Victory (Dover Thrift Editions), Page 3

CHAPTER TWO

  It was about this time that Heyst became associated with Morrison on terms

  about which people were in doubt. Some said he was a partner, others said he was a

  sort of paying guest, but the real truth of the matter was more complex. One day

  Heyst turned up in Timor. Why in Timor, of all places in the world, no one knows.

  Well, he was mooning about Delli, that highly pestilential place, possibly in search

  of some undiscovered facts, when he came in the street upon Morrison, who, in his

  way, was also an "enchanted" man. When you spoke to Morrison of going home—

  he was from Dorsetshire—he shuddered. He said it was dark and wet there; that it

  was like living with your head and shoulders in a moist gunny-bag. That was only

  his exaggerated style of talking. Morrison was "one of us." He was owner and

  master of the Capricorn, trading brig, and was understood to be doing well with

  her, except for the drawback of too much altruism. He was the dearly beloved

  friend of a quantity of God-forsaken villages up dark creeks and obscure bays,

  where he traded for produce. He would often sail, through awfully dangerous

  channels up to some miserable settlement, only to find a very hungry population

  clamorous for rice, and without so much "produce" between them as would have

  filled Morrison's suitcase. Amid general rejoicings, he would land the rice all the

  same, explain to the people that it was an advance, that they were in debt to him

  now; would preach to them energy and industry, and make an elaborate note in a

  pocket-diary which he always carried; and this would be the end of that transaction.

  I don't know if Morrison thought so, but the villagers had no doubt whatever about

  it. Whenever a coast village sighted the brig it would begin to beat all its gongs and

  hoist all its streamers, and all its girls would put flowers in their hair and the crowd

  would line the river bank, and Morrison would beam and glitter at all this

  excitement through his single eyeglass with an air of intense gratification. He was

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  tall and lantern-jawed, and clean-shaven, and looked like a barrister who had

  thrown his wig to the dogs.

  We used to remonstrate with him:

  "You will never see any of your advances if you go on like this, Morrison."

  He would put on a knowing air.

  "I shall squeeze them yet some day—never you fear. And that reminds me"—

  pulling out his inseparable pocketbook—"there's that So-and-So village. They are

  pretty well off again; I may just as well squeeze them to begin with."

  He would make a ferocious entry in the pocketbook.

  Memo: Squeeze the So-and-So village at the first time of calling.

  Then he would stick the pencil back and snap the elastic on with inflexible

  finality; but he never began the squeezing. Some men grumbled at him. He was

  spoiling the trade. Well, perhaps to a certain extent; not much. Most of the places

  he traded with were unknown not only to geography but also to the traders' special

  lore which is transmitted by word of mouth, without ostentation, and forms the

  stock of mysterious local knowledge. It was hinted also that Morrison had a wife in

  each and every one of them, but the majority of us repulsed these innuendoes with

  indignation. He was a true humanitarian and rather ascetic than otherwise.

  When Heyst met him in Delli, Morrison was walking along the street, his

  eyeglass tossed over his shoulder, his head down, with the hopeless aspect of those

  hardened tramps one sees on our roads trudging from workhouse to workhouse.

  Being hailed on the street he looked up with a wild worried expression. He was

  really in trouble. He had come the week before into Delli and the Portuguese

  authorities, on some pretence of irregularity in his papers, had inflicted a fine upon

  him and had arrested his brig.

  Morrison never had any spare cash in hand. With his system of trading it would

  have been strange if he had; and all these debts entered in the pocketbook weren't

  good enough to raise a millrei on—let alone a shilling. The Portuguese officials

  begged him not to distress himself. They gave him a week's grace, and then

  proposed to sell the brig at auction. This meant ruin for Morrison; and when Heyst

  hailed him across the street in his usual courtly tone, the week was nearly out.

  Heyst crossed over, and said with a slight bow, and in the manner of a prince

  addressing another prince on a private occasion:

  "What an unexpected pleasure. Would you have any objection to drink

  something with me in that infamous wine-shop over there? The sun is really too

  strong to talk in the street."

  The haggard Morrison followed obediently into a sombre, cool hovel which he

  would have distained to enter at any other time. He was distracted. He did not know

  what he was doing. You could have led him over the edge of a precipice just as

  easily as into that wine-shop. He sat down like an automaton. He was speechless,

  but he saw a glass full of rough red wine before him, and emptied it. Heyst

  meantime, politely watchful, had taken a seat opposite.

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  "You are in for a bout of fever, I fear," he said sympathetically.

  Poor Morrison's tongue was loosened at that.

  "Fever!" he cried. "Give me fever. Give me plague. They are diseases. One gets

  over them. But I am being murdered. I am being murdered by the Portuguese. The

  gang here downed me at last among them. I am to have my throat cut the day after

  tomorrow."

  In the face of this passion Heyst made, with his eyebrows, a slight motion of

  surprise which would not have been misplaced in a drawing-room. Morrison's

  despairing reserve had broken down. He had been wandering with a dry throat all

  over that miserable town of mud hovels, silent, with no soul to turn to in his

  distress, and positively maddened by his thoughts; and suddenly he had stumbled

  on a white man, figuratively and actually white—for Morrison refused to accept the

  racial whiteness of the Portuguese officials. He let himself go for the mere relief of

  violent speech, his elbows planted on the table, his eyes blood-shot, his voice

  nearly gone, the brim of his round pith hat shading an unshaven, livid face. His

  white clothes, which he had not taken off for three days, were dingy. He had

  already gone to the bad, past redemption. The sight was shocking to Heyst; but he

  let nothing of it appear in his hearing, concealing his impression under that

  consummate good-society manner of his. Polite attention, what's due from one

  gentleman listening to another, was what he showed; and, as usual, it was catching;

  so that Morrison pulled himself together and finished his narrative in a

  conversational tone, with a man-of-the-world air.

  "It's a villainous plot. Unluckily, one is helpless. That scoundrel Cousinho—

  Andreas, you know—has been coveting the brig for years. Naturally, I would never

  sell. She is not only my livelihood; she's my life. So he has hatched th
is pretty little

  plot with the chief of the customs. The sale, of course, will be a farce. There's no

  one here to bid. He will get the brig for a song—no, not even that—a line of a song.

  You have been some years now in the islands, Heyst. You know us all; you have

  seen how we live. Now you shall have the opportunity to see how some of us end;

  for it is the end, for me. I can't deceive myself any longer. You see it—don't your?"

  Morrison had pulled himself together, but one felt the snapping strain on his

  recovered self-possession. Heyst was beginning to say that he "could very well see

  all the bearings of this unfortunate—" when Morrison interrupted him jerkily.

  "Upon my word, I don't know why I have been telling you all this. I suppose

  seeing a thoroughly white man made it impossible to keep my trouble to myself.

  Words can't do it justice; but since I've told you so much I may as well tell you

  more. Listen. This morning on board, in my cabin I went down on my knees and

  prayed for help. I went down on my knees!"

  "You are a believer, Morrison?" asked Heyst with a distinct note of respect.

  "Surely I am not an infidel."

  Morrison was swiftly reproachful in his answer, and there came a pause,

  Morrison perhaps interrogating his conscience, and Heyst preserving a mien of

  unperturbed, polite interest.

  "I prayed like a child, of course. I believe in children praying—well, women,

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  too, but I rather think God expects men to be more self-reliant. I don't hold with

  a man everlastingly bothering the Almighty with his silly troubles. It seems such

  cheek. Anyhow, this morning I—I have never done any harm to any God's creature

  knowingly—I prayed. A sudden impulse—I went flop on my knees; so you may

  judge—"

  They were gazing earnestly into each other's eyes. Poor Morrison added, as a

  discouraging afterthought:

  "Only this is such a God-forsaken spot."

  Heyst inquired with a delicate intonation whether he might know the amount for

  which the brig was seized.

  Morrison suppressed an oath, and named curtly a sum which was in itself so

  insignificant that any other person than Heyst would have exclaimed at it. And

  even Heyst could hardly keep incredulity out of his politely modulated voice as he

  asked if it was a fact that Morrison had not that amount in hand.

  Morrison hadn't. He had only a little English gold, a few sovereigns, on board.

  He had left all his spare cash with the Tesmans, in Samarang, to meet certain bills

  which would fall due while he was away on his cruise. Anyhow, that money would

  not have been any more good to him than if it had been in the innermost depths of

  the infernal regions. He said all this brusquely. He looked with sudden disfavour at

  that noble forehead, at those great martial moustaches, at the tired eyes of the man

  sitting opposite him. Who the devil was he? What was he, Morrison, doing there,

  talking like this? Morrison knew no more of Heyst than the rest of us trading in the

  Archipelago did. Had the Swede suddenly risen and hit him on the nose, he could

  not have been taken more aback than when this stranger, this nondescript wanderer,

  said with a little bow across the table:

  "Oh! If that's the case I would be very happy if you'd allow me to be of use!"

  Morrison didn't understand. This was one of those things that don't happen—

  unheard of things. He had no real inkling of what it meant, till Heyst said

  definitely:

  "I can lend you the amount."

  "You have the money?" whispered Morrison. "Do you mean here, in your

  pocket?"

  "Yes, on me. Glad to be of use."

  Morrison, staring open-mouthed, groped over his shoulder for the cord of the

  eyeglass hanging down his back. When he found it, he stuck it in his eye hastily. It

  was as if he expected Heyst's usual white suit of the tropics to change into a shining

  garment, flowing down to his toes, and a pair of great dazzling wings to sprout out

  on the Swede's shoulders—and didn't want to miss a single detail of the

  transformation. But if Heyst was an angle from on high, sent in answer to prayer,

  he did not betray his heavenly origin by outward signs. So, instead of going on his

  knees, as he felt inclined to do, Morrison stretched out his hand, which Heyst

  grasped with formal alacrity and a polite murmur in which "Trifle—delighted—of

  service," could just be distinguished.

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  "Miracles do happen," thought the awestruck Morrison. To him, as to all of us in

  the Islands, this wandering Heyst, who didn't toil or spin visibly, seemed the very

  last person to be the agent of Providence in an affair concerned with money. The

  fact of his turning up in Timor or anywhere else was no more wonderful than the

  settling of a sparrow on one's window-sill at any given moment. But that he should

  carry a sum of money in his pocket seemed somehow inconceivable.

  So inconceivable that as they were trudging together through the sand of the

  roadway to the custom-house—another mud hovel—to pay the fine, Morrison

  broke into a cold sweat, stopped short, and exclaimed in faltering accents:

  "I say! You aren't joking, Heyst?"

  "Joking!" Heyst's blue eyes went hard as he turned them on the discomposed

  Morrison. "In what way, may I ask?" he continued with austere politeness.

  Morrison was abashed.

  "Forgive me, Heyst. You must have been sent by God in answer to my prayer.

  But I have been nearly off my chump for three days with worry; and it suddenly

  struck me: 'What if it's the Devil who has sent him?'"

  "I have no connection with the supernatural," said Heyst graciously, moving on.

  "Nobody has sent me. I just happened along."

  "I know better," contradicted Morrison. "I may be unworthy, but I have been

  heard. I know it. I feel it. For why should you offer—"

  Heyst inclined his head, as from respect for a conviction in which he could not

  share. But he stuck to his point by muttering that in the presence of an odious fact

  like this, it was natural—

  Later in the day, the fine paid, and the two of them on board the brig, from which

  the guard had been removed, Morrison who, besides, being a gentleman was also

  an honest fellow began to talk about repayment. He knew very well his inability to

  lay by any sum of money. It was partly the fault of circumstances and partly of his

  temperament; and it would have been very difficult to apportion the responsibility

  between the two. Even Morrison himself could not say, while confessing to the

  fact. With a worried air he ascribed it to fatality:

  "I don't know how it is that I've never been able to save. It's some sort of curse.

  There's always a bill or two to meet."

  He plunged his hand into his pocket for the famous notebook so well known in

  the islands, the fetish of his hopes, and fluttered the pages feverishly.

  "And yet—look," he went on. "There it is—more than five thousa
nd dollars

  owing. Surely that's something."

  He ceased suddenly. Heyst, who had been all the time trying to look as

  unconcerned as he could, made reassuring noises in his throat. But Morrison was

  not only honest. He was honourable, too; and on this stressful day, before this

  amazing emissary of Providence and in the revulsion of his feelings, he made his

  great renunciation. He cast off the abiding illusion of his existence.

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  "No. No. They are not good. I'll never be able to squeeze them. Never. I've been

  saying for years I would, but I give it up. I never really believed I could. Don't

  reckon on that, Heyst. I have robbed you."

  Poor Morrison actually laid his head on the cabin table, and remained in that

  crushed attitude while Heyst talked to him soothingly with the utmost courtesy. The

  Swede was as much distressed as Morrison; for he understood the other's feelings

  perfectly. No decent feeling was ever scorned by Heyst. But he was incapable of

  outward cordiality of manner, and he felt acutely his defect. Consummate

  politeness is not the right tonic for an emotional collapse. They must have had, both

  of them, a fairly painful time of it in the cabin of the brig. In the end Morrison,

  casting desperately for an idea in the blackness of his despondency, hit upon the

  notion of inviting Heyst to travel with him in his brig and have a share in his

  trading ventures up to the amount of his loan.

  It is characteristic of Heyst's unattached, floating existence that he was in a

  position to accept this proposal. There is no reason to think that he wanted

  particularly just then to go poking aboard the brig into all the holes and corners of

  the Archipelago where Morrison picked up most of his trade. Far from it; but he

  would have consented to almost any arrangement in order to put an end to the

  harrowing scene in the cabin. There was at once a great transformation act:

  Morrison raising his diminished head, and sticking the glass in his eye to looked

  affectionately at Heyst, a bottle being uncorked, and so on. It was agreed that

  nothing should be said to anyone of this transaction. Morrison, you understand, was

  not proud of the episode, and he was afraid of being unmercifully chaffed.