Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (790 page)

The days which followed were not exactly such as Renouard had feared — yet they were not better than his fears.  They were accursed in all the moods they brought him.  But the general aspect of things was quiet.  The professor smoked innumerable pipes with the air of a worker on his holiday, always in movement and looking at things with that mysteriously sagacious aspect of men who are admittedly wiser than the rest of the world.  His white head of hair — whiter than anything within the horizon except the broken water on the reefs — was glimpsed in every part of the plantation always on the move under the white parasol.  And once he climbed the headland and appeared suddenly to those below, a white speck elevated in the blue, with a diminutive but statuesque effect.

Felicia Moorsom remained near the house.  Sometimes she could be seen with a despairing expression scribbling rapidly in her lock-up dairy.  But only for a moment.  At the sound of Renouard’s footsteps she would turn towards him her beautiful face, adorable in that calm which was like a wilful, like a cruel ignoring of her tremendous power.  Whenever she sat on the verandah, on a chair more specially reserved for her use, Renouard would stroll up and sit on the steps near her, mostly silent, and often not trusting himself to turn his glance on her.  She, very still with her eyes half-closed, looked down on his head — so that to a beholder (such as Professor Moorsom, for instance) she would appear to be turning over in her mind profound thoughts about that man sitting at her feet, his shoulders bowed a little, his hands listless — as if vanquished.  And, indeed, the moral poison of falsehood has such a decomposing power that Renouard felt his old personality turn to dead dust.  Often, in the evening, when they sat outside conversing languidly in the dark, he felt that he must rest his forehead on her feet and burst into tears.

The professor’s sister suffered from some little strain caused by the unstability of her own feelings toward Renouard.  She could not tell whether she really did dislike him or not.  At times he appeared to her most fascinating; and, though he generally ended by saying something shockingly crude, she could not resist her inclination to talk with him — at least not always.  One day when her niece had left them alone on the verandah she leaned forward in her chair — speckless, resplendent, and, in her way, almost as striking a personality as her niece, who did not resemble her in the least.  “Dear Felicia has inherited her hair and the greatest part of her appearance from her mother,” the maiden lady used to tell people.

She leaned forward then, confidentially.

“Oh!  Mr. Renouard!  Haven’t you something comforting to say?”

He looked up, as surprised as if a voice from heaven had spoken with this perfect society intonation, and by the puzzled profundity of his blue eyes fluttered the wax-flower of refined womanhood.  She continued.  “For — I can speak to you openly on this tiresome subject — only think what a terrible strain this hope deferred must be for Felicia’s heart — for her nerves.”

“Why speak to me about it,” he muttered feeling half choked suddenly.

“Why!  As a friend — a well-wisher — the kindest of hosts.  I am afraid we are really eating you out of house and home.”  She laughed a little.  “Ah!  When, when will this suspense be relieved!  That poor lost Arthur!  I confess that I am almost afraid of the great moment.  It will be like seeing a ghost.”

“Have you ever seen a ghost?” asked Renouard, in a dull voice.

She shifted her hands a little.  Her pose was perfect in its ease and middle-aged grace.

“Not actually.  Only in a photograph.  But we have many friends who had the experience of apparitions.”

“Ah!  They see ghosts in London,” mumbled Renouard, not looking at her.

“Frequently — in a certain very interesting set.  But all sorts of people do.  We have a friend, a very famous author — his ghost is a girl.  One of my brother’s intimates is a very great man of science.  He is friendly with a ghost . . . Of a girl too,” she added in a voice as if struck for the first time by the coincidence.  “It is the photograph of that apparition which I have seen.  Very sweet.  Most interesting.  A little cloudy naturally. . . . Mr. Renouard!  I hope you are not a sceptic.  It’s so consoling to think. . .”

“Those plantation boys of mine see ghosts too,” said Renouard grimly.

The sister of the philosopher sat up stiffly.  What crudeness!  It was always so with this strange young man.

“Mr. Renouard!  How can you compare the superstitious fancies of your horrible savages with the manifestations . . . “

Words failed her.  She broke off with a very faint primly angry smile.  She was perhaps the more offended with him because of that flutter at the beginning of the conversation.  And in a moment with perfect tact and dignity she got up from her chair and left him alone.

Renouard didn’t even look up.  It was not the displeasure of the lady which deprived him of his sleep that night.  He was beginning to forget what simple, honest sleep was like.  His hammock from the ship had been hung for him on a side verandah, and he spent his nights in it on his back, his hands folded on his chest, in a sort of half conscious, oppressed stupor.  In the morning he watched with unseeing eyes the headland come out a shapeless inkblot against the thin light of the false dawn, pass through all the stages of daybreak to the deep purple of its outlined mass nimbed gloriously with the gold of the rising sun.  He listened to the vague sounds of waking within the house: and suddenly he became aware of Luiz standing by the hammock — obviously troubled.

“What’s the matter?”

“Tse!  Tse!  Tse!”

“Well, what now?  Trouble with the boys?”

“No, master.  The gentleman when I take him his bath water he speak to me.  He ask me — he ask — when, when, I think Mr. Walter, he come back.”

The half-caste’s teeth chattered slightly.  Renouard got out of the hammock.

“And he is here all the time — eh?”

Luiz nodded a scared affirmative, but at once protested, “I no see him.  I never.  Not I!  The ignorant wild boys say they see . . . Something!  Ough!”

He clapped his teeth on another short rattle, and stood there, shrunk, blighted, like a man in a freezing blast.

“And what did you say to the gentleman?”

“I say I don’t know — and I clear out.  I — I don’t like to speak of him.”

“All right.  We shall try to lay that poor ghost,” said Renouard gloomily, going off to a small hut near by to dress.  He was saying to himself: “This fellow will end by giving me away.  The last thing that I . . . No!  That mustn’t be.”  And feeling his hand being forced he discovered the whole extent of his cowardice.

CHAPTER X

That morning wandering about his plantation, more like a frightened soul than its creator and master, he dodged the white parasol bobbing up here and there like a buoy adrift on a sea of dark-green plants.  The crop promised to be magnificent, and the fashionable philosopher of the age took other than a merely scientific interest in the experiment.  His investments were judicious, but he had always some little money lying by, for experiments.

After lunch, being left alone with Renouard, he talked a little of cultivation and such matters.  Then suddenly:

“By the way, is it true what my sister tells me, that your plantation boys have been disturbed by a ghost?”

Renouard, who since the ladies had left the table was not keeping such a strict watch on himself, came out of his abstraction with a start and a stiff smile.

“My foreman had some trouble with them during my absence.  They funk working in a certain field on the slope of the hill.”

“A ghost here!” exclaimed the amused professor.  “Then our whole conception of the psychology of ghosts must be revised.  This island has been uninhabited probably since the dawn of ages.  How did a ghost come here.  By air or water?  And why did it leave its native haunts.  Was it from misanthropy?  Was he expelled from some community of spirits?”

Renouard essayed to respond in the same tone.  The words died on his lips.  Was it a man or a woman ghost, the professor inquired.

“I don’t know.”  Renouard made an effort to appear at ease.  He had, he said, a couple of Tahitian amongst his boys — a ghost-ridden race.  They had started the scare.  They had probably brought their ghost with them.

“Let us investigate the matter, Renouard,” proposed the professor half in earnest.  “We may make some interesting discoveries as to the state of primitive minds, at any rate.”

This was too much.  Renouard jumped up and leaving the room went out and walked about in front of the house.  He would allow no one to force his hand.  Presently the professor joined him outside.  He carried his parasol, but had neither his book nor his pipe with him.  Amiably serious he laid his hand on his “dear young friend’s” arm.

“We are all of us a little strung up,” he said.  “For my part I have been like sister Anne in the story.  But I cannot see anything coming.  Anything that would be the least good for anybody — I mean.”

Renouard had recovered sufficiently to murmur coldly his regret of this waste of time.  For that was what, he supposed, the professor had in his mind.

“Time,” mused Professor Moorsom.  “I don’t know that time can be wasted.  But I will tell you, my dear friend, what this is: it is an awful waste of life.  I mean for all of us.  Even for my sister, who has got a headache and is gone to lie down.”

He shook gently Renouard’s arm.  “Yes, for all of us!  One may meditate on life endlessly, one may even have a poor opinion of it — but the fact remains that we have only one life to live.  And it is short.  Think of that, my young friend.”

He released Renouard’s arm and stepped out of the shade opening his parasol.  It was clear that there was something more in his mind than mere anxiety about the date of his lectures for fashionable audiences.  What did the man mean by his confounded platitudes?  To Renouard, scared by Luiz in the morning (for he felt that nothing could be more fatal than to have his deception unveiled otherwise than by personal confession), this talk sounded like encouragement or a warning from that man who seemed to him to be very brazen and very subtle.  It was like being bullied by the dead and cajoled by the living into a throw of dice for a supreme stake.

Renouard went away to some distance from the house and threw himself down in the shade of a tree.  He lay there perfectly still with his forehead resting on his folded arms, light-headed and thinking.  It seemed to him that he must be on fire, then that he had fallen into a cool whirlpool, a smooth funnel of water swirling about with nauseating rapidity.  And then (it must have been a reminiscence of his boyhood) he was walking on the dangerous thin ice of a river, unable to turn back. . . . Suddenly it parted from shore to shore with a loud crack like the report of a gun.

With one leap he found himself on his feet.  All was peace, stillness, sunshine.  He walked away from there slowly.  Had he been a gambler he would have perhaps been supported in a measure by the mere excitement.  But he was not a gambler.  He had always disdained that artificial manner of challenging the fates.  The bungalow came into view, bright and pretty, and all about everything was peace, stillness, sunshine. . . .

While he was plodding towards it he had a disagreeable sense of the dead man’s company at his elbow.  The ghost!  He seemed to be everywhere but in his grave.  Could one ever shake him off? he wondered.  At that moment Miss Moorsom came out on the verandah; and at once, as if by a mystery of radiating waves, she roused a great tumult in his heart, shook earth and sky together — but he plodded on.  Then like a grave song-note in the storm her voice came to him ominously.

“Ah!  Mr. Renouard. . . “  He came up and smiled, but she was very serious.  “I can’t keep still any longer.  Is there time to walk up this headland and back before dark?”

The shadows were lying lengthened on the ground; all was stillness and peace.  “No,” said Renouard, feeling suddenly as steady as a rock.  “But I can show you a view from the central hill which your father has not seen.  A view of reefs and of broken water without end, and of great wheeling clouds of sea-birds.”

She came down the verandah steps at once and they moved off.  “You go first,” he proposed, “and I’ll direct you.  To the left.”

She was wearing a short nankin skirt, a muslin blouse; he could see through the thin stuff the skin of her shoulders, of her arms.  The noble delicacy of her neck caused him a sort of transport.  “The path begins where these three palms are.  The only palms on the island.”

“I see.”

She never turned her head.  After a while she observed: “This path looks as if it had been made recently.”

“Quite recently,” he assented very low.

They went on climbing steadily without exchanging another word; and when they stood on the top she gazed a long time before her.  The low evening mist veiled the further limit of the reefs.  Above the enormous and melancholy confusion, as of a fleet of wrecked islands, the restless myriads of sea-birds rolled and unrolled dark ribbons on the sky, gathered in clouds, soared and stooped like a play of shadows, for they were too far for them to hear their cries.

Renouard broke the silence in low tones.

“They’ll be settling for the night presently.”  She made no sound.  Round them all was peace and declining sunshine.  Near by, the topmost pinnacle of Malata, resembling the top of a buried tower, rose a rock, weather-worn, grey, weary of watching the monotonous centuries of the Pacific.  Renouard leaned his shoulders against it.  Felicia Moorsom faced him suddenly, her splendid black eyes full on his face as though she had made up her mind at last to destroy his wits once and for all.  Dazzled, he lowered his eyelids slowly.

“Mr. Renouard!  There is something strange in all this.  Tell me where he is?”

He answered deliberately.

“On the other side of this rock.  I buried him there myself.”

She pressed her hands to her breast, struggled for her breath for a moment, then: “Ohhh! . . . You buried him! . . . What sort of man are you? . . . You dared not tell! . . . He is another of your victims? . . . You dared not confess that evening. . . . You must have killed him.  What could he have done to you? . . . You fastened on him some atrocious quarrel and . . .”