第6章 PART I(5)
He took to wandering about the settlement.The afterwards flourishing Sambir was born in a swamp and passed its youth in malodorous mud.The houses crowded the bank,and,as if to get away from the unhealthy shore,stepped boldly into the river,shooting over it in a close row of bamboo platforms elevated on high piles,amongst which the current below spoke in a soft and unceasing plaint of murmuring eddies.There was only one path in the whole town and it ran at the back of the houses along the succession of blackened circular patches that marked the place of the household fires.On the other side the virgin forest bordered the path,coming close to it,as if to provoke impudently any passer-by to the solution of the gloomy problem of its depths.Nobody would accept the deceptive challenge.There were only a few feeble attempts at a clearing here and there,but the ground was low and the river,retiring after its yearly floods,left on each a gradually diminishing mudhole,where the imported buffaloes of the Bugis settlers wallowed happily during the heat of the day.When Willems walked on the path,the indolent men stretched on the shady side of the houses looked at him with calm curiosity,the women busy round the cooking fires would send after him wondering and timid glances,while the children would only look once,and then run away yelling with fright at the horrible appearance of the man with a red and white face.These manifestations of childish disgust and fear stung Willems with a sense of absurd humiliation;he sought in his walks the comparative solitude of the rudimentary clearings,but the very buffaloes snorted with alarm at his sight,scrambled lumberingly out of the cool mud and stared wildly in a compact herd at him as he tried to slink unperceived along the edge of the forest.One day,at some unguarded and sudden movement of his,the whole herd stampeded down the path,scattered the fires,sent the women flying with shrill cries,and left behind a track of smashed pots,trampled rice,overturned children,and a crowd of angry men brandishing sticks in loud-voiced pursuit.The innocent cause of that disturbance ran shamefacedly the gauntlet of black looks and unfriendly remarks,and hastily sought refuge in Almayer's campong.After that he left the settlement alone.
Later,when the enforced confinement grew irksome,Willems took one of Almayer's many canoes and crossed the main branch of the Pantai in search of some solitary spot where he could hide his discouragement and his weariness.He skirted in his little craft the wall of tangled verdure,keeping in the dead water close to the bank where the spreading nipa palms nodded their broad leaves over his head as if in contemptuous pity of the wandering outcast.Here and there he could see the beginnings of chopped-out pathways,and,with the fixed idea of getting out of sight of the busy river,he would land and follow the narrow and winding path,only to find that it led nowhere,ending abruptly in the discouragement of thorny thickets.He would go back slowly,with a bitter sense of unreasonable disappointment and sadness;oppressed by the hot smell of earth,dampness,and decay in that forest which seemed to push him mercilessly back into the glittering sunshine of the river.And he would recommence paddling with tired arms to seek another opening,to find another deception.
As he paddled up to the point where the Rajah's stockade came down to the river,the nipas were left behind rattling their leaves over the brown water,and the big trees would appear on the bank,tall,strong,indifferent in the immense solidity of their life,which endures for ages,to that short and fleeting life in the heart of the man who crept painfully amongst their shadows in search of a refuge from the unceasing reproach of his thoughts.Amongst their smooth trunks a clear brook meandered for a time in twining lacets before it made up its mind to take a leap into the hurrying river,over the edge of the steep bank.
There was also a pathway there and it seemed frequented.Willems landed,and following the capricious promise of the track soon found himself in a comparatively clear space,where the confused tracery of sunlight fell through the branches and the foliage overhead,and lay on the stream that shone in an easy curve like a bright sword-blade dropped amongst the long and feathery grass.
Further on,the path continued,narrowed again in the thick undergrowth.At the end of the first turning Willems saw a flash of white and colour,a gleam of gold like a sun-ray lost in shadow,and a vision of blackness darker than the deepest shade of the forest.He stopped,surprised,and fancied he had heard light footsteps--growing lighter--ceasing.He looked around.
The grass on the bank of the stream trembled and a tremulous path of its shivering,silver-grey tops ran from the water to the beginning of the thicket.And yet there was not a breath of wind.Somebody kind passed there.He looked pensive while the tremor died out in a quick tremble under his eyes;and the grass stood high,unstirring,with drooping heads in the warm and motionless air.
He hurried on,driven by a suddenly awakened curiosity,and entered the narrow way between the bushes.At the next turn of the path he caught again the glimpse of coloured stuff and of a woman's black hair before him.He hastened his pace and came in full view of the object of his pursuit.The woman,who was carrying two bamboo vessels full of water,heard his footsteps,stopped,and putting the bamboos down half turned to look back.
Willems also stood still for a minute,then walked steadily on with a firm tread,while the woman moved aside to let him pass.
He kept his eyes fixed straight before him,yet almost unconsciously he took in every detail of the tall and graceful figure.As he approached her the woman tossed her head slightly back,and with a free gesture of her strong,round arm,caught up the mass of loose black hair and brought it over her shoulder and across the lower part of her face.The next moment he was passing her close,walking rigidly,like a man in a trance.He heard her rapid breathing and he felt the touch of a look darted at him from half-open eyes.It touched his brain and his heart together.It seemed to him to be something loud and stirring like a shout,silent and penetrating like an inspiration.The momentum of his motion carried him past her,but an invisible force made up of surprise and curiosity and desire spun him round as soon as he had passed.
She had taken up her burden already,with the intention of pursuing her path.His sudden movement arrested her at the first step,and again she stood straight,slim,expectant,with a readiness to dart away suggested in the light immobility of her pose.High above,the branches of the trees met in a transparent shimmer of waving green mist,through which the rain of yellow rays descended upon her head,streamed in glints down her black tresses,shone with the changing glow of liquid metal on her face,and lost itself in vanishing sparks in the sombre depths of her eyes that,wide open now,with enlarged pupils,looked steadily at the man in her path.And Willems stared at her,charmed with a charm that carries with it a sense of irreparable loss,tingling with that feeling which begins like a caress and ends in a blow,in that sudden hurt of a new emotion making its way into a human heart,with the brusque stirring of sleeping sensations awakening suddenly to the rush of new hopes,new fears,new desires--and to the flight of one's old self.
She moved a step forward and again halted.A breath of wind that came through the trees,but in Willems'fancy seemed to be driven by her moving figure,rippled in a hot wave round his body and scorched his face in a burning touch.He drew it in with a long breath,the last long breath of a soldier before the rush of battle,of a lover before he takes in his arms the adored woman;the breath that gives courage to confront the menace of death or the storm of passion.
Who was she?Where did she come from?Wonderingly he took his eyes off her face to look round at the serried trees of the forest that stood big and still and straight,as if watching him and her breathlessly.He had been baffled,repelled,almost frightened by the intensity of that tropical life which wants the sunshine but works in gloom;which seems to be all grace of colour and form,all brilliance,all smiles,but is only the blossoming of the dead;whose mystery holds the promise of joy and beauty,yet contains nothing but poison and decay.He had been frightened by the vague perception of danger before,but now,as he looked at that life again,his eyes seemed able to pierce the fantastic veil of creepers and leaves,to look past the solid trunks,to see through the forbidding gloom--and the mystery was disclosed--enchanting,subduing,beautiful.He looked at the woman.Through the checkered light between them she appeared to him with the impalpable distinctness of a dream.
The very spirit of that land of mysterious forests,standing before him like an apparition behind a transparent veil--a veil woven of sunbeams and shadows.
She had approached him still nearer.He felt a strange impatience within him at her advance.Confused thoughts rushed through his head,disordered,shapeless,stunning.Then he heard his own voice asking--"Who are you?"
"I am the daughter of the blind Omar,"she answered,in a low but steady tone."And you,"she went on,a little louder,"you are the white trader--the great man of this place.""Yes,"said Willems,holding her eyes with his in a sense of extreme effort,"Yes,I am white."Then he added,feeling as if he spoke about some other man,"But I am the outcast of my people."She listened to him gravely.Through the mesh of scattered hair her face looked like the face of a golden statue with living eyes.The heavy eyelids dropped slightly,and from between the long eyelashes she sent out a sidelong look:hard,keen,and narrow,like the gleam of sharp steel.Her lips were firm and composed in a graceful curve,but the distended nostrils,the upward poise of the half-averted head,gave to her whole person the expression of a wild and resentful defiance.
A shadow passed over Willems'face.He put his hand over his lips as if to keep back the words that wanted to come out in a surge of impulsive necessity,the outcome of dominant thought that rushes from the heart to the brain and must be spoken in the face of doubt,of danger,of fear,of destruction itself.
"You are beautiful,"he whispered.
She looked at him again with a glance that running in one quick flash of her eyes over his sunburnt features,his broad shoulders,his straight,tall,motionless figure,rested at last on the ground at his feet.Then she smiled.In the sombre beauty of her face that smile was like the first ray of light on a stormy daybreak that darts evanescent and pale through the gloomy clouds:the forerunner of sunrise and of thunder.
CHAPTER SEVEN
There are in our lives short periods which hold no place in memory but only as the recollection of a feeling.There is no remembrance of gesture,of action,of any outward manifestation of life;those are lost in the unearthly brilliance or in the unearthly gloom of such moments.We are absorbed in the contemplation of that something,within our bodies,which rejoices or suffers while the body goes on breathing,instinctively runs away or,not less instinctively,fights--perhaps dies.But death in such a moment is the privilege of the fortunate,it is a high and rare favour,a supreme grace.
Willems never remembered how and when he parted from Aissa.He caught himself drinking the muddy water out of the hollow of his hand,while his canoe was drifting in mid-stream past the last houses of Sambir.With his returning wits came the fear of something unknown that had taken possession of his heart,of something inarticulate and masterful which could not speak and would be obeyed.His first impulse was that of revolt.He would never go back there.Never!He looked round slowly at the brilliance of things in the deadly sunshine and took up his paddle!How changed everything seemed!The river was broader,the sky was higher.How fast the canoe flew under the strokes of his paddle!Since when had he acquired the strength of two men or more?He looked up and down the reach at the forests of the bank with a confused notion that with one sweep of his hand he could tumble all these trees into the stream.His face felt burning.He drank again,and shuddered with a depraved sense of pleasure at the after-taste of slime in the water.
It was late when he reached Almayer's house,but he crossed the dark and uneven courtyard,walking lightly in the radiance of some light of his own,invisible to other eyes.His host's sulky greeting jarred him like a sudden fall down a great height.He took his place at the table opposite Almayer and tried to speak cheerfully to his gloomy companion,but when the meal was ended and they sat smoking in silence he felt an abrupt discouragement,a lassitude in all his limbs,a sense of immense sadness as after some great and irreparable loss.The darkness of the night entered his heart,bringing with it doubt and hesitation and dull anger with himself and all the world.He had an impulse to shout horrible curses,to quarrel with Almayer,to do something violent.Quite without any immediate provocation he thought he would like to assault the wretched,sulky beast.He glanced at him ferociously from under his eyebrows.The unconscious Almayer smoked thoughtfully,planning to-morrow's work probably.The man's composure seemed to Willems an unpardonable insult.Why didn't that idiot talk to-night when he wanted him to?...on other nights he was ready enough to chatter.And such dull nonsense too!And Willems,trying hard to repress his own senseless rage,looked fixedly through the thick tobacco-smoke at the stained tablecloth.
They retired early,as usual,but in the middle of the night Willems leaped out of his hammock with a stifled execration and ran down the steps into the courtyard.The two night watchmen,who sat by a little fire talking together in a monotonous undertone,lifted their heads to look wonderingly at the discomposed features of the white man as he crossed the circle of light thrown out by their fire.He disappeared in the darkness and then came back again,passing them close,but with no sign of consciousness of their presence on his face.Backwards and forwards he paced,muttering to himself,and the two Malays,after a short consultation in whispers left the fire quietly,not thinking it safe to remain in the vicinity of a white man who behaved in such a strange manner.They retired round the corner of the godown and watched Willems curiously through the night,till the short daybreak was followed by the sudden blaze of the rising sun,and Almayer's establishment woke up to life and work.
As soon as he could get away unnoticed in the bustle of the busy riverside,Willems crossed the river on his way to the place where he had met Aissa.He threw himself down in the grass by the side of the brook and listened for the sound of her footsteps.The brilliant light of day fell through the irregular opening in the high branches of the trees and streamed down,softened,amongst the shadows of big trunks.Here and there a narrow sunbeam touched the rugged bark of a tree with a golden splash,sparkled on the leaping water of the brook,or rested on a leaf that stood out,shimmering and distinct,on the monotonous background of sombre green tints.The clear gap of blue above his head was crossed by the quick flight of white rice-birds whose wings flashed in the sunlight,while through it the heat poured down from the sky,clung about the steaming earth,rolled among the trees,and wrapped up Willems in the soft and odorous folds of air heavy with the faint scent of blossoms and with the acrid smell of decaying life.And in that atmosphere of Nature's workshop Willems felt soothed and lulled into forgetfulness of his past,into indifference as to his future.The recollections of his triumphs,of his wrongs and of his ambition vanished in that warmth,which seemed to melt all regrets,all hope,all anger,all strength out of his heart.And he lay there,dreamily contented,in the tepid and perfumed shelter,thinking of Aissa's eyes;recalling the sound of her voice,the quiver of her lips--her frowns and her smile.
She came,of course.To her he was something new,unknown and strange.He was bigger,stronger than any man she had seen before,and altogether different from all those she knew.He was of the victorious race.With a vivid remembrance of the great catastrophe of her life he appeared to her with all the fascination of a great and dangerous thing;of a terror vanquished,surmounted,made a plaything of.They spoke with just such a deep voice--those victorious men;they looked with just such hard blue eyes at their enemies.And she made that voice speak softly to her,those eyes look tenderly at her face!
He was indeed a man.She could not understand all he told her of his life,but the fragments she understood she made up for herself into a story of a man great amongst his own people,valorous and unfortunate;an undaunted fugitive dreaming of vengeance against his enemies.He had all the attractiveness of the vague and the unknown--of the unforeseen and of the sudden;of a being strong,dangerous,alive,and human,ready to be enslaved.
She felt that he was ready.She felt it with the unerring intuition of a primitive woman confronted by a simple impulse.
Day after day,when they met and she stood a little way off,listening to his words,holding him with her look,the undefined terror of the new conquest became faint and blurred like the memory of a dream,and the certitude grew distinct,and convincing,and visible to the eyes like some material thing in full sunlight.It was a deep joy,a great pride,a tangible sweetness that seemed to leave the taste of honey on her lips.
He lay stretched at her feet without moving,for he knew from experience how a slight movement of his could frighten her away in those first days of their intercourse.He lay very quiet,with all the ardour of his desire ringing in his voice and shining in his eyes,whilst his body was still,like death itself.And he looked at her,standing above him,her head lost in the shadow of broad and graceful leaves that touched her cheek;while the slender spikes of pale green orchids streamed down from amongst the boughs and mingled with the black hair that framed her face,as if all those plants claimed her for their own--the animated and brilliant flower of all that exuberant life which,born in gloom,struggles for ever towards the sunshine.
Every day she came a little nearer.He watched her slow progress--the gradual taming of that woman by the words of his love.It was the monotonous song of praise and desire that,commencing at creation,wraps up the world like an atmosphere and shall end only in the end of all things--when there are no lips to sing and no ears to hear.He told her that she was beautiful and desirable,and he repeated it again and again;for when he told her that,he had said all there was within him--he had expressed his only thought,his only feeling.And he watched the startled look of wonder and mistrust vanish from her face with the passing days,her eyes soften,the smile dwell longer and longer on her lips;a smile as of one charmed by a delightful dream;with the slight exaltation of intoxicating triumph lurking in its dawning tenderness.
And while she was near there was nothing in the whole world--for that idle man--but her look and her smile.Nothing in the past,nothing in the future;and in the present only the luminous fact of her existence.But in the sudden darkness of her going he would be left weak and helpless,as though despoiled violently of all that was himself.He who had lived all his life with no preoccupation but that of his own career,contemptuously indifferent to all feminine influence,full of scorn for men that would submit to it,if ever so little;he,so strong,so superior even in his errors,realized at last that his very individuality was snatched from within himself by the hand of a woman.Where was the assurance and pride of his cleverness;the belief in success,the anger of failure,the wish to retrieve his fortune,the certitude of his ability to accomplish it yet?Gone.All gone.All that had been a man within him was gone,and there remained only the trouble of his heart--that heart which had become a contemptible thing;which could be fluttered by a look or a smile,tormented by a word,soothed by a promise.
When the longed-for day came at last,when she sank on the grass by his side and with a quick gesture took his hand in hers,he sat up suddenly with the movement and look of a man awakened by the crash of his own falling house.All his blood,all his sensation,all his life seemed to rush into that hand leaving him without strength,in a cold shiver,in the sudden clamminess and collapse as of a deadly gun-shot wound.He flung her hand away brutally,like something burning,and sat motionless,his head fallen forward,staring on the ground and catching his breath in painful gasps.His impulse of fear and apparent horror did not dismay her in the least.Her face was grave and her eyes looked seriously at him.Her fingers touched the hair of his temple,ran in a light caress down his cheek,twisted gently the end of his long moustache:and while he sat in the tremor of that contact she ran off with startling fleetness and disappeared in a peal of clear laughter,in the stir of grass,in the nod of young twigs growing over the path;leaving behind only a vanishing trail of motion and sound.
He scrambled to his feet slowly and painfully,like a man with a burden on his shoulders,and walked towards the riverside.He hugged to his breast the recollection of his fear and of his delight,but told himself seriously over and over again that this must be the end of that adventure.After shoving off his canoe into the stream he lifted his eyes to the bank and gazed at it long and steadily,as if taking his last look at a place of charming memories.He marched up to Almayer's house with the concentrated expression and the determined step of a man who had just taken a momentous resolution.His face was set and rigid,his gestures and movements were guarded and slow.He was keeping a tight hand on himself.A very tight hand.He had a vivid illusion--as vivid as reality almost--of being in charge of a slippery prisoner.He sat opposite Almayer during that dinner--which was their last meal together--with a perfectly calm face and within him a growing terror of escape from his own self.
Now and then he would grasp the edge of the table and set his teeth hard in a sudden wave of acute despair,like one who,falling down a smooth and rapid declivity that ends in a precipice,digs his finger nails into the yielding surface and feels himself slipping helplessly to inevitable destruction.
Then,abruptly,came a relaxation of his muscles,the giving way of his will.Something seemed to snap in his head,and that wish,that idea kept back during all those hours,darted into his brain with the heat and noise of a conflagration.He must see her!See her at once!Go now!To-night!He had the raging regret of the lost hour,of every passing moment.There was no thought of resistance now.Yet with the instinctive fear of the irrevocable,with the innate falseness of the human heart,he wanted to keep open the way of retreat.He had never absented himself during the night.What did Almayer know?What would Almayer think?Better ask him for the gun.A moonlight night..
Look for deer...A colourable pretext.He would lie to Almayer.What did it matter!He lied to himself every minute of his life.And for what?For a woman.And such...
Almayer's answer showed him that deception was useless.
Everything gets to be known,even in this place.Well,he did not care.Cared for nothing but for the lost seconds.What if he should suddenly die.Die before he saw her.Before he could.
As,with the sound of Almayer's laughter in his ears,he urged his canoe in a slanting course across the rapid current,he tried to tell himself that he could return at any moment.He would just go and look at the place where they used to meet,at the tree under which he lay when she took his hand,at the spot where she sat by his side.Just go there and then return--nothing more;but when his little skiff touched the bank he leaped out,forgetting the painter,and the canoe hung for a moment amongst the bushes and then swung out of sight before he had time to dash into the water and secure it.He was thunderstruck at first.
Now he could not go back unless he called up the Rajah's people to get a boat and rowers--and the way to Patalolo's campong led past Aissa's house!
He went up the path with the eager eyes and reluctant steps of a man pursuing a phantom,and when he found himself at a place where a narrow track branched off to the left towards Omar's clearing he stood still,with a look of strained attention on his face as if listening to a far-off voice--the voice of his fate.
It was a sound inarticulate but full of meaning;and following it there came a rending and tearing within his breast.He twisted his fingers together,and the joints of his hands and arms cracked.On his forehead the perspiration stood out in small pearly drops.He looked round wildly.Above the shapeless darkness of the forest undergrowth rose the treetops with their high boughs and leaves standing out black on the pale sky--like fragments of night floating on moonbeams.Under his feet warm steam rose from the heated earth.Round him there was a great silence.
He was looking round for help.This silence,this immobility of his surroundings seemed to him a cold rebuke,a stern refusal,a cruel unconcern.There was no safety outside of himself--and in himself there was no refuge;there was only the image of that woman.He had a sudden moment of lucidity--of that cruel lucidity that comes once in life to the most benighted.He seemed to see what went on within him,and was horrified at the strange sight.
He,a white man whose worst fault till then had been a little want of judgment and too much confidence in the rectitude of his kind!That woman was a complete savage,and...He tried to tell himself that the thing was of no consequence.It was a vain effort.The novelty of the sensations he had never experienced before in the slightest degree,yet had despised on hearsay from his safe position of a civilized man,destroyed his courage.He was disappointed with himself.He seemed to be surrendering to a wild creature the unstained purity of his life,of his race,of his civilization.He had a notion of being lost amongst shapeless things that were dangerous and ghastly.He struggled with the sense of certain defeat--lost his footing--fell back into the darkness.With a faint cry and an upward throw of his arms he gave up as a tired swimmer gives up:because the swamped craft is gone from under his feet;because the night is dark and the shore is far--because death is better than strife.