Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (761 page)

His thick hand fell on and grasped with force the back of a light chair (there were several standing about) and I perceived the chance of a broken head at the end of all this — most likely.  My mortification was extreme.  The scandal would be horrible; that was unavoidable.  But how to act so as to satisfy myself I did not know.  I stood on my guard and at any rate faced him.  There was nothing else for it.  Of one thing I was certain, that, however brazen my attitude, it could never equal the characteristic Jacobus impudence.

He gave me his melancholy, glued smile and sat down.  I own I was relieved.  The perspective of passing from kisses to blows had nothing particularly attractive in it.  Perhaps — perhaps he had seen nothing?  He behaved as usual, but he had never before found me alone on the verandah.  If he had alluded to it, if he had asked: “Where’s Alice?” or something of the sort, I would have been able to judge from the tone.  He would give me no opportunity.  The striking peculiarity was that he had never looked up at me yet.  “He knows,” I said to myself confidently.  And my contempt for him relieved my disgust with myself.

“You are early home,” I remarked.

“Things are very quiet; nothing doing at the store to-day,” he explained with a cast-down air.

“Oh, well, you know, I am off,” I said, feeling that this, perhaps, was the best thing to do.

“Yes,” he breathed out.  “Day after to-morrow.”

This was not what I had meant; but as he gazed persistently on the floor, I followed the direction of his glance.  In the absolute stillness of the house we stared at the high-heeled slipper the girl had lost in her flight.  We stared.  It lay overturned.

After what seemed a very long time to me, Jacobus hitched his chair forward, stooped with extended arm and picked it up.  It looked a slender thing in his big, thick hands.  It was not really a slipper, but a low shoe of blue, glazed kid, rubbed and shabby.  It had straps to go over the instep, but the girl only thrust her feet in, after her slovenly manner.  Jacobus raised his eyes from the shoe to look at me.

“Sit down, Captain,” he said at last, in his subdued tone.

As if the sight of that shoe had renewed the spell, I gave up suddenly the idea of leaving the house there and then.  It had become impossible.  I sat down, keeping my eyes on the fascinating object.  Jacobus turned his daughter’s shoe over and over in his cushioned paws as if studying the way the thing was made.  He contemplated the thin sole for a time; then glancing inside with an absorbed air:

“I am glad I found you here, Captain.”

I answered this by some sort of grunt, watching him covertly.  Then I added: “You won’t have much more of me now.”

He was still deep in the interior of that shoe on which my eyes too were resting.

“Have you thought any more of this deal in potatoes I spoke to you about the other day?”

“No, I haven’t,” I answered curtly.  He checked my movement to rise by an austere, commanding gesture of the hand holding that fatal shoe.  I remained seated and glared at him.  “You know I don’t trade.”

“You ought to, Captain.  You ought to.”

I reflected.  If I left that house now I would never see the girl again.  And I felt I must see her once more, if only for an instant.  It was a need, not to be reasoned with, not to be disregarded.  No, I did not want to go away.  I wanted to stay for one more experience of that strange provoking sensation and of indefinite desire, the habit of which had made me — me of all people! — dread the prospect of going to sea.

“Mr. Jacobus,” I pronounced slowly.  “Do you really think that upon the whole and taking various’ matters into consideration — I mean everything, do you understand? — it would be a good thing for me to trade, let us say, with you?”

I waited for a while.  He went on looking at the shoe which he held now crushed in the middle, the worn point of the toe and the high heel protruding on each side of his heavy fist.

“That will be all right,” he said, facing me squarely at last.

“Are you sure?”

“You’ll find it quite correct, Captain.”  He had uttered his habitual phrases in his usual placid, breath-saving voice and stood my hard, inquisitive stare sleepily without as much as a wink.

“Then let us trade,” I said, turning my shoulder to him.  “I see you are bent on it.”

I did not want an open scandal, but I thought that outward decency may be bought too dearly at times.  I included Jacobus, myself, the whole population of the island, in the same contemptuous disgust as though we had been partners in an ignoble transaction.  And the remembered vision at sea, diaphanous and blue, of the Pearl of the Ocean at sixty miles off; the unsubstantial, clear marvel of it as if evoked by the art of a beautiful and pure magic, turned into a thing of horrors too.  Was this the fortune this vaporous and rare apparition had held for me in its hard heart, hidden within the shape as of fair dreams and mist?  Was this my luck?

“I think” — Jacobus became suddenly audible after what seemed the silence of vile meditation — ”that you might conveniently take some thirty tons.  That would be about the lot, Captain.”

“Would it?  The lot!  I dare say it would be convenient, but I haven’t got enough money for that.”

I had never seen him so animated.

“No!” he exclaimed with what I took for the accent of grim menace.  “That’s a pity.”  He paused, then, unrelenting: “How much money have you got, Captain?” he inquired with awful directness.

It was my turn to face him squarely.  I did so and mentioned the amount I could dispose of.  And I perceived that he was disappointed.  He thought it over, his calculating gaze lost in mine, for quite a long time before he came out in a thoughtful tone with the rapacious suggestion:

“You could draw some more from your charterers.  That would be quite easy, Captain.”

“No, I couldn’t,” I retorted brusquely.  “I’ve drawn my salary up to date, and besides, the ship’s accounts are closed.”

I was growing furious.  I pursued: “And I’ll tell you what: if I could do it I wouldn’t.”  Then throwing off all restraint, I added: “You are a bit too much of a Jacobus, Mr. Jacobus.”

The tone alone was insulting enough, but he remained tranquil, only a little puzzled, till something seemed to dawn upon him; but the unwonted light in his eyes died out instantly.  As a Jacobus on his native heath, what a mere skipper chose to say could not touch him, outcast as he was.  As a ship-chandler he could stand anything.  All I caught of his mumble was a vague — ”quite correct,” than which nothing could have been more egregiously false at bottom — to my view, at least.  But I remembered — I had never forgotten — that I must see the girl.  I did not mean to go.  I meant to stay in the house till I had seen her once more.

“Look here!” I said finally.  “I’ll tell you what I’ll do.  I’ll take as many of your confounded potatoes as my money will buy, on condition that you go off at once down to the wharf to see them loaded in the lighter and sent alongside the ship straight away.  Take the invoice and a signed receipt with you.  Here’s the key of my desk.  Give it to Burns.  He will pay you.

He got up from his chair before I had finished speaking, but he refused to take the key.  Burns would never do it.  He wouldn’t like to ask him even.

“Well, then,” I said, eyeing him slightingly, “there’s nothing for it, Mr. Jacobus, but you must wait on board till I come off to settle with you.”

“That will be all right, Captain.  I will go at once.”

He seemed at a loss what to do with the girl’s shoe he was still holding in his fist.  Finally, looking dully at me, he put it down on the chair from which he had risen.

“And you, Captain?  Won’t you come along, too, just to see — ”

“Don’t bother about me.  I’ll take care of myself.”

He remained perplexed for a moment, as if trying to understand; and then his weighty: “Certainly, certainly, Captain,” seemed to be the outcome of some sudden thought.  His big chest heaved.  Was it a sigh?  As he went out to hurry off those potatoes he never looked back at me.

I waited till the noise of his footsteps had died out of the dining-room, and I waited a little longer.  Then turning towards the distant door I raised my voice along the verandah:

“Alice!”

Nothing answered me, not even a stir behind the door.  Jacobus’s house might have been made empty for me to make myself at home in.  I did not call again.  I had become aware of a great discouragement.  I was mentally jaded, morally dejected.  I turned to the garden again, sitting down with my elbows spread on the low balustrade, and took my head in my hands.

The evening closed upon me.  The shadows lengthened, deepened, mingled together into a pool of twilight in which the flower-beds glowed like coloured embers; whiffs of heavy scent came to me as if the dusk of this hemisphere were but the dimness of a temple and the garden an enormous censer swinging before the altar of the stars.  The colours of the blossoms deepened, losing their glow one by one.

The girl, when I turned my head at a slight noise, appeared to me very tall and slender, advancing with a swaying limp, a floating and uneven motion which ended in the sinking of her shadowy form into the deep low chair.  And I don’t know why or whence I received the impression that she had come too late.  She ought to have appeared at my call.  She ought to have . . . It was as if a supreme opportunity had been missed.

I rose and took a seat close to her, nearly opposite her arm-chair.  Her ever discontented voice addressed me at once, contemptuously:

“You are still here.”

I pitched mine low.

“You have come out at last.”

“I came to look for my shoe — before they bring in the lights.”

It was her harsh, enticing whisper, subdued, not very steady, but its low tremulousness gave me no thrill now.  I could only make out the oval of her face, her uncovered throat, the long, white gleam of her eyes.  She was mysterious enough.  Her hands were resting on the arms of the chair.  But where was the mysterious and provoking sensation which was like the perfume of her flower-like youth?  I said quietly:

“I have got your shoe here.”  She made no sound and I continued: “You had better give me your foot and I will put it on for you.”

She made no movement.  I bent low down and groped for her foot under the flounces of the wrapper.  She did not withdraw it and I put on the shoe, buttoning the instep-strap.  It was an inanimate foot.  I lowered it gently to the floor.

“If you buttoned the strap you would not be losing your shoe, Miss Don’t Care,” I said, trying to be playful without conviction.  I felt more like wailing over the lost illusion of vague desire, over the sudden conviction that I would never find again near her the strange, half-evil, half-tender sensation which had given its acrid flavour to so many days, which had made her appear tragic and promising, pitiful and provoking.  That was all over.

“Your father picked it up,” I said, thinking she may just as well be told of the fact.

“I am not afraid of papa — by himself,” she declared scornfully.

“Oh!  It’s only in conjunction with his disreputable associates, strangers, the ‘riff-raff of Europe’ as your charming aunt or great-aunt says — men like me, for instance — that you — ”

“I am not afraid of you,” she snapped out.

“That’s because you don’t know that I am now doing business with your father.  Yes, I am in fact doing exactly what he wants me to do.  I’ve broken my promise to you.  That’s the sort of man I am.  And now — aren’t you afraid?  If you believe what that dear, kind, truthful old lady says you ought to be.”

It was with unexpected modulated softness that the affirmed:

“No.  I am not afraid.”  She hesitated. . . . “Not now.”

“Quite right.  You needn’t be.  I shall not see you again before I go to sea.”  I rose and stood near her chair.  “But I shall often think of you in this old garden, passing under the trees over there, walking between these gorgeous flower-beds.  You must love this garden — ”

“I love nothing.”

I heard in her sullen tone the faint echo of that resentfully tragic note which I had found once so provoking.  But it left me unmoved except for a sudden and weary conviction of the emptiness of all things under Heaven.

“Good-bye, Alice,” I said.

She did not answer, she did not move.  To merely take her hand, shake it, and go away seemed impossible, almost improper.  I stooped without haste and pressed my lips to her smooth forehead.  This was the moment when I realised clearly with a sort of terror my complete detachment from that unfortunate creature.  And as I lingered in that cruel self-knowledge I felt the light touch of her arms falling languidly on my neck and received a hasty, awkward, haphazard kiss which missed my lips.  No!  She was not afraid; but I was no longer moved.  Her arms slipped off my neck slowly, she made no sound, the deep wicker arm-chair creaked slightly; only a sense of my dignity prevented me fleeing headlong from that catastrophic revelation.

I traversed the dining-room slowly.  I thought: She’s listening to my footsteps; she can’t help it; she’ll hear me open and shut that door.  And I closed it as gently behind me as if I had been a thief retreating with his ill-gotten booty.  During that stealthy act I experienced the last touch of emotion in that house, at the thought of the girl I had left sitting there in the obscurity, with her heavy hair and empty eyes as black as the night itself, staring into the walled garden, silent, warm, odorous with the perfume of imprisoned flowers, which, like herself, were lost to sight in a world buried in darkness.

The narrow, ill-lighted, rustic streets I knew so well on my way to the harbour were extremely quiet.  I felt in my heart that the further one ventures the better one understands how everything in our life is common, short, and empty; that it is in seeking the unknown in our sensations that we discover how mediocre are our attempts and how soon defeated!  Jacobus’s boatman was waiting at the steps with an unusual air of readiness.  He put me alongside the ship, but did not give me his confidential “Good-evening, sah,” and, instead of shoving off at once, remained holding by the ladder.