The Rescue (41 page)

Jorgenson, behind the door, repeated with lifeless obstinacy:

"Do you see King Tom's watch in there?"

Mrs. Travers got up from the floor. She tottered, snatching at the air,
and found the back of the armchair under her hand.

"Who's there?"

She was also ready to ask: "Where am I?" but she remembered and at once
became the prey of that active dread which had been lying dormant for
a few hours in her uneasy and prostrate body. "What time is it?" she
faltered out.

"Dawn," pronounced the imperturbable voice at the door. It seemed to
her that it was a word that could make any heart sink with apprehension.
Dawn! She stood appalled. And the toneless voice outside the door
insisted:

"You must have Tom's watch there!"

"I haven't seen it," she cried as if tormented by a dream.

"Look in that desk thing. If you push open the shutter you will be able
to see."

Mrs. Travers became aware of the profound darkness of the cabin.
Jorgenson heard her staggering in there. After a moment a woman's voice,
which struck even him as strange, said in faint tones:

"I have it. It's stopped."

"It doesn't matter. I don't want to know the time. There should be a key
about. See it anywhere?"

"Yes, it's fastened to the watch," the dazed voice answered from within.
Jorgenson waited before making his request. "Will you pass it out to me?
There's precious little time left now!"

The door flew open, which was certainly something Jorgenson had not
expected. He had expected but a hand with the watch protruded through
a narrow crack, But he didn't start back or give any other sign of
surprise at seeing Mrs. Travers fully dressed. Against the faint
clearness in the frame of the open shutter she presented to him the dark
silhouette of her shoulders surmounted by a sleek head, because her
hair was still in the two plaits. To Jorgenson Mrs. Travers in her
un-European dress had always been displeasing, almost monstrous. Her
stature, her gestures, her general carriage struck his eye as
absurdly incongruous with a Malay costume, too ample, too free, too
bold—offensive. To Mrs. Travers, Jorgenson, in the dusk of the passage,
had the aspect of a dim white ghost, and he chilled her by his ghost's
aloofness.

He picked up the watch from her outspread palm without a word of thanks,
only mumbling in his moustache, "H'm, yes, that's it. I haven't yet
forgotten how to count seconds correctly, but it's better to have a
watch."

She had not the slightest notion what he meant. And she did not care.
Her mind remained confused and the sense of bodily discomfort oppressed
her. She whispered, shamefacedly, "I believe I've slept."

"I haven't," mumbled Jorgenson, growing more and more distinct to her
eyes. The brightness of the short dawn increased rapidly as if the sun
were impatient to look upon the Settlement. "No fear of that," he added,
boastfully.

It occurred to Mrs. Travers that perhaps she had not slept either. Her
state had been more like an imperfect, half-conscious, quivering death.
She shuddered at the recollection.

"What an awful night," she murmured, drearily.

There was nothing to hope for from Jorgenson. She expected him to
vanish, indifferent, like a phantom of the dead carrying off the
appropriately dead watch in his hand for some unearthly purpose.
Jorgenson didn't move. His was an insensible, almost a senseless
presence! Nothing could be extorted from it. But a wave of anguish as
confused as all her other sensations swept Mrs. Travers off her feet.

"Can't you tell me something?" she cried.

For half a minute perhaps Jorgenson made no sound; then: "For years
I have been telling anybody who cared to ask," he mumbled in his
moustache. "Telling Tom, too. And Tom knew what he wanted to do. How's
one to know what
you
are after?"

She had never expected to hear so many words from that rigid shadow. Its
monotonous mumble was fascinating, its sudden loquacity was shocking.
And in the profound stillness that reigned outside it was as if there
had been no one left in the world with her but the phantom of that old
adventurer. He was heard again: "What I could tell you would be worse
than poison."

Mrs. Travers was not familiar with Jorgenson's consecrated phrases. The
mechanical voice, the words themselves, his air of abstraction appalled
her. And he hadn't done yet; she caught some more of his unconcerned
mumbling: "There is nothing I don't know," and the absurdity of the
statement was also appalling. Mrs. Travers gasped and with a wild little
laugh:

"Then you know why I called after King Tom last night."

He glanced away along his shoulder through the door of the deckhouse at
the growing brightness of the day. She did so, too. It was coming. It
had come! Another day! And it seemed to Mrs. Travers a worse calamity
than any discovery she had made in her life, than anything she could
have imagined to come to her. The very magnitude of horror steadied her,
seemed to calm her agitation as some kinds of fatal drugs do before they
kill. She laid a steady hand on Jorgenson's sleeve and spoke quietly,
distinctly, urgently.

"You were on deck. What I want to know is whether I was heard?"

"Yes," said Jorgenson, absently, "I heard you." Then, as if roused a
little, he added less mechanically: "The whole ship heard you."

Mrs. Travers asked herself whether perchance she had not simply
screamed. It had never occurred to her before that perhaps she had. At
the time it seemed to her she had no strength for more than a whisper.
Had she been really so loud? And the deadly chill, the night that had
gone by her had left in her body, vanished from her limbs, passed out of
her in a flush. Her face was turned away from the light, and that
fact gave her courage to continue. Moreover, the man before her was so
detached from the shames and prides and schemes of life that he seemed
not to count at all, except that somehow or other he managed at times to
catch the mere literal sense of the words addressed to him—and answer
them. And answer them! Answer unfailingly, impersonally, without any
feeling.

"You saw Tom—King Tom? Was he there? I mean just then, at the moment.
There was a light at the gangway. Was he on deck?"

"No. In the boat."

"Already? Could I have been heard in the boat down there? You say the
whole ship heard me—and I don't care. But could he hear me?"

"Was it Tom you were after?" said Jorgenson in the tone of a negligent
remark.

"Can't you answer me?" she cried, angrily.

"Tom was busy. No child's play. The boat shoved off," said Jorgenson, as
if he were merely thinking aloud.

"You won't tell me, then?" Mrs. Travers apostrophized him, fearlessly.
She was not afraid of Jorgenson. Just then she was afraid of nothing and
nobody. And Jorgenson went on thinking aloud.

"I guess he will be kept busy from now on and so shall I."

Mrs. Travers seemed ready to take by the shoulders and shake that
dead-voiced spectre till it begged for mercy. But suddenly her strong
white arms fell down by her side, the arms of an exhausted woman.

"I shall never, never find out," she whispered to herself.

She cast down her eyes in intolerable humiliation, in intolerable
desire, as though she had veiled her face. Not a sound reached the
loneliness of her thought. But when she raised her eyes again Jorgenson
was no longer standing before her.

For an instant she saw him all black in the brilliant and narrow
doorway, and the next moment he had vanished outside, as if devoured by
the hot blaze of light. The sun had risen on the Shore of Refuge.

When Mrs. Travers came out on deck herself it was as it were with a
boldly unveiled face, with wide-open and dry, sleepless eyes. Their
gaze, undismayed by the sunshine, sought the innermost heart of things
each day offered to the passion of her dread and of her impatience. The
lagoon, the beach, the colours and the shapes struck her more than ever
as a luminous painting on an immense cloth hiding the movements of an
inexplicable life. She shaded her eyes with her hand. There were figures
on the beach, moving dark dots on the white semicircle bounded by the
stockades, backed by roof ridges above the palm groves. Further back the
mass of carved white coral on the roof of the mosque shone like a white
day-star. Religion and politics—always politics! To the left, before
Tengga's enclosure, the loom of fire had changed into a pillar of smoke.
But there were some big trees over there and she couldn't tell whether
the night council had prolonged its sitting. Some vague forms were still
moving there and she could picture them to herself: Daman, the supreme
chief of sea-robbers, with a vengeful heart and the eyes of a gazelle;
Sentot, the sour fanatic with the big turban, that other saint with
a scanty loin cloth and ashes in his hair, and Tengga whom she could
imagine from hearsay, fat, good-tempered, crafty, but ready to spill
blood on his ambitious way and already bold enough to flaunt a yellow
state umbrella at the very gate of Belarab's stockade—so they said.

She saw, she imagined, she even admitted now the reality of those
things no longer a mere pageant marshalled for her vision with barbarous
splendour and savage emphasis. She questioned it no longer—but she did
not feel it in her soul any more than one feels the depth of the sea
under its peaceful glitter or the turmoil of its grey fury. Her eyes
ranged afar, unbelieving and fearful—and then all at once she became
aware of the empty Cage with its interior in disorder, the camp
bedsteads not taken away, a pillow lying on the deck, the dying flame
like a shred of dull yellow stuff inside the lamp left hanging over
the table. The whole struck her as squalid and as if already decayed,
a flimsy and idle phantasy. But Jorgenson, seated on the deck with his
back to it, was not idle. His occupation, too, seemed fantastic and so
truly childish that her heart sank at the man's utter absorption in it.
Jorgenson had before him, stretched on the deck, several bits of rather
thin and dirty-looking rope of different lengths from a couple of inches
to about a foot. He had (an idiot might have amused himself in that
way) set fire to the ends of them. They smouldered with amazing energy,
emitting now and then a splutter, and in the calm air within the
bulwarks sent up very slender, exactly parallel threads of smoke,
each with a vanishing curl at the end; and the absorption with which
Jorgenson gave himself up to that pastime was enough to shake all
confidence in his sanity.

In one half-opened hand he was holding the watch. He was also provided
with a scrap of paper and the stump of a pencil. Mrs. Travers was
confident that he did not either hear or see her.

"Captain Jorgenson, you no doubt think. . . ."

He tried to wave her away with the stump of the pencil. He did not want
to be interrupted in his strange occupation. He was playing very gravely
indeed with those bits of string. "I lighted them all together," he
murmured, keeping one eye on the dial of the watch. Just then the
shortest piece of string went out, utterly consumed. Jorgenson made
a hasty note and remained still while Mrs. Travers looked at him with
stony eyes thinking that nothing in the world was any use. The other
threads of smoke went on vanishing in spirals before the attentive
Jorgenson.

"What are you doing?" asked Mrs. Travers, drearily.

"Timing match . . . precaution. . . ."

He had never in Mrs. Travers' experience been less spectral than then.
He displayed a weakness of the flesh. He was impatient at her intrusion.
He divided his attention between the threads of smoke and the face of
the watch with such interest that the sudden reports of several guns
breaking for the first time for days the stillness of the lagoon and the
illusion of the painted scene failed to make him raise his head. He only
jerked it sideways a little. Mrs. Travers stared at the wisps of
white vapour floating above Belarab's stockade. The series of sharp
detonations ceased and their combined echoes came back over the lagoon
like a long-drawn and rushing sigh.

"What's this?" cried Mrs. Travers.

"Belarab's come home," said Jorgenson.

The last thread of smoke disappeared and Jorgenson got up. He had lost
all interest in the watch and thrust it carelessly into his pocket,
together with the bit of paper and the stump of pencil. He had resumed
his aloofness from the life of men, but approaching the bulwark he
condescended to look toward Belarab's stockade.

"Yes, he is home," he said very low.

"What's going to happen?" cried Mrs. Travers. "What's to be done?"
Jorgenson kept up his appearance of communing with himself.

"I know what to do," he mumbled.

"You are lucky," said Mrs. Travers, with intense bitterness.

It seemed to her that she was abandoned by all the world. The opposite
shore of the lagoon had resumed its aspect of a painted scene that would
never roll up to disclose the truth behind its blinding and soulless
splendour. It seemed to her that she had said her last words to all of
them: to d'Alcacer, to her husband, to Lingard himself—and that they
had all gone behind the curtain forever out of her sight. Of all the
white men Jorgenson alone was left, that man who had done with life so
completely that his mere presence robbed it of all heat and mystery,
leaving nothing but its terrible, its revolting insignificance. And Mrs.
Travers was ready for revolt. She cried with suppressed passion:

"Are you aware, Captain Jorgenson, that I am alive?"

He turned his eyes on her, and for a moment she was daunted by their
cold glassiness. But before they could drive her away, something like
the gleam of a spark gave them an instant's animation.

"I want to go and join them. I want to go ashore," she said, firmly.
"There!"

Her bare and extended arm pointed across the lagoon, and Jorgenson's
resurrected eyes glided along the white limb and wandered off into
space.