Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (567 page)

“Very well, and you are extraordinary, too. That’s understood — here we are both under that curse and having to face together whatever may turn up. But who on earth could have sent you this writing?”

“Who?” repeated Lingard. “Why, that young fellow that blundered on my brig in the dark, bringing a boatload of trouble alongside on that quiet night in Carimata Straits. The darkest night I have ever known. An accursed night.”

Mrs. Travers bit her lip, waited a little, then asked quietly:

“What difficulty has he got into now?”

“Difficulty!” cried Lingard. “He is immensely pleased with himself, the young fool. You know, when you sent him to talk to me that evening you left the yacht, he came with a loaded pistol in his pocket. And now he has gone and done it.”

“Done it?” repeated Mrs. Travers blankly. “Done what?”

She snatched from Lingard’s unresisting palm the sheet of paper. While she was smoothing it Lingard moved round and stood close at her elbow. She ran quickly over the first lines, then her eyes steadied. At the end she drew a quick breath and looked up at Lingard. Their faces had never been so close together before and Mrs. Travers had a surprising second of a perfectly new sensation. She looked away. — ”Do you understand what this news means?” he murmured. Mrs. Travers let her hand fall by her side. “Yes,” she said in a low tone. “The compact is broken.”

Carter had begun his letter without any preliminaries:

You cleared out in the middle of the night and took the lady away with you. You left me no proper orders. But as a sailorman I looked upon myself as left in charge of two ships while within half a mile on that sandbank there were more than a hundred piratical cut-throats watching me as closely as so many tigers about to leap. Days went by without a word of you or the lady. To leave the ships outside and go inland to look for you was not to be thought of with all those pirates within springing distance. Put yourself in my place. Can’t you imagine my anxiety, my sleepless nights? Each night worse than the night before. And still no word from you. I couldn’t sit still and worry my head off about things I couldn’t understand. I am a sailorman. My first duty was to the ships. I had to put an end to this impossible situation and I hope you will agree that I have done it in a seamanlike way. One misty morning I moved the brig nearer the sandbank and directly the mist cleared I opened fire on the praus of those savages which were anchored in the channel. We aimed wide at first to give those vagabonds that were on board a chance to clear out and join their friends camped on the sands. I didn’t want to kill people. Then we got the long gun to bear and in about an hour we had the bottom knocked out of the two praus. The savages on the bank howled and screamed at every shot. They are mighty angry but I don’t care for their anger now, for by sinking their praus I have made them as harmless as a flock of lambs. They needn’t starve on their sandbank because they have two or three dugouts hauled up on the sand and they may ferry themselves and their women to the mainland whenever they like.

I fancy I have acted as a seaman and as a seaman I intend to go on acting. Now I have made the ships safe I shall set about without loss of time trying to get the yacht off the mud. When that’s done I shall arm the boats and proceed inshore to look for you and the yacht’s gentry, and shan’t rest till I know whether any or all of you are above the earth yet.

I hope these words will reach you. Just as we had done the business of those praus the man you sent off that night in Carimata to stop our chief officer came sailing in from the west with our first gig in tow and the boat’s crew all well. Your serang tells me he is a most trustworthy messenger and that his name is Jaffir. He seems only too anxious to try to get to you as soon as possible. I repeat, ships and men have been made safe and I don’t mean to give you up dead or alive.

“You are quick in taking the point,” said Lingard in a dull voice, while Mrs. Travers, with the sheet of paper gripped in her hand, looked into his face with anxious eyes. “He has been smart and no mistake.”

“He didn’t know,” murmured Mrs. Travers.

“No, he didn’t know. But could I take everybody into my confidence?” protested Lingard in the same low tone. “And yet who else could I trust? It seemed to me that he must have understood without being told. But he is too young. He may well be proud according to his lights. He has done that job outside very smartly — damn his smartness! And here we are with all our lives depending on my word — which is broken now, Mrs. Travers. It is broken.”

Mrs. Travers nodded at him slightly.

“They would sooner have expected to see the sun and the moon fall out of the sky,” Lingard continued with repressed fire. Next moment it seemed to have gone out of him and Mrs. Travers heard him mutter a disconnected phrase. . . . “The world down about my ears.”

“What will you do?” she whispered.

“What will I do?” repeated Lingard, gently. “Oh, yes — do. Mrs. Travers, do you see that I am nothing now? Just nothing.”

He had lost himself in the contemplation of her face turned to him with an expression of awed curiosity. The shock of the world coming down about his ears in consequence of Carter’s smartness was so terrific that it had dulled his sensibilities in the manner of a great pain or of a great catastrophe. What was there to look at but that woman’s face, in a world which had lost its consistency, its shape, and its promises in a moment?

Mrs. Travers looked away. She understood that she had put to Lingard an impossible question. What was presenting itself to her as a problem was to that man a crisis of feeling. Obviously Carter’s action had broken the compact entered into with Daman, and she was intelligent enough to understand that it was the sort of thing that could not be explained away. It wasn’t horror that she felt, but a sort of consternation, something like the discomfiture of people who have just missed their train. It was only more intense. The real dismay had yet to make its way into her comprehension. To Lingard it was a blow struck straight at his heart.

He was not angry with Carter. The fellow had acted like a seaman. Carter’s concern was for the ships. In this fatality Carter was a mere incident. The real cause of the disaster was somewhere else, was other, and more remote. And at the same time Lingard could not defend himself from a feeling that it was in himself, too, somewhere in the unexplored depths of his nature, something fatal and unavoidable. He muttered to himself:

“No. I am not a lucky man.”

This was but a feeble expression of the discovery of the truth that suddenly had come home to him as if driven into his breast by a revealing power which had decided that this was to be the end of his fling. But he was not the man to give himself up to the examination of his own sensations. His natural impulse was to grapple with the circumstances and that was what he was trying to do; but he missed now that sense of mastery which is half the battle. Conflict of some sort was the very essence of his life. But this was something he had never known before. This was a conflict within himself. He had to face unsuspected powers, foes that he could not go out to meet at the gate. They were within, as though he had been betrayed by somebody, by some secret enemy. He was ready to look round for that subtle traitor. A sort of blankness fell on his mind and he suddenly thought: “Why! It’s myself.”

Immediately afterward he had a clear, merciless recollection of Hassim and Immada. He saw them far off beyond the forests. Oh, yes, they existed — within his breast!

“That was a night!” he muttered, looking straight at Mrs. Travers. He had been looking at her all the time. His glance had held her under a spell, but for a whole interminable minute he had not been aware of her at all. At the murmur of his words she made a slight movement and he saw her again. — ”What night?” she whispered, timidly, like an intruder. She was astonished to see him smile. — ”Not like this one,” he said. “You made me notice how quiet and still it was. Yes. Listen how still it is.”

Both moved their heads slightly and seemed to lend an ear. There was not a murmur, sigh, rustle, splash, or footfall. No whispers, no tremors, not a sound of any kind. They might have been alone on board the Emma, abandoned even by the ghost of Captain Jorgenson departed to rejoin the Barque Wild Rose on the shore of the Cimmerian sea. — ”It’s like the stillness of the end,” said Mrs. Travers in a low, equable voice. — ”Yes, but that, too, is false,” said Lingard in the same tone. — ”I don’t understand,” Mrs. Travers began, hurriedly, after a short silence. “But don’t use that word. Don’t use it, King Tom! It frightens me by its mere sound.”

Lingard made no sign. His thoughts were back with Hassim and Immada. The young chief and his sister had gone up country on a voluntary mission to persuade Belarab to return to his stockade and to take up again the direction of affairs. They carried urgent messages from Lingard, who for Belarab was the very embodiment of truth and force, that unquestioned force which had permitted Belarab to indulge in all his melancholy hesitations. But those two young people had also some personal prestige. They were Lingard’s heart’s friends. They were like his children. But beside that, their high birth, their warlike story, their wanderings, adventures, and prospects had given them a glamour of their own.

V

The very day that Travers and d’Alcacer had come on board the Emma Hassim and Immada had departed on their mission; for Lingard, of course, could not think of leaving the white people alone with Jorgenson. Jorgenson was all right, but his ineradicable habit of muttering in his moustache about “throwing a lighted match amongst the powder barrels” had inspired Lingard with a certain amount of mistrust. And, moreover, he did not want to go away from Mrs. Travers.

It was the only correct inspiration on Carter’s part to send Jaffir with his report to Lingard. That stout-hearted fighter, swimmer, and devoted follower of the princely misfortunes of Hassim and Immada, had looked upon his mission to catch the chief officer of the yacht (which he had received from Lingard in Carimata) as a trifling job. It took him a little longer than he expected but he had got back to the brig just in time to be sent on to Lingard with Carter’s letter after a couple of hours’ rest. He had the story of all the happenings from Wasub before he left and though his face preserved its grave impassivity, in his heart he did not like it at all.

Fearless and wily, Jaffir was the man for difficult missions and a born messenger — as he expressed it himself — ”to bear weighty words between great men.” With his unfailing memory he was able to reproduce them exactly, whether soft or hard, in council or in private; for he knew no fear. With him there was no need for writing which might fall into the hands of the enemy. If he died on the way the message would die with him. He had also the gift of getting at the sense of any situation and an observant eye. He was distinctly one of those men from whom trustworthy information can be obtained by the leaders of great enterprises. Lingard did put several questions to him, but in this instance, of course, Jaffir could have only very little to say. Of Carter, whom he called the “young one,” he said that he looked as white men look when they are pleased with themselves; then added without waiting for a definite question — ”The ships out there are now safe enough, O, Rajah Laut!” There was no elation in his tone.

Lingard looked at him blankly. When the Greatest of White Men remarked that there was yet a price to be paid for that safety, Jaffir assented by a “Yes, by Allah!” without losing for a moment his grim composure. When told that he would be required to go and find his master and the lady Immada who were somewhere in the back country, in Belarab’s travelling camp, he declared himself ready to proceed at once. He had eaten his fill and had slept three hours on board the brig and he was not tired. When he was young he used to get tired sometimes; but for many years now he had known no such weakness. He did not require the boat with paddlers in which he had come up into the lagoon. He would go alone in a small canoe. This was no time, he remarked, for publicity and ostentation. His pent-up anxiety burst through his lips. “It is in my mind, Tuan, that death has not been so near them since that night when you came sailing in a black cloud and took us all out of the stockade.”

Lingard said nothing but there was in Jaffir a faith in that white man which was not easily shaken.

“How are you going to save them this time, O Rajah Laut?” he asked, simply.

“Belarab is my friend,” murmured Lingard.

In his anxiety Jaffir was very outspoken. “A man of peace!” he exclaimed in a low tone. “Who could be safe with a man like that?” he asked, contemptuously.

“There is no war,” said Lingard

“There is suspicion, dread, and revenge, and the anger of armed men,” retorted Jaffir. “You have taken the white prisoners out of their hands by the force of your words alone. Is that so, Tuan?”

“Yes,” said Lingard.

“And you have them on board here?” asked Jaffir, with a glance over his shoulder at the white and misty structure within which by the light of a small oil flame d’Alcacer and Mrs. Travers were just then conversing.

“Yes, I have them here.”

“Then, Rajah Laut,” whispered Jaffir, “you can make all safe by giving them back.”

“Can I do that?” were the words breathed out through Lingard’s lips to the faithful follower of Hassim and Immada.

“Can you do anything else?” was the whispered retort of Jaffir the messenger accustomed to speak frankly to the great of the earth. “You are a white man and you can have only one word. And now I go.”

A small, rough dug-out belonging to the Emma had been brought round to the ladder. A shadowy calash hovering respectfully in the darkness of the deck had already cleared his throat twice in a warning manner.

“Yes, Jaffir, go,” said Lingard, “and be my friend.”

“I am the friend of a great prince,” said the other, sturdily. “But you, Rajah Laut, were even greater. And great you will remain while you are with us, people of this sea and of this land. But what becomes of the strength of your arms before your own white people? Where does it go to, I say? Well, then, we must trust in the strength of your heart.”