Victory (Dover Thrift Editions) Read online

  my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human

  animal, to the end of my days. Of the nigger I used to dream for years afterwards.

  Of Pedro never. The impression was less vivid. I got away from him too quickly.

  It seems to me but natural that those three buried in a corner of my memory

  should suddenly get out into the light of the world—so natural that I offer no

  excuse for their existence, They were there, they had to come out; and this is a

  sufficient excuse for a writer of tales who had taken to his trade without

  preparation, or premeditation, and without any moral intention but that which

  pervades the whole scheme of this world of senses.

  Since this Note is mostly concerned with personal contacts and the origins of the

  persons in the tale, I am bound also to speak of Lena, because if I were to leave her

  out it would look like a slight; and nothing would be further from my thoughts than

  putting a slight on Lena. If of all the personages involved in the "mystery of

  Samburan" I have lived longest with Heyst (or with him I call Heyst) it was at her,

  whom I call Lena, that I have looked the longest and with a most sustained

  attention. This attention originated in idleness for which I have a natural talent. One

  evening I wandered into a cafe, in a town not of the tropics but of the South of

  France. It was filled with tobacco smoke, the hum of voices, the rattling of

  dominoes, and the sounds of strident music. The orchestra was rather smaller than

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  the one that performed at Schomberg's hotel, had the air more of a family party

  than of an enlisted band, and, I must confess, seemed rather more respectable than

  the Zangiacomo musical enterprise. It was less pretentious also, more homely and

  familiar, so to speak, insomuch that in the intervals when all the performers left the

  platform one of them went amongst the marble tables collecting offerings of sous

  and francs in a battered tin receptacle recalling the shape of a sauceboat. It was a

  girl. Her detachment from her task seems to me now to have equalled or even

  surpassed Heyst's aloofness from all the mental degradations to which a man's

  intelligence is exposed in its way through life. Silent and wide-eyed she went from

  table to table with the air of a sleep-walker and with no other sound but the slight

  rattle of the coins to attract attention. It was long after the sea-chapter of my life

  had been closed but it is difficult to discard completely the characteristics of half a

  lifetime, and it was in something of the Jack-ashore spirit that I dropped a five-

  franc piece into the sauceboat; whereupon the sleep-walker turned her head to gaze

  at me and said "Merci, Monsieur" in a tone in which there was no gratitude but

  only surprise. I must have been idle indeed to take the trouble to remark on such

  slight evidence that the voice was very charming and when the performers resumed

  their seats I shifted my position slightly in order not to have that particular

  performer hidden from me by the little man with the beard who conducted, and

  who might for all I know have been her father, but whose real mission in life was to

  be a model for the Zangiacomo of Victory. Having got a clear line of sight I

  naturally (being idle) continued to look at the girl through all the second part of the

  programme. The shape of her dark head inclined over the violin was fascinating,

  and, while resting between the pieces of that interminable programme she was, in

  her white dress and with her brown hands reposing in her lap, the very image of

  dreamy innocence. The mature, bad-tempered woman at the piano might have been

  her mother, though there was not the slightest resemblance between them. All I am

  certain of in their personal relation to each other is that cruel pinch on the upper

  part of the arm. That I am sure I have seen! There could be no mistake. I was in too

  idle a mood to imagine such a gratuitous barbarity. It may have been playfulness,

  yet the girl jumped up as if she had been stung by a wasp. It may have been

  playfulness. Yet I saw plainly poor "dreamy innocence" rub gently the affected

  place as she filed off with the other performers down the middle aisle between the

  marble tables in the uproar of voices, the rattling of dominoes through a blue

  atmosphere of tobacco smoke. I believe that those people left the town next day.

  Or perhaps they had only migrated to the other big cafe, on the other side of the

  Place de la Comedie. It is very possible. I did not go across to find out. It was my

  perfect idleness that had invested the girl with a peculiar charm, and I did not want

  to destroy it by any superfluous exertion. The receptivity of my indolence made the

  impression so permanent that when the moment came for her meeting with Heyst I

  felt that she would be heroically equal to every demand of the risky and uncertain

  future. I was so convinced of it that I let her go with Heyst, I won't say without a

  pang but certainly without misgivings. And in view of her triumphant end what

  more could I have done for her rehabilitation and her happiness?

  1920. J. C.

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  VICTORY: AN ISLAND TALE

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  There is, as every schoolboy knows in this scientific age, a very close chemical

  relation between coal and diamonds. It is the reason, I believe, why some people

  allude to coal as "black diamonds." Both these commodities represent wealth; but

  coal is a much less portable form of property. There is, from that point of view, a

  deplorable lack of concentration in coal. Now, if a coal-mine could be put into

  one's waistcoat pocket—but it can't! At the same time, there is a fascination in coal,

  the supreme commodity of the age in which we are camped like bewildered

  travellers in a garish, unrestful hotel. And I suppose those two considerations, the

  practical and the mystical, prevented Heyst—Axel Heyst—from going away.

  The Tropical Belt Coal Company went into liquidation. The world of finance is a

  mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may appear, evaporation precedes

  liquidation. First the capital evaporates, and then the company goes into

  liquidation. These are very unnatural physics, but they account for the persistent

  inertia of Heyst, at which we "out there" used to laugh among ourselves—but not

  inimically. An inert body can do no harm to anyone, provokes no hostility, is

  scarcely worth derision. It may, indeed, be in the way sometimes; but this could not

  be said of Axel Heyst. He was out of everybody's way, as if he were perched on the

  highest peak of the Himalayas, and in a sense as conspicuous. Everyone in that part

  of the world knew of him, dwelling on his little island. An island is but the top of a

  mountain. Axel Heyst, perched on it immovably, was surrounded, instead of the

  imponderable stormy and transparent ocean of air merging into infinity, by a tepid,

  shallow sea; a passionless offshoot of the great waters which
embrace the

  continents of this globe. His most frequent visitors were shadows, the shadows of

  clouds, relieving the monotony of the inanimate, brooding sunshine of the tropics.

  His nearest neighbour—I am speaking now of things showing some sort of

  animation—was an indolent volcano which smoked faintly all day with its head

  just above the northern horizon, and at night levelled at him, from amongst the

  clear stars, a dull red glow, expanding and collapsing spasmodically like the end of

  a gigantic cigar puffed at intermittently in the dark. Axel Heyst was also a smoker;

  and when he lounged out on his veranda with his cheroot, the last thing before

  going to bed, he made in the night the same sort of glow and of the same size as

  that other one so many miles away.

  In a sense, the volcano was company to him in the shades of the night—which

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  were often too thick, one would think, to let a breath of air through. There was

  seldom enough wind to blow a feather along. On most evenings of the year Heyst

  could have sat outside with a naked candle to read one of the books left him by his

  late father. It was not a mean store. But he never did that. Afraid of mosquitoes,

  very likely. Neither was he ever tempted by the silence to address any casual

  remarks to the companion glow of the volcano. He was not mad. Queer chap—yes,

  that may have been said, and in fact was said; but there is a tremendous difference

  between the two, you will allow.

  On the nights of full moon the silence around Samburan—the "Round Island" of

  the charts—was dazzling; and in the flood of cold light Heyst could see his

  immediate surroundings, which had the aspect of an abandoned settlement invaded

  by the jungle: vague roofs above low vegetation, broken shadows of bamboo fences

  in the sheen of long grass, something like an overgrown bit of road slanting among

  ragged thickets towards the shore only a couple of hundred yards away, with a

  black jetty and a mound of some sort, quite inky on its unlighted side. But the most

  conspicuous object was a gigantic blackboard raised on two posts and presenting to

  Heyst, when the moon got over that side, the white letters "T. B. C. Co." in a row at

  least two feet high. These were the initials of the Tropical Belt Coal Company, his

  employers—his late employers, to be precise.

  According to the unnatural mysteries of the financial world, the T. B. C.

  Company's capital having evaporated in the course of two years, the company went

  into liquidation—forced, I believe, not voluntary. There was nothing forcible in the

  process, however. It was slow; and while the liquidation—in London and

  Amsterdam—pursued its languid course, Axel Heyst, styled in the prospectus

  "manager in the tropics," remained at his post on Samburan, the No. 1 coaling-

  station of the company.

  And it was not merely a coaling-station. There was a coal-mine there, with an

  outcrop in the hillside less than five hundred yards from the rickety wharf and the

  imposing blackboard. The company's object had been to get hold of all the outcrops

  on tropical islands and exploit them locally. And, Lord knows, there were any

  amount of outcrops. It was Heyst who had located most of them in this part of the

  tropical belt during his rather aimless wanderings, and being a ready letter-writer

  had written pages and pages about them to his friends in Europe. At least, so it was

  said.

  We doubted whether he had any visions of wealth—for himself, at any rate.

  What he seemed mostly concerned for was the "stride forward," as he expressed it,

  in the general organization of the universe, apparently. He was heard by more than

  a hundred persons in the islands talking of a "great stride forward for these

  regions." The convinced wave of the hand which accompanied the phrase

  suggested tropical distances being impelled onward. In connection with the finished

  courtesy of his manner, it was persuasive, or at any rate silencing—for a time, at

  least. Nobody cared to argue with him when he talked in this strain. His earnestness

  could do no harm to anybody. There was no danger of anyone taking seriously his

  dream of tropical coal, so what was the use of hurting his feelings?

  Thus reasoned men in reputable business offices where he had his entree as a

  person who came out East with letters of introduction—and modest letters of credit,

  too—some years before these coal-outcrops began to crop up in his playfully

  courteous talk. From the first there was some difficulty in making him out. He was

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  not a traveller. A traveller arrives and departs, goes on somewhere. Heyst did not

  depart. I met a man once—the manager of the branch of the Oriental Banking

  Corporation in Malacca—to whom Heyst exclaimed, in no connection with

  anything in particular (it was in the billiard-room of the club):

  "I am enchanted with these islands!"

  He shot it out suddenly, a propos des bottes, as the French say, and while

  chalking his cue. And perhaps it was some sort of enchantment. There are more

  spells than your commonplace magicians ever dreamed of.

  Roughly speaking, a circle with a radius of eight hundred miles drawn round a

  point in North Borneo was in Heyst's case a magic circle. It just touched Manila,

  and he had been seen there. It just touched Saigon, and he was likewise seen there

  once. Perhaps these were his attempts to break out. If so, they were failures. The

  enchantment must have been an unbreakable one. The manager—the man who

  heard the exclamation—had been so impressed by the tone, fervour, rapture, what

  you will, or perhaps by the incongruity of it that he had related the experience to

  more than one person.

  "Queer chap, that Swede," was his only comment; but this is the origin of the

  name "Enchanted Heyst" which some fellows fastened on our man.

  He also had other names. In his early years, long before he got so becomingly

  bald on the top, he went to present a letter of introduction to Mr. Tesman of

  Tesman Brothers, a Sourabaya firm—tip-top house. Well, Mr. Tesman was a

  kindly, benevolent old gentleman. He did not know what to make of that caller.

  After telling him that they wished to render his stay among the islands as pleasant

  as possible, and that they were ready to assist him in his plans, and so on, and after

  receiving Heyst's thanks—you know the usual kind of conversation—he proceeded

  to query in a slow, paternal tone:

  "And you are interested in—?"

  "Facts," broke in Heyst in his courtly voice. "There's nothing worth knowing but

  facts. Hard facts! Facts alone, Mr. Tesman."

  I don't know if old Tesman agreed with him or not, but he must have spoken

  about it, because, for a time, our man got the name of "Hard Facts." He had the

  singular good fortune that his sayings stuck to him and became part of his name.

  Thereafter he mooned about the Java Sea in some of the Tesmans' trading

 
; schooners, and then vanished, on board an Arab ship, in the direction of New

  Guinea. He remained so long in that outlying part of his enchanted circle that he

  was nearly forgotten before he swam into view again in a native proa full of Goram

  vagabonds, burnt black by the sun, very lean, his hair much thinned, and a portfolio

  of sketches under his arm. He showed these willingly, but was very reserved as to

  anything else. He had had an "amusing time," he said. A man who will go to New

  Guinea for fun—well!

  Later, years afterwards, when the last vestiges of youth had gone off his face and

  all the hair off the top of his head, and his red-gold pair of horizontal moustaches

  had grown to really noble proportions, a certain disreputable white man fastened

  upon him an epithet. Putting down with a shaking hand a long glass emptied of its

  contents—paid for by Heyst—he said, with that deliberate sagacity which no mere

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  water-drinker ever attained:

  "Heyst's a puffect g'n'lman. Puffect! But he's a ut-uto-utopist."

  Heyst had just gone out of the place of public refreshment where this

  pronouncement was voiced. Utopist, eh? Upon my word, the only thing I heard him

  say which might have had a bearing on the point was his invitation to old McNab

  himself. Turning with that finished courtesy of attitude, movement voice, which

  was his obvious characteristic, he had said with delicate playfulness:

  "Come along and quench your thirst with us, Mr. McNab!"

  Perhaps that was it. A man who could propose, even playfully, to quench old

  McNab's thirst must have been a utopist, a pursuer of chimeras; for of downright

  irony Heyst was not prodigal. And, may be, this was the reason why he was

  generally liked. At that epoch in his life, in the fulness of his physical development,

  of a broad, martial presence, with his bald head and long moustaches, he resembled

  the portraits of Charles XII., of adventurous memory. However, there was no

  reason to think that Heyst was in any way a fighting man.