JOSEPH CONRAD: 9 Quintessential Books in One Collection. Джозеф Конрад

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ morning shadow was gone; and far away in the devouring sunshine Wang was in time to see Number One and the woman, two remote white specks against the sombre line of the forest. In a moment they vanished. With the smallest display of action, Wang also vanished from the sunlight of the clearing.

      Heyst and Lena entered the shade of the forest path which crossed the island, and which, near its highest point had been blocked by felled trees. But their intention was not to go so far. After keeping to the path for some distance, they left it at a point where the forest was bare of undergrowth, and the trees, festooned with creepers, stood clear of one another in the gloom of their own making. Here and there great splashes of light lay on the ground. They moved, silent in the great stillness, breathing the calmness, the infinite isolation, the repose of a slumber without dreams. They emerged at the upper limit of vegetation, among some rocks; and in a depression of the sharp slope, like a small platform, they turned about and looked from on high over the sea, lonely, its colour effaced by sunshine, its horizon a heat mist, a mere unsubstantial shimmer in the pale and blinding infinity overhung by the darker blaze of the sky.

      "It makes my head swim," the girl murmured, shutting her eyes and putting her hand on his shoulder.

      Heyst, gazing fixedly to the southward, exclaimed:

      "Sail ho!"

      A moment of silence ensued.

      "It must be very far away," he went on. "I don't think you could see it. Some native craft making for the Moluccas, probably. Come, we mustn't stay here."

      With his arm round her waist, he led her down a little distance, and they settled themselves in the shade; she, seated on the ground, he a little lower, reclining at her feet.

      "You don't like to look at the sea from up there?" he said after a time.

      She shook her head. That empty space was to her the abomination of desolation. But she only said again:

      "It makes my head swim."

      "Too big?" he inquired.

      "Too lonely. It makes my heart sink, too," she added in a low voice, as if confessing a secret.

      "I'm afraid," said Heyst, "that you would be justified in reproaching me for these sensations. But what would you have?"

      His tone was playful, but his eyes, directed at her face, were serious. She protested.

      "I am not feeling lonely with you—not a bit. It is only when we come up to that place, and I look at all that water and all that light—"

      "We will never come here again, then," he interrupted her.

      She remained silent for a while, returning his gaze till he removed it.

      "It seems as if everything that there is had gone under," she said.

      "Reminds you of the story of the deluge," muttered the man, stretched at her feet and looking at them. "Are you frightened at it?"

      "I should be rather frightened to be left behind alone. When I say, I, of course I mean we."

      "Do you?" . . . Heyst remained silent for a while. "The vision of a world destroyed," he mused aloud. "Would you be sorry for it?"

      "I should be sorry for the happy people in it," she said simply.

      His gaze travelled up her figure and reached her face, where he seemed to detect the veiled glow of intelligence, as one gets a glimpse of the sun through the clouds.

      "I should have thought it's they specially who ought to have been congratulated. Don't you?"

      "Oh, yes—I understand what you mean; but there were forty days before it was all over."

      "You seem to be in possession of all the details."

      Heyst spoke just to say something rather than to gaze at her in silence. She was not looking at him.

      "Sunday school," she murmured. "I went regularly from the time I was eight till I was thirteen. We lodged in the north of London, off Kingsland Road. It wasn't a bad time. Father was earning good money then. The woman of the house used to pack me off in the afternoon with her own girls. She was a good woman. Her husband was in the post office. Sorter or something. Such a quiet man. He used to go off after supper for night-duty, sometimes. Then one day they had a row, and broke up the home. I remember I cried when we had to pack up all of a sudden and go into other lodgings. I never knew what it was, though—"

      "The deluge," muttered Heyst absently.

      He felt intensely aware of her personality, as if this were the first moment of leisure he had found to look at her since they had come together. The peculiar timbre of her voice, with its modulations of audacity and sadness, would have given interest to the most inane chatter. But she was no chatterer. She was rather silent, with a capacity for immobility, an upright stillness, as when resting on the concert platform between the musical numbers, her feet crossed, her hands reposing on her lap. But in the intimacy of their life her grey, unabashed gaze forced upon him the sensation of something inexplicable reposing within her; stupidity or inspiration, weakness or force—or simply an abysmal emptiness, reserving itself even in the moments of complete surrender.

      During a long pause she did not look at him. Then suddenly, as if the word "deluge" had stuck in her mind, she asked, looking up at the cloudless sky:

      "Does it ever rain here?"

      "There is a season when it rains almost every day," said Heyst, surprised. "There are also thunderstorms. We once had a 'mud-shower.'"

      "Mud-shower?"

      "Our neighbour there was shooting up ashes. He sometimes clears his red-hot gullet like that; and a thunderstorm came along at the same time. It was very messy; but our neighbour is generally well behaved—just smokes quietly, as he did that day when I first showed you the smudge in the sky from the schooner's deck. He's a good-natured, lazy fellow of a volcano."

      "I saw a mountain smoking like that before," she said, staring at the slender stem of a tree-fern some dozen feet in front of her. "It wasn't very long after we left England—some few days, though. I was so ill at first that I lost count of days. A smoking mountain—I can't think how they called it."

      "Vesuvius, perhaps," suggested Heyst.

      "That's the name."

      "I saw it, too, years, ages ago," said Heyst.

      "On your way here?"

      "No, long before I ever thought of coming into this part of the world. I was yet a boy."

      She turned and looked at him attentively, as if seeking to discover some trace of that boyhood in the mature face of the man with the hair thin at the top and the long, thick moustaches. Heyst stood the frank examination with a playful smile, hiding the profound effect these veiled grey eyes produced—whether on his heart or on his nerves, whether sensuous or spiritual, tender or irritating, he was unable to say.

      "Well, princess of Samburan," he said at last, "have I found favour in your sight?"

      She seemed to wake up, and shook her head.

      "I was thinking," she murmured very low.

СКАЧАТЬ