An Outcast of the Islands

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


Tom Lingard was a master, a lover, a servant of the sea. The sea took
him young, fashioned him body and soul; gave him his fierce aspect, his
loud voice, his fearless eyes, his stupidly guileless heart. Generously
it gave him his absurd faith in himself, his universal love of creation,
his wide indulgence, his contemptuous severity, his straightforward
simplicity of motive and honesty of aim. Having made him what he was,
womanlike, the sea served him humbly and let him bask unharmed in the
sunshine of its terribly uncertain favour. Tom Lingard grew rich on the
sea and by the sea. He loved it with the ardent affection of a lover,
he made light of it with the assurance of perfect mastery, he feared it
with the wise fear of a brave man, and he took liberties with it as a
spoiled child might do with a paternal and good-natured ogre. He was
grateful to it, with the gratitude of an honest heart. His greatest
pride lay in his profound conviction of its faithfulness--in the deep
sense of his unerring knowledge of its treachery.

The little brig Flash was the instrument of Lingard's fortune. They came
north together--both young--out of an Australian port, and after a very
few years there was not a white man in the islands, from Palembang to
Ternate, from Ombawa to Palawan, that did not know Captain Tom and
his lucky craft. He was liked for his reckless generosity, for his
unswerving honesty, and at first was a little feared on account of his
violent temper. Very soon, however, they found him out, and the word
went round that Captain Tom's fury was less dangerous than many a man's
smile. He prospered greatly. After his first--and successful--fight with
the sea robbers, when he rescued, as rumour had it, the yacht of some
big wig from home, somewhere down Carimata way, his great popularity
began. As years went on it grew apace. Always visiting out-of-the-way
places of that part of the world, always in search of new markets for
his cargoes--not so much for profit as for the pleasure of finding
them--he soon became known to the Malays, and by his successful
recklessness in several encounters with pirates, established the
terror of his name. Those white men with whom he had business, and who
naturally were on the look-out for his weaknesses, could easily see that
it was enough to give him his Malay title to flatter him greatly. So
when there was anything to be gained by it, and sometimes out of pure
and unprofitable good nature, they would drop the ceremonious "Captain
Lingard" and address him half seriously as Rajah Laut--the King of the
Sea.

He carried the name bravely on his broad shoulders. He had carried it
many years already when the boy Willems ran barefooted on the deck of
the ship Kosmopoliet IV. in Samarang roads, looking with innocent eyes
on the strange shore and objurgating his immediate surroundings with
blasphemous lips, while his childish brain worked upon the heroic idea
of running away. From the poop of the Flash Lingard saw in the early
morning the Dutch ship get lumberingly under weigh, bound for the
eastern ports. Very late in the evening of the same day he stood on the
quay of the landing canal, ready to go on board of his brig. The night
was starry and clear; the little custom-house building was shut up, and
as the gharry that brought him down disappeared up the long avenue of
dusty trees leading to the town, Lingard thought himself alone on the
quay. He roused up his sleeping boat-crew and stood waiting for them to
get ready, when he felt a tug at his coat and a thin voice said, very
distinctly--

"English captain."

Lingard turned round quickly, and what seemed to be a very lean boy
jumped back with commendable activity.

"Who are you? Where do you spring from?" asked Lingard, in startled
surprise.

From a safe distance the boy pointed toward a cargo lighter moored to
the quay.

"Been hiding there, have you?" said Lingard. "Well, what do you want?
Speak out, confound you. You did not come here to scare me to death, for
fun, did you?"

The boy tried to explain in imperfect English, but very soon Lingard
interrupted him.

"I see," he exclaimed, "you ran away from the big ship that sailed this
morning. Well, why don't you go to your countrymen here?"

"Ship gone only a little way--to Sourabaya. Make me go back to the
ship," explained the boy.

"Best thing for you," affirmed Lingard with conviction.

"No," retorted the boy; "me want stop here; not want go home. Get money
here; home no good."

"This beats all my going a-fishing," commented the astonished Lingard.
"It's money you want? Well! well! And you were not afraid to run away,
you bag of bones, you!"

The boy intimated that he was frightened of nothing but of being sent
back to the ship. Lingard looked at him in meditative silence.

"Come closer," he said at last. He took the boy by the chin, and turning
up his face gave him a searching look. "How old are you?"

"Seventeen."

"There's not much of you for seventeen. Are you hungry?"

"A little."

"Will you come with me, in that brig there?"

The boy moved without a word towards the boat and scrambled into the
bows.

"Knows his place," muttered Lingard to himself as he stepped heavily
into the stern sheets and took up the yoke lines. "Give way there."

The Malay boat crew lay back together, and the gig sprang away from the
quay heading towards the brig's riding light.

Such was the beginning of Willems' career.

Lingard learned in half an hour all that there was of Willems'
commonplace story. Father outdoor clerk of some ship-broker in
Rotterdam; mother dead. The boy quick in learning, but idle in school.
The straitened circumstances in the house filled with small brothers and
sisters, sufficiently clothed and fed but otherwise running wild, while
the disconsolate widower tramped about all day in a shabby overcoat and
imperfect boots on the muddy quays, and in the evening piloted wearily
the half-intoxicated foreign skippers amongst the places of cheap
delights, returning home late, sick with too much smoking and
drinking--for company's sake--with these men, who expected such
attentions in the way of business. Then the offer of the good-natured
captain of Kosmopoliet IV., who was pleased to do something for the
patient and obliging fellow; young Willems' great joy, his still greater
disappointment with the sea that looked so charming from afar, but
proved so hard and exacting on closer acquaintance--and then this
running away by a sudden impulse. The boy was hopelessly at variance
with the spirit of the sea. He had an instinctive contempt for the
honest simplicity of that work which led to nothing he cared for.
Lingard soon found this out. He offered to send him home in an English
ship, but the boy begged hard to be permitted to remain. He wrote a
beautiful hand, became soon perfect in English, was quick at figures;
and Lingard made him useful in that way. As he grew older his trading
instincts developed themselves astonishingly, and Lingard left him
often to trade in one island or another while he, himself, made an
intermediate trip to some out-of-the-way place. On Willems expressing
a wish to that effect, Lingard let him enter Hudig's service. He felt
a little sore at that abandonment because he had attached himself, in
a way, to his protege. Still he was proud of him, and spoke up for him
loyally. At first it was, "Smart boy that--never make a seaman though."
Then when Willems was helping in the trading he referred to him as "that
clever young fellow." Later when Willems became the confidential agent
of Hudig, employed in many a delicate affair, the simple-hearted old
seaman would point an admiring finger at his back and whisper to whoever
stood near at the moment, "Long-headed chap that; deuced long-headed
chap. Look at him. Confidential man of old Hudig. I picked him up in a
ditch, you may say, like a starved cat. Skin and bone. 'Pon my word I
did. And now he knows more than I do about island trading. Fact. I am
not joking. More than I do," he would repeat, seriously, with innocent
pride in his honest eyes.

From the safe elevation of his commercial successes Willems patronized
Lingard. He had a liking for his benefactor, not unmixed with some
disdain for the crude directness of the old fellow's methods of conduct.
There were, however, certain sides of Lingard's character for which
Willems felt a qualified respect. The talkative seaman knew how to
be silent on certain matters that to Willems were very interesting.
Besides, Lingard was rich, and that in itself was enough to compel
Willems' unwilling admiration. In his confidential chats with Hudig,
Willems generally alluded to the benevolent Englishman as the "lucky
old fool" in a very distinct tone of vexation; Hudig would grunt an
unqualified assent, and then the two would look at each other in a
sudden immobility of pupils fixed by a stare of unexpressed thought.

"You can't find out where he gets all that india-rubber, hey Willems?"
Hudig would ask at last, turning away and bending over the papers on his
desk.

"No, Mr. Hudig. Not yet. But I am trying," was Willems' invariable
reply, delivered with a ring of regretful deprecation.

"Try! Always try! You may try! You think yourself clever perhaps,"
rumbled on Hudig, without looking up. "I have been trading with him
twenty--thirty years now. The old fox. And I have tried. Bah!"

He stretched out a short, podgy leg and contemplated the bare instep and
the grass slipper hanging by the toes. "You can't make him drunk?" he
would add, after a pause of stertorous breathing.

"No, Mr. Hudig, I can't really," protested Willems, earnestly.

"Well, don't try. I know him. Don't try," advised the master, and,
bending again over his desk, his staring bloodshot eyes close to the
paper, he would go on tracing laboriously with his thick fingers the
slim unsteady letters of his correspondence, while Willems waited
respectfully for his further good pleasure before asking, with great
deference--

"Any orders, Mr. Hudig?"

"Hm! yes. Go to Bun-Hin yourself and see the dollars of that payment
counted and packed, and have them put on board the mail-boat for
Ternate. She's due here this afternoon."

"Yes, Mr. Hudig."

"And, look here. If the boat is late, leave the case in Bun-Hin's godown
till to-morrow. Seal it up. Eight seals as usual. Don't take it away
till the boat is here."

"No, Mr. Hudig."

"And don't forget about these opium cases. It's for to-night. Use my own
boatmen. Transship them from the Caroline to the Arab barque," went
on the master in his hoarse undertone. "And don't you come to me with
another story of a case dropped overboard like last time," he added,
with sudden ferocity, looking up at his confidential clerk.

"No, Mr. Hudig. I will take care."

"That's all. Tell that pig as you go out that if he doesn't make the
punkah go a little better I will break every bone in his body," finished
up Hudig, wiping his purple face with a red silk handkerchief nearly as
big as a counterpane.

Noiselessly Willems went out, shutting carefully behind him the little
green door through which he passed to the warehouse. Hudig, pen in hand,
listened to him bullying the punkah boy with profane violence, born
of unbounded zeal for the master's comfort, before he returned to his
writing amid the rustling of papers fluttering in the wind sent down by
the punkah that waved in wide sweeps above his head.

Willems would nod familiarly to Mr. Vinck, who had his desk close to the
little door of the private office, and march down the warehouse with an
important air. Mr. Vinck--extreme dislike lurking in every wrinkle of
his gentlemanly countenance--would follow with his eyes the white figure
flitting in the gloom amongst the piles of bales and cases till it
passed out through the big archway into the glare of the street.



CHAPTER THREE


The opportunity and the temptation were too much for Willems, and under
the pressure of sudden necessity he abused that trust which was his
pride, the perpetual sign of his cleverness and a load too heavy for him
to carry. A run of bad luck at cards, the failure of a small speculation
undertaken on his own account, an unexpected demand for money from one
or another member of the Da Souza family--and almost before he was well
aware of it he was off the path of his peculiar honesty. It was such a
faint and ill-defined track that it took him some time to find out how
far he had strayed amongst the brambles of the dangerous wilderness he
had been skirting for so many years, without any other guide than his
own convenience and that doctrine of success which he had found for
himself in the book of life--in those interesting chapters that the
Devil has been permitted to write in it, to test the sharpness of men's
eyesight and the steadfastness of their hearts. For one short, dark and
solitary moment he was dismayed, but he had that courage that will not
scale heights, yet will wade bravely through the mud--if there be no
other road. He applied himself to the task of restitution, and devoted
himself to the duty of not being found out. On his thirtieth birthday he
had almost accomplished the task--and the duty had been faithfully and
cleverly performed. He saw himself safe. Again he could look hopefully
towards the goal of his legitimate ambition. Nobody would dare to
suspect him, and in a few days there would be nothing to suspect. He
was elated. He did not know that his prosperity had touched then its
high-water mark, and that the tide was already on the turn.

Two days afterwards he knew. Mr. Vinck, hearing the rattle of the
door-handle, jumped up from his desk--where he had been tremulously
listening to the loud voices in the private office--and buried his face
in the big safe with nervous haste. For the last time Willems passed
through the little green door leading to Hudig's sanctum, which, during
the past half-hour, might have been taken--from the fiendish noise
within--for the cavern of some wild beast. Willems' troubled eyes took
in the quick impression of men and things as he came out from the place
of his humiliation. He saw the scared expression of the punkah boy; the
Chinamen tellers sitting on their heels with unmovable faces turned up
blankly towards him while their arrested hands hovered over the
little piles of bright guilders ranged on the floor; Mr. Vinck's
shoulder-blades with the fleshy rims of two red ears above. He saw the
long avenue of gin cases stretching from where he stood to the arched
doorway beyond which he would be able to breathe perhaps. A thin rope's
end lay across his path and he saw it distinctly, yet stumbled heavily
over it as if it had been a bar of iron. Then he found himself in the
street at last, but could not find air enough to fill his lungs. He
walked towards his home, gasping.

As the sound of Hudig's insults that lingered in his ears grew fainter
by the lapse of time, the feeling of shame was replaced slowly by a
passion of anger against himself and still more against the stupid
concourse of circumstances that had driven him into his idiotic
indiscretion. Idiotic indiscretion; that is how he defined his guilt
to himself. Could there be anything worse from the point of view of his
undeniable cleverness? What a fatal aberration of an acute mind! He did
not recognize himself there. He must have been mad. That's it. A sudden
gust of madness. And now the work of long years was destroyed utterly.
What would become of him?

Before he could answer that question he found himself in the garden
before his house, Hudig's wedding gift. He looked at it with a vague
surprise to find it there. His past was so utterly gone from him that
the dwelling which belonged to it appeared to him incongruous standing
there intact, neat, and cheerful in the sunshine of the hot afternoon.
The house was a pretty little structure all doors and windows,
surrounded on all sides by the deep verandah supported on slender
columns clothed in the green foliage of creepers, which also fringed the
overhanging eaves of the high-pitched roof. Slowly, Willems mounted the
dozen steps that led to the verandah. He paused at every step. He
must tell his wife. He felt frightened at the prospect, and his alarm
dismayed him. Frightened to face her! Nothing could give him a better
measure of the greatness of the change around him, and in him. Another
man--and another life with the faith in himself gone. He could not be
worth much if he was afraid to face that woman.

He dared not enter the house through the open door of the dining-room,
but stood irresolute by the little work-table where trailed a white
piece of calico, with a needle stuck in it, as if the work had been left
hurriedly. The pink-crested cockatoo started, on his appearance, into
clumsy activity and began to climb laboriously up and down his perch,
calling "Joanna" with indistinct loudness and a persistent screech
that prolonged the last syllable of the name as if in a peal of insane
laughter. The screen in the doorway moved gently once or twice in the
breeze, and each time Willems started slightly, expecting his wife, but
he never lifted his eyes, although straining his ears for the sound of
her footsteps. Gradually he lost himself in his thoughts, in the endless
speculation as to the manner in which she would receive his news--and
his orders. In this preoccupation he almost forgot the fear of her
presence. No doubt she will cry, she will lament, she will be helpless
and frightened and passive as ever. And he would have to drag that limp
weight on and on through the darkness of a spoiled life. Horrible!
Of course he could not abandon her and the child to certain misery or
possible starvation. The wife and the child of Willems. Willems the
successful, the smart; Willems the conf . . . . Pah! And what was
Willems now? Willems the. . . . He strangled the half-born thought, and
cleared his throat to stifle a groan. Ah! Won't they talk to-night in
the billiard-room--his world, where he had been first--all those men to
whom he had been so superciliously condescending. Won't they talk with
surprise, and affected regret, and grave faces, and wise nods. Some of
them owed him money, but he never pressed anybody. Not he. Willems, the
prince of good fellows, they called him. And now they will rejoice, no
doubt, at his downfall. A crowd of imbeciles. In his abasement he was
yet aware of his superiority over those fellows, who were merely honest
or simply not found out yet. A crowd of imbeciles! He shook his fist at
the evoked image of his friends, and the startled parrot fluttered its
wings and shrieked in desperate fright.

In a short glance upwards Willems saw his wife come round the corner of
the house. He lowered his eyelids quickly, and waited silently till she
came near and stood on the other side of the little table. He would
not look at her face, but he could see the red dressing-gown he knew so
well. She trailed through life in that red dressing-gown, with its row
of dirty blue bows down the front, stained, and hooked on awry; a torn
flounce at the bottom following her like a snake as she moved languidly
about, with her hair negligently caught up, and a tangled wisp
straggling untidily down her back. His gaze travelled upwards from bow
to bow, noticing those that hung only by a thread, but it did not
go beyond her chin. He looked at her lean throat, at the obtrusive
collarbone visible in the disarray of the upper part of her attire. He
saw the thin arm and the bony hand clasping the child she carried,
and he felt an immense distaste for those encumbrances of his life. He
waited for her to say something, but as he felt her eyes rest on him in
unbroken silence he sighed and began to speak.

It was a hard task. He spoke slowly, lingering amongst the memories of
this early life in his reluctance to confess that this was the end of
it and the beginning of a less splendid existence. In his conviction of
having made her happiness in the full satisfaction of all material wants
he never doubted for a moment that she was ready to keep him company
on no matter how hard and stony a road. He was not elated by this
certitude. He had married her to please Hudig, and the greatness of his
sacrifice ought to have made her happy without any further exertion on
his part. She had years of glory as Willems' wife, and years of comfort,
of loyal care, and of such tenderness as she deserved. He had guarded
her carefully from any bodily hurt; and of any other suffering he had
no conception. The assertion of his superiority was only another benefit
conferred on her. All this was a matter of course, but he told her all
this so as to bring vividly before her the greatness of her loss. She
was so dull of understanding that she would not grasp it else. And now
it was at an end. They would have to go. Leave this house, leave
this island, go far away where he was unknown. To the English
Strait-Settlements perhaps. He would find an opening there for his
abilities--and juster men to deal with than old Hudig. He laughed
bitterly.

"You have the money I left at home this morning, Joanna?" he asked. "We
will want it all now."

As he spoke those words he thought he was a fine fellow. Nothing new
that. Still, he surpassed there his own expectations. Hang it all, there
are sacred things in life, after all. The marriage tie was one of them,
and he was not the man to break it. The solidity of his principles
caused him great satisfaction, but he did not care to look at his wife,
for all that. He waited for her to speak. Then he would have to console
her; tell her not to be a crying fool; to get ready to go. Go where?
How? When? He shook his head. They must leave at once; that was the
principal thing. He felt a sudden need to hurry up his departure.

"Well, Joanna," he said, a little impatiently---"don't stand there in a
trance. Do you hear? We must. . . ."

He looked up at his wife, and whatever he was going to add remained
unspoken. She was staring at him with her big, slanting eyes, that
seemed to him twice their natural size. The child, its dirty little
face pressed to its mother's shoulder, was sleeping peacefully. The deep
silence of the house was not broken, but rather accentuated, by the
low mutter of the cockatoo, now very still on its perch. As Willems was
looking at Joanna her upper lip was drawn up on one side, giving to her
melancholy face a vicious expression altogether new to his experience.
He stepped back in his surprise.

"Oh! You great man!" she said distinctly, but in a voice that was hardly
above a whisper.

Those words, and still more her tone, stunned him as if somebody had
fired a gun close to his ear. He stared back at her stupidly.

"Oh! you great man!" she repeated slowly, glancing right and left as
if meditating a sudden escape. "And you think that I am going to starve
with you. You are nobody now. You think my mamma and Leonard would let
me go away? And with you! With you," she repeated scornfully, raising
her voice, which woke up the child and caused it to whimper feebly.

"Joanna!" exclaimed Willems.

"Do not speak to me. I have heard what I have waited for all these
years. You are less than dirt, you that have wiped your feet on me. I
have waited for this. I am not afraid now. I do not want you; do not
come near me. Ah-h!" she screamed shrilly, as he held out his hand in an
entreating gesture--"Ah! Keep off me! Keep off me! Keep off!"

She backed away, looking at him with eyes both angry and frightened.
Willems stared motionless, in dumb amazement at the mystery of anger and
revolt in the head of his wife. Why? What had he ever done to her? This
was the day of injustice indeed. First Hudig--and now his wife. He felt
a terror at this hate that had lived stealthily so near him for years.
He tried to speak, but she shrieked again, and it was like a needle
through his heart. Again he raised his hand.

"Help!" called Mrs. Willems, in a piercing voice. "Help!"

"Be quiet! You fool!" shouted Willems, trying to drown the noise of
his wife and child in his own angry accents and rattling violently the
little zinc table in his exasperation.

From under the house, where there were bathrooms and a tool closet,
appeared Leonard, a rusty iron bar in his hand. He called threateningly
from the bottom of the stairs.

"Do not hurt her, Mr. Willems. You are a savage. Not at all like we,
whites."

"You too!" said the bewildered Willems. "I haven't touched her. Is this
a madhouse?" He moved towards the stairs, and Leonard dropped the bar
with a clang and made for the gate of the compound. Willems turned back
to his wife.

"So you expected this," he said. "It is a conspiracy. Who's that sobbing
and groaning in the room? Some more of your precious family. Hey?"

She was more calm now, and putting hastily the crying child in the big
chair walked towards him with sudden fearlessness.

"My mother," she said, "my mother who came to defend me from you--man
from nowhere; a vagabond!"

"You did not call me a vagabond when you hung round my neck--before we
were married," said Willems, contemptuously.