Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (792 page)

“Reparation?  To you!  It is you who can offer me no reparation for the offence against my feelings — and my person; for what reparation can be adequate for your odious and ridiculous plot so scornful in its implication, so humiliating to my pride.  No!  I don’t want to remember you.”

Unexpectedly, with a tightening grip, he pulled her nearer to him, and looking into her eyes with fearless despair —

“You’ll have to.  I shall haunt you,” he said firmly.

Her hand was wrenched out of his grasp before he had time to release it.  Felicia Moorsom stepped into the boat, sat down by the side of her father, and breathed tenderly on her crushed fingers.

The professor gave her a sidelong look — nothing more.  But the professor’s sister, yet on shore, had put up her long-handle double eye-glass to look at the scene.  She dropped it with a faint rattle.

“I’ve never in my life heard anything so crude said to a lady,” she murmured, passing before Renouard with a perfectly erect head.  When, a moment afterwards, softening suddenly, she turned to throw a good-bye to that young man, she saw only his back in the distance moving towards the bungalow.  She watched him go in — amazed — before she too left the soil of Malata.

Nobody disturbed Renouard in that room where he had shut himself in to breathe the evanescent perfume of her who for him was no more, till late in the afternoon when the half-caste was heard on the other side of the door.

He wanted the master to know that the trader Janet was just entering the cove.

Renouard’s strong voice on his side of the door gave him most unexpected instructions.  He was to pay off the boys with the cash in the office and arrange with the captain of the Janet to take every worker away from Malata, returning them to their respective homes.  An order on the Dunster firm would be given to him in payment.

And again the silence of the bungalow remained unbroken till, next morning, the half-caste came to report that everything was done.  The plantation boys were embarking now.

Through a crack in the door a hand thrust at him a piece of paper, and the door slammed to so sharply that Luiz stepped back.  Then approaching cringingly the keyhole, in a propitiatory tone he asked:

“Do I go too, master?”

“Yes.  You too.  Everybody.”

“Master stop here alone?”

Silence.  And the half-caste’s eyes grew wide with wonder.  But he also, like those “ignorant savages,” the plantation boys, was only too glad to leave an island haunted by the ghost of a white man.  He backed away noiselessly from the mysterious silence in the closed room, and only in the very doorway of the bungalow allowed himself to give vent to his feelings by a deprecatory and pained —

“Tse!  Tse!  Tse!”

CHAPTER XII

The Moorsoms did manage to catch the homeward mail boat all right, but had only twenty-four hours in town.  Thus the sentimental Willie could not see very much of them.  This did not prevent him afterwards from relating at great length, with manly tears in his eyes, how poor Miss Moorsom — the fashionable and clever beauty — found her betrothed in Malata only to see him die in her arms.  Most people were deeply touched by the sad story.  It was the talk of a good many days.

But the all-knowing Editor, Renouard’s only friend and crony, wanted to know more than the rest of the world.  From professional incontinence, perhaps, he thirsted for a full cup of harrowing detail.  And when he noticed Renouard’s schooner lying in port day after day he sought the sailing master to learn the reason.  The man told him that such were his instructions.  He had been ordered to lie there a month before returning to Malata.  And the month was nearly up.  “I will ask you to give me a passage,” said the Editor.

He landed in the morning at the bottom of the garden and found peace, stillness, sunshine reigning everywhere, the doors and windows of the bungalow standing wide open, no sight of a human being anywhere, the plants growing rank and tall on the deserted fields.  For hours the Editor and the schooner’s crew, excited by the mystery, roamed over the island shouting Renouard’s name; and at last set themselves in grim silence to explore systematically the uncleared bush and the deeper ravines in search of his corpse.  What had happened?  Had he been murdered by the boys?  Or had he simply, capricious and secretive, abandoned his plantation taking the people with him.  It was impossible to tell what had happened.  At last, towards the decline of the day, the Editor and the sailing master discovered a track of sandals crossing a strip of sandy beach on the north shore of the bay.  Following this track fearfully, they passed round the spur of the headland, and there on a large stone found the sandals, Renouard’s white jacket, and the Malay sarong of chequered pattern which the planter of Malata was well known to wear when going to bathe.  These things made a little heap, and the sailor remarked, after gazing at it in silence —

“Birds have been hovering over this for many a day.”

“He’s gone bathing and got drowned,” cried the Editor in dismay.

“I doubt it, sir.  If he had been drowned anywhere within a mile from the shore the body would have been washed out on the reefs.  And our boats have found nothing so far.”

Nothing was ever found — and Renouard’s disappearance remained in the main inexplicable.  For to whom could it have occurred that a man would set out calmly to swim beyond the confines of life — with a steady stroke — his eyes fixed on a star!

Next evening, from the receding schooner, the Editor looked back for the last time at the deserted island.  A black cloud hung listlessly over the high rock on the middle hill; and under the mysterious silence of that shadow Malata lay mournful, with an air of anguish in the wild sunset, as if remembering the heart that was broken there.

THE PARTNER

“And that be hanged for a silly yarn.  The boatmen here in Westport have been telling this lie to the summer visitors for years.  The sort that gets taken out for a row at a shilling a head — and asks foolish questions — must be told something to pass the time away.  D’ye know anything more silly than being pulled in a boat along a beach? . . . It’s like drinking weak lemonade when you aren’t thirsty.  I don’t know why they do it!  They don’t even get sick.”

A forgotten glass of beer stood at his elbow; the locality was a small respectable smoking-room of a small respectable hotel, and a taste for forming chance acquaintances accounts for my sitting up late with him.  His great, flat, furrowed cheeks were shaven; a thick, square wisp of white hairs hung from his chin; its waggling gave additional point to his deep utterance; and his general contempt for mankind with its activities and moralities was expressed in the rakish set of his big soft hat of black felt with a large rim, which he kept always on his head.

His appearance was that of an old adventurer, retired after many unholy experiences in the darkest parts of the earth; but I had every reason to believe that he had never been outside England.  From a casual remark somebody dropped I gathered that in his early days he must have been somehow connected with shipping — with ships in docks.  Of individuality he had plenty.  And it was this which attracted my attention at first.  But he was not easy to classify, and before the end of the week I gave him up with the vague definition, “an imposing old ruffian.”

One rainy afternoon, oppressed by infinite boredom, I went into the smoking-room.  He was sitting there in absolute immobility, which was really fakir-like and impressive.  I began to wonder what could be the associations of that sort of man, his “milieu,” his private connections, his views, his morality, his friends, and even his wife — when to my surprise he opened a conversation in a deep, muttering voice.

I must say that since he had learned from somebody that I was a writer of stories he had been acknowledging my existence by means of some vague growls in the morning.

He was essentially a taciturn man.  There was an effect of rudeness in his fragmentary sentences.  It was some time before I discovered that what he would be at was the process by which stories — stories for periodicals — were produced.

What could one say to a fellow like that?  But I was bored to death; the weather continued impossible; and I resolved to be amiable.

“And so you make these tales up on your own.  How do they ever come into your head?” he rumbled.

I explained that one generally got a hint for a tale.

“What sort of hint?”

“Well, for instance,” I said, “I got myself rowed out to the rocks the other day.  My boatman told me of the wreck on these rocks nearly twenty years ago.  That could be used as a hint for a mainly descriptive bit of story with some such title as ‘In the Channel,’ for instance.”

It was then that he flew out at the boatmen and the summer visitors who listen to their tales.  Without moving a muscle of his face he emitted a powerful “Rot,” from somewhere out of the depths of his chest, and went on in his hoarse, fragmentary mumble.  “Stare at the silly rocks — nod their silly heads [the visitors, I presume].  What do they think a man is — blown-out paper bag or what? — go off pop like that when he’s hit — Damn silly yarn — Hint indeed! . . . A lie?”

You must imagine this statuesque ruffian enhaloed in the black rim of his hat, letting all this out as an old dog growls sometimes, with his head up and staring-away eyes.

“Indeed!” I exclaimed.  “Well, but even if untrue it is a hint, enabling me to see these rocks, this gale they speak of, the heavy seas, etc., etc., in relation to mankind.  The struggle against natural forces and the effect of the issue on at least one, say, exalted — ”

He interrupted me by an aggressive —

“Would truth be any good to you?”

“I shouldn’t like to say,” I answered, cautiously.  “It’s said that truth is stranger than fiction.”

“Who says that?” he mouthed.

“Oh!  Nobody in particular.”

I turned to the window; for the contemptuous beggar was oppressive to look at, with his immovable arm on the table.  I suppose my unceremonious manner provoked him to a comparatively long speech.

“Did you ever see such a silly lot of rocks?  Like plums in a slice of cold pudding.”

I was looking at them — an acre or more of black dots scattered on the steel-grey shades of the level sea, under the uniform gossamer grey mist with a formless brighter patch in one place — the veiled whiteness of the cliff coming through, like a diffused, mysterious radiance.  It was a delicate and wonderful picture, something expressive, suggestive, and desolate, a symphony in grey and black — a Whistler.  But the next thing said by the voice behind me made me turn round.  It growled out contempt for all associated notions of roaring seas with concise energy, then went on —

“I — no such foolishness — looking at the rocks out there — more likely call to mind an office — I used to look in sometimes at one time — office in London — one of them small streets behind Cannon Street Station. . . “

He was very deliberate; not jerky, only fragmentary; at times profane.

“That’s a rather remote connection,” I observed, approaching him.

“Connection?  To Hades with your connections.  It was an accident.”

“Still,” I said, “an accident has its backward and forward connections, which, if they could be set forth — ”

Without moving he seemed to lend an attentive ear.

“Aye!  Set forth.  That’s perhaps what you could do.  Couldn’t you now?  There’s no sea life in this connection.  But you can put it in out of your head — if you like.”

“Yes.  I could, if necessary,” I said.  “Sometimes it pays to put in a lot out of one’s head, and sometimes it doesn’t.  I mean that the story isn’t worth it.  Everything’s in that.”

It amused me to talk to him like this.  He reflected audibly that he guessed story-writers were out after money like the rest of the world which had to live by its wits: and that it was extraordinary how far people who were out after money would go. . . Some of them.

Then he made a sally against sea life.  Silly sort of life, he called it.  No opportunities, no experience, no variety, nothing.  Some fine men came out of it — he admitted — but no more chance in the world if put to it than fly.  Kids.  So Captain Harry Dunbar.  Good sailor.  Great name as a skipper.  Big man; short side-whiskers going grey, fine face, loud voice.  A good fellow, but no more up to people’s tricks than a baby.

“That’s the captain of the Sagamore you’re talking about,” I said, confidently.

After a low, scornful “Of course” he seemed now to hold on the wall with his fixed stare the vision of that city office, “at the back of Cannon Street Station,” while he growled and mouthed a fragmentary description, jerking his chin up now and then, as if angry.

It was, according to his account, a modest place of business, not shady in any sense, but out of the way, in a small street now rebuilt from end to end.  “Seven doors from the Cheshire Cat public house under the railway bridge.  I used to take my lunch there when my business called me to the city.  Cloete would come in to have his chop and make the girl laugh.  No need to talk much, either, for that.  Nothing but the way he would twinkle his spectacles on you and give a twitch of his thick mouth was enough to start you off before he began one of his little tales.  Funny fellow, Cloete.  C-l-o-e-t-e — Cloete.”