Victory | Page 4

of the low pestilential mangrove-lined coast of our destination. The
excellent Father Superior mentioned to me with an air of immense
commiseration: "The poor man has left a young daughter." Who was to

look after her I don't know, but I saw the devoted Martin taking the
trunks ashore with great care just before I landed myself. I would
perhaps have tracked the ways of that man of immense sincerity for a
little while, but I had some of my own very pressing business to attend
to, which in the end got mixed up with an earthquake and so I had no
time to give to Ricardo. The reader need not be told that I have not
forgotten him, though.
My contact with the faithful Pedro was much shorter and my
observation of him was less complete but incomparably more anxious.
It ended in a sudden inspiration to get out of his way. It was in a hovel
of sticks and mats by the side of a path. As I went in there only to ask
for a bottle of lemonade I have not to this day the slightest idea what in
my appearance or actions could have roused his terrible ire. It became
manifest to me less than two minutes after I had set eyes on him for the
first time, and though immensely surprised of course I didn't stop to
think it out I took the nearest short cut--through the wall. This bestial
apparition and a certain enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti
only a couple of months afterwards, have fixed my conception of blind,
furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal, to the
end of my days. Of the nigger I used to dream for years afterwards. Of
Pedro never. The impression was less vivid. I got away from him too
quickly.
It seems to me but natural that those three buried in a corner of my
memory should suddenly get out into the light of the world--so natural
that I offer no excuse for their existence, They were there, they had to
come out; and this is a sufficient excuse for a writer of tales who had
taken to his trade without preparation, or premeditation, and without
any moral intention but that which pervades the whole scheme of this
world of senses.
Since this Note is mostly concerned with personal contacts and the
origins of the persons in the tale, I am bound also to speak of Lena,
because if I were to leave her out it would look like a slight; and
nothing would be further from my thoughts than putting a slight on
Lena. If of all the personages involved in the "mystery of Samburan" I

have lived longest with Heyst (or with him I call Heyst) it was at her,
whom I call Lena, that I have looked the longest and with a most
sustained attention. This attention originated in idleness for which I
have a natural talent. One evening I wandered into a cafe, in a town not
of the tropics but of the South of France. It was filled with tobacco
smoke, the hum of voices, the rattling of dominoes, and the sounds of
strident music. The orchestra was rather smaller than the one that
performed at Schomberg's hotel, had the air more of a family party than
of an enlisted band, and, I must confess, seemed rather more
respectable than the Zangiacomo musical enterprise. It was less
pretentious also, more homely and familiar, so to speak, insomuch that
in the intervals when all the performers left the platform one of them
went amongst the marble tables collecting offerings of sous and francs
in a battered tin receptacle recalling the shape of a sauceboat. It was a
girl. Her detachment from her task seems to me now to have equalled
or even surpassed Heyst's aloofness from all the mental degradations to
which a man's intelligence is exposed in its way through life. Silent and
wide-eyed she went from table to table with the air of a sleep-walker
and with no other sound but the slight rattle of the coins to attract
attention. It was long after the sea-chapter of my life had been closed
but it is difficult to discard completely the characteristics of half a
lifetime, and it was in something of the Jack-ashore spirit that I
dropped a five- franc piece into the sauceboat; whereupon the
sleep-walker turned her head to gaze at me and said "Merci, Monsieur"
in a tone in which there was no gratitude but only surprise. I must have
been idle indeed to take the trouble to remark on such slight evidence
that the voice was very charming and when the performers resumed
their seats I shifted my position slightly in order not to have