Victory | Page 6

lounged out on his veranda with his
cheroot, the last thing before going to bed, he made in the night the
same sort of glow and of the same size as that other one so many miles
away.
In a sense, the volcano was company to him in the shades of the

night--which were often too thick, one would think, to let a breath of
air through. There was seldom enough wind to blow a feather along.
On most evenings of the year Heyst could have sat outside with a
naked candle to read one of the books left him by his late father. It was
not a mean store. But he never did that. Afraid of mosquitoes, very
likely. Neither was he ever tempted by the silence to address any casual
remarks to the companion glow of the volcano. He was not mad. Queer
chap--yes, that may have been said, and in fact was said; but there is a
tremendous difference between the two, you will allow.
On the nights of full moon the silence around Samburan--the "Round
Island" of the charts--was dazzling; and in the flood of cold light Heyst
could see his immediate surroundings, which had the aspect of an
abandoned settlement invaded by the jungle: vague roofs above low
vegetation, broken shadows of bamboo fences in the sheen of long
grass, something like an overgrown bit of road slanting among ragged
thickets towards the shore only a couple of hundred yards away, with a
black jetty and a mound of some sort, quite inky on its unlighted side.
But the most conspicuous object was a gigantic blackboard raised on
two posts and presenting to Heyst, when the moon got over that side,
the white letters "T. B. C. Co." in a row at least two feet high. These
were the initials of the Tropical Belt Coal Company, his employers--his
late employers, to be precise.
According to the unnatural mysteries of the financial world, the T. B. C.
Company's capital having evaporated in the course of two years, the
company went into liquidation--forced, I believe, not voluntary. There
was nothing forcible in the process, however. It was slow; and while
the liquidation--in London and Amsterdam-- pursued its languid course,
Axel Heyst, styled in the prospectus "manager in the tropics," remained
at his post on Samburan, the No. 1 coaling-station of the company.
And it was not merely a coaling-station. There was a coal-mine there,
with an outcrop in the hillside less than five hundred yards from the
rickety wharf and the imposing blackboard. The company's object had
been to get hold of all the outcrops on tropical islands and exploit them
locally. And, Lord knows, there were any amount of outcrops. It was

Heyst who had located most of them in this part of the tropical belt
during his rather aimless wanderings, and being a ready letter-writer
had written pages and pages about them to his friends in Europe. At
least, so it was said.
We doubted whether he had any visions of wealth--for himself, at any
rate. What he seemed mostly concerned for was the "stride forward," as
he expressed it, in the general organization of the universe, apparently.
He was heard by more than a hundred persons in the islands talking of
a "great stride forward for these regions." The convinced wave of the
hand which accompanied the phrase suggested tropical distances being
impelled onward. In connection with the finished courtesy of his
manner, it was persuasive, or at any rate silencing--for a time, at least.
Nobody cared to argue with him when he talked in this strain. His
earnestness could do no harm to anybody. There was no danger of
anyone taking seriously his dream of tropical coal, so what was the use
of hurting his feelings?
Thus reasoned men in reputable business offices where he had his
entree as a person who came out East with letters of introduction-- and
modest letters of credit, too--some years before these coal- outcrops
began to crop up in his playfully courteous talk. From the first there
was some difficulty in making him out. He was not a traveller. A
traveller arrives and departs, goes on somewhere. Heyst did not depart.
I met a man once--the manager of the branch of the Oriental Banking
Corporation in Malacca--to whom Heyst exclaimed, in no connection
with anything in particular (it was in the billiard-room of the club):
"I am enchanted with these islands!"
He shot it out suddenly, a propos des bottes, as the French say, and
while chalking his cue. And perhaps it was some sort of enchantment.
There are more spells than your commonplace magicians ever dreamed
of.
Roughly speaking, a circle with a radius of eight hundred miles drawn
round a point in North Borneo was in Heyst's