The Rescue (28 page)

"No."

The futility of her question came home to Mrs. Travers. In a few hours
of life she had been torn away from all her certitudes, flung into
a world of improbabilities. This thought instead of augmenting her
distress seemed to soothe her. What she experienced was not doubt and
it was not fear. It was something else. It might have been only a great
fatigue.

She heard a dull detonation as if in the depth of the sea. It was hardly
more than a shock and a vibration. A roller had broken amongst the
shoals; the livid clearness Lingard had seen ahead flashed and flickered
in expanded white sheets much nearer to the boat now. And all this—the
wan burst of light, the faint shock as of something remote and immense
falling into ruins, was taking place outside the limits of her
life which remained encircled by an impenetrable darkness and by an
impenetrable silence. Puffs of wind blew about her head and expired;
the sail collapsed, shivered audibly, stood full and still in turn;
and again the sensation of vertiginous speed and of absolute immobility
succeeding each other with increasing swiftness merged at last into
a bizarre state of headlong motion and profound peace. The darkness
enfolded her like the enervating caress of a sombre universe. It was
gentle and destructive. Its languor seduced her soul into surrender.
Nothing existed and even all her memories vanished into space. She was
content that nothing should exist.

Lingard, aware all the time of their contact in the narrow stern sheets
of the boat, was startled by the pressure of the woman's head drooping
on his shoulder. He stiffened himself still more as though he had
tried on the approach of a danger to conceal his life in the breathless
rigidity of his body. The boat soared and descended slowly; a region
of foam and reefs stretched across her course hissing like a gigantic
cauldron; a strong gust of wind drove her straight at it for a moment
then passed on and abandoned her to the regular balancing of the swell.
The struggle of the rocks forever overwhelmed and emerging, with the sea
forever victorious and repulsed, fascinated the man. He watched it as he
would have watched something going on within himself while Mrs. Travers
slept sustained by his arm, pressed to his side, abandoned to his
support. The shoals guarding the Shore of Refuge had given him his first
glimpse of success—the solid support he needed for his action. The
Shallows were the shelter of his dreams; their voice had the power to
soothe and exalt his thoughts with the promise of freedom for his hopes.
Never had there been such a generous friendship. . . . A mass of white
foam whirling about a centre of intense blackness spun silently past the
side of the boat. . . . That woman he held like a captive on his arm had
also been given to him by the Shallows.

Suddenly his eyes caught on a distant sandbank the red gleam of Daman's
camp fire instantly eclipsed like the wink of a signalling lantern along
the level of the waters. It brought to his mind the existence of the two
men—those other captives. If the war canoe transporting them into the
lagoon had left the sands shortly after Hassim's retreat from Daman's
camp, Travers and d'Alcacer were by this time far away up the creek.
Every thought of action had become odious to Lingard since all he could
do in the world now was to hasten the moment of his separation from that
woman to whom he had confessed the whole secret of his life.

And she slept. She could sleep! He looked down at her as he would have
looked at the slumbering ignorance of a child, but the life within him
had the fierce beat of supreme moments. Near by, the eddies sighed along
the reefs, the water soughed amongst the stones, clung round the rocks
with tragic murmurs that resembled promises, good-byes, or prayers. From
the unfathomable distances of the night came the booming of the swell
assaulting the seaward face of the Shallows. He felt the woman's
nearness with such intensity that he heard nothing. . . . Then suddenly
he thought of death.

"Wake up!" he shouted in her ear, swinging round in his seat. Mrs.
Travers gasped; a splash of water flicked her over the eyes and she felt
the separate drops run down her cheeks, she tasted them on her lips,
tepid and bitter like tears. A swishing undulation tossed the boat on
high followed by another and still another; and then the boat with the
breeze abeam glided through still water, laying over at a steady angle.

"Clear of the reef now," remarked Lingard in a tone of relief.

"Were we in any danger?" asked Mrs. Travers in a whisper.

"Well, the breeze dropped and we drifted in very close to the rocks," he
answered. "I had to rouse you. It wouldn't have done for you to wake up
suddenly struggling in the water."

So she had slept! It seemed to her incredible that she should have
closed her eyes in this small boat, with the knowledge of their
desperate errand, on so disturbed a sea. The man by her side leaned
forward, extended his arm, and the boat going off before the wind went
on faster on an even keel. A motionless black bank resting on the sea
stretched infinitely right in their way in ominous stillness. She called
Lingard's attention to it. "Look at this awful cloud."

"This cloud is the coast and in a moment we shall be entering the
creek," he said, quietly. Mrs. Travers stared at it. Was it land—land!
It seemed to her even less palpable than a cloud, a mere sinister
immobility above the unrest of the sea, nursing in its depth the unrest
of men who, to her mind, were no more real than fantastic shadows.

What struck Mrs. Travers most, directly she set eyes on him, was the
other-world aspect of Jorgenson. He had been buried out of sight so long
that his tall, gaunt body, his unhurried, mechanical movements, his
set face and his eyes with an empty gaze suggested an invincible
indifference to all the possible surprises of the earth. That appearance
of a resuscitated man who seemed to be commanded by a conjuring spell
strolled along the decks of what was even to Mrs. Travers' eyes the mere
corpse of a ship and turned on her a pair of deep-sunk, expressionless
eyes with an almost unearthly detachment. Mrs. Travers had never been
looked at before with that strange and pregnant abstraction. Yet she
didn't dislike Jorgenson. In the early morning light, white from head to
foot in a perfectly clean suit of clothes which seemed hardly to contain
any limbs, freshly shaven (Jorgenson's sunken cheeks with their withered
colouring always had a sort of gloss as though he had the habit of
shaving every two hours or so), he looked as immaculate as though he
had been indeed a pure spirit superior to the soiling contacts of the
material earth. He was disturbing but he was not repulsive. He gave no
sign of greeting.

Lingard addressed him at once.

"You have had a regular staircase built up the side of the hulk,
Jorgenson," he said. "It was very convenient for us to come aboard now,
but in case of an attack don't you think . . ."

"I did think." There was nothing so dispassionate in the world as the
voice of Captain H. C. Jorgenson, ex Barque Wild Rose, since he had
recrossed the Waters of Oblivion to step back into the life of men. "I
did think, but since I don't want to make trouble. . . ."

"Oh, you don't want to make trouble," interrupted Lingard.

"No. Don't believe in it. Do you, King Tom?"

"I may have to make trouble."

"So you came up here in this small dinghy of yours like this to start
making trouble, did you?"

"What's the matter with you? Don't you know me yet, Jorgenson?"

"I thought I knew you. How could I tell that a man like you would come
along for a fight bringing a woman with him?"

"This lady is Mrs. Travers," said Lingard. "The wife of one of the
luckless gentlemen Daman got hold of last evening. . . . This is
Jorgenson, the friend of whom I have been telling you, Mrs. Travers."

Mrs. Travers smiled faintly. Her eyes roamed far and near and the
strangeness of her surroundings, the overpowering curiosity, the
conflict of interest and doubt gave her the aspect of one still new to
life, presenting an innocent and naive attitude before the surprises
of experience. She looked very guileless and youthful between those two
men. Lingard gazed at her with that unconscious tenderness mingled with
wonder, which some men manifest toward girlhood. There was nothing of
a conqueror of kingdoms in his bearing. Jorgenson preserved his
amazing abstraction which seemed neither to hear nor see anything. But,
evidently, he kept a mysterious grip on events in the world of living
men because he asked very naturally:

"How did she get away?"

"The lady wasn't on the sandbank," explained Lingard, curtly.

"What sandbank?" muttered Jorgenson, perfunctorily. . . . "Is the yacht
looted, Tom?"

"Nothing of the kind," said Lingard.

"Ah, many dead?" inquired Jorgenson.

"I tell you there was nothing of the kind," said Lingard, impatiently.

"What? No fight!" inquired Jorgenson again without the slightest sign of
animation.

"No."

"And you a fighting man."

"Listen to me, Jorgenson. Things turned out so that before the time came
for a fight it was already too late." He turned to Mrs. Travers still
looking about with anxious eyes and a faint smile on her lips. "While I
was talking to you that evening from the boat it was already too late.
No. There was never any time for it. I have told you all about myself,
Mrs. Travers, and you know that I speak the truth when I say too late.
If you had only been alone in that yacht going about the seas!"

"Yes," she struck in, "but I was not alone."

Lingard dropped his chin on his breast. Already a foretaste of noonday
heat staled the sparkling freshness of the morning. The smile had
vanished from Edith Travers' lips and her eyes rested on Lingard's bowed
head with an expression no longer curious but which might have appeared
enigmatic to Jorgenson if he had looked at her. But Jorgenson looked at
nothing. He asked from the remoteness of his dead past, "What have you
left outside, Tom? What is there now?"

"There's the yacht on the shoals, my brig at anchor, and about a hundred
of the worst kind of Illanun vagabonds under three chiefs and with two
war-praus moored to the edge of the bank. Maybe Daman is with them, too,
out there."

"No," said Jorgenson, positively.

"He has come in," cried Lingard. "He brought his prisoners in himself
then."

"Landed by torchlight," uttered precisely the shade of Captain
Jorgenson, late of the Barque Wild Rose. He swung his arm pointing
across the lagoon and Mrs. Travers turned about in that direction.

All the scene was but a great light and a great solitude. Her gaze
travelled over the lustrous, dark sheet of empty water to a shore
bordered by a white beach empty, too, and showing no sign of human life.
The human habitations were lost in the shade of the fruit trees, masked
by the cultivated patches of Indian corn and the banana plantations.
Near the shore the rigid lines of two stockaded forts could be
distinguished flanking the beach, and between them with a great open
space before it, the brown roof slope of an enormous long building that
seemed suspended in the air had a great square flag fluttering above it.
Something like a small white flame in the sky was the carved white coral
finial on the gable of the mosque which had caught full the rays of
the sun. A multitude of gay streamers, white and red, flew over the
half-concealed roofs, over the brilliant fields and amongst the sombre
palm groves. But it might have been a deserted settlement decorated and
abandoned by its departed population. Lingard pointed to the stockade on
the right.

"That's where your husband is," he said to Mrs. Travers.

"Who is the other?" uttered Jorgenson's voice at their backs. He also
was turned that way with his strange sightless gaze fixed beyond them
into the void.

"A Spanish gentleman I believe you said, Mrs Travers," observed Lingard.

"It is extremely difficult to believe that there is anybody there,"
murmured Mrs. Travers.

"Did you see them both, Jorgenson?" asked Lingard.

"Made out nobody. Too far. Too dark."

As a matter of fact Jorgenson had seen nothing, about an hour before
daybreak, but the distant glare of torches while the loud shouts of an
excited multitude had reached him across the water only like a faint
and tempestuous murmur. Presently the lights went away processionally
through the groves of trees into the armed stockades. The distant glare
vanished in the fading darkness and the murmurs of the invisible crowd
ceased suddenly as if carried off by the retreating shadow of the night.
Daylight followed swiftly, disclosing to the sleepless Jorgenson the
solitude of the shore and the ghostly outlines of the familiar forms of
grouped trees and scattered human habitations. He had watched the varied
colours come out in the dawn, the wide cultivated Settlement of
many shades of green, framed far away by the fine black lines of the
forest-edge that was its limit and its protection.

Mrs. Travers stood against the rail as motionless as a statue. Her face
had lost all its mobility and her cheeks were dead white as if all the
blood in her body had flowed back into her heart and had remained there.
Her very lips had lost their colour. Lingard caught hold of her arm
roughly.

"Don't, Mrs. Travers. Why are you terrifying yourself like this? If you
don't believe what I say listen to me asking Jorgenson. . . ."

"Yes, ask me," mumbled Jorgenson in his white moustache.

"Speak straight, Jorgenson. What do you think? Are the gentlemen alive?"

"Certainly," said Jorgenson in a sort of disappointed tone as though he
had expected a much more difficult question.

"Is their life in immediate danger?"

"Of course not," said Jorgenson.