Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (553 page)

The silly fuss of that man seared his very soul. There was no end to this plague of fools coming to him from the forgotten ends of the earth. A fellow like that could not be told. No one could be told. Blind they came and blind they would go out. He admitted reluctantly, but without doubt, that as if pushed by a force from outside he would have to try and save two of them. To this end he foresaw the probable need of leaving his brig for a time. He would have to leave her with that man. The mate. He had engaged him himself — to make his insurance valid — to be able sometimes to speak — to have near him. Who would have believed such a fool-man could exist on the face of the sea! Who? Leave the brig with him. The brig!

Ever since sunset, the breeze kept off by the heat of the day had been trying to re-establish in the darkness its sway over the Shoals. Its approaches had been heard in the night, its patient murmurs, its foiled sighs; but now a surprisingly heavy puff came in a free rush as if, far away there to the northward, the last defence of the calm had been victoriously carried. The flames borne down streamed bluishly, horizontal and noisy at the end of tall sticks, like fluttering pennants; and behold, the shadows on the deck went mad and jostled each other as if trying to escape from a doomed craft, the darkness, held up dome-like by the brilliant glare, seemed to tumble headlong upon the brig in an overwhelming downfall, the men stood swaying as if ready to fall under the ruins of a black and noiseless disaster. The blurred outlines of the brig, the masts, the rigging, seemed to shudder in the terror of coming extinction — and then the darkness leaped upward again, the shadows returned to their places, the men were seen distinct, swarthy, with calm faces, with glittering eyeballs. The destruction in the breath had passed, was gone.

A discord of three voices raised together in a drawling wail trailed on the sudden immobility of the air.

“Brig ahoy! Give us a rope!”

The first boat-load from the yacht emerged floating slowly into the pool of purple light wavering round the brig on the black water. Two men squeezed in the bows pulled uncomfortably; in the middle, on a heap of seamen’s canvas bags, another sat, insecure, propped with both arms, stiff-legged, angularly helpless. The light from the poop brought everything out in lurid detail, and the boat floating slowly toward the brig had a suspicious and pitiful aspect. The shabby load lumbering her looked somehow as if it had been stolen by those men who resembled castaways. In the sternsheets Carter, standing up, steered with his leg. He had a smile of youthful sarcasm.

“Here they are!” he cried to Lingard. “You’ve got your own way, Captain. I thought I had better come myself with the first precious lot — ”

“Pull around the stern. The brig’s on the swing,” interrupted Lingard.

“Aye, aye! We’ll try not to smash the brig. We would be lost indeed if — fend off there, John; fend off, old reliable, if you care a pin for your salty hide. I like the old chap,” he said, when he stood by Lingard’s side looking down at the boat which was being rapidly cleared by whites and Malays working shoulder to shoulder in silence. “I like him. He don’t belong to that yachting lot either. They picked him up on the road somewhere. Look at the old dog — carved out of a ship’s timber — as talkative as a fish — grim as a gutted wreck. That’s the man for me. All the others there are married, or going to be, or ought to be, or sorry they ain’t. Every man jack of them has a petticoat in tow — dash me! Never heard in all my travels such a jabber about wives and kids. Hurry up with your dunnage — below there! Aye! I had no difficulty in getting them to clear out from the yacht. They never saw a pair of gents stolen before — you understand. It upset all their little notions of what a stranding means, hereabouts. Not that mine aren’t mixed a bit, too — and yet I’ve seen a thing or two.”

His excitement was revealed in this boyish impulse to talk.

“Look,” he said, pointing at the growing pile of bags and bedding on the brig’s quarter-deck. “Look. Don’t they mean to sleep soft — and dream of home — maybe. Home. Think of that, Captain. These chaps can’t get clear away from it. It isn’t like you and me — ”

Lingard made a movement.

“I ran away myself when so high. My old man’s a Trinity pilot. That’s a job worth staying at home for. Mother writes sometimes, but they can’t miss me much. There’s fourteen of us altogether — eight at home yet. No fear of the old country ever getting undermanned — let die who must. Only let it be a fair game, Captain. Let’s have a fair show.”

Lingard assured him briefly he should have it. That was the very reason he wanted the yacht’s crew in the brig, he added. Then quiet and grave he inquired whether that pistol was still in Carter’s pocket.

“Never mind that,” said the young man, hurriedly. “Remember who began. To be shot at wouldn’t rile me so much — it’s being threatened, don’t you see, that was heavy on my chest. Last night is very far off though — and I will be hanged if I know what I meant exactly when I took the old thing from its nail. There. More I can’t say till all’s settled one way or another. Will that do?”

Flushing brick red, he suspended his judgment and stayed his hand with the generosity of youth.

. . . . . . .

Apparently it suited Lingard to be reprieved in that form. He bowed his head slowly. It would do. To leave his life to that youngster’s ignorance seemed to redress the balance of his mind against a lot of secret intentions. It was distasteful and bitter as an expiation should be. He also held a life in his hand; a life, and many deaths besides, but these were like one single feather in the scales of his conscience. That he should feel so was unavoidable because his strength would at no price permit itself to be wasted. It would not be — and there was an end of it. All he could do was to throw in another risk into the sea of risks. Thus was he enabled to recognize that a drop of water in the ocean makes a great difference. His very desire, unconquered, but exiled, had left the place where he could constantly hear its voice. He saw it, he saw himself, the past, the future, he saw it all, shifting and indistinct like those shapes the strained eye of a wanderer outlines in darker strokes upon the face of the night.

X

When Lingard went to his boat to follow Carter, who had gone back to the yacht, Wasub, mast and sail on shoulder, preceded him down the ladder. The old man leaped in smartly and busied himself in getting the dinghy ready for his commander.

In that little boat Lingard was accustomed to traverse the Shallows alone. She had a short mast and a lug-sail, carried two easily, floated in a few inches of water. In her he was independent of a crew, and, if the wind failed, could make his way with a pair of sculls taking short cuts over shoal places. There were so many islets and sandbanks that in case of sudden bad weather there was always a lee to be found, and when he wished to land he could pull her up a beach, striding ahead, painter in hand, like a giant child dragging a toy boat. When the brig was anchored within the Shallows it was in her that he visited the lagoon. Once, when caught by a sudden freshening of the sea-breeze, he had waded up a shelving bank carrying her on his head and for two days they had rested together on the sand, while around them the shallow waters raged lividly, and across three miles of foam the brig would time after time dissolve in the mist and re-appear distinct, nodding her tall spars that seemed to touch a weeping sky of lamentable greyness.

Whenever he came into the lagoon tugging with bare arms, Jorgenson, who would be watching the entrance of the creek ever since a muffled detonation of a gun to seaward had warned him of the brig’s arrival on the Shore of Refuge, would mutter to himself — ”Here’s Tom coming in his nutshell.” And indeed she was in shape somewhat like half a nutshell and also in the colour of her dark varnished planks. The man’s shoulders and head rose high above her gunwales; loaded with Lingard’s heavy frame she would climb sturdily the steep ridges, slide squatting into the hollows of the sea, or, now and then, take a sedate leap over a short wave. Her behaviour had a stout trustworthiness about it, and she reminded one of a surefooted mountain-pony carrying over difficult ground a rider much bigger than himself.

Wasub wiped the thwarts, ranged the mast and sail along the side, shipped the rowlocks. Lingard looked down at his old servant’s spare shoulders upon which the light from above fell unsteady but vivid. Wasub worked for the comfort of his commander and his singleminded absorption in that task flashed upon Lingard the consolation of an act of friendliness. The elderly Malay at last lifted his head with a deferential murmur; his wrinkled old face with half a dozen wiry hairs pendulous at each corner of the dark lips expressed a kind of weary satisfaction, and the slightly oblique worn eyes stole a discreet upward glance containing a hint of some remote meaning. Lingard found himself compelled by the justice of that obscure claim to murmur as he stepped into the boat:

“These are times of danger.”

He sat down and took up the sculls. Wasub held on to the gunwale as to a last hope of a further confidence. He had served in the brig five years. Lingard remembered that very well. This aged figure had been intimately associated with the brig’s life and with his own, appearing silently ready for every incident and emergency in an unquestioning expectation of orders; symbolic of blind trust in his strength, of an unlimited obedience to his will. Was it unlimited?

“We shall require courage and fidelity,” added Lingard, in a tentative tone.

“There are those who know me,” snapped the old man, readily, as if the words had been waiting for a long time. “Observe, Tuan. I have filled with fresh water the little breaker in the bows.”

“I know you, too,” said Lingard.

“And the wind — and the sea,” ejaculated the serang, jerkily. “These also are faithful to the strong. By Allah! I who am a pilgrim and have listened to words of wisdom in many places, I tell you, Tuan, there is strength in the knowledge of what is hidden in things without life, as well as in the living men. Will Tuan be gone long?”

“I come back in a short time — together with the rest of the whites from over there. This is the beginning of many stratagems. Wasub! Daman, the son of a dog, has suddenly made prisoners two of my own people. My face is made black.”

“Tse! Tse! What ferocity is that! One should not offer shame to a friend or to a friend’s brother lest revenge come sweeping like a flood. Yet can an Illanun chief be other than tyrannical? My old eyes have seen much but they never saw a tiger change its stripes. Ya-wa! The tiger can not. This is the wisdom of us ignorant Malay men. The wisdom of white Tuans is great. They think that by the power of many speeches the tiger may — ” He broke off and in a crisp, busy tone said: “The rudder dwells safely under the aftermost seat should Tuan be pleased to sail the boat. This breeze will not die away before sunrise.” Again his voice changed as if two different souls had been flitting in and out of his body. “No, no, kill the tiger and then the stripes may be counted without fear — one by one, thus.”

He pointed a frail brown finger and, abruptly, made a mirthless dry sound as if a rattle had been sprung in his throat.

“The wretches are many,” said Lingard.

“Nay, Tuan. They follow their great men even as we in the brig follow you. That is right.”

Lingard reflected for a moment.

“My men will follow me then,” he said.

“They are poor calashes without sense,” commented Wasub with pitying superiority. “Some with no more comprehension than men of the bush freshly caught. There is Sali, the foolish son of my sister and by your great favour appointed to mind the tiller of this ship. His stupidity is extreme, but his eyes are good — nearly as good as mine that by praying and much exercise can see far into the night.”

Lingard laughed low and then looked earnestly at the serang. Above their heads a man shook a flare over the side and a thin shower of sparks floated downward and expired before touching the water.

“So you can see in the night, O serang! Well, then, look and speak. Speak! Fight — or no fight? Weapons or words? Which folly? Well, what do you see?”

“A darkness, a darkness,” whispered Wasub at last in a frightened tone. “There are nights — ” He shook his head and muttered. “Look. The tide has turned. Ya, Tuan. The tide has turned.”

Lingard looked downward where the water could be seen, gliding past the ship’s side, moving smoothly, streaked with lines of froth, across the illumined circle thrown round the brig by the lights on her poop. Air bubbles sparkled, lines of darkness, ripples of glitter appeared, glided, went astern without a splash, without a trickle, without a plaint, without a break. The unchecked gentleness of the flow captured the eye by a subtle spell, fastened insidiously upon the mind a disturbing sense of the irretrievable. The ebbing of the sea athwart the lonely sheen of flames resembled the eternal ebb-tide of time; and when at last Lingard looked up, the knowledge of that noiseless passage of the waters produced on his mind a bewildering effect. For a moment the speck of light lost in vast obscurity the brig, the boat, the hidden coast, the Shallows, the very walls and roof of darkness — the seen and the unseen alike seemed to be gliding smoothly onward through the enormous gloom of space. Then, with a great mental effort, he brought everything to a sudden standstill; and only the froth and bubbles went on streaming past ceaselessly, unchecked by the power of his will.

“The tide has turned — you say, serang? Has it — ? Well, perhaps it has, perhaps it has,” he finished, muttering to himself.

“Truly it has. Can not Tuan see it run under his own eyes?” said Wasub with an alarmed earnestness. “Look. Now it is in my mind that a prau coming from amongst the southern islands, if steered cunningly in the free set of the current, would approach the bows of this, our brig, drifting silently as a shape without a substance.”

“And board suddenly — is that it?” said Lingard.

“Daman is crafty and the Illanuns are very bloodthirsty. Night is nothing to them. They are certainly valorous. Are they not born in the midst of fighting and are they not inspired by the evil of their hearts even before they can speak? And their chiefs would be leading them while you, Tuan, are going from us even now — ”