“Yes, but is he not a friend of Mr. Norrie?” She pronounced the vowels of the name with a comically slow precision. Ah Loi avoided a mention of Norrie.
“We have been talking of Kuan-yin and much else.”
“It is pleasant to talk of her; but Mr. Colet, he does not know her.”
“Oh, but he does.”
“He is a collector?” There was a shade of anticipated disappointment in her voice.
“Oh no. He admires.”
“Then I shall like you, Mr. Colet.”
The more attractive a woman is, the more the resolution needed to look at her; their laughter was freedom to Colet for a candid glance at beauty that was unusual and debateable. Others might not like it. Beauty may cause a little fear. Her dark eyes were large for so small a face, and their soft uncritical light gave Colet a suspicion that she could penetrate to the thoughts at the back of his head. Her eyes, which only seemed slow because their lids were a trifle sleepy, did not rest on one’s face, though they looked at it. She listened, but not so much to what you said as to your reservations; or else she pondered childishly, finding it difficult to understand. (Don’t deceive yourself, Colet thought; she understands very well.) Her face was wide for that delicate chin. But then, of course, her brow had to find room for those eyes. Only the rather high cheek-bones were faintly tinctured with colour. She would have been a rarity in the court of Kubla. The nose was the more diminished by the bold curves of her lips, which really looked like the Orient.
Colet began to speak of Norrie, but Mr. Ah Loi smiled uneasily, moving an object or two about the table.
“My wife does not like him. Norrie is a little different for each of us.”
“A little? Mr. Norrie is evil,” she said.
Her husband protested ardently.
“No, no. He is not that. I know what you mean. He is naughty, but he is not evil.”
“Yet you tell me he understands.”
“Yes, and for me, that saves him. He is a sad man, for he knows too much, but he had accepted so very little. He is a little amused by all the gods. I am sorry for Norrie.”
“I like him, too, when I am talking to him,” she confessed. “But not after. Then I remember that he knows, yet smiles. He is only polite to you,” she advised her husband, “but he smiles when he goes away.”
“I know he does.” Ah Loi admitted it. “I know him. Yes. There is no ultimate value, for him. Think of that. It has been killed by his science, which is—what is it?—the formulation of dirt. He must pay for that, of course. But he does not understand the penalty.”
“Then he doesn’t understand after all,” she challenged.
“Well, no, not the last things. We must lose all the first good things if we do not understand the last. It is sad not to have ears to hear, especially if one hears so well as Norrie.”
Chapter XXV
In his Penang bedroom, alone with what he did not know of the tropics, Colet guessed he was inappropriate to that variety of dark. It was not only a covert dark. Its nature was foreign. It was unlike the nights of the north. The boards of the room were bare, and they were a deep red. The room was too large and high for one small glim, and it contained but a wardrobe, a table, a chair, and a bed enclosed in a muslin box. It resembled a large meat safe, that bed. At a glance by lamp-light the gauze did not quite hide the fact that there was a body in his bed; but he saw it was a bolster lying fore and aft, the uninvited Dutch wife. It was there for some reason well known in the locality, of course, but it was a silly mitigation.
The hot night came close up to you. It tried to keep you from moving. It was an obstructing presence, mum and unseen, but heavy. Yet it was full of a sly stirring, though always behind you. Something was going on in it. Nothing there when you looked round. He went to the wardrobe, and the opening of its door surprised whatever was hanging about in that. A crack flashed in a zigzag across the back of the cupboard. He imagined he heard the movement, but when he looked closer there was no doubt the wood was all right. The crack had gone. Nothing in the cupboard. Nothing he could see.
He went to the table and began to write. His moist hands made the paper damp, and then the ink spread into blots; but if you tried to write while poising the hand, to give it air, then the paper became sportive under the pen. It was so ominously quiet that he heard a tiny voice at his ear. A mosquito was about. But that solitary beast had got at his bare foot. He held the light over the floor, and saw a dusky flight of gnats undulating about his ankles. Nothing for it but the inside of the meat safe.
Then a creature harsh and green, a sort of gaunt and membraneous moth, if it was a moth and not a heartless joke, plumped on his writing-pad. He immediately surrendered the pad, as that thing wanted it. What name among the bugbears had this beastly object? Its green wings were like a petticoat of leaves about its waist. There was a phantasmal head at the end of a stalk-like neck. It had a chin. It turned its cadaverous face lugubriously towards him, and waved its hands in dispraise. He didn’t like it. It didn’t like him, either. Its long thin arms, which wearily motioned him to keep off, had grappling hooks for hands. One of the Little People maybe; the Malayan sort. Not from the fairy rings and the daisies pied, but out of the jungle. When he moved it flew away to a corner of his ambiguous resting-place.
Better see where this thing went. As he lifted the lamp, shadows from the ceiling came down the walls to go with him. There the thing was, on the floor. Its grappling hooks were raised, as though in the act of malevolent prayer. But it took no notice of him. It had no time for him. It had other business. That triangular face was watching something else, straight before it. He followed its gaze. A shaggy spider, as large as a straddling mouse, with minute eyes like twin starboard lights, was observing the mantid. Colet was glad he was not either of them, glad that he was only the mystified audience of this show. The two horrors sat staring at each other, each waiting for midnight to strike, or else for the other to make the first move. Human life was not the only problem of life. The chimeras on the floor knew that; each of them knew something that is not in Plato. They did not move. Their apprehensions must have been tense enough to snap. Colet moved, and their thoughts snapped. He did not see what happened. There was a mingling of green and black, or else the mantid leaped forward and was caught in the spider’s mouth.
An usual bedroom. Dreams were there before you slept. A place of torment for Cimmerian eccentricities, a cockpit for boggarts and kobolds. He was sure now that something was in that cupboard, and he wondered, while the floorboards were clear for the journey, how long it would take to get under the mosquito netting once the lamp was blown out. A loud voice addressed him from the wood beams of the ceiling; a clear whistling cluck. He could make out a brief slender shadow up there which was cast by no visible object; and, anyhow, it was too small for so much loud confidence. It was motionless. It was a mistake, that reptilian mark. It was a stain in the wood. The voice spoke again aloft, cheechak, chee-chak; not an unpleasant sound; rather like shameless and noisy kissing. The little shadow writhed forward a yard, as though the lamp had been shifted quietly, and that prompted similar shadows to move above, though the lamp remained still; abrupt divergent wriggles of creatures upside down. The ceiling was populated with lizards; one fell to the floor, rather solidly. That smack knocked the stuffing out of it. No. It was off—going to get into his bed, perhaps. A close night.
Did any one ever manage to sleep through a tropic night? Not likely. You turned over, and then found that that side was hotter than the other. You turned over again. Not a sound. The lizards had ceased to kiss aloud, now the light was out. But a swift slithering passed over the boards beneath the bed. The silence was the heat. The heat was muffled. The silence was soft and hot, but heavy. It could not be pushed away. The darkness outside the curtains was waiting. For what? He was waiting too, for sleep, but it was no good waiting for that when the unseen was waiting for something else. The idea of that bolster beside him was to keep him cool, but
it was an imbecile lump. He pushed it off with petulance.
That spider. There it was. It was looking at him out of a tunnel. Its eyes were as big as the headlights of a locomotive about to emerge. To emerge at any moment. Its hairy legs filled the tunnel. Its hunched legs made the tunnel dark. He could not move because he could not breathe. He was being held down for that brute. It was coming out. It put a hairy foot on his mouth. Faugh! That released him. Touched him off. The bolster was in his face. It was night still, not morning. Daylight was slow about it.
When next he woke the day was nearly there. The night had thinned; everything in the room could be seen in it, even through the mosquito curtain. It was cool at last, but the silence had not been broken.
Now it had gone. A bird was fluting in the garden, trying to remember a morning song. Strange, he felt rather like singing himself, though sleep had been only an intermittent nightmare. In that cool grey light the bare room was merely bare. That reminiscent bird had not yet got the tune right, but he kept at it on his lonesome, a meditative and conscientious little fellow. Quietly trying it over before any one was about, to be ready for the sun.
Colet opened the shutters of the verandah, and stepped out. The garden below was asleep. Only its familiar spirit was awake, tuning up before sunrise. The garden was still in the mirk. The trees were night itself settling out of the sky, descending to the earth, spreading there unequally while being absorbed. The bathroom was the first door to the left along the verandah. The liquid fluting of that bird was bathing for the mind. It made it fresh and glad. The bathroom tiles were delicious to walk over; another touch or two and they would have been cold. In a corner was an earthenware cistern, with a brass dipper on its ledge. A lizard was stuck to the wall, upside down, a flesh-coloured creature with eager and prominent eyes. It raised its head to watch him. Almost indecent to strip before such an expectant gaze; but it went off, shocked, in a flash, when it saw what he was like. You held the full dipper as high as you could, and tried to imagine you would shrink from the fall of the water. The water was felt, but no more. There was no shock. The water was as soft as new milk.
By his chair on the verandah, when he came out, somebody had left biscuits and tea. These Chinese boys moved about as though they were disembodied spirits, and unless you were watching they were never more than wraiths in the very act of vanishing. At that moment he was sure that a Malayan sunrise, with some tea just after you had bathed, was not to be exchanged for a halo and a harp. This corner of the earth had leisured and regal scope, and its jubilant light, with the musky smell of its lush growth, was good enough for the pleasaunce of an archangel, only he might be upset by a sight of Aphrodite. The crowns of the dominant palms, and the filigree of the upper foliage of the shrubbery, were black against lambent gold, and that tide of fire was plainly welling rapidly to flood the garden. The colours below were already bright; the orange and ruby crotons were separated, and the blossoms on the vines. The sun was so quick that he could be seen moving up behind the screen; he was blazing over the top before the first moment of coolness and calm was forgotten. Wasps arrived with him, to blunder about the joists of the verandah, and they were not ordinary wasps, and knew it. The seething had begun again.
This morning he was leaving with Norrie for the other side of the peninsula. What was to come of that was as speculative as being born, for Malaya was to him what the latencies are about a child playing hop-scotch, and Norrie was as debatable as poker or immortality. It was as good as just coming into the world. The liveliness of Penang that morning was the celebration of nativity, the perennial birthday, old earth a cherub again and having another cut at it. Their ’rickshaws had to stop to allow a Chinese wedding to pass. That was the way to do it. No bare certificate of legitimacy, with a registrar’s stamp, for these people, not even for the additional third wife. The regiment of forerunners of the joy were in scarlet, hats and all, as exceptional as the oncoming of an Olympian circus. They cleared the way for musicians in pale blue robes, with stringed instruments wailing bliss. The bride, if it was the bride, was a large doll with dark hypnotic eyes in a face of porcelain, a capricious crown holding her head firm on her neck, and her turquoise silk dress a call to extravagance for the poor in spirit and the homespun.
Norrie was damning his coolie for pausing to watch the procession. He wanted to get aboard; but it was unfair to expect a man to dodge a bit of luck like that. It isn’t a Malay morning every day of the year. Now if all cities were as Penang, then there would be no reason to regret Ithaca and the young days of Ulysses. Our birthright would be as plain as a sign given by the gods. To think this coast had been here always, waiting for whoever doubted the earth was planned for asphalt and regrets, while there he used to be, clanking his chains west of Aldgate Pump, dutiful as an old soldier grateful for the workhouse and skilly. Colet went up the gangway, and saw the leisurely smoke from the funnel of his small coasting steamer as though it were the beckoning of the original Argo.
Chapter XXVI
Norrie was taciturn. He had hardly spoken that morning. It was noticeable, too, to his companion, that he was very generous in the confined space of that cabin for two with the broad of his back, which was in no hurry to get out of the way. He was a little testy over the refractory angles of events. Sometimes it was an angle of Colet’s. His white jacket was showing the damp smutch of the heat. He peeled it off and flung it down, and then the cabin became mordant with an alien smell. Colet was aware of a distinct and opposite being, weighty and offensively otherwise, to which all his sympathy did not naturally flow.
Not all, but some, for the leisurely presence of Norrie was a warrant of literal meaning. Norrie was a cunning centre of gravity, never overset in the drift of light chances. You could hold on to him. He accepted and named events, often not vouchsafing them a glance, with melancholy understanding, as though he had known them before Homer. He dismissed occasions which perplexed Colet with droll epithets, though sadly tolerant and broody. All the same, then he was in the way.
They continued to stow their properties for the voyage. Neither spoke. Back to back, they kept impeding each other, forgetfully. Colet wondered whether men were not better apart; might not admire each other more if they were not in contact. Ought to have separate cubicles. Each man had a different aura. What did Norrie think of his? The aura was worse on a close morning. Better to be alone.
They bumped again, and Norrie put out a hand to steady himself. Colet felt aggrieved; it was all Norrie’s fault.
“Don’t mind me, Colet. And don’t hit me. I’m simply intolerable most mornings. I couldn’t be civil to the sweetest young thing in the morning.”
He stretched, wiped his face, looked round.
“Now, where’s that blessed bag with my maps? Where is it?”
“What’s it like? If it’s maps, we must find it.”
“I should just think we must. It’s got some whisky in it, and I simply can’t drink trade poison. I wouldn’t change it for all the commercial substitutes in the ship.”
“This it?”
“That’s right. Put it in my bunk. We shall want it. No other way to shorten this voyage.”
“Need we shorten it? But you’ve done it before.”
“And before that. In and out of the mangrove swamps. When I die, I shall be shoved into a mangrove swamp with an empty bottle, to sweat for ever, and nobody to talk to but the sort of people you meet at a ship’s saloon table. You just think of that. It would make a man virtuous, even if he had a long time to live.”
Norrie reclined on the settee.
“I wonder whether Ah Loi telegraphed for berths on the Singapore steamer. We shall have to change there. But of course he did.”
“He certainly did, if he said he would. I like your friend the Chinaman.”
“That shows your good taste. That Chink reduces most Europeans to the texture of clay pots. He’s rather too rare, for my taste. Strictly speaking, he oughtn’t to have a body. He’s only a subt
le appreciation of refinements. Yet he seems to enjoy life. Did you see his wife?”
“She was at table.”
“She was? Then you really were honoured. She won’t always eat before me. I’m too coarse. You’ve never seen anything like her, so don’t say you have. I mean alive, and walking about.”
“No. Not in great numbers. I felt large and cumbersome.”
“She doesn’t know it, but I’d go without food just to look at her. I’d be as good as gold. She doesn’t know I’ve got the heart of a poet under a most unlikely outside.”
“What is she?”
“I should call her a masterpiece. But the best people out here, they say she is a stengah. That’s what they would do, you know. Her mother was Siamese. There are little bodies in Siam who would make you forget almost anything important. Her father was a Scotchman, and he must have been a forgetful Burns with red hair. I feel almost like a bishop when I look at her. Good job you are not an artist, or you’d be blethering now.”
“That couple surely are not typical here.”
“What an idea. They wouldn’t be typical in Chelsea. Nothing good is typical. It’s a surprise. I don’t know where my cork-screw is. Where is yours?”
“I haven’t got one. I haven’t got even a stepladder.”
“Now, what a traveller. He hasn’t got a cork-screw. I wonder you’ve got a shirt. Press the button for a boy. There it is, just behind you.”
Colet went outside. The island of Penang was already a place apart, and they were leaving fishing stakes, sampans, steamers, and junks behind them. He did not always know what the queer objects signified, those marks of strange human handiwork on another order of nature, but he was satisfied that they were amiable. The waters of the Malacca Strait were the reflections of an upper light, desultory with its display, as though the celestial operator had time to waste, and wanted to see what would happen to the human stage when oriels, seldom used, were opened in the supernal. Norrie was in a hurry to get round to the coast of the China Sea, but there was no need to hurry along this coast on his account.
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