Complete Works

those that thought most of you. I appeal to what is best in you; do not abandon that woman.”
    “I have not abandoned her,” answered Willems, quickly, with conscious truthfulness. “Why should I? As you so justly observed, she has been a good wife to me. A very good, quiet, obedient, loving wife, and I love her as much as she loves me. Every bit. But as to going back now, to that place where I . . . To walk again amongst those men who yesterday were ready to crawl before me, and then feel on my back the sting of their pitying or satisfied smiles — no! I can’t. I would rather hide from them at the bottom of the sea,” he went on, with resolute energy. “I don’t think, Captain Lingard,” he added, more quietly, “I don’t think that you realize what my position was there.”
    In a wide sweep of his hand he took in the sleeping shore from north to south, as if wishing it a proud and threatening good-bye. For a short moment he forgot his downfall in the recollection of his brilliant triumphs. Amongst the men of his class and occupation who slept in those dark houses he had been indeed the first.
    “It is hard,” muttered Lingard, pensively. “But whose the fault? Whose the fault?”
    “Captain Lingard!” cried Willems, under the sudden impulse of a felicitous inspiration, “if you leave me here on this jetty — it’s murder. I shall never return to that place alive, wife or no wife. You may just as well cut my throat at once.”
    The old seaman started.
    “Don’t try to frighten me, Willems,” he said, with great severity, and paused.
    Above the accents of Willems’ brazen despair he heard, with considerable uneasiness, the whisper of his own absurd conscience. He meditated for awhile with an irresolute air.
    “I could tell you to go and drown yourself, and be damned to you,” he said, with an unsuccessful assumption of brutality in his manner, “but I won’t. We are responsible for one another — worse luck. I am almost ashamed of myself, but I can understand your dirty pride. I can! By . . .”
    He broke off with a loud sigh and walked briskly to the steps, at the bottom of which lay his boat, rising and falling gently on the slight and invisible swell.
    “Below there! Got a lamp in the boat? Well, light it and bring it up, one of you. Hurry now!”
    He tore out a page of his pocketbook, moistened his pencil with great energy and waited, stamping his feet impatiently.
    “I will see this thing through,” he muttered to himself. “And I will have it all square and ship-shape; see if I don’t! Are you going to bring that lamp, you son of a crippled mud-turtle? I am waiting.”
    The gleam of the light on the paper placated his professional anger, and he wrote rapidly, the final dash of his signature curling the paper up in a triangular tear.
    “Take that to this white Tuan’s house. I will send the boat back for you in half an hour.”
    The coxswain raised his lamp deliberately to Willem’s face.
    “This Tuan? Tau! I know.”
    “Quick then!” said Lingard, taking the lamp from him — and the man went off at a run.
    “Kassi mem! To the lady herself,” called Lingard after him.
    Then, when the man disappeared, he turned to Willems.
    “I have written to your wife,” he said. “If you do not return for good, you do not go back to that house only for another parting. You must come as you stand. I won’t have that poor woman tormented. I will see to it that you are not separated for long. Trust me!”
    Willems shivered, then smiled in the darkness.
    “No fear of that,” he muttered, enigmatically. “I trust you implicitly, Captain Lingard,” he added, in a louder tone.
    Lingard led the way down the steps, swinging the lamp and speaking over his shoulder.
    “It is the second time, Willems, I take you in hand. Mind it is the last. The second time; and the only difference between then and now is that you were bare-footed then and have boots now. In fourteen years. With all your smartness! A poor result that. A very poor result.”
    He stood for awhile on the lowest platform of the steps, the light of the lamp falling on the upturned face of the stroke oar, who held the gunwale of the boat close alongside, ready for the captain to step in.
    “You see,” he went on, argumentatively, fumbling about the top of the lamp, “you got yourself so crooked amongst those ‘longshore quill-drivers that you could not run clear in any way. That’s what comes of such talk as yours, and