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PART FOUR: CHAPTER FOUR
Heyst, seated at the table with his chin on his breast, raised his
head at the faint rustle of Lena's dress. He was startled by the
dead pallor of her cheeks, by something lifeless in her eyes, which
looked at him strangely, without recognition. But to his anxious
inquiries she answered reassuringly that there was nothing the
matter with her, really. She had felt giddy on rising. She had
even had a moment of faintness, after her bath. She had to sit down
to wait for it to pass. This had made her late dressing.
"I didn't try to do my hair. I didn't want to keep you waiting any
longer," she said.
He was unwilling to press her with questions about her health, since
she seemed to make light of this indisposition. She had not done
her hair, but she had brushed it, and had tied it with a ribbon
behind. With her forehead uncovered, she looked very young, almost
a child, a careworn child; a child with something on its mind.
What surprised Heyst was the non-appearance of Wang. The Chinaman
had always materialized at the precise moment of his service,
neither too soon nor too late. This time the usual miracle failed.
What was the meaning of this?
Heyst raised his voice--a thing he disliked doing. It was promptly
answered from the compound:
"Ada tuan!"
Lena, leaning on her elbow, with her eyes on her plate, did not seem
to hear anything. When Wang entered with a tray, his narrow eyes,
tilted inward by the prominence of salient cheek-bones, kept her
under stealthy observation all the time. Neither the one nor the
other of that white couple paid the slightest attention to him and
he withdrew without having heard them exchange a single word. He
squatted on his heels on the back veranda. His Chinaman's mind,
very clear but not far-reaching, was made up according to the plain
reason of things, such as it appeared to him in the light of his
simple feeling for self-preservation, untrammelled by any notions of
romantic honour or tender conscience. His yellow hands, lightly
clasped, hung idly between his knees. The graves of Wang's
ancestors were far away, his parents were dead, his elder brother
was a soldier in the yamen of some Mandarin away in Formosa. No one
near by had a claim on his veneration or his obedience. He had been
for years a labouring restless vagabond. His only tie in the world
was the Alfuro woman, in exchange for whom he had given away some
considerable part of his hard-earned substance; and his duty, in
reason, could be to no one but himself.
The scuffle behind the curtain was a thing of bad augury for that
Number One for whom the Chinaman had neither love nor dislike. He
had been awed enough by that development to hang back with the
coffee-pot till at last the white man was induced to call him in.
Wang went in with curiosity. Certainly, the white woman looked as
if she had been wrestling with a spirit which had managed to tear
half her blood out of her before letting her go. As to the man,
Wang had long looked upon him as being in some sort bewitched; and
now he was doomed. He heard their voices in the room. Heyst was
urging the girl to go and lie down again. He was extremely
concerned. She had eaten nothing.
"The best thing for you. You really must!"
She sat listless, shaking her head from time to time negatively, as
if nothing could be any good. But he insisted; she saw the
beginning of wonder in his eyes, and suddenly gave way.
"Perhaps I had better."
She did not want to arouse his wonder, which would lead him straight
to suspicion. He must not suspect!
Already, with the consciousness of her love for this man, of that
something rapturous and profound going beyond the mere embrace,
there was born in her a woman's innate mistrust of masculinity, of
that seductive strength allied to an absurd, delicate shrinking from
the recognition of the naked necessity of facts, which never yet
frightened a woman worthy of the name. She had no plan; but her
mind, quieted down somewhat by the very effort to preserve outward
composure for his sake, perceived that her behaviour had secured, at
any rate, a short period of safety. Perhaps because of the
similarity of their miserable origin in the dregs of mankind, she
had understood Ricardo perfectly. He would keep quiet for a time
now. In this momentarily soothing certitude her bodily fatigue
asserted itself, the more overpoweringly since its cause was not so
much the demand on her strength as the awful suddenness of the
stress she had had to meet. She would have tried to overcome it
from the mere instinct of resistance, if it had not been for Heyst's
alternate pleadings and commands. Before this eminently masculine
fussing she felt the woman's need to give way, the sweetness of
surrender.
"I will do anything you like," she said.
Getting up, she was surprised by a wave of languid weakness that
came over her, embracing and enveloping her like warm water, with a
noise in her ears as of a breaking sea.
"You must help me along," she added quickly.
While he put his arm round her waist--not by any means an uncommon
thing for him to do--she found a special satisfaction in the feeling
of being thus sustained. She abandoned all her weight to that
encircling and protecting pressure, while a thrill went through her
at the sudden thought that it was she who would have to protect him,
to be the defender of a man who was strong enough to lift her
bodily, as he was doing even then in his two arms. For Heyst had
done this as soon as they had crept through the doorway of the room.
He thought it was quicker and simpler to carry her the last step or
two. He had grown really too anxious to be aware of the effort. He
lifted her high and deposited her on the bed, as one lays a child on
its side in a cot. Then he sat down on the edge, masking his
concern with a smile which obtained no response from the dreamy
immobility of her eyes. But she sought his hand, seized it eagerly;
and while she was pressing it with all the force of which she was
capable, the sleep she needed overtook her suddenly, overwhelmingly,
as it overtakes a child in a cot, with her lips parted for a safe,
endearing word which she had thought of but had no time to utter.
The usual flaming silence brooded over Samburan.
"What in the world is this new mystery?" murmured Heyst to himself,
contemplating her deep slumber.
It was so deep, this enchanted sleep, that when some time afterwards
he gently tried to open her fingers and free his hand, he succeeded
without provoking the slightest stir.
"There is some very simple explanation, no doubt," he thought, as he
stole out into the living-room.
Absent-mindedly he pulled a book out of the top shelf, and sat down
with it; but even after he had opened it on his knee, and had been
staring at the pages for a time, he had not the slightest idea of
what it was about. He stared and stared at the crowded, parallel
lines. It was only when, raising his eyes for no particular reason,
he saw Wang standing motionless on the other side of the table, that
he regained complete control of his faculties.
"Oh, yes," he said, as if suddenly reminded of a forgotten
appointment of a not particularly welcome sort.
He waited a little, and then, with reluctant curiosity, forced
himself to ask the silent Wang what he had to say. He had some idea
that the matter of the vanished revolver would come up at last; but
the guttural sounds which proceeded from the Chinaman did not refer
to that delicate subject. His speech was concerned with cups,
saucers, plates, forks, and knives. All these things had been put
away in the cupboards on the back veranda, where they belonged,
perfectly clean, "all plopel." Heyst wondered at the scrupulosity
of a man who was about to abandon him; for he was not surprised to
hear Wang conclude the account of his stewardship with the words:
"I go now."
"Oh! You go now?" said Heyst, leaning back, his book on his knees.
"Yes. Me no likee. One man, two man, three man--no can do! Me go
now."
"What's frightening you away like this?" asked Heyst, while through
his mind flashed the hope that something enlightening might come
from that being so unlike himself, taking contact with the world
with a simplicity and directness of which his own mind was not
capable. "Why?" he went on. "You are used to white men. You know
them well."
"Yes. Me savee them," assented Wang inscrutably. "Me savee
plenty."
All that he really knew was his own mind. He had made it up to
withdraw himself and the Alfuro woman from the uncertainties of the
relations which were going to establish themselves between those
white men. It was Pedro who had been the first cause of Wang's
suspicion and fear. The Chinaman had seen wild men. He had
penetrated, in the train of a Chinese pedlar, up one or two of the
Bornean rivers into the country of the Dyaks. He had also been in
the interior of Mindanao, where there are people who live in trees--
savages, no better than animals; but a hairy brute like Pedro, with
his great fangs and ferocious growls, was altogether beyond his
conception of anything that could be looked upon as human. The
strong impression made on him by Pedro was the prime inducement
which had led Wang to purloin the revolver. Reflection on the
general situation, and on the insecurity of Number One, came later,
after he had obtained possession of the revolver and of the box of
cartridges out of the table drawer in the living-room.
"Oh, you savee plenty about white men," Heyst went on in a slightly
bantering tone, after a moment of silent reflection in which he had
confessed to himself that the recovery of the revolver was not to be
thought of, either by persuasion or by some more forcible means.
"You speak in that fashion, but you are frightened of those white
men over there."
"Me no flightened," protested Wang raucously, throwing up his head--
which gave to his throat a more strained, anxious appearance than
ever. "Me no likee," he added in a quieter tone. "Me velly sick."
He put his hand over the region under the breast-bone.
"That," said Heyst, serenely positive, "belong one piecee lie. That
isn't proper man-talk at all. And after stealing my revolver, too!"
He had suddenly decided to speak about it, because this frankness
could not make the situation much worse than it was. He did not
suppose for a moment that Wang had the revolver anywhere about his
person; and after having thought the matter over, he had arrived at
the conclusion that the Chinaman never meant to use the weapon
against him. After a slight start, because the direct charge had
taken him unawares, Wang tore open the front of his jacket with a
convulsive show of indignation.
"No hab got. Look see!" he mouthed in pretended anger.
He slapped his bare chest violently; he uncovered his very ribs, all
astir with the panting of outraged virtue; his smooth stomach heaved
with indignation. He started his wide blue breeches flapping about
his yellow calves. Heyst watched him quietly.
"I never said you had it on you," he observed, without raising his
voice; "but the revolver is gone from where I kept it."
"Me no savee levolvel," Wang said obstinately.
The book lying open on Heyst's knee slipped suddenly and he made a
sharp movement to catch it up. Wang was unable to see the reason of
this because of the table, and leaped away from what seemed to him a
threatening symptom. When Heyst looked up, the Chinaman was already
at the door facing the room, not frightened, but alert.
"What's the matter?" asked Heyst.
Wang nodded his shaven head significantly at the curtain closing the
doorway of the bedroom.
"Me no likee," he repeated.
"What the devil do you mean?" Heyst was genuinely amazed. "Don't
like what?"
Wang pointed a long lemon-coloured finger at the motionless folds.
"Two," he said.
"Two what? I don't understand."
"Suppose you savee, you no like that fashion. Me savee plenty. Me
go now."
Heyst had risen from his chair, but Wang kept his ground in the
doorway for a little longer. His almond-shaped eyes imparted to his
face an expression of soft and sentimental melancholy. The muscles
of his throat moved visibly while he uttered a distinct and guttural
"Goodbye" and vanished from Number One's sight.
The Chinaman's departure altered the situation. Heyst reflected on
what would be best to do in view of that fact. For a long time he
hesitated; then, shrugging his shoulders wearily, he walked out on
the veranda, down the steps, and continued at a steady gait, with a
thoughtful mien, in the direction of his guests' bungalow. He
wanted to make an important communication to them, and he had no
other object--least of all to give them the shock of a surprise
call. Nevertheless, their brutish henchman not being on watch, it
was Heyst's fate to startle Mr. Jones and his secretary by his
sudden appearance in the doorway. Their conversation must have been
very interesting to prevent them from hearing the visitor's
approach. In the dim room--the shutters were kept constantly closed
against the heat--Heyst saw them start apart. It was Mr. Jones who
spoke:
"Ah, here you are again! Come in, come in!"
Heyst, taking his hat off in the doorway, entered the room.
Content of PART FOUR CHAPTER FOUR [Joseph Conrad's novel: Victory]
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