Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (11 page)

He rose, and, approaching the table, leaned both his elbows on it; Lakamba responsively edged his seat a little closer, while Babalatchi scrambled to his feet and thrust his inquisitive head between his master’s and Dain’s.  They interchanged their ideas rapidly, speaking in whispers into each other’s faces, very close now, Dain suggesting, Lakamba contradicting, Babalatchi conciliating and anxious in his vivid apprehension of coming difficulties.  He spoke most, whispering earnestly, turning his head slowly from side to side so as to bring his solitary eye to bear upon each of his interlocutors in turn.  Why should there be strife? said he.  Let Tuan Dain, whom he loved only less than his master, go trustfully into hiding.  There were many places for that.  Bulangi’s house away in the clearing was best.

Bulangi was a safe man.  In the network of crooked channels no white man could find his way.  White men were strong, but very foolish.  It was undesirable to fight them, but deception was easy.  They were like silly women — they did not know the use of reason, and he was a match for any of them — went on Babalatchi, with all the confidence of deficient experience.  Probably the Dutch would seek Almayer.  Maybe they would take away their countryman if they were suspicious of him.  That would be good.  After the Dutch went away Lakamba and Dain would get the treasure without any trouble, and there would be one person less to share it.  Did he not speak wisdom?  Will Tuan Dain go to Bulangi’s house till the danger is over, go at once?

Dain accepted this suggestion of going into hiding with a certain sense of conferring a favour upon Lakamba and the anxious statesman, but he met the proposal of going at once with a decided no, looking Babalatchi meaningly in the eye.  The statesman sighed as a man accepting the inevitable would do, and pointed silently towards the other bank of the river.  Dain bent his head slowly.

“Yes, I am going there,” he said.

“Before the day comes?” asked Babalatchi.

“I am going there now,” answered Dain, decisively.  “The Orang Blanda will not be here before to-morrow night, perhaps, and I must tell Almayer of our arrangements.”

“No, Tuan.  No; say nothing,” protested Babalatchi.  “I will go over myself at sunrise and let him know.”

“I will see,” said Dain, preparing to go.

The thunderstorm was recommencing outside, the heavy clouds hanging low overhead now.

There was a constant rumble of distant thunder punctuated by the nearer sharp crashes, and in the continuous play of blue lightning the woods and the river showed fitfully, with all the elusive distinctness of detail characteristic of such a scene.  Outside the door of the Rajah’s house Dain and Babalatchi stood on the shaking verandah as if dazed and stunned by the violence of the storm.  They stood there amongst the cowering forms of the Rajah’s slaves and retainers seeking shelter from the rain, and Dain called aloud to his boatmen, who responded with an unanimous “Ada!  Tuan!” while they looked uneasily at the river.

“This is a great flood!” shouted Babalatchi into Dain’s ear.  “The river is very angry.  Look!  Look at the drifting logs!  Can you go?”

Dain glanced doubtfully on the livid expanse of seething water bounded far away on the other side by the narrow black line of the forests.  Suddenly, in a vivid white flash, the low point of land with the bending trees on it and Almayer’s house, leaped into view, flickered and disappeared.  Dain pushed Babalatchi aside and ran down to the water-gate followed by his shivering boatmen.

Babalatchi backed slowly in and closed the door, then turned round and looked silently upon Lakamba.  The Rajah sat still, glaring stonily upon the table, and Babalatchi gazed curiously at the perplexed mood of the man he had served so many years through good and evil fortune.  No doubt the one-eyed statesman felt within his savage and much sophisticated breast the unwonted feelings of sympathy with, and perhaps even pity for, the man he called his master.  From the safe position of a confidential adviser, he could, in the dim vista of past years, see himself — a casual cut-throat — finding shelter under that man’s roof in the modest rice-clearing of early beginnings.  Then came a long period of unbroken success, of wise counsels, and deep plottings resolutely carried out by the fearless Lakamba, till the whole east coast from Poulo Laut to Tanjong Batu listened to Babalatchi’s wisdom speaking through the mouth of the ruler of Sambir.  In those long years how many dangers escaped, how many enemies bravely faced, how many white men successfully circumvented!  And now he looked upon the result of so many years of patient toil: the fearless Lakamba cowed by the shadow of an impending trouble.  The ruler was growing old, and Babalatchi, aware of an uneasy feeling at the pit of his stomach, put both his hands there with a suddenly vivid and sad perception of the fact that he himself was growing old too; that the time of reckless daring was past for both of them, and that they had to seek refuge in prudent cunning.  They wanted peace; they were disposed to reform; they were ready even to retrench, so as to have the wherewithal to bribe the evil days away, if bribed away they could be.  Babalatchi sighed for the second time that night as he squatted again at his master’s feet and tendered him his betel-nut box in mute sympathy.  And they sat there in close yet silent communion of betel-nut chewers, moving their jaws slowly, expectorating decorously into the wide-mouthed brass vessel they passed to one another, and listening to the awful din of the battling elements outside.

“There is a very great flood,” remarked Babalatchi, sadly.

“Yes,” said Lakamba.  “Did Dain go?”

“He went, Tuan.  He ran down to the river like a man possessed of the Sheitan himself.”

There was another long pause.

“He may get drowned,” suggested Lakamba at last, with some show of interest.

“The floating logs are many,” answered Babalatchi, “but he is a good swimmer,” he added languidly.

“He ought to live,” said Lakamba; “he knows where the treasure is.”

Babalatchi assented with an ill-humoured grunt.  His want of success in penetrating the white man’s secret as to the locality where the gold was to be found was a sore point with the statesman of Sambir, as the only conspicuous failure in an otherwise brilliant career.

A great peace had now succeeded the turmoil of the storm.  Only the little belated clouds, which hurried past overhead to catch up the main body flashing silently in the distance, sent down short showers that pattered softly with a soothing hiss over the palm-leaf roof.

Lakamba roused himself from his apathy with an appearance of having grasped the situation at last.

“Babalatchi,” he called briskly, giving him a slight kick.

“Ada Tuan!  I am listening.”

“If the Orang Blanda come here, Babalatchi, and take Almayer to Batavia to punish him for smuggling gunpowder, what will he do, you think?”

“I do not know, Tuan.”

“You are a fool,” commented Lakamba, exultingly.  “He will tell them where the treasure is, so as to find mercy.  He will.”

Babalatchi looked up at his master and nodded his head with by no means a joyful surprise.  He had not thought of this; there was a new complication.

“Almayer must die,” said Lakamba, decisively, “to make our secret safe.  He must die quietly, Babalatchi.  You must do it.”

Babalatchi assented, and rose wearily to his feet.  “To-morrow?” he asked.

“Yes; before the Dutch come.  He drinks much coffee,” answered Lakamba, with seeming irrelevancy.

Babalatchi stretched himself yawning, but Lakamba, in the flattering consciousness of a knotty problem solved by his own unaided intellectual efforts, grew suddenly very wakeful.

“Babalatchi,” he said to the exhausted statesman, “fetch the box of music the white captain gave me.  I cannot sleep.”

At this order a deep shade of melancholy settled upon Babalatchi’s features.  He went reluctantly behind the curtain and soon reappeared carrying in his arms a small hand-organ, which he put down on the table with an air of deep dejection.  Lakamba settled himself comfortably in his arm-chair.

“Turn, Babalatchi, turn,” he murmured, with closed eyes.

Babalatchi’s hand grasped the handle with the energy of despair, and as he turned, the deep gloom on his countenance changed into an expression of hopeless resignation.  Through the open shutter the notes of Verdi’s music floated out on the great silence over the river and forest.  Lakamba listened with closed eyes and a delighted smile; Babalatchi turned, at times dozing off and swaying over, then catching himself up in a great fright with a few quick turns of the handle.  Nature slept in an exhausted repose after the fierce turmoil, while under the unsteady hand of the statesman of Sambir the Trovatore fitfully wept, wailed, and bade good-bye to his Leonore again and again in a mournful round of tearful and endless iteration.

CHAPTER VII.

The bright sunshine of the clear mistless morning, after the stormy night, flooded the main path of the settlement leading from the low shore of the Pantai branch of the river to the gate of Abdulla’s compound.  The path was deserted this morning; it stretched its dark yellow surface, hard beaten by the tramp of many bare feet, between the clusters of palm trees, whose tall trunks barred it with strong black lines at irregular intervals, while the newly risen sun threw the shadows of their leafy heads far away over the roofs of the buildings lining the river, even over the river itself as it flowed swiftly and silently past the deserted houses.  For the houses were deserted too.  On the narrow strip of trodden grass intervening between their open doors and the road, the morning fires smouldered untended, sending thin fluted columns of smoke into the cool air, and spreading the thinnest veil of mysterious blue haze over the sunlit solitude of the settlement.  Almayer, just out of his hammock, gazed sleepily at the unwonted appearance of Sambir, wondering vaguely at the absence of life.  His own house was very quiet; he could not hear his wife’s voice, nor the sound of Nina’s footsteps in the big room, opening on the verandah, which he called his sitting-room, whenever, in the company of white men, he wished to assert his claims to the commonplace decencies of civilisation.  Nobody ever sat there; there was nothing there to sit upon, for Mrs. Almayer in her savage moods, when excited by the reminiscences of the piratical period of her life, had torn off the curtains to make sarongs for the slave-girls, and had burnt the showy furniture piecemeal to cook the family rice.  But Almayer was not thinking of his furniture now.  He was thinking of Dain’s return, of Dain’s nocturnal interview with Lakamba, of its possible influence on his long-matured plans, now nearing the period of their execution.  He was also uneasy at the non-appearance of Dain who had promised him an early visit.  “The fellow had plenty of time to cross the river,” he mused, “and there was so much to be done to-day.  The settling of details for the early start on the morrow; the launching of the boats; the thousand and one finishing touches.  For the expedition must start complete, nothing should be forgotten, nothing should — ”

The sense of the unwonted solitude grew upon him suddenly, and in the unusual silence he caught himself longing even for the usually unwelcome sound of his wife’s voice to break the oppressive stillness which seemed, to his frightened fancy, to portend the advent of some new misfortune.  “What has happened?” he muttered half aloud, as he shuffled in his imperfectly adjusted slippers towards the balustrade of the verandah.  “Is everybody asleep or dead?”

The settlement was alive and very much awake.  It was awake ever since the early break of day, when Mahmat Banjer, in a fit of unheard-of energy, arose and, taking up his hatchet, stepped over the sleeping forms of his two wives and walked shivering to the water’s edge to make sure that the new house he was building had not floated away during the night.

The house was being built by the enterprising Mahmat on a large raft, and he had securely moored it just inside the muddy point of land at the junction of the two branches of the Pantai so as to be out of the way of drifting logs that would no doubt strand on the point during the freshet.  Mahmat walked through the wet grass saying bourrouh, and cursing softly to himself the hard necessities of active life that drove him from his warm couch into the cold of the morning.  A glance showed him that his house was still there, and he congratulated himself on his foresight in hauling it out of harm’s way, for the increasing light showed him a confused wrack of drift-logs, half-stranded on the muddy flat, interlocked into a shapeless raft by their branches, tossing to and fro and grinding together in the eddy caused by the meeting currents of the two branches of the river.  Mahmat walked down to the water’s edge to examine the rattan moorings of his house just as the sun cleared the trees of the forest on the opposite shore.  As he bent over the fastenings he glanced again carelessly at the unquiet jumble of logs and saw there something that caused him to drop his hatchet and stand up, shading his eyes with his hand from the rays of the rising sun.  It was something red, and the logs rolled over it, at times closing round it, sometimes hiding it.  It looked to him at first like a strip of red cloth.  The next moment Mahmat had made it out and raised a great shout.

“Ah ya!  There!” yelled Mahmat.  “There’s a man amongst the logs.”  He put the palms of his hand to his lips and shouted, enunciating distinctly, his face turned towards the settlement: “There’s a body of a man in the river!  Come and see!  A dead — stranger!”

The women of the nearest house were already outside kindling the fires and husking the morning rice.  They took up the cry shrilly, and it travelled so from house to house, dying away in the distance.  The men rushed out excited but silent, and ran towards the muddy point where the unconscious logs tossed and ground and bumped and rolled over the dead stranger with the stupid persistency of inanimate things.  The women followed, neglecting their domestic duties and disregarding the possibilities of domestic discontent, while groups of children brought up the rear, warbling joyously, in the delight of unexpected excitement.