CHAPTER IV
My little passage with Jacobus the merchant became known generally.
One or two of my acquaintances made distant allusions to it.
Perhaps the mulatto boy had talked. I must confess that people
appeared rather scandalised, but not with Jacobus's brutality. A
man I knew remonstrated with me for my hastiness.
I gave him the whole story of my visit, not forgetting the tell-
tale resemblance of the wretched mulatto boy to his tormentor. He
was not surprised. No doubt, no doubt. What of that? In a jovial
tone he assured me that there must be many of that sort. The elder
Jacobus had been a bachelor all his life. A highly respectable
bachelor. But there had never been open scandal in that
connection. His life had been quite regular. It could cause no
offence to any one.
I said that I had been offended considerably. My interlocutor
opened very wide eyes. Why? Because a mulatto lad got a few
knocks? That was not a great affair, surely. I had no idea how
insolent and untruthful these half-castes were. In fact he seemed
to think Mr. Jacobus rather kind than otherwise to employ that
youth at all; a sort of amiable weakness which could be forgiven.
This acquaintance of mine belonged to one of the old French
families, descendants of the old colonists; all noble, all
impoverished, and living a narrow domestic life in dull, dignified
decay. The men, as a rule, occupy inferior posts in Government
offices or in business houses. The girls are almost always pretty,
ignorant of the world, kind and agreeable and generally bilingual;
they prattle innocently both in French and English. The emptiness
of their existence passes belief.
I obtained my entry into a couple of such households because some
years before, in Bombay, I had occasion to be of use to a pleasant,
ineffectual young man who was rather stranded there, not knowing
what to do with himself or even how to get home to his island
again. It was a matter of two hundred rupees or so, but, when I
turned up, the family made a point of showing their gratitude by
admitting me to their intimacy. My knowledge of the French
language made me specially acceptable. They had meantime managed
to marry the fellow to a woman nearly twice his age, comparatively
well off: the only profession he was really fit for. But it was
not all cakes and ale. The first time I called on the couple she
spied a little spot of grease on the poor devil's pantaloons and
made him a screaming scene of reproaches so full of sincere passion
that I sat terrified as at a tragedy of Racine.
Of course there was never question of the money I had advanced him;
but his sisters, Miss Angele and Miss Mary, and the aunts of both
families, who spoke quaint archaic French of pre-Revolution period,
and a host of distant relations adopted me for a friend outright in
a manner which was almost embarrassing.
It was with the eldest brother (he was employed at a desk in my
consignee's office) that I was having this talk about the merchant
Jacobus. He regretted my attitude and nodded his head sagely. An
influential man. One never knew when one would need him. I
expressed my immense preference for the shopkeeper of the two. At
that my friend looked grave.
"What on earth are you pulling that long face about?" I cried
impatiently. "He asked me to see his garden and I have a good mind
to go some day."
"Don't do that," he said, so earnestly that I burst into a fit of
laughter; but he looked at me without a smile.
This was another matter altogether. At one time the public
conscience of the island had been mightily troubled by my Jacobus.
The two brothers had been partners for years in great harmony, when
a wandering circus came to the island and my Jacobus became
suddenly infatuated with one of the lady-riders. What made it
worse was that he was married. He had not even the grace to
conceal his passion. It must have been strong indeed to carry away
such a large placid creature. His behaviour was perfectly
scandalous. He followed that woman to the Cape, and apparently
travelled at the tail of that beastly circus to other parts of the
world, in a most degrading position. The woman soon ceased to care
for him, and treated him worse than a dog. Most extraordinary
stories of moral degradation were reaching the island at that time.
He had not the strength of mind to shake himself free. . . .
The grotesque image of a fat, pushing ship-chandler, enslaved by an
unholy love-spell, fascinated me; and I listened rather open-
mouthed to the tale as old as the world, a tale which had been the
subject of legend, of moral fables, of poems, but which so
ludicrously failed to fit the personality. What a strange victim
for the gods!
Meantime his deserted wife had died. His daughter was taken care
of by his brother, who married her as advantageously as was
possible in the circumstances.
"Oh! The Mrs. Doctor!" I exclaimed.
"You know that? Yes. A very able man. He wanted a lift in the
world, and there was a good bit of money from her mother, besides
the expectations. . . Of course, they don't know him," he added.
"The doctor nods in the street, I believe, but he avoids speaking
to him when they meet on board a ship, as must happen sometimes."
I remarked that this surely was an old story by now.
My friend assented. But it was Jacobus's own fault that it was
neither forgiven nor forgotten. He came back ultimately. But how?
Not in a spirit of contrition, in a way to propitiate his
scandalised fellow-citizens. He must needs drag along with him a
child--a girl. . . .
"He spoke to me of a daughter who lives with him," I observed, very
much interested.
"She's certainly the daughter of the circus-woman," said my friend.
"She may be his daughter too; I am willing to admit that she is.
In fact I have no doubt--"
But he did not see why she should have been brought into a
respectable community to perpetuate the memory of the scandal. And
that was not the worst. Presently something much more distressing
happened. That abandoned woman turned up. Landed from a mail-
boat. . . .
"What! Here? To claim the child perhaps," I suggested.
"Not she!" My friendly informant was very scornful. "Imagine a
painted, haggard, agitated, desperate hag. Been cast off in
Mozambique by somebody who paid her passage here. She had been
injured internally by a kick from a horse; she hadn't a cent on her
when she got ashore; I don't think she even asked to see the child.
At any rate, not till the last day of her life. Jacobus hired for
her a bungalow to die in. He got a couple of Sisters from the
hospital to nurse her through these few months. If he didn't marry
her in extremis as the good Sisters tried to bring about, it's
because she wouldn't even hear of it. As the nuns said: 'The
woman died impenitent.' It was reported that she ordered Jacobus
out of the room with her last breath. This may be the real reason
why he didn't go into mourning himself; he only put the child into
black. While she was little she was to be seen sometimes about the
streets attended by a negro woman, but since she became of age to
put her hair up I don't think she has set foot outside that garden
once. She must be over eighteen now."
Thus my friend, with some added details; such as, that he didn't
think the girl had spoken to three people of any position in the
island; that an elderly female relative of the brothers Jacobus had
been induced by extreme poverty to accept the position of
gouvernante to the girl. As to Jacobus's business (which certainly
annoyed his brother) it was a wise choice on his part. It brought
him in contact only with strangers of passage; whereas any other
would have given rise to all sorts of awkwardness with his social
equals. The man was not wanting in a certain tact--only he was
naturally shameless. For why did he want to keep that girl with
him? It was most painful for everybody.
I thought suddenly (and with profound disgust) of the other
Jacobus, and I could not refrain from saying slily:
"I suppose if he employed her, say, as a scullion in his household
and occasionally pulled her hair or boxed her ears, the position
would have been more regular--less shocking to the respectable
class to which he belongs."
He was not so stupid as to miss my intention, and shrugged his
shoulders impatiently.
"You don't understand. To begin with, she's not a mulatto. And a
scandal is a scandal. People should be given a chance to forget.
I dare say it would have been better for her if she had been turned
into a scullion or something of that kind. Of course he's trying
to make money in every sort of petty way, but in such a business
there'll never be enough for anybody to come forward."
When my friend left me I had a conception of Jacobus and his
daughter existing, a lonely pair of castaways, on a desert island;
the girl sheltering in the house as if it were a cavern in a cliff,
and Jacobus going out to pick up a living for both on the beach--
exactly like two shipwrecked people who always hope for some
rescuer to bring them back at last into touch with the rest of
mankind.
But Jacobus's bodily reality did not fit in with this romantic
view. When he turned up on board in the usual course, he sipped
the cup of coffee placidly, asked me if I was satisfied--and I
hardly listened to the harbour gossip he dropped slowly in his low,
voice-saving enunciation. I had then troubles of my own. My ship
chartered, my thoughts dwelling on the success of a quick round
voyage, I had been suddenly confronted by a shortage of bags. A
catastrophe! The stock of one especial kind, called pockets,
seemed to be totally exhausted. A consignment was shortly
expected--it was afloat, on its way, but, meantime, the loading of
my ship dead stopped, I had enough to worry about. My consignees,
who had received me with such heartiness on my arrival, now, in the
character of my charterers, listened to my complaints with polite
helplessness. Their manager, the old-maidish, thin man, who so
prudishly didn't even like to speak about the impure Jacobus, gave
me the correct commercial view of the position.
"My dear Captain"--he was retracting his leathery cheeks into a
condescending, shark-like smile--"we were not morally obliged to
tell you of a possible shortage before you signed the charter-
party. It was for you to guard against the contingency of a delay-
-strictly speaking. But of course we shouldn't have taken any
advantage. This is no one's fault really. We ourselves have been
taken unawares," he concluded primly, with an obvious lie.
This lecture I confess had made me thirsty. Suppressed rage
generally produces that effect; and as I strolled on aimlessly I
bethought myself of the tall earthenware pitcher in the captains'
room of the Jacobus "store."
With no more than a nod to the men I found assembled there, I
poured down a deep, cool draught on my indignation, then another,
and then, becoming dejected, I sat plunged in cheerless
reflections. The others read, talked, smoked, bandied over my head
some unsubtle chaff. But my abstraction was respected. And it was
without a word to any one that I rose and went out, only to be
quite unexpectedly accosted in the bustle of the store by Jacobus
the outcast.
"Glad to see you, Captain. What? Going away? You haven't been
looking so well these last few days, I notice. Run down, eh?"
He was in his shirt-sleeves, and his words were in the usual course
of business, but they had a human note. It was commercial amenity,
but I had been a stranger to amenity in that connection. I do
verily believe (from the direction of his heavy glance towards a
certain shelf) that he was going to suggest the purchase of
Clarkson's Nerve Tonic, which he kept in stock, when I said
impulsively:
"I am rather in trouble with my loading."
Wide awake under his sleepy, broad mask with glued lips, he
understood at once, had a movement of the head so appreciative that
I relieved my exasperation by exclaiming:
"Surely there must be eleven hundred quarter-bags to be found in
the colony. It's only a matter of looking for them."
Again that slight movement of the big head, and in the noise and
activity of the store that tranquil murmur:
"To be sure. But then people likely to have a reserve of quarter-
bags wouldn't want to sell. They'd need that size themselves."
"That's exactly what my consignees are telling me. Impossible to
buy. Bosh! They don't want to. It suits them to have the ship
hung up. But if I were to discover the lot they would have to--
Look here, Jacobus! You are the man to have such a thing up your
sleeve."
He protested with a ponderous swing of his big head. I stood
before him helplessly, being looked at by those heavy eyes with a
veiled expression as of a man after some soul-shaking crisis.
Then, suddenly:
"It's impossible to talk quietly here," he whispered. "I am very
busy. But if you could go and wait for me in my house. It's less
than ten minutes' walk. Oh, yes, you don't know the way."
He called for his coat and offered to take me there himself. He
would have to return to the store at once for an hour or so to
finish his business, and then he would be at liberty to talk over
with me that matter of quarter-bags. This programme was breathed
out at me through slightly parted, still lips; his heavy,
motionless glance rested upon me, placid as ever, the glance of a
tired man--but I felt that it was searching, too. I could not
imagine what he was looking for in me and kept silent, wondering.
"I am asking you to wait for me in my house till I am at liberty to
talk this matter over. You will?"
"Why, of course!" I cried.
"But I cannot promise--"
"I dare say not," I said. "I don't expect a promise."
"I mean I can't even promise to try the move I've in my mind. One
must see first . . . h'm!"
"All right. I'll take the chance. I'll wait for you as long as
you like. What else have I to do in this infernal hole of a port!"
Before I had uttered my last words we had set off at a swinging
pace. We turned a couple of corners and entered a street
completely empty of traffic, of semi-rural aspect, paved with
cobblestones nestling in grass tufts. The house came to the line
of the roadway; a single story on an elevated basement of rough-
stones, so that our heads were below the level of the windows as we
went along. All the jalousies were tightly shut, like eyes, and
the house seemed fast asleep in the afternoon sunshine. The
entrance was at the side, in an alley even more grass-grown than
the street: a small door, simply on the latch.
With a word of apology as to showing me the way, Jacobus preceded
me up a dark passage and led me across the naked parquet floor of
what I supposed to be the dining-room. It was lighted by three
glass doors which stood wide open on to a verandah or rather loggia
running its brick arches along the garden side of the house. It
was really a magnificent garden: smooth green lawns and a gorgeous
maze of flower-beds in the foreground, displayed around a basin of
dark water framed in a marble rim, and in the distance the massed
foliage of varied trees concealing the roofs of other houses. The
town might have been miles away. It was a brilliantly coloured
solitude, drowsing in a warm, voluptuous silence. Where the long,
still shadows fell across the beds, and in shady nooks, the massed
colours of the flowers had an extraordinary magnificence of effect.
I stood entranced. Jacobus grasped me delicately above the elbow,
impelling me to a half-turn to the left.
I had not noticed the girl before. She occupied a low, deep,
wickerwork arm-chair, and I saw her in exact profile like a figure
in a tapestry, and as motionless. Jacobus released my arm.
"This is Alice," he announced tranquilly; and his subdued manner of
speaking made it sound so much like a confidential communication
that I fancied myself nodding understandingly and whispering: "I
see, I see." . . . Of course, I did nothing of the kind. Neither
of us did anything; we stood side by side looking down at the girl.
For quite a time she did not stir, staring straight before her as
if watching the vision of some pageant passing through the garden
in the deep, rich glow of light and the splendour of flowers.
Then, coming to the end of her reverie, she looked round and up.
If I had not at first noticed her, I am certain that she too had
been unaware of my presence till she actually perceived me by her
father's side. The quickened upward movement of the heavy eyelids,
the widening of the languid glance, passing into a fixed stare, put
that beyond doubt.
Under her amazement there was a hint of fear, and then came a flash
as of anger. Jacobus, after uttering my name fairly loud, said:
"Make yourself at home, Captain--I won't be gone long," and went
away rapidly. Before I had time to make a bow I was left alone
with the girl--who, I remembered suddenly, had not been seen by any
man or woman of that town since she had found it necessary to put
up her hair. It looked as though it had not been touched again
since that distant time of first putting up; it was a mass of
black, lustrous locks, twisted anyhow high on her head, with long,
untidy wisps hanging down on each side of the clear sallow face; a
mass so thick and strong and abundant that, nothing but to look at,
it gave you a sensation of heavy pressure on the top of your head
and an impression of magnificently cynical untidiness. She leaned
forward, hugging herself with crossed legs; a dingy, amber-
coloured, flounced wrapper of some thin stuff revealed the young
supple body drawn together tensely in the deep low seat as if
crouching for a spring. I detected a slight, quivering start or
two, which looked uncommonly like bounding away. They were
followed by the most absolute immobility.
The absurd impulse to run out after Jacobus (for I had been
startled, too) once repressed, I took a chair, placed it not very
far from her, sat down deliberately, and began to talk about the
garden, caring not what I said, but using a gentle caressing
intonation as one talks to soothe a startled wild animal. I could
not even be certain that she understood me. She never raised her
face nor attempted to look my way. I kept on talking only to
prevent her from taking flight. She had another of those
quivering, repressed starts which made me catch my breath with
apprehension.
Ultimately I formed a notion that what prevented her perhaps from
going off in one great, nervous leap, was the scantiness of her
attire. The wicker armchair was the most substantial thing about
her person. What she had on under that dingy, loose, amber wrapper
must have been of the most flimsy and airy character. One could
not help being aware of it. It was obvious. I felt it actually
embarrassing at first; but that sort of embarrassment is got over
easily by a mind not enslaved by narrow prejudices. I did not
avert my gaze from Alice. I went on talking with ingratiating
softness, the recollection that, most likely, she had never before
been spoken to by a strange man adding to my assurance. I don't
know why an emotional tenseness should have crept into the
situation. But it did. And just as I was becoming aware of it a
slight scream cut short my flow of urbane speech.
The scream did not proceed from the girl. It was emitted behind
me, and caused me to turn my head sharply. I understood at once
that the apparition in the doorway was the elderly relation of
Jacobus, the companion, the gouvernante. While she remained
thunderstruck, I got up and made her a low bow.
The ladies of Jacobus's household evidently spent their days in
light attire. This stumpy old woman with a face like a large
wrinkled lemon, beady eyes, and a shock of iron-grey hair, was
dressed in a garment of some ash-coloured, silky, light stuff. It
fell from her thick neck down to her toes with the simplicity of an
unadorned nightgown. It made her appear truly cylindrical. She
exclaimed: "How did you get here?"
Before I could say a word she vanished and presently I heard a
confusion of shrill protestations in a distant part of the house.
Obviously no one could tell her how I got there. In a moment, with
great outcries from two negro women following her, she waddled back
to the doorway, infuriated.
"What do you want here?"
I turned to the girl. She was sitting straight up now, her hands
posed on the arms of the chair. I appealed to her.
"Surely, Miss Alice, you will not let them drive me out into the
street?"
Her magnificent black eyes, narrowed, long in shape, swept over me
with an indefinable expression, then in a harsh, contemptuous voice
she let fall in French a sort of explanation:
"C'est papa."
I made another low bow to the old woman.
She turned her back on me in order to drive away her black
henchwomen, then surveying my person in a peculiar manner with one
small eye nearly closed and her face all drawn up on that side as
if with a twinge of toothache, she stepped out on the verandah, sat
down in a rocking-chair some distance away, and took up her
knitting from a little table. Before she started at it she plunged
one of the needles into the mop of her grey hair and stirred it
vigorously.
Her elementary nightgown-sort of frock clung to her ancient,
stumpy, and floating form. She wore white cotton stockings and
flat brown velvet slippers. Her feet and ankles were obtrusively
visible on the foot-rest. She began to rock herself slightly,
while she knitted. I had resumed my seat and kept quiet, for I
mistrusted that old woman. What if she ordered me to depart? She
seemed capable of any outrage. She had snorted once or twice; she
was knitting violently. Suddenly she piped at the young girl in
French a question which I translate colloquially:
"What's your father up to, now?"
The young creature shrugged her shoulders so comprehensively that
her whole body swayed within the loose wrapper; and in that
unexpectedly harsh voice which yet had a seductive quality to the
senses, like certain kinds of natural rough wines one drinks with
pleasure:
"It's some captain. Leave me alone--will you!"
The chair rocked quicker, the old, thin voice was like a whistle.
"You and your father make a pair. He would stick at nothing--
that's well known. But I didn't expect this."
I thought it high time to air some of my own French. I remarked
modestly, but firmly, that this was business. I had some matters
to talk over with Mr. Jacobus.
At once she piped out a derisive "Poor innocent!" Then, with a
change of tone: "The shop's for business. Why don't you go to the
shop to talk with him?"
The furious speed of her fingers and knitting-needles made one
dizzy; and with squeaky indignation:
"Sitting here staring at that girl--is that what you call
business?"
"No," I said suavely. "I call this pleasure--an unexpected
pleasure. And unless Miss Alice objects--"
I half turned to her. She flung at me an angry and contemptuous
"Don't care!" and leaning her elbow on her knees took her chin in
her hand--a Jacobus chin undoubtedly. And those heavy eyelids,
this black irritated stare reminded me of Jacobus, too--the wealthy
merchant, the respected one. The design of her eyebrows also was
the same, rigid and ill-omened. Yes! I traced in her a
resemblance to both of them. It came to me as a sort of surprising
remote inference that both these Jacobuses were rather handsome men
after all. I said:
"Oh! Then I shall stare at you till you smile."
She favoured me again with an even more viciously scornful "Don't
care!"
The old woman broke in blunt and shrill:
"Hear his impudence! And you too! Don't care! Go at least and
put some more clothes on. Sitting there like this before this
sailor riff-raff."
The sun was about to leave the Pearl of the Ocean for other seas,
for other lands. The walled garden full of shadows blazed with
colour as if the flowers were giving up the light absorbed during
the day. The amazing old woman became very explicit. She
suggested to the girl a corset and a petticoat with a cynical
unreserve which humiliated me. Was I of no more account than a
wooden dummy? The girl snapped out: "Shan't!"
It was not the naughty retort of a vulgar child; it had a note of
desperation. Clearly my intrusion had somehow upset the balance of
their established relations. The old woman knitted with furious
accuracy, her eyes fastened down on her work.
"Oh, you are the true child of your father! And THAT talks of
entering a convent! Letting herself be stared at by a fellow."
"Leave off."
"Shameless thing!"
"Old sorceress," the girl uttered distinctly, preserving her
meditative pose, chin in hand, and a far-away stare over the
garden.
It was like the quarrel of the kettle and the pot. The old woman
flew out of the chair, banged down her work, and with a great play
of thick limb perfectly visible in that weird, clinging garment of
hers, strode at the girl--who never stirred. I was experiencing a
sort of trepidation when, as if awed by that unconscious attitude,
the aged relative of Jacobus turned short upon me.
She was, I perceived, armed with a knitting-needle; and as she
raised her hand her intention seemed to be to throw it at me like a
dart. But she only used it to scratch her head with, examining me
the while at close range, one eye nearly shut and her face
distorted by a whimsical, one-sided grimace.
"My dear man," she asked abruptly, "do you expect any good to come
of this?"
"I do hope so indeed, Miss Jacobus." I tried to speak in the easy
tone of an afternoon caller. "You see, I am here after some bags."
"Bags! Look at that now! Didn't I hear you holding forth to that
graceless wretch?"
"You would like to see me in my grave," uttered the motionless girl
hoarsely.
"Grave! What about me? Buried alive before I am dead for the sake
of a thing blessed with such a pretty father!" she cried; and
turning to me: "You're one of these men he does business with.
Well--why don't you leave us in peace, my good fellow?"
It was said in a tone--this "leave us in peace!" There was a sort
of ruffianly familiarity, a superiority, a scorn in it. I was to
hear it more than once, for you would show an imperfect knowledge
of human nature if you thought that this was my last visit to that
house--where no respectable person had put foot for ever so many
years. No, you would be very much mistaken if you imagined that
this reception had scared me away. First of all I was not going to
run before a grotesque and ruffianly old woman.
And then you mustn't forget these necessary bags. That first
evening Jacobus made me stay to dinner; after, however, telling me
loyally that he didn't know whether he could do anything at all for
me. He had been thinking it over. It was too difficult, he
feared. . . . But he did not give it up in so many words.
We were only three at table; the girl by means of repeated "Won't!"
"Shan't!" and "Don't care!" having conveyed and affirmed her
intention not to come to the table, not to have any dinner, not to
move from the verandah. The old relative hopped about in her flat
slippers and piped indignantly, Jacobus towered over her and
murmured placidly in his throat; I joined jocularly from a
distance, throwing in a few words, for which under the cover of the
night I received secretly a most vicious poke in the ribs from the
old woman's elbow or perhaps her fist. I restrained a cry. And
all the time the girl didn't even condescend to raise her head to
look at any of us. All this may sound childish--and yet that
stony, petulant sullenness had an obscurely tragic flavour.
And so we sat down to the food around the light of a good many
candles while she remained crouching out there, staring in the dark
as if feeding her bad temper on the heavily scented air of the
admirable garden.
Before leaving I said to Jacobus that I would come next day to hear
if the bag affair had made any progress. He shook his head
slightly at that.
"I'll haunt your house daily till you pull it off. You'll be
always finding me here."
His faint, melancholy smile did not part his thick lips.
"That will be all right, Captain."
Then seeing me to the door, very tranquil, he murmured earnestly
the recommendation: "Make yourself at home," and also the
hospitable hint about there being always "a plate of soup." It was
only on my way to the quay, down the ill-lighted streets, that I
remembered I had been engaged to dine that very evening with the S-
family. Though vexed with my forgetfulness (it would be rather
awkward to explain) I couldn't help thinking that it had procured
me a more amusing evening. And besides--business. The sacred
business--.
In a barefooted negro who overtook me at a run and bolted down the
landing-steps I recognised Jacobus's boatman, who must have been
feeding in the kitchen. His usual "Good-night, sah!" as I went up
my ship's ladder had a more cordial sound than on previous
occasions.
