Complete Works

in close proximity to the great iron boiler, where the family daily rice was being cooked by the women under Mrs. Almayer’s superintendence, did that astute negotiator carry on long conversations in Sulu language with Almayer’s wife.  What the subject of their discourses was might have been guessed from the subsequent domestic scenes by Almayer’s hearthstone.
    Of late Almayer had taken to excursions up the river.  In a small canoe with two paddlers and the faithful Ali for a steersman he would disappear for a few days at a time.  All his movements were no doubt closely watched by Lakamba and Abdulla, for the man once in the confidence of Rajah Laut was supposed to be in possession of valuable secrets.  The coast population of Borneo believes implicitly in diamonds of fabulous value, in gold mines of enormous richness in the interior.  And all those imaginings are heightened by the difficulty of penetrating far inland, especially on the north-east coast, where the Malays and the river tribes of Dyaks or Head-hunters are eternally quarrelling.  It is true enough that some gold reaches the coast in the hands of those Dyaks when, during short periods of truce in the desultory warfare, they visit the coast settlements of Malays.  And so the wildest exaggerations are built up and added to on the slight basis of that fact.
    Almayer in his quality of white man — as Lingard before him — had somewhat better relations with the up-river tribes.  Yet even his excursions were not without danger, and his returns were eagerly looked for by the impatient Lakamba.  But every time the Rajah was disappointed.  Vain were the conferences by the rice-pot of his factotum Babalatchi with the white man’s wife.  The white man himself was impenetrable — impenetrable to persuasion, coaxing, abuse; to soft words and shrill revilings; to desperate beseechings or murderous threats; for Mrs. Almayer, in her extreme desire to persuade her husband into an alliance with Lakamba, played upon the whole gamut of passion.  With her soiled robe wound tightly under the armpits across her lean bosom, her scant grayish hair tumbled in disorder over her projecting cheek-bones, in suppliant attitude, she depicted with shrill volubility the advantages of close union with a man so good and so fair dealing.
    “Why don’t you go to the Rajah?” she screamed.  “Why do you go back to those Dyaks in the great forest?  They should be killed.  You cannot kill them, you cannot; but our Rajah’s men are brave!  You tell the Rajah where the old white man’s treasure is.  Our Rajah is good!  He is our very grandfather, Datu Besar!  He will kill those wretched Dyaks, and you shall have half the treasure.  Oh, Kaspar, tell where the treasure is!  Tell me!  Tell me out of the old man’s surat where you read so often at night.”
    On those occasions Almayer sat with rounded shoulders bending to the blast of this domestic tempest, accentuating only each pause in the torrent of his wife’s eloquence by an angry growl, “There is no treasure!  Go away, woman!”  Exasperated by the sight of his patiently bent back, she would at last walk round so as to face him across the table, and clasping her robe with one hand she stretched the other lean arm and claw-like hand to emphasise, in a passion of anger and contempt, the rapid rush of scathing remarks and bitter cursings heaped on the head of the man unworthy to associate with brave Malay chiefs.  It ended generally by Almayer rising slowly, his long pipe in hand, his face set into a look of inward pain, and walking away in silence.  He descended the steps and plunged into the long grass on his way to the solitude of his new house, dragging his feet in a state of physical collapse from disgust and fear before that fury.  She followed to the head of the steps, and sent the shafts of indiscriminate abuse after the retreating form.  And each of those scenes was concluded by a piercing shriek, reaching him far away.  “You know, Kaspar, I am your wife! your own Christian wife after your own Blanda law!”  For she knew that this was the bitterest thing of all; the greatest regret of that man’s life.
    All these scenes Nina witnessed unmoved.  She might have been deaf, dumb, without any feeling as far as any expression of opinion went.  Yet oft when her father had sought the refuge of the great dusty rooms of “Almayer’s Folly,” and her mother, exhausted by rhetorical efforts,