PART VI. THE CLAIM OF LIFE AND THE TOLL OF DEATH

I

"Have you got King Tom's watch in there?" said a voice that seemed not to attach the slightest importance to the question. Jorgenson, outside the door of Mrs. Travers' part of the deckhouse, waited for the answer.

He heard a low cry very much like a moan, the startled sound of pain that may be sometimes heard in sick rooms. But it moved him not at all.

He would never have dreamt of opening the door unless told to do so, in which case he would have beheld, with complete indifference, Mrs.

Travers extended on the floor with her head resting on the edge of the camp bedstead (on which Lingard had never slept), as though she had subsided there from a kneeling posture which is the att.i.tude of prayer, supplication, or defeat. The hours of the night had pa.s.sed Mrs. Travers by. After flinging herself on her knees, she didn't know why, since she could think of nothing to pray for, had nothing to invoke, and was too far gone for such a futile thing as despair, she had remained there till the sense of exhaustion had grown on her to the point in which she lost her belief in her power to rise. In a half-sitting att.i.tude, her head resting against the edge of the couch and her arms flung above her head, she sank into an indifference, the mere resignation of a worn-out body and a worn-out mind which often is the only sort of rest that comes to people who are desperately ill and is welcome enough in a way. The voice of Jorgenson roused her out of that state. She sat up, aching in every limb and cold all over.

Jorgenson, behind the door, repeated with lifeless obstinacy:

"Do you see King Tom's watch in there?"

Mrs. Travers got up from the floor. She tottered, s.n.a.t.c.hing at the air, and found the back of the armchair under her hand.

"Who's there?"

She was also ready to ask: "Where am I?" but she remembered and at once became the prey of that active dread which had been lying dormant for a few hours in her uneasy and prostrate body. "What time is it?" she faltered out.

"Dawn," p.r.o.nounced the imperturbable voice at the door. It seemed to her that it was a word that could make any heart sink with apprehension.

Dawn! She stood appalled. And the toneless voice outside the door insisted:

"You must have Tom's watch there!"

"I haven't seen it," she cried as if tormented by a dream.

"Look in that desk thing. If you push open the shutter you will be able to see."

Mrs. Travers became aware of the profound darkness of the cabin.

Jorgenson heard her staggering in there. After a moment a woman's voice, which struck even him as strange, said in faint tones:

"I have it. It's stopped."

"It doesn't matter. I don't want to know the time. There should be a key about. See it anywhere?"

"Yes, it's fastened to the watch," the dazed voice answered from within.

Jorgenson waited before making his request. "Will you pa.s.s it out to me?

There's precious little time left now!"

The door flew open, which was certainly something Jorgenson had not expected. He had expected but a hand with the watch protruded through a narrow crack, But he didn't start back or give any other sign of surprise at seeing Mrs. Travers fully dressed. Against the faint clearness in the frame of the open shutter she presented to him the dark silhouette of her shoulders surmounted by a sleek head, because her hair was still in the two plaits. To Jorgenson Mrs. Travers in her un-European dress had always been displeasing, almost monstrous. Her stature, her gestures, her general carriage struck his eye as absurdly incongruous with a Malay costume, too ample, too free, too bold--offensive. To Mrs. Travers, Jorgenson, in the dusk of the pa.s.sage, had the aspect of a dim white ghost, and he chilled her by his ghost's aloofness.

He picked up the watch from her outspread palm without a word of thanks, only mumbling in his moustache, "H'm, yes, that's it. I haven't yet forgotten how to count seconds correctly, but it's better to have a watch."

She had not the slightest notion what he meant. And she did not care.

Her mind remained confused and the sense of bodily discomfort oppressed her. She whispered, shamefacedly, "I believe I've slept."

"I haven't," mumbled Jorgenson, growing more and more distinct to her eyes. The brightness of the short dawn increased rapidly as if the sun were impatient to look upon the Settlement. "No fear of that," he added, boastfully.

It occurred to Mrs. Travers that perhaps she had not slept either. Her state had been more like an imperfect, half-conscious, quivering death.

She shuddered at the recollection.

"What an awful night," she murmured, drearily.

There was nothing to hope for from Jorgenson. She expected him to vanish, indifferent, like a phantom of the dead carrying off the appropriately dead watch in his hand for some unearthly purpose.

Jorgenson didn't move. His was an insensible, almost a senseless presence! Nothing could be extorted from it. But a wave of anguish as confused as all her other sensations swept Mrs. Travers off her feet.

"Can't you tell me something?" she cried.

For half a minute perhaps Jorgenson made no sound; then: "For years I have been telling anybody who cared to ask," he mumbled in his moustache. "Telling Tom, too. And Tom knew what he wanted to do. How's one to know what _you_ are after?"

She had never expected to hear so many words from that rigid shadow. Its monotonous mumble was fascinating, its sudden loquacity was shocking.

And in the profound stillness that reigned outside it was as if there had been no one left in the world with her but the phantom of that old adventurer. He was heard again: "What I could tell you would be worse than poison."

Mrs. Travers was not familiar with Jorgenson's consecrated phrases. The mechanical voice, the words themselves, his air of abstraction appalled her. And he hadn't done yet; she caught some more of his unconcerned mumbling: "There is nothing I don't know," and the absurdity of the statement was also appalling. Mrs. Travers gasped and with a wild little laugh:

"Then you know why I called after King Tom last night."

He glanced away along his shoulder through the door of the deckhouse at the growing brightness of the day. She did so, too. It was coming. It had come! Another day! And it seemed to Mrs. Travers a worse calamity than any discovery she had made in her life, than anything she could have imagined to come to her. The very magnitude of horror steadied her, seemed to calm her agitation as some kinds of fatal drugs do before they kill. She laid a steady hand on Jorgenson's sleeve and spoke quietly, distinctly, urgently.

"You were on deck. What I want to know is whether I was heard?"

"Yes," said Jorgenson, absently, "I heard you." Then, as if roused a little, he added less mechanically: "The whole ship heard you."

Mrs. Travers asked herself whether perchance she had not simply screamed. It had never occurred to her before that perhaps she had. At the time it seemed to her she had no strength for more than a whisper.

Had she been really so loud? And the deadly chill, the night that had gone by her had left in her body, vanished from her limbs, pa.s.sed out of her in a flush. Her face was turned away from the light, and that fact gave her courage to continue. Moreover, the man before her was so detached from the shames and prides and schemes of life that he seemed not to count at all, except that somehow or other he managed at times to catch the mere literal sense of the words addressed to him--and answer them. And answer them! Answer unfailingly, impersonally, without any feeling.

"You saw Tom--King Tom? Was he there? I mean just then, at the moment.

There was a light at the gangway. Was he on deck?"

"No. In the boat."

"Already? Could I have been heard in the boat down there? You say the whole ship heard me--and I don't care. But could he hear me?"

"Was it Tom you were after?" said Jorgenson in the tone of a negligent remark.

"Can't you answer me?" she cried, angrily.

"Tom was busy. No child's play. The boat shoved off," said Jorgenson, as if he were merely thinking aloud.

"You won't tell me, then?" Mrs. Travers apostrophized him, fearlessly.

She was not afraid of Jorgenson. Just then she was afraid of nothing and n.o.body. And Jorgenson went on thinking aloud.

"I guess he will be kept busy from now on and so shall I."

Mrs. Travers seemed ready to take by the shoulders and shake that dead-voiced spectre till it begged for mercy. But suddenly her strong white arms fell down by her side, the arms of an exhausted woman.

"I shall never, never find out," she whispered to herself.