,
looking to his left, he saw the accustomed shapes of the other
bungalows looming in the night, and remembered the arrival of the
thirsty company in the boat. Wang would hardly risk such a crime in
the presence of other white men. It was a peculiar instance of the
"safety in numbers," principle, which somehow was not much to
Heyst's taste.
He went in gloomily, and stood over the empty drawer in deep and
unsatisfactory thought. He had just made up his mind that he must
breathe nothing of this to the girl, when he heard her voice behind
him. She had taken him by surprise, but he resisted the impulse to
turn round at once under the impression that she might read his
trouble in his face. Yes, she had taken him by surprise, and for
that reason the conversation which began was not exactly as he would
have conducted it if he had been prepared for her pointblank
question. He ought to have said at once: "I've missed nothing."
It was a deplorable thing that he should have let it come so far as
to have her ask what it was he missed. He closed the conversation
by saying lightly:
"It's an object of very small value. Don't worry about it--it isn't
worth while. The best you can do is to go and lie down again,
Lena."
Reluctant she turned away, and only in the doorway asked: "And
you?"
"I think I shall smoke a cheroot on the veranda. I don't feel
sleepy for the moment."
"Well, don't be long."
He made no answer. She saw him standing there, very still, with a
frown on his brow, and slowly dropped the curtain.
Heyst did really light a cheroot before going out again on the
veranda. He glanced up from under the low eaves, to see by the
stars how the night went on. It was going very slowly. Why it
should have irked him he did not know, for he had nothing to expect
from the dawn; but everything round him had become unreasonable,
unsettled, and vaguely urgent, laying him under an obligation, but
giving him no line of action. He felt contemptuously irritated with
the situation. The outer world had broken upon him; and he did not
know what wrong he had done to bring this on himself, any more than
he knew what he had done to provoke the horrible calumny about his
treatment of poor Morrison. For he could not forget this. It had
reached the ears of one who needed to have the most perfect
confidence in the rectitude of his conduct.
"And she only half disbelieves it," he thought, with hopeless
humiliation.
This moral stab in the back seemed to have taken some of his
strength from him, as a physical wound would have done. He had no
desire to do anything--neither to bring Wang to terms in the matter
of the revolver nor to find out from the strangers who they were,
and how their predicament had come about. He flung his glowing
cigar away into the night. But Samburan was no longer a solitude
wherein he could indulge in all his moods. The fiery parabolic path
the cast-out stump traced in the air was seen from another veranda
at a distant of some twenty yards. It was noted as a symptom of
importance by an observer with his faculties greedy for signs, and
in a state of alertness tense enough almost to hear the grass grow.
Content of PART THREE CHAPTER NINE [Joseph Conrad's novel: Victory]
_
Read next: PART THREE: CHAPTER TEN
Read previous: PART THREE: 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
