Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (775 page)

“Why, is his face hurt?” asked the astounded old Nelson.  The truth dawned suddenly upon his innocent mind.  “Dear me!” he cried, enlightened.  “Get some brandy, quick, Freya. . . . You are subject to it, lieutenant?  Fiendish, eh?  I know, I know!  Used to go crazy all of a sudden myself in the time. . . . And the little bottle of laudanum from the medicine-chest, too, Freya.  Look sharp. . . . Don’t you see he’s got a toothache?”

And, indeed, what other explanation could have presented itself to the guileless old Nelson, beholding this cheek nursed with both hands, these wild glances, these stampings, this distracted swaying of the body?  It would have demanded a preternatural acuteness to hit upon the true cause.  Freya had not moved.  She watched Heemskirk’s savagely inquiring, black stare directed stealthily upon herself.  “Aha, you would like to be let off!” she said to herself.  She looked at him unflinchingly, thinking it out.  The temptation of making an end of it all without further trouble was irresistible.  She gave an almost imperceptible nod of assent, and glided away.

“Hurry up that brandy!” old Nelson shouted, as she disappeared in the passage.

Heemskirk relieved his deeper feelings by a sudden string of curses in Dutch and English which he sent after her.  He raved to his heart’s content, flinging to and fro the verandah and kicking chairs out of his way; while Nelson (or Nielsen), whose sympathy was profoundly stirred by these evidences of agonising pain, hovered round his dear (and dreaded) lieutenant, fussing like an old hen.

“Dear me, dear me!  Is it so bad?  I know well what it is.  I used to frighten my poor wife sometimes.  Do you get it often like this, lieutenant?”

Heemskirk shouldered him viciously out of his way, with a short, insane laugh.  But his staggering host took it in good part; a man beside himself with excruciating toothache is not responsible.

“Go into my room, lieutenant,” he suggested urgently.  “Throw yourself on my bed.  We will get something to ease you in a minute.”

He seized the poor sufferer by the arm and forced him gently onwards to the very bed, on which Heemskirk, in a renewed access of rage, flung himself down with such force that he rebounded from the mattress to the height of quite a foot.

“Dear me!” exclaimed the scared Nelson, and incontinently ran off to hurry up the brandy and the laudanum, very angry that so little alacrity was shown in relieving the tortures of his precious guest.  In the end he got these things himself.

Half an hour later he stood in the inner passage of the house, surprised by faint, spasmodic sounds of a mysterious nature, between laughter and sobs.  He frowned; then went straight towards his daughter’s room and knocked at the door.

Freya, her glorious fair hair framing her white face and rippling down a dark-blue dressing-gown, opened it partly.

The light in the room was dim.  Antonia, crouching in a corner, rocked herself backwards and forwards, uttering feeble moans.  Old Nelson had not much experience in various kinds of feminine laughter, but he was certain there had been laughter there.

“Very unfeeling, very unfeeling!” he said, with weighty displeasure.  “What is there so amusing in a man being in pain?  I should have thought a woman — a young girl — ”

“He was so funny,” murmured Freya, whose eyes glistened strangely in the semi-obscurity of the passage.  “And then, you know, I don’t like him,” she added, in an unsteady voice.

“Funny!” repeated old Nelson, amazed at this evidence of callousness in one so young.  “You don’t like him!  Do you mean to say that, because you don’t like him, you — Why, it’s simply cruel!  Don’t you know it’s about the worst sort of pain there is?  Dogs have been known to go mad with it.”

“He certainly seemed to have gone mad,” Freya said with an effort, as if she were struggling with some hidden feeling.

But her father was launched.

“And you know how he is.  He notices everything.  He is a fellow to take offence for the least little thing — regular Dutchman — and I want to keep friendly with him.  It’s like this, my girl: if that rajah of ours were to do something silly — and you know he is a sulky, rebellious beggar — and the authorities took into their heads that my influence over him wasn’t good, you would find yourself without a roof over your head — ”

She cried: “What nonsense, father!” in a not very assured tone, and discovered that he was angry, angry enough to achieve irony; yes, old Nelson (or Nielsen), irony!  Just a gleam of it.

“Oh, of course, if you have means of your own — a mansion, a plantation that I know nothing of — ”  But he was not capable of sustained irony.  “I tell you they would bundle me out of here,” he whispered forcibly; “without compensation, of course.  I know these Dutch.  And the lieutenant’s just the fellow to start the trouble going.  He has the ear of influential officials.  I wouldn’t offend him for anything — for anything — on no consideration whatever. . . . What did you say?”

It was only an inarticulate exclamation.  If she ever had a half-formed intention of telling him everything she had given it up now.  It was impossible, both out of regard for his dignity and for the peace of his poor mind.

“I don’t care for him myself very much,” old Nelson’s subdued undertone confessed in a sigh.  “He’s easier now,” he went on, after a silence.  “I’ve given him up my bed for the night.  I shall sleep on my verandah, in the hammock.  No; I can’t say I like him either, but from that to laugh at a man because he’s driven crazy with pain is a long way.  You’ve surprised me, Freya.  That side of his face is quite flushed.”

Her shoulders shook convulsively under his hands, which he laid on her paternally.  His straggly, wiry moustache brushed her forehead in a good-night kiss.  She closed the door, and went away from it to the middle of the room before she allowed herself a tired-out sort of laugh, without buoyancy.

“Flushed!  A little flushed!” she repeated to herself.  “I hope so, indeed!  A little — ”

Her eyelashes were wet.  Antonia, in her corner, moaned and giggled, and it was impossible to tell where the moans ended and the giggles began.

The mistress and the maid had been somewhat hysterical, for Freya, on fleeing into her room, had found Antonia there, and had told her everything.

“I have avenged you, my girl,” she exclaimed.

And then they had laughingly cried and cryingly laughed with admonitions — ”Ssh, not so loud!  Be quiet!” on one part, and interludes of “I am so frightened. . . . He’s an evil man,” on the other.

Antonia was very much afraid of Heemskirk.  She was afraid of him because of his personal appearance: because of his eyes and his eyebrows, and his mouth and his nose and his limbs.  Nothing could be more rational.  And she thought him an evil man, because, to her eyes, he looked evil.  No ground for an opinion could be sounder.  In the dimness of the room, with only a nightlight burning at the head of Freya’s bed, the camerista crept out of her corner to crouch at the feet of her mistress, supplicating in whispers:

“There’s the brig.  Captain Allen.  Let us run away at once — oh, let us run away!  I am so frightened.  Let us!  Let us!”

“I!  Run away!” thought Freya to herself, without looking down at the scared girl.  “Never.”

Both the resolute mistress under the mosquito-net and the frightened maid lying curled up on a mat at the foot of the bed did not sleep very well that night.  The person that did not sleep at all was Lieutenant Heemskirk.  He lay on his back staring vindictively in the darkness.  Inflaming images and humiliating reflections succeeded each other in his mind, keeping up, augmenting his anger.  A pretty tale this to get about!  But it must not be allowed to get about.  The outrage had to be swallowed in silence.  A pretty affair!  Fooled, led on, and struck by the girl — and probably fooled by the father, too.  But no.  Nielsen was but another victim of that shameless hussy, that brazen minx, that sly, laughing, kissing, lying . . .

“No; he did not deceive me on purpose,” thought the tormented lieutenant.  “But I should like to pay him off, all the same, for being such an imbecile — ”

Well, some day, perhaps.  One thing he was firmly resolved on: he had made up his mind to steal early out of the house.  He did not think he could face the girl without going out of his mind with fury.

“Fire and perdition!  Ten thousand devils!  I shall choke here before the morning!” he muttered to himself, lying rigid on his back on old Nelson’s bed, his breast heaving for air.

He arose at daylight and started cautiously to open the door.  Faint sounds in the passage alarmed him, and remaining concealed he saw Freya coming out.  This unexpected sight deprived him of all power to move away from the crack of the door.  It was the narrowest crack possible, but commanding the view of the end of the verandah.  Freya made for that end hastily to watch the brig passing the point.  She wore her dark dressing-gown; her feet were bare, because, having fallen asleep towards the morning, she ran out headlong in her fear of being too late.  Heemskirk had never seen her looking like this, with her hair drawn back smoothly to the shape of her head, and hanging in one heavy, fair tress down her back, and with that air of extreme youth, intensity, and eagerness.  And at first he was amazed, and then he gnashed his teeth.  He could not face her at all.  He muttered a curse, and kept still behind the door.

With a low, deep-breathed “Ah!” when she first saw the brig already under way, she reached for Nelson’s long glass reposing on brackets high up the wall.  The wide sleeve of the dressing-gown slipped back, uncovering her white arm as far as the shoulder.  Heemskirk gripping the door-handle, as if to crush it, felt like a man just risen to his feet from a drinking bout.

And Freya knew that he was watching her.  She knew.  She had seen the door move as she came out of the passage.  She was aware of his eyes being on her, with scornful bitterness, with triumphant contempt.

“You are there,” she thought, levelling the long glass.  “Oh, well, look on, then!”

The green islets appeared like black shadows, the ashen sea was smooth as glass, the clear robe of the colourless dawn, in which even the brig appeared shadowy, had a hem of light in the east.  Directly Freya had made out Jasper on deck, with his own long glass directed to the bungalow, she laid hers down and raised both her beautiful white arms above her head.  In that attitude of supreme cry she stood still, glowing with the consciousness of Jasper’s adoration going out to her figure held in the field of his glass away there, and warmed, too, by the feeling of evil passion, the burning, covetous eyes of the other, fastened on her back.  In the fervour of her love, in the caprice of her mind, and with that mysterious knowledge of masculine nature women seem to be born to, she thought:

“You are looking on — you will — you must!  Then you shall see something.”

She brought both her hands to her lips, then flung them out, sending a kiss over the sea, as if she wanted to throw her heart along with it on the deck of the brig.  Her face was rosy, her eyes shone.  Her repeated, passionate gesture seemed to fling kisses by the hundred again and again and again, while the slowly ascending sun brought the glory of colour to the world, turning the islets green, the sea blue, the brig below her white — dazzlingly white in the spread of her wings — with the red ensign streaming like a tiny flame from the peak.

And each time she murmured with a rising inflexion:

“Take this — and this — and this — ” till suddenly her arms fell.  She had seen the ensign dipped in response, and next moment the point below hid the hull of the brig from her view.  Then she turned away from the balustrade, and, passing slowly before the door of her father’s room with her eyelids lowered, and an enigmatic expression on her face, she disappeared behind the curtain.

But instead of going along the passage, she remained concealed and very still on the other side to watch what would happen.  For some time the broad, furnished verandah remained empty.  Then the door of old Nelson’s room came open suddenly, and Heemskirk staggered out.  His hair was rumpled, his eyes bloodshot, his unshaven face looked very dark.  He gazed wildly about, saw his cap on a table, snatched it up, and made for the stairs quietly, but with a strange, tottering gait, like the last effort of waning strength.

Shortly after his head had sunk below the level of the floor, Freya came out from behind the curtain, with compressed, scheming lips, and no softness at all in her luminous eyes.  He could not be allowed to sneak off scot free.  Never — never!  She was excited, she tingled all over, she had tasted blood!  He must be made to understand that she had been aware of having been watched; he must know that he had been seen slinking off shamefully.  But to run to the front rail and shout after him would have been childish, crude — undignified.  And to shout — what?  What word?  What phrase?  No; it was impossible.  Then how? . . . She frowned, discovered it, dashed at the piano, which had stood open all night, and made the rosewood monster growl savagery in an irritated bass.  She struck chords as if firing shots after that straddling, broad figure in ample white trousers and a dark uniform jacket with gold shoulder-straps, and then she pursued him with the same thing she had played the evening before — a modern, fierce piece of love music which had been tried more than once against the thunderstorms of the group.  She accentuated its rhythm with triumphant malice, so absorbed in her purpose that she did not notice the presence of her father, who, wearing an old threadbare ulster of a check pattern over his sleeping suit, had run out from the back verandah to inquire the reason of this untimely performance.  He stared at her.

“What on earth? . . . Freya!”  His voice was nearly drowned by the piano.  “What’s become of the lieutenant?” he shouted.

She looked up at him as if her soul were lost in her music, with unseeing eyes.

“Gone.”

“Wha-a-t? . . . Where?”

She shook her head slightly, and went on playing louder than before.  Old Nelson’s innocently anxious gaze starting from the open door of his room, explored the whole place high and low, as if the lieutenant were something small which might have been crawling on the floor or clinging to a wall.  But a shrill whistle coming somewhere from below pierced the ample volume of sound rolling out of the piano in great, vibrating waves.  The lieutenant was down at the cove, whistling for the boat to come and take him off to his ship.  And he seemed to be in a terrific hurry, too, for he whistled again almost directly, waited for a moment, and then sent out a long, interminable, shrill call as distressful to hear as though he had shrieked without drawing breath.  Freya ceased playing suddenly.