516
FREDERICK CREWS
Conrad seems unable to control: as the hero gets (verbally) more
committed to involvement in the world, his remarkable passivity
is
not overcome but intensified. In effect Axel Heyst does noth–
ing to defend himself and his mistress Lena from the four villains
whose chief business seems to be to persecute him. The atmosphere
of muffled depression which has accumulated over many chap–
ters
is
discharged through a series of weirdly static
tableaux
in
which Heyst has no efficient part. This immobility is contagious;
the main villain, Jones, turns out to be almost as much a bystander
as Heyst, and what they witness
is
confusing in the extreme. What–
ever passion Conrad had intended to explore
is
shunted off onto the
lecher Ricardo and Lena, who is promoted rapidly from a meek and
threatened chorus girl to a typical Conradian Amazon, statuesque and
immensely powerful. She mesmerizes Heyst, Jones is terrified at
the thought of her and the would-be seducer Ricardo addresses
her
in
a way that makes one reach for Kraft-Ebbing. "What you
want is a man," he tells her, "a master that will let you put the heel
of your shoe on
his
neck." Instead of indicating that there might be
something a bit odd about such a relationship, Conrad proceeds to a
climactic scene that is perverse in every sense. Lena succeeds in ac–
quiring Ricardo's knife, not to protect herself but to secrete it between
her legs so that "the dreaded thing was out of sight at last," while
Ricardo shows the nature of his sexuality by crawling across the
room and timidly begging Lena to stick out her foot: "Ricardo, clasp–
ing her ankle, pressed his lips time after time to the instep, muttering
gasping words that were like sobs, making little noises that resembled
the sounds of grief and distress." When things have reached such a
compromised point it
is
understandable that Conrad should halt them
with a gunshot that seems to have been fired by Heyst but in fact
has been fired by Jones, and that seems to have merely wounded
Ricardo but in fact kills Lena. No wonder, too, that after this charade
the familiar objects of Heyst's room should appear to him "shadowy,
unsubstantial, the dumb accomplices of an amazing dream-plot end–
ing in an illusory effect of awakening...."
Viewed as fantasy, all the literal peculiarities of
Victory
belong
together: the rescue of the mother-Magdalen (that is Lena's name)
from a paternal seducer (Schomberg); the flight of the incestuous
pair to an island retreat where further aggressors arrive to renew the
