Victory (Dover Thrift Editions)

  at a table next but one to us, drinking with some Dutch clerks from the town. No

  doubt he was watching us—watching you, at least. That's why I asked you to

  smile."

  "Ah, that's why. It never came into my head!"

  "And you did it very well, too—very readily, as if you had understood my

  intention."

  "Readily!" she repeated. "Oh, I was ready enough to smile then. That's the truth.

  It was the first time for years I may say that I felt disposed to smile. I've not had

  many chances to smile in my life, I can tell you; especially of late."

  "But you do it most charmingly—in a perfectly fascinating way."

  He paused. She stood still, waiting for more with the stillness of extreme delight,

  wishing to prolong the sensation.

  "It astonished me," he added. "It went as straight to my heart as though you had

  smiled for the purpose of dazzling me. I felt as if I had never seen a smile before in

  my life. I thought of it after I left you. It made me restless."

  "It did all that?" came her voice, unsteady, gentle, and incredulous.

  "If you had not smiled as you did, perhaps I should not have come out here

  tonight," he said, with his playful earnestness of tone. "It was your triumph."

  He felt her lips touch his lightly, and the next moment she was gone. Her white

  dress gleamed in the distance, and then the opaque darkness of the house seemed to

  swallow it. Heyst waited a little before he went the same way, round the corner, up

  the steps of the veranda, and into his room, where he lay down at last—not to sleep,

  but to go over in his mind all that had been said at their meeting.

  "It's exactly true about that smile," he thought. There he had spoken the truth to

  her; and about her voice, too. For the rest—what must be must be.

  A great wave of heat passed over him. He turned on his back, flung his arms

  crosswise on the broad, hard bed, and lay still, open-eyed under the mosquito net,

  till daylight entered his room, brightened swiftly, and turned to unfailing sunlight.

  He got up then, went to a small looking-glass hanging on the wall, and stared at

  himself steadily. It was not a new-born vanity which induced this long survey. He

  felt so strange that he could not resist the suspicion of his personal appearance

  having changed during the night. What he saw in the glass, however, was the man

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  he knew before. It was almost a disappointment—a belittling of his recent

  experience. And then he smiled at his naiveness; for, being over five and thirty

  years of age, he ought to have known that in most cases the body is the unalterable

  mask of the soul, which even death itself changes but little, till it is put out of sight

  where no changes matter any more, either to our friends or to our enemies.

  Heyst was not conscious of either friends or of enemies. It was the very essence

  of his life to be a solitary achievement, accomplished not by hermit-like withdrawal

  with its silence and immobility, but by a system of restless wandering, by the

  detachment of an impermanent dweller amongst changing scenes. In this scheme he

  had perceived the means of passing through life without suffering and almost

  without a single care in the world—invulnerable because elusive.

  CHAPTER THREE

  For fifteen years Heyst had wandered, invariably courteous and unapproachable,

  and in return was generally considered a "queer chap." He had started off on these

  travels of his after the death of his father, an expatriated Swede who died in

  London, dissatisfied with his country and angry with all the world, which had

  instinctively rejected his wisdom.

  Thinker, stylist, and man of the world in his time, the elder Heyst had begun by

  coveting all the joys, those of the great and those of the humble, those of the fools

  and those of the sages. For more than sixty years he had dragged on this painful

  earth of ours the most weary, the most uneasy soul that civilization had ever

  fashioned to its ends of disillusion and regret. One could not refuse him a measure

  of greatness, for he was unhappy in a way unknown to mediocre souls. His mother

  Heyst had never known, but he kept his father's pale, distinguished face in

  affectionate memory. He remembered him mainly in an ample blue dressing-gown

  in a large house of a quiet London suburb. For three years, after leaving school at

  the age of eighteen, he had lived with the elder Heyst, who was then writing his last

  book. In this work, at the end of his life, he claimed for mankind that right to

  absolute moral and intellectual liberty of which he no longer believed them worthy.

  Three years of such companionship at that plastic and impressionable age were

  bound to leave in the boy a profound mistrust of life. The young man learned to

  reflect, which is a destructive process, a reckoning of the cost. It is not the clear-

  sighted who lead the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed,

  warm mental fog, which the pitiless cold blasts of the father's analysis had blown

  away from the son.

  "I'll drift," Heyst had said to himself deliberately.

  He did not mean intellectually or sentimentally or morally. He meant to drift

  altogether and literally, body and soul, like a detached leaf drifting in the wind-

  currents under the immovable trees of a forest glade; to drift without ever catching

  on to anything.

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  "This shall be my defence against life," he had said to himself with a sort of

  inward consciousness that for the son of his father there was no other worthy

  alternative.

  He became a waif and stray, austerely, from conviction, as others do through

  drink, from vice, from some weakness of character—with deliberation, as others do

  in despair. This, stripped of its facts, had been Heyst's life up to that disturbing

  night. Next day, when he saw the girl called Alma, she managed to give him a

  glance of frank tenderness, quick as lightning and leaving a profound impression, a

  secret touch on the heart. It was in the grounds of the hotel, about tiffin time, while

  the Ladies of the orchestra were strolling back to their pavilion after rehearsal, or

  practice, or whatever they called their morning musical exercises in the hall. Heyst,

  returning from the town, where he had discovered that there would be difficulties in

  the way of getting away at once, was crossing the compound, disappointed and

  worried. He had walked almost unwittingly into the straggling group of

  Zangiacomo's performers. It was a shock to him, on coming out of his brown study,

  to find the girl so near to him, as if one waking suddenly should see the figure of

  his dream turned into flesh and blood. She did not raise her shapely head, but her

  glance was no dream thing. It was real, the most real impression of his detached

  existence—so far.

  Heyst had not acknowledged it in any way, though it seemed to him impossible

  that its effect on him should not be visible to anyone who happened to be loo
king

  on. And there were several men on the veranda, steady customers of Schomberg's

  table d'hote, gazing in his direction—at the ladies of the orchestra, in fact. Heyst's

  dread arose, not out of shame or timidity, but from his fastidiousness. On getting

  amongst them, however, he noticed no signs of interest or astonishment in their

  faces, any more than if they had been blind men. Even Schomberg himself, who

  had to make way for him at the top of the stairs, was completely unperturbed, and

  continued the conversation he was carrying on with a client.

  Schomberg, indeed, had observed "that Swede" talking with the girl in the

  intervals. A crony of his had nudged him; and he had thought that it was so much

  the better; the silly fellow would keep everybody else off. He was rather pleased

  than otherwise and watched them out of the corner of his eye with a malicious

  enjoyment of the situation—a sort of Satanic glee. For he had little doubt of his

  personal fascination, and still less of his power to get hold of the girl, who seemed

  too ignorant to know how to help herself, and who was worse than friendless, since

  she had for some reason incurred the animosity of Mrs. Zangiacomo, a woman with

  no conscience. The aversion she showed him as far as she dared (for it is not

  always safe for the helpless to display the delicacy of their sentiments), Schomberg

  pardoned on the score of feminine conventional silliness. He had told Alma, as an

  argument, that she was a clever enough girl to see that she could do no better than

  to put her trust in a man of substance, in the prime of life, who knew his way about.

  But for the excited trembling of his voice, and the extraordinary way in which his

  eyes seemed to be starting out of his crimson, hirsute countenance, such speeches

  had every character of calm, unselfish advice—which, after the manner of lovers,

  passed easily into sanguine plans for the future.

  "We'll soon get rid of the old woman," he whispered to her hurriedly, with

  panting ferocity. "Hang her! I've never cared for her. The climate don't suit her; I

  shall tell her to go to her people in Europe. She will have to go, too! I will see to it.

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  Eins, zwei, march! And then we shall sell this hotel and start another somewhere

  else."

  He assured her that he didn't care what he did for her sake; and it was true. Forty-

  five is the age of recklessness for many men, as if in defiance of the decay and

  death waiting with open arms in the sinister valley at the bottom of the inevitable

  hill. Her shrinking form, her downcast eyes, when she had to listen to him,

  cornered at the end of an empty corridor, he regarded as signs of submission to the

  overpowering force of his will, the recognition of his personal fascinations. For

  every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human

  race come to an end.

  It's easy to imagine Schomberg's humiliation, his shocked fury, when he

  discovered that the girl who had for weeks resisted his attacks, his prayers, and his

  fiercest protestations, had been snatched from under his nose by "that Swede,"

  apparently without any trouble worth speaking of. He refused to believe the fact.

  He would have it, at first, that the Zangiacomos, for some unfathomable reason,

  had played him a scurvy trick, but when no further doubt was possible, he changed

  his view of Heyst. The despised Swede became for Schomberg the deepest, the

  most dangerous, the most hateful of scoundrels. He could not believe that the

  creature he had coveted with so much force and with so little effect, was in reality

  tender, docile to her impulse, and had almost offered herself to Heyst without a

  sense of guilt, in a desire of safety, and from a profound need of placing her trust

  where her woman's instinct guided her ignorance. Nothing would serve Schomberg

  but that she must have been circumvented by some occult exercise of force or craft,

  by the laying of some subtle trap. His wounded vanity wondered ceaselessly at the

  means "that Swede" had employed to seduce her away from a man like him—

  Schomberg—as though those means were bound to have been extraordinary,

  unheard of, inconceivable. He slapped his forehead openly before his customers; he

  would sit brooding in silence or else would burst out unexpectedly declaiming

  against Heyst without measure, discretion, or prudence, with swollen features and

  an affectation of outraged virtue which could not have deceived the most childlike

  of moralists for a moment—and greatly amused his audience.

  It became a recognized entertainment to go and hear his abuse of Heyst, while

  sipping iced drinks on the veranda of the hotel. It was, in a manner, a more

  successful draw than the Zangiacomo concerts had ever been—intervals and all.

  There was never any difficulty in starting the performer off. Anybody could do it,

  by almost any distant allusion. As likely as not he would start his endless

  denunciations in the very billiard-room where Mrs. Schomberg sat enthroned as

  usual, swallowing her sobs, concealing her tortures of abject humiliation and terror

  under her stupid, set, everlasting grin, which, having been provided for her by

  nature, was an excellent mask, in as much as nothing—not even death itself,

  perhaps—could tear it away.

  But nothing lasts in this world, at least without changing its physiognomy. So,

  after a few weeks, Schomberg regained his outward calm, as if his indignation had

  dried up within him. And it was time. He was becoming a bore with his inability to

  talk of anything else but Heyst's unfitness to be at large, Heyst's wickedness, his

  wiles, his astuteness, and his criminality. Schomberg no longer pretended to

  despise him. He could not have done it. After what had happened he could not

  pretend, even to himself. But his bottled-up indignation was fermenting

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  venomously. At the time of his immoderate loquacity one of his customers, an

  elderly man, had remarked one evening:

  "If that ass keeps on like this, he will end by going crazy."

  And this belief was less than half wrong. Schomberg had Heyst on the brain.

  Even the unsatisfactory state of his affairs, which had never been so unpromising

  since he came out East directly after the Franco-Prussian War, he referred to some

  subtly noxious influence of Heyst. It seemed to him that he could never be himself

  again till he had got even with that artful Swede. He was ready to swear that Heyst

  had ruined his life. The girl so unfairly, craftily, basely decoyed away would have

  inspired him to success in a new start. Obviously Mrs. Schomberg, whom he

  terrified by savagely silent moods combined with underhand, poisoned glances,

  could give him no inspiration. He had grown generally neglectful, but with a

  partiality for reckless expedients, as if he did not care when and how his career as a

  hotel-keeper was to be brought to an end. This demoralized state accounted for

  what Davidson had o
bserved on his last visit to the Schomberg establishment, some

  two months after Heyst's secret departure with the girl to the solitude of Samburan.

  The Schomberg of a few years ago—the Schomberg of the Bangkok days, for

  instance, when he started the first of his famed table d'hote dinners—would never

  have risked anything of the sort. His genius ran to catering, "white man for white

  men" and to the inventing, elaborating, and retailing of scandalous gossip with

  asinine unction and impudent delight. But now his mind was perverted by the

  pangs of wounded vanity and of thwarted passion. In this state of moral weakness

  Schomberg allowed himself to be corrupted.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The business was done by a guest who arrived one fine morning by mail-boat—

  immediately from Celebes, having boarded her in Macassar, but generally,

  Schomberg understood, from up China Sea way; a wanderer clearly, even as Heyst

  was, but not alone and of quite another kind.

  Schomberg, looking up from the stern-sheets of his steam-launch, which he used

  for boarding passenger ships on arrival, discovered a dark sunken stare plunging

  down on him over the rail of the first-class part of the deck. He was no great judge

  of physiognomy. Human beings, for him, were either the objects of scandalous

  gossip or else recipients of narrow strips of paper, with proper bill-heads stating the

  name of his hotel—"W. Schomberg, proprietor, accounts settled weekly."

  So in the clean-shaven, extremely thin face hanging over the mail-boat's rail

  Schomberg saw only the face of a possible "account." The steam-launches of other

  hotels were also alongside, but he obtained the preference.

  "You are Mr. Schomberg, aren't you?" the face asked quite unexpectedly.

  "I am at your service," he answered from below; for business is business, and its

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  forms and formulas must be observed, even if one's manly bosom is tortured by

  that dull rage which succeeds the fury of baffled passion, like the glow of embers

  after a fierce blaze.

  Presently the possessor of the handsome but emaciated face was seated beside