An Outcast of the Islands

J >> Joseph Conrad >> An Outcast of the Islands


He wanted to run away, but when he moved it was to slide about painfully
and slowly upon that earth which had become mud so suddenly under his
feet. He fought his way up the courtyard like a man pushing through
a crowd, his head down, one shoulder forward, stopping often, and
sometimes carried back a pace or two in the rush of water which his
heart was not stout enough to face. Aissa followed him step by step,
stopping when he stopped, recoiling with him, moving forward with him
in his toilsome way up the slippery declivity of the courtyard, of that
courtyard, from which everything seemed to have been swept away by the
first rush of the mighty downpour. They could see nothing. The tree, the
bushes, the house, and the fences--all had disappeared in the thickness
of the falling rain. Their hair stuck, streaming, to their heads; their
clothing clung to them, beaten close to their bodies; water ran off
them, off their heads over their shoulders. They moved, patient,
upright, slow and dark, in the gleam clear or fiery of the falling
drops, under the roll of unceasing thunder, like two wandering ghosts
of the drowned that, condemned to haunt the water for ever, had come up
from the river to look at the world under a deluge.

On the left the tree seemed to step out to meet them, appearing vaguely,
high, motionless and patient; with a rustling plaint of its innumerable
leaves through which every drop of water tore its separate way with
cruel haste. And then, to the right, the house surged up in the
mist, very black, and clamorous with the quick patter of rain on its
high-pitched roof above the steady splash of the water running off the
eaves. Down the plankway leading to the door flowed a thin and pellucid
stream, and when Willems began his ascent it broke over his foot as
if he were going up a steep ravine in the bed of a rapid and shallow
torrent. Behind his heels two streaming smudges of mud stained for an
instant the purity of the rushing water, and then he splashed his way up
with a spurt and stood on the bamboo platform before the open door under
the shelter of the overhanging eaves--under shelter at last!

A low moan ending in a broken and plaintive mutter arrested Willems on
the threshold. He peered round in the half-light under the roof and saw
the old woman crouching close to the wall in a shapeless heap, and while
he looked he felt a touch of two arms on his shoulders. Aissa! He had
forgotten her. He turned, and she clasped him round the neck instantly,
pressing close to him as if afraid of violence or escape. He stiffened
himself in repulsion, in horror, in the mysterious revolt of his heart;
while she clung to him--clung to him as if he were a refuge from misery,
from storm, from weariness, from fear, from despair; and it was on the
part of that being an embrace terrible, enraged and mournful, in which
all her strength went out to make him captive, to hold him for ever.

He said nothing. He looked into her eyes while he struggled with her
fingers about the nape of his neck, and suddenly he tore her hands
apart, holding her arms up in a strong grip of her wrists, and bending
his swollen face close over hers, he said--

"It is all your doing. You . . ."

She did not understand him--not a word. He spoke in the language of his
people--of his people that know no mercy and no shame. And he was angry.
Alas! he was always angry now, and always speaking words that she could
not understand. She stood in silence, looking at him through her patient
eyes, while he shook her arms a little and then flung them down.

"Don't follow me!" he shouted. "I want to be alone--I mean to be left
alone!"

He went in, leaving the door open.

She did not move. What need to understand the words when they are spoken
in such a voice? In that voice which did not seem to be his voice--his
voice when he spoke by the brook, when he was never angry and always
smiling! Her eyes were fixed upon the dark doorway, but her hands
strayed mechanically upwards; she took up all her hair, and, inclining
her head slightly over her shoulder, wrung out the long black tresses,
twisting them persistently, while she stood, sad and absorbed, like one
listening to an inward voice--the voice of bitter, of unavailing
regret. The thunder had ceased, the wind had died out, and the rain fell
perpendicular and steady through a great pale clearness--the light of
remote sun coming victorious from amongst the dissolving blackness of
the clouds. She stood near the doorway. He was there--alone in the gloom
of the dwelling. He was there. He spoke not. What was in his mind now?
What fear? What desire? Not the desire of her as in the days when he
used to smile . . . How could she know? . . .

A sigh coming from the bottom of her heart, flew out into the world
through her parted lips. A sigh faint, profound, and broken; a sigh
full of pain and fear, like the sigh of those who are about to face the
unknown: to face it in loneliness, in doubt, and without hope. She let
go her hair, that fell scattered over her shoulders like a funeral veil,
and she sank down suddenly by the door. Her hands clasped her ankles;
she rested her head on her drawn-up knees, and remained still, very
still, under the streaming mourning of her hair. She was thinking of
him; of the days by the brook; she was thinking of all that had been
their love--and she sat in the abandoned posture of those who sit
weeping by the dead, of those who watch and mourn over a corpse.




PART V


CHAPTER ONE

Almayer propped, alone on the verandah of his house, with both his
elbows on the table, and holding his head between his hands, stared
before him, away over the stretch of sprouting young grass in his
courtyard, and over the short jetty with its cluster of small canoes,
amongst which his big whale-boat floated high, like a white mother
of all that dark and aquatic brood. He stared on the river, past the
schooner anchored in mid-stream, past the forests of the left bank; he
stared through and past the illusion of the material world.

The sun was sinking. Under the sky was stretched a network of white
threads, a network fine and close-meshed, where here and there were
caught thicker white vapours of globular shape; and to the eastward,
above the ragged barrier of the forests, surged the summits of a chain
of great clouds, growing bigger slowly, in imperceptible motion, as if
careful not to disturb the glowing stillness of the earth and of the
sky. Abreast of the house the river was empty but for the motionless
schooner. Higher up, a solitary log came out from the bend above and
went on drifting slowly down the straight reach: a dead and wandering
tree going out to its grave in the sea, between two ranks of trees
motionless and living.

And Almayer sat, his face in his hands, looking on and hating all this:
the muddy river; the faded blue of the sky; the black log passing by on
its first and last voyage; the green sea of leaves--the sea that glowed
shimmered, and stirred above the uniform and impenetrable gloom of the
forests--the joyous sea of living green powdered with the brilliant dust
of oblique sunrays.

He hated all this; he begrudged every day--every minute--of his life
spent amongst all these things; he begrudged it bitterly, angrily, with
enraged and immense regret, like a miser compelled to give up some of
his treasure to a near relation. And yet all this was very precious to
him. It was the present sign of a splendid future.

He pushed the table away impatiently, got up, made a few steps
aimlessly, then stood by the balustrade and again looked at the
river--at that river which would have been the instrument for the making
of his fortune if . . . if . . .

"What an abominable brute!" he said.

He was alone, but he spoke aloud, as one is apt to do under the impulse
of a strong, of an overmastering thought.

"What a brute!" he muttered again.

The river was dark now, and the schooner lay on it, a black, a lonely,
and a graceful form, with the slender masts darting upwards from it
in two frail and raking lines. The shadows of the evening crept up the
trees, crept up from bough to bough, till at last the long sunbeams
coursing from the western horizon skimmed lightly over the topmost
branches, then flew upwards amongst the piled-up clouds, giving them
a sombre and fiery aspect in the last flush of light. And suddenly the
light disappeared as if lost in the immensity of the great, blue,
and empty hollow overhead. The sun had set: and the forests became
a straight wall of formless blackness. Above them, on the edge of
lingering clouds, a single star glimmered fitfully, obscured now and
then by the rapid flight of high and invisible vapours.

Almayer fought with the uneasiness within his breast. He heard Ali,
who moved behind him preparing his evening meal, and he listened with
strange attention to the sounds the man made--to the short, dry bang
of the plate put upon the table, to the clink of glass and the metallic
rattle of knife and fork. The man went away. Now he was coming back. He
would speak directly; and Almayer, notwithstanding the absorbing gravity
of his thoughts, listened for the sound of expected words. He heard
them, spoken in English with painstaking distinctness.

"Ready, sir!"

"All right," said Almayer, curtly. He did not move. He remained pensive,
with his back to the table upon which stood the lighted lamp brought
by Ali. He was thinking: "Where was Lingard now? Halfway down the
river probably, in Abdulla's ship. He would be back in about three
days--perhaps less. And then? Then the schooner would have to be got out
of the river, and when that craft was gone they--he and Lingard--would
remain here; alone with the constant thought of that other man, that
other man living near them! What an extraordinary idea to keep him
there for ever. For ever! What did that mean--for ever? Perhaps a year,
perhaps ten years. Preposterous! Keep him there ten years--or may be
twenty! The fellow was capable of living more than twenty years. And for
all that time he would have to be watched, fed, looked after. There was
nobody but Lingard to have such notions. Twenty years! Why, no! In less
than ten years their fortune would be made and they would leave this
place, first for Batavia--yes, Batavia--and then for Europe. England,
no doubt. Lingard would want to go to England. And would they leave that
man here? How would that fellow look in ten years? Very old probably.
Well, devil take him. Nina would be fifteen. She would be rich and very
pretty and he himself would not be so old then. . . ."

Almayer smiled into the night.

. . . Yes, rich! Why! Of course! Captain Lingard was a resourceful man,
and he had plenty of money even now. They were rich already; but not
enough. Decidedly not enough. Money brings money. That gold business was
good. Famous! Captain Lingard was a remarkable man. He said the gold was
there--and it was there. Lingard knew what he was talking about. But he
had queer ideas. For instance, about Willems. Now what did he want to
keep him alive for? Why?

"That scoundrel," muttered Almayer again.

"Makan Tuan!" ejaculated Ali suddenly, very loud in a pressing tone.

Almayer walked to the table, sat down, and his anxious visage dropped
from above into the light thrown down by the lamp-shade. He helped
himself absently, and began to eat in great mouthfuls.

. . . Undoubtedly, Lingard was the man to stick to! The man undismayed,
masterful and ready. How quickly he had planned a new future when
Willems' treachery destroyed their established position in Sambir! And
the position even now was not so bad. What an immense prestige that
Lingard had with all those people--Arabs, Malays and all. Ah, it was
good to be able to call a man like that father. Fine! Wonder how much
money really the old fellow had. People talked--they exaggerated surely,
but if he had only half of what they said . . .

He drank, throwing his head up, and fell to again.

. . . Now, if that Willems had known how to play his cards well, had he
stuck to the old fellow he would have been in his position, he would
be now married to Lingard's adopted daughter with his future
assured--splendid . . .

"The beast!" growled Almayer, between two mouthfuls.

Ali stood rigidly straight with an uninterested face, his gaze lost in
the night which pressed round the small circle of light that shone on
the table, on the glass, on the bottle, and on Almayer's head as he
leaned over his plate moving his jaws.

. . . A famous man Lingard--yet you never knew what he would do next.
It was notorious that he had shot a white man once for less than Willems
had done. For less? . . . Why, for nothing, so to speak! It was not even
his own quarrel. It was about some Malay returning from pilgrimage
with wife and children. Kidnapped, or robbed, or something. A stupid
story--an old story. And now he goes to see that Willems and--nothing.
Comes back talking big about his prisoner; but after all he said very
little. What did that Willems tell him? What passed between them?
The old fellow must have had something in his mind when he let that
scoundrel off. And Joanna! She would get round the old fellow. Sure.
Then he would forgive perhaps. Impossible. But at any rate he would
waste a lot of money on them. The old man was tenacious in his hates,
but also in his affections. He had known that beast Willems from a boy.
They would make it up in a year or so. Everything is possible: why did
he not rush off at first and kill the brute? That would have been more
like Lingard. . . .

Almayer laid down his spoon suddenly, and pushing his plate away, threw
himself back in the chair.

. . . Unsafe. Decidedly unsafe. He had no mind to share Lingard's
money with anybody. Lingard's money was Nina's money in a sense. And
if Willems managed to become friendly with the old man it would be
dangerous for him--Almayer. Such an unscrupulous scoundrel! He would
oust him from his position. He would lie and slander. Everything would
be lost. Lost. Poor Nina. What would become of her? Poor child. For her
sake he must remove that Willems. Must. But how? Lingard wanted to be
obeyed. Impossible to kill Willems. Lingard might be angry. Incredible,
but so it was. He might . . .

A wave of heat passed through Almayer's body, flushed his face, and
broke out of him in copious perspiration. He wriggled in his chair, and
pressed his hands together under the table. What an awful prospect!
He fancied he could see Lingard and Willems reconciled and going away
arm-in-arm, leaving him alone in this God-forsaken hole--in Sambir--in
this deadly swamp! And all his sacrifices, the sacrifice of his
independence, of his best years, his surrender to Lingard's fancies and
caprices, would go for nothing! Horrible! Then he thought of his
little daughter--his daughter!--and the ghastliness of his supposition
overpowered him. He had a deep emotion, a sudden emotion that made him
feel quite faint at the idea of that young life spoiled before it had
fairly begun. His dear child's life! Lying back in his chair he covered
his face with both his hands.

Ali glanced down at him and said, unconcernedly--"Master finish?"

Almayer was lost in the immensity of his commiseration for himself, for
his daughter, who was--perhaps--not going to be the richest woman in
the world--notwithstanding Lingard's promises. He did not understand the
other's question, and muttered through his fingers in a doleful tone--

"What did you say? What? Finish what?"

"Clear up meza," explained Ali.

"Clear up!" burst out Almayer, with incomprehensible exasperation.
"Devil take you and the table. Stupid! Chatterer! Chelakka! Get out!"

He leaned forward, glaring at his head man, then sank back in his seat
with his arms hanging straight down on each side of the chair. And he
sat motionless in a meditation so concentrated and so absorbing, with
all his power of thought so deep within himself, that all expression
disappeared from his face in an aspect of staring vacancy.

Ali was clearing the table. He dropped negligently the tumbler into the
greasy dish, flung there the spoon and fork, then slipped in the plate
with a push amongst the remnants of food. He took up the dish, tucked up
the bottle under his armpit, and went off.

"My hammock!" shouted Almayer after him.

"Ada! I come soon," answered Ali from the doorway in an offended tone,
looking back over his shoulder. . . . How could he clear the table
and hang the hammock at the same time. Ya-wa! Those white men were all
alike. Wanted everything done at once. Like children . . .

The indistinct murmur of his criticism went away, faded and died out
together with the soft footfall of his bare feet in the dark passage.

For some time Almayer did not move. His thoughts were busy at work
shaping a momentous resolution, and in the perfect silence of the house
he believed that he could hear the noise of the operation as if the work
had been done with a hammer. He certainly felt a thumping of strokes,
faint, profound, and startling, somewhere low down in his breast; and
he was aware of a sound of dull knocking, abrupt and rapid, in his ears.
Now and then he held his breath, unconsciously, too long, and had to
relieve himself by a deep expiration that whistled dully through his
pursed lips. The lamp standing on the far side of the table threw a
section of a lighted circle on the floor, where his out-stretched legs
stuck out from under the table with feet rigid and turned up like the
feet of a corpse; and his set face with fixed eyes would have been also
like the face of the dead, but for its vacant yet conscious aspect;
the hard, the stupid, the stony aspect of one not dead, but only buried
under the dust, ashes, and corruption of personal thoughts, of base
fears, of selfish desires.

"I will do it!"

Not till he heard his own voice did he know that he had spoken. It
startled him. He stood up. The knuckles of his hand, somewhat behind
him, were resting on the edge of the table as he remained still with one
foot advanced, his lips a little open, and thought: It would not do to
fool about with Lingard. But I must risk it. It's the only way I can
see. I must tell her. She has some little sense. I wish they were a
thousand miles off already. A hundred thousand miles. I do. And if
it fails. And she blabs out then to Lingard? She seemed a fool. No;
probably they will get away. And if they did, would Lingard believe me?
Yes. I never lied to him. He would believe. I don't know . . . Perhaps
he won't. . . . "I must do it. Must!" he argued aloud to himself.

For a long time he stood still, looking before him with an intense gaze,
a gaze rapt and immobile, that seemed to watch the minute quivering of a
delicate balance, coming to a rest.

To the left of him, in the whitewashed wall of the house that formed
the back of the verandah, there was a closed door. Black letters were
painted on it proclaiming the fact that behind that door there was the
office of Lingard & Co. The interior had been furnished by Lingard when
he had built the house for his adopted daughter and her husband, and it
had been furnished with reckless prodigality. There was an office desk,
a revolving chair, bookshelves, a safe: all to humour the weakness of
Almayer, who thought all those paraphernalia necessary to successful
trading. Lingard had laughed, but had taken immense trouble to get the
things. It pleased him to make his protege, his adopted son-in-law,
happy. It had been the sensation of Sambir some five years ago. While
the things were being landed, the whole settlement literally lived on
the river bank in front of the Rajah Laut's house, to look, to wonder,
to admire. . . . What a big meza, with many boxes fitted all over it and
under it! What did the white man do with such a table? And look, look, O
Brothers! There is a green square box, with a gold plate on it, a box
so heavy that those twenty men cannot drag it up the bank. Let us go,
brothers, and help pull at the ropes, and perchance we may see what's
inside. Treasure, no doubt. Gold is heavy and hard to hold, O Brothers!
Let us go and earn a recompense from the fierce Rajah of the Sea who
shouts over there, with a red face. See! There is a man carrying a pile
of books from the boat! What a number of books. What were they for?
. . . And an old invalided jurumudi, who had travelled over many seas and
had heard holy men speak in far-off countries, explained to a small knot
of unsophisticated citizens of Sambir that those books were books of
magic--of magic that guides the white men's ships over the seas, that
gives them their wicked wisdom and their strength; of magic that makes
them great, powerful, and irresistible while they live, and--praise be
to Allah!--the victims of Satan, the slaves of Jehannum when they die.

And when he saw the room furnished, Almayer had felt proud. In his
exultation of an empty-headed quill-driver, he thought himself, by the
virtue of that furniture, at the head of a serious business. He had
sold himself to Lingard for these things--married the Malay girl of his
adoption for the reward of these things and of the great wealth that
must necessarily follow upon conscientious book-keeping. He found out
very soon that trade in Sambir meant something entirely different. He
could not guide Patalolo, control the irrepressible old Sahamin, or
restrain the youthful vagaries of the fierce Bahassoen with pen, ink,
and paper. He found no successful magic in the blank pages of his
ledgers; and gradually he lost his old point of view in the saner
appreciation of his situation. The room known as the office became
neglected then like a temple of an exploded superstition. At first, when
his wife reverted to her original savagery, Almayer, now and again, had
sought refuge from her there; but after their child began to speak, to
know him, he became braver, for he found courage and consolation in his
unreasoning and fierce affection for his daughter--in the impenetrable
mantle of selfishness he wrapped round both their lives: round himself,
and that young life that was also his.

When Lingard ordered him to receive Joanna into his house, he had a
truckle bed put into the office--the only room he could spare. The big
office desk was pushed on one side, and Joanna came with her little
shabby trunk and with her child and took possession in her dreamy,
slack, half-asleep way; took possession of the dust, dirt, and squalor,
where she appeared naturally at home, where she dragged a melancholy and
dull existence; an existence made up of sad remorse and frightened hope,
amongst the hopeless disorder--the senseless and vain decay of all these
emblems of civilized commerce. Bits of white stuff; rags yellow, pink,
blue: rags limp, brilliant and soiled, trailed on the floor, lay on the
desk amongst the sombre covers of books soiled, grimy, but stiff-backed,
in virtue, perhaps, of their European origin. The biggest set of
bookshelves was partly hidden by a petticoat, the waistband of which was
caught upon the back of a slender book pulled a little out of the row so
as to make an improvised clothespeg. The folding canvas bedstead stood
nearly in the middle of the room, stood anyhow, parallel to no wall, as
if it had been, in the process of transportation to some remote place,
dropped casually there by tired bearers. And on the tumbled blankets
that lay in a disordered heap on its edge, Joanna sat almost all day
with her stockingless feet upon one of the bed pillows that were somehow
always kicking about the floor. She sat there, vaguely tormented
at times by the thought of her absent husband, but most of the time
thinking tearfully of nothing at all, looking with swimming eyes at
her little son--at the big-headed, pasty-faced, and sickly Louis
Willems--who rolled a glass inkstand, solid with dried ink, about the
floor, and tottered after it with the portentous gravity of demeanour
and absolute absorption by the business in hand that characterize the
pursuits of early childhood. Through the half-open shutter a ray of
sunlight, a ray merciless and crude, came into the room, beat in the
early morning upon the safe in the far-off corner, then, travelling
against the sun, cut at midday the big desk in two with its solid and
clean-edged brilliance; with its hot brilliance in which a swarm of
flies hovered in dancing flight over some dirty plate forgotten there
amongst yellow papers for many a day. And towards the evening the
cynical ray seemed to cling to the ragged petticoat, lingered on it with
wicked enjoyment of that misery it had exposed all day; lingered on the
corner of the dusty bookshelf, in a red glow intense and mocking, till
it was suddenly snatched by the setting sun out of the way of the coming
night. And the night entered the room. The night abrupt, impenetrable
and all-filling with its flood of darkness; the night cool and merciful;
the blind night that saw nothing, but could hear the fretful whimpering
of the child, the creak of the bedstead, Joanna's deep sighs as she
turned over, sleepless, in the confused conviction of her wickedness,
thinking of that man masterful, fair-headed, and strong--a man hard
perhaps, but her husband; her clever and handsome husband to whom she
had acted so cruelly on the advice of bad people, if her own people; and
of her poor, dear, deceived mother.