"Oh, but they had a scrap!" the other said.
"What do you mean? Was there a fight!—a fight with Heyst?" asked Davidson,
much perturbed, if somewhat incredulous.
"Heyst? No, these two—the bandmaster, the fellow who's taking these women
about and our Schomberg. Signor Zangiacomo ran amuck in the morning, and went
for our worthy friend. I tell you, they were rolling on the floor together on this very
veranda, after chasing each other all over the house, doors slamming, women
screaming, seventeen of them, in the dining-room; Chinamen up the trees. Hey,
John? You climb tree to see the fight, eh?"
The boy, almond-eyed and impassive, emitted a scornful grunt, finished wiping
the table, and withdrew.
"That's what it was—a real, go-as-you-please scrap. And Zangiacomo began it.
Oh, here's Schomberg. Say, Schomberg, didn't he fly at you, when the girl was
missed, because it was you who insisted that the artists should go about the
audience during the interval?"
Schomberg had reappeared in the doorway. He advanced. His bearing was
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stately, but his nostrils were extraordinarily expanded, and he controlled his
voice with apparent effort.
"Certainly. That was only business. I quoted him special terms and all for your
sake, gentlemen. I was thinking of my regular customers. There's nothing to do in
the evenings in this town. I think, gentlemen, you were all pleased at the
opportunity of hearing a little good music; and where's the harm of offering a
grenadine, or what not, to a lady artist? But that fellow—that Swede—he got round
the girl. He got round all the people out here. I've been watching him for years. You
remember how he got round Morrison."
He changed front abruptly, as if on parade, and marched off. The customers at
the table exchanged glances silently. Davidson's attitude was that of a spectator.
Schomberg's moody pacing of the billiard-room could be heard on the veranda.
"And the funniest part is," resumed the man who had been speaking before—an
English clerk in a Dutch house—"the funniest part is that before nine o'clock that
same morning those two were driving together in a gharry down to the port, to look
for Heyst and the girl. I saw them rushing around making inquiries. I don't know
what they would have done to the girl, but they seemed quite ready to fall upon
your Heyst, Davidson, and kill him on the quay."
He had never, he said, seen anything so queer. Those two investigators working
feverishly to the same end were glaring at each other with surprising ferocity. In
hatred and mistrust they entered a steam-launch, and went flying from ship to ship
all over the harbour, causing no end of sensation. The captains of vessels, coming
on shore later in the day, brought tales of a strange invasion, and wanted to know
who were the two offensive lunatics in a steam-launch, apparently after a man and
a girl, and telling a story of which one could make neither head nor tail. Their
reception by the roadstead was generally unsympathetic, even to the point of the
mate of an American ship bundling them out over the rail with unseemly
precipitation.
Meantime Heyst and the girl were a good few miles away, having gone in the
night on board one of the Tesman schooners bound to the eastward. This was
known afterwards from the Javanese boatmen whom Heyst hired for the purpose at
three o'clock in the morning. The Tesman schooner had sailed at daylight with the
usual land breeze, and was probably still in sight in the offing at the time. However,
the two pursuers after their experience with the American mate, made for the shore.
On landing, they had another violent row in the German language. But there was no
second fight; and finally, with looks of fierce animosity, they got together into a
gharry—obviously with the frugal view of sharing expenses—and drove away,
leaving an astonished little crowd of Europeans and natives on the quay.
After hearing this wondrous tale, Davidson went away from the hotel veranda,
which was filling with Schomberg's regular customers. Heyst's escapade was the
general topic of conversation. Never before had that unaccountable individual been
the cause of so much gossip, he judged. No! Not even in the beginnings of the
Tropical Belt Coal Company when becoming for a moment a public character was
adventurer in the islands. Davidson concluded that people liked to discuss that sort
of scandal better than any other.
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I asked him if he believed that this was such a great scandal after all.
"Heavens, no!" said that excellent man who, himself, was incapable of any
impropriety of conduct. "But it isn't a thing I would have done myself; I mean even
if I had not been married."
There was no implied condemnation in the statement; rather something like
regret. Davidson shared my suspicion that this was in its essence the rescue of a
distressed human being. Not that we were two romantics, tingeing the world to the
hue of our temperament, but that both of us had been acute enough to discover a
long time ago that Heyst was.
"I shouldn't have had the pluck," he continued. "I see a thing all round, as it
were; but Heyst doesn't, or else he would have been scared. You don't take a
woman into a desert jungle without being made sorry for it sooner or later, in one
way or another; and Heyst being a gentleman only makes it worse."
CHAPTER SIX
We said no more about Heyst on that occasion, and it so happened that I did not
meet Davidson again for some three months. When we did come together, almost
the first thing he said to me was:
"I've seen him."
Before I could exclaim, he assured me that he had taken no liberty, that he had
not intruded. He was called in. Otherwise he would not have dreamed of breaking
in upon Heyst's privacy.
"I am certain you wouldn't," I assured him, concealing my amusement at his
wonderful delicacy. He was the most delicate man that ever took a small steamer to
and fro among the islands. But his humanity, which was not less strong and
praiseworthy, had induced him to take his steamer past Samburan wharf (at an
average distance of a mile) every twenty-three days—exactly. Davidson was
delicate, humane, and regular.
"Heyst called you in?" I asked, interested.
Yes, Heyst had called him in as he was going by on his usual date. Davidson was
examining the shore through his glasses with his unwearied and punctual humanity
as he steamed past Samburan.
I saw a man in white. It could only have been Heyst. He had fastened some sort
of enormous flag to a bamboo pole, and was waving it at the end of the old wharf.
Davidson didn't like to take his steamer alongside—for fear of being indiscreet, I
suppose; but he steered close inshore, stopped h
is engines, and lowered a boat. He
went himself in that boat, which was manned, of course, by his Malay seamen.
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Heyst, when he saw the boat pulling towards him, dropped his signalling-pole;
and when Davidson arrived, he was kneeling down engaged busily in unfastening
the flag from it.
"Was there anything wrong?" I inquired, Davidson having paused in his narrative
and my curiosity being naturally aroused. You must remember that Heyst as the
Archipelago knew him was not—what shall I say—was not a signalling sort of
man.
"The very words that came out of my mouth," said Davidson, "before I laid the
boat against the piles. I could not help it!"
Heyst got up from his knees and began carefully folding up the flag thing, which
struck Davidson as having the dimensions of a blanket.
"No, nothing wrong," he cried. His white teeth flashed agreeably below the
coppery horizontal bar of his long moustaches.
I don't know whether it was his delicacy or his obesity which prevented
Davidson from clambering upon the wharf. He stood up in the boat, and, above
him, Heyst stooped low with urbane smiles, thanking him and apologizing for the
liberty, exactly in his usual manner. Davidson had expected some change in the
man, but there was none. Nothing in him betrayed the momentous fact that within
that jungle there was a girl, a performer in a ladies' orchestra, whom he had carried
straight off the concert platform into the wilderness. He was not ashamed or defiant
or abashed about it. He might have been a shade confidential when addressing
Davidson. And his words were enigmatical.
"I took this course of signalling to you," he said to Davidson, "because to
preserve appearances might be of the utmost importance. Not to me, of course. I
don't care what people may say, and of course no one can hurt me. I suppose I have
done a certain amount of harm, since I allowed myself to be tempted into action. It
seemed innocent enough, but all action is bound to be harmful. It is devilish. That
is why this world is evil upon the whole. But I have done with it! I shall never lift a
little finger again. At one time I thought that intelligent observation of facts was the
best way of cheating the time which is allotted to us whether we want it or not; but
now I, have done with observation, too."
Imagine poor, simple Davidson being addressed in such terms alongside an
abandoned, decaying wharf jutting out of tropical bush. He had never heard
anybody speak like this before; certainly not Heyst, whose conversation was
concise, polite, with a faint ring of playfulness in the cultivated tones of his voice.
"He's gone mad," Davidson thought to himself.
But, looking at the physiognomy above him on the wharf, he was obliged to
dismiss the notion of common, crude lunacy. It was truly most unusual talk. Then
he remembered—in his surprise he had lost sight of it—that Heyst now had a girl
there. This bizarre discourse was probably the effect of the girl. Davidson shook off
the absurd feeling, and asked, wishing to make clear his friendliness, and not
knowing what else to say:
"You haven't run short of stores or anything like that?"
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Heyst smiled and shook his head:
"No, no. Nothing of the kind. We are fairly well off here. Thanks, all the same. If
I have taken the liberty to detain you, it is I not from any uneasiness for myself and
my—companion. The person I was thinking of when I made up my mind to invoke
your assistance is Mrs. Schomberg."
"I have talked with her," interjected Davidson.
"Oh! You? Yes, I hoped she would find means to—"
"But she didn't tell me much," interrupted Davidson, who was not averse from
hearing something—he hardly knew what.
"H'm—Yes. But that note of mine? Yes? She found an opportunity to give it to
you? That's good, very good. She's more resourceful than one would give her credit
for."
"Women often are—" remarked Davidson. The strangeness from which he had
suffered, merely because his interlocutor had carried off a girl, wore off as the
minutes went by. "There's a lot of unexpectedness about women," he generalized
with a didactic aim which seemed to miss its mark; for the next thing Heyst said
was:
"This is Mrs. Schomberg's shawl." He touched the stuff hanging over his arm.
"An Indian thing, I believe," he added, glancing at his arm sideways.
"It isn't of particular value," said Davidson truthfully.
"Very likely. The point is that it belongs to Schomberg's wife. That Schomberg
seems to be an unconscionable ruffian—don't you think so?"
Davidson smiled faintly.
"We out here have got used to him," he said, as if excusing a universal and guilty
toleration of a manifest nuisance. "I'd hardly call him that. I only know him as a
hotel-keeper."
"I never knew him even as that—not till this time, when you were so obliging as
to take me to Sourabaya, I went to stay there from economy. The Netherlands
House is very expensive, and they expect you to bring your own servant with you.
It's a nuisance."
"Of course, of course," protested Davidson hastily.
After a short silence Heyst returned to the matter of the shawl. He wanted to
send it back to Mrs. Schomberg. He said that it might be very awkward for her if
she were unable, if asked, to produce it. This had given him, Heyst, much
uneasiness. She was terrified of Schomberg. Apparently she had reason to be.
Davidson had remarked that, too. Which did not prevent her, he pointed out,
from making a fool of him, in a way, for the sake of a stranger.
"Oh! You know!" said Heyst. "Yes, she helped me—us."
"She told me so. I had quite a talk with her," Davidson informed him. "Fancy
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anyone having a talk with Mrs. Schomberg! If I were to tell the fellows they
wouldn't believe me. How did you get round her, Heyst? How did you think of it?
Why, she looks too stupid to understand human speech and too scared to shoo a
chicken away. Oh, the women, the women! You don't know what there may be in
the quietest of them."
"She was engaged in the task of defending her position in life," said Heyst. "It's a
very respectable task."
"Is that it? I had some idea it was that," confessed Davidson.
He then imparted to Heyst the story of the violent proceedings following on the
discovery of his flight. Heyst's polite attention to the tale took on a sombre cast; but
he manifested no surprise, and offered no comment. When Davidson had finished
he handed down the shawl into the boat, and Davidson promised to do his best to
return it to Mrs. Schomberg in some secret fashion. Heyst expressed his thanks in a
few simple words, set off by his manner of
finished courtesy. Davidson prepared to
depart. They were not looking at each other. Suddenly Heyst spoke:
"You understand that this was a case of odious persecution, don't you? I became
aware of it and—"
It was a view which the sympathetic Davidson was capable of appreciating.
"I am not surprised to hear it," he said placidly. "Odious enough, I dare say. And
you, of course—not being a married man—were free to step in. Ah, well!"
He sat down in the stern-sheets, and already had the steering lines in his hands
when Heyst observed abruptly:
"The world is a bad dog. It will bite you if you give it a chance; but I think that
here we can safely defy the fates."
When relating all this to me, Davidson's only comment was:
"Funny notion of defying the fates—to take a woman in tow!"
CHAPTER SEVEN
Some considerable time afterwards—we did not meet very often—I asked
Davidson how he had managed about the shawl and heard that he had tackled his
mission in a direct way, and had found it easy enough. At the very first call he
made in Samarang he rolled the shawl as tightly as he could into the smallest
possible brown-paper parcel, which he carried ashore with him. His business in the
town being transacted, he got into a gharry with the parcel and drove to the hotel.
With his precious experience, he timed his arrival accurately for the hour of
Schomberg's siesta. Finding the place empty as on the former occasion, he marched
into the billiard-room, took a seat at the back, near the sort of dais which Mrs.
Schomberg would in due course come to occupy, and broke the slumbering silence
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of the house by thumping a bell vigorously. Of course a Chinaman appeared
promptly. Davidson ordered a drink and sat tight.
"I would have ordered twenty drinks one after another, if necessary," he said—
Davidson's a very abstemious man—"rather than take that parcel out of the house
again. Couldn't leave it in a corner without letting the woman know it was there. It
might have turned out worse for her than not bringing the thing back at all."
And so he waited, ringing the bell again and again, and swallowing two or three
iced drinks which he did not want. Presently, as he hoped it would happen, Mrs.