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VICTORY
Joseph Conrad
Copyright
William Collins
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Life & Times section © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
Gerard Cheshire asserts his moral right as author of the Life & Times section
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from
Collins English Dictionary
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History of Collins
In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books, and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.
Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner; however, it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed, and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.
Aged 30, William’s son, William II, took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly “Victorian” in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and The Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases, and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.
In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of “books for the millions” was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published, and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel, and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time, and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.
HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics, and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible, and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.
Life & Times
About the Author
Joseph Conrad had a highly imaginative and creative mind, given to bouts of emotional distress and apathy, but also incredibly driven by his desire for self-expression. Throughout his life his mood would swing back and forth from elation to depression and it has been said that in his darkest moments he contemplated suicide and even attempted it on one occasion, by shooting himself in the chest, although he made a full recovery. On the other hand, his lucid periods resulted in English prose of the first order and an ability to befriend and entertain those around him. With our modern knowledge of the interior psyche, it seems reasonable to conclude that Joseph Conrad may have displayed classic symptoms of bipolar disorder, or what used to be described as ‘manic depression’.
Conrad had a less than desirable childhood, which may account for his psychological profile. He was born into Polish nobility in a region that is now part of Ukraine. Despite this promising start his father was arrested for political activism and exiled to the Russian town of Vologda, northeast of Moscow. One thing led to another and Conrad – at that time named Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski – found himself orphaned at the tender age of 11. He spent the next five years in the charge of his uncle, but left home at 16. His first port of call, quite literally, was Marseille, France, where he enlisted into the French merchant navy and his seagoing adventures began. Conrad spent a 20-year period at sea and his experiences provided the foundation for his literary career. His travels took him to South America, Africa and Asia and he eventually married and settled in England, by now fluent in English and choosing to write in that language, making his prosaic achievements all the more remarkable. At this time he also anglicised his name to Joseph Conrad.
Although Conrad set his stories in exotic places and spun a good yarn, his primary agenda was to use his fiction as a vehicle for investigating human nature – specifically the human condition. Having lost both of his parents, experienced unrequited love and witnessed hardship and cruelty on his journeys, he was perplexed by his own species. He saw that the world is unfair and that people can possess complex ideas and behaviours that can, by turns, make the world a wonderful place or a living hell. He wanted to express his feelings about such contradictions in his books. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his sombre and sobering words were not well received by the novelbuying public and commercial success was not forthcoming. He was, however, praised by literary critics who saw the genius in his intentions and recognised that a lighter touch would be inappropriate. As a result he developed a kind of cult following with those ‘in the know’ – especially fellow writers, who admired his uncompromising and deeply moralistic style.
Lord Jim
In Lord Jim (1900) Conrad investigated selfishness, cowardice and dishonour. The eponymous Jim is a member of the crew of a ship who commit the shameful crime of abandoning a boat and its passengers, rather than remaining onboard as ethical law would have expected of them. He finds himself professionally castigated for his misconduct and has to move on from one job to the next whenever his ignominy is discovered. Eventually he finds employment in a place where his past does not catch up with him, so his opprobrium ends, except that he is perpetually troubled by his own conscience. In his new environment he makes an impression and becomes known as ‘Lord Jim’, such is the respect and adoration he receives from the locals. However, events unfold that lead to the killing of the son of a tribal leader. Haunted by his past shame, Jim decides to take the blame and is executed as retribution. Thus, he goes to the grave at peace with himself.
Conrad demonstrates his interest in human psychology in much of his writing. It is his signature style to delve deep into the human soul. Lord Jim addresses the issue of conscience above all else. Jim makes a mistake and pays a heavy price due to society’s view; however, the central issue is that Jim realizes his mistake is an expression of the very way his mind works – he is intrinsically unheroic and selfish, and he therefore has to live with disliking himself. Ultimately his torment reaches a point where he is willing to die so that he can leave the world having done something honourable. Some scholars also see Lord Jim as a comment on the values of ‘civilized’ societies and ‘primitive’ societies in juxtaposition. That is to say, one might think that issues of honour and etiquette are the product of high culture, but in fact they are fundamental components of all cultures. Jim realizes this and that is why he is compelled to do the right thing. Wherever he hides in the world, his failings will inevitably come to the surface and let him down in the eyes of others, whoever they happen to be.
At the time that Lord Jim was published, anthropologists were just beginning to study non-Western cultures and beginning to realize that it was a mistake to view them as primitive in comparison. Although they did not possess the same levels of scientific and technological progress, that did not mean that their societal rules were any less sophisticated. The Golden Bough (1890) by James George Frazer was an insightful investigation of the evolution of cultures and societies that greatly influenced the thinkers of the period.
Heart of Darkness
Conrad’s most celebrated work, Heart of Darkness (1902) was inspired by time spent as a river boat captain in the Congo in 1889. The region was in a state of warfare over slavery at the time, leading to massacres and atrocities that Conrad bore witness to. This experience coloured his view of humanity and crystallized his own views, allowing him to become more complete as a personality. It also erased the romantic vision of Africa that he had developed as a child and which led him there in the first place. He came away with the nucleus of a story, painting Africa as a primal, dangerous and unprepossessing continent, hence the chosen title.
In essence, the central character of Charles Marlow is Conrad himself. The narrator is recounting the adventures of Marlow in the Congo, to a crew of boatmen on the Thames. As Marlow’s story unfolds and things become more baleful so dusk envelops the narrator’s audience, only adding to the general sense of claustrophobia, oppression and atrociousness of the scenario.
The axis of Heart of Darkness is Marlow’s struggle to deal with a shadowy figure named Kurtz, who holds influence over local tribesman. Kurtz’s motive is trade in ivory, which the authorities want for themselves. As a result, Marlow’s boat is sabotaged and his crew is attacked, making Marlow’s job difficult and dangerous. Ultimately, Marlow finds himself taking Kurtz into his protection due to his declining health. Aboard the boat Marlow is struck by the charisma of Kurtz, but also sees a dying mortal, in marked contrast to the god-like status he has among the Congo natives.
Conrad used Heart of Darkness as a vehicle for his exploration of human mores – morals and ethics. He was intelligent enough to understand that qualities considered virtuous are relative and subjective. Kurtz manipulates the belief systems of the natives for his own gain, but becomes morally bankrupted by the atrocities committed in his name, where villages are ransacked and their inhabitants slaughtered to access the valuable ivory. By the time he dies, Kurtz is horrified and ashamed by what he has affected. Conrad’s point is that civilization, knowledge and education are easily used by Kurtz to control the behaviour of those who exist in a primitive culture, but the outcome shocks Kurtz because they place less value on life and have different ideas about right and wrong.
In effect, Kurtz is hoisted by his own petard. Marlow, in contrast, is the moral leveller. He initially wishes to perform his duty as river boat captain and arrives with an optimistic outlook on his new life. The events that ensue serve to adjust his outlook, but he remains on an even keel, despite the unpleasant things he is exposed to. He comes away with a wiser and more considered comprehension of the human animal. He has been irrevocably jaded and scarred by his experience in the Congo, but he is also tougher and more tolerant; accepting even.
Victory
The novel Victory, published late in Conrad’s career (1915), is a good example of his shifting style as he disregards any attempt to maintain consistency in the narrative voice. As a result the story is narrated in various ways – from the perspective of a sailor, and that of an omniscient main character. This use of different narrative voices creates an increasingly claustrophobic feel to the story as the world progressively closes in on the main character.
The novel is both an adventure and a tragedy, and the book gave Conrad a belated flush of popular success. Victory is set among islands in Indonesia, which was then known as the Dutch East Indies. The region had been a colony for two centuries, and the population was a mix of indigenous and foreign people. Conrad drew on the cultural tensions that resulted from this environment, where lawlessness made the atmosphere both exciting and dangerous. As a result, the feel of the place easily switches from utopia to dystopia.
It would seem that Conrad was writing a moral tale disguised as an exotic adventure. There is certainly the sense that the ever-decreasing circles of their lives are the result of living in an archipelago where social rules and conventions cannot easily be policed. In this setting, criminality and villainy are an ever-present threat to peace and harmony. As a result, people take what pleasure they can from life when they can, knowing that it is likely to be short-lived.
In essence, Victory is a thriller, imbued with a pervading sense of menace and uncertainty. The reader knows that the moments of happiness and calm will be fleeting and that, ultimately, the central characters are doomed by their circumstances.
Conrad and Humanity
In the modern world we now understand scientifically that all organisms are nothing more than evolved life support systems for DNA, be they human, beast or plant, and that morals and ethics are therefore constructs of the human imagination. When Conrad was alive such strictly secular ideas were not yet formulated, so even atheists tended to believe that there must be some purpose to life. They also acknowledged that society needed people to adhere to behavioural rules based on notions of right and wrong to prevent anarchy and chaos.
Conrad was interested in what happens when different societies overlap, so that contrasting mores are juxtaposed and blended together. His underlying message was that the one cannot judge the other, because they are borne on cosmologies (world views in anthropological terminology) that are each constructs, but an amalgamation can result in outcomes that are reprehensible to both parties. In a way, Conrad’s writing was a portent of the complications that have arisen in modern societies where people from different cultures attempt to homogenize but often realize that cultural isolation or segregation are the best ways to find social harmony and accord. We may all belong to the same species biologically, but socially and culturally we can be so disparate as to seem like different species. In essence modern nations immerse peoples of ‘primitive’ culture within populations of ‘developed’ culture, so that incompatibilities and antitheses cause people to foment. No one is right, no one is wrong, but the results can be unfortunate and unpleasant whatever one’s precepts.
In this way Conrad was a kind of literary social anthropologist. Study of the human as a moral being was his interest, because he himself had encountered a plethora of specimens of humanity over the years and witnessed all manner of extreme behaviours, including his own. He wanted to understand what it means to be human and the novel became the chosen conduit for expounding his ideas in a non-academic and creative way. It would be a few years before other novelists dared to delve so deeply into what might be described as the human soul in such an exposing and revelatory way. As is so often the case with pioneers, Conrad remained largely unsung until other writers began citing him as an influence.
Dedication
TO
PERCEVAL
AND
MAISIE GIBBON
Calling shapes and beckoning shadows dire And airy tongues that syllable men’s names On sands and shores and desert wildernesses.
COMUS
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
History of Collins
Life & Times
Dedication
Epigraph
Note to the First Edition
Author’s Note
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part Three
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part Four
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases
About the Publisher
NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION
The last word of this novel was written on 29 May 1914. And that last word was the single word of the title.
Those were the times of peace. Now that the moment of publication approaches I have been considering the discretion of altering the title-page. The word “Victory”, the shining and tragic goal of noble effort, appeared too great, too august, to stand at the head of a mere novel. There was also the possibility of falling under the suspicion of commercial astuteness deceiving the public into the belief that the book had something to do with war.
Of that, however, I was not afraid very much. What influenced my decision most were the obscure promptings of that pagan residuum of awe and wonder which lurks still at the bottom of our old humanity. “Victory” was the last word I had written in peace-time. It was the last literary thought which had occurred to me before the doors of the Temple of Janus flying open with a crash shook the minds, the hearts, the consciences of men all over the world. Such coincidence could not be treated lightly. And I made up my mind to let the word stand, in the same hopeful spirit in which some simple citizen of Old Rome would have “accepted the Omen.”
The second point on which I wish to offer a remark is the existence (in the novel) of a person named Schomberg.
That I believe him to be true goes without saying. I am not likely to offer pinchbeck wares to my public consciously. Schomberg is an old member of my company. A very subordinate personage in Lord Jim as far back as the year 1899, he became notably active in a certain short story of mine published in 1902. Here he appears in a still larger part, true to life (I hope), but also true to himself. Only, in this instance, his deeper passions come into play, and thus his grotesque psychology is completed at last.
I don’t pretend to say that this is the entire Teutonic psychology; but it is indubitably the psychology of a Teuton. My object in mentioning him here is to bring out the fact that, far from being the incarnation of recent animosities, he is the creature of my old deep-seated, and, as it were, impartial conviction.
J. C.
1915
AUTHOR’S NOTE
On approaching the task of writing this Note for Victory, the first thing I am conscious of is the actual nearness of the book, its nearness to me personally, to the vanished mood in which it was written, and to the mixed feelings aroused by the critical notices the book obtained when first published almost exactly a year after the beginning of the war. The writing of it was finished in 1914 long before the murder of an Austrian Archduke sounded the first note of warning for a world already full of doubts and fears.
The contemporaneous very short Author’s Note which is preserved in this edition bears sufficient witness to the feelings with which I consented to the publication of the book. The fact of the book having been published in the United States early in the year made it difficult to delay its appearance in England any longer. It came out in the thirteenth month of the war, and my conscience was troubled by the awful incongruity of throwing this bit of imagined drama into the welter of reality, tragic enough in all conscience, but even more cruel than tragic and more inspiring than cruel. It seemed awfully presumptuous to think there would be eyes to spare for those pages in a community which in the crash of the big guns and in the din of brave words expressing the truth of an indomitable faith could not but feel the edge of a sharp knife at its throat.
The unchanging Man of history is wonderfully adaptable both by his power of endurance and in his capacity for detachment. The fact seems to be that the play of his destiny is too great for his fears and too mysterious for his understanding. Were the trump of the Last Judgement to sound suddenly on a working day the musician at his piano would go on with his performance of Beethoven’s sonata and the cobbler at his stall stick to his last in undisturbed confidence in the virtues of the leather. And with perfect propriety. For what are we to let ourselves be disturbed by an angel’s vengeful music too mighty for our ears and too awful for our terrors? Thus it happens to us to be struck suddenly by the lightning of wrath. The reader will go on reading if the book pleases him and the critic will go on criticizing with that faculty of detachment born perhaps from a sense of infinite littleness and which is yet the only faculty that seems to assimilate man to the immortal gods.
It is only when the catastrophe matches the natural obscurity of our fate that even the best representative of the race is liable to lose his detachment. It is very obvious that on the arrival of the gentlemanly Mr. Jones, the single-minded Ricardo, and the faithful Pedro, Heyst, the man of universal detachment, loses his mental self-possession, that fine attitude before the universally irremediable which wears the name of stoicism. It is all a matter of proportion. There should have been a remedy for that sort of thing. And yet there is no remedy. Behind this minute instance of life’s hazards Heyst sees the power of blind destiny. Besides, Heyst in his fine detachment had lost the habit of asserting himself. I don’t mean the courage of self-assertion, either moral or physical, but the mere way of it, the trick of the thing, the readiness of mind and the turn of the hand that come without reflection and lead the man to excellence in life, in art, in crime, in virtue, and, for the matter of that, even in love. Thinking is the great enemy of perfection. The habit of profound reflection, I am compelled to say, is the most pernicious of all the habits formed by the civilized man.
But I wouldn’t be suspected even remotely of making fun of Axel Heyst. I have always liked him. The flesh-and-blood individual who stands behind the infinitely more familiar figure of the book I remember as a mysterious Swede right enough. Whether he was a baron, too, I am not so certain. He himself never laid claim to that distinction. His detachment was too great to make any claims, big or small, on one’s credulity. I will not say where I met him because I fear to give my readers a wrong impression, since a marked incongruity between a man and his surroundings is often a very misleading circumstance. We became very friendly for a time, and I would not like to expose him to unpleasant suspicions though, personally, I am sure he would have been indifferent to suspicions as he was indifferent to all the other disadvantages of life. He was not the whole Heyst of course; he is only the physical and moral foundation of my Heyst laid on the ground of a short acquaintance. That it was short was certainly not my fault for he had charmed me by the mere amenity of his detachment which, in this case, I cannot help thinking he had carried to excess. He went away from his rooms without leaving a trace. I wondered where he had gone to—but now I know. He vanished from my ken only to drift into this adventure that, unavoidable, waited for him in a world which he persisted in looking upon as a malevolent shadow spinning in the sunlight. Often in the course of years an expressed sentiment, the particular sense of a phrase heard casually, would recall him to my mind so that I have fastened on to him many words heard on other men’s lips and belonging to other men’s less perfect, less pathetic moods.
The same observation will apply mutatis mutandis to Mr. Jones, who is built on a much slenderer connection. Mr. Jones (or whatever his name was) did not drift away from me. He turned his back on me and walked out of the room. It was in a little hotel in the island of St. Thomas in the West Indies (in the year ’75) where we found him one hot afternoon extended on three chairs, all alone in the loud buzzing of flies to which his immobility and his cadaverous aspect gave a most gruesome significance. Our invasion must have displeased him because he got off the chairs brusquely and walked out, leaving with me an indelibly weird impression of his thin shanks. One of the men with me said that the fellow was the most desperate gambler he had ever come across. I said: “A professional sharper?” and got for an answer: “He’s a terror; but I must say that up to a certain point he will play fair …” I wonder what the point was. I never saw him again because I believe he went straight on board a mail-boat which left within the hour for other ports of call in the direction of Aspinall. Mr. Jones’s characteristic insolence belongs to another man of a quite different type. I will say nothing as to the origins of his mentality because I don’t intend to make any damaging admissions.
It so happened that the very same year Ricardo—the physical Ricardo—was a fellow passenger of mine on board an extremely small and extremely dirty little schooner, during a four days’ passage between two places in the Gulf of Mexico whose names don’t matter. For the most part he lay on deck aft as it were at my feet, and raising himself from time to time on his elbow would talk about himself and go on talking, not exactly to me or even at me (he would not even look up but kept his eyes fixed on the deck) but more as if communing in a low voice with his familiar devil. Now and then he would give me a glance and make the hairs of his stiff little moustache stir quaintly. His eyes were green and every cat I see to this day reminds me of the exact contour of his face. What he was travelling for or what was his business in life he never confided to me. Truth to say, the only passenger on board that schooner who could have talked openly about his activities and purposes was a very snuffy and conversationally delightful friar, the superior of a convent, attended by a very young lay brother, of a particularly ferocious countenance. We had with us also, lying prostrate in the dark and unspeakable cuddy of that schooner, an old Spanish gentleman, owner of much luggage and, as Ricardo assured me, very ill indeed. Ricardo seemed to be either a servant or the confidant of that aged and distinguished-looking invalid, who early on the passage held a long murmured conversation with the friar, and after that did nothing but groan feebly, smoke cigarettes, and now and then call for Martin in a voice full of pain. Then he who had become Ricardo in the book would go below into that beastly and noisome hole, remain there mysteriously, and coming up on deck again with a face on which nothing could be read, would as likely as not resume for my edification the exposition of his moral attitude towards life illustrated by striking particular instances of the most atrocious complexion. Did he mean to frighten me? Or seduce me? Or astonish me? Or arouse my admiration? All he did was to arouse my amused incredulity. As scoundrels go he was far from being a bore. For the rest my innocence was so great then that I could not take his philosophy seriously. All the time he kept one ear turned to the cuddy in the manner of a devoted servant, but I had the idea that in some way or other he had imposed the connection on the invalid for some end of his own. The reader, therefore, won’t be surprised to hear that one morning I was told without any particular emotion by the padrone of the schooner that the “rich man” down there was dead: He had died in the night. I don’t remember ever being so moved by the desolate end of a complete stranger. I looked down the skylight, and there was the devoted Martin busy cording cowhide trunks belonging to the deceased whose white beard and hooked nose were the only parts I could make out in the dark depths of a horrible stuffy bunk.
As it fell calm in the course of the afternoon and continued calm during all that night and the terrible, flaming day, the late “rich man” had to be thrown overboard at sunset, though as a matter of fact we were in sight of the low pestilential mangrove-lined coast of our destination. The excellent Father Superior mentioned to me with an air of immense commiseration: “The poor man has left a young daughter.” Who was to look after her I don’t know, but I saw the devoted Martin taking the trunks ashore with great care just before I landed myself. I would perhaps have tracked the ways of that man of immense sincerity for a little while, but I had some of my own very pressing business to attend to, which in the end got mixed up with an earthquake and so I had no time to give to Ricardo. The reader need not be told that I have not forgotten him, though.
My contact with the faithful Pedro was much shorter and my observation of him was less complete but incomparably more anxious. It ended in a sudden inspiration to get out of his way. It was in a hovel of sticks and mats by the side of a path. As I went in there only to ask for a bottle of lemonade I have not to this day the slightest idea what in my appearance or actions could have roused his terrible ire. It became manifest to me less than two minutes after I had set eyes on him for the first time, and though immensely surprised of course I didn’t stop to think it out I took the nearest short cut—through the wall. This bestial apparition and a certain enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti only a couple of months afterwards, have fixed 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 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?
J. C.
1920
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
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 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 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 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.
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