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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Tales of Unrest, by Joseph Conrad
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Tales of Unrest
+
+Author: Joseph Conrad
+
+Release Date: January 9, 2006 [EBook #1202]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TALES OF UNREST ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Judy Boss and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+TALES OF UNREST
+
+By Joseph Conrad
+
+
+
+“Be it thy course to being giddy minds With foreign quarrels.”
+ --SHAKESPEARE
+
+
+
+TO ADOLF P. KRIEGER FOR THE SAKE OF OLD DAYS
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+KARAIN: A MEMORY
+
+THE IDIOTS
+
+AN OUTPOST OF PROGRESS
+
+THE RETURN
+
+THE LAGOON
+
+
+
+
+AUTHOR’S NOTE
+
+Of the five stories in this volume, “The Lagoon,” the last in order,
+is the earliest in date. It is the first short story I ever wrote and
+marks, in a manner of speaking, the end of my first phase, the Malayan
+phase with its special subject and its verbal suggestions. Conceived in
+the same mood which produced “Almayer’s Folly” and “An Outcast of the
+Islands,” it is told in the same breath (with what was left of it, that
+is, after the end of “An Outcast”), seen with the same vision, rendered
+in the same method--if such a thing as method did exist then in my
+conscious relation to this new adventure of writing for print. I
+doubt it very much. One does one’s work first and theorises about it
+afterwards. It is a very amusing and egotistical occupation of no
+use whatever to any one and just as likely as not to lead to false
+conclusions.
+
+Anybody can see that between the last paragraph of “An Outcast” and
+the first of “The Lagoon” there has been no change of pen, figuratively
+speaking. It happened also to be literally true. It was the same pen: a
+common steel pen. Having been charged with a certain lack of emotional
+faculty I am glad to be able to say that on one occasion at least I did
+give way to a sentimental impulse. I thought the pen had been a good pen
+and that it had done enough for me, and so, with the idea of keeping it
+for a sort of memento on which I could look later with tender eyes, I
+put it into my waistcoat pocket. Afterwards it used to turn up in all
+sorts of places--at the bottom of small drawers, among my studs in
+cardboard boxes--till at last it found permanent rest in a large wooden
+bowl containing some loose keys, bits of sealing wax, bits of string,
+small broken chains, a few buttons, and similar minute wreckage that
+washes out of a man’s life into such receptacles. I would catch sight of
+it from time to time with a distinct feeling of satisfaction till, one
+day, I perceived with horror that there were two old pens in there. How
+the other pen found its way into the bowl instead of the fireplace or
+wastepaper basket I can’t imagine, but there the two were, lying side by
+side, both encrusted with ink and completely undistinguishable from each
+other. It was very distressing, but being determined not to share my
+sentiment between two pens or run the risk of sentimentalising over
+a mere stranger, I threw them both out of the window into a flower
+bed--which strikes me now as a poetical grave for the remnants of one’s
+past.
+
+But the tale remained. It was first fixed in print in the “Cornhill
+Magazine”, being my first appearance in a serial of any kind; and I have
+lived long enough to see it guyed most agreeably by Mr. Max Beerbohm
+in a volume of parodies entitled “A Christmas Garland,” where I found
+myself in very good company. I was immensely gratified. I began to
+believe in my public existence. I have much to thank “The Lagoon” for.
+
+My next effort in short-story writing was a departure--I mean a
+departure from the Malay Archipelago. Without premeditation, without
+sorrow, without rejoicing, and almost without noticing it, I stepped
+into the very different atmosphere of “An Outpost of Progress.” I
+found there a different moral attitude. I seemed able to capture new
+reactions, new suggestions, and even new rhythms for my paragraphs. For
+a moment I fancied myself a new man--a most exciting illusion. It clung
+to me for some time, monstrous, half conviction and half hope as to its
+body, with an iridescent tail of dreams and with a changeable head like
+a plastic mask. It was only later that I perceived that in common with
+the rest of men nothing could deliver me from my fatal consistency. We
+cannot escape from ourselves.
+
+“An Outpost of Progress” is the lightest part of the loot I carried
+off from Central Africa, the main portion being of course “The Heart of
+Darkness.” Other men have found a lot of quite different things there
+and I have the comfortable conviction that what I took would not have
+been of much use to anybody else. And it must be said that it was but
+a very small amount of plunder. All of it could go into one’s breast
+pocket when folded neatly. As for the story itself it is true enough in
+its essentials. The sustained invention of a really telling lie demands
+a talent which I do not possess.
+
+“The Idiots” is such an obviously derivative piece of work that it is
+impossible for me to say anything about it here. The suggestion of it
+was not mental but visual: the actual idiots. It was after an interval
+of long groping amongst vague impulses and hesitations which ended in
+the production of “The Nigger” that I turned to my third short story in
+the order of time, the first in this volume: “Karain: A Memory.”
+
+Reading it after many years “Karain” produced on me the effect of
+something seen through a pair of glasses from a rather advantageous
+position. In that story I had not gone back to the Archipelago, I had
+only turned for another look at it. I admit that I was absorbed by the
+distant view, so absorbed that I didn’t notice then that the motif of
+the story is almost identical with the motif of “The Lagoon.” However,
+the idea at the back is very different; but the story is mainly made
+memorable to me by the fact that it was my first contribution to
+“Blackwood’s Magazine” and that it led to my personal acquaintance with
+Mr. William Blackwood whose guarded appreciation I felt nevertheless
+to be genuine, and prized accordingly. “Karain” was begun on a sudden
+impulse only three days after I wrote the last line of “The Nigger,” and
+the recollection of its difficulties is mixed up with the worries of
+the unfinished “Return,” the last pages of which I took up again at the
+time; the only instance in my life when I made an attempt to write with
+both hands at once as it were.
+
+Indeed my innermost feeling, now, is that “The Return” is a left-handed
+production. Looking through that story lately I had the material
+impression of sitting under a large and expensive umbrella in the loud
+drumming of a heavy rain-shower. It was very distracting. In the general
+uproar one could hear every individual drop strike on the stout and
+distended silk. Mentally, the reading rendered me dumb for the remainder
+of the day, not exactly with astonishment but with a sort of dismal
+wonder. I don’t want to talk disrespectfully of any pages of mine.
+Psychologically there were no doubt good reasons for my attempt; and it
+was worth while, if only to see of what excesses I was capable in that
+sort of virtuosity. In this connection I should like to confess my
+surprise on finding that notwithstanding all its apparatus of
+analysis the story consists for the most part of physical impressions;
+impressions of sound and sight, railway station, streets, a trotting
+horse, reflections in mirrors and so on, rendered as if for their
+own sake and combined with a sublimated description of a desirable
+middle-class town-residence which somehow manages to produce a sinister
+effect. For the rest any kind word about “The Return” (and there have
+been such words said at different times) awakens in me the liveliest
+gratitude, for I know how much the writing of that fantasy has cost me
+in sheer toil, in temper, and in disillusion.
+
+J. C.
+
+
+
+
+
+TALES OF UNREST
+
+
+
+
+KARAIN, A MEMORY
+
+
+I
+
+We knew him in those unprotected days when we were content to hold in
+our hands our lives and our property. None of us, I believe, has any
+property now, and I hear that many, negligently, have lost their lives;
+but I am sure that the few who survive are not yet so dim-eyed as to
+miss in the befogged respectability of their newspapers the intelligence
+of various native risings in the Eastern Archipelago. Sunshine gleams
+between the lines of those short paragraphs--sunshine and the glitter of
+the sea. A strange name wakes up memories; the printed words scent the
+smoky atmosphere of to-day faintly, with the subtle and penetrating
+perfume as of land breezes breathing through the starlight of bygone
+nights; a signal fire gleams like a jewel on the high brow of a sombre
+cliff; great trees, the advanced sentries of immense forests, stand
+watchful and still over sleeping stretches of open water; a line of
+white surf thunders on an empty beach, the shallow water foams on the
+reefs; and green islets scattered through the calm of noonday lie upon
+the level of a polished sea, like a handful of emeralds on a buckler of
+steel.
+
+There are faces too--faces dark, truculent, and smiling; the frank
+audacious faces of men barefooted, well armed and noiseless. They
+thronged the narrow length of our schooner’s decks with their ornamented
+and barbarous crowd, with the variegated colours of checkered sarongs,
+red turbans, white jackets, embroideries; with the gleam of scabbards,
+gold rings, charms, armlets, lance blades, and jewelled handles of their
+weapons. They had an independent bearing, resolute eyes, a restrained
+manner; and we seem yet to hear their soft voices speaking of battles,
+travels, and escapes; boasting with composure, joking quietly; sometimes
+in well-bred murmurs extolling their own valour, our generosity;
+or celebrating with loyal enthusiasm the virtues of their ruler. We
+remember the faces, the eyes, the voices, we see again the gleam of silk
+and metal; the murmuring stir of that crowd, brilliant, festive, and
+martial; and we seem to feel the touch of friendly brown hands that,
+after one short grasp, return to rest on a chased hilt. They were
+Karain’s people--a devoted following. Their movements hung on his lips;
+they read their thoughts in his eyes; he murmured to them nonchalantly
+of life and death, and they accepted his words humbly, like gifts of
+fate. They were all free men, and when speaking to him said, “Your
+slave.” On his passage voices died out as though he had walked guarded
+by silence; awed whispers followed him. They called him their war-chief.
+He was the ruler of three villages on a narrow plain; the master of
+an insignificant foothold on the earth--of a conquered foothold that,
+shaped like a young moon, lay ignored between the hills and the sea.
+
+From the deck of our schooner, anchored in the middle of the bay, he
+indicated by a theatrical sweep of his arm along the jagged outline
+of the hills the whole of his domain; and the ample movement seemed to
+drive back its limits, augmenting it suddenly into something so immense
+and vague that for a moment it appeared to be bounded only by the sky.
+And really, looking at that place, landlocked from the sea and shut off
+from the land by the precipitous slopes of mountains, it was difficult
+to believe in the existence of any neighbourhood. It was still,
+complete, unknown, and full of a life that went on stealthily with a
+troubling effect of solitude; of a life that seemed unaccountably empty
+of anything that would stir the thought, touch the heart, give a hint of
+the ominous sequence of days. It appeared to us a land without memories,
+regrets, and hopes; a land where nothing could survive the coming of the
+night, and where each sunrise, like a dazzling act of special creation,
+was disconnected from the eve and the morrow.
+
+Karain swept his hand over it. “All mine!” He struck the deck with his
+long staff; the gold head flashed like a falling star; very close behind
+him a silent old fellow in a richly embroidered black jacket alone of
+all the Malays around did not follow the masterful gesture with a look.
+He did not even lift his eyelids. He bowed his head behind his master,
+and without stirring held hilt up over his right shoulder a long blade
+in a silver scabbard. He was there on duty, but without curiosity, and
+seemed weary, not with age, but with the possession of a burdensome
+secret of existence. Karain, heavy and proud, had a lofty pose and
+breathed calmly. It was our first visit, and we looked about curiously.
+
+The bay was like a bottomless pit of intense light. The circular sheet
+of water reflected a luminous sky, and the shores enclosing it made an
+opaque ring of earth floating in an emptiness of transparent blue. The
+hills, purple and arid, stood out heavily on the sky: their summits
+seemed to fade into a coloured tremble as of ascending vapour; their
+steep sides were streaked with the green of narrow ravines; at their
+foot lay rice-fields, plantain-patches, yellow sands. A torrent wound
+about like a dropped thread. Clumps of fruit-trees marked the villages;
+slim palms put their nodding heads together above the low houses;
+dried palm-leaf roofs shone afar, like roofs of gold, behind the dark
+colonnades of tree-trunks; figures passed vivid and vanishing; the smoke
+of fires stood upright above the masses of flowering bushes; bamboo
+fences glittered, running away in broken lines between the fields. A
+sudden cry on the shore sounded plaintive in the distance, and ceased
+abruptly, as if stifled in the downpour of sunshine. A puff of breeze
+made a flash of darkness on the smooth water, touched our faces, and
+became forgotten. Nothing moved. The sun blazed down into a shadowless
+hollow of colours and stillness.
+
+It was the stage where, dressed splendidly for his part, he strutted,
+incomparably dignified, made important by the power he had to awaken an
+absurd expectation of something heroic going to take place--a burst of
+action or song--upon the vibrating tone of a wonderful sunshine. He was
+ornate and disturbing, for one could not imagine what depth of horrible
+void such an elaborate front could be worthy to hide. He was not
+masked--there was too much life in him, and a mask is only a lifeless
+thing; but he presented himself essentially as an actor, as a human
+being aggressively disguised. His smallest acts were prepared and
+unexpected, his speeches grave, his sentences ominous like hints and
+complicated like arabesques. He was treated with a solemn respect
+accorded in the irreverent West only to the monarchs of the stage, and
+he accepted the profound homage with a sustained dignity seen nowhere
+else but behind the footlights and in the condensed falseness of some
+grossly tragic situation. It was almost impossible to remember who he
+was--only a petty chief of a conveniently isolated corner of Mindanao,
+where we could in comparative safety break the law against the traffic
+in firearms and ammunition with the natives. What would happen should
+one of the moribund Spanish gun-boats be suddenly galvanized into a
+flicker of active life did not trouble us, once we were inside the
+bay--so completely did it appear out of the reach of a meddling world;
+and besides, in those days we were imaginative enough to look with
+a kind of joyous equanimity on any chance there was of being quietly
+hanged somewhere out of the way of diplomatic remonstrance. As to
+Karain, nothing could happen to him unless what happens to all--failure
+and death; but his quality was to appear clothed in the illusion of
+unavoidable success. He seemed too effective, too necessary there, too
+much of an essential condition for the existence of his land and his
+people, to be destroyed by anything short of an earthquake. He summed up
+his race, his country, the elemental force of ardent life, of tropical
+nature. He had its luxuriant strength, its fascination; and, like it, he
+carried the seed of peril within.
+
+In many successive visits we came to know his stage well--the purple
+semicircle of hills, the slim trees leaning over houses, the yellow
+sands, the streaming green of ravines. All that had the crude and
+blended colouring, the appropriateness almost excessive, the suspicious
+immobility of a painted scene; and it enclosed so perfectly the
+accomplished acting of his amazing pretences that the rest of the world
+seemed shut out forever from the gorgeous spectacle. There could be
+nothing outside. It was as if the earth had gone on spinning, and had
+left that crumb of its surface alone in space. He appeared utterly cut
+off from everything but the sunshine, and that even seemed to be made
+for him alone. Once when asked what was on the other side of the hills,
+he said, with a meaning smile, “Friends and enemies--many enemies;
+else why should I buy your rifles and powder?” He was always like
+this--word-perfect in his part, playing up faithfully to the mysteries
+and certitudes of his surroundings. “Friends and enemies”--nothing else.
+It was impalpable and vast. The earth had indeed rolled away from under
+his land, and he, with his handful of people, stood surrounded by a
+silent tumult as of contending shades. Certainly no sound came from
+outside. “Friends and enemies!” He might have added, “and memories,” at
+least as far as he himself was concerned; but he neglected to make that
+point then. It made itself later on, though; but it was after the
+daily performance--in the wings, so to speak, and with the lights out.
+Meantime he filled the stage with barbarous dignity. Some ten years ago
+he had led his people--a scratch lot of wandering Bugis--to the conquest
+of the bay, and now in his august care they had forgotten all the past,
+and had lost all concern for the future. He gave them wisdom, advice,
+reward, punishment, life or death, with the same serenity of attitude
+and voice. He understood irrigation and the art of war--the qualities of
+weapons and the craft of boat-building. He could conceal his heart; had
+more endurance; he could swim longer, and steer a canoe better than any
+of his people; he could shoot straighter, and negotiate more tortuously
+than any man of his race I knew. He was an adventurer of the sea, an
+outcast, a ruler--and my very good friend. I wish him a quick death in a
+stand-up fight, a death in sunshine; for he had known remorse and power,
+and no man can demand more from life. Day after day he appeared before
+us, incomparably faithful to the illusions of the stage, and at sunset
+the night descended upon him quickly, like a falling curtain. The seamed
+hills became black shadows towering high upon a clear sky; above them
+the glittering confusion of stars resembled a mad turmoil stilled by a
+gesture; sounds ceased, men slept, forms vanished--and the reality
+of the universe alone remained--a marvellous thing of darkness and
+glimmers.
+
+
+II
+
+But it was at night that he talked openly, forgetting the exactions of
+his stage. In the daytime there were affairs to be discussed in state.
+There were at first between him and me his own splendour, my shabby
+suspicions, and the scenic landscape that intruded upon the reality of
+our lives by its motionless fantasy of outline and colour. His followers
+thronged round him; above his head the broad blades of their spears made
+a spiked halo of iron points, and they hedged him from humanity by the
+shimmer of silks, the gleam of weapons, the excited and respectful hum
+of eager voices. Before sunset he would take leave with ceremony, and go
+off sitting under a red umbrella, and escorted by a score of boats.
+All the paddles flashed and struck together with a mighty splash that
+reverberated loudly in the monumental amphitheatre of hills. A broad
+stream of dazzling foam trailed behind the flotilla. The canoes appeared
+very black on the white hiss of water; turbaned heads swayed back and
+forth; a multitude of arms in crimson and yellow rose and fell with
+one movement; the spearmen upright in the bows of canoes had variegated
+sarongs and gleaming shoulders like bronze statues; the muttered
+strophes of the paddlers’ song ended periodically in a plaintive shout.
+They diminished in the distance; the song ceased; they swarmed on the
+beach in the long shadows of the western hills. The sunlight lingered on
+the purple crests, and we could see him leading the way to his stockade,
+a burly bareheaded figure walking far in advance of a straggling
+cortege, and swinging regularly an ebony staff taller than himself. The
+darkness deepened fast; torches gleamed fitfully, passing behind bushes;
+a long hail or two trailed in the silence of the evening; and at last
+the night stretched its smooth veil over the shore, the lights, and the
+voices.
+
+Then, just as we were thinking of repose, the watchmen of the schooner
+would hail a splash of paddles away in the starlit gloom of the bay; a
+voice would respond in cautious tones, and our serang, putting his head
+down the open skylight, would inform us without surprise, “That Rajah,
+he coming. He here now.” Karain appeared noiselessly in the doorway of
+the little cabin. He was simplicity itself then; all in white; muffled
+about his head; for arms only a kriss with a plain buffalo-horn handle,
+which he would politely conceal within a fold of his sarong before
+stepping over the threshold. The old sword-bearer’s face, the worn-out
+and mournful face so covered with wrinkles that it seemed to look out
+through the meshes of a fine dark net, could be seen close above his
+shoulders. Karain never moved without that attendant, who stood or
+squatted close at his back. He had a dislike of an open space
+behind him. It was more than a dislike--it resembled fear, a nervous
+preoccupation of what went on where he could not see. This, in view of
+the evident and fierce loyalty that surrounded him, was inexplicable.
+He was there alone in the midst of devoted men; he was safe from
+neighbourly ambushes, from fraternal ambitions; and yet more than one of
+our visitors had assured us that their ruler could not bear to be alone.
+They said, “Even when he eats and sleeps there is always one on the
+watch near him who has strength and weapons.” There was indeed always
+one near him, though our informants had no conception of that watcher’s
+strength and weapons, which were both shadowy and terrible. We knew, but
+only later on, when we had heard the story. Meantime we noticed that,
+even during the most important interviews, Karain would often give a
+start, and interrupting his discourse, would sweep his arm back with
+a sudden movement, to feel whether the old fellow was there. The old
+fellow, impenetrable and weary, was always there. He shared his food,
+his repose, and his thoughts; he knew his plans, guarded his secrets;
+and, impassive behind his master’s agitation, without stirring the least
+bit, murmured above his head in a soothing tone some words difficult to
+catch.
+
+It was only on board the schooner, when surrounded by white faces, by
+unfamiliar sights and sounds, that Karain seemed to forget the strange
+obsession that wound like a black thread through the gorgeous pomp of
+his public life. At night we treated him in a free and easy manner,
+which just stopped short of slapping him on the back, for there are
+liberties one must not take with a Malay. He said himself that on such
+occasions he was only a private gentleman coming to see other gentlemen
+whom he supposed as well born as himself. I fancy that to the last he
+believed us to be emissaries of Government, darkly official persons
+furthering by our illegal traffic some dark scheme of high statecraft.
+Our denials and protestations were unavailing. He only smiled with
+discreet politeness and inquired about the Queen. Every visit began with
+that inquiry; he was insatiable of details; he was fascinated by the
+holder of a sceptre the shadow of which, stretching from the
+westward over the earth and over the seas, passed far beyond his own
+hand’s-breadth of conquered land. He multiplied questions; he could
+never know enough of the Monarch of whom he spoke with wonder and
+chivalrous respect--with a kind of affectionate awe! Afterwards, when we
+had learned that he was the son of a woman who had many years ago ruled
+a small Bugis state, we came to suspect that the memory of his mother
+(of whom he spoke with enthusiasm) mingled somehow in his mind with the
+image he tried to form for himself of the far-off Queen whom he called
+Great, Invincible, Pious, and Fortunate. We had to invent details at
+last to satisfy his craving curiosity; and our loyalty must be pardoned,
+for we tried to make them fit for his august and resplendent ideal. We
+talked. The night slipped over us, over the still schooner, over the
+sleeping land, and over the sleepless sea that thundered amongst the
+reefs outside the bay. His paddlers, two trustworthy men, slept in the
+canoe at the foot of our side-ladder. The old confidant, relieved from
+duty, dozed on his heels, with his back against the companion-doorway;
+and Karain sat squarely in the ship’s wooden armchair, under the slight
+sway of the cabin lamp, a cheroot between his dark fingers, and a glass
+of lemonade before him. He was amused by the fizz of the thing, but
+after a sip or two would let it get flat, and with a courteous wave of
+his hand ask for a fresh bottle. He decimated our slender stock; but we
+did not begrudge it to him, for, when he began, he talked well. He must
+have been a great Bugis dandy in his time, for even then (and when we
+knew him he was no longer young) his splendour was spotlessly neat,
+and he dyed his hair a light shade of brown. The quiet dignity of
+his bearing transformed the dim-lit cuddy of the schooner into an
+audience-hall. He talked of inter-island politics with an ironic and
+melancholy shrewdness. He had travelled much, suffered not a little,
+intrigued, fought. He knew native Courts, European Settlements, the
+forests, the sea, and, as he said himself, had spoken in his time to
+many great men. He liked to talk with me because I had known some of
+these men: he seemed to think that I could understand him, and, with
+a fine confidence, assumed that I, at least, could appreciate how
+much greater he was himself. But he preferred to talk of his native
+country--a small Bugis state on the island of Celebes. I had visited it
+some time before, and he asked eagerly for news. As men’s names came up
+in conversation he would say, “We swam against one another when we were
+boys”; or, “We hunted the deer together--he could use the noose and
+the spear as well as I.” Now and then his big dreamy eyes would roll
+restlessly; he frowned or smiled, or he would become pensive, and,
+staring in silence, would nod slightly for a time at some regretted
+vision of the past.
+
+His mother had been the ruler of a small semi-independent state on the
+sea-coast at the head of the Gulf of Boni. He spoke of her with pride.
+She had been a woman resolute in affairs of state and of her own heart.
+After the death of her first husband, undismayed by the turbulent
+opposition of the chiefs, she married a rich trader, a Korinchi man
+of no family. Karain was her son by that second marriage, but his
+unfortunate descent had apparently nothing to do with his exile. He said
+nothing as to its cause, though once he let slip with a sigh, “Ha!
+my land will not feel any more the weight of my body.” But he related
+willingly the story of his wanderings, and told us all about the
+conquest of the bay. Alluding to the people beyond the hills, he would
+murmur gently, with a careless wave of the hand, “They came over the
+hills once to fight us, but those who got away never came again.” He
+thought for a while, smiling to himself. “Very few got away,” he added,
+with proud serenity. He cherished the recollections of his successes; he
+had an exulting eagerness for endeavour; when he talked, his aspect was
+warlike, chivalrous, and uplifting. No wonder his people admired him. We
+saw him once walking in daylight amongst the houses of the settlement.
+At the doors of huts groups of women turned to look after him, warbling
+softly, and with gleaming eyes; armed men stood out of the way,
+submissive and erect; others approached from the side, bending their
+backs to address him humbly; an old woman stretched out a draped
+lean arm--“Blessings on thy head!” she cried from a dark doorway;
+a fiery-eyed man showed above the low fence of a plantain-patch a
+streaming face, a bare breast scarred in two places, and bellowed out
+pantingly after him, “God give victory to our master!” Karain walked
+fast, and with firm long strides; he answered greetings right and left
+by quick piercing glances. Children ran forward between the houses,
+peeped fearfully round corners; young boys kept up with him, gliding
+between bushes: their eyes gleamed through the dark leaves. The old
+sword-bearer, shouldering the silver scabbard, shuffled hastily at his
+heels with bowed head, and his eyes on the ground. And in the midst of a
+great stir they passed swift and absorbed, like two men hurrying through
+a great solitude.
+
+In his council hall he was surrounded by the gravity of armed chiefs,
+while two long rows of old headmen dressed in cotton stuffs squatted on
+their heels, with idle arms hanging over their knees. Under the thatch
+roof supported by smooth columns, of which each one had cost the life of
+a straight-stemmed young palm, the scent of flowering hedges drifted in
+warm waves. The sun was sinking. In the open courtyard suppliants walked
+through the gate, raising, when yet far off, their joined hands above
+bowed heads, and bending low in the bright stream of sunlight. Young
+girls, with flowers in their laps, sat under the wide-spreading boughs
+of a big tree. The blue smoke of wood fires spread in a thin mist above
+the high-pitched roofs of houses that had glistening walls of woven
+reeds, and all round them rough wooden pillars under the sloping eaves.
+He dispensed justice in the shade; from a high seat he gave orders,
+advice, reproof. Now and then the hum of approbation rose louder, and
+idle spearmen that lounged listlessly against the posts, looking at
+the girls, would turn their heads slowly. To no man had been given the
+shelter of so much respect, confidence, and awe. Yet at times he would
+lean forward and appear to listen as for a far-off note of discord, as
+if expecting to hear some faint voice, the sound of light footsteps;
+or he would start half up in his seat, as though he had been familiarly
+touched on the shoulder. He glanced back with apprehension; his aged
+follower whispered inaudibly at his ear; the chiefs turned their eyes
+away in silence, for the old wizard, the man who could command ghosts
+and send evil spirits against enemies, was speaking low to their ruler.
+Around the short stillness of the open place the trees rustled faintly,
+the soft laughter of girls playing with the flowers rose in clear bursts
+of joyous sound. At the end of upright spear-shafts the long tufts of
+dyed horse-hair waved crimson and filmy in the gust of wind; and beyond
+the blaze of hedges the brook of limpid quick water ran invisible
+and loud under the drooping grass of the bank, with a great murmur,
+passionate and gentle.
+
+After sunset, far across the fields and over the bay, clusters of
+torches could be seen burning under the high roofs of the council shed.
+Smoky red flames swayed on high poles, and the fiery blaze flickered
+over faces, clung to the smooth trunks of palm-trees, kindled bright
+sparks on the rims of metal dishes standing on fine floor-mats. That
+obscure adventurer feasted like a king. Small groups of men crouched in
+tight circles round the wooden platters; brown hands hovered over snowy
+heaps of rice. Sitting upon a rough couch apart from the others, he
+leaned on his elbow with inclined head; and near him a youth improvised
+in a high tone a song that celebrated his valour and wisdom. The singer
+rocked himself to and fro, rolling frenzied eyes; old women hobbled
+about with dishes, and men, squatting low, lifted their heads to listen
+gravely without ceasing to eat. The song of triumph vibrated in the
+night, and the stanzas rolled out mournful and fiery like the thoughts
+of a hermit. He silenced it with a sign, “Enough!” An owl hooted far
+away, exulting in the delight of deep gloom in dense foliage; overhead
+lizards ran in the attap thatch, calling softly; the dry leaves of the
+roof rustled; the rumour of mingled voices grew louder suddenly. After
+a circular and startled glance, as of a man waking up abruptly to the
+sense of danger, he would throw himself back, and under the downward
+gaze of the old sorcerer take up, wide-eyed, the slender thread of his
+dream. They watched his moods; the swelling rumour of animated talk
+subsided like a wave on a sloping beach. The chief is pensive. And above
+the spreading whisper of lowered voices only a little rattle of weapons
+would be heard, a single louder word distinct and alone, or the grave
+ring of a big brass tray.
+
+
+III
+
+For two years at short intervals we visited him. We came to like him,
+to trust him, almost to admire him. He was plotting and preparing a war
+with patience, with foresight--with a fidelity to his purpose and with
+a steadfastness of which I would have thought him racially incapable.
+He seemed fearless of the future, and in his plans displayed a sagacity
+that was only limited by his profound ignorance of the rest of the
+world. We tried to enlighten him, but our attempts to make clear the
+irresistible nature of the forces which he desired to arrest failed to
+discourage his eagerness to strike a blow for his own primitive ideas.
+He did not understand us, and replied by arguments that almost drove
+one to desperation by their childish shrewdness. He was absurd and
+unanswerable. Sometimes we caught glimpses of a sombre, glowing fury
+within him--a brooding and vague sense of wrong, and a concentrated lust
+of violence which is dangerous in a native. He raved like one inspired.
+On one occasion, after we had been talking to him late in his campong,
+he jumped up. A great, clear fire blazed in the grove; lights and
+shadows danced together between the trees; in the still night bats
+flitted in and out of the boughs like fluttering flakes of denser
+darkness. He snatched the sword from the old man, whizzed it out of the
+scabbard, and thrust the point into the earth. Upon the thin, upright
+blade the silver hilt, released, swayed before him like something alive.
+He stepped back a pace, and in a deadened tone spoke fiercely to the
+vibrating steel: “If there is virtue in the fire, in the iron, in the
+hand that forged thee, in the words spoken over thee, in the desire of
+my heart, and in the wisdom of thy makers,--then we shall be victorious
+together!” He drew it out, looked along the edge. “Take,” he said over
+his shoulder to the old sword-bearer. The other, unmoved on his hams,
+wiped the point with a corner of his sarong, and returning the weapon to
+its scabbard, sat nursing it on his knees without a single look upwards.
+Karain, suddenly very calm, reseated himself with dignity. We gave
+up remonstrating after this, and let him go his way to an honourable
+disaster. All we could do for him was to see to it that the powder was
+good for the money and the rifles serviceable, if old.
+
+But the game was becoming at last too dangerous; and if we, who had
+faced it pretty often, thought little of the danger, it was decided for
+us by some very respectable people sitting safely in counting-houses
+that the risks were too great, and that only one more trip could be
+made. After giving in the usual way many misleading hints as to our
+destination, we slipped away quietly, and after a very quick passage
+entered the bay. It was early morning, and even before the anchor went
+to the bottom the schooner was surrounded by boats.
+
+The first thing we heard was that Karain’s mysterious sword-bearer had
+died a few days ago. We did not attach much importance to the news.
+It was certainly difficult to imagine Karain without his inseparable
+follower; but the fellow was old, he had never spoken to one of us, we
+hardly ever had heard the sound of his voice; and we had come to
+look upon him as upon something inanimate, as a part of our friend’s
+trappings of state--like that sword he had carried, or the fringed red
+umbrella displayed during an official progress. Karain did not visit us
+in the afternoon as usual. A message of greeting and a present of fruit
+and vegetables came off for us before sunset. Our friend paid us like a
+banker, but treated us like a prince. We sat up for him till midnight.
+Under the stern awning bearded Jackson jingled an old guitar and sang,
+with an execrable accent, Spanish love-songs; while young Hollis and
+I, sprawling on the deck, had a game of chess by the light of a cargo
+lantern. Karain did not appear. Next day we were busy unloading, and
+heard that the Rajah was unwell. The expected invitation to visit him
+ashore did not come. We sent friendly messages, but, fearing to intrude
+upon some secret council, remained on board. Early on the third day we
+had landed all the powder and rifles, and also a six-pounder brass gun
+with its carriage which we had subscribed together for a present for our
+friend. The afternoon was sultry. Ragged edges of black clouds peeped
+over the hills, and invisible thunderstorms circled outside, growling
+like wild beasts. We got the schooner ready for sea, intending to leave
+next morning at daylight. All day a merciless sun blazed down into the
+bay, fierce and pale, as if at white heat. Nothing moved on the land.
+The beach was empty, the villages seemed deserted; the trees far off
+stood in unstirring clumps, as if painted; the white smoke of some
+invisible bush-fire spread itself low over the shores of the bay like
+a settling fog. Late in the day three of Karain’s chief men, dressed in
+their best and armed to the teeth, came off in a canoe, bringing a case
+of dollars. They were gloomy and languid, and told us they had not seen
+their Rajah for five days. No one had seen him! We settled all accounts,
+and after shaking hands in turn and in profound silence, they descended
+one after another into their boat, and were paddled to the shore,
+sitting close together, clad in vivid colours, with hanging heads: the
+gold embroideries of their jackets flashed dazzlingly as they went
+away gliding on the smooth water, and not one of them looked back once.
+Before sunset the growling clouds carried with a rush the ridge of
+hills, and came tumbling down the inner slopes. Everything disappeared;
+black whirling vapours filled the bay, and in the midst of them the
+schooner swung here and there in the shifting gusts of wind. A single
+clap of thunder detonated in the hollow with a violence that seemed
+capable of bursting into small pieces the ring of high land, and a warm
+deluge descended. The wind died out. We panted in the close cabin; our
+faces streamed; the bay outside hissed as if boiling; the water fell in
+perpendicular shafts as heavy as lead; it swished about the deck, poured
+off the spars, gurgled, sobbed, splashed, murmured in the blind night.
+Our lamp burned low. Hollis, stripped to the waist, lay stretched out on
+the lockers, with closed eyes and motionless like a despoiled corpse; at
+his head Jackson twanged the guitar, and gasped out in sighs a mournful
+dirge about hopeless love and eyes like stars. Then we heard startled
+voices on deck crying in the rain, hurried footsteps overhead, and
+suddenly Karain appeared in the doorway of the cabin. His bare breast
+and his face glistened in the light; his sarong, soaked, clung about his
+legs; he had his sheathed kriss in his left hand; and wisps of wet hair,
+escaping from under his red kerchief, stuck over his eyes and down
+his cheeks. He stepped in with a headlong stride and looking over his
+shoulder like a man pursued. Hollis turned on his side quickly and
+opened his eyes. Jackson clapped his big hand over the strings and the
+jingling vibration died suddenly. I stood up.
+
+“We did not hear your boat’s hail!” I exclaimed.
+
+“Boat! The man’s swum off,” drawled out Hollis from the locker. “Look at
+him!”
+
+He breathed heavily, wild-eyed, while we looked at him in silence. Water
+dripped from him, made a dark pool, and ran crookedly across the cabin
+floor. We could hear Jackson, who had gone out to drive away our Malay
+seamen from the doorway of the companion; he swore menacingly in the
+patter of a heavy shower, and there was a great commotion on deck. The
+watchmen, scared out of their wits by the glimpse of a shadowy figure
+leaping over the rail, straight out of the night as it were, had alarmed
+all hands.
+
+Then Jackson, with glittering drops of water on his hair and beard, came
+back looking angry, and Hollis, who, being the youngest of us, assumed
+an indolent superiority, said without stirring, “Give him a dry
+sarong--give him mine; it’s hanging up in the bathroom.” Karain laid
+the kriss on the table, hilt inwards, and murmured a few words in a
+strangled voice.
+
+“What’s that?” asked Hollis, who had not heard.
+
+“He apologizes for coming in with a weapon in his hand,” I said,
+dazedly.
+
+“Ceremonious beggar. Tell him we forgive a friend . . . on such a
+night,” drawled out Hollis. “What’s wrong?”
+
+Karain slipped the dry sarong over his head, dropped the wet one at
+his feet, and stepped out of it. I pointed to the wooden armchair--his
+armchair. He sat down very straight, said “Ha!” in a strong voice;
+a short shiver shook his broad frame. He looked over his shoulder
+uneasily, turned as if to speak to us, but only stared in a curious
+blind manner, and again looked back. Jackson bellowed out, “Watch well
+on deck there!” heard a faint answer from above, and reaching out with
+his foot slammed-to the cabin door.
+
+“All right now,” he said.
+
+Karain’s lips moved slightly. A vivid flash of lightning made the
+two round stern-ports facing him glimmer like a pair of cruel and
+phosphorescent eyes. The flame of the lamp seemed to wither into brown
+dust for an instant, and the looking-glass over the little sideboard
+leaped out behind his back in a smooth sheet of livid light. The roll of
+thunder came near, crashed over us; the schooner trembled, and the great
+voice went on, threatening terribly, into the distance. For less than a
+minute a furious shower rattled on the decks. Karain looked slowly from
+face to face, and then the silence became so profound that we all could
+hear distinctly the two chronometers in my cabin ticking along with
+unflagging speed against one another.
+
+And we three, strangely moved, could not take our eyes from him. He had
+become enigmatical and touching, in virtue of that mysterious cause that
+had driven him through the night and through the thunderstorm to the
+shelter of the schooner’s cuddy. Not one of us doubted that we were
+looking at a fugitive, incredible as it appeared to us. He was haggard,
+as though he had not slept for weeks; he had become lean, as though
+he had not eaten for days. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes sunk,
+the muscles of his chest and arms twitched slightly as if after an
+exhausting contest. Of course it had been a long swim off to the
+schooner; but his face showed another kind of fatigue, the tormented
+weariness, the anger and the fear of a struggle against a thought, an
+idea--against something that cannot be grappled, that never rests--a
+shadow, a nothing, unconquerable and immortal, that preys upon life. We
+knew it as though he had shouted it at us. His chest expanded time after
+time, as if it could not contain the beating of his heart. For a moment
+he had the power of the possessed--the power to awaken in the beholders
+wonder, pain, pity, and a fearful near sense of things invisible, of
+things dark and mute, that surround the loneliness of mankind. His eyes
+roamed about aimlessly for a moment, then became still. He said with
+effort--
+
+“I came here . . . I leaped out of my stockade as after a defeat. I ran
+in the night. The water was black. I left him calling on the edge of
+black water. . . . I left him standing alone on the beach. I swam . . .
+he called out after me . . . I swam . . .”
+
+He trembled from head to foot, sitting very upright and gazing straight
+before him. Left whom? Who called? We did not know. We could not
+understand. I said at all hazards--
+
+“Be firm.”
+
+The sound of my voice seemed to steady him into a sudden rigidity, but
+otherwise he took no notice. He seemed to listen, to expect something
+for a moment, then went on--
+
+“He cannot come here--therefore I sought you. You men with white faces
+who despise the invisible voices. He cannot abide your unbelief and your
+strength.”
+
+He was silent for a while, then exclaimed softly--
+
+“Oh! the strength of unbelievers!”
+
+“There’s no one here but you--and we three,” said Hollis, quietly. He
+reclined with his head supported on elbow and did not budge.
+
+“I know,” said Karain. “He has never followed me here. Was not the wise
+man ever by my side? But since the old wise man, who knew of my trouble,
+has died, I have heard the voice every night. I shut myself up--for
+many days--in the dark. I can hear the sorrowful murmurs of women, the
+whisper of the wind, of the running waters; the clash of weapons in the
+hands of faithful men, their footsteps--and his voice! . . . Near . . .
+So! In my ear! I felt him near . . . His breath passed over my neck. I
+leaped out without a cry. All about me men slept quietly. I ran to the
+sea. He ran by my side without footsteps, whispering, whispering old
+words--whispering into my ear in his old voice. I ran into the sea; I
+swam off to you, with my kriss between my teeth. I, armed, I fled before
+a breath--to you. Take me away to your land. The wise old man has died,
+and with him is gone the power of his words and charms. And I can tell
+no one. No one. There is no one here faithful enough and wise enough
+to know. It is only near you, unbelievers, that my trouble fades like a
+mist under the eye of day.”
+
+He turned to me.
+
+“With you I go!” he cried in a contained voice. “With you, who know so
+many of us. I want to leave this land--my people . . . and him--there!”
+
+He pointed a shaking finger at random over his shoulder. It was hard for
+us to bear the intensity of that undisclosed distress. Hollis stared at
+him hard. I asked gently--
+
+“Where is the danger?”
+
+“Everywhere outside this place,” he answered, mournfully. “In every
+place where I am. He waits for me on the paths, under the trees, in the
+place where I sleep--everywhere but here.”
+
+He looked round the little cabin, at the painted beams, at the tarnished
+varnish of bulkheads; he looked round as if appealing to all its shabby
+strangeness, to the disorderly jumble of unfamiliar things that
+belong to an inconceivable life of stress, of power, of endeavour, of
+unbelief--to the strong life of white men, which rolls on irresistible
+and hard on the edge of outer darkness. He stretched out his arms as if
+to embrace it and us. We waited. The wind and rain had ceased, and the
+stillness of the night round the schooner was as dumb and complete as if
+a dead world had been laid to rest in a grave of clouds. We expected him
+to speak. The necessity within him tore at his lips. There are those
+who say that a native will not speak to a white man. Error. No man will
+speak to his master; but to a wanderer and a friend, to him who does not
+come to teach or to rule, to him who asks for nothing and accepts all
+things, words are spoken by the camp-fires, in the shared solitude
+of the sea, in riverside villages, in resting-places surrounded by
+forests--words are spoken that take no account of race or colour. One
+heart speaks--another one listens; and the earth, the sea, the sky, the
+passing wind and the stirring leaf, hear also the futile tale of the
+burden of life.
+
+He spoke at last. It is impossible to convey the effect of his story. It
+is undying, it is but a memory, and its vividness cannot be made clear
+to another mind, any more than the vivid emotions of a dream. One must
+have seen his innate splendour, one must have known him before--looked
+at him then. The wavering gloom of the little cabin; the breathless
+stillness outside, through which only the lapping of water against the
+schooner’s sides could be heard; Hollis’s pale face, with steady dark
+eyes; the energetic head of Jackson held up between two big palms, and
+with the long yellow hair of his beard flowing over the strings of the
+guitar lying on the table; Karain’s upright and motionless pose, his
+tone--all this made an impression that cannot be forgotten. He faced
+us across the table. His dark head and bronze torso appeared above the
+tarnished slab of wood, gleaming and still as if cast in metal. Only
+his lips moved, and his eyes glowed, went out, blazed again, or stared
+mournfully. His expressions came straight from his tormented heart. His
+words sounded low, in a sad murmur as of running water; at times they
+rang loud like the clash of a war-gong--or trailed slowly like weary
+travellers--or rushed forward with the speed of fear.
+
+
+IV
+
+This is, imperfectly, what he said--
+
+“It was after the great trouble that broke the alliance of the four
+states of Wajo. We fought amongst ourselves, and the Dutch watched from
+afar till we were weary. Then the smoke of their fire-ships was seen
+at the mouth of our rivers, and their great men came in boats full of
+soldiers to talk to us of protection and peace. We answered with caution
+and wisdom, for our villages were burnt, our stockades weak, the people
+weary, and the weapons blunt. They came and went; there had been much
+talk, but after they went away everything seemed to be as before,
+only their ships remained in sight from our coast, and very soon their
+traders came amongst us under a promise of safety. My brother was a
+Ruler, and one of those who had given the promise. I was young then,
+and had fought in the war, and Pata Matara had fought by my side. We
+had shared hunger, danger, fatigue, and victory. His eyes saw my danger
+quickly, and twice my arm had preserved his life. It was his destiny. He
+was my friend. And he was great amongst us--one of those who were near
+my brother, the Ruler. He spoke in council, his courage was great,
+he was the chief of many villages round the great lake that is in the
+middle of our country as the heart is in the middle of a man’s body.
+When his sword was carried into a campong in advance of his coming,
+the maidens whispered wonderingly under the fruit-trees, the rich
+men consulted together in the shade, and a feast was made ready with
+rejoicing and songs. He had the favour of the Ruler and the affection of
+the poor. He loved war, deer hunts, and the charms of women. He was the
+possessor of jewels, of lucky weapons, and of men’s devotion. He was a
+fierce man; and I had no other friend.
+
+“I was the chief of a stockade at the mouth of the river, and collected
+tolls for my brother from the passing boats. One day I saw a Dutch
+trader go up the river. He went up with three boats, and no toll was
+demanded from him, because the smoke of Dutch war-ships stood out from
+the open sea, and we were too weak to forget treaties. He went up under
+the promise of safety, and my brother gave him protection. He said
+he came to trade. He listened to our voices, for we are men who speak
+openly and without fear; he counted the number of our spears, he
+examined the trees, the running waters, the grasses of the bank,
+the slopes of our hills. He went up to Matara’s country and obtained
+permission to build a house. He traded and planted. He despised our
+joys, our thoughts, and our sorrows. His face was red, his hair like
+flame, and his eyes pale, like a river mist; he moved heavily, and spoke
+with a deep voice; he laughed aloud like a fool, and knew no courtesy
+in his speech. He was a big, scornful man, who looked into women’s faces
+and put his hand on the shoulders of free men as though he had been a
+noble-born chief. We bore with him. Time passed.
+
+“Then Pata Matara’s sister fled from the campong and went to live in the
+Dutchman’s house. She was a great and wilful lady: I had seen her once
+carried high on slaves’ shoulders amongst the people, with uncovered
+face, and I had heard all men say that her beauty was extreme, silencing
+the reason and ravishing the heart of the beholders. The people were
+dismayed; Matara’s face was blackened with that disgrace, for she knew
+she had been promised to another man. Matara went to the Dutchman’s
+house, and said, ‘Give her up to die--she is the daughter of chiefs.’
+The white man refused and shut himself up, while his servants kept
+guard night and day with loaded guns. Matara raged. My brother called a
+council. But the Dutch ships were near, and watched our coast greedily.
+My brother said, ‘If he dies now our land will pay for his blood. Leave
+him alone till we grow stronger and the ships are gone.’ Matara was
+wise; he waited and watched. But the white man feared for her life and
+went away.
+
+“He left his house, his plantations, and his goods! He departed, armed
+and menacing, and left all--for her! She had ravished his heart! From
+my stockade I saw him put out to sea in a big boat. Matara and I
+watched him from the fighting platform behind the pointed stakes. He sat
+cross-legged, with his gun in his hands, on the roof at the stern of his
+prau. The barrel of his rifle glinted aslant before his big red face.
+The broad river was stretched under him--level, smooth, shining, like
+a plain of silver; and his prau, looking very short and black from the
+shore, glided along the silver plain and over into the blue of the sea.
+
+“Thrice Matara, standing by my side, called aloud her name with grief
+and imprecations. He stirred my heart. It leaped three times; and three
+times with the eyes of my mind I saw in the gloom within the enclosed
+space of the prau a woman with streaming hair going away from her land
+and her people. I was angry--and sorry. Why? And then I also cried out
+insults and threats. Matara said, ‘Now they have left our land their
+lives are mind. I shall follow and strike--and, alone, pay the price of
+blood.’ A great wind was sweeping towards the setting sun over the empty
+river. I cried, ‘By your side I will go!’ He lowered his head in sign of
+assent. It was his destiny. The sun had set, and the trees swayed their
+boughs with a great noise above our heads.
+
+“On the third night we two left our land together in a trading prau.
+
+“The sea met us--the sea, wide, pathless, and without voice. A sailing
+prau leaves no track. We went south. The moon was full; and, looking up,
+we said to one another, ‘When the next moon shines as this one, we shall
+return and they will be dead.’ It was fifteen years ago. Many moons have
+grown full and withered and I have not seen my land since. We sailed
+south; we overtook many praus; we examined the creeks and the bays; we
+saw the end of our coast, of our island--a steep cape over a disturbed
+strait, where drift the shadows of shipwrecked praus and drowned men
+clamour in the night. The wide sea was all round us now. We saw a great
+mountain burning in the midst of water; we saw thousands of islets
+scattered like bits of iron fired from a big gun; we saw a long coast of
+mountain and lowlands stretching away in sunshine from west to east.
+It was Java. We said, ‘They are there; their time is near, and we shall
+return or die cleansed from dishonour.’
+
+“We landed. Is there anything good in that country? The paths run
+straight and hard and dusty. Stone campongs, full of white faces, are
+surrounded by fertile fields, but every man you meet is a slave. The
+rulers live under the edge of a foreign sword. We ascended mountains,
+we traversed valleys; at sunset we entered villages. We asked everyone,
+‘Have you seen such a white man?’ Some stared; others laughed; women
+gave us food, sometimes, with fear and respect, as though we had been
+distracted by the visitation of God; but some did not understand our
+language, and some cursed us, or, yawning, asked with contempt the
+reason of our quest. Once, as we were going away, an old man called
+after us, ‘Desist!’
+
+“We went on. Concealing our weapons, we stood humbly aside before the
+horsemen on the road; we bowed low in the courtyards of chiefs who were
+no better than slaves. We lost ourselves in the fields, in the jungle;
+and one night, in a tangled forest, we came upon a place where crumbling
+old walls had fallen amongst the trees, and where strange stone
+idols--carved images of devils with many arms and legs, with snakes
+twined round their bodies, with twenty heads and holding a hundred
+swords--seemed to live and threaten in the light of our camp fire.
+Nothing dismayed us. And on the road, by every fire, in resting-places,
+we always talked of her and of him. Their time was near. We spoke
+of nothing else. No! not of hunger, thirst, weariness, and faltering
+hearts. No! we spoke of him and her! Of her! And we thought of them--of
+her! Matara brooded by the fire. I sat and thought and thought, till
+suddenly I could see again the image of a woman, beautiful, and young,
+and great and proud, and tender, going away from her land and her
+people. Matara said, ‘When we find them we shall kill her first to
+cleanse the dishonour--then the man must die.’ I would say, ‘It shall
+be so; it is your vengeance.’ He stared long at me with his big sunken
+eyes.
+
+“We came back to the coast. Our feet were bleeding, our bodies thin. We
+slept in rags under the shadow of stone enclosures; we prowled, soiled
+and lean, about the gateways of white men’s courtyards. Their hairy dogs
+barked at us, and their servants shouted from afar, ‘Begone!’ Low-born
+wretches, that keep watch over the streets of stone campongs, asked us
+who we were. We lied, we cringed, we smiled with hate in our hearts,
+and we kept looking here, looking there for them--for the white man with
+hair like flame, and for her, for the woman who had broken faith, and
+therefore must die. We looked. At last in every woman’s face I thought
+I could see hers. We ran swiftly. No! Sometimes Matara would whisper,
+‘Here is the man,’ and we waited, crouching. He came near. It was
+not the man--those Dutchmen are all alike. We suffered the anguish of
+deception. In my sleep I saw her face, and was both joyful and sorry
+. . . . Why? . . . I seemed to hear a whisper near me. I turned swiftly.
+She was not there! And as we trudged wearily from stone city to stone
+city I seemed to hear a light footstep near me. A time came when I heard
+it always, and I was glad. I thought, walking dizzy and weary in
+sunshine on the hard paths of white men I thought, She is there--with
+us! . . . Matara was sombre. We were often hungry.
+
+“We sold the carved sheaths of our krisses--the ivory sheaths with
+golden ferules. We sold the jewelled hilts. But we kept the blades--for
+them. The blades that never touch but kill--we kept the blades for her.
+. . . Why? She was always by our side. . . . We starved. We begged. We
+left Java at last.
+
+“We went West, we went East. We saw many lands, crowds of strange faces,
+men that live in trees and men who eat their old people. We cut rattans
+in the forest for a handful of rice, and for a living swept the decks of
+big ships and heard curses heaped upon our heads. We toiled in villages;
+we wandered upon the seas with the Bajow people, who have no country.
+We fought for pay; we hired ourselves to work for Goram men, and were
+cheated; and under the orders of rough white faces we dived for pearls
+in barren bays, dotted with black rocks, upon a coast of sand and
+desolation. And everywhere we watched, we listened, we asked. We asked
+traders, robbers, white men. We heard jeers, mockery, threats--words of
+wonder and words of contempt. We never knew rest; we never thought of
+home, for our work was not done. A year passed, then another. I ceased
+to count the number of nights, of moons, of years. I watched over
+Matara. He had my last handful of rice; if there was water enough for
+one he drank it; I covered him up when he shivered with cold; and when
+the hot sickness came upon him I sat sleepless through many nights and
+fanned his face. He was a fierce man, and my friend. He spoke of her
+with fury in the daytime, with sorrow in the dark; he remembered her in
+health, in sickness. I said nothing; but I saw her every day--always!
+At first I saw only her head, as of a woman walking in the low mist on
+a river bank. Then she sat by our fire. I saw her! I looked at her! She
+had tender eyes and a ravishing face. I murmured to her in the night.
+Matara said sleepily sometimes, ‘To whom are you talking? Who is there?’
+I answered quickly, ‘No one’ . . . It was a lie! She never left me. She
+shared the warmth of our fire, she sat on my couch of leaves, she swam
+on the sea to follow me. . . . I saw her! . . . I tell you I saw her
+long black hair spread behind her upon the moonlit water as she struck
+out with bare arms by the side of a swift prau. She was beautiful, she
+was faithful, and in the silence of foreign countries she spoke to me
+very low in the language of my people. No one saw her; no one heard her;
+she was mine only! In daylight she moved with a swaying walk before me
+upon the weary paths; her figure was straight and flexible like the stem
+of a slender tree; the heels of her feet were round and polished like
+shells of eggs; with her round arm she made signs. At night she looked
+into my face. And she was sad! Her eyes were tender and frightened; her
+voice soft and pleading. Once I murmured to her, ‘You shall not die,’
+and she smiled . . . ever after she smiled! . . . She gave me courage to
+bear weariness and hardships. Those were times of pain, and she soothed
+me. We wandered patient in our search. We knew deception, false hopes;
+we knew captivity, sickness, thirst, misery, despair . . . . Enough! We
+found them! . . .”
+
+He cried out the last words and paused. His face was impassive, and he
+kept still like a man in a trance. Hollis sat up quickly, and spread his
+elbows on the table. Jackson made a brusque movement, and accidentally
+touched the guitar. A plaintive resonance filled the cabin with confused
+vibrations and died out slowly. Then Karain began to speak again. The
+restrained fierceness of his tone seemed to rise like a voice from
+outside, like a thing unspoken but heard; it filled the cabin and
+enveloped in its intense and deadened murmur the motionless figure in
+the chair.
+
+“We were on our way to Atjeh, where there was war; but the vessel ran on
+a sandbank, and we had to land in Delli. We had earned a little money,
+and had bought a gun from some Selangore traders; only one gun, which
+was fired by the spark of a stone; Matara carried it. We landed. Many
+white men lived there, planting tobacco on conquered plains, and Matara
+. . . But no matter. He saw him! . . . The Dutchman! . . . At last!
+. . . We crept and watched. Two nights and a day we watched. He had a
+house--a big house in a clearing in the midst of his fields; flowers and
+bushes grew around; there were narrow paths of yellow earth between the
+cut grass, and thick hedges to keep people out. The third night we came
+armed, and lay behind a hedge.
+
+“A heavy dew seemed to soak through our flesh and made our very entrails
+cold. The grass, the twigs, the leaves, covered with drops of water,
+were gray in the moonlight. Matara, curled up in the grass, shivered
+in his sleep. My teeth rattled in my head so loud that I was afraid
+the noise would wake up all the land. Afar, the watchmen of white men’s
+houses struck wooden clappers and hooted in the darkness. And, as every
+night, I saw her by my side. She smiled no more! . . . The fire of
+anguish burned in my breast, and she whispered to me with compassion,
+with pity, softly--as women will; she soothed the pain of my mind; she
+bent her face over me--the face of a woman who ravishes the hearts
+and silences the reason of men. She was all mine, and no one could see
+her--no one of living mankind! Stars shone through her bosom, through
+her floating hair. I was overcome with regret, with tenderness, with
+sorrow. Matara slept . . . Had I slept? Matara was shaking me by the
+shoulder, and the fire of the sun was drying the grass, the bushes, the
+leaves. It was day. Shreds of white mist hung between the branches of
+trees.
+
+“Was it night or day? I saw nothing again till I heard Matara breathe
+quickly where he lay, and then outside the house I saw her. I saw them
+both. They had come out. She sat on a bench under the wall, and twigs
+laden with flowers crept high above her head, hung over her hair. She
+had a box on her lap, and gazed into it, counting the increase of her
+pearls. The Dutchman stood by looking on; he smiled down at her; his
+white teeth flashed; the hair on his lip was like two twisted flames.
+He was big and fat, and joyous, and without fear. Matara tipped
+fresh priming from the hollow of his palm, scraped the flint with his
+thumb-nail, and gave the gun to me. To me! I took it . . . O fate!
+
+“He whispered into my ear, lying on his stomach, ‘I shall creep close
+and then amok . . . let her die by my hand. You take aim at the
+fat swine there. Let him see me strike my shame off the face of the
+earth--and then . . . you are my friend--kill with a sure shot.’ I said
+nothing; there was no air in my chest--there was no air in the world.
+Matara had gone suddenly from my side. The grass nodded. Then a bush
+rustled. She lifted her head.
+
+“I saw her! The consoler of sleepless nights, of weary days; the
+companion of troubled years! I saw her! She looked straight at the place
+where I crouched. She was there as I had seen her for years--a faithful
+wanderer by my side. She looked with sad eyes and had smiling lips; she
+looked at me . . . Smiling lips! Had I not promised that she should not
+die!
+
+“She was far off and I felt her near. Her touch caressed me, and
+her voice murmured, whispered above me, around me. ‘Who shall be thy
+companion, who shall console thee if I die?’ I saw a flowering thicket
+to the left of her stir a little . . . Matara was ready . . . I cried
+aloud--‘Return!’
+
+“She leaped up; the box fell; the pearls streamed at her feet. The big
+Dutchman by her side rolled menacing eyes through the still sunshine.
+The gun went up to my shoulder. I was kneeling and I was firm--firmer
+than the trees, the rocks, the mountains. But in front of the steady
+long barrel the fields, the house, the earth, the sky swayed to and
+fro like shadows in a forest on a windy day. Matara burst out of the
+thicket; before him the petals of torn flowers whirled high as if driven
+by a tempest. I heard her cry; I saw her spring with open arms in front
+of the white man. She was a woman of my country and of noble blood. They
+are so! I heard her shriek of anguish and fear--and all stood still! The
+fields, the house, the earth, the sky stood still--while Matara leaped
+at her with uplifted arm. I pulled the trigger, saw a spark, heard
+nothing; the smoke drove back into my face, and then I could see Matara
+roll over head first and lie with stretched arms at her feet. Ha! A sure
+shot! The sunshine fell on my back colder than the running water. A sure
+shot! I flung the gun after the shot. Those two stood over the dead man
+as though they had been bewitched by a charm. I shouted at her, ‘Live
+and remember!’ Then for a time I stumbled about in a cold darkness.
+
+“Behind me there were great shouts, the running of many feet; strange
+men surrounded me, cried meaningless words into my face, pushed me,
+dragged me, supported me . . . I stood before the big Dutchman: he
+stared as if bereft of his reason. He wanted to know, he talked fast,
+he spoke of gratitude, he offered me food, shelter, gold--he asked many
+questions. I laughed in his face. I said, ‘I am a Korinchi traveller
+from Perak over there, and know nothing of that dead man. I was passing
+along the path when I heard a shot, and your senseless people rushed
+out and dragged me here.’ He lifted his arms, he wondered, he could not
+believe, he could not understand, he clamoured in his own tongue! She
+had her arms clasped round his neck, and over her shoulder stared back
+at me with wide eyes. I smiled and looked at her; I smiled and waited to
+hear the sound of her voice. The white man asked her suddenly. ‘Do you
+know him?’ I listened--my life was in my ears! She looked at me long,
+she looked at me with unflinching eyes, and said aloud, ‘No! I never saw
+him before.’ . . . What! Never before? Had she forgotten already? Was
+it possible? Forgotten already--after so many years--so many years
+of wandering, of companionship, of trouble, of tender words! Forgotten
+already! . . . I tore myself out from the hands that held me and went
+away without a word . . . They let me go.
+
+“I was weary. Did I sleep? I do not know. I remember walking upon a
+broad path under a clear starlight; and that strange country seemed so
+big, the rice-fields so vast, that, as I looked around, my head swam
+with the fear of space. Then I saw a forest. The joyous starlight was
+heavy upon me. I turned off the path and entered the forest, which was
+very sombre and very sad.”
+
+
+V
+
+Karain’s tone had been getting lower and lower, as though he had been
+going away from us, till the last words sounded faint but clear, as
+if shouted on a calm day from a very great distance. He moved not. He
+stared fixedly past the motionless head of Hollis, who faced him, as
+still as himself. Jackson had turned sideways, and with elbow on the
+table shaded his eyes with the palm of his hand. And I looked on,
+surprised and moved; I looked at that man, loyal to a vision, betrayed
+by his dream, spurned by his illusion, and coming to us unbelievers for
+help--against a thought. The silence was profound; but it seemed full
+of noiseless phantoms, of things sorrowful, shadowy, and mute, in
+whose invisible presence the firm, pulsating beat of the two ship’s
+chronometers ticking off steadily the seconds of Greenwich Time seemed
+to me a protection and a relief. Karain stared stonily; and looking at
+his rigid figure, I thought of his wanderings, of that obscure Odyssey
+of revenge, of all the men that wander amongst illusions faithful,
+faithless; of the illusions that give joy, that give sorrow, that give
+pain, that give peace; of the invincible illusions that can make life
+and death appear serene, inspiring, tormented, or ignoble.
+
+A murmur was heard; that voice from outside seemed to flow out of a
+dreaming world into the lamp-light of the cabin. Karain was speaking.
+
+“I lived in the forest.
+
+“She came no more. Never! Never once! I lived alone. She had forgotten.
+It was well. I did not want her; I wanted no one. I found an abandoned
+house in an old clearing. Nobody came near. Sometimes I heard in the
+distance the voices of people going along a path. I slept; I rested;
+there was wild rice, water from a running stream--and peace! Every night
+I sat alone by my small fire before the hut. Many nights passed over my
+head.
+
+“Then, one evening, as I sat by my fire after having eaten, I looked
+down on the ground and began to remember my wanderings. I lifted my
+head. I had heard no sound, no rustle, no footsteps--but I lifted my
+head. A man was coming towards me across the small clearing. I waited.
+He came up without a greeting and squatted down into the firelight. Then
+he turned his face to me. It was Matara. He stared at me fiercely with
+his big sunken eyes. The night was cold; the heat died suddenly out of
+the fire, and he stared at me. I rose and went away from there, leaving
+him by the fire that had no heat.
+
+“I walked all that night, all next day, and in the evening made up a big
+blaze and sat down--to wait for him. He had not come into the light.
+I heard him in the bushes here and there, whispering, whispering.
+I understood at last--I had heard the words before, ‘You are my
+friend--kill with a sure shot.’
+
+“I bore it as long as I could--then leaped away, as on this very night
+I leaped from my stockade and swam to you. I ran--I ran crying like a
+child left alone and far from the houses. He ran by my side, without
+footsteps, whispering, whispering--invisible and heard. I sought
+people--I wanted men around me! Men who had not died! And again we two
+wandered. I sought danger, violence, and death. I fought in the Atjeh
+war, and a brave people wondered at the valiance of a stranger. But we
+were two; he warded off the blows . . . Why? I wanted peace, not life.
+And no one could see him; no one knew--I dared tell no one. At times he
+would leave me, but not for long; then he would return and whisper or
+stare. My heart was torn with a strange fear, but could not die. Then I
+met an old man.
+
+“You all knew him. People here called him my sorcerer, my servant and
+sword-bearer; but to me he was father, mother, protection, refuge and
+peace. When I met him he was returning from a pilgrimage, and I heard
+him intoning the prayer of sunset. He had gone to the holy place with
+his son, his son’s wife, and a little child; and on their return, by
+the favour of the Most High, they all died: the strong man, the young
+mother, the little child--they died; and the old man reached his country
+alone. He was a pilgrim serene and pious, very wise and very lonely.
+I told him all. For a time we lived together. He said over me words of
+compassion, of wisdom, of prayer. He warded from me the shade of the
+dead. I begged him for a charm that would make me safe. For a long
+time he refused; but at last, with a sigh and a smile, he gave me one.
+Doubtless he could command a spirit stronger than the unrest of my dead
+friend, and again I had peace; but I had become restless, and a lover of
+turmoil and danger. The old man never left me. We travelled together.
+We were welcomed by the great; his wisdom and my courage are remembered
+where your strength, O white men, is forgotten! We served the Sultan
+of Sula. We fought the Spaniards. There were victories, hopes, defeats,
+sorrow, blood, women’s tears . . . What for? . . . We fled. We collected
+wanderers of a warlike race and came here to fight again. The rest you
+know. I am the ruler of a conquered land, a lover of war and danger,
+a fighter and a plotter. But the old man has died, and I am again the
+slave of the dead. He is not here now to drive away the reproachful
+shade--to silence the lifeless voice! The power of his charm has died
+with him. And I know fear; and I hear the whisper, ‘Kill! kill! kill!’
+. . . Have I not killed enough? . . .”
+
+For the first time that night a sudden convulsion of madness and rage
+passed over his face. His wavering glances darted here and there like
+scared birds in a thunderstorm. He jumped up, shouting--
+
+“By the spirits that drink blood: by the spirits that cry in the night:
+by all the spirits of fury, misfortune, and death, I swear--some day I
+will strike into every heart I meet--I . . .”
+
+He looked so dangerous that we all three leaped to our feet, and Hollis,
+with the back of his hand, sent the kriss flying off the table. I
+believe we shouted together. It was a short scare, and the next moment
+he was again composed in his chair, with three white men standing over
+him in rather foolish attitudes. We felt a little ashamed of ourselves.
+Jackson picked up the kriss, and, after an inquiring glance at me, gave
+it to him. He received it with a stately inclination of the head and
+stuck it in the twist of his sarong, with punctilious care to give
+his weapon a pacific position. Then he looked up at us with an austere
+smile. We were abashed and reproved. Hollis sat sideways on the table
+and, holding his chin in his hand, scrutinized him in pensive silence. I
+said--
+
+“You must abide with your people. They need you. And there is
+forgetfulness in life. Even the dead cease to speak in time.”
+
+“Am I a woman, to forget long years before an eyelid has had the time
+to beat twice?” he exclaimed, with bitter resentment. He startled me.
+It was amazing. To him his life--that cruel mirage of love and
+peace--seemed as real, as undeniable, as theirs would be to any saint,
+philosopher, or fool of us all. Hollis muttered--
+
+“You won’t soothe him with your platitudes.”
+
+Karain spoke to me.
+
+“You know us. You have lived with us. Why?--we cannot know; but you
+understand our sorrows and our thoughts. You have lived with my people,
+and you understand our desires and our fears. With you I will go. To
+your land--to your people. To your people, who live in unbelief; to whom
+day is day, and night is night--nothing more, because you understand all
+things seen, and despise all else! To your land of unbelief, where the
+dead do not speak, where every man is wise, and alone--and at peace!”
+
+“Capital description,” murmured Hollis, with the flicker of a smile.
+
+Karain hung his head.
+
+“I can toil, and fight--and be faithful,” he whispered, in a weary tone,
+“but I cannot go back to him who waits for me on the shore. No! Take me
+with you . . . Or else give me some of your strength--of your unbelief.
+. . . A charm! . . .”
+
+He seemed utterly exhausted.
+
+“Yes, take him home,” said Hollis, very low, as if debating with
+himself. “That would be one way. The ghosts there are in society, and
+talk affably to ladies and gentlemen, but would scorn a naked human
+being--like our princely friend. . . . Naked . . . Flayed! I should say.
+I am sorry for him. Impossible--of course. The end of all this shall
+be,” he went on, looking up at us--“the end of this shall be, that some
+day he will run amuck amongst his faithful subjects and send ‘ad patres’
+ever so many of them before they make up their minds to the disloyalty
+of knocking him on the head.”
+
+I nodded. I thought it more than probable that such would be the end of
+Karain. It was evident that he had been hunted by his thought along the
+very limit of human endurance, and very little more pressing was needed
+to make him swerve over into the form of madness peculiar to his race.
+The respite he had during the old man’s life made the return of the
+torment unbearable. That much was clear.
+
+He lifted his head suddenly; we had imagined for a moment that he had
+been dozing.
+
+“Give me your protection--or your strength!” he cried. “A charm . . . a
+weapon!”
+
+Again his chin fell on his breast. We looked at him, then looked at one
+another with suspicious awe in our eyes, like men who come unexpectedly
+upon the scene of some mysterious disaster. He had given himself up to
+us; he had thrust into our hands his errors and his torment, his life
+and his peace; and we did not know what to do with that problem from the
+outer darkness. We three white men, looking at the Malay, could not find
+one word to the purpose amongst us--if indeed there existed a word that
+could solve that problem. We pondered, and our hearts sank. We felt as
+though we three had been called to the very gate of Infernal Regions to
+judge, to decide the fate of a wanderer coming suddenly from a world of
+sunshine and illusions.
+
+“By Jove, he seems to have a great idea of our power,” whispered Hollis,
+hopelessly. And then again there was a silence, the feeble plash of
+water, the steady tick of chronometers. Jackson, with bare arms crossed,
+leaned his shoulders against the bulkhead of the cabin. He was bending
+his head under the deck beam; his fair beard spread out magnificently
+over his chest; he looked colossal, ineffectual, and mild. There was
+something lugubrious in the aspect of the cabin; the air in it seemed
+to become slowly charged with the cruel chill of helplessness, with
+the pitiless anger of egoism against the incomprehensible form of an
+intruding pain. We had no idea what to do; we began to resent bitterly
+the hard necessity to get rid of him.
+
+Hollis mused, muttered suddenly with a short laugh, “Strength . . .
+Protection . . . Charm.” He slipped off the table and left the cuddy
+without a look at us. It seemed a base desertion. Jackson and I
+exchanged indignant glances. We could hear him rummaging in his
+pigeon-hole of a cabin. Was the fellow actually going to bed? Karain
+sighed. It was intolerable!
+
+Then Hollis reappeared, holding in both hands a small leather box. He
+put it down gently on the table and looked at us with a queer gasp,
+we thought, as though he had from some cause become speechless for a
+moment, or were ethically uncertain about producing that box. But in
+an instant the insolent and unerring wisdom of his youth gave him the
+needed courage. He said, as he unlocked the box with a very small key,
+“Look as solemn as you can, you fellows.”
+
+Probably we looked only surprised and stupid, for he glanced over his
+shoulder, and said angrily--
+
+“This is no play; I am going to do something for him. Look serious.
+Confound it! . . . Can’t you lie a little . . . for a friend!”
+
+Karain seemed to take no notice of us, but when Hollis threw open the
+lid of the box his eyes flew to it--and so did ours. The quilted crimson
+satin of the inside put a violent patch of colour into the sombre
+atmosphere; it was something positive to look at--it was fascinating.
+
+
+VI
+
+Hollis looked smiling into the box. He had lately made a dash home
+through the Canal. He had been away six months, and only joined us again
+just in time for this last trip. We had never seen the box before. His
+hands hovered above it; and he talked to us ironically, but his face
+became as grave as though he were pronouncing a powerful incantation
+over the things inside.
+
+“Every one of us,” he said, with pauses that somehow were more offensive
+than his words--“every one of us, you’ll admit, has been haunted by some
+woman . . . And . . . as to friends . . . dropped by the way . . . Well!
+. . . ask yourselves . . .”
+
+He paused. Karain stared. A deep rumble was heard high up under the
+deck. Jackson spoke seriously--
+
+“Don’t be so beastly cynical.”
+
+“Ah! You are without guile,” said Hollis, sadly. “You will learn . . .
+Meantime this Malay has been our friend . . .”
+
+He repeated several times thoughtfully, “Friend . . . Malay. Friend,
+Malay,” as though weighing the words against one another, then went on
+more briskly--
+
+“A good fellow--a gentleman in his way. We can’t, so to speak, turn
+our backs on his confidence and belief in us. Those Malays are easily
+impressed--all nerves, you know--therefore . . .”
+
+He turned to me sharply.
+
+“You know him best,” he said, in a practical tone. “Do you think he is
+fanatical--I mean very strict in his faith?”
+
+I stammered in profound amazement that “I did not think so.”
+
+“It’s on account of its being a likeness--an engraved image,” muttered
+Hollis, enigmatically, turning to the box. He plunged his fingers into
+it. Karain’s lips were parted and his eyes shone. We looked into the
+box.
+
+There were there a couple of reels of cotton, a packet of needles, a bit
+of silk ribbon, dark blue; a cabinet photograph, at which Hollis stole a
+glance before laying it on the table face downwards. A girl’s portrait,
+I could see. There were, amongst a lot of various small objects, a bunch
+of flowers, a narrow white glove with many buttons, a slim packet of
+letters carefully tied up. Amulets of white men! Charms and talismans!
+Charms that keep them straight, that drive them crooked, that have the
+power to make a young man sigh, an old man smile. Potent things that
+procure dreams of joy, thoughts of regret; that soften hard hearts, and
+can temper a soft one to the hardness of steel. Gifts of heaven--things
+of earth . . .
+
+Hollis rummaged in the box.
+
+And it seemed to me, during that moment of waiting, that the cabin of
+the schooner was becoming filled with a stir invisible and living as of
+subtle breaths. All the ghosts driven out of the unbelieving West by men
+who pretend to be wise and alone and at peace--all the homeless ghosts
+of an unbelieving world--appeared suddenly round the figure of Hollis
+bending over the box; all the exiled and charming shades of loved women;
+all the beautiful and tender ghosts of ideals, remembered, forgotten,
+cherished, execrated; all the cast-out and reproachful ghosts of friends
+admired, trusted, traduced, betrayed, left dead by the way--they all
+seemed to come from the inhospitable regions of the earth to crowd
+into the gloomy cabin, as though it had been a refuge and, in all the
+unbelieving world, the only place of avenging belief. . . . It lasted a
+second--all disappeared. Hollis was facing us alone with something small
+that glittered between his fingers. It looked like a coin.
+
+“Ah! here it is,” he said.
+
+He held it up. It was a sixpence--a Jubilee sixpence. It was gilt; it
+had a hole punched near the rim. Hollis looked towards Karain.
+
+“A charm for our friend,” he said to us. “The thing itself is of great
+power--money, you know--and his imagination is struck. A loyal vagabond;
+if only his puritanism doesn’t shy at a likeness . . .”
+
+We said nothing. We did not know whether to be scandalized, amused, or
+relieved. Hollis advanced towards Karain, who stood up as if startled,
+and then, holding the coin up, spoke in Malay.
+
+“This is the image of the Great Queen, and the most powerful thing the
+white men know,” he said, solemnly.
+
+Karain covered the handle of his kriss in sign of respect, and stared at
+the crowned head.
+
+“The Invincible, the Pious,” he muttered.
+
+“She is more powerful than Suleiman the Wise, who commanded the genii,
+as you know,” said Hollis, gravely. “I shall give this to you.”
+
+He held the sixpence in the palm of his hand, and looking at it
+thoughtfully, spoke to us in English.
+
+“She commands a spirit, too--the spirit of her nation; a masterful,
+conscientious, unscrupulous, unconquerable devil . . . that does a lot
+of good--incidentally . . . a lot of good . . . at times--and wouldn’t
+stand any fuss from the best ghost out for such a little thing as our
+friend’s shot. Don’t look thunderstruck, you fellows. Help me to make
+him believe--everything’s in that.”
+
+“His people will be shocked,” I murmured.
+
+Hollis looked fixedly at Karain, who was the incarnation of the very
+essence of still excitement. He stood rigid, with head thrown back; his
+eyes rolled wildly, flashing; the dilated nostrils quivered.
+
+“Hang it all!” said Hollis at last, “he is a good fellow. I’ll give him
+something that I shall really miss.”
+
+He took the ribbon out of the box, smiled at it scornfully, then with a
+pair of scissors cut out a piece from the palm of the glove.
+
+“I shall make him a thing like those Italian peasants wear, you know.”
+
+He sewed the coin in the delicate leather, sewed the leather to the
+ribbon, tied the ends together. He worked with haste. Karain watched his
+fingers all the time.
+
+“Now then,” he said--then stepped up to Karain. They looked close
+into one another’s eyes. Those of Karain stared in a lost glance, but
+Hollis’s seemed to grow darker and looked out masterful and compelling.
+They were in violent contrast together--one motionless and the colour
+of bronze, the other dazzling white and lifting his arms, where the
+powerful muscles rolled slightly under a skin that gleamed like satin.
+Jackson moved near with the air of a man closing up to a chum in a tight
+place. I said impressively, pointing to Hollis--
+
+“He is young, but he is wise. Believe him!”
+
+Karain bent his head: Hollis threw lightly over it the dark-blue ribbon
+and stepped back.
+
+“Forget, and be at peace!” I cried.
+
+Karain seemed to wake up from a dream. He said, “Ha!” shook himself as
+if throwing off a burden. He looked round with assurance. Someone on
+deck dragged off the skylight cover, and a flood of light fell into the
+cabin. It was morning already.
+
+“Time to go on deck,” said Jackson.
+
+Hollis put on a coat, and we went up, Karain leading.
+
+The sun had risen beyond the hills, and their long shadows stretched
+far over the bay in the pearly light. The air was clear, stainless, and
+cool. I pointed at the curved line of yellow sands.
+
+“He is not there,” I said, emphatically, to Karain. “He waits no more.
+He has departed forever.”
+
+A shaft of bright hot rays darted into the bay between the summits
+of two hills, and the water all round broke out as if by magic into a
+dazzling sparkle.
+
+“No! He is not there waiting,” said Karain, after a long look over the
+beach. “I do not hear him,” he went on, slowly. “No!”
+
+He turned to us.
+
+“He has departed again--forever!” he cried.
+
+We assented vigorously, repeatedly, and without compunction. The great
+thing was to impress him powerfully; to suggest absolute safety--the end
+of all trouble. We did our best; and I hope we affirmed our faith in the
+power of Hollis’s charm efficiently enough to put the matter beyond the
+shadow of a doubt. Our voices rang around him joyously in the still air,
+and above his head the sky, pellucid, pure, stainless, arched its tender
+blue from shore to shore and over the bay, as if to envelop the water,
+the earth, and the man in the caress of its light.
+
+The anchor was up, the sails hung still, and half-a-dozen big boats were
+seen sweeping over the bay to give us a tow out. The paddlers in the
+first one that came alongside lifted their heads and saw their ruler
+standing amongst us. A low murmur of surprise arose--then a shout of
+greeting.
+
+He left us, and seemed straightway to step into the glorious splendour
+of his stage, to wrap himself in the illusion of unavoidable success.
+For a moment he stood erect, one foot over the gangway, one hand on the
+hilt of his kriss, in a martial pose; and, relieved from the fear of
+outer darkness, he held his head high, he swept a serene look over his
+conquered foothold on the earth. The boats far off took up the cry of
+greeting; a great clamour rolled on the water; the hills echoed it, and
+seemed to toss back at him the words invoking long life and victories.
+
+He descended into a canoe, and as soon as he was clear of the side we
+gave him three cheers. They sounded faint and orderly after the wild
+tumult of his loyal subjects, but it was the best we could do. He stood
+up in the boat, lifted up both his arms, then pointed to the infallible
+charm. We cheered again; and the Malays in the boats stared--very much
+puzzled and impressed. I wondered what they thought; what he thought;
+. . . what the reader thinks?
+
+We towed out slowly. We saw him land and watch us from the beach. A
+figure approached him humbly but openly--not at all like a ghost with
+a grievance. We could see other men running towards him. Perhaps he had
+been missed? At any rate there was a great stir. A group formed itself
+rapidly near him, and he walked along the sands, followed by a growing
+cortege and kept nearly abreast of the schooner. With our glasses we
+could see the blue ribbon on his neck and a patch of white on his brown
+chest. The bay was waking up. The smokes of morning fires stood in faint
+spirals higher than the heads of palms; people moved between the houses;
+a herd of buffaloes galloped clumsily across a green slope; the slender
+figures of boys brandishing sticks appeared black and leaping in the
+long grass; a coloured line of women, with water bamboos on their heads,
+moved swaying through a thin grove of fruit-trees. Karain stopped in the
+midst of his men and waved his hand; then, detaching himself from the
+splendid group, walked alone to the water’s edge and waved his hand
+again. The schooner passed out to sea between the steep headlands that
+shut in the bay, and at the same instant Karain passed out of our life
+forever.
+
+But the memory remains. Some years afterwards I met Jackson, in the
+Strand. He was magnificent as ever. His head was high above the crowd.
+His beard was gold, his face red, his eyes blue; he had a wide-brimmed
+gray hat and no collar or waistcoat; he was inspiring; he had just
+come home--had landed that very day! Our meeting caused an eddy in the
+current of humanity. Hurried people would run against us, then walk
+round us, and turn back to look at that giant. We tried to compress
+seven years of life into seven exclamations; then, suddenly appeased,
+walked sedately along, giving one another the news of yesterday. Jackson
+gazed about him, like a man who looks for landmarks, then stopped before
+Bland’s window. He always had a passion for firearms; so he stopped
+short and contemplated the row of weapons, perfect and severe, drawn up
+in a line behind the black-framed panes. I stood by his side. Suddenly
+he said--
+
+“Do you remember Karain?”
+
+I nodded.
+
+“The sight of all this made me think of him,” he went on, with his face
+near the glass . . . and I could see another man, powerful and bearded,
+peering at him intently from amongst the dark and polished tubes
+that can cure so many illusions. “Yes; it made me think of him,” he
+continued, slowly. “I saw a paper this morning; they are fighting
+over there again. He’s sure to be in it. He will make it hot for
+the caballeros. Well, good luck to him, poor devil! He was perfectly
+stunning.”
+
+We walked on.
+
+“I wonder whether the charm worked--you remember Hollis’s charm, of
+course. If it did . . . Never was a sixpence wasted to better advantage!
+Poor devil! I wonder whether he got rid of that friend of his. Hope so.
+. . . Do you know, I sometimes think that--”
+
+I stood still and looked at him.
+
+“Yes . . . I mean, whether the thing was so, you know . . . whether it
+really happened to him. . . . What do you think?”
+
+“My dear chap,” I cried, “you have been too long away from home. What a
+question to ask! Only look at all this.”
+
+A watery gleam of sunshine flashed from the west and went out between
+two long lines of walls; and then the broken confusion of roofs, the
+chimney-stacks, the gold letters sprawling over the fronts of houses,
+the sombre polish of windows, stood resigned and sullen under the
+falling gloom. The whole length of the street, deep as a well and narrow
+like a corridor, was full of a sombre and ceaseless stir. Our ears
+were filled by a headlong shuffle and beat of rapid footsteps and by
+an underlying rumour--a rumour vast, faint, pulsating, as of panting
+breaths, of beating hearts, of gasping voices. Innumerable eyes stared
+straight in front, feet moved hurriedly, blank faces flowed, arms swung.
+Over all, a narrow ragged strip of smoky sky wound about between the
+high roofs, extended and motionless, like a soiled streamer flying above
+the rout of a mob.
+
+“Ye-e-e-s,” said Jackson, meditatively.
+
+The big wheels of hansoms turned slowly along the edge of side-walks;
+a pale-faced youth strolled, overcome by weariness, by the side of his
+stick and with the tails of his overcoat flapping gently near his heels;
+horses stepped gingerly on the greasy pavement, tossing their heads; two
+young girls passed by, talking vivaciously and with shining eyes; a fine
+old fellow strutted, red-faced, stroking a white moustache; and a line
+of yellow boards with blue letters on them approached us slowly, tossing
+on high behind one another like some queer wreckage adrift upon a river
+of hats.
+
+“Ye-e-es,” repeated Jackson. His clear blue eyes looked about,
+contemptuous, amused and hard, like the eyes of a boy. A clumsy string
+of red, yellow, and green omnibuses rolled swaying, monstrous and gaudy;
+two shabby children ran across the road; a knot of dirty men with
+red neckerchiefs round their bare throats lurched along, discussing
+filthily; a ragged old man with a face of despair yelled horribly in
+the mud the name of a paper; while far off, amongst the tossing heads of
+horses, the dull flash of harnesses, the jumble of lustrous panels
+and roofs of carriages, we could see a policeman, helmeted and dark,
+stretching out a rigid arm at the crossing of the streets.
+
+“Yes; I see it,” said Jackson, slowly. “It is there; it pants, it runs,
+it rolls; it is strong and alive; it would smash you if you didn’t look
+out; but I’ll be hanged if it is yet as real to me as . . . as the other
+thing . . . say, Karain’s story.”
+
+I think that, decidedly, he had been too long away from home.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE IDIOTS
+
+
+We were driving along the road from Treguier to Kervanda. We passed at a
+smart trot between the hedges topping an earth wall on each side of
+the road; then at the foot of the steep ascent before Ploumar the horse
+dropped into a walk, and the driver jumped down heavily from the box.
+He flicked his whip and climbed the incline, stepping clumsily uphill
+by the side of the carriage, one hand on the footboard, his eyes on the
+ground. After a while he lifted his head, pointed up the road with the
+end of the whip, and said--
+
+“The idiot!”
+
+The sun was shining violently upon the undulating surface of the land.
+The rises were topped by clumps of meagre trees, with their branches
+showing high on the sky as if they had been perched upon stilts. The
+small fields, cut up by hedges and stone walls that zig-zagged over
+the slopes, lay in rectangular patches of vivid greens and yellows,
+resembling the unskilful daubs of a naive picture. And the landscape was
+divided in two by the white streak of a road stretching in long loops
+far away, like a river of dust crawling out of the hills on its way to
+the sea.
+
+“Here he is,” said the driver, again.
+
+In the long grass bordering the road a face glided past the carriage
+at the level of the wheels as we drove slowly by. The imbecile face was
+red, and the bullet head with close-cropped hair seemed to lie alone,
+its chin in the dust. The body was lost in the bushes growing thick
+along the bottom of the deep ditch.
+
+It was a boy’s face. He might have been sixteen, judging from the
+size--perhaps less, perhaps more. Such creatures are forgotten by
+time, and live untouched by years till death gathers them up into its
+compassionate bosom; the faithful death that never forgets in the press
+of work the most insignificant of its children.
+
+“Ah! there’s another,” said the man, with a certain satisfaction in his
+tone, as if he had caught sight of something expected.
+
+There was another. That one stood nearly in the middle of the road in
+the blaze of sunshine at the end of his own short shadow. And he stood
+with hands pushed into the opposite sleeves of his long coat, his head
+sunk between the shoulders, all hunched up in the flood of heat. From a
+distance he had the aspect of one suffering from intense cold.
+
+“Those are twins,” explained the driver.
+
+The idiot shuffled two paces out of the way and looked at us over his
+shoulder when we brushed past him. The glance was unseeing and staring,
+a fascinated glance; but he did not turn to look after us. Probably the
+image passed before the eyes without leaving any trace on the misshapen
+brain of the creature. When we had topped the ascent I looked over the
+hood. He stood in the road just where we had left him.
+
+The driver clambered into his seat, clicked his tongue, and we went
+downhill. The brake squeaked horribly from time to time. At the foot he
+eased off the noisy mechanism and said, turning half round on his box--
+
+“We shall see some more of them by-and-by.”
+
+“More idiots? How many of them are there, then?” I asked.
+
+“There’s four of them--children of a farmer near Ploumar here. . . . The
+parents are dead now,” he added, after a while. “The grandmother lives
+on the farm. In the daytime they knock about on this road, and they come
+home at dusk along with the cattle. . . . It’s a good farm.”
+
+We saw the other two: a boy and a girl, as the driver said. They were
+dressed exactly alike, in shapeless garments with petticoat-like skirts.
+The imperfect thing that lived within them moved those beings to howl
+at us from the top of the bank, where they sprawled amongst the tough
+stalks of furze. Their cropped black heads stuck out from the bright
+yellow wall of countless small blossoms. The faces were purple with
+the strain of yelling; the voices sounded blank and cracked like a
+mechanical imitation of old people’s voices; and suddenly ceased when we
+turned into a lane.
+
+I saw them many times in my wandering about the country. They lived on
+that road, drifting along its length here and there, according to the
+inexplicable impulses of their monstrous darkness. They were an
+offence to the sunshine, a reproach to empty heaven, a blight on the
+concentrated and purposeful vigour of the wild landscape. In time the
+story of their parents shaped itself before me out of the listless
+answers to my questions, out of the indifferent words heard in wayside
+inns or on the very road those idiots haunted. Some of it was told by
+an emaciated and sceptical old fellow with a tremendous whip, while we
+trudged together over the sands by the side of a two-wheeled cart loaded
+with dripping seaweed. Then at other times other people confirmed and
+completed the story: till it stood at last before me, a tale formidable
+and simple, as they always are, those disclosures of obscure trials
+endured by ignorant hearts.
+
+When he returned from his military service Jean-Pierre Bacadou found the
+old people very much aged. He remarked with pain that the work of the
+farm was not satisfactorily done. The father had not the energy of
+old days. The hands did not feel over them the eye of the master.
+Jean-Pierre noted with sorrow that the heap of manure in the courtyard
+before the only entrance to the house was not so large as it should
+have been. The fences were out of repair, and the cattle suffered from
+neglect. At home the mother was practically bedridden, and the girls
+chattered loudly in the big kitchen, unrebuked, from morning to night.
+He said to himself: “We must change all this.” He talked the matter over
+with his father one evening when the rays of the setting sun entering
+the yard between the outhouses ruled the heavy shadows with luminous
+streaks. Over the manure heap floated a mist, opal-tinted and odorous,
+and the marauding hens would stop in their scratching to examine with
+a sudden glance of their round eye the two men, both lean and tall,
+talking in hoarse tones. The old man, all twisted with rheumatism and
+bowed with years of work, the younger bony and straight, spoke without
+gestures in the indifferent manner of peasants, grave and slow.
+But before the sun had set the father had submitted to the sensible
+arguments of the son. “It is not for me that I am speaking,” insisted
+Jean-Pierre. “It is for the land. It’s a pity to see it badly used. I am
+not impatient for myself.” The old fellow nodded over his stick. “I dare
+say; I dare say,” he muttered. “You may be right. Do what you like. It’s
+the mother that will be pleased.”
+
+The mother was pleased with her daughter-in-law. Jean-Pierre brought
+the two-wheeled spring-cart with a rush into the yard. The gray horse
+galloped clumsily, and the bride and bridegroom, sitting side by side,
+were jerked backwards and forwards by the up and down motion of the
+shafts, in a manner regular and brusque. On the road the distanced
+wedding guests straggled in pairs and groups. The men advanced with
+heavy steps, swinging their idle arms. They were clad in town clothes;
+jackets cut with clumsy smartness, hard black hats, immense boots,
+polished highly. Their women all in simple black, with white caps and
+shawls of faded tints folded triangularly on the back, strolled lightly
+by their side. In front the violin sang a strident tune, and the biniou
+snored and hummed, while the player capered solemnly, lifting high his
+heavy clogs. The sombre procession drifted in and out of the narrow
+lanes, through sunshine and through shade, between fields and hedgerows,
+scaring the little birds that darted away in troops right and left. In
+the yard of Bacadou’s farm the dark ribbon wound itself up into a mass
+of men and women pushing at the door with cries and greetings. The
+wedding dinner was remembered for months. It was a splendid feast in the
+orchard. Farmers of considerable means and excellent repute were to be
+found sleeping in ditches, all along the road to Treguier, even as late
+as the afternoon of the next day. All the countryside participated in
+the happiness of Jean-Pierre. He remained sober, and, together with his
+quiet wife, kept out of the way, letting father and mother reap their
+due of honour and thanks. But the next day he took hold strongly, and
+the old folks felt a shadow--precursor of the grave--fall upon them
+finally. The world is to the young.
+
+When the twins were born there was plenty of room in the house, for the
+mother of Jean-Pierre had gone away to dwell under a heavy stone in the
+cemetery of Ploumar. On that day, for the first time since his son’s
+marriage, the elder Bacadou, neglected by the cackling lot of strange
+women who thronged the kitchen, left in the morning his seat under the
+mantel of the fireplace, and went into the empty cow-house, shaking his
+white locks dismally. Grandsons were all very well, but he wanted his
+soup at midday. When shown the babies, he stared at them with a fixed
+gaze, and muttered something like: “It’s too much.” Whether he meant too
+much happiness, or simply commented upon the number of his descendants,
+it is impossible to say. He looked offended--as far as his old wooden
+face could express anything; and for days afterwards could be seen,
+almost any time of the day, sitting at the gate, with his nose over his
+knees, a pipe between his gums, and gathered up into a kind of raging
+concentrated sulkiness. Once he spoke to his son, alluding to the
+newcomers with a groan: “They will quarrel over the land.” “Don’t bother
+about that, father,” answered Jean-Pierre, stolidly, and passed, bent
+double, towing a recalcitrant cow over his shoulder.
+
+He was happy, and so was Susan, his wife. It was not an ethereal joy
+welcoming new souls to struggle, perchance to victory. In fourteen years
+both boys would be a help; and, later on, Jean-Pierre pictured two big
+sons striding over the land from patch to patch, wringing tribute from
+the earth beloved and fruitful. Susan was happy too, for she did not
+want to be spoken of as the unfortunate woman, and now she had children
+no one could call her that. Both herself and her husband had seen
+something of the larger world--he during the time of his service; while
+she had spent a year or so in Paris with a Breton family; but had been
+too home-sick to remain longer away from the hilly and green country,
+set in a barren circle of rocks and sands, where she had been born.
+She thought that one of the boys ought perhaps to be a priest, but said
+nothing to her husband, who was a republican, and hated the “crows,”
+ as he called the ministers of religion. The christening was a splendid
+affair. All the commune came to it, for the Bacadous were rich
+and influential, and, now and then, did not mind the expense. The
+grandfather had a new coat.
+
+Some months afterwards, one evening when the kitchen had been swept,
+and the door locked, Jean-Pierre, looking at the cot, asked his wife:
+“What’s the matter with those children?” And, as if these words, spoken
+calmly, had been the portent of misfortune, she answered with a loud
+wail that must have been heard across the yard in the pig-sty; for
+the pigs (the Bacadous had the finest pigs in the country) stirred and
+grunted complainingly in the night. The husband went on grinding his
+bread and butter slowly, gazing at the wall, the soup-plate smoking
+under his chin. He had returned late from the market, where he had
+overheard (not for the first time) whispers behind his back. He revolved
+the words in his mind as he drove back. “Simple! Both of them. . . .
+Never any use! . . . Well! May be, may be. One must see. Would ask his
+wife.” This was her answer. He felt like a blow on his chest, but said
+only: “Go, draw me some cider. I am thirsty!”
+
+She went out moaning, an empty jug in her hand. Then he arose, took up
+the light, and moved slowly towards the cradle. They slept. He looked at
+them sideways, finished his mouthful there, went back heavily, and sat
+down before his plate. When his wife returned he never looked up,
+but swallowed a couple of spoonfuls noisily, and remarked, in a dull
+manner--
+
+“When they sleep they are like other people’s children.”
+
+She sat down suddenly on a stool near by, and shook with a silent
+tempest of sobs, unable to speak. He finished his meal, and remained
+idly thrown back in his chair, his eyes lost amongst the black rafters
+of the ceiling. Before him the tallow candle flared red and straight,
+sending up a slender thread of smoke. The light lay on the rough,
+sunburnt skin of his throat; the sunk cheeks were like patches of
+darkness, and his aspect was mournfully stolid, as if he had ruminated
+with difficulty endless ideas. Then he said, deliberately--
+
+“We must see . . . consult people. Don’t cry. . . . They won’t all be
+like that . . . surely! We must sleep now.”
+
+After the third child, also a boy, was born, Jean-Pierre went about his
+work with tense hopefulness. His lips seemed more narrow, more tightly
+compressed than before; as if for fear of letting the earth he tilled
+hear the voice of hope that murmured within his breast. He watched the
+child, stepping up to the cot with a heavy clang of sabots on the stone
+floor, and glanced in, along his shoulder, with that indifference which
+is like a deformity of peasant humanity. Like the earth they master and
+serve, those men, slow of eye and speech, do not show the inner fire; so
+that, at last, it becomes a question with them as with the earth,
+what there is in the core: heat, violence, a force mysterious and
+terrible--or nothing but a clod, a mass fertile and inert, cold and
+unfeeling, ready to bear a crop of plants that sustain life or give
+death.
+
+The mother watched with other eyes; listened with otherwise expectant
+ears. Under the high hanging shelves supporting great sides of bacon
+overhead, her body was busy by the great fireplace, attentive to the pot
+swinging on iron gallows, scrubbing the long table where the field hands
+would sit down directly to their evening meal. Her mind remained by the
+cradle, night and day on the watch, to hope and suffer. That child, like
+the other two, never smiled, never stretched its hands to her, never
+spoke; never had a glance of recognition for her in its big black eyes,
+which could only stare fixedly at any glitter, but failed hopelessly to
+follow the brilliance of a sun-ray slipping slowly along the floor.
+When the men were at work she spent long days between her three idiot
+children and the childish grandfather, who sat grim, angular, and
+immovable, with his feet near the warm ashes of the fire. The feeble
+old fellow seemed to suspect that there was something wrong with his
+grandsons. Only once, moved either by affection or by the sense of
+proprieties, he attempted to nurse the youngest. He took the boy up from
+the floor, clicked his tongue at him, and essayed a shaky gallop of his
+bony knees. Then he looked closely with his misty eyes at the child’s
+face and deposited him down gently on the floor again. And he sat, his
+lean shanks crossed, nodding at the steam escaping from the cooking-pot
+with a gaze senile and worried.
+
+Then mute affliction dwelt in Bacadou’s farmhouse, sharing the breath
+and the bread of its inhabitants; and the priest of the Ploumar parish
+had great cause for congratulation. He called upon the rich landowner,
+the Marquis de Chavanes, on purpose to deliver himself with joyful
+unction of solemn platitudes about the inscrutable ways of Providence.
+In the vast dimness of the curtained drawing-room, the little man,
+resembling a black bolster, leaned towards a couch, his hat on
+his knees, and gesticulated with a fat hand at the elongated,
+gracefully-flowing lines of the clear Parisian toilette from which the
+half-amused, half-bored marquise listened with gracious languor. He was
+exulting and humble, proud and awed. The impossible had come to pass.
+Jean-Pierre Bacadou, the enraged republican farmer, had been to mass
+last Sunday--had proposed to entertain the visiting priests at the next
+festival of Ploumar! It was a triumph for the Church and for the good
+cause. “I thought I would come at once to tell Monsieur le Marquis. I
+know how anxious he is for the welfare of our country,” declared the
+priest, wiping his face. He was asked to stay to dinner.
+
+The Chavanes returning that evening, after seeing their guest to the
+main gate of the park, discussed the matter while they strolled in
+the moonlight, trailing their long shadows up the straight avenue of
+chestnuts. The marquise, a royalist of course, had been mayor of the
+commune which includes Ploumar, the scattered hamlets of the coast, and
+the stony islands that fringe the yellow flatness of the sands. He had
+felt his position insecure, for there was a strong republican element in
+that part of the country; but now the conversion of Jean-Pierre made
+him safe. He was very pleased. “You have no idea how influential
+those people are,” he explained to his wife. “Now, I am sure, the next
+communal election will go all right. I shall be re-elected.” “Your
+ambition is perfectly insatiable, Charles,” exclaimed the marquise,
+gaily. “But, ma chere amie,” argued the husband, seriously, “it’s most
+important that the right man should be mayor this year, because of the
+elections to the Chamber. If you think it amuses me . . .”
+
+Jean-Pierre had surrendered to his wife’s mother. Madame Levaille was
+a woman of business, known and respected within a radius of at least
+fifteen miles. Thick-set and stout, she was seen about the country, on
+foot or in an acquaintance’s cart, perpetually moving, in spite of her
+fifty-eight years, in steady pursuit of business. She had houses in all
+the hamlets, she worked quarries of granite, she freighted coasters
+with stone--even traded with the Channel Islands. She was broad-cheeked,
+wide-eyed, persuasive in speech: carrying her point with the placid and
+invincible obstinacy of an old woman who knows her own mind. She very
+seldom slept for two nights together in the same house; and the wayside
+inns were the best places to inquire in as to her whereabouts. She had
+either passed, or was expected to pass there at six; or somebody, coming
+in, had seen her in the morning, or expected to meet her that evening.
+After the inns that command the roads, the churches were the buildings
+she frequented most. Men of liberal opinions would induce small children
+to run into sacred edifices to see whether Madame Levaille was there,
+and to tell her that so-and-so was in the road waiting to speak to her
+about potatoes, or flour, or stones, or houses; and she would curtail
+her devotions, come out blinking and crossing herself into the sunshine;
+ready to discuss business matters in a calm, sensible way across a table
+in the kitchen of the inn opposite. Latterly she had stayed for a few
+days several times with her son-in-law, arguing against sorrow and
+misfortune with composed face and gentle tones. Jean-Pierre felt the
+convictions imbibed in the regiment torn out of his breast--not by
+arguments but by facts. Striding over his fields he thought it over.
+There were three of them. Three! All alike! Why? Such things did not
+happen to everybody--to nobody he ever heard of. One--might pass. But
+three! All three. Forever useless, to be fed while he lived and . . .
+What would become of the land when he died? This must be seen to. He
+would sacrifice his convictions. One day he told his wife--
+
+“See what your God will do for us. Pay for some masses.”
+
+Susan embraced her man. He stood unbending, then turned on his heels and
+went out. But afterwards, when a black soutane darkened his doorway,
+he did not object; even offered some cider himself to the priest.
+He listened to the talk meekly; went to mass between the two women;
+accomplished what the priest called “his religious duties” at Easter.
+That morning he felt like a man who had sold his soul. In the afternoon
+he fought ferociously with an old friend and neighbour who had remarked
+that the priests had the best of it and were now going to eat the
+priest-eater. He came home dishevelled and bleeding, and happening to
+catch sight of his children (they were kept generally out of the way),
+cursed and swore incoherently, banging the table. Susan wept. Madame
+Levaille sat serenely unmoved. She assured her daughter that “It will
+pass;” and taking up her thick umbrella, departed in haste to see after
+a schooner she was going to load with granite from her quarry.
+
+A year or so afterwards the girl was born. A girl. Jean-Pierre heard of
+it in the fields, and was so upset by the news that he sat down on the
+boundary wall and remained there till the evening, instead of going home
+as he was urged to do. A girl! He felt half cheated. However, when he
+got home he was partly reconciled to his fate. One could marry her to
+a good fellow--not to a good for nothing, but to a fellow with some
+understanding and a good pair of arms. Besides, the next may be a boy,
+he thought. Of course they would be all right. His new credulity knew
+of no doubt. The ill luck was broken. He spoke cheerily to his wife.
+She was also hopeful. Three priests came to that christening, and Madame
+Levaille was godmother. The child turned out an idiot too.
+
+Then on market days Jean-Pierre was seen bargaining bitterly,
+quarrelsome and greedy; then getting drunk with taciturn earnestness;
+then driving home in the dusk at a rate fit for a wedding, but with a
+face gloomy enough for a funeral. Sometimes he would insist on his wife
+coming with him; and they would drive in the early morning, shaking side
+by side on the narrow seat above the helpless pig, that, with tied legs,
+grunted a melancholy sigh at every rut. The morning drives were silent;
+but in the evening, coming home, Jean-Pierre, tipsy, was viciously
+muttering, and growled at the confounded woman who could not rear
+children that were like anybody else’s. Susan, holding on against the
+erratic swayings of the cart, pretended not to hear. Once, as they were
+driving through Ploumar, some obscure and drunken impulse caused him to
+pull up sharply opposite the church. The moon swam amongst light white
+clouds. The tombstones gleamed pale under the fretted shadows of
+the trees in the churchyard. Even the village dogs slept. Only the
+nightingales, awake, spun out the thrill of their song above the silence
+of graves. Jean-Pierre said thickly to his wife--
+
+“What do you think is there?”
+
+He pointed his whip at the tower--in which the big dial of the clock
+appeared high in the moonlight like a pallid face without eyes--and
+getting out carefully, fell down at once by the wheel. He picked
+himself up and climbed one by one the few steps to the iron gate of the
+churchyard. He put his face to the bars and called out indistinctly--
+
+“Hey there! Come out!”
+
+“Jean! Return! Return!” entreated his wife in low tones.
+
+He took no notice, and seemed to wait there. The song of nightingales
+beat on all sides against the high walls of the church, and flowed back
+between stone crosses and flat gray slabs, engraved with words of hope
+and sorrow.
+
+“Hey! Come out!” shouted Jean-Pierre, loudly.
+
+The nightingales ceased to sing.
+
+“Nobody?” went on Jean-Pierre. “Nobody there. A swindle of the crows.
+That’s what this is. Nobody anywhere. I despise it. _Allez! Houp!_”
+
+He shook the gate with all his strength, and the iron bars rattled with
+a frightful clanging, like a chain dragged over stone steps. A dog
+near by barked hurriedly. Jean-Pierre staggered back, and after three
+successive dashes got into his cart. Susan sat very quiet and still. He
+said to her with drunken severity--
+
+“See? Nobody. I’ve been made a fool! _Malheur!_ Somebody will pay for it.
+The next one I see near the house I will lay my whip on . . . on the
+black spine . . . I will. I don’t want him in there . . . he only helps
+the carrion crows to rob poor folk. I am a man. . . . We will see if
+I can’t have children like anybody else . . . now you mind. . . . They
+won’t be all . . . all . . . we see. . . .”
+
+She burst out through the fingers that hid her face--
+
+“Don’t say that, Jean; don’t say that, my man!”
+
+He struck her a swinging blow on the head with the back of his hand
+and knocked her into the bottom of the cart, where she crouched,
+thrown about lamentably by every jolt. He drove furiously, standing
+up, brandishing his whip, shaking the reins over the gray horse that
+galloped ponderously, making the heavy harness leap upon his broad
+quarters. The country rang clamorous in the night with the irritated
+barking of farm dogs, that followed the rattle of wheels all along the
+road. A couple of belated wayfarers had only just time to step into the
+ditch. At his own gate he caught the post and was shot out of the cart
+head first. The horse went on slowly to the door. At Susan’s piercing
+cries the farm hands rushed out. She thought him dead, but he was only
+sleeping where he fell, and cursed his men, who hastened to him, for
+disturbing his slumbers.
+
+Autumn came. The clouded sky descended low upon the black contours
+of the hills; and the dead leaves danced in spiral whirls under naked
+trees, till the wind, sighing profoundly, laid them to rest in the
+hollows of bare valleys. And from morning till night one could see all
+over the land black denuded boughs, the boughs gnarled and twisted, as
+if contorted with pain, swaying sadly between the wet clouds and
+the soaked earth. The clear and gentle streams of summer days rushed
+discoloured and raging at the stones that barred the way to the sea,
+with the fury of madness bent upon suicide. From horizon to horizon the
+great road to the sands lay between the hills in a dull glitter of empty
+curves, resembling an unnavigable river of mud.
+
+Jean-Pierre went from field to field, moving blurred and tall in the
+drizzle, or striding on the crests of rises, lonely and high upon the
+gray curtain of drifting clouds, as if he had been pacing along the very
+edge of the universe. He looked at the black earth, at the earth
+mute and promising, at the mysterious earth doing its work of life in
+death-like stillness under the veiled sorrow of the sky. And it seemed
+to him that to a man worse than childless there was no promise in
+the fertility of fields, that from him the earth escaped, defied him,
+frowned at him like the clouds, sombre and hurried above his head.
+Having to face alone his own fields, he felt the inferiority of man who
+passes away before the clod that remains. Must he give up the hope of
+having by his side a son who would look at the turned-up sods with a
+master’s eye? A man that would think as he thought, that would feel as
+he felt; a man who would be part of himself, and yet remain to trample
+masterfully on that earth when he was gone? He thought of some distant
+relations, and felt savage enough to curse them aloud. They! Never! He
+turned homewards, going straight at the roof of his dwelling, visible
+between the enlaced skeletons of trees. As he swung his legs over the
+stile a cawing flock of birds settled slowly on the field; dropped down
+behind his back, noiseless and fluttering, like flakes of soot.
+
+That day Madame Levaille had gone early in the afternoon to the house
+she had near Kervanion. She had to pay some of the men who worked in her
+granite quarry there, and she went in good time because her little house
+contained a shop where the workmen could spend their wages without the
+trouble of going to town. The house stood alone amongst rocks. A lane
+of mud and stones ended at the door. The sea-winds coming ashore on
+Stonecutter’s point, fresh from the fierce turmoil of the waves, howled
+violently at the unmoved heaps of black boulders holding up steadily
+short-armed, high crosses against the tremendous rush of the invisible.
+In the sweep of gales the sheltered dwelling stood in a calm resonant
+and disquieting, like the calm in the centre of a hurricane. On stormy
+nights, when the tide was out, the bay of Fougere, fifty feet below the
+house, resembled an immense black pit, from which ascended mutterings
+and sighs as if the sands down there had been alive and complaining.
+At high tide the returning water assaulted the ledges of rock in short
+rushes, ending in bursts of livid light and columns of spray, that flew
+inland, stinging to death the grass of pastures.
+
+The darkness came from the hills, flowed over the coast, put out the red
+fires of sunset, and went on to seaward pursuing the retiring tide. The
+wind dropped with the sun, leaving a maddened sea and a devastated sky.
+The heavens above the house seemed to be draped in black rags, held up
+here and there by pins of fire. Madame Levaille, for this evening the
+servant of her own workmen, tried to induce them to depart. “An old
+woman like me ought to be in bed at this late hour,” she good-humouredly
+repeated. The quarrymen drank, asked for more. They shouted over the
+table as if they had been talking across a field. At one end four
+of them played cards, banging the wood with their hard knuckles, and
+swearing at every lead. One sat with a lost gaze, humming a bar of
+some song, which he repeated endlessly. Two others, in a corner, were
+quarrelling confidentially and fiercely over some woman, looking close
+into one another’s eyes as if they had wanted to tear them out, but
+speaking in whispers that promised violence and murder discreetly, in a
+venomous sibillation of subdued words. The atmosphere in there was thick
+enough to slice with a knife. Three candles burning about the long room
+glowed red and dull like sparks expiring in ashes.
+
+The slight click of the iron latch was at that late hour as unexpected
+and startling as a thunder-clap. Madame Levaille put down a bottle
+she held above a liqueur glass; the players turned their heads; the
+whispered quarrel ceased; only the singer, after darting a glance at the
+door, went on humming with a stolid face. Susan appeared in the doorway,
+stepped in, flung the door to, and put her back against it, saying, half
+aloud--
+
+“Mother!”
+
+Madame Levaille, taking up the bottle again, said calmly: “Here you are,
+my girl. What a state you are in!” The neck of the bottle rang on the
+rim of the glass, for the old woman was startled, and the idea that the
+farm had caught fire had entered her head. She could think of no other
+cause for her daughter’s appearance.
+
+Susan, soaked and muddy, stared the whole length of the room towards the
+men at the far end. Her mother asked--
+
+“What has happened? God guard us from misfortune!”
+
+Susan moved her lips. No sound came. Madame Levaille stepped up to her
+daughter, took her by the arm, looked into her face.
+
+“In God’s name,” she said, shakily, “what’s the matter? You have been
+rolling in mud. . . . Why did you come? . . . Where’s Jean?”
+
+The men had all got up and approached slowly, staring with dull
+surprise. Madame Levaille jerked her daughter away from the door, swung
+her round upon a seat close to the wall. Then she turned fiercely to the
+men--
+
+“Enough of this! Out you go--you others! I close.”
+
+One of them observed, looking down at Susan collapsed on the seat: “She
+is--one may say--half dead.”
+
+Madame Levaille flung the door open.
+
+“Get out! March!” she cried, shaking nervously.
+
+They dropped out into the night, laughing stupidly. Outside, the two
+Lotharios broke out into loud shouts. The others tried to soothe them,
+all talking at once. The noise went away up the lane with the men,
+who staggered together in a tight knot, remonstrating with one another
+foolishly.
+
+“Speak, Susan. What is it? Speak!” entreated Madame Levaille, as soon as
+the door was shut.
+
+Susan pronounced some incomprehensible words, glaring at the table. The
+old woman clapped her hands above her head, let them drop, and stood
+looking at her daughter with disconsolate eyes. Her husband had been
+“deranged in his head” for a few years before he died, and now she began
+to suspect her daughter was going mad. She asked, pressingly--
+
+“Does Jean know where you are? Where is Jean?”
+
+“He knows . . . he is dead.”
+
+“What!” cried the old woman. She came up near, and peering at her
+daughter, repeated three times: “What do you say? What do you say? What
+do you say?”
+
+Susan sat dry-eyed and stony before Madame Levaille, who contemplated
+her, feeling a strange sense of inexplicable horror creep into the
+silence of the house. She had hardly realised the news, further than to
+understand that she had been brought in one short moment face to face
+with something unexpected and final. It did not even occur to her to ask
+for any explanation. She thought: accident--terrible accident--blood to
+the head--fell down a trap door in the loft. . . . She remained there,
+distracted and mute, blinking her old eyes.
+
+Suddenly, Susan said--
+
+“I have killed him.”
+
+For a moment the mother stood still, almost unbreathing, but with
+composed face. The next second she burst out into a shout--
+
+“You miserable madwoman . . . they will cut your neck. . . .”
+
+She fancied the gendarmes entering the house, saying to her: “We want
+your daughter; give her up:” the gendarmes with the severe, hard faces
+of men on duty. She knew the brigadier well--an old friend, familiar
+and respectful, saying heartily, “To your good health, Madame!” before
+lifting to his lips the small glass of cognac--out of the special bottle
+she kept for friends. And now! . . . She was losing her head. She rushed
+here and there, as if looking for something urgently needed--gave that
+up, stood stock still in the middle of the room, and screamed at her
+daughter--
+
+“Why? Say! Say! Why?”
+
+The other seemed to leap out of her strange apathy.
+
+“Do you think I am made of stone?” she shouted back, striding towards
+her mother.
+
+“No! It’s impossible . . .” said Madame Levaille, in a convinced tone.
+
+“You go and see, mother,” retorted Susan, looking at her with blazing
+eyes. “There’s no money in heaven--no justice. No! . . . I did not know.
+. . . Do you think I have no heart? Do you think I have never heard
+people jeering at me, pitying me, wondering at me? Do you know how some
+of them were calling me? The mother of idiots--that was my nickname!
+And my children never would know me, never speak to me. They would know
+nothing; neither men--nor God. Haven’t I prayed! But the Mother of God
+herself would not hear me. A mother! . . . Who is accursed--I, or the
+man who is dead? Eh? Tell me. I took care of myself. Do you think I
+would defy the anger of God and have my house full of those things--that
+are worse than animals who know the hand that feeds them? Who blasphemed
+in the night at the very church door? Was it I? . . . I only wept and
+prayed for mercy . . . and I feel the curse at every moment of the
+day--I see it round me from morning to night . . . I’ve got to keep them
+alive--to take care of my misfortune and shame. And he would come. I
+begged him and Heaven for mercy. . . . No! . . . Then we shall see. . . .
+He came this evening. I thought to myself: ‘Ah! again!’ . . . I had
+my long scissors. I heard him shouting . . . I saw him near. . . . I
+must--must I? . . . Then take! . . . And I struck him in the throat
+above the breastbone. . . . I never heard him even sigh. . . . I left
+him standing. . . . It was a minute ago. How did I come here?”
+
+Madame Levaille shivered. A wave of cold ran down her back, down her
+fat arms under her tight sleeves, made her stamp gently where she stood.
+Quivers ran over the broad cheeks, across the thin lips, ran amongst the
+wrinkles at the corners of her steady old eyes. She stammered--
+
+“You wicked woman--you disgrace me. But there! You always resembled your
+father. What do you think will become of you . . . in the other world?
+In this . . . Oh misery!”
+
+She was very hot now. She felt burning inside. She wrung her perspiring
+hands--and suddenly, starting in great haste, began to look for her big
+shawl and umbrella, feverishly, never once glancing at her daughter, who
+stood in the middle of the room following her with a gaze distracted and
+cold.
+
+“Nothing worse than in this,” said Susan.
+
+Her mother, umbrella in hand and trailing the shawl over the floor,
+groaned profoundly.
+
+“I must go to the priest,” she burst out passionately. “I do not know
+whether you even speak the truth! You are a horrible woman. They will
+find you anywhere. You may stay here--or go. There is no room for you in
+this world.”
+
+Ready now to depart, she yet wandered aimlessly about the room, putting
+the bottles on the shelf, trying to fit with trembling hands the covers
+on cardboard boxes. Whenever the real sense of what she had heard
+emerged for a second from the haze of her thoughts she would fancy that
+something had exploded in her brain without, unfortunately, bursting her
+head to pieces--which would have been a relief. She blew the candles
+out one by one without knowing it, and was horribly startled by the
+darkness. She fell on a bench and began to whimper. After a while she
+ceased, and sat listening to the breathing of her daughter, whom she
+could hardly see, still and upright, giving no other sign of life. She
+was becoming old rapidly at last, during those minutes. She spoke in
+tones unsteady, cut about by the rattle of teeth, like one shaken by a
+deadly cold fit of ague.
+
+“I wish you had died little. I will never dare to show my old head in
+the sunshine again. There are worse misfortunes than idiot children. I
+wish you had been born to me simple--like your own. . . .”
+
+She saw the figure of her daughter pass before the faint and livid
+clearness of a window. Then it appeared in the doorway for a second, and
+the door swung to with a clang. Madame Levaille, as if awakened by the
+noise from a long nightmare, rushed out.
+
+“Susan!” she shouted from the doorstep.
+
+She heard a stone roll a long time down the declivity of the rocky beach
+above the sands. She stepped forward cautiously, one hand on the wall
+of the house, and peered down into the smooth darkness of the empty bay.
+Once again she cried--
+
+“Susan! You will kill yourself there.”
+
+The stone had taken its last leap in the dark, and she heard nothing
+now. A sudden thought seemed to strangle her, and she called no more.
+She turned her back upon the black silence of the pit and went up the
+lane towards Ploumar, stumbling along with sombre determination, as if
+she had started on a desperate journey that would last, perhaps, to the
+end of her life. A sullen and periodic clamour of waves rolling over
+reefs followed her far inland between the high hedges sheltering the
+gloomy solitude of the fields.
+
+Susan had run out, swerving sharp to the left at the door, and on the
+edge of the slope crouched down behind a boulder. A dislodged stone went
+on downwards, rattling as it leaped. When Madame Levaille called out,
+Susan could have, by stretching her hand, touched her mother’s skirt,
+had she had the courage to move a limb. She saw the old woman go away,
+and she remained still, closing her eyes and pressing her side to the
+hard and rugged surface of the rock. After a while a familiar face with
+fixed eyes and an open mouth became visible in the intense obscurity
+amongst the boulders. She uttered a low cry and stood up. The face
+vanished, leaving her to gasp and shiver alone in the wilderness of
+stone heaps. But as soon as she had crouched down again to rest, with
+her head against the rock, the face returned, came very near, appeared
+eager to finish the speech that had been cut short by death, only a
+moment ago. She scrambled quickly to her feet and said: “Go away, or I
+will do it again.” The thing wavered, swung to the right, to the left.
+She moved this way and that, stepped back, fancied herself screaming
+at it, and was appalled by the unbroken stillness of the night. She
+tottered on the brink, felt the steep declivity under her feet, and
+rushed down blindly to save herself from a headlong fall. The shingle
+seemed to wake up; the pebbles began to roll before her, pursued her
+from above, raced down with her on both sides, rolling past with an
+increasing clatter. In the peace of the night the noise grew, deepening
+to a rumour, continuous and violent, as if the whole semicircle of the
+stony beach had started to tumble down into the bay. Susan’s feet hardly
+touched the slope that seemed to run down with her. At the bottom she
+stumbled, shot forward, throwing her arms out, and fell heavily. She
+jumped up at once and turned swiftly to look back, her clenched hands
+full of sand she had clutched in her fall. The face was there, keeping
+its distance, visible in its own sheen that made a pale stain in the
+night. She shouted, “Go away!”--she shouted at it with pain, with fear,
+with all the rage of that useless stab that could not keep him quiet,
+keep him out of her sight. What did he want now? He was dead. Dead
+men have no children. Would he never leave her alone? She shrieked
+at it--waved her outstretched hands. She seemed to feel the breath of
+parted lips, and, with a long cry of discouragement, fled across the
+level bottom of the bay.
+
+She ran lightly, unaware of any effort of her body. High sharp rocks
+that, when the bay is full, show above the glittering plain of blue
+water like pointed towers of submerged churches, glided past her,
+rushing to the land at a tremendous pace. To the left, in the distance,
+she could see something shining: a broad disc of light in which narrow
+shadows pivoted round the centre like the spokes of a wheel. She heard
+a voice calling, “Hey! There!” and answered with a wild scream. So, he
+could call yet! He was calling after her to stop. Never! . . . She tore
+through the night, past the startled group of seaweed-gatherers who
+stood round their lantern paralysed with fear at the unearthly screech
+coming from that fleeing shadow. The men leaned on their pitchforks
+staring fearfully. A woman fell on her knees, and, crossing herself,
+began to pray aloud. A little girl with her ragged skirt full of slimy
+seaweed began to sob despairingly, lugging her soaked burden close to
+the man who carried the light. Somebody said: “The thing ran out towards
+the sea.” Another voice exclaimed: “And the sea is coming back! Look at
+the spreading puddles. Do you hear--you woman--there! Get up!” Several
+voices cried together. “Yes, let us be off! Let the accursed thing go to
+the sea!” They moved on, keeping close round the light. Suddenly a man
+swore loudly. He would go and see what was the matter. It had been a
+woman’s voice. He would go. There were shrill protests from women--but
+his high form detached itself from the group and went off running. They
+sent an unanimous call of scared voices after him. A word, insulting and
+mocking, came back, thrown at them through the darkness. A woman moaned.
+An old man said gravely: “Such things ought to be left alone.” They went
+on slower, shuffling in the yielding sand and whispering to one another
+that Millot feared nothing, having no religion, but that it would end
+badly some day.
+
+Susan met the incoming tide by the Raven islet and stopped, panting,
+with her feet in the water. She heard the murmur and felt the cold
+caress of the sea, and, calmer now, could see the sombre and confused
+mass of the Raven on one side and on the other the long white streak of
+Molene sands that are left high above the dry bottom of Fougere Bay
+at every ebb. She turned round and saw far away, along the starred
+background of the sky, the ragged outline of the coast. Above it, nearly
+facing her, appeared the tower of Ploumar Church; a slender and tall
+pyramid shooting up dark and pointed into the clustered glitter of the
+stars. She felt strangely calm. She knew where she was, and began
+to remember how she came there--and why. She peered into the smooth
+obscurity near her. She was alone. There was nothing there; nothing near
+her, either living or dead.
+
+The tide was creeping in quietly, putting out long impatient arms of
+strange rivulets that ran towards the land between ridges of sand. Under
+the night the pools grew bigger with mysterious rapidity, while
+the great sea, yet far off, thundered in a regular rhythm along the
+indistinct line of the horizon. Susan splashed her way back for a
+few yards without being able to get clear of the water that murmured
+tenderly all around and, suddenly, with a spiteful gurgle, nearly took
+her off her feet. Her heart thumped with fear. This place was too big
+and too empty to die in. To-morrow they would do with her what they
+liked. But before she died she must tell them--tell the gentlemen in
+black clothes that there are things no woman can bear. She must explain
+how it happened. . . . She splashed through a pool, getting wet to the
+waist, too preoccupied to care. . . . She must explain. “He came in the
+same way as ever and said, just so: ‘Do you think I am going to leave
+the land to those people from Morbihan that I do not know? Do you? We
+shall see! Come along, you creature of mischance!’ And he put his arms
+out. Then, Messieurs, I said: ‘Before God--never!’ And he said, striding
+at me with open palms: ‘There is no God to hold me! Do you understand,
+you useless carcase. I will do what I like.’ And he took me by the
+shoulders. Then I, Messieurs, called to God for help, and next minute,
+while he was shaking me, I felt my long scissors in my hand. His shirt
+was unbuttoned, and, by the candle-light, I saw the hollow of his
+throat. I cried: ‘Let go!’ He was crushing my shoulders. He was strong,
+my man was! Then I thought: No! . . . Must I? . . . Then take!--and I
+struck in the hollow place. I never saw him fall. . . . The old father
+never turned his head. He is deaf and childish, gentlemen. . . . Nobody
+saw him fall. I ran out . . . Nobody saw. . . .”
+
+She had been scrambling amongst the boulders of the Raven and now found
+herself, all out of breath, standing amongst the heavy shadows of the
+rocky islet. The Raven is connected with the main land by a natural pier
+of immense and slippery stones. She intended to return home that way.
+Was he still standing there? At home. Home! Four idiots and a corpse.
+She must go back and explain. Anybody would understand. . . .
+
+Below her the night or the sea seemed to pronounce distinctly--
+
+“Aha! I see you at last!”
+
+She started, slipped, fell; and without attempting to rise, listened,
+terrified. She heard heavy breathing, a clatter of wooden clogs. It
+stopped.
+
+“Where the devil did you pass?” said an invisible man, hoarsely.
+
+She held her breath. She recognized the voice. She had not seen him
+fall. Was he pursuing her there dead, or perhaps . . . alive?
+
+She lost her head. She cried from the crevice where she lay huddled,
+“Never, never!”
+
+“Ah! You are still there. You led me a fine dance. Wait, my beauty, I
+must see how you look after all this. You wait. . . .”
+
+Millot was stumbling, laughing, swearing meaninglessly out of
+pure satisfaction, pleased with himself for having run down that
+fly-by-night. “As if there were such things as ghosts! Bah! It took an
+old African soldier to show those clodhoppers. . . . But it was curious.
+Who the devil was she?”
+
+Susan listened, crouching. He was coming for her, this dead man. There
+was no escape. What a noise he made amongst the stones. . . . She saw
+his head rise up, then the shoulders. He was tall--her own man! His long
+arms waved about, and it was his own voice sounding a little strange
+. . . because of the scissors. She scrambled out quickly, rushed to the
+edge of the causeway, and turned round. The man stood still on a high
+stone, detaching himself in dead black on the glitter of the sky.
+
+“Where are you going to?” he called, roughly.
+
+She answered, “Home!” and watched him intensely. He made a striding,
+clumsy leap on to another boulder, and stopped again, balancing himself,
+then said--
+
+“Ha! ha! Well, I am going with you. It’s the least I can do. Ha! ha!
+ha!”
+
+She stared at him till her eyes seemed to become glowing coals that
+burned deep into her brain, and yet she was in mortal fear of making
+out the well-known features. Below her the sea lapped softly against the
+rock with a splash continuous and gentle.
+
+The man said, advancing another step--
+
+“I am coming for you. What do you think?”
+
+She trembled. Coming for her! There was no escape, no peace, no hope.
+She looked round despairingly. Suddenly the whole shadowy coast, the
+blurred islets, the heaven itself, swayed about twice, then came to a
+rest. She closed her eyes and shouted--
+
+“Can’t you wait till I am dead!”
+
+She was shaken by a furious hate for that shade that pursued her in this
+world, unappeased even by death in its longing for an heir that would be
+like other people’s children.
+
+“Hey! What?” said Millot, keeping his distance prudently. He was saying
+to himself: “Look out! Some lunatic. An accident happens soon.”
+
+She went on, wildly--
+
+“I want to live. To live alone--for a week--for a day. I must explain
+to them. . . . I would tear you to pieces, I would kill you twenty times
+over rather than let you touch me while I live. How many times must I
+kill you--you blasphemer! Satan sends you here. I am damned too!”
+
+“Come,” said Millot, alarmed and conciliating. “I am perfectly alive!
+. . . Oh, my God!”
+
+She had screamed, “Alive!” and at once vanished before his eyes, as if
+the islet itself had swerved aside from under her feet. Millot rushed
+forward, and fell flat with his chin over the edge. Far below he saw the
+water whitened by her struggles, and heard one shrill cry for help that
+seemed to dart upwards along the perpendicular face of the rock, and
+soar past, straight into the high and impassive heaven.
+
+Madame Levaille sat, dry-eyed, on the short grass of the hill side, with
+her thick legs stretched out, and her old feet turned up in their black
+cloth shoes. Her clogs stood near by, and further off the umbrella
+lay on the withered sward like a weapon dropped from the grasp of a
+vanquished warrior. The Marquis of Chavanes, on horseback, one gloved
+hand on thigh, looked down at her as she got up laboriously, with
+groans. On the narrow track of the seaweed-carts four men were carrying
+inland Susan’s body on a hand-barrow, while several others straggled
+listlessly behind. Madame Levaille looked after the procession. “Yes,
+Monsieur le Marquis,” she said dispassionately, in her usual calm tone
+of a reasonable old woman. “There are unfortunate people on this earth.
+I had only one child. Only one! And they won’t bury her in consecrated
+ground!”
+
+Her eyes filled suddenly, and a short shower of tears rolled down the
+broad cheeks. She pulled the shawl close about her. The Marquis leaned
+slightly over in his saddle, and said--
+
+“It is very sad. You have all my sympathy. I shall speak to the Cure.
+She was unquestionably insane, and the fall was accidental. Millot says
+so distinctly. Good-day, Madame.”
+
+And he trotted off, thinking to himself: “I must get this old woman
+appointed guardian of those idiots, and administrator of the farm.
+It would be much better than having here one of those other Bacadous,
+probably a red republican, corrupting my commune.”
+
+
+
+
+
+AN OUTPOST OF PROGRESS
+
+
+I
+
+There were two white men in charge of the trading station. Kayerts, the
+chief, was short and fat; Carlier, the assistant, was tall, with a large
+head and a very broad trunk perched upon a long pair of thin legs. The
+third man on the staff was a Sierra Leone nigger, who maintained that
+his name was Henry Price. However, for some reason or other, the natives
+down the river had given him the name of Makola, and it stuck to him
+through all his wanderings about the country. He spoke English and
+French with a warbling accent, wrote a beautiful hand, understood
+bookkeeping, and cherished in his innermost heart the worship of evil
+spirits. His wife was a negress from Loanda, very large and very noisy.
+Three children rolled about in sunshine before the door of his low,
+shed-like dwelling. Makola, taciturn and impenetrable, despised the two
+white men. He had charge of a small clay storehouse with a dried-grass
+roof, and pretended to keep a correct account of beads, cotton cloth,
+red kerchiefs, brass wire, and other trade goods it contained. Besides
+the storehouse and Makola’s hut, there was only one large building in
+the cleared ground of the station. It was built neatly of reeds, with a
+verandah on all the four sides. There were three rooms in it. The one
+in the middle was the living-room, and had two rough tables and a few
+stools in it. The other two were the bedrooms for the white men. Each
+had a bedstead and a mosquito net for all furniture. The plank floor was
+littered with the belongings of the white men; open half-empty boxes,
+torn wearing apparel, old boots; all the things dirty, and all the
+things broken, that accumulate mysteriously round untidy men. There was
+also another dwelling-place some distance away from the buildings. In
+it, under a tall cross much out of the perpendicular, slept the man who
+had seen the beginning of all this; who had planned and had watched
+the construction of this outpost of progress. He had been, at home, an
+unsuccessful painter who, weary of pursuing fame on an empty stomach,
+had gone out there through high protections. He had been the first chief
+of that station. Makola had watched the energetic artist die of fever
+in the just finished house with his usual kind of “I told you so”
+ indifference. Then, for a time, he dwelt alone with his family, his
+account books, and the Evil Spirit that rules the lands under the
+equator. He got on very well with his god. Perhaps he had propitiated
+him by a promise of more white men to play with, by and by. At any rate
+the director of the Great Trading Company, coming up in a steamer that
+resembled an enormous sardine box with a flat-roofed shed erected on it,
+found the station in good order, and Makola as usual quietly diligent.
+The director had the cross put up over the first agent’s grave, and
+appointed Kayerts to the post. Carlier was told off as second in charge.
+The director was a man ruthless and efficient, who at times, but very
+imperceptibly, indulged in grim humour. He made a speech to Kayerts and
+Carlier, pointing out to them the promising aspect of their station.
+The nearest trading-post was about three hundred miles away. It was an
+exceptional opportunity for them to distinguish themselves and to
+earn percentages on the trade. This appointment was a favour done to
+beginners. Kayerts was moved almost to tears by his director’s kindness.
+He would, he said, by doing his best, try to justify the flattering
+confidence, &c., &c. Kayerts had been in the Administration of the
+Telegraphs, and knew how to express himself correctly. Carlier, an
+ex-non-commissioned officer of cavalry in an army guaranteed from
+harm by several European Powers, was less impressed. If there were
+commissions to get, so much the better; and, trailing a sulky glance
+over the river, the forests, the impenetrable bush that seemed to cut
+off the station from the rest of the world, he muttered between his
+teeth, “We shall see, very soon.”
+
+Next day, some bales of cotton goods and a few cases of provisions
+having been thrown on shore, the sardine-box steamer went off, not to
+return for another six months. On the deck the director touched his cap
+to the two agents, who stood on the bank waving their hats, and turning
+to an old servant of the Company on his passage to headquarters, said,
+“Look at those two imbeciles. They must be mad at home to send me such
+specimens. I told those fellows to plant a vegetable garden, build new
+storehouses and fences, and construct a landing-stage. I bet nothing
+will be done! They won’t know how to begin. I always thought the station
+on this river useless, and they just fit the station!”
+
+“They will form themselves there,” said the old stager with a quiet
+smile.
+
+“At any rate, I am rid of them for six months,” retorted the director.
+
+The two men watched the steamer round the bend, then, ascending arm in
+arm the slope of the bank, returned to the station. They had been in
+this vast and dark country only a very short time, and as yet always
+in the midst of other white men, under the eye and guidance of their
+superiors. And now, dull as they were to the subtle influences of
+surroundings, they felt themselves very much alone, when suddenly left
+unassisted to face the wilderness; a wilderness rendered more strange,
+more incomprehensible by the mysterious glimpses of the vigorous life
+it contained. They were two perfectly insignificant and incapable
+individuals, whose existence is only rendered possible through the high
+organization of civilized crowds. Few men realize that their life,
+the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their
+audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of
+their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the
+emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought
+belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that
+believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and
+of its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion. But
+the contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and
+primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart. To the
+sentiment of being alone of one’s kind, to the clear perception of the
+loneliness of one’s thoughts, of one’s sensations--to the negation
+of the habitual, which is safe, there is added the affirmation of
+the unusual, which is dangerous; a suggestion of things vague,
+uncontrollable, and repulsive, whose discomposing intrusion excites the
+imagination and tries the civilized nerves of the foolish and the wise
+alike.
+
+Kayerts and Carlier walked arm in arm, drawing close to one another
+as children do in the dark; and they had the same, not altogether
+unpleasant, sense of danger which one half suspects to be imaginary.
+They chatted persistently in familiar tones. “Our station is prettily
+situated,” said one. The other assented with enthusiasm, enlarging
+volubly on the beauties of the situation. Then they passed near the
+grave. “Poor devil!” said Kayerts. “He died of fever, didn’t he?”
+ muttered Carlier, stopping short. “Why,” retorted Kayerts, with
+indignation, “I’ve been told that the fellow exposed himself recklessly
+to the sun. The climate here, everybody says, is not at all worse than
+at home, as long as you keep out of the sun. Do you hear that, Carlier?
+I am chief here, and my orders are that you should not expose yourself
+to the sun!” He assumed his superiority jocularly, but his meaning
+was serious. The idea that he would, perhaps, have to bury Carlier and
+remain alone, gave him an inward shiver. He felt suddenly that this
+Carlier was more precious to him here, in the centre of Africa, than a
+brother could be anywhere else. Carlier, entering into the spirit of the
+thing, made a military salute and answered in a brisk tone, “Your
+orders shall be attended to, chief!” Then he burst out laughing, slapped
+Kayerts on the back and shouted, “We shall let life run easily here!
+Just sit still and gather in the ivory those savages will bring. This
+country has its good points, after all!” They both laughed loudly while
+Carlier thought: “That poor Kayerts; he is so fat and unhealthy. It
+would be awful if I had to bury him here. He is a man I respect.” . . .
+Before they reached the verandah of their house they called one another
+“my dear fellow.”
+
+The first day they were very active, pottering about with hammers and
+nails and red calico, to put up curtains, make their house habitable and
+pretty; resolved to settle down comfortably to their new life. For them
+an impossible task. To grapple effectually with even purely material
+problems requires more serenity of mind and more lofty courage than
+people generally imagine. No two beings could have been more unfitted
+for such a struggle. Society, not from any tenderness, but because of
+its strange needs, had taken care of those two men, forbidding them all
+independent thought, all initiative, all departure from routine; and
+forbidding it under pain of death. They could only live on condition of
+being machines. And now, released from the fostering care of men with
+pens behind the ears, or of men with gold lace on the sleeves, they were
+like those lifelong prisoners who, liberated after many years, do not
+know what use to make of their freedom. They did not know what use to
+make of their faculties, being both, through want of practice, incapable
+of independent thought.
+
+At the end of two months Kayerts often would say, “If it was not for
+my Melie, you wouldn’t catch me here.” Melie was his daughter. He had
+thrown up his post in the Administration of the Telegraphs, though he
+had been for seventeen years perfectly happy there, to earn a dowry for
+his girl. His wife was dead, and the child was being brought up by his
+sisters. He regretted the streets, the pavements, the cafes, his friends
+of many years; all the things he used to see, day after day; all
+the thoughts suggested by familiar things--the thoughts effortless,
+monotonous, and soothing of a Government clerk; he regretted all the
+gossip, the small enmities, the mild venom, and the little jokes of
+Government offices. “If I had had a decent brother-in-law,” Carlier
+would remark, “a fellow with a heart, I would not be here.” He had left
+the army and had made himself so obnoxious to his family by his laziness
+and impudence, that an exasperated brother-in-law had made superhuman
+efforts to procure him an appointment in the Company as a second-class
+agent. Having not a penny in the world he was compelled to accept this
+means of livelihood as soon as it became quite clear to him that there
+was nothing more to squeeze out of his relations. He, like Kayerts,
+regretted his old life. He regretted the clink of sabre and spurs on
+a fine afternoon, the barrack-room witticisms, the girls of garrison
+towns; but, besides, he had also a sense of grievance. He was evidently
+a much ill-used man. This made him moody, at times. But the two men
+got on well together in the fellowship of their stupidity and laziness.
+Together they did nothing, absolutely nothing, and enjoyed the sense
+of the idleness for which they were paid. And in time they came to feel
+something resembling affection for one another.
+
+They lived like blind men in a large room, aware only of what came in
+contact with them (and of that only imperfectly), but unable to see
+the general aspect of things. The river, the forest, all the great land
+throbbing with life, were like a great emptiness. Even the brilliant
+sunshine disclosed nothing intelligible. Things appeared and disappeared
+before their eyes in an unconnected and aimless kind of way. The river
+seemed to come from nowhere and flow nowhither. It flowed through a
+void. Out of that void, at times, came canoes, and men with spears in
+their hands would suddenly crowd the yard of the station. They were
+naked, glossy black, ornamented with snowy shells and glistening brass
+wire, perfect of limb. They made an uncouth babbling noise when they
+spoke, moved in a stately manner, and sent quick, wild glances out of
+their startled, never-resting eyes. Those warriors would squat in
+long rows, four or more deep, before the verandah, while their chiefs
+bargained for hours with Makola over an elephant tusk. Kayerts sat on
+his chair and looked down on the proceedings, understanding nothing. He
+stared at them with his round blue eyes, called out to Carlier, “Here,
+look! look at that fellow there--and that other one, to the left. Did
+you ever such a face? Oh, the funny brute!”
+
+Carlier, smoking native tobacco in a short wooden pipe, would swagger
+up twirling his moustaches, and surveying the warriors with haughty
+indulgence, would say--
+
+“Fine animals. Brought any bone? Yes? It’s not any too soon. Look at
+the muscles of that fellow third from the end. I wouldn’t care to get a
+punch on the nose from him. Fine arms, but legs no good below the knee.
+Couldn’t make cavalry men of them.” And after glancing down complacently
+at his own shanks, he always concluded: “Pah! Don’t they stink! You,
+Makola! Take that herd over to the fetish” (the storehouse was in every
+station called the fetish, perhaps because of the spirit of civilization
+it contained) “and give them up some of the rubbish you keep there. I’d
+rather see it full of bone than full of rags.”
+
+Kayerts approved.
+
+“Yes, yes! Go and finish that palaver over there, Mr. Makola. I will
+come round when you are ready, to weigh the tusk. We must be careful.”
+ Then turning to his companion: “This is the tribe that lives down the
+river; they are rather aromatic. I remember, they had been once before
+here. D’ye hear that row? What a fellow has got to put up with in this
+dog of a country! My head is split.”
+
+Such profitable visits were rare. For days the two pioneers of trade and
+progress would look on their empty courtyard in the vibrating brilliance
+of vertical sunshine. Below the high bank, the silent river flowed on
+glittering and steady. On the sands in the middle of the stream, hippos
+and alligators sunned themselves side by side. And stretching away
+in all directions, surrounding the insignificant cleared spot of the
+trading post, immense forests, hiding fateful complications of fantastic
+life, lay in the eloquent silence of mute greatness. The two men
+understood nothing, cared for nothing but for the passage of days that
+separated them from the steamer’s return. Their predecessor had left
+some torn books. They took up these wrecks of novels, and, as they had
+never read anything of the kind before, they were surprised and amused.
+Then during long days there were interminable and silly discussions
+about plots and personages. In the centre of Africa they made
+acquaintance of Richelieu and of d’Artagnan, of Hawk’s Eye and of Father
+Goriot, and of many other people. All these imaginary personages became
+subjects for gossip as if they had been living friends. They discounted
+their virtues, suspected their motives, decried their successes; were
+scandalized at their duplicity or were doubtful about their courage.
+The accounts of crimes filled them with indignation, while tender or
+pathetic passages moved them deeply. Carlier cleared his throat and said
+in a soldierly voice, “What nonsense!” Kayerts, his round eyes suffused
+with tears, his fat cheeks quivering, rubbed his bald head, and
+declared. “This is a splendid book. I had no idea there were such clever
+fellows in the world.” They also found some old copies of a home
+paper. That print discussed what it was pleased to call “Our Colonial
+Expansion” in high-flown language. It spoke much of the rights and
+duties of civilization, of the sacredness of the civilizing work, and
+extolled the merits of those who went about bringing light, and faith
+and commerce to the dark places of the earth. Carlier and Kayerts read,
+wondered, and began to think better of themselves. Carlier said one
+evening, waving his hand about, “In a hundred years, there will
+be perhaps a town here. Quays, and warehouses, and barracks,
+and--and--billiard-rooms. Civilization, my boy, and virtue--and all. And
+then, chaps will read that two good fellows, Kayerts and Carlier, were
+the first civilized men to live in this very spot!” Kayerts nodded,
+“Yes, it is a consolation to think of that.” They seemed to forget their
+dead predecessor; but, early one day, Carlier went out and replanted the
+cross firmly. “It used to make me squint whenever I walked that way,”
+ he explained to Kayerts over the morning coffee. “It made me squint,
+leaning over so much. So I just planted it upright. And solid, I promise
+you! I suspended myself with both hands to the cross-piece. Not a move.
+Oh, I did that properly.”
+
+At times Gobila came to see them. Gobila was the chief of the
+neighbouring villages. He was a gray-headed savage, thin and black, with
+a white cloth round his loins and a mangy panther skin hanging over
+his back. He came up with long strides of his skeleton legs, swinging a
+staff as tall as himself, and, entering the common room of the station,
+would squat on his heels to the left of the door. There he sat, watching
+Kayerts, and now and then making a speech which the other did not
+understand. Kayerts, without interrupting his occupation, would from
+time to time say in a friendly manner: “How goes it, you old image?” and
+they would smile at one another. The two whites had a liking for
+that old and incomprehensible creature, and called him Father Gobila.
+Gobila’s manner was paternal, and he seemed really to love all white
+men. They all appeared to him very young, indistinguishably alike
+(except for stature), and he knew that they were all brothers, and also
+immortal. The death of the artist, who was the first white man whom
+he knew intimately, did not disturb this belief, because he was firmly
+convinced that the white stranger had pretended to die and got himself
+buried for some mysterious purpose of his own, into which it was useless
+to inquire. Perhaps it was his way of going home to his own country?
+At any rate, these were his brothers, and he transferred his absurd
+affection to them. They returned it in a way. Carlier slapped him on the
+back, and recklessly struck off matches for his amusement. Kayerts was
+always ready to let him have a sniff at the ammonia bottle. In short,
+they behaved just like that other white creature that had hidden itself
+in a hole in the ground. Gobila considered them attentively. Perhaps
+they were the same being with the other--or one of them was. He couldn’t
+decide--clear up that mystery; but he remained always very friendly. In
+consequence of that friendship the women of Gobila’s village walked
+in single file through the reedy grass, bringing every morning to the
+station, fowls, and sweet potatoes, and palm wine, and sometimes a goat.
+The Company never provisions the stations fully, and the agents required
+those local supplies to live. They had them through the good-will of
+Gobila, and lived well. Now and then one of them had a bout of fever,
+and the other nursed him with gentle devotion. They did not think much
+of it. It left them weaker, and their appearance changed for the worse.
+Carlier was hollow-eyed and irritable. Kayerts showed a drawn, flabby
+face above the rotundity of his stomach, which gave him a weird aspect.
+But being constantly together, they did not notice the change that took
+place gradually in their appearance, and also in their dispositions.
+
+Five months passed in that way.
+
+Then, one morning, as Kayerts and Carlier, lounging in their chairs
+under the verandah, talked about the approaching visit of the steamer,
+a knot of armed men came out of the forest and advanced towards the
+station. They were strangers to that part of the country. They were
+tall, slight, draped classically from neck to heel in blue fringed
+cloths, and carried percussion muskets over their bare right shoulders.
+Makola showed signs of excitement, and ran out of the storehouse (where
+he spent all his days) to meet these visitors. They came into the
+courtyard and looked about them with steady, scornful glances. Their
+leader, a powerful and determined-looking negro with bloodshot eyes,
+stood in front of the verandah and made a long speech. He gesticulated
+much, and ceased very suddenly.
+
+There was something in his intonation, in the sounds of the long
+sentences he used, that startled the two whites. It was like a
+reminiscence of something not exactly familiar, and yet resembling
+the speech of civilized men. It sounded like one of those impossible
+languages which sometimes we hear in our dreams.
+
+“What lingo is that?” said the amazed Carlier. “In the first moment I
+fancied the fellow was going to speak French. Anyway, it is a different
+kind of gibberish to what we ever heard.”
+
+“Yes,” replied Kayerts. “Hey, Makola, what does he say? Where do they
+come from? Who are they?”
+
+But Makola, who seemed to be standing on hot bricks, answered hurriedly,
+“I don’t know. They come from very far. Perhaps Mrs. Price will
+understand. They are perhaps bad men.”
+
+The leader, after waiting for a while, said something sharply to Makola,
+who shook his head. Then the man, after looking round, noticed Makola’s
+hut and walked over there. The next moment Mrs. Makola was heard
+speaking with great volubility. The other strangers--they were six in
+all--strolled about with an air of ease, put their heads through
+the door of the storeroom, congregated round the grave, pointed
+understandingly at the cross, and generally made themselves at home.
+
+“I don’t like those chaps--and, I say, Kayerts, they must be from the
+coast; they’ve got firearms,” observed the sagacious Carlier.
+
+Kayerts also did not like those chaps. They both, for the first time,
+became aware that they lived in conditions where the unusual may be
+dangerous, and that there was no power on earth outside of themselves
+to stand between them and the unusual. They became uneasy, went in and
+loaded their revolvers. Kayerts said, “We must order Makola to tell them
+to go away before dark.”
+
+The strangers left in the afternoon, after eating a meal prepared for
+them by Mrs. Makola. The immense woman was excited, and talked much with
+the visitors. She rattled away shrilly, pointing here and there at the
+forests and at the river. Makola sat apart and watched. At times he got
+up and whispered to his wife. He accompanied the strangers across the
+ravine at the back of the station-ground, and returned slowly looking
+very thoughtful. When questioned by the white men he was very strange,
+seemed not to understand, seemed to have forgotten French--seemed to
+have forgotten how to speak altogether. Kayerts and Carlier agreed that
+the nigger had had too much palm wine.
+
+There was some talk about keeping a watch in turn, but in the evening
+everything seemed so quiet and peaceful that they retired as usual. All
+night they were disturbed by a lot of drumming in the villages. A
+deep, rapid roll near by would be followed by another far off--then all
+ceased. Soon short appeals would rattle out here and there, then all
+mingle together, increase, become vigorous and sustained, would spread
+out over the forest, roll through the night, unbroken and ceaseless,
+near and far, as if the whole land had been one immense drum booming out
+steadily an appeal to heaven. And through the deep and tremendous noise
+sudden yells that resembled snatches of songs from a madhouse darted
+shrill and high in discordant jets of sound which seemed to rush far
+above the earth and drive all peace from under the stars.
+
+Carlier and Kayerts slept badly. They both thought they had heard shots
+fired during the night--but they could not agree as to the direction. In
+the morning Makola was gone somewhere. He returned about noon with one
+of yesterday’s strangers, and eluded all Kayerts’ attempts to close with
+him: had become deaf apparently. Kayerts wondered. Carlier, who had been
+fishing off the bank, came back and remarked while he showed his catch,
+“The niggers seem to be in a deuce of a stir; I wonder what’s up. I saw
+about fifteen canoes cross the river during the two hours I was there
+fishing.” Kayerts, worried, said, “Isn’t this Makola very queer to-day?”
+ Carlier advised, “Keep all our men together in case of some trouble.”
+
+
+II
+
+There were ten station men who had been left by the Director. Those
+fellows, having engaged themselves to the Company for six months
+(without having any idea of a month in particular and only a very faint
+notion of time in general), had been serving the cause of progress for
+upwards of two years. Belonging to a tribe from a very distant part
+of the land of darkness and sorrow, they did not run away, naturally
+supposing that as wandering strangers they would be killed by the
+inhabitants of the country; in which they were right. They lived in
+straw huts on the slope of a ravine overgrown with reedy grass, just
+behind the station buildings. They were not happy, regretting the
+festive incantations, the sorceries, the human sacrifices of their own
+land; where they also had parents, brothers, sisters, admired chiefs,
+respected magicians, loved friends, and other ties supposed generally
+to be human. Besides, the rice rations served out by the Company did not
+agree with them, being a food unknown to their land, and to which they
+could not get used. Consequently they were unhealthy and miserable.
+Had they been of any other tribe they would have made up their minds to
+die--for nothing is easier to certain savages than suicide--and so have
+escaped from the puzzling difficulties of existence. But belonging, as
+they did, to a warlike tribe with filed teeth, they had more grit, and
+went on stupidly living through disease and sorrow. They did very little
+work, and had lost their splendid physique. Carlier and Kayerts doctored
+them assiduously without being able to bring them back into condition
+again. They were mustered every morning and told off to different
+tasks--grass-cutting, fence-building, tree-felling, &c., &c., which no
+power on earth could induce them to execute efficiently. The two whites
+had practically very little control over them.
+
+In the afternoon Makola came over to the big house and found Kayerts
+watching three heavy columns of smoke rising above the forests. “What is
+that?” asked Kayerts. “Some villages burn,” answered Makola, who seemed
+to have regained his wits. Then he said abruptly: “We have got very
+little ivory; bad six months’ trading. Do you like get a little more
+ivory?”
+
+“Yes,” said Kayerts, eagerly. He thought of percentages which were low.
+
+“Those men who came yesterday are traders from Loanda who have got more
+ivory than they can carry home. Shall I buy? I know their camp.”
+
+“Certainly,” said Kayerts. “What are those traders?”
+
+“Bad fellows,” said Makola, indifferently. “They fight with people, and
+catch women and children. They are bad men, and got guns. There is a
+great disturbance in the country. Do you want ivory?”
+
+“Yes,” said Kayerts. Makola said nothing for a while. Then: “Those
+workmen of ours are no good at all,” he muttered, looking round.
+“Station in very bad order, sir. Director will growl. Better get a fine
+lot of ivory, then he say nothing.”
+
+“I can’t help it; the men won’t work,” said Kayerts. “When will you get
+that ivory?”
+
+“Very soon,” said Makola. “Perhaps to-night. You leave it to me, and
+keep indoors, sir. I think you had better give some palm wine to our men
+to make a dance this evening. Enjoy themselves. Work better to-morrow.
+There’s plenty palm wine--gone a little sour.”
+
+Kayerts said “yes,” and Makola, with his own hands carried big
+calabashes to the door of his hut. They stood there till the evening,
+and Mrs. Makola looked into every one. The men got them at sunset. When
+Kayerts and Carlier retired, a big bonfire was flaring before the men’s
+huts. They could hear their shouts and drumming. Some men from Gobila’s
+village had joined the station hands, and the entertainment was a great
+success.
+
+In the middle of the night, Carlier waking suddenly, heard a man shout
+loudly; then a shot was fired. Only one. Carlier ran out and met Kayerts
+on the verandah. They were both startled. As they went across the yard
+to call Makola, they saw shadows moving in the night. One of them cried,
+“Don’t shoot! It’s me, Price.” Then Makola appeared close to them. “Go
+back, go back, please,” he urged, “you spoil all.” “There are strange
+men about,” said Carlier. “Never mind; I know,” said Makola. Then he
+whispered, “All right. Bring ivory. Say nothing! I know my business.”
+ The two white men reluctantly went back to the house, but did not sleep.
+They heard footsteps, whispers, some groans. It seemed as if a lot of
+men came in, dumped heavy things on the ground, squabbled a long time,
+then went away. They lay on their hard beds and thought: “This Makola is
+invaluable.” In the morning Carlier came out, very sleepy, and pulled
+at the cord of the big bell. The station hands mustered every morning
+to the sound of the bell. That morning nobody came. Kayerts turned out
+also, yawning. Across the yard they saw Makola come out of his hut, a
+tin basin of soapy water in his hand. Makola, a civilized nigger, was
+very neat in his person. He threw the soapsuds skilfully over a wretched
+little yellow cur he had, then turning his face to the agent’s house, he
+shouted from the distance, “All the men gone last night!”
+
+They heard him plainly, but in their surprise they both yelled out
+together: “What!” Then they stared at one another. “We are in a proper
+fix now,” growled Carlier. “It’s incredible!” muttered Kayerts. “I will
+go to the huts and see,” said Carlier, striding off. Makola coming up
+found Kayerts standing alone.
+
+“I can hardly believe it,” said Kayerts, tearfully. “We took care of
+them as if they had been our children.”
+
+“They went with the coast people,” said Makola after a moment of
+hesitation.
+
+“What do I care with whom they went--the ungrateful brutes!” exclaimed
+the other. Then with sudden suspicion, and looking hard at Makola, he
+added: “What do you know about it?”
+
+Makola moved his shoulders, looking down on the ground. “What do I know?
+I think only. Will you come and look at the ivory I’ve got there? It is
+a fine lot. You never saw such.”
+
+He moved towards the store. Kayerts followed him mechanically, thinking
+about the incredible desertion of the men. On the ground before the door
+of the fetish lay six splendid tusks.
+
+“What did you give for it?” asked Kayerts, after surveying the lot with
+satisfaction.
+
+“No regular trade,” said Makola. “They brought the ivory and gave it to
+me. I told them to take what they most wanted in the station. It is
+a beautiful lot. No station can show such tusks. Those traders wanted
+carriers badly, and our men were no good here. No trade, no entry in
+books: all correct.”
+
+Kayerts nearly burst with indignation. “Why!” he shouted, “I believe you
+have sold our men for these tusks!” Makola stood impassive and silent.
+“I--I--will--I,” stuttered Kayerts. “You fiend!” he yelled out.
+
+“I did the best for you and the Company,” said Makola, imperturbably.
+“Why you shout so much? Look at this tusk.”
+
+“I dismiss you! I will report you--I won’t look at the tusk. I forbid
+you to touch them. I order you to throw them into the river. You--you!”
+
+“You very red, Mr. Kayerts. If you are so irritable in the sun, you
+will get fever and die--like the first chief!” pronounced Makola
+impressively.
+
+They stood still, contemplating one another with intense eyes, as if
+they had been looking with effort across immense distances. Kayerts
+shivered. Makola had meant no more than he said, but his words seemed to
+Kayerts full of ominous menace! He turned sharply and went away to the
+house. Makola retired into the bosom of his family; and the tusks, left
+lying before the store, looked very large and valuable in the sunshine.
+
+Carlier came back on the verandah. “They’re all gone, hey?” asked
+Kayerts from the far end of the common room in a muffled voice. “You did
+not find anybody?”
+
+“Oh, yes,” said Carlier, “I found one of Gobila’s people lying dead
+before the huts--shot through the body. We heard that shot last night.”
+
+Kayerts came out quickly. He found his companion staring grimly over
+the yard at the tusks, away by the store. They both sat in silence for
+a while. Then Kayerts related his conversation with Makola. Carlier said
+nothing. At the midday meal they ate very little. They hardly exchanged
+a word that day. A great silence seemed to lie heavily over the station
+and press on their lips. Makola did not open the store; he spent the day
+playing with his children. He lay full-length on a mat outside his door,
+and the youngsters sat on his chest and clambered all over him. It was
+a touching picture. Mrs. Makola was busy cooking all day, as usual.
+The white men made a somewhat better meal in the evening. Afterwards,
+Carlier smoking his pipe strolled over to the store; he stood for a long
+time over the tusks, touched one or two with his foot, even tried to
+lift the largest one by its small end. He came back to his chief, who
+had not stirred from the verandah, threw himself in the chair and said--
+
+“I can see it! They were pounced upon while they slept heavily after
+drinking all that palm wine you’ve allowed Makola to give them. A put-up
+job! See? The worst is, some of Gobila’s people were there, and got
+carried off too, no doubt. The least drunk woke up, and got shot for his
+sobriety. This is a funny country. What will you do now?”
+
+“We can’t touch it, of course,” said Kayerts.
+
+“Of course not,” assented Carlier.
+
+“Slavery is an awful thing,” stammered out Kayerts in an unsteady voice.
+
+“Frightful--the sufferings,” grunted Carlier with conviction.
+
+They believed their words. Everybody shows a respectful deference to
+certain sounds that he and his fellows can make. But about feelings
+people really know nothing. We talk with indignation or enthusiasm; we
+talk about oppression, cruelty, crime, devotion, self-sacrifice, virtue,
+and we know nothing real beyond the words. Nobody knows what suffering
+or sacrifice mean--except, perhaps the victims of the mysterious purpose
+of these illusions.
+
+Next morning they saw Makola very busy setting up in the yard the big
+scales used for weighing ivory. By and by Carlier said: “What’s
+that filthy scoundrel up to?” and lounged out into the yard. Kayerts
+followed. They stood watching. Makola took no notice. When the balance
+was swung true, he tried to lift a tusk into the scale. It was too
+heavy. He looked up helplessly without a word, and for a minute they
+stood round that balance as mute and still as three statues. Suddenly
+Carlier said: “Catch hold of the other end, Makola--you beast!” and
+together they swung the tusk up. Kayerts trembled in every limb. He
+muttered, “I say! O! I say!” and putting his hand in his pocket found
+there a dirty bit of paper and the stump of a pencil. He turned his back
+on the others, as if about to do something tricky, and noted stealthily
+the weights which Carlier shouted out to him with unnecessary loudness.
+When all was over Makola whispered to himself: “The sun’s very strong
+here for the tusks.” Carlier said to Kayerts in a careless tone: “I
+say, chief, I might just as well give him a lift with this lot into the
+store.”
+
+As they were going back to the house Kayerts observed with a sigh: “It
+had to be done.” And Carlier said: “It’s deplorable, but, the men being
+Company’s men the ivory is Company’s ivory. We must look after it.” “I
+will report to the Director, of course,” said Kayerts. “Of course; let
+him decide,” approved Carlier.
+
+At midday they made a hearty meal. Kayerts sighed from time to time.
+Whenever they mentioned Makola’s name they always added to it an
+opprobrious epithet. It eased their conscience. Makola gave himself a
+half-holiday, and bathed his children in the river. No one from Gobila’s
+villages came near the station that day. No one came the next day, and
+the next, nor for a whole week. Gobila’s people might have been dead and
+buried for any sign of life they gave. But they were only mourning for
+those they had lost by the witchcraft of white men, who had brought
+wicked people into their country. The wicked people were gone, but
+fear remained. Fear always remains. A man may destroy everything within
+himself, love and hate and belief, and even doubt; but as long as he
+clings to life he cannot destroy fear: the fear, subtle, indestructible,
+and terrible, that pervades his being; that tinges his thoughts; that
+lurks in his heart; that watches on his lips the struggle of his last
+breath. In his fear, the mild old Gobila offered extra human sacrifices
+to all the Evil Spirits that had taken possession of his white friends.
+His heart was heavy. Some warriors spoke about burning and killing, but
+the cautious old savage dissuaded them. Who could foresee the woe those
+mysterious creatures, if irritated, might bring? They should be left
+alone. Perhaps in time they would disappear into the earth as the first
+one had disappeared. His people must keep away from them, and hope for
+the best.
+
+Kayerts and Carlier did not disappear, but remained above on this earth,
+that, somehow, they fancied had become bigger and very empty. It was not
+the absolute and dumb solitude of the post that impressed them so much
+as an inarticulate feeling that something from within them was gone,
+something that worked for their safety, and had kept the wilderness from
+interfering with their hearts. The images of home; the memory of people
+like them, of men that thought and felt as they used to think and
+feel, receded into distances made indistinct by the glare of unclouded
+sunshine. And out of the great silence of the surrounding wilderness,
+its very hopelessness and savagery seemed to approach them nearer, to
+draw them gently, to look upon them, to envelop them with a solicitude
+irresistible, familiar, and disgusting.
+
+Days lengthened into weeks, then into months. Gobila’s people drummed
+and yelled to every new moon, as of yore, but kept away from
+the station. Makola and Carlier tried once in a canoe to open
+communications, but were received with a shower of arrows, and had to
+fly back to the station for dear life. That attempt set the country up
+and down the river into an uproar that could be very distinctly heard
+for days. The steamer was late. At first they spoke of delay jauntily,
+then anxiously, then gloomily. The matter was becoming serious. Stores
+were running short. Carlier cast his lines off the bank, but the river
+was low, and the fish kept out in the stream. They dared not stroll
+far away from the station to shoot. Moreover, there was no game in the
+impenetrable forest. Once Carlier shot a hippo in the river. They had no
+boat to secure it, and it sank. When it floated up it drifted away, and
+Gobila’s people secured the carcase. It was the occasion for a national
+holiday, but Carlier had a fit of rage over it and talked about the
+necessity of exterminating all the niggers before the country could be
+made habitable. Kayerts mooned about silently; spent hours looking
+at the portrait of his Melie. It represented a little girl with long
+bleached tresses and a rather sour face. His legs were much swollen, and
+he could hardly walk. Carlier, undermined by fever, could not swagger
+any more, but kept tottering about, still with a devil-may-care air, as
+became a man who remembered his crack regiment. He had become hoarse,
+sarcastic, and inclined to say unpleasant things. He called it “being
+frank with you.” They had long ago reckoned their percentages on trade,
+including in them that last deal of “this infamous Makola.” They had
+also concluded not to say anything about it. Kayerts hesitated at
+first--was afraid of the Director.
+
+“He has seen worse things done on the quiet,” maintained Carlier, with
+a hoarse laugh. “Trust him! He won’t thank you if you blab. He is no
+better than you or me. Who will talk if we hold our tongues? There is
+nobody here.”
+
+That was the root of the trouble! There was nobody there; and being left
+there alone with their weakness, they became daily more like a pair
+of accomplices than like a couple of devoted friends. They had heard
+nothing from home for eight months. Every evening they said, “To-morrow
+we shall see the steamer.” But one of the Company’s steamers had been
+wrecked, and the Director was busy with the other, relieving very
+distant and important stations on the main river. He thought that the
+useless station, and the useless men, could wait. Meantime Kayerts and
+Carlier lived on rice boiled without salt, and cursed the Company, all
+Africa, and the day they were born. One must have lived on such diet to
+discover what ghastly trouble the necessity of swallowing one’s food
+may become. There was literally nothing else in the station but rice
+and coffee; they drank the coffee without sugar. The last fifteen lumps
+Kayerts had solemnly locked away in his box, together with a half-bottle
+of Cognac, “in case of sickness,” he explained. Carlier approved. “When
+one is sick,” he said, “any little extra like that is cheering.”
+
+They waited. Rank grass began to sprout over the courtyard. The bell
+never rang now. Days passed, silent, exasperating, and slow. When the
+two men spoke, they snarled; and their silences were bitter, as if
+tinged by the bitterness of their thoughts.
+
+One day after a lunch of boiled rice, Carlier put down his cup untasted,
+and said: “Hang it all! Let’s have a decent cup of coffee for once.
+Bring out that sugar, Kayerts!”
+
+“For the sick,” muttered Kayerts, without looking up.
+
+“For the sick,” mocked Carlier. “Bosh! . . . Well! I am sick.”
+
+“You are no more sick than I am, and I go without,” said Kayerts in a
+peaceful tone.
+
+“Come! out with that sugar, you stingy old slave-dealer.”
+
+Kayerts looked up quickly. Carlier was smiling with marked insolence.
+And suddenly it seemed to Kayerts that he had never seen that man
+before. Who was he? He knew nothing about him. What was he capable of?
+There was a surprising flash of violent emotion within him, as if in the
+presence of something undreamt-of, dangerous, and final. But he managed
+to pronounce with composure--
+
+“That joke is in very bad taste. Don’t repeat it.”
+
+“Joke!” said Carlier, hitching himself forward on his seat. “I am
+hungry--I am sick--I don’t joke! I hate hypocrites. You are a hypocrite.
+You are a slave-dealer. I am a slave-dealer. There’s nothing but
+slave-dealers in this cursed country. I mean to have sugar in my coffee
+to-day, anyhow!”
+
+“I forbid you to speak to me in that way,” said Kayerts with a fair show
+of resolution.
+
+“You!--What?” shouted Carlier, jumping up.
+
+Kayerts stood up also. “I am your chief,” he began, trying to master the
+shakiness of his voice.
+
+“What?” yelled the other. “Who’s chief? There’s no chief here. There’s
+nothing here: there’s nothing but you and I. Fetch the sugar--you
+pot-bellied ass.”
+
+“Hold your tongue. Go out of this room,” screamed Kayerts. “I dismiss
+you--you scoundrel!”
+
+Carlier swung a stool. All at once he looked dangerously in earnest.
+“You flabby, good-for-nothing civilian--take that!” he howled.
+
+Kayerts dropped under the table, and the stool struck the grass inner
+wall of the room. Then, as Carlier was trying to upset the table,
+Kayerts in desperation made a blind rush, head low, like a cornered pig
+would do, and over-turning his friend, bolted along the verandah, and
+into his room. He locked the door, snatched his revolver, and stood
+panting. In less than a minute Carlier was kicking at the door
+furiously, howling, “If you don’t bring out that sugar, I will shoot you
+at sight, like a dog. Now then--one--two--three. You won’t? I will show
+you who’s the master.”
+
+Kayerts thought the door would fall in, and scrambled through the square
+hole that served for a window in his room. There was then the whole
+breadth of the house between them. But the other was apparently not
+strong enough to break in the door, and Kayerts heard him running round.
+Then he also began to run laboriously on his swollen legs. He ran as
+quickly as he could, grasping the revolver, and unable yet to understand
+what was happening to him. He saw in succession Makola’s house, the
+store, the river, the ravine, and the low bushes; and he saw all those
+things again as he ran for the second time round the house. Then again
+they flashed past him. That morning he could not have walked a yard
+without a groan.
+
+And now he ran. He ran fast enough to keep out of sight of the other
+man.
+
+Then as, weak and desperate, he thought, “Before I finish the next round
+I shall die,” he heard the other man stumble heavily, then stop. He
+stopped also. He had the back and Carlier the front of the house, as
+before. He heard him drop into a chair cursing, and suddenly his own
+legs gave way, and he slid down into a sitting posture with his back to
+the wall. His mouth was as dry as a cinder, and his face was wet with
+perspiration--and tears. What was it all about? He thought it must be a
+horrible illusion; he thought he was dreaming; he thought he was going
+mad! After a while he collected his senses. What did they quarrel about?
+That sugar! How absurd! He would give it to him--didn’t want it himself.
+And he began scrambling to his feet with a sudden feeling of security.
+But before he had fairly stood upright, a commonsense reflection
+occurred to him and drove him back into despair. He thought: “If I give
+way now to that brute of a soldier, he will begin this horror again
+to-morrow--and the day after--every day--raise other pretensions,
+trample on me, torture me, make me his slave--and I will be lost! Lost!
+The steamer may not come for days--may never come.” He shook so that he
+had to sit down on the floor again. He shivered forlornly. He felt he
+could not, would not move any more. He was completely distracted by the
+sudden perception that the position was without issue--that death and
+life had in a moment become equally difficult and terrible.
+
+All at once he heard the other push his chair back; and he leaped to
+his feet with extreme facility. He listened and got confused. Must
+run again! Right or left? He heard footsteps. He darted to the left,
+grasping his revolver, and at the very same instant, as it seemed to
+him, they came into violent collision. Both shouted with surprise. A
+loud explosion took place between them; a roar of red fire, thick smoke;
+and Kayerts, deafened and blinded, rushed back thinking: “I am hit--it’s
+all over.” He expected the other to come round--to gloat over his agony.
+He caught hold of an upright of the roof--“All over!” Then he heard a
+crashing fall on the other side of the house, as if somebody had tumbled
+headlong over a chair--then silence. Nothing more happened. He did not
+die. Only his shoulder felt as if it had been badly wrenched, and he had
+lost his revolver. He was disarmed and helpless! He waited for his fate.
+The other man made no sound. It was a stratagem. He was stalking him
+now! Along what side? Perhaps he was taking aim this very minute!
+
+After a few moments of an agony frightful and absurd, he decided to go
+and meet his doom. He was prepared for every surrender. He turned the
+corner, steadying himself with one hand on the wall; made a few paces,
+and nearly swooned. He had seen on the floor, protruding past the other
+corner, a pair of turned-up feet. A pair of white naked feet in
+red slippers. He felt deadly sick, and stood for a time in profound
+darkness. Then Makola appeared before him, saying quietly: “Come along,
+Mr. Kayerts. He is dead.” He burst into tears of gratitude; a loud,
+sobbing fit of crying. After a time he found himself sitting in a
+chair and looking at Carlier, who lay stretched on his back. Makola was
+kneeling over the body.
+
+“Is this your revolver?” asked Makola, getting up.
+
+“Yes,” said Kayerts; then he added very quickly, “He ran after me to
+shoot me--you saw!”
+
+“Yes, I saw,” said Makola. “There is only one revolver; where’s his?”
+
+“Don’t know,” whispered Kayerts in a voice that had become suddenly very
+faint.
+
+“I will go and look for it,” said the other, gently. He made the round
+along the verandah, while Kayerts sat still and looked at the corpse.
+Makola came back empty-handed, stood in deep thought, then stepped
+quietly into the dead man’s room, and came out directly with a revolver,
+which he held up before Kayerts. Kayerts shut his eyes. Everything was
+going round. He found life more terrible and difficult than death. He
+had shot an unarmed man.
+
+After meditating for a while, Makola said softly, pointing at the dead
+man who lay there with his right eye blown out--
+
+“He died of fever.” Kayerts looked at him with a stony stare. “Yes,”
+ repeated Makola, thoughtfully, stepping over the corpse, “I think he
+died of fever. Bury him to-morrow.”
+
+And he went away slowly to his expectant wife, leaving the two white men
+alone on the verandah.
+
+Night came, and Kayerts sat unmoving on his chair. He sat quiet as if
+he had taken a dose of opium. The violence of the emotions he had passed
+through produced a feeling of exhausted serenity. He had plumbed in one
+short afternoon the depths of horror and despair, and now found repose
+in the conviction that life had no more secrets for him: neither had
+death! He sat by the corpse thinking; thinking very actively, thinking
+very new thoughts. He seemed to have broken loose from himself
+altogether. His old thoughts, convictions, likes and dislikes, things he
+respected and things he abhorred, appeared in their true light at last!
+Appeared contemptible and childish, false and ridiculous. He revelled
+in his new wisdom while he sat by the man he had killed. He argued with
+himself about all things under heaven with that kind of wrong-headed
+lucidity which may be observed in some lunatics. Incidentally he
+reflected that the fellow dead there had been a noxious beast
+anyway; that men died every day in thousands; perhaps in hundreds of
+thousands--who could tell?--and that in the number, that one death could
+not possibly make any difference; couldn’t have any importance, at least
+to a thinking creature. He, Kayerts, was a thinking creature. He had
+been all his life, till that moment, a believer in a lot of nonsense
+like the rest of mankind--who are fools; but now he thought! He knew! He
+was at peace; he was familiar with the highest wisdom! Then he tried to
+imagine himself dead, and Carlier sitting in his chair watching him; and
+his attempt met with such unexpected success, that in a very few
+moments he became not at all sure who was dead and who was alive. This
+extraordinary achievement of his fancy startled him, however, and by
+a clever and timely effort of mind he saved himself just in time from
+becoming Carlier. His heart thumped, and he felt hot all over at the
+thought of that danger. Carlier! What a beastly thing! To compose his
+now disturbed nerves--and no wonder!--he tried to whistle a little.
+Then, suddenly, he fell asleep, or thought he had slept; but at any rate
+there was a fog, and somebody had whistled in the fog.
+
+He stood up. The day had come, and a heavy mist had descended upon the
+land: the mist penetrating, enveloping, and silent; the morning mist
+of tropical lands; the mist that clings and kills; the mist white and
+deadly, immaculate and poisonous. He stood up, saw the body, and threw
+his arms above his head with a cry like that of a man who, waking from a
+trance, finds himself immured forever in a tomb. “Help! . . . . My God!”
+
+A shriek inhuman, vibrating and sudden, pierced like a sharp dart the
+white shroud of that land of sorrow. Three short, impatient screeches
+followed, and then, for a time, the fog-wreaths rolled on, undisturbed,
+through a formidable silence. Then many more shrieks, rapid and
+piercing, like the yells of some exasperated and ruthless creature, rent
+the air. Progress was calling to Kayerts from the river. Progress
+and civilization and all the virtues. Society was calling to its
+accomplished child to come, to be taken care of, to be instructed, to
+be judged, to be condemned; it called him to return to that rubbish heap
+from which he had wandered away, so that justice could be done.
+
+Kayerts heard and understood. He stumbled out of the verandah, leaving
+the other man quite alone for the first time since they had been thrown
+there together. He groped his way through the fog, calling in his
+ignorance upon the invisible heaven to undo its work. Makola flitted by
+in the mist, shouting as he ran--
+
+“Steamer! Steamer! They can’t see. They whistle for the station. I go
+ring the bell. Go down to the landing, sir. I ring.”
+
+He disappeared. Kayerts stood still. He looked upwards; the fog rolled
+low over his head. He looked round like a man who has lost his way; and
+he saw a dark smudge, a cross-shaped stain, upon the shifting purity of
+the mist. As he began to stumble towards it, the station bell rang in a
+tumultuous peal its answer to the impatient clamour of the steamer.
+
+The Managing Director of the Great Civilizing Company (since we know
+that civilization follows trade) landed first, and incontinently lost
+sight of the steamer. The fog down by the river was exceedingly dense;
+above, at the station, the bell rang unceasing and brazen.
+
+The Director shouted loudly to the steamer:
+
+“There is nobody down to meet us; there may be something wrong, though
+they are ringing. You had better come, too!”
+
+And he began to toil up the steep bank. The captain and the
+engine-driver of the boat followed behind. As they scrambled up the fog
+thinned, and they could see their Director a good way ahead. Suddenly
+they saw him start forward, calling to them over his shoulder:--“Run!
+Run to the house! I’ve found one of them. Run, look for the other!”
+
+He had found one of them! And even he, the man of varied and startling
+experience, was somewhat discomposed by the manner of this finding. He
+stood and fumbled in his pockets (for a knife) while he faced Kayerts,
+who was hanging by a leather strap from the cross. He had evidently
+climbed the grave, which was high and narrow, and after tying the end of
+the strap to the arm, had swung himself off. His toes were only a couple
+of inches above the ground; his arms hung stiffly down; he seemed to be
+standing rigidly at attention, but with one purple cheek playfully posed
+on the shoulder. And, irreverently, he was putting out a swollen tongue
+at his Managing Director.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE RETURN
+
+
+The inner circle train from the City rushed impetuously out of a black
+hole and pulled up with a discordant, grinding racket in the smirched
+twilight of a West-End station. A line of doors flew open and a lot of
+men stepped out headlong. They had high hats, healthy pale faces,
+dark overcoats and shiny boots; they held in their gloved hands thin
+umbrellas and hastily folded evening papers that resembled stiff, dirty
+rags of greenish, pinkish, or whitish colour. Alvan Hervey stepped out
+with the rest, a smouldering cigar between his teeth. A disregarded
+little woman in rusty black, with both arms full of parcels, ran along
+in distress, bolted suddenly into a third-class compartment and the
+train went on. The slamming of carriage doors burst out sharp and
+spiteful like a fusillade; an icy draught mingled with acrid fumes swept
+the whole length of the platform and made a tottering old man, wrapped
+up to his ears in a woollen comforter, stop short in the moving throng
+to cough violently over his stick. No one spared him a glance.
+
+Alvan Hervey passed through the ticket gate. Between the bare walls of
+a sordid staircase men clambered rapidly; their backs appeared
+alike--almost as if they had been wearing a uniform; their indifferent
+faces were varied but somehow suggested kinship, like the faces of a
+band of brothers who through prudence, dignity, disgust, or foresight
+would resolutely ignore each other; and their eyes, quick or slow; their
+eyes gazing up the dusty steps; their eyes brown, black, gray, blue, had
+all the same stare, concentrated and empty, satisfied and unthinking.
+
+Outside the big doorway of the street they scattered in all directions,
+walking away fast from one another with the hurried air of men fleeing
+from something compromising; from familiarity or confidences; from
+something suspected and concealed--like truth or pestilence. Alvan
+Hervey hesitated, standing alone in the doorway for a moment; then
+decided to walk home.
+
+He strode firmly. A misty rain settled like silvery dust on clothes,
+on moustaches; wetted the faces, varnished the flagstones, darkened the
+walls, dripped from umbrellas. And he moved on in the rain with careless
+serenity, with the tranquil ease of someone successful and disdainful,
+very sure of himself--a man with lots of money and friends. He was tall,
+well set-up, good-looking and healthy; and his clear pale face had under
+its commonplace refinement that slight tinge of overbearing
+brutality which is given by the possession of only partly difficult
+accomplishments; by excelling in games, or in the art of making money;
+by the easy mastery over animals and over needy men.
+
+He was going home much earlier than usual, straight from the City and
+without calling at his club. He considered himself well connected, well
+educated and intelligent. Who doesn’t? But his connections, education
+and intelligence were strictly on a par with those of the men with whom
+he did business or amused himself. He had married five years ago. At the
+time all his acquaintances had said he was very much in love; and he had
+said so himself, frankly, because it is very well understood that every
+man falls in love once in his life--unless his wife dies, when it may
+be quite praiseworthy to fall in love again. The girl was healthy,
+tall, fair, and in his opinion was well connected, well educated and
+intelligent. She was also intensely bored with her home where, as
+if packed in a tight box, her individuality--of which she was very
+conscious--had no play. She strode like a grenadier, was strong and
+upright like an obelisk, had a beautiful face, a candid brow, pure eyes,
+and not a thought of her own in her head. He surrendered quickly to all
+those charms, and she appeared to him so unquestionably of the right
+sort that he did not hesitate for a moment to declare himself in love.
+Under the cover of that sacred and poetical fiction he desired her
+masterfully, for various reasons; but principally for the satisfaction
+of having his own way. He was very dull and solemn about it--for no
+earthly reason, unless to conceal his feelings--which is an eminently
+proper thing to do. Nobody, however, would have been shocked had
+he neglected that duty, for the feeling he experienced really was a
+longing--a longing stronger and a little more complex no doubt, but no
+more reprehensible in its nature than a hungry man’s appetite for his
+dinner.
+
+After their marriage they busied themselves, with marked success, in
+enlarging the circle of their acquaintance. Thirty people knew them
+by sight; twenty more with smiling demonstrations tolerated their
+occasional presence within hospitable thresholds; at least fifty others
+became aware of their existence. They moved in their enlarged world
+amongst perfectly delightful men and women who feared emotion,
+enthusiasm, or failure, more than fire, war, or mortal disease; who
+tolerated only the commonest formulas of commonest thoughts, and
+recognized only profitable facts. It was an extremely charming sphere,
+the abode of all the virtues, where nothing is realized and where
+all joys and sorrows are cautiously toned down into pleasures and
+annoyances. In that serene region, then, where noble sentiments are
+cultivated in sufficient profusion to conceal the pitiless materialism
+of thoughts and aspirations Alvan Hervey and his wife spent five years
+of prudent bliss unclouded by any doubt as to the moral propriety of
+their existence. She, to give her individuality fair play, took up all
+manner of philanthropic work and became a member of various rescuing and
+reforming societies patronized or presided over by ladies of title. He
+took an active interest in politics; and having met quite by chance a
+literary man--who nevertheless was related to an earl--he was induced
+to finance a moribund society paper. It was a semi-political, and wholly
+scandalous publication, redeemed by excessive dulness; and as it was
+utterly faithless, as it contained no new thought, as it never by any
+chance had a flash of wit, satire, or indignation in its pages, he
+judged it respectable enough, at first sight. Afterwards, when it paid,
+he promptly perceived that upon the whole it was a virtuous undertaking.
+It paved the way of his ambition; and he enjoyed also the special kind
+of importance he derived from this connection with what he imagined to
+be literature.
+
+This connection still further enlarged their world. Men who wrote or
+drew prettily for the public came at times to their house, and his
+editor came very often. He thought him rather an ass because he had such
+big front teeth (the proper thing is to have small, even teeth) and
+wore his hair a trifle longer than most men do. However, some dukes wear
+their hair long, and the fellow indubitably knew his business. The worst
+was that his gravity, though perfectly portentous, could not be trusted.
+He sat, elegant and bulky, in the drawing-room, the head of his
+stick hovering in front of his big teeth, and talked for hours with
+a thick-lipped smile (he said nothing that could be considered
+objectionable and not quite the thing) talked in an unusual manner--not
+obviously irritatingly. His forehead was too lofty--unusually so--and
+under it there was a straight nose, lost between the hairless cheeks,
+that in a smooth curve ran into a chin shaped like the end of a
+snow-shoe. And in this face that resembled the face of a fat and
+fiendishly knowing baby there glittered a pair of clever, peering,
+unbelieving black eyes. He wrote verses too. Rather an ass. But the band
+of men who trailed at the skirts of his monumental frock-coat seemed to
+perceive wonderful things in what he said. Alvan Hervey put it down
+to affectation. Those artist chaps, upon the whole, were so affected.
+Still, all this was highly proper--very useful to him--and his wife
+seemed to like it--as if she also had derived some distinct and secret
+advantage from this intellectual connection. She received her mixed and
+decorous guests with a kind of tall, ponderous grace, peculiarly her own
+and which awakened in the mind of intimidated strangers incongruous and
+improper reminiscences of an elephant, a giraffe, a gazelle; of a gothic
+tower--of an overgrown angel. Her Thursdays were becoming famous in
+their world; and their world grew steadily, annexing street after
+street. It included also Somebody’s Gardens, a Crescent--a couple of
+Squares.
+
+Thus Alvan Hervey and his wife for five prosperous years lived by the
+side of one another. In time they came to know each other sufficiently
+well for all the practical purposes of such an existence, but they were
+no more capable of real intimacy than two animals feeding at the same
+manger, under the same roof, in a luxurious stable. His longing was
+appeased and became a habit; and she had her desire--the desire to get
+away from under the paternal roof, to assert her individuality, to move
+in her own set (so much smarter than the parental one); to have a
+home of her own, and her own share of the world’s respect, envy, and
+applause. They understood each other warily, tacitly, like a pair of
+cautious conspirators in a profitable plot; because they were both
+unable to look at a fact, a sentiment, a principle, or a belief
+otherwise than in the light of their own dignity, of their own
+glorification, of their own advantage. They skimmed over the surface
+of life hand in hand, in a pure and frosty atmosphere--like two
+skilful skaters cutting figures on thick ice for the admiration of
+the beholders, and disdainfully ignoring the hidden stream, the stream
+restless and dark; the stream of life, profound and unfrozen.
+
+Alvan Hervey turned twice to the left, once to the right, walked along
+two sides of a square, in the middle of which groups of tame-looking
+trees stood in respectable captivity behind iron railings, and rang at
+his door. A parlour-maid opened. A fad of his wife’s, this, to have only
+women servants. That girl, while she took his hat and overcoat, said
+something which made him look at his watch. It was five o’clock, and his
+wife not at home. There was nothing unusual in that. He said, “No; no
+tea,” and went upstairs.
+
+He ascended without footfalls. Brass rods glimmered all up the red
+carpet. On the first-floor landing a marble woman, decently covered from
+neck to instep with stone draperies, advanced a row of lifeless toes
+to the edge of the pedestal, and thrust out blindly a rigid white arm
+holding a cluster of lights. He had artistic tastes--at home. Heavy
+curtains caught back, half concealed dark corners. On the rich, stamped
+paper of the walls hung sketches, water-colours, engravings. His tastes
+were distinctly artistic. Old church towers peeped above green masses
+of foliage; the hills were purple, the sands yellow, the seas sunny, the
+skies blue. A young lady sprawled with dreamy eyes in a moored boat, in
+company of a lunch basket, a champagne bottle, and an enamoured man in
+a blazer. Bare-legged boys flirted sweetly with ragged maidens, slept
+on stone steps, gambolled with dogs. A pathetically lean girl flattened
+against a blank wall, turned up expiring eyes and tendered a flower for
+sale; while, near by, the large photographs of some famous and mutilated
+bas-reliefs seemed to represent a massacre turned into stone.
+
+He looked, of course, at nothing, ascended another flight of stairs and
+went straight into the dressing room. A bronze dragon nailed by the tail
+to a bracket writhed away from the wall in calm convolutions, and
+held, between the conventional fury of its jaws, a crude gas flame that
+resembled a butterfly. The room was empty, of course; but, as he stepped
+in, it became filled all at once with a stir of many people; because
+the strips of glass on the doors of wardrobes and his wife’s large
+pier-glass reflected him from head to foot, and multiplied his image
+into a crowd of gentlemanly and slavish imitators, who were dressed
+exactly like himself; had the same restrained and rare gestures; who
+moved when he moved, stood still with him in an obsequious immobility,
+and had just such appearances of life and feeling as he thought it
+dignified and safe for any man to manifest. And like real people who are
+slaves of common thoughts, that are not even their own, they affected a
+shadowy independence by the superficial variety of their movements. They
+moved together with him; but they either advanced to meet him, or walked
+away from him; they appeared, disappeared; they seemed to dodge behind
+walnut furniture, to be seen again, far within the polished panes,
+stepping about distinct and unreal in the convincing illusion of a
+room. And like the men he respected they could be trusted to do nothing
+individual, original, or startling--nothing unforeseen and nothing
+improper.
+
+He moved for a time aimlessly in that good company, humming a popular
+but refined tune, and thinking vaguely of a business letter from abroad,
+which had to be answered on the morrow with cautious prevarication.
+Then, as he walked towards a wardrobe, he saw appearing at his back, in
+the high mirror, the corner of his wife’s dressing-table, and amongst
+the glitter of silver-mounted objects on it, the square white patch of
+an envelope. It was such an unusual thing to be seen there that he spun
+round almost before he realized his surprise; and all the sham men
+about him pivoted on their heels; all appeared surprised; and all moved
+rapidly towards envelopes on dressing-tables.
+
+He recognized his wife’s handwriting and saw that the envelope was
+addressed to himself. He muttered, “How very odd,” and felt annoyed.
+Apart from any odd action being essentially an indecent thing in itself,
+the fact of his wife indulging in it made it doubly offensive. That she
+should write to him at all, when she knew he would be home for dinner,
+was perfectly ridiculous; but that she should leave it like this--in
+evidence for chance discovery--struck him as so outrageous that,
+thinking of it, he experienced suddenly a staggering sense of
+insecurity, an absurd and bizarre flash of a notion that the house had
+moved a little under his feet. He tore the envelope open, glanced at the
+letter, and sat down in a chair near by.
+
+He held the paper before his eyes and looked at half a dozen lines
+scrawled on the page, while he was stunned by a noise meaningless
+and violent, like the clash of gongs or the beating of drums; a great
+aimless uproar that, in a manner, prevented him from hearing himself
+think and made his mind an absolute blank. This absurd and distracting
+tumult seemed to ooze out of the written words, to issue from between
+his very fingers that trembled, holding the paper. And suddenly he
+dropped the letter as though it had been something hot, or venomous, or
+filthy; and rushing to the window with the unreflecting precipitation
+of a man anxious to raise an alarm of fire or murder, he threw it up and
+put his head out.
+
+A chill gust of wind, wandering through the damp and sooty obscurity
+over the waste of roofs and chimney-pots, touched his face with a clammy
+flick. He saw an illimitable darkness, in which stood a black jumble of
+walls, and, between them, the many rows of gaslights stretched far away
+in long lines, like strung-up beads of fire. A sinister loom as of a
+hidden conflagration lit up faintly from below the mist, falling upon
+a billowy and motionless sea of tiles and bricks. At the rattle of the
+opened window the world seemed to leap out of the night and confront
+him, while floating up to his ears there came a sound vast and faint;
+the deep mutter of something immense and alive. It penetrated him with
+a feeling of dismay and he gasped silently. From the cab-stand in the
+square came distinct hoarse voices and a jeering laugh which sounded
+ominously harsh and cruel. It sounded threatening. He drew his head in,
+as if before an aimed blow, and flung the window down quickly. He made
+a few steps, stumbled against a chair, and with a great effort, pulled
+himself together to lay hold of a certain thought that was whizzing
+about loose in his head.
+
+He got it at last, after more exertion than he expected; he was flushed
+and puffed a little as though he had been catching it with his hands,
+but his mental hold on it was weak, so weak that he judged it necessary
+to repeat it aloud--to hear it spoken firmly--in order to insure a
+perfect measure of possession. But he was unwilling to hear his own
+voice--to hear any sound whatever--owing to a vague belief, shaping
+itself slowly within him, that solitude and silence are the greatest
+felicities of mankind. The next moment it dawned upon him that they are
+perfectly unattainable--that faces must be seen, words spoken, thoughts
+heard. All the words--all the thoughts!
+
+He said very distinctly, and looking at the carpet, “She’s gone.”
+
+It was terrible--not the fact but the words; the words charged with the
+shadowy might of a meaning, that seemed to possess the tremendous power
+to call Fate down upon the earth, like those strange and appalling words
+that sometimes are heard in sleep. They vibrated round him in a metallic
+atmosphere, in a space that had the hardness of iron and the resonance
+of a bell of bronze. Looking down between the toes of his boots he
+seemed to listen thoughtfully to the receding wave of sound; to the
+wave spreading out in a widening circle, embracing streets, roofs,
+church-steeples, fields--and travelling away, widening endlessly,
+far, very far, where he could not hear--where he could not imagine
+anything--where . . .
+
+“And--with that . . . ass,” he said again without stirring in the least.
+And there was nothing but humiliation. Nothing else. He could derive no
+moral solace from any aspect of the situation, which radiated pain only
+on every side. Pain. What kind of pain? It occurred to him that he ought
+to be heart-broken; but in an exceedingly short moment he perceived that
+his suffering was nothing of so trifling and dignified a kind. It was
+altogether a more serious matter, and partook rather of the nature
+of those subtle and cruel feelings which are awakened by a kick or a
+horse-whipping.
+
+He felt very sick--physically sick--as though he had bitten through
+something nauseous. Life, that to a well-ordered mind should be a
+matter of congratulation, appeared to him, for a second or so, perfectly
+intolerable. He picked up the paper at his feet, and sat down with the
+wish to think it out, to understand why his wife--his wife!--should
+leave him, should throw away respect, comfort, peace, decency, position
+throw away everything for nothing! He set himself to think out the
+hidden logic of her action--a mental undertaking fit for the leisure
+hours of a madhouse, though he couldn’t see it. And he thought of his
+wife in every relation except the only fundamental one. He thought
+of her as a well-bred girl, as a wife, as a cultured person, as the
+mistress of a house, as a lady; but he never for a moment thought of her
+simply as a woman.
+
+Then a fresh wave, a raging wave of humiliation, swept through his mind,
+and left nothing there but a personal sense of undeserved abasement. Why
+should he be mixed up with such a horrid exposure! It annihilated all
+the advantages of his well-ordered past, by a truth effective and unjust
+like a calumny--and the past was wasted. Its failure was disclosed--a
+distinct failure, on his part, to see, to guard, to understand. It could
+not be denied; it could not be explained away, hustled out of sight. He
+could not sit on it and look solemn. Now--if she had only died!
+
+If she had only died! He was driven to envy such a respectable
+bereavement, and one so perfectly free from any taint of misfortune that
+even his best friend or his best enemy would not have felt the slightest
+thrill of exultation. No one would have cared. He sought comfort in
+clinging to the contemplation of the only fact of life that the resolute
+efforts of mankind had never failed to disguise in the clatter and
+glamour of phrases. And nothing lends itself more to lies than death.
+If she had only died! Certain words would have been said to him in a
+sad tone, and he, with proper fortitude, would have made appropriate
+answers. There were precedents for such an occasion. And no one would
+have cared. If she had only died! The promises, the terrors, the hopes
+of eternity, are the concern of the corrupt dead; but the obvious
+sweetness of life belongs to living, healthy men. And life was his
+concern: that sane and gratifying existence untroubled by too much love
+or by too much regret. She had interfered with it; she had defaced it.
+And suddenly it occurred to him he must have been mad to marry. It was
+too much in the nature of giving yourself away, of wearing--if for
+a moment--your heart on your sleeve. But every one married. Was all
+mankind mad!
+
+In the shock of that startling thought he looked up, and saw to the
+left, to the right, in front, men sitting far off in chairs and looking
+at him with wild eyes--emissaries of a distracted mankind intruding to
+spy upon his pain and his humiliation. It was not to be borne. He rose
+quickly, and the others jumped up, too, on all sides. He stood still in
+the middle of the room as if discouraged by their vigilance. No escape!
+He felt something akin to despair. Everybody must know. The servants
+must know to-night. He ground his teeth . . . And he had never noticed,
+never guessed anything. Every one will know. He thought: “The woman’s a
+monster, but everybody will think me a fool”; and standing still in the
+midst of severe walnut-wood furniture, he felt such a tempest of anguish
+within him that he seemed to see himself rolling on the carpet, beating
+his head against the wall. He was disgusted with himself, with the
+loathsome rush of emotion breaking through all the reserves that guarded
+his manhood. Something unknown, withering and poisonous, had entered
+his life, passed near him, touched him, and he was deteriorating. He was
+appalled. What was it? She was gone. Why? His head was ready to burst
+with the endeavour to understand her act and his subtle horror of it.
+Everything was changed. Why? Only a woman gone, after all; and yet he
+had a vision, a vision quick and distinct as a dream: the vision of
+everything he had thought indestructible and safe in the world crashing
+down about him, like solid walls do before the fierce breath of
+a hurricane. He stared, shaking in every limb, while he felt the
+destructive breath, the mysterious breath, the breath of passion, stir
+the profound peace of the house. He looked round in fear. Yes. Crime may
+be forgiven; uncalculating sacrifice, blind trust, burning faith, other
+follies, may be turned to account; suffering, death itself, may with a
+grin or a frown be explained away; but passion is the unpardonable and
+secret infamy of our hearts, a thing to curse, to hide and to deny; a
+shameless and forlorn thing that tramples upon the smiling promises,
+that tears off the placid mask, that strips the body of life. And it had
+come to him! It had laid its unclean hand upon the spotless draperies
+of his existence, and he had to face it alone with all the world looking
+on. All the world! And he thought that even the bare suspicion of
+such an adversary within his house carried with it a taint and a
+condemnation. He put both his hands out as if to ward off the reproach
+of a defiling truth; and, instantly, the appalled conclave of unreal
+men, standing about mutely beyond the clear lustre of mirrors, made at
+him the same gesture of rejection and horror.
+
+He glanced vainly here and there, like a man looking in desperation
+for a weapon or for a hiding place, and understood at last that he was
+disarmed and cornered by the enemy that, without any squeamishness,
+would strike so as to lay open his heart. He could get help nowhere,
+or even take counsel with himself, because in the sudden shock of her
+desertion the sentiments which he knew that in fidelity to his bringing
+up, to his prejudices and his surroundings, he ought to experience, were
+so mixed up with the novelty of real feelings, of fundamental feelings
+that know nothing of creed, class, or education, that he was unable to
+distinguish clearly between what is and what ought to be; between the
+inexcusable truth and the valid pretences. And he knew instinctively
+that truth would be of no use to him. Some kind of concealment seemed a
+necessity because one cannot explain. Of course not! Who would listen?
+One had simply to be without stain and without reproach to keep one’s
+place in the forefront of life.
+
+He said to himself, “I must get over it the best I can,” and began to
+walk up and down the room. What next? What ought to be done? He thought:
+“I will travel--no I won’t. I shall face it out.” And after that resolve
+he was greatly cheered by the reflection that it would be a mute and an
+easy part to play, for no one would be likely to converse with him about
+the abominable conduct of--that woman. He argued to himself that
+decent people--and he knew no others--did not care to talk about such
+indelicate affairs. She had gone off--with that unhealthy, fat ass of a
+journalist. Why? He had been all a husband ought to be. He had given her
+a good position--she shared his prospects--he had treated her invariably
+with great consideration. He reviewed his conduct with a kind of dismal
+pride. It had been irreproachable. Then, why? For love? Profanation!
+There could be no love there. A shameful impulse of passion. Yes,
+passion. His own wife! Good God! . . . And the indelicate aspect of his
+domestic misfortune struck him with such shame that, next moment, he
+caught himself in the act of pondering absurdly over the notion whether
+it would not be more dignified for him to induce a general belief that
+he had been in the habit of beating his wife. Some fellows do . . . and
+anything would be better than the filthy fact; for it was clear he
+had lived with the root of it for five years--and it was too shameful.
+Anything! Anything! Brutality . . . But he gave it up directly, and
+began to think of the Divorce Court. It did not present itself to him,
+notwithstanding his respect for law and usage, as a proper refuge for
+dignified grief. It appeared rather as an unclean and sinister cavern
+where men and women are haled by adverse fate to writhe ridiculously
+in the presence of uncompromising truth. It should not be allowed. That
+woman! Five . . . years . . . married five years . . . and never to see
+anything. Not to the very last day . . . not till she coolly went off.
+And he pictured to himself all the people he knew engaged in speculating
+as to whether all that time he had been blind, foolish, or infatuated.
+What a woman! Blind! . . . Not at all. Could a clean-minded man imagine
+such depravity? Evidently not. He drew a free breath. That was the
+attitude to take; it was dignified enough; it gave him the advantage,
+and he could not help perceiving that it was moral. He yearned
+unaffectedly to see morality (in his person) triumphant before the
+world. As to her she would be forgotten. Let her be forgotten--buried in
+oblivion--lost! No one would allude . . . Refined people--and every man
+and woman he knew could be so described--had, of course, a horror of
+such topics. Had they? Oh, yes. No one would allude to her . . . in his
+hearing. He stamped his foot, tore the letter across, then again and
+again. The thought of sympathizing friends excited in him a fury
+of mistrust. He flung down the small bits of paper. They settled,
+fluttering at his feet, and looked very white on the dark carpet, like a
+scattered handful of snow-flakes.
+
+This fit of hot anger was succeeded by a sudden sadness, by the
+darkening passage of a thought that ran over the scorched surface of his
+heart, like upon a barren plain, and after a fiercer assault of sunrays,
+the melancholy and cooling shadow of a cloud. He realized that he had
+had a shock--not a violent or rending blow, that can be seen, resisted,
+returned, forgotten, but a thrust, insidious and penetrating, that had
+stirred all those feelings, concealed and cruel, which the arts of the
+devil, the fears of mankind--God’s infinite compassion, perhaps--keep
+chained deep down in the inscrutable twilight of our breasts. A dark
+curtain seemed to rise before him, and for less than a second he looked
+upon the mysterious universe of moral suffering. As a landscape is seen
+complete, and vast, and vivid, under a flash of lightning, so he
+could see disclosed in a moment all the immensity of pain that can be
+contained in one short moment of human thought. Then the curtain fell
+again, but his rapid vision left in Alvan Hervey’s mind a trail of
+invincible sadness, a sense of loss and bitter solitude, as though he
+had been robbed and exiled. For a moment he ceased to be a member of
+society with a position, a career, and a name attached to all this, like
+a descriptive label of some complicated compound. He was a simple human
+being removed from the delightful world of crescents and squares. He
+stood alone, naked and afraid, like the first man on the first day of
+evil. There are in life events, contacts, glimpses, that seem brutally
+to bring all the past to a close. There is a shock and a crash, as of
+a gate flung to behind one by the perfidious hand of fate. Go and seek
+another paradise, fool or sage. There is a moment of dumb dismay, and
+the wanderings must begin again; the painful explaining away of facts,
+the feverish raking up of illusions, the cultivation of a fresh crop
+of lies in the sweat of one’s brow, to sustain life, to make it
+supportable, to make it fair, so as to hand intact to another generation
+of blind wanderers the charming legend of a heartless country, of a
+promised land, all flowers and blessings . . .
+
+He came to himself with a slight start, and became aware of an
+oppressive, crushing desolation. It was only a feeling, it is true,
+but it produced on him a physical effect, as though his chest had
+been squeezed in a vice. He perceived himself so extremely forlorn
+and lamentable, and was moved so deeply by the oppressive sorrow, that
+another turn of the screw, he felt, would bring tears out of his eyes.
+He was deteriorating. Five years of life in common had appeased his
+longing. Yes, long-time ago. The first five months did that--but . . .
+There was the habit--the habit of her person, of her smile, of her
+gestures, of her voice, of her silence. She had a pure brow and
+good hair. How utterly wretched all this was. Good hair and fine
+eyes--remarkably fine. He was surprised by the number of details that
+intruded upon his unwilling memory. He could not help remembering her
+footsteps, the rustle of her dress, her way of holding her head, her
+decisive manner of saying “Alvan,” the quiver of her nostrils when she
+was annoyed. All that had been so much his property, so intimately and
+specially his! He raged in a mournful, silent way, as he took stock
+of his losses. He was like a man counting the cost of an unlucky
+speculation--irritated, depressed--exasperated with himself and with
+others, with the fortunate, with the indifferent, with the callous; yet
+the wrong done him appeared so cruel that he would perhaps have dropped
+a tear over that spoliation if it had not been for his conviction
+that men do not weep. Foreigners do; they also kill sometimes in such
+circumstances. And to his horror he felt himself driven to regret almost
+that the usages of a society ready to forgive the shooting of a burglar
+forbade him, under the circumstances, even as much as a thought of
+murder. Nevertheless, he clenched his fists and set his teeth hard.
+And he was afraid at the same time. He was afraid with that penetrating
+faltering fear that seems, in the very middle of a beat, to turn one’s
+heart into a handful of dust. The contamination of her crime spread out,
+tainted the universe, tainted himself; woke up all the dormant infamies
+of the world; caused a ghastly kind of clairvoyance in which he could
+see the towns and fields of the earth, its sacred places, its temples
+and its houses, peopled by monsters--by monsters of duplicity, lust, and
+murder. She was a monster--he himself was thinking monstrous thoughts
+. . . and yet he was like other people. How many men and women at this
+very moment were plunged in abominations--meditated crimes. It was
+frightful to think of. He remembered all the streets--the well-to-do
+streets he had passed on his way home; all the innumerable houses with
+closed doors and curtained windows. Each seemed now an abode of anguish
+and folly. And his thought, as if appalled, stood still, recalling with
+dismay the decorous and frightful silence that was like a conspiracy;
+the grim, impenetrable silence of miles of walls concealing passions,
+misery, thoughts of crime. Surely he was not the only man; his was not
+the only house . . . and yet no one knew--no one guessed. But he knew.
+He knew with unerring certitude that could not be deceived by the
+correct silence of walls, of closed doors, of curtained windows. He was
+beside himself with a despairing agitation, like a man informed of
+a deadly secret--the secret of a calamity threatening the safety of
+mankind--the sacredness, the peace of life.
+
+He caught sight of himself in one of the looking-glasses. It was a
+relief. The anguish of his feeling had been so powerful that he more
+than half expected to see some distorted wild face there, and he was
+pleasantly surprised to see nothing of the kind. His aspect, at any
+rate, would let no one into the secret of his pain. He examined himself
+with attention. His trousers were turned up, and his boots a little
+muddy, but he looked very much as usual. Only his hair was slightly
+ruffled, and that disorder, somehow, was so suggestive of trouble
+that he went quickly to the table, and began to use the brushes, in an
+anxious desire to obliterate the compromising trace, that only vestige
+of his emotion. He brushed with care, watching the effect of his
+smoothing; and another face, slightly pale and more tense than was
+perhaps desirable, peered back at him from the toilet glass. He laid the
+brushes down, and was not satisfied. He took them up again and brushed,
+brushed mechanically--forgot himself in that occupation. The tumult of
+his thoughts ended in a sluggish flow of reflection, such as, after the
+outburst of a volcano, the almost imperceptible progress of a stream
+of lava, creeping languidly over a convulsed land and pitilessly
+obliterating any landmark left by the shock of the earthquake. It is
+a destructive but, by comparison, it is a peaceful phenomenon. Alvan
+Hervey was almost soothed by the deliberate pace of his thoughts. His
+moral landmarks were going one by one, consumed in the fire of his
+experience, buried in hot mud, in ashes. He was cooling--on the surface;
+but there was enough heat left somewhere to make him slap the brushes on
+the table, and turning away, say in a fierce whisper: “I wish him joy
+. . . Damn the woman.”
+
+He felt himself utterly corrupted by her wickedness, and the most
+significant symptom of his moral downfall was the bitter, acrid
+satisfaction with which he recognized it. He, deliberately, swore in his
+thoughts; he meditated sneers; he shaped in profound silence words of
+cynical unbelief, and his most cherished convictions stood revealed
+finally as the narrow prejudices of fools. A crowd of shapeless, unclean
+thoughts crossed his mind in a stealthy rush, like a band of veiled
+malefactors hastening to a crime. He put his hands deep into his
+pockets. He heard a faint ringing somewhere, and muttered to himself:
+“I am not the only one . . . not the only one.” There was another ring.
+Front door!
+
+His heart leaped up into his throat, and forthwith descended as low as
+his boots. A call! Who? Why? He wanted to rush out on the landing and
+shout to the servant: “Not at home! Gone away abroad!” . . . Any excuse.
+He could not face a visitor. Not this evening. No. To-morrow. . . .
+Before he could break out of the numbness that enveloped him like a
+sheet of lead, he heard far below, as if in the entrails of the earth,
+a door close heavily. The house vibrated to it more than to a clap of
+thunder. He stood still, wishing himself invisible. The room was very
+chilly. He did not think he would ever feel like that. But people must
+be met--they must be faced--talked to--smiled at. He heard another door,
+much nearer--the door of the drawing-room--being opened and flung to
+again. He imagined for a moment he would faint. How absurd! That kind
+of thing had to be gone through. A voice spoke. He could not catch the
+words. Then the voice spoke again, and footsteps were heard on the
+first floor landing. Hang it all! Was he to hear that voice and those
+footsteps whenever any one spoke or moved? He thought: “This is like
+being haunted--I suppose it will last for a week or so, at least. Till
+I forget. Forget! Forget!” Someone was coming up the second flight of
+stairs. Servant? He listened, then, suddenly, as though an incredible,
+frightful revelation had been shouted to him from a distance, he
+bellowed out in the empty room: “What! What!” in such a fiendish tone
+as to astonish himself. The footsteps stopped outside the door. He stood
+openmouthed, maddened and still, as if in the midst of a catastrophe.
+The door-handle rattled lightly. It seemed to him that the walls were
+coming apart, that the furniture swayed at him; the ceiling slanted
+queerly for a moment, a tall wardrobe tried to topple over. He caught
+hold of something and it was the back of a chair. So he had reeled
+against a chair! Oh! Confound it! He gripped hard.
+
+The flaming butterfly poised between the jaws of the bronze dragon
+radiated a glare, a glare that seemed to leap up all at once into a
+crude, blinding fierceness, and made it difficult for him to distinguish
+plainly the figure of his wife standing upright with her back to the
+closed door. He looked at her and could not detect her breathing. The
+harsh and violent light was beating on her, and he was amazed to see her
+preserve so well the composure of her upright attitude in that scorching
+brilliance which, to his eyes, enveloped her like a hot and consuming
+mist. He would not have been surprised if she had vanished in it as
+suddenly as she had appeared. He stared and listened; listened for some
+sound, but the silence round him was absolute--as though he had in
+a moment grown completely deaf as well as dim-eyed. Then his hearing
+returned, preternaturally sharp. He heard the patter of a rain-shower on
+the window panes behind the lowered blinds, and below, far below, in
+the artificial abyss of the square, the deadened roll of wheels and the
+splashy trotting of a horse. He heard a groan also--very distinct--in
+the room--close to his ear.
+
+He thought with alarm: “I must have made that noise myself;” and at the
+same instant the woman left the door, stepped firmly across the floor
+before him, and sat down in a chair. He knew that step. There was no
+doubt about it. She had come back! And he very nearly said aloud
+“Of course!”--such was his sudden and masterful perception of the
+indestructible character of her being. Nothing could destroy her--and
+nothing but his own destruction could keep her away. She was the
+incarnation of all the short moments which every man spares out of his
+life for dreams, for precious dreams that concrete the most cherished,
+the most profitable of his illusions. He peered at her with inward
+trepidation. She was mysterious, significant, full of obscure meaning
+--like a symbol. He peered, bending forward, as though he had been
+discovering about her things he had never seen before. Unconsciously
+he made a step towards her--then another. He saw her arm make an ample,
+decided movement and he stopped. She had lifted her veil. It was like
+the lifting of a vizor.
+
+The spell was broken. He experienced a shock as though he had been
+called out of a trance by the sudden noise of an explosion. It was even
+more startling and more distinct; it was an infinitely more intimate
+change, for he had the sensation of having come into this room only that
+very moment; of having returned from very far; he was made aware that
+some essential part of himself had in a flash returned into his
+body, returned finally from a fierce and lamentable region, from the
+dwelling-place of unveiled hearts. He woke up to an amazing infinity of
+contempt, to a droll bitterness of wonder, to a disenchanted conviction
+of safety. He had a glimpse of the irresistible force, and he saw also
+the barrenness of his convictions--of her convictions. It seemed to him
+that he could never make a mistake as long as he lived. It was morally
+impossible to go wrong. He was not elated by that certitude; he was
+dimly uneasy about its price; there was a chill as of death in this
+triumph of sound principles, in this victory snatched under the very
+shadow of disaster.
+
+The last trace of his previous state of mind vanished, as the
+instantaneous and elusive trail of a bursting meteor vanishes on the
+profound blackness of the sky; it was the faint flicker of a painful
+thought, gone as soon as perceived, that nothing but her presence--after
+all--had the power to recall him to himself. He stared at her. She sat
+with her hands on her lap, looking down; and he noticed that her boots
+were dirty, her skirts wet and splashed, as though she had been driven
+back there by a blind fear through a waste of mud. He was indignant,
+amazed and shocked, but in a natural, healthy way now; so that he
+could control those unprofitable sentiments by the dictates of cautious
+self-restraint. The light in the room had no unusual brilliance now; it
+was a good light in which he could easily observe the expression of her
+face. It was that of dull fatigue. And the silence that surrounded them
+was the normal silence of any quiet house, hardly disturbed by the faint
+noises of a respectable quarter of the town. He was very cool--and it
+was quite coolly that he thought how much better it would be if neither
+of them ever spoke again. She sat with closed lips, with an air of
+lassitude in the stony forgetfulness of her pose, but after a moment she
+lifted her drooping eyelids and met his tense and inquisitive stare by
+a look that had all the formless eloquence of a cry. It penetrated, it
+stirred without informing; it was the very essence of anguish stripped
+of words that can be smiled at, argued away, shouted down, disdained.
+It was anguish naked and unashamed, the bare pain of existence let loose
+upon the world in the fleeting unreserve of a look that had in it an
+immensity of fatigue, the scornful sincerity, the black impudence of an
+extorted confession. Alvan Hervey was seized with wonder, as though he
+had seen something inconceivable; and some obscure part of his being
+was ready to exclaim with him: “I would never have believed it!” but
+an instantaneous revulsion of wounded susceptibilities checked the
+unfinished thought.
+
+He felt full of rancorous indignation against the woman who could look
+like this at one. This look probed him; it tampered with him. It was
+dangerous to one as would be a hint of unbelief whispered by a priest in
+the august decorum of a temple; and at the same time it was impure,
+it was disturbing, like a cynical consolation muttered in the dark,
+tainting the sorrow, corroding the thought, poisoning the heart. He
+wanted to ask her furiously: “Who do you take me for? How dare you look
+at me like this?” He felt himself helpless before the hidden meaning of
+that look; he resented it with pained and futile violence as an injury
+so secret that it could never, never be redressed. His wish was to crush
+her by a single sentence. He was stainless. Opinion was on his side;
+morality, men and gods were on his side; law, conscience--all the world!
+She had nothing but that look. And he could only say:
+
+“How long do you intend to stay here?”
+
+Her eyes did not waver, her lips remained closed; and for any effect
+of his words he might have spoken to a dead woman, only that this one
+breathed quickly. He was profoundly disappointed by what he had said.
+It was a great deception, something in the nature of treason. He had
+deceived himself. It should have been altogether different--other
+words--another sensation. And before his eyes, so fixed that at times
+they saw nothing, she sat apparently as unconscious as though she had
+been alone, sending that look of brazen confession straight at him--with
+an air of staring into empty space. He said significantly:
+
+“Must I go then?” And he knew he meant nothing of what he implied.
+
+One of her hands on her lap moved slightly as though his words had
+fallen there and she had thrown them off on the floor. But her silence
+encouraged him. Possibly it meant remorse--perhaps fear. Was she
+thunderstruck by his attitude? . . . Her eyelids dropped. He seemed to
+understand ever so much--everything! Very well--but she must be made to
+suffer. It was due to him. He understood everything, yet he judged it
+indispensable to say with an obvious affectation of civility:
+
+“I don’t understand--be so good as to . . .”
+
+She stood up. For a second he believed she intended to go away, and
+it was as though someone had jerked a string attached to his heart. It
+hurt. He remained open-mouthed and silent. But she made an irresolute
+step towards him, and instinctively he moved aside. They stood before
+one another, and the fragments of the torn letter lay between them--at
+their feet--like an insurmountable obstacle, like a sign of eternal
+separation! Around them three other couples stood still and face to
+face, as if waiting for a signal to begin some action--a struggle, a
+dispute, or a dance.
+
+She said: “Don’t--Alvan!” and there was something that resembled a
+warning in the pain of her tone. He narrowed his eyes as if trying to
+pierce her with his gaze. Her voice touched him. He had aspirations
+after magnanimity, generosity, superiority--interrupted, however, by
+flashes of indignation and anxiety--frightful anxiety to know how far
+she had gone. She looked down at the torn paper. Then she looked up, and
+their eyes met again, remained fastened together, like an unbreakable
+bond, like a clasp of eternal complicity; and the decorous silence, the
+pervading quietude of the house which enveloped this meeting of their
+glances became for a moment inexpressibly vile, for he was afraid she
+would say too much and make magnanimity impossible, while behind the
+profound mournfulness of her face there was a regret--a regret of things
+done--the regret of delay--the thought that if she had only turned back
+a week sooner--a day sooner--only an hour sooner. . . . They were afraid
+to hear again the sound of their voices; they did not know what they
+might say--perhaps something that could not be recalled; and words are
+more terrible than facts. But the tricky fatality that lurks in obscure
+impulses spoke through Alvan Hervey’s lips suddenly; and he heard
+his own voice with the excited and sceptical curiosity with which one
+listens to actors’ voices speaking on the stage in the strain of a
+poignant situation.
+
+“If you have forgotten anything . . . of course . . . I . . .”
+
+Her eyes blazed at him for an instant; her lips trembled--and then she
+also became the mouth-piece of the mysterious force forever hovering
+near us; of that perverse inspiration, wandering capricious and
+uncontrollable, like a gust of wind.
+
+“What is the good of this, Alvan? . . . You know why I came back. . . .
+You know that I could not . . .”
+
+He interrupted her with irritation.
+
+“Then! what’s this?” he asked, pointing downwards at the torn letter.
+
+“That’s a mistake,” she said hurriedly, in a muffled voice.
+
+This answer amazed him. He remained speechless, staring at her. He had
+half a mind to burst into a laugh. It ended in a smile as involuntary as
+a grimace of pain.
+
+“A mistake . . .” he began, slowly, and then found himself unable to say
+another word.
+
+“Yes . . . it was honest,” she said very low, as if speaking to the
+memory of a feeling in a remote past.
+
+He exploded.
+
+“Curse your honesty! . . . Is there any honesty in all this! . . . When
+did you begin to be honest? Why are you here? What are you now? . . .
+Still honest? . . .”
+
+He walked at her, raging, as if blind; during these three quick strides
+he lost touch of the material world and was whirled interminably through
+a kind of empty universe made up of nothing but fury and anguish, till
+he came suddenly upon her face--very close to his. He stopped short, and
+all at once seemed to remember something heard ages ago.
+
+“You don’t know the meaning of the word,” he shouted.
+
+She did not flinch. He perceived with fear that everything around him
+was still. She did not move a hair’s breadth; his own body did not stir.
+An imperturbable calm enveloped their two motionless figures, the house,
+the town, all the world--and the trifling tempest of his feelings. The
+violence of the short tumult within him had been such as could well have
+shattered all creation; and yet nothing was changed. He faced his wife
+in the familiar room in his own house. It had not fallen. And right and
+left all the innumerable dwellings, standing shoulder to shoulder,
+had resisted the shock of his passion, had presented, unmoved, to the
+loneliness of his trouble, the grim silence of walls, the impenetrable
+and polished discretion of closed doors and curtained windows.
+Immobility and silence pressed on him, assailed him, like two
+accomplices of the immovable and mute woman before his eyes. He was
+suddenly vanquished. He was shown his impotence. He was soothed by the
+breath of a corrupt resignation coming to him through the subtle irony
+of the surrounding peace.
+
+He said with villainous composure:
+
+“At any rate it isn’t enough for me. I want to know more--if you’re
+going to stay.”
+
+“There is nothing more to tell,” she answered, sadly.
+
+It struck him as so very true that he did not say anything. She went on:
+
+“You wouldn’t understand. . . .”
+
+“No?” he said, quietly. He held himself tight not to burst into howls
+and imprecations.
+
+“I tried to be faithful . . .” she began again.
+
+“And this?” he exclaimed, pointing at the fragments of her letter.
+
+“This--this is a failure,” she said.
+
+“I should think so,” he muttered, bitterly.
+
+“I tried to be faithful to myself--Alvan--and . . . and honest to
+you. . . .”
+
+“If you had tried to be faithful to me it would have been more to the
+purpose,” he interrupted, angrily. “I’ve been faithful to you and you
+have spoiled my life--both our lives . . .” Then after a pause the
+unconquerable preoccupation of self came out, and he raised his voice to
+ask resentfully, “And, pray, for how long have you been making a fool of
+me?”
+
+She seemed horribly shocked by that question. He did not wait for an
+answer, but went on moving about all the time; now and then coming up to
+her, then wandering off restlessly to the other end of the room.
+
+“I want to know. Everybody knows, I suppose, but myself--and that’s your
+honesty!”
+
+“I have told you there is nothing to know,” she said, speaking
+unsteadily as if in pain. “Nothing of what you suppose. You don’t
+understand me. This letter is the beginning--and the end.”
+
+“The end--this thing has no end,” he clamoured, unexpectedly. “Can’t you
+understand that? I can . . . The beginning . . .”
+
+He stopped and looked into her eyes with concentrated intensity, with
+a desire to see, to penetrate, to understand, that made him positively
+hold his breath till he gasped.
+
+“By Heavens!” he said, standing perfectly still in a peering attitude
+and within less than a foot from her.
+
+“By Heavens!” he repeated, slowly, and in a tone whose involuntary
+strangeness was a complete mystery to himself. “By Heavens--I could
+believe you--I could believe anything--now!”
+
+He turned short on his heel and began to walk up and down the room with
+an air of having disburdened himself of the final pronouncement of his
+life--of having said something on which he would not go back, even if
+he could. She remained as if rooted to the carpet. Her eyes followed
+the restless movements of the man, who avoided looking at her. Her wide
+stare clung to him, inquiring, wondering and doubtful.
+
+“But the fellow was forever sticking in here,” he burst out,
+distractedly. “He made love to you, I suppose--and, and . . .” He
+lowered his voice. “And--you let him.”
+
+“And I let him,” she murmured, catching his intonation, so that her
+voice sounded unconscious, sounded far off and slavish, like an echo.
+
+He said twice, “You! You!” violently, then calmed down. “What could you
+see in the fellow?” he asked, with unaffected wonder. “An effeminate,
+fat ass. What could you . . . Weren’t you happy? Didn’t you have all you
+wanted? Now--frankly; did I deceive your expectations in any way? Were
+you disappointed with our position--or with our prospects--perhaps? You
+know you couldn’t be--they are much better than you could hope for when
+you married me. . . .”
+
+He forgot himself so far as to gesticulate a little while he went on
+with animation:
+
+“What could you expect from such a fellow? He’s an outsider--a rank
+outsider. . . . If it hadn’t been for my money . . . do you hear? . . .
+for my money, he wouldn’t know where to turn. His people won’t have
+anything to do with him. The fellow’s no class--no class at all.
+He’s useful, certainly, that’s why I . . . I thought you had enough
+intelligence to see it. . . . And you . . . No! It’s incredible!
+What did he tell you? Do you care for no one’s opinion--is there no
+restraining influence in the world for you--women? Did you ever give me
+a thought? I tried to be a good husband. Did I fail? Tell me--what have
+I done?”
+
+Carried away by his feelings he took his head in both his hands and
+repeated wildly:
+
+“What have I done? . . . Tell me! What? . . .”
+
+“Nothing,” she said.
+
+“Ah! You see . . . you can’t . . .” he began, triumphantly, walking
+away; then suddenly, as though he had been flung back at her by
+something invisible he had met, he spun round and shouted with
+exasperation:
+
+“What on earth did you expect me to do?”
+
+Without a word she moved slowly towards the table, and, sitting down,
+leaned on her elbow, shading her eyes with her hand. All that time he
+glared at her watchfully as if expecting every moment to find in her
+deliberate movements an answer to his question. But he could not read
+anything, he could gather no hint of her thought. He tried to suppress
+his desire to shout, and after waiting awhile, said with incisive scorn:
+
+“Did you want me to write absurd verses; to sit and look at you for
+hours--to talk to you about your soul? You ought to have known I wasn’t
+that sort. . . . I had something better to do. But if you think I was
+totally blind . . .”
+
+He perceived in a flash that he could remember an infinity of
+enlightening occurrences. He could recall ever so many distinct
+occasions when he came upon them; he remembered the absurdly interrupted
+gesture of his fat, white hand, the rapt expression of her face, the
+glitter of unbelieving eyes; snatches of incomprehensible conversations
+not worth listening to, silences that had meant nothing at the time
+and seemed now illuminating like a burst of sunshine. He remembered all
+that. He had not been blind. Oh! No! And to know this was an exquisite
+relief: it brought back all his composure.
+
+“I thought it beneath me to suspect you,” he said, loftily.
+
+The sound of that sentence evidently possessed some magical power,
+because, as soon as he had spoken, he felt wonderfully at ease; and
+directly afterwards he experienced a flash of joyful amazement at
+the discovery that he could be inspired to such noble and truthful
+utterance. He watched the effect of his words. They caused her to glance
+to him quickly over her shoulder. He caught a glimpse of wet eyelashes,
+of a red cheek with a tear running down swiftly; and then she turned
+away again and sat as before, covering her face with her hands.
+
+“You ought to be perfectly frank with me,” he said, slowly.
+
+“You know everything,” she answered, indistinctly, through her fingers.
+
+“This letter. . . . Yes . . . but . . .”
+
+“And I came back,” she exclaimed in a stifled voice; “you know
+everything.”
+
+“I am glad of it--for your sake,” he said with impressive gravity. He
+listened to himself with solemn emotion. It seemed to him that something
+inexpressibly momentous was in progress within the room, that every
+word and every gesture had the importance of events preordained from
+the beginning of all things, and summing up in their finality the whole
+purpose of creation.
+
+“For your sake,” he repeated.
+
+Her shoulders shook as though she had been sobbing, and he forgot
+himself in the contemplation of her hair. Suddenly he gave a start, as
+if waking up, and asked very gently and not much above a whisper--
+
+“Have you been meeting him often?”
+
+“Never!” she cried into the palms of her hands.
+
+This answer seemed for a moment to take from him the power of speech.
+His lips moved for some time before any sound came.
+
+“You preferred to make love here--under my very nose,” he said,
+furiously. He calmed down instantly, and felt regretfully uneasy, as
+though he had let himself down in her estimation by that outburst. She
+rose, and with her hand on the back of the chair confronted him with
+eyes that were perfectly dry now. There was a red spot on each of her
+cheeks.
+
+“When I made up my mind to go to him--I wrote,” she said.
+
+“But you didn’t go to him,” he took up in the same tone. “How far did
+you go? What made you come back?”
+
+“I didn’t know myself,” she murmured. Nothing of her moved but her lips.
+He fixed her sternly.
+
+“Did he expect this? Was he waiting for you?” he asked.
+
+She answered him by an almost imperceptible nod, and he continued to
+look at her for a good while without making a sound. Then, at last--
+
+“And I suppose he is waiting yet?” he asked, quickly.
+
+Again she seemed to nod at him. For some reason he felt he must know the
+time. He consulted his watch gloomily. Half-past seven.
+
+“Is he?” he muttered, putting the watch in his pocket. He looked up at
+her, and, as if suddenly overcome by a sense of sinister fun, gave a
+short, harsh laugh, directly repressed.
+
+“No! It’s the most unheard! . . .” he mumbled while she stood before him
+biting her lower lip, as if plunged in deep thought. He laughed again
+in one low burst that was as spiteful as an imprecation. He did not know
+why he felt such an overpowering and sudden distaste for the facts of
+existence--for facts in general--such an immense disgust at the thought
+of all the many days already lived through. He was wearied. Thinking
+seemed a labour beyond his strength. He said--
+
+“You deceived me--now you make a fool of him . . . It’s awful! Why?”
+
+“I deceived myself!” she exclaimed.
+
+“Oh! Nonsense!” he said, impatiently.
+
+“I am ready to go if you wish it,” she went on, quickly. “It was due to
+you--to be told--to know. No! I could not!” she cried, and stood still
+wringing her hands stealthily.
+
+“I am glad you repented before it was too late,” he said in a dull
+tone and looking at his boots. “I am glad . . . some spark of better
+feeling,” he muttered, as if to himself. He lifted up his head after a
+moment of brooding silence. “I am glad to see that there is some sense
+of decency left in you,” he added a little louder. Looking at her he
+appeared to hesitate, as if estimating the possible consequences of what
+he wished to say, and at last blurted out--
+
+“After all, I loved you. . . .”
+
+“I did not know,” she whispered.
+
+“Good God!” he cried. “Why do you imagine I married you?”
+
+The indelicacy of his obtuseness angered her.
+
+“Ah--why?” she said through her teeth.
+
+He appeared overcome with horror, and watched her lips intently as
+though in fear.
+
+“I imagined many things,” she said, slowly, and paused. He watched,
+holding his breath. At last she went on musingly, as if thinking aloud,
+“I tried to understand. I tried honestly. . . . Why? . . . To do the
+usual thing--I suppose. . . . To please yourself.”
+
+He walked away smartly, and when he came back, close to her, he had a
+flushed face.
+
+“You seemed pretty well pleased, too--at the time,” he hissed, with
+scathing fury. “I needn’t ask whether you loved me.”
+
+“I know now I was perfectly incapable of such a thing,” she said,
+calmly, “If I had, perhaps you would not have married me.”
+
+“It’s very clear I would not have done it if I had known you--as I know
+you now.”
+
+He seemed to see himself proposing to her--ages ago. They were strolling
+up the slope of a lawn. Groups of people were scattered in sunshine.
+The shadows of leafy boughs lay still on the short grass. The coloured
+sunshades far off, passing between trees, resembled deliberate and
+brilliant butterflies moving without a flutter. Men smiling amiably,
+or else very grave, within the impeccable shelter of their black coats,
+stood by the side of women who, clustered in clear summer toilettes,
+recalled all the fabulous tales of enchanted gardens where animated
+flowers smile at bewitched knights. There was a sumptuous serenity in
+it all, a thin, vibrating excitement, the perfect security, as of an
+invincible ignorance, that evoked within him a transcendent belief in
+felicity as the lot of all mankind, a recklessly picturesque desire to
+get promptly something for himself only, out of that splendour unmarred
+by any shadow of a thought. The girl walked by his side across an open
+space; no one was near, and suddenly he stood still, as if inspired, and
+spoke. He remembered looking at her pure eyes, at her candid brow; he
+remembered glancing about quickly to see if they were being observed,
+and thinking that nothing could go wrong in a world of so much charm,
+purity, and distinction. He was proud of it. He was one of its makers,
+of its possessors, of its guardians, of its extollers. He wanted to
+grasp it solidly, to get as much gratification as he could out of it;
+and in view of its incomparable quality, of its unstained atmosphere,
+of its nearness to the heaven of its choice, this gust of brutal desire
+seemed the most noble of aspirations. In a second he lived again through
+all these moments, and then all the pathos of his failure presented
+itself to him with such vividness that there was a suspicion of tears in
+his tone when he said almost unthinkingly, “My God! I did love you!”
+
+She seemed touched by the emotion of his voice. Her lips quivered a
+little, and she made one faltering step towards him, putting out her
+hands in a beseeching gesture, when she perceived, just in time, that
+being absorbed by the tragedy of his life he had absolutely forgotten
+her very existence. She stopped, and her outstretched arms fell slowly.
+He, with his features distorted by the bitterness of his thought, saw
+neither her movement nor her gesture. He stamped his foot in vexation,
+rubbed his head--then exploded.
+
+“What the devil am I to do now?”
+
+He was still again. She seemed to understand, and moved to the door
+firmly.
+
+“It’s very simple--I’m going,” she said aloud.
+
+At the sound of her voice he gave a start of surprise, looked at her
+wildly, and asked in a piercing tone--
+
+“You. . . . Where? To him?”
+
+“No--alone--good-bye.”
+
+The door-handle rattled under her groping hand as though she had been
+trying to get out of some dark place.
+
+“No--stay!” he cried.
+
+She heard him faintly. He saw her shoulder touch the lintel of the door.
+She swayed as if dazed. There was less than a second of suspense while
+they both felt as if poised on the very edge of moral annihilation,
+ready to fall into some devouring nowhere. Then, almost simultaneously,
+he shouted, “Come back!” and she let go the handle of the door. She
+turned round in peaceful desperation like one who deliberately has
+thrown away the last chance of life; and, for a moment, the room she
+faced appeared terrible, and dark, and safe--like a grave.
+
+He said, very hoarse and abrupt: “It can’t end like this. . . . Sit
+down;” and while she crossed the room again to the low-backed chair
+before the dressing-table, he opened the door and put his head out to
+look and listen. The house was quiet. He came back pacified, and asked--
+
+“Do you speak the truth?”
+
+She nodded.
+
+“You have lived a lie, though,” he said, suspiciously.
+
+“Ah! You made it so easy,” she answered.
+
+“You reproach me--me!”
+
+“How could I?” she said; “I would have you no other--now.”
+
+“What do you mean by . . .” he began, then checked himself, and without
+waiting for an answer went on, “I won’t ask any questions. Is this
+letter the worst of it?”
+
+She had a nervous movement of her hands.
+
+“I must have a plain answer,” he said, hotly.
+
+“Then, no! The worst is my coming back.”
+
+There followed a period of dead silence, during which they exchanged
+searching glances.
+
+He said authoritatively--
+
+“You don’t know what you are saying. Your mind is unhinged. You are
+beside yourself, or you would not say such things. You can’t control
+yourself. Even in your remorse . . .” He paused a moment, then said with
+a doctoral air: “Self-restraint is everything in life, you know. It’s
+happiness, it’s dignity . . . it’s everything.”
+
+She was pulling nervously at her handkerchief while he went on watching
+anxiously to see the effect of his words. Nothing satisfactory happened.
+Only, as he began to speak again, she covered her face with both her
+hands.
+
+“You see where the want of self-restraint leads to.
+Pain--humiliation--loss of respect--of friends, of everything that
+ennobles life, that . . . All kinds of horrors,” he concluded, abruptly.
+
+She made no stir. He looked at her pensively for some time as though he
+had been concentrating the melancholy thoughts evoked by the sight of
+that abased woman. His eyes became fixed and dull. He was profoundly
+penetrated by the solemnity of the moment; he felt deeply the greatness
+of the occasion. And more than ever the walls of his house seemed
+to enclose the sacredness of ideals to which he was about to offer a
+magnificent sacrifice. He was the high priest of that temple, the severe
+guardian of formulas, of rites, of the pure ceremonial concealing the
+black doubts of life. And he was not alone. Other men, too--the best of
+them--kept watch and ward by the hearthstones that were the altars of
+that profitable persuasion. He understood confusedly that he was part
+of an immense and beneficent power, which had a reward ready for every
+discretion. He dwelt within the invincible wisdom of silence; he was
+protected by an indestructible faith that would last forever, that would
+withstand unshaken all the assaults--the loud execrations of apostates,
+and the secret weariness of its confessors! He was in league with a
+universe of untold advantages. He represented the moral strength of a
+beautiful reticence that could vanquish all the deplorable crudities of
+life--fear, disaster, sin--even death itself. It seemed to him he was
+on the point of sweeping triumphantly away all the illusory mysteries of
+existence. It was simplicity itself.
+
+“I hope you see now the folly--the utter folly of wickedness,” he began
+in a dull, solemn manner. “You must respect the conditions of your life
+or lose all it can give you. All! Everything!”
+
+He waved his arm once, and three exact replicas of his face, of his
+clothes, of his dull severity, of his solemn grief, repeated the wide
+gesture that in its comprehensive sweep indicated an infinity of moral
+sweetness, embraced the walls, the hangings, the whole house, all the
+crowd of houses outside, all the flimsy and inscrutable graves of the
+living, with their doors numbered like the doors of prison-cells, and as
+impenetrable as the granite of tombstones.
+
+“Yes! Restraint, duty, fidelity--unswerving fidelity to what is expected
+of you. This--only this--secures the reward, the peace. Everything else
+we should labour to subdue--to destroy. It’s misfortune; it’s disease.
+It is terrible--terrible. We must not know anything about it--we
+needn’t. It is our duty to ourselves--to others. You do not live all
+alone in the world--and if you have no respect for the dignity of life,
+others have. Life is a serious matter. If you don’t conform to the
+highest standards you are no one--it’s a kind of death. Didn’t this
+occur to you? You’ve only to look round you to see the truth of what I
+am saying. Did you live without noticing anything, without understanding
+anything? From a child you had examples before your eyes--you could see
+daily the beauty, the blessings of morality, of principles. . . .”
+
+His voice rose and fell pompously in a strange chant. His eyes were
+still, his stare exalted and sullen; his face was set, was hard, was
+woodenly exulting over the grim inspiration that secretly possessed him,
+seethed within him, lifted him up into a stealthy frenzy of belief. Now
+and then he would stretch out his right arm over her head, as it were,
+and he spoke down at that sinner from a height, and with a sense of
+avenging virtue, with a profound and pure joy as though he could
+from his steep pinnacle see every weighty word strike and hurt like a
+punishing stone.
+
+“Rigid principles--adherence to what is right,” he finished after a
+pause.
+
+“What is right?” she said, distinctly, without uncovering her face.
+
+“Your mind is diseased!” he cried, upright and austere. “Such a question
+is rot--utter rot. Look round you--there’s your answer, if you only care
+to see. Nothing that outrages the received beliefs can be right. Your
+conscience tells you that. They are the received beliefs because they
+are the best, the noblest, the only possible. They survive. . . .”
+
+He could not help noticing with pleasure the philosophic breadth of his
+view, but he could not pause to enjoy it, for his inspiration, the call
+of august truth, carried him on.
+
+“You must respect the moral foundations of a society that has made
+you what you are. Be true to it. That’s duty--that’s honour--that’s
+honesty.”
+
+He felt a great glow within him, as though he had swallowed something
+hot. He made a step nearer. She sat up and looked at him with an ardour
+of expectation that stimulated his sense of the supreme importance of
+that moment. And as if forgetting himself he raised his voice very much.
+
+“‘What’s right?’ you ask me. Think only. What would you have been if
+you had gone off with that infernal vagabond? . . . What would you have
+been? . . . You! My wife! . . .”
+
+He caught sight of himself in the pier glass, drawn up to his full
+height, and with a face so white that his eyes, at the distance,
+resembled the black cavities in a skull. He saw himself as if about to
+launch imprecations, with arms uplifted above her bowed head. He was
+ashamed of that unseemly posture, and put his hands in his pockets
+hurriedly. She murmured faintly, as if to herself--
+
+“Ah! What am I now?”
+
+“As it happens you are still Mrs. Alvan Hervey--uncommonly lucky for
+you, let me tell you,” he said in a conversational tone. He walked up to
+the furthest corner of the room, and, turning back, saw her sitting very
+upright, her hands clasped on her lap, and with a lost, unswerving gaze
+of her eyes which stared unwinking like the eyes of the blind, at the
+crude gas flame, blazing and still, between the jaws of the bronze
+dragon.
+
+He came up quite close to her, and straddling his legs a little, stood
+looking down at her face for some time without taking his hands out of
+his pockets. He seemed to be turning over in his mind a heap of words,
+piecing his next speech out of an overpowering abundance of thoughts.
+
+“You’ve tried me to the utmost,” he said at last; and as soon as he said
+these words he lost his moral footing, and felt himself swept away from
+his pinnacle by a flood of passionate resentment against the bungling
+creature that had come so near to spoiling his life. “Yes; I’ve
+been tried more than any man ought to be,” he went on with righteous
+bitterness. “It was unfair. What possessed you to? . . . What possessed
+you? . . . Write such a . . . After five years of perfect happiness!
+‘Pon my word, no one would believe. . . . Didn’t you feel you couldn’t?
+Because you couldn’t . . . it was impossible--you know. Wasn’t it?
+Think. Wasn’t it?”
+
+“It was impossible,” she whispered, obediently.
+
+This submissive assent given with such readiness did not soothe him,
+did not elate him; it gave him, inexplicably, that sense of terror
+we experience when in the midst of conditions we had learned to think
+absolutely safe we discover all at once the presence of a near and
+unsuspected danger. It was impossible, of course! He knew it. She knew
+it. She confessed it. It was impossible! That man knew it, too--as well
+as any one; couldn’t help knowing it. And yet those two had been engaged
+in a conspiracy against his peace--in a criminal enterprise for which
+there could be no sanction of belief within themselves. There could not
+be! There could not be! And yet how near to . . . With a short thrill
+he saw himself an exiled forlorn figure in a realm of ungovernable,
+of unrestrained folly. Nothing could be foreseen, foretold--guarded
+against. And the sensation was intolerable, had something of the
+withering horror that may be conceived as following upon the utter
+extinction of all hope. In the flash of thought the dishonouring
+episode seemed to disengage itself from everything actual, from
+earthly conditions, and even from earthly suffering; it became purely a
+terrifying knowledge, an annihilating knowledge of a blind and infernal
+force. Something desperate and vague, a flicker of an insane desire to
+abase himself before the mysterious impulses of evil, to ask for mercy
+in some way, passed through his mind; and then came the idea, the
+persuasion, the certitude, that the evil must be forgotten--must be
+resolutely ignored to make life possible; that the knowledge must be
+kept out of mind, out of sight, like the knowledge of certain death is
+kept out of the daily existence of men. He stiffened himself inwardly
+for the effort, and next moment it appeared very easy, amazingly
+feasible, if one only kept strictly to facts, gave one’s mind to their
+perplexities and not to their meaning. Becoming conscious of a long
+silence, he cleared his throat warningly, and said in a steady voice--
+
+“I am glad you feel this . . . uncommonly glad . . . you felt this in
+time. For, don’t you see . . .” Unexpectedly he hesitated.
+
+“Yes . . . I see,” she murmured.
+
+“Of course you would,” he said, looking at the carpet and speaking
+like one who thinks of something else. He lifted his head. “I
+cannot believe--even after this--even after this--that you are
+altogether--altogether . . . other than what I thought you. It seems
+impossible--to me.”
+
+“And to me,” she breathed out.
+
+“Now--yes,” he said, “but this morning? And to-morrow? . . . This is
+what . . .”
+
+He started at the drift of his words and broke off abruptly. Every train
+of thought seemed to lead into the hopeless realm of ungovernable folly,
+to recall the knowledge and the terror of forces that must be ignored.
+He said rapidly--
+
+“My position is very painful--difficult . . . I feel . . .”
+
+He looked at her fixedly with a pained air, as though frightfully
+oppressed by a sudden inability to express his pent-up ideas.
+
+“I am ready to go,” she said very low. “I have forfeited everything
+. . . to learn . . . to learn . . .”
+
+Her chin fell on her breast; her voice died out in a sigh. He made a
+slight gesture of impatient assent.
+
+“Yes! Yes! It’s all very well . . . of course. Forfeited--ah! Morally
+forfeited--only morally forfeited . . . if I am to believe you . . .”
+
+She startled him by jumping up.
+
+“Oh! I believe, I believe,” he said, hastily, and she sat down as
+suddenly as she had got up. He went on gloomily--
+
+“I’ve suffered--I suffer now. You can’t understand how much. So much
+that when you propose a parting I almost think. . . . But no. There is
+duty. You’ve forgotten it; I never did. Before heaven, I never did. But
+in a horrid exposure like this the judgment of mankind goes astray--at
+least for a time. You see, you and I--at least I feel that--you and I
+are one before the world. It is as it should be. The world is right--in
+the main--or else it couldn’t be--couldn’t be--what it is. And we are
+part of it. We have our duty to--to our fellow beings who don’t want to
+. . . to . . . er.”
+
+He stammered. She looked up at him with wide eyes, and her lips were
+slightly parted. He went on mumbling--
+
+“. . . Pain. . . . Indignation. . . . Sure to misunderstand. I’ve
+suffered enough. And if there has been nothing irreparable--as you
+assure me . . . then . . .”
+
+“Alvan!” she cried.
+
+“What?” he said, morosely. He gazed down at her for a moment with a
+sombre stare, as one looks at ruins, at the devastation of some natural
+disaster.
+
+“Then,” he continued after a short pause, “the best thing is . . .
+the best for us . . . for every one. . . . Yes . . . least pain--most
+unselfish. . . .” His voice faltered, and she heard only detached words.
+“. . . Duty. . . . Burden. . . . Ourselves. . . . Silence.”
+
+A moment of perfect stillness ensued.
+
+“This is an appeal I am making to your conscience,” he said, suddenly,
+in an explanatory tone, “not to add to the wretchedness of all this:
+to try loyally and help me to live it down somehow. Without any
+reservations--you know. Loyally! You can’t deny I’ve been cruelly
+wronged and--after all--my affection deserves . . .” He paused with
+evident anxiety to hear her speak.
+
+“I make no reservations,” she said, mournfully. “How could I? I found
+myself out and came back to . . .” her eyes flashed scornfully for an
+instant “. . . to what--to what you propose. You see . . . I . . . I can
+be trusted . . . now.”
+
+He listened to every word with profound attention, and when she ceased
+seemed to wait for more.
+
+“Is that all you’ve got to say?” he asked.
+
+She was startled by his tone, and said faintly--
+
+“I spoke the truth. What more can I say?”
+
+“Confound it! You might say something human,” he burst out. “It isn’t
+being truthful; it’s being brazen--if you want to know. Not a word
+to show you feel your position, and--and mine. Not a single word of
+acknowledgment, or regret--or remorse . . . or . . . something.”
+
+“Words!” she whispered in a tone that irritated him. He stamped his
+foot.
+
+“This is awful!” he exclaimed. “Words? Yes, words. Words mean
+something--yes--they do--for all this infernal affectation. They mean
+something to me--to everybody--to you. What the devil did you use to
+express those sentiments--sentiments--pah!--which made you forget me,
+duty, shame!” . . . He foamed at the mouth while she stared at him,
+appalled by this sudden fury. “Did you two talk only with your eyes?” he
+spluttered savagely. She rose.
+
+“I can’t bear this,” she said, trembling from head to foot. “I am
+going.”
+
+They stood facing one another for a moment.
+
+“Not you,” he said, with conscious roughness, and began to walk up
+and down the room. She remained very still with an air of listening
+anxiously to her own heart-beats, then sank down on the chair slowly,
+and sighed, as if giving up a task beyond her strength.
+
+“You misunderstand everything I say,” he began quietly, “but I prefer
+to think that--just now--you are not accountable for your actions.”
+ He stopped again before her. “Your mind is unhinged,” he said, with
+unction. “To go now would be adding crime--yes, crime--to folly. I’ll
+have no scandal in my life, no matter what’s the cost. And why? You are
+sure to misunderstand me--but I’ll tell you. As a matter of duty. Yes.
+But you’re sure to misunderstand me--recklessly. Women always do--they
+are too--too narrow-minded.”
+
+He waited for a while, but she made no sound, didn’t even look at
+him; he felt uneasy, painfully uneasy, like a man who suspects he
+is unreasonably mistrusted. To combat that exasperating sensation
+he recommenced talking very fast. The sound of his words excited his
+thoughts, and in the play of darting thoughts he had glimpses now and
+then of the inexpugnable rock of his convictions, towering in solitary
+grandeur above the unprofitable waste of errors and passions.
+
+“For it is self-evident,” he went on with anxious vivacity, “it is
+self-evident that, on the highest ground we haven’t the right--no, we
+haven’t the right to intrude our miseries upon those who--who naturally
+expect better things from us. Every one wishes his own life and the life
+around him to be beautiful and pure. Now, a scandal amongst people of
+our position is disastrous for the morality--a fatal influence--don’t
+you see--upon the general tone of the class--very important--the
+most important, I verily believe, in--in the community. I feel
+this--profoundly. This is the broad view. In time you’ll give me . . .
+when you become again the woman I loved--and trusted. . . .”
+
+He stopped short, as though unexpectedly suffocated, then in a
+completely changed voice said, “For I did love and trust you”--and again
+was silent for a moment. She put her handkerchief to her eyes.
+
+“You’ll give me credit for--for--my motives. It’s mainly loyalty to--to
+the larger conditions of our life--where you--you! of all women--failed.
+One doesn’t usually talk like this--of course--but in this case you’ll
+admit . . . And consider--the innocent suffer with the guilty. The world
+is pitiless in its judgments. Unfortunately there are always those in
+it who are only too eager to misunderstand. Before you and before my
+conscience I am guiltless, but any--any disclosure would impair my
+usefulness in the sphere--in the larger sphere in which I hope soon to
+. . . I believe you fully shared my views in that matter--I don’t want
+to say any more . . . on--on that point--but, believe me, true
+unselfishness is to bear one’s burdens in--in silence. The ideal
+must--must be preserved--for others, at least. It’s clear as daylight.
+If I’ve a--a loathsome sore, to gratuitously display it would be
+abominable--abominable! And often in life--in the highest conception
+of life--outspokenness in certain circumstances is nothing less than
+criminal. Temptation, you know, excuses no one. There is no such thing
+really if one looks steadily to one’s welfare--which is grounded in
+duty. But there are the weak.” . . . His tone became ferocious for an
+instant . . . “And there are the fools and the envious--especially for
+people in our position. I am guiltless of this terrible--terrible . . .
+estrangement; but if there has been nothing irreparable.” . . .
+Something gloomy, like a deep shadow passed over his face. . . .
+“Nothing irreparable--you see even now I am ready to trust you
+implicitly--then our duty is clear.”
+
+He looked down. A change came over his expression and straightway
+from the outward impetus of his loquacity he passed into the dull
+contemplation of all the appeasing truths that, not without some wonder,
+he had so recently been able to discover within himself. During this
+profound and soothing communion with his innermost beliefs he remained
+staring at the carpet, with a portentously solemn face and with a dull
+vacuity of eyes that seemed to gaze into the blankness of an empty hole.
+Then, without stirring in the least, he continued:
+
+“Yes. Perfectly clear. I’ve been tried to the utmost, and I can’t
+pretend that, for a time, the old feelings--the old feelings are not.
+. . .” He sighed. . . . “But I forgive you. . . .”
+
+She made a slight movement without uncovering her eyes. In his profound
+scrutiny of the carpet he noticed nothing. And there was silence,
+silence within and silence without, as though his words had stilled the
+beat and tremor of all the surrounding life, and the house had stood
+alone--the only dwelling upon a deserted earth.
+
+He lifted his head and repeated solemnly:
+
+“I forgive you . . . from a sense of duty--and in the hope . . .”
+
+He heard a laugh, and it not only interrupted his words but also
+destroyed the peace of his self-absorption with the vile pain of a
+reality intruding upon the beauty of a dream. He couldn’t understand
+whence the sound came. He could see, foreshortened, the tear-stained,
+dolorous face of the woman stretched out, and with her head thrown over
+the back of the seat. He thought the piercing noise was a delusion.
+But another shrill peal followed by a deep sob and succeeded by another
+shriek of mirth positively seemed to tear him out from where he stood.
+He bounded to the door. It was closed. He turned the key and thought:
+that’s no good. . . . “Stop this!” he cried, and perceived with alarm
+that he could hardly hear his own voice in the midst of her screaming.
+He darted back with the idea of stifling that unbearable noise with his
+hands, but stood still distracted, finding himself as unable to touch
+her as though she had been on fire. He shouted, “Enough of this!” like
+men shout in the tumult of a riot, with a red face and starting eyes;
+then, as if swept away before another burst of laughter, he disappeared
+in a flash out of three looking-glasses, vanished suddenly from before
+her. For a time the woman gasped and laughed at no one in the luminous
+stillness of the empty room.
+
+He reappeared, striding at her, and with a tumbler of water in his hand.
+He stammered: “Hysterics--Stop--They will hear--Drink this.” She laughed
+at the ceiling. “Stop this!” he cried. “Ah!”
+
+He flung the water in her face, putting into the action all the secret
+brutality of his spite, yet still felt that it would have been
+perfectly excusable--in any one--to send the tumbler after the water. He
+restrained himself, but at the same time was so convinced nothing could
+stop the horror of those mad shrieks that, when the first sensation of
+relief came, it did not even occur to him to doubt the impression of
+having become suddenly deaf. When, next moment, he became sure that she
+was sitting up, and really very quiet, it was as though everything--men,
+things, sensations, had come to a rest. He was prepared to be grateful.
+He could not take his eyes off her, fearing, yet unwilling to admit,
+the possibility of her beginning again; for, the experience, however
+contemptuously he tried to think of it, had left the bewilderment of a
+mysterious terror. Her face was streaming with water and tears; there
+was a wisp of hair on her forehead, another stuck to her cheek; her hat
+was on one side, undecorously tilted; her soaked veil resembled a sordid
+rag festooning her forehead. There was an utter unreserve in her aspect,
+an abandonment of safeguards, that ugliness of truth which can only be
+kept out of daily life by unremitting care for appearances. He did not
+know why, looking at her, he thought suddenly of to-morrow, and why
+the thought called out a deep feeling of unutterable, discouraged
+weariness--a fear of facing the succession of days. To-morrow! It was as
+far as yesterday. Ages elapsed between sunrises--sometimes. He scanned
+her features like one looks at a forgotten country. They were not
+distorted--he recognized landmarks, so to speak; but it was only a
+resemblance that he could see, not the woman of yesterday--or was
+it, perhaps, more than the woman of yesterday? Who could tell? Was
+it something new? A new expression--or a new shade of expression?
+or something deep--an old truth unveiled, a fundamental and hidden
+truth--some unnecessary, accursed certitude? He became aware that he was
+trembling very much, that he had an empty tumbler in his hand--that time
+was passing. Still looking at her with lingering mistrust he reached
+towards the table to put the glass down and was startled to feel it
+apparently go through the wood. He had missed the edge. The surprise,
+the slight jingling noise of the accident annoyed him beyond expression.
+He turned to her irritated.
+
+“What’s the meaning of this?” he asked, grimly.
+
+She passed her hand over her face and made an attempt to get up.
+
+“You’re not going to be absurd again,” he said. “‘Pon my soul, I did not
+know you could forget yourself to that extent.” He didn’t try to conceal
+his physical disgust, because he believed it to be a purely moral
+reprobation of every unreserve, of anything in the nature of a scene.
+“I assure you--it was revolting,” he went on. He stared for a moment at
+her. “Positively degrading,” he added with insistence.
+
+She stood up quickly as if moved by a spring and tottered. He started
+forward instinctively. She caught hold of the back of the chair
+and steadied herself. This arrested him, and they faced each other
+wide-eyed, uncertain, and yet coming back slowly to the reality of
+things with relief and wonder, as though just awakened after tossing
+through a long night of fevered dreams.
+
+“Pray, don’t begin again,” he said, hurriedly, seeing her open her lips.
+“I deserve some little consideration--and such unaccountable behaviour
+is painful to me. I expect better things. . . . I have the right. . . .”
+
+She pressed both her hands to her temples.
+
+“Oh, nonsense!” he said, sharply. “You are perfectly capable of coming
+down to dinner. No one should even suspect; not even the servants. No
+one! No one! . . . I am sure you can.”
+
+She dropped her arms; her face twitched. She looked straight into his
+eyes and seemed incapable of pronouncing a word. He frowned at her.
+
+“I--wish--it,” he said, tyrannically. “For your own sake also. . . .”
+ He meant to carry that point without any pity. Why didn’t she speak?
+He feared passive resistance. She must. . . . Make her come. His frown
+deepened, and he began to think of some effectual violence, when most
+unexpectedly she said in a firm voice, “Yes, I can,” and clutched the
+chair-back again. He was relieved, and all at once her attitude ceased
+to interest him. The important thing was that their life would
+begin again with an every-day act--with something that could not be
+misunderstood, that, thank God, had no moral meaning, no perplexity--and
+yet was symbolic of their uninterrupted communion in the past--in all
+the future. That morning, at that table, they had breakfast together;
+and now they would dine. It was all over! What had happened between
+could be forgotten--must be forgotten, like things that can only happen
+once--death for instance.
+
+“I will wait for you,” he said, going to the door. He had some
+difficulty with it, for he did not remember he had turned the key. He
+hated that delay, and his checked impatience to be gone out of the
+room made him feel quite ill as, with the consciousness of her presence
+behind his back, he fumbled at the lock. He managed it at last; then in
+the doorway he glanced over his shoulder to say, “It’s rather late--you
+know--” and saw her standing where he had left her, with a face white as
+alabaster and perfectly still, like a woman in a trance.
+
+He was afraid she would keep him waiting, but without any breathing
+time, he hardly knew how, he found himself sitting at table with her.
+He had made up his mind to eat, to talk, to be natural. It seemed to
+him necessary that deception should begin at home. The servants must not
+know--must not suspect. This intense desire of secrecy; of secrecy dark,
+destroying, profound, discreet like a grave, possessed him with the
+strength of a hallucination--seemed to spread itself to inanimate
+objects that had been the daily companions of his life, affected with a
+taint of enmity every single thing within the faithful walls that would
+stand forever between the shamelessness of facts and the indignation of
+mankind. Even when--as it happened once or twice--both the servants left
+the room together he remained carefully natural, industriously hungry,
+laboriously at his ease, as though he had wanted to cheat the black oak
+sideboard, the heavy curtains, the stiff-backed chairs, into the
+belief of an unstained happiness. He was mistrustful of his wife’s
+self-control, unwilling to look at her and reluctant to speak, for it
+seemed to him inconceivable that she should not betray herself by the
+slightest movement, by the very first word spoken. Then he thought
+the silence in the room was becoming dangerous, and so excessive as to
+produce the effect of an intolerable uproar. He wanted to end it, as one
+is anxious to interrupt an indiscreet confession; but with the memory of
+that laugh upstairs he dared not give her an occasion to open her lips.
+Presently he heard her voice pronouncing in a calm tone some unimportant
+remark. He detached his eyes from the centre of his plate and felt
+excited as if on the point of looking at a wonder. And nothing could be
+more wonderful than her composure. He was looking at the candid eyes,
+at the pure brow, at what he had seen every evening for years in that
+place; he listened to the voice that for five years he had heard every
+day. Perhaps she was a little pale--but a healthy pallor had always
+been for him one of her chief attractions. Perhaps her face was rigidly
+set--but that marmoreal impassiveness, that magnificent stolidity, as of
+a wonderful statue by some great sculptor working under the curse of the
+gods; that imposing, unthinking stillness of her features, had till then
+mirrored for him the tranquil dignity of a soul of which he had thought
+himself--as a matter of course--the inexpugnable possessor. Those were
+the outward signs of her difference from the ignoble herd that feels,
+suffers, fails, errs--but has no distinct value in the world except as a
+moral contrast to the prosperity of the elect. He had been proud of her
+appearance. It had the perfectly proper frankness of perfection--and
+now he was shocked to see it unchanged. She looked like this, spoke like
+this, exactly like this, a year ago, a month ago--only yesterday when
+she. . . . What went on within made no difference. What did she think?
+What meant the pallor, the placid face, the candid brow, the pure
+eyes? What did she think during all these years? What did she think
+yesterday--to-day; what would she think to-morrow? He must find out.
+. . . And yet how could he get to know? She had been false to him, to that
+man, to herself; she was ready to be false--for him. Always false. She
+looked lies, breathed lies, lived lies--would tell lies--always--to the
+end of life! And he would never know what she meant. Never! Never! No
+one could. Impossible to know.
+
+He dropped his knife and fork, brusquely, as though by the virtue of a
+sudden illumination he had been made aware of poison in his plate, and
+became positive in his mind that he could never swallow another morsel
+of food as long as he lived. The dinner went on in a room that had been
+steadily growing, from some cause, hotter than a furnace. He had to
+drink. He drank time after time, and, at last, recollecting himself,
+was frightened at the quantity, till he perceived that what he had
+been drinking was water--out of two different wine glasses; and the
+discovered unconsciousness of his actions affected him painfully. He was
+disturbed to find himself in such an unhealthy state of mind. Excess of
+feeling--excess of feeling; and it was part of his creed that any excess
+of feeling was unhealthy--morally unprofitable; a taint on practical
+manhood. Her fault. Entirely her fault. Her sinful self-forgetfulness
+was contagious. It made him think thoughts he had never had before;
+thoughts disintegrating, tormenting, sapping to the very core of
+life--like mortal disease; thoughts that bred the fear of air, of
+sunshine, of men--like the whispered news of a pestilence.
+
+The maids served without noise; and to avoid looking at his wife and
+looking within himself, he followed with his eyes first one and then
+the other without being able to distinguish between them. They moved
+silently about, without one being able to see by what means, for
+their skirts touched the carpet all round; they glided here and there,
+receded, approached, rigid in black and white, with precise gestures,
+and no life in their faces, like a pair of marionettes in mourning;
+and their air of wooden unconcern struck him as unnatural, suspicious,
+irremediably hostile. That such people’s feelings or judgment could
+affect one in any way, had never occurred to him before. He understood
+they had no prospects, no principles--no refinement and no power. But
+now he had become so debased that he could not even attempt to disguise
+from himself his yearning to know the secret thoughts of his servants.
+Several times he looked up covertly at the faces of those girls.
+Impossible to know. They changed his plates and utterly ignored his
+existence. What impenetrable duplicity. Women--nothing but women round
+him. Impossible to know. He experienced that heart-probing, fiery
+sense of dangerous loneliness, which sometimes assails the courage of
+a solitary adventurer in an unexplored country. The sight of a man’s
+face--he felt--of any man’s face, would have been a profound relief. One
+would know then--something--could understand. . . . He would engage a
+butler as soon as possible. And then the end of that dinner--which
+had seemed to have been going on for hours--the end came, taking him
+violently by surprise, as though he had expected in the natural course
+of events to sit at that table for ever and ever.
+
+But upstairs in the drawing-room he became the victim of a restless
+fate, that would, on no account, permit him to sit down. She had sunk
+on a low easy-chair, and taking up from a small table at her elbow a
+fan with ivory leaves, shaded her face from the fire. The coals glowed
+without a flame; and upon the red glow the vertical bars of the grate
+stood out at her feet, black and curved, like the charred ribs of a
+consumed sacrifice. Far off, a lamp perched on a slim brass rod, burned
+under a wide shade of crimson silk: the centre, within the shadows of
+the large room, of a fiery twilight that had in the warm quality of its
+tint something delicate, refined and infernal. His soft footfalls and
+the subdued beat of the clock on the high mantel-piece answered each
+other regularly--as if time and himself, engaged in a measured contest,
+had been pacing together through the infernal delicacy of twilight
+towards a mysterious goal.
+
+He walked from one end of the room to the other without a pause, like a
+traveller who, at night, hastens doggedly upon an interminable journey.
+Now and then he glanced at her. Impossible to know. The gross precision
+of that thought expressed to his practical mind something illimitable
+and infinitely profound, the all-embracing subtlety of a feeling, the
+eternal origin of his pain. This woman had accepted him, had abandoned
+him--had returned to him. And of all this he would never know the truth.
+Never. Not till death--not after--not on judgment day when all shall be
+disclosed, thoughts and deeds, rewards and punishments, but the secret
+of hearts alone shall return, forever unknown, to the Inscrutable
+Creator of good and evil, to the Master of doubts and impulses.
+
+He stood still to look at her. Thrown back and with her face turned away
+from him, she did not stir--as if asleep. What did she think? What
+did she feel? And in the presence of her perfect stillness, in the
+breathless silence, he felt himself insignificant and powerless before
+her, like a prisoner in chains. The fury of his impotence called out
+sinister images, that faculty of tormenting vision, which in a moment
+of anguishing sense of wrong induces a man to mutter threats or make
+a menacing gesture in the solitude of an empty room. But the gust of
+passion passed at once, left him trembling a little, with the wondering,
+reflective fear of a man who has paused on the very verge of suicide.
+The serenity of truth and the peace of death can be only secured through
+a largeness of contempt embracing all the profitable servitudes of life.
+He found he did not want to know. Better not. It was all over. It was
+as if it hadn’t been. And it was very necessary for both of them, it was
+morally right, that nobody should know.
+
+He spoke suddenly, as if concluding a discussion.
+
+“The best thing for us is to forget all this.”
+
+She started a little and shut the fan with a click.
+
+“Yes, forgive--and forget,” he repeated, as if to himself.
+
+“I’ll never forget,” she said in a vibrating voice. “And I’ll never
+forgive myself. . . .”
+
+“But I, who have nothing to reproach myself . . .” He began, making a
+step towards her. She jumped up.
+
+“I did not come back for your forgiveness,” she exclaimed, passionately,
+as if clamouring against an unjust aspersion.
+
+He only said “oh!” and became silent. He could not understand this
+unprovoked aggressiveness of her attitude, and certainly was very
+far from thinking that an unpremeditated hint of something resembling
+emotion in the tone of his last words had caused that uncontrollable
+burst of sincerity. It completed his bewilderment, but he was not at
+all angry now. He was as if benumbed by the fascination of the
+incomprehensible. She stood before him, tall and indistinct, like a
+black phantom in the red twilight. At last poignantly uncertain as to
+what would happen if he opened his lips, he muttered:
+
+“But if my love is strong enough . . .” and hesitated.
+
+He heard something snap loudly in the fiery stillness. She had broken
+her fan. Two thin pieces of ivory fell, one after another, without a
+sound, on the thick carpet, and instinctively he stooped to pick them
+up. While he groped at her feet it occurred to him that the woman there
+had in her hands an indispensable gift which nothing else on earth could
+give; and when he stood up he was penetrated by an irresistible belief
+in an enigma, by the conviction that within his reach and passing away
+from him was the very secret of existence--its certitude, immaterial and
+precious! She moved to the door, and he followed at her elbow, casting
+about for a magic word that would make the enigma clear, that would
+compel the surrender of the gift. And there is no such word! The enigma
+is only made clear by sacrifice, and the gift of heaven is in the hands
+of every man. But they had lived in a world that abhors enigmas, and
+cares for no gifts but such as can be obtained in the street. She was
+nearing the door. He said hurriedly:
+
+“‘Pon my word, I loved you--I love you now.”
+
+She stopped for an almost imperceptible moment to give him an indignant
+glance, and then moved on. That feminine penetration--so clever and
+so tainted by the eternal instinct of self-defence, so ready to see an
+obvious evil in everything it cannot understand--filled her with bitter
+resentment against both the men who could offer to the spiritual and
+tragic strife of her feelings nothing but the coarseness of their
+abominable materialism. In her anger against her own ineffectual
+self-deception she found hate enough for them both. What did they want?
+What more did this one want? And as her husband faced her again,
+with his hand on the door-handle, she asked herself whether he was
+unpardonably stupid, or simply ignoble.
+
+She said nervously, and very fast:
+
+“You are deceiving yourself. You never loved me. You wanted a wife--some
+woman--any woman that would think, speak, and behave in a certain
+way--in a way you approved. You loved yourself.”
+
+“You won’t believe me?” he asked, slowly.
+
+“If I had believed you loved me,” she began, passionately, then drew in
+a long breath; and during that pause he heard the steady beat of blood
+in his ears. “If I had believed it . . . I would never have come back,”
+ she finished, recklessly.
+
+He stood looking down as though he had not heard. She waited. After a
+moment he opened the door, and, on the landing, the sightless woman of
+marble appeared, draped to the chin, thrusting blindly at them a cluster
+of lights.
+
+He seemed to have forgotten himself in a meditation so deep that on the
+point of going out she stopped to look at him in surprise. While she
+had been speaking he had wandered on the track of the enigma, out of the
+world of senses into the region of feeling. What did it matter what she
+had done, what she had said, if through the pain of her acts and words
+he had obtained the word of the enigma! There can be no life without
+faith and love--faith in a human heart, love of a human being! That
+touch of grace, whose help once in life is the privilege of the
+most undeserving, flung open for him the portals of beyond, and in
+contemplating there the certitude immaterial and precious he forgot
+all the meaningless accidents of existence: the bliss of getting, the
+delight of enjoying; all the protean and enticing forms of the cupidity
+that rules a material world of foolish joys, of contemptible sorrows.
+Faith!--Love!--the undoubting, clear faith in the truth of a soul--the
+great tenderness, deep as the ocean, serene and eternal, like the
+infinite peace of space above the short tempests of the earth. It was
+what he had wanted all his life--but he understood it only then for the
+first time. It was through the pain of losing her that the knowledge had
+come. She had the gift! She had the gift! And in all the world she was
+the only human being that could surrender it to his immense desire.
+He made a step forward, putting his arms out, as if to take her to
+his breast, and, lifting his head, was met by such a look of blank
+consternation that his arms fell as though they had been struck down by
+a blow. She started away from him, stumbled over the threshold, and
+once on the landing turned, swift and crouching. The train of her gown
+swished as it flew round her feet. It was an undisguised panic. She
+panted, showing her teeth, and the hate of strength, the disdain of
+weakness, the eternal preoccupation of sex came out like a toy demon out
+of a box.
+
+“This is odious,” she screamed.
+
+He did not stir; but her look, her agitated movements, the sound of her
+voice were like a mist of facts thickening between him and the vision
+of love and faith. It vanished; and looking at that face triumphant and
+scornful, at that white face, stealthy and unexpected, as if discovered
+staring from an ambush, he was coming back slowly to the world of
+senses. His first clear thought was: I am married to that woman; and the
+next: she will give nothing but what I see. He felt the need not to see.
+But the memory of the vision, the memory that abides forever within the
+seer made him say to her with the naive austerity of a convert awed by
+the touch of a new creed, “You haven’t the gift.” He turned his back
+on her, leaving her completely mystified. And she went upstairs slowly,
+struggling with a distasteful suspicion of having been confronted by
+something more subtle than herself--more profound than the misunderstood
+and tragic contest of her feelings.
+
+He shut the door of the drawing-room and moved at hazard, alone amongst
+the heavy shadows and in the fiery twilight as of an elegant place of
+perdition. She hadn’t the gift--no one had. . . . He stepped on a book
+that had fallen off one of the crowded little tables. He picked up the
+slender volume, and holding it, approached the crimson-shaded lamp. The
+fiery tint deepened on the cover, and contorted gold letters sprawling
+all over it in an intricate maze, came out, gleaming redly. “Thorns
+and Arabesques.” He read it twice, “Thorns and Ar . . . . . . . .” The
+other’s book of verses. He dropped it at his feet, but did not feel the
+slightest pang of jealousy or indignation. What did he know? . . . What?
+. . . The mass of hot coals tumbled down in the grate, and he turned to
+look at them . . . Ah! That one was ready to give up everything he had
+for that woman--who did not come--who had not the faith, the love, the
+courage to come. What did that man expect, what did he hope, what did
+he want? The woman--or the certitude immaterial and precious! The first
+unselfish thought he had ever given to any human being was for that
+man who had tried to do him a terrible wrong. He was not angry. He was
+saddened by an impersonal sorrow, by a vast melancholy as of all mankind
+longing for what cannot be attained. He felt his fellowship with every
+man--even with that man--especially with that man. What did he think
+now? Had he ceased to wait--and hope? Would he ever cease to wait and
+hope? Would he understand that the woman, who had no courage, had not
+the gift--had not the gift!
+
+The clock began to strike, and the deep-toned vibration filled the
+room as though with the sound of an enormous bell tolling far away. He
+counted the strokes. Twelve. Another day had begun. To-morrow had come;
+the mysterious and lying to-morrow that lures men, disdainful of love
+and faith, on and on through the poignant futilities of life to the
+fitting reward of a grave. He counted the strokes, and gazing at the
+grate seemed to wait for more. Then, as if called out, left the room,
+walking firmly.
+
+When outside he heard footsteps in the hall and stood still. A bolt was
+shot--then another. They were locking up--shutting out his desire and
+his deception from the indignant criticism of a world full of noble
+gifts for those who proclaim themselves without stain and without
+reproach. He was safe; and on all sides of his dwelling servile
+fears and servile hopes slept, dreaming of success, behind the severe
+discretion of doors as impenetrable to the truth within as the granite
+of tombstones. A lock snapped--a short chain rattled. Nobody shall know!
+
+Why was this assurance of safety heavier than a burden of fear, and why
+the day that began presented itself obstinately like the last day of
+all--like a to-day without a to-morrow? Yet nothing was changed, for
+nobody would know; and all would go on as before--the getting, the
+enjoying, the blessing of hunger that is appeased every day; the noble
+incentives of unappeasable ambitions. All--all the blessings of life.
+All--but the certitude immaterial and precious--the certitude of love
+and faith. He believed the shadow of it had been with him as long as he
+could remember; that invisible presence had ruled his life. And now the
+shadow had appeared and faded he could not extinguish his longing for
+the truth of its substance. His desire of it was naive; it was masterful
+like the material aspirations that are the groundwork of existence, but,
+unlike these, it was unconquerable. It was the subtle despotism of
+an idea that suffers no rivals, that is lonely, inconsolable, and
+dangerous. He went slowly up the stairs. Nobody shall know. The days
+would go on and he would go far--very far. If the idea could not be
+mastered, fortune could be, man could be--the whole world. He was
+dazzled by the greatness of the prospect; the brutality of a practical
+instinct shouted to him that only that which could be had was worth
+having. He lingered on the steps. The lights were out in the hall, and
+a small yellow flame flitted about down there. He felt a sudden contempt
+for himself which braced him up. He went on, but at the door of their
+room and with his arm advanced to open it, he faltered. On the flight of
+stairs below the head of the girl who had been locking up appeared. His
+arm fell. He thought, “I’ll wait till she is gone”--and stepped back
+within the perpendicular folds of a portiere.
+
+He saw her come up gradually, as if ascending from a well. At every step
+the feeble flame of the candle swayed before her tired, young face, and
+the darkness of the hall seemed to cling to her black skirt, followed
+her, rising like a silent flood, as though the great night of the world
+had broken through the discreet reserve of walls, of closed doors, of
+curtained windows. It rose over the steps, it leaped up the walls like
+an angry wave, it flowed over the blue skies, over the yellow sands,
+over the sunshine of landscapes, and over the pretty pathos of ragged
+innocence and of meek starvation. It swallowed up the delicious idyll
+in a boat and the mutilated immortality of famous bas-reliefs. It flowed
+from outside--it rose higher, in a destructive silence. And, above it,
+the woman of marble, composed and blind on the high pedestal, seemed to
+ward off the devouring night with a cluster of lights.
+
+He watched the rising tide of impenetrable gloom with impatience, as if
+anxious for the coming of a darkness black enough to conceal a shameful
+surrender. It came nearer. The cluster of lights went out. The girl
+ascended facing him. Behind her the shadow of a colossal woman danced
+lightly on the wall. He held his breath while she passed by, noiseless
+and with heavy eyelids. And on her track the flowing tide of a tenebrous
+sea filled the house, seemed to swirl about his feet, and rising
+unchecked, closed silently above his head.
+
+The time had come but he did not open the door. All was still; and
+instead of surrendering to the reasonable exigencies of life he stepped
+out, with a rebelling heart, into the darkness of the house. It was the
+abode of an impenetrable night; as though indeed the last day had come
+and gone, leaving him alone in a darkness that has no to-morrow. And
+looming vaguely below the woman of marble, livid and still like a
+patient phantom, held out in the night a cluster of extinguished lights.
+
+His obedient thought traced for him the image of an uninterrupted life,
+the dignity and the advantages of an uninterrupted success; while his
+rebellious heart beat violently within his breast, as if maddened by the
+desire of a certitude immaterial and precious--the certitude of love and
+faith. What of the night within his dwelling if outside he could find
+the sunshine in which men sow, in which men reap! Nobody would know. The
+days, the years would pass, and . . . He remembered that he had loved
+her. The years would pass . . . And then he thought of her as we think
+of the dead--in a tender immensity of regret, in a passionate longing
+for the return of idealized perfections. He had loved her--he had loved
+her--and he never knew the truth . . . The years would pass in the
+anguish of doubt . . . He remembered her smile, her eyes, her voice, her
+silence, as though he had lost her forever. The years would pass and
+he would always mistrust her smile, suspect her eyes; he would always
+misbelieve her voice, he would never have faith in her silence. She had
+no gift--she had no gift! What was she? Who was she? . . . The years
+would pass; the memory of this hour would grow faint--and she would
+share the material serenity of an unblemished life. She had no love and
+no faith for any one. To give her your thought, your belief, was like
+whispering your confession over the edge of the world. Nothing came
+back--not even an echo.
+
+In the pain of that thought was born his conscience; not that fear of
+remorse which grows slowly, and slowly decays amongst the complicated
+facts of life, but a Divine wisdom springing full-grown, armed and
+severe out of a tried heart, to combat the secret baseness of motives.
+It came to him in a flash that morality is not a method of happiness.
+The revelation was terrible. He saw at once that nothing of what he knew
+mattered in the least. The acts of men and women, success, humiliation,
+dignity, failure--nothing mattered. It was not a question of more or
+less pain, of this joy, of that sorrow. It was a question of truth or
+falsehood--it was a question of life or death.
+
+He stood in the revealing night--in the darkness that tries the hearts,
+in the night useless for the work of men, but in which their gaze,
+undazzled by the sunshine of covetous days, wanders sometimes as far as
+the stars. The perfect stillness around him had something solemn in it,
+but he felt it was the lying solemnity of a temple devoted to the rites
+of a debasing persuasion. The silence within the discreet walls was
+eloquent of safety but it appeared to him exciting and sinister, like
+the discretion of a profitable infamy; it was the prudent peace of a
+den of coiners--of a house of ill-fame! The years would pass--and nobody
+would know. Never! Not till death--not after . . .
+
+“Never!” he said aloud to the revealing night.
+
+And he hesitated. The secret of hearts, too terrible for the timid eyes
+of men, shall return, veiled forever, to the Inscrutable Creator of
+good and evil, to the Master of doubts and impulses. His conscience
+was born--he heard its voice, and he hesitated, ignoring the strength
+within, the fateful power, the secret of his heart! It was an awful
+sacrifice to cast all one’s life into the flame of a new belief. He
+wanted help against himself, against the cruel decree of salvation. The
+need of tacit complicity, where it had never failed him, the habit of
+years affirmed itself. Perhaps she would help . . . He flung the door
+open and rushed in like a fugitive.
+
+He was in the middle of the room before he could see anything but the
+dazzling brilliance of the light; and then, as if detached and floating
+in it on the level of his eyes, appeared the head of a woman. She had
+jumped up when he burst into the room.
+
+For a moment they contemplated each other as if struck dumb with
+amazement. Her hair streaming on her shoulders glinted like burnished
+gold. He looked into the unfathomable candour of her eyes. Nothing
+within--nothing--nothing.
+
+He stammered distractedly.
+
+“I want . . . I want . . . to . . . to . . . know . . .”
+
+On the candid light of the eyes flitted shadows; shadows of doubt,
+of suspicion, the ready suspicion of an unquenchable antagonism, the
+pitiless mistrust of an eternal instinct of defence; the hate, the
+profound, frightened hate of an incomprehensible--of an abominable
+emotion intruding its coarse materialism upon the spiritual and tragic
+contest of her feelings.
+
+“Alvan . . . I won’t bear this . . .” She began to pant suddenly, “I’ve
+a right--a right to--to--myself . . .”
+
+He lifted one arm, and appeared so menacing that she stopped in a fright
+and shrank back a little.
+
+He stood with uplifted hand . . . The years would pass--and he would
+have to live with that unfathomable candour where flit shadows of
+suspicions and hate . . . The years would pass--and he would never
+know--never trust . . . The years would pass without faith and
+love. . . .
+
+“Can you stand it?” he shouted, as though she could have heard all his
+thoughts.
+
+He looked menacing. She thought of violence, of danger--and, just for
+an instant, she doubted whether there were splendours enough on earth to
+pay the price of such a brutal experience. He cried again:
+
+“Can you stand it?” and glared as if insane. Her eyes blazed, too. She
+could not hear the appalling clamour of his thoughts. She suspected
+in him a sudden regret, a fresh fit of jealousy, a dishonest desire of
+evasion. She shouted back angrily--
+
+“Yes!”
+
+He was shaken where he stood as if by a struggle to break out of
+invisible bonds. She trembled from head to foot.
+
+“Well, I can’t!” He flung both his arms out, as if to push her away,
+and strode from the room. The door swung to with a click. She made three
+quick steps towards it and stood still, looking at the white and gold
+panels. No sound came from beyond, not a whisper, not a sigh; not even
+a footstep was heard outside on the thick carpet. It was as though no
+sooner gone he had suddenly expired--as though he had died there and his
+body had vanished on the instant together with his soul. She listened,
+with parted lips and irresolute eyes. Then below, far below her, as
+if in the entrails of the earth, a door slammed heavily; and the quiet
+house vibrated to it from roof to foundations, more than to a clap of
+thunder.
+
+He never returned.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE LAGOON
+
+
+The white man, leaning with both arms over the roof of the little house
+in the stern of the boat, said to the steersman--
+
+“We will pass the night in Arsat’s clearing. It is late.”
+
+The Malay only grunted, and went on looking fixedly at the river. The
+white man rested his chin on his crossed arms and gazed at the wake
+of the boat. At the end of the straight avenue of forests cut by the
+intense glitter of the river, the sun appeared unclouded and dazzling,
+poised low over the water that shone smoothly like a band of metal. The
+forests, sombre and dull, stood motionless and silent on each side of
+the broad stream. At the foot of big, towering trees, trunkless nipa
+palms rose from the mud of the bank, in bunches of leaves enormous
+and heavy, that hung unstirring over the brown swirl of eddies. In the
+stillness of the air every tree, every leaf, every bough, every tendril
+of creeper and every petal of minute blossoms seemed to have been
+bewitched into an immobility perfect and final. Nothing moved on
+the river but the eight paddles that rose flashing regularly, dipped
+together with a single splash; while the steersman swept right and left
+with a periodic and sudden flourish of his blade describing a glinting
+semicircle above his head. The churned-up water frothed alongside with
+a confused murmur. And the white man’s canoe, advancing upstream in the
+short-lived disturbance of its own making, seemed to enter the portals
+of a land from which the very memory of motion had forever departed.
+
+The white man, turning his back upon the setting sun, looked along the
+empty and broad expanse of the sea-reach. For the last three miles of
+its course the wandering, hesitating river, as if enticed irresistibly
+by the freedom of an open horizon, flows straight into the sea, flows
+straight to the east--to the east that harbours both light and darkness.
+Astern of the boat the repeated call of some bird, a cry discordant and
+feeble, skipped along over the smooth water and lost itself, before it
+could reach the other shore, in the breathless silence of the world.
+
+The steersman dug his paddle into the stream, and held hard with
+stiffened arms, his body thrown forward. The water gurgled aloud; and
+suddenly the long straight reach seemed to pivot on its centre, the
+forests swung in a semicircle, and the slanting beams of sunset touched
+the broadside of the canoe with a fiery glow, throwing the slender and
+distorted shadows of its crew upon the streaked glitter of the river.
+The white man turned to look ahead. The course of the boat had been
+altered at right-angles to the stream, and the carved dragon-head of its
+prow was pointing now at a gap in the fringing bushes of the bank. It
+glided through, brushing the overhanging twigs, and disappeared from the
+river like some slim and amphibious creature leaving the water for its
+lair in the forests.
+
+The narrow creek was like a ditch: tortuous, fabulously deep; filled
+with gloom under the thin strip of pure and shining blue of the heaven.
+Immense trees soared up, invisible behind the festooned draperies of
+creepers. Here and there, near the glistening blackness of the water,
+a twisted root of some tall tree showed amongst the tracery of small
+ferns, black and dull, writhing and motionless, like an arrested snake.
+The short words of the paddlers reverberated loudly between the thick
+and sombre walls of vegetation. Darkness oozed out from between the
+trees, through the tangled maze of the creepers, from behind the
+great fantastic and unstirring leaves; the darkness, mysterious and
+invincible; the darkness scented and poisonous of impenetrable forests.
+
+The men poled in the shoaling water. The creek broadened, opening out
+into a wide sweep of a stagnant lagoon. The forests receded from the
+marshy bank, leaving a level strip of bright green, reedy grass to frame
+the reflected blueness of the sky. A fleecy pink cloud drifted high
+above, trailing the delicate colouring of its image under the floating
+leaves and the silvery blossoms of the lotus. A little house, perched
+on high piles, appeared black in the distance. Near it, two tall nibong
+palms, that seemed to have come out of the forests in the background,
+leaned slightly over the ragged roof, with a suggestion of sad
+tenderness and care in the droop of their leafy and soaring heads.
+
+The steersman, pointing with his paddle, said, “Arsat is there. I see
+his canoe fast between the piles.”
+
+The polers ran along the sides of the boat glancing over their shoulders
+at the end of the day’s journey. They would have preferred to spend the
+night somewhere else than on this lagoon of weird aspect and ghostly
+reputation. Moreover, they disliked Arsat, first as a stranger, and also
+because he who repairs a ruined house, and dwells in it, proclaims
+that he is not afraid to live amongst the spirits that haunt the places
+abandoned by mankind. Such a man can disturb the course of fate by
+glances or words; while his familiar ghosts are not easy to propitiate
+by casual wayfarers upon whom they long to wreak the malice of their
+human master. White men care not for such things, being unbelievers and
+in league with the Father of Evil, who leads them unharmed through the
+invisible dangers of this world. To the warnings of the righteous they
+oppose an offensive pretence of disbelief. What is there to be done?
+
+So they thought, throwing their weight on the end of their long poles.
+The big canoe glided on swiftly, noiselessly, and smoothly, towards
+Arsat’s clearing, till, in a great rattling of poles thrown down, and
+the loud murmurs of “Allah be praised!” it came with a gentle knock
+against the crooked piles below the house.
+
+The boatmen with uplifted faces shouted discordantly, “Arsat! O Arsat!”
+ Nobody came. The white man began to climb the rude ladder giving access
+to the bamboo platform before the house. The juragan of the boat said
+sulkily, “We will cook in the sampan, and sleep on the water.”
+
+“Pass my blankets and the basket,” said the white man, curtly.
+
+He knelt on the edge of the platform to receive the bundle. Then the
+boat shoved off, and the white man, standing up, confronted Arsat,
+who had come out through the low door of his hut. He was a man young,
+powerful, with broad chest and muscular arms. He had nothing on but
+his sarong. His head was bare. His big, soft eyes stared eagerly at
+the white man, but his voice and demeanour were composed as he asked,
+without any words of greeting--
+
+“Have you medicine, Tuan?”
+
+“No,” said the visitor in a startled tone. “No. Why? Is there sickness
+in the house?”
+
+“Enter and see,” replied Arsat, in the same calm manner, and turning
+short round, passed again through the small doorway. The white man,
+dropping his bundles, followed.
+
+In the dim light of the dwelling he made out on a couch of bamboos a
+woman stretched on her back under a broad sheet of red cotton cloth.
+She lay still, as if dead; but her big eyes, wide open, glittered in the
+gloom, staring upwards at the slender rafters, motionless and unseeing.
+She was in a high fever, and evidently unconscious. Her cheeks were sunk
+slightly, her lips were partly open, and on the young face there was the
+ominous and fixed expression--the absorbed, contemplating expression of
+the unconscious who are going to die. The two men stood looking down at
+her in silence.
+
+“Has she been long ill?” asked the traveller.
+
+“I have not slept for five nights,” answered the Malay, in a deliberate
+tone. “At first she heard voices calling her from the water and
+struggled against me who held her. But since the sun of to-day rose she
+hears nothing--she hears not me. She sees nothing. She sees not me--me!”
+
+He remained silent for a minute, then asked softly--
+
+“Tuan, will she die?”
+
+“I fear so,” said the white man, sorrowfully. He had known Arsat years
+ago, in a far country in times of trouble and danger, when no friendship
+is to be despised. And since his Malay friend had come unexpectedly to
+dwell in the hut on the lagoon with a strange woman, he had slept many
+times there, in his journeys up and down the river. He liked the man who
+knew how to keep faith in council and how to fight without fear by the
+side of his white friend. He liked him--not so much perhaps as a man
+likes his favourite dog--but still he liked him well enough to help and
+ask no questions, to think sometimes vaguely and hazily in the midst of
+his own pursuits, about the lonely man and the long-haired woman with
+audacious face and triumphant eyes, who lived together hidden by the
+forests--alone and feared.
+
+The white man came out of the hut in time to see the enormous
+conflagration of sunset put out by the swift and stealthy shadows that,
+rising like a black and impalpable vapour above the tree-tops, spread
+over the heaven, extinguishing the crimson glow of floating clouds and
+the red brilliance of departing daylight. In a few moments all the stars
+came out above the intense blackness of the earth and the great lagoon
+gleaming suddenly with reflected lights resembled an oval patch of night
+sky flung down into the hopeless and abysmal night of the wilderness.
+The white man had some supper out of the basket, then collecting a
+few sticks that lay about the platform, made up a small fire, not
+for warmth, but for the sake of the smoke, which would keep off the
+mosquitos. He wrapped himself in the blankets and sat with his back
+against the reed wall of the house, smoking thoughtfully.
+
+Arsat came through the doorway with noiseless steps and squatted down by
+the fire. The white man moved his outstretched legs a little.
+
+“She breathes,” said Arsat in a low voice, anticipating the expected
+question. “She breathes and burns as if with a great fire. She speaks
+not; she hears not--and burns!”
+
+He paused for a moment, then asked in a quiet, incurious tone--
+
+“Tuan . . . will she die?”
+
+The white man moved his shoulders uneasily and muttered in a hesitating
+manner--
+
+“If such is her fate.”
+
+“No, Tuan,” said Arsat, calmly. “If such is my fate. I hear, I see,
+I wait. I remember . . . Tuan, do you remember the old days? Do you
+remember my brother?”
+
+“Yes,” said the white man. The Malay rose suddenly and went in. The
+other, sitting still outside, could hear the voice in the hut. Arsat
+said: “Hear me! Speak!” His words were succeeded by a complete silence.
+“O Diamelen!” he cried, suddenly. After that cry there was a deep sigh.
+Arsat came out and sank down again in his old place.
+
+They sat in silence before the fire. There was no sound within the
+house, there was no sound near them; but far away on the lagoon they
+could hear the voices of the boatmen ringing fitful and distinct on
+the calm water. The fire in the bows of the sampan shone faintly in the
+distance with a hazy red glow. Then it died out. The voices ceased.
+The land and the water slept invisible, unstirring and mute. It was as
+though there had been nothing left in the world but the glitter of stars
+streaming, ceaseless and vain, through the black stillness of the night.
+
+The white man gazed straight before him into the darkness with wide-open
+eyes. The fear and fascination, the inspiration and the wonder of
+death--of death near, unavoidable, and unseen, soothed the unrest of his
+race and stirred the most indistinct, the most intimate of his thoughts.
+The ever-ready suspicion of evil, the gnawing suspicion that lurks in
+our hearts, flowed out into the stillness round him--into the stillness
+profound and dumb, and made it appear untrustworthy and infamous, like
+the placid and impenetrable mask of an unjustifiable violence. In that
+fleeting and powerful disturbance of his being the earth enfolded in
+the starlight peace became a shadowy country of inhuman strife, a
+battle-field of phantoms terrible and charming, august or ignoble,
+struggling ardently for the possession of our helpless hearts. An
+unquiet and mysterious country of inextinguishable desires and fears.
+
+A plaintive murmur rose in the night; a murmur saddening and startling,
+as if the great solitudes of surrounding woods had tried to whisper
+into his ear the wisdom of their immense and lofty indifference. Sounds
+hesitating and vague floated in the air round him, shaped themselves
+slowly into words; and at last flowed on gently in a murmuring stream
+of soft and monotonous sentences. He stirred like a man waking up and
+changed his position slightly. Arsat, motionless and shadowy, sitting
+with bowed head under the stars, was speaking in a low and dreamy tone--
+
+“. . . for where can we lay down the heaviness of our trouble but in
+a friend’s heart? A man must speak of war and of love. You, Tuan, know
+what war is, and you have seen me in time of danger seek death as other
+men seek life! A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the
+eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!”
+
+“I remember,” said the white man, quietly. Arsat went on with mournful
+composure--
+
+“Therefore I shall speak to you of love. Speak in the night. Speak
+before both night and love are gone--and the eye of day looks upon my
+sorrow and my shame; upon my blackened face; upon my burnt-up heart.”
+
+A sigh, short and faint, marked an almost imperceptible pause, and then
+his words flowed on, without a stir, without a gesture.
+
+“After the time of trouble and war was over and you went away from my
+country in the pursuit of your desires, which we, men of the islands,
+cannot understand, I and my brother became again, as we had been
+before, the sword-bearers of the Ruler. You know we were men of family,
+belonging to a ruling race, and more fit than any to carry on our right
+shoulder the emblem of power. And in the time of prosperity Si Dendring
+showed us favour, as we, in time of sorrow, had showed to him the
+faithfulness of our courage. It was a time of peace. A time of
+deer-hunts and cock-fights; of idle talks and foolish squabbles between
+men whose bellies are full and weapons are rusty. But the sower watched
+the young rice-shoots grow up without fear, and the traders came and
+went, departed lean and returned fat into the river of peace. They
+brought news, too. Brought lies and truth mixed together, so that no man
+knew when to rejoice and when to be sorry. We heard from them about you
+also. They had seen you here and had seen you there. And I was glad to
+hear, for I remembered the stirring times, and I always remembered you,
+Tuan, till the time came when my eyes could see nothing in the past,
+because they had looked upon the one who is dying there--in the house.”
+
+He stopped to exclaim in an intense whisper, “O Mara bahia! O Calamity!”
+ then went on speaking a little louder:
+
+“There’s no worse enemy and no better friend than a brother, Tuan, for
+one brother knows another, and in perfect knowledge is strength for good
+or evil. I loved my brother. I went to him and told him that I could see
+nothing but one face, hear nothing but one voice. He told me: ‘Open your
+heart so that she can see what is in it--and wait. Patience is wisdom.
+Inchi Midah may die or our Ruler may throw off his fear of a woman!’
+. . . I waited! . . . You remember the lady with the veiled face, Tuan, and
+the fear of our Ruler before her cunning and temper. And if she wanted
+her servant, what could I do? But I fed the hunger of my heart on short
+glances and stealthy words. I loitered on the path to the bath-houses in
+the daytime, and when the sun had fallen behind the forest I crept along
+the jasmine hedges of the women’s courtyard. Unseeing, we spoke to
+one another through the scent of flowers, through the veil of leaves,
+through the blades of long grass that stood still before our lips; so
+great was our prudence, so faint was the murmur of our great longing.
+The time passed swiftly . . . and there were whispers amongst women--and
+our enemies watched--my brother was gloomy, and I began to think of
+killing and of a fierce death. . . . We are of a people who take what
+they want--like you whites. There is a time when a man should forget
+loyalty and respect. Might and authority are given to rulers, but to all
+men is given love and strength and courage. My brother said, ‘You shall
+take her from their midst. We are two who are like one.’ And I answered,
+‘Let it be soon, for I find no warmth in sunlight that does not shine
+upon her.’ Our time came when the Ruler and all the great people went
+to the mouth of the river to fish by torchlight. There were hundreds
+of boats, and on the white sand, between the water and the forests,
+dwellings of leaves were built for the households of the Rajahs. The
+smoke of cooking-fires was like a blue mist of the evening, and many
+voices rang in it joyfully. While they were making the boats ready to
+beat up the fish, my brother came to me and said, ‘To-night!’ I looked
+to my weapons, and when the time came our canoe took its place in the
+circle of boats carrying the torches. The lights blazed on the water,
+but behind the boats there was darkness. When the shouting began and the
+excitement made them like mad we dropped out. The water swallowed our
+fire, and we floated back to the shore that was dark with only here
+and there the glimmer of embers. We could hear the talk of slave-girls
+amongst the sheds. Then we found a place deserted and silent. We waited
+there. She came. She came running along the shore, rapid and leaving
+no trace, like a leaf driven by the wind into the sea. My brother said
+gloomily, ‘Go and take her; carry her into our boat.’ I lifted her in
+my arms. She panted. Her heart was beating against my breast. I said, ‘I
+take you from those people. You came to the cry of my heart, but my arms
+take you into my boat against the will of the great!’ ‘It is right,’
+said my brother. ‘We are men who take what we want and can hold it
+against many. We should have taken her in daylight.’ I said, ‘Let us be
+off’; for since she was in my boat I began to think of our Ruler’s many
+men. ‘Yes. Let us be off,’ said my brother. ‘We are cast out and this
+boat is our country now--and the sea is our refuge.’ He lingered with
+his foot on the shore, and I entreated him to hasten, for I remembered
+the strokes of her heart against my breast and thought that two men
+cannot withstand a hundred. We left, paddling downstream close to the
+bank; and as we passed by the creek where they were fishing, the great
+shouting had ceased, but the murmur of voices was loud like the humming
+of insects flying at noonday. The boats floated, clustered together, in
+the red light of torches, under a black roof of smoke; and men talked of
+their sport. Men that boasted, and praised, and jeered--men that would
+have been our friends in the morning, but on that night were already our
+enemies. We paddled swiftly past. We had no more friends in the country
+of our birth. She sat in the middle of the canoe with covered face;
+silent as she is now; unseeing as she is now--and I had no regret at
+what I was leaving because I could hear her breathing close to me--as I
+can hear her now.”
+
+He paused, listened with his ear turned to the doorway, then shook his
+head and went on:
+
+“My brother wanted to shout the cry of challenge--one cry only--to let
+the people know we were freeborn robbers who trusted our arms and the
+great sea. And again I begged him in the name of our love to be silent.
+Could I not hear her breathing close to me? I knew the pursuit would
+come quick enough. My brother loved me. He dipped his paddle without a
+splash. He only said, ‘There is half a man in you now--the other half is
+in that woman. I can wait. When you are a whole man again, you will come
+back with me here to shout defiance. We are sons of the same mother.’ I
+made no answer. All my strength and all my spirit were in my hands that
+held the paddle--for I longed to be with her in a safe place beyond the
+reach of men’s anger and of women’s spite. My love was so great, that
+I thought it could guide me to a country where death was unknown, if I
+could only escape from Inchi Midah’s fury and from our Ruler’s sword.
+We paddled with haste, breathing through our teeth. The blades bit deep
+into the smooth water. We passed out of the river; we flew in clear
+channels amongst the shallows. We skirted the black coast; we skirted
+the sand beaches where the sea speaks in whispers to the land; and the
+gleam of white sand flashed back past our boat, so swiftly she ran upon
+the water. We spoke not. Only once I said, ‘Sleep, Diamelen, for soon
+you may want all your strength.’ I heard the sweetness of her voice, but
+I never turned my head. The sun rose and still we went on. Water fell
+from my face like rain from a cloud. We flew in the light and heat. I
+never looked back, but I knew that my brother’s eyes, behind me, were
+looking steadily ahead, for the boat went as straight as a bushman’s
+dart, when it leaves the end of the sumpitan. There was no better
+paddler, no better steersman than my brother. Many times, together, we
+had won races in that canoe. But we never had put out our strength as we
+did then--then, when for the last time we paddled together! There was no
+braver or stronger man in our country than my brother. I could not spare
+the strength to turn my head and look at him, but every moment I heard
+the hiss of his breath getting louder behind me. Still he did not speak.
+The sun was high. The heat clung to my back like a flame of fire. My
+ribs were ready to burst, but I could no longer get enough air into
+my chest. And then I felt I must cry out with my last breath, ‘Let us
+rest!’ . . . ‘Good!’ he answered; and his voice was firm. He was strong.
+He was brave. He knew not fear and no fatigue . . . My brother!”
+
+A murmur powerful and gentle, a murmur vast and faint; the murmur of
+trembling leaves, of stirring boughs, ran through the tangled depths of
+the forests, ran over the starry smoothness of the lagoon, and the water
+between the piles lapped the slimy timber once with a sudden splash.
+A breath of warm air touched the two men’s faces and passed on with
+a mournful sound--a breath loud and short like an uneasy sigh of the
+dreaming earth.
+
+Arsat went on in an even, low voice.
+
+“We ran our canoe on the white beach of a little bay close to a long
+tongue of land that seemed to bar our road; a long wooded cape going far
+into the sea. My brother knew that place. Beyond the cape a river has
+its entrance, and through the jungle of that land there is a narrow
+path. We made a fire and cooked rice. Then we lay down to sleep on the
+soft sand in the shade of our canoe, while she watched. No sooner had I
+closed my eyes than I heard her cry of alarm. We leaped up. The sun was
+halfway down the sky already, and coming in sight in the opening of the
+bay we saw a prau manned by many paddlers. We knew it at once; it was
+one of our Rajah’s praus. They were watching the shore, and saw us. They
+beat the gong, and turned the head of the prau into the bay. I felt my
+heart become weak within my breast. Diamelen sat on the sand and covered
+her face. There was no escape by sea. My brother laughed. He had the
+gun you had given him, Tuan, before you went away, but there was only a
+handful of powder. He spoke to me quickly: ‘Run with her along the path.
+I shall keep them back, for they have no firearms, and landing in the
+face of a man with a gun is certain death for some. Run with her. On the
+other side of that wood there is a fisherman’s house--and a canoe.
+When I have fired all the shots I will follow. I am a great runner, and
+before they can come up we shall be gone. I will hold out as long as I
+can, for she is but a woman--that can neither run nor fight, but she has
+your heart in her weak hands.’ He dropped behind the canoe. The prau was
+coming. She and I ran, and as we rushed along the path I heard shots.
+My brother fired--once--twice--and the booming of the gong ceased. There
+was silence behind us. That neck of land is narrow. Before I heard my
+brother fire the third shot I saw the shelving shore, and I saw the
+water again; the mouth of a broad river. We crossed a grassy glade. We
+ran down to the water. I saw a low hut above the black mud, and a small
+canoe hauled up. I heard another shot behind me. I thought, ‘That is his
+last charge.’ We rushed down to the canoe; a man came running from the
+hut, but I leaped on him, and we rolled together in the mud. Then I got
+up, and he lay still at my feet. I don’t know whether I had killed him
+or not. I and Diamelen pushed the canoe afloat. I heard yells behind me,
+and I saw my brother run across the glade. Many men were bounding after
+him, I took her in my arms and threw her into the boat, then leaped in
+myself. When I looked back I saw that my brother had fallen. He fell
+and was up again, but the men were closing round him. He shouted, ‘I am
+coming!’ The men were close to him. I looked. Many men. Then I looked
+at her. Tuan, I pushed the canoe! I pushed it into deep water. She was
+kneeling forward looking at me, and I said, ‘Take your paddle,’ while
+I struck the water with mine. Tuan, I heard him cry. I heard him cry my
+name twice; and I heard voices shouting, ‘Kill! Strike!’ I never turned
+back. I heard him calling my name again with a great shriek, as when
+life is going out together with the voice--and I never turned my head.
+My own name! . . . My brother! Three times he called--but I was not
+afraid of life. Was she not there in that canoe? And could I not with
+her find a country where death is forgotten--where death is unknown!”
+
+The white man sat up. Arsat rose and stood, an indistinct and silent
+figure above the dying embers of the fire. Over the lagoon a mist
+drifting and low had crept, erasing slowly the glittering images of
+the stars. And now a great expanse of white vapour covered the land: it
+flowed cold and gray in the darkness, eddied in noiseless whirls round
+the tree-trunks and about the platform of the house, which seemed to
+float upon a restless and impalpable illusion of a sea. Only far away
+the tops of the trees stood outlined on the twinkle of heaven, like a
+sombre and forbidding shore--a coast deceptive, pitiless and black.
+
+Arsat’s voice vibrated loudly in the profound peace.
+
+“I had her there! I had her! To get her I would have faced all mankind.
+But I had her--and--”
+
+His words went out ringing into the empty distances. He paused, and
+seemed to listen to them dying away very far--beyond help and beyond
+recall. Then he said quietly--
+
+“Tuan, I loved my brother.”
+
+A breath of wind made him shiver. High above his head, high above the
+silent sea of mist the drooping leaves of the palms rattled together
+with a mournful and expiring sound. The white man stretched his legs.
+His chin rested on his chest, and he murmured sadly without lifting his
+head--
+
+“We all love our brothers.”
+
+Arsat burst out with an intense whispering violence--
+
+“What did I care who died? I wanted peace in my own heart.”
+
+He seemed to hear a stir in the house--listened--then stepped in
+noiselessly. The white man stood up. A breeze was coming in fitful
+puffs. The stars shone paler as if they had retreated into the frozen
+depths of immense space. After a chill gust of wind there were a few
+seconds of perfect calm and absolute silence. Then from behind the black
+and wavy line of the forests a column of golden light shot up into the
+heavens and spread over the semicircle of the eastern horizon. The sun
+had risen. The mist lifted, broke into drifting patches, vanished into
+thin flying wreaths; and the unveiled lagoon lay, polished and black, in
+the heavy shadows at the foot of the wall of trees. A white eagle rose
+over it with a slanting and ponderous flight, reached the clear sunshine
+and appeared dazzlingly brilliant for a moment, then soaring higher,
+became a dark and motionless speck before it vanished into the blue as
+if it had left the earth forever. The white man, standing gazing upwards
+before the doorway, heard in the hut a confused and broken murmur of
+distracted words ending with a loud groan. Suddenly Arsat stumbled out
+with outstretched hands, shivered, and stood still for some time with
+fixed eyes. Then he said--
+
+“She burns no more.”
+
+Before his face the sun showed its edge above the tree-tops rising
+steadily. The breeze freshened; a great brilliance burst upon the
+lagoon, sparkled on the rippling water. The forests came out of the
+clear shadows of the morning, became distinct, as if they had rushed
+nearer--to stop short in a great stir of leaves, of nodding boughs, of
+swaying branches. In the merciless sunshine the whisper of unconscious
+life grew louder, speaking in an incomprehensible voice round the dumb
+darkness of that human sorrow. Arsat’s eyes wandered slowly, then stared
+at the rising sun.
+
+“I can see nothing,” he said half aloud to himself.
+
+“There is nothing,” said the white man, moving to the edge of the
+platform and waving his hand to his boat. A shout came faintly over the
+lagoon and the sampan began to glide towards the abode of the friend of
+ghosts.
+
+“If you want to come with me, I will wait all the morning,” said the
+white man, looking away upon the water.
+
+“No, Tuan,” said Arsat, softly. “I shall not eat or sleep in this house,
+but I must first see my road. Now I can see nothing--see nothing! There
+is no light and no peace in the world; but there is death--death for
+many. We are sons of the same mother--and I left him in the midst of
+enemies; but I am going back now.”
+
+He drew a long breath and went on in a dreamy tone:
+
+“In a little while I shall see clear enough to strike--to strike. But
+she has died, and . . . now . . . darkness.”
+
+He flung his arms wide open, let them fall along his body, then stood
+still with unmoved face and stony eyes, staring at the sun. The white
+man got down into his canoe. The polers ran smartly along the sides
+of the boat, looking over their shoulders at the beginning of a weary
+journey. High in the stern, his head muffled up in white rags, the
+juragan sat moody, letting his paddle trail in the water. The white man,
+leaning with both arms over the grass roof of the little cabin, looked
+back at the shining ripple of the boat’s wake. Before the sampan passed
+out of the lagoon into the creek he lifted his eyes. Arsat had not
+moved. He stood lonely in the searching sunshine; and he looked beyond
+the great light of a cloudless day into the darkness of a world of
+illusions.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Tales of Unrest, by Joseph Conrad
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