There were a score of superior passengers at the saloon table. The table was full. Norrie insisted that Colet should sit beside him. He was to talk eagerly whenever the man on the other side showed the least sign of affability.
“I can’t stand it. It isn’t natural. If that planter once begins with his insufferable rubber, I shall have to kill him with the water-bottle, or else sit with the Malays on deck and eat bananas and dried fish.”
Colet thought the deck passengers would be an attractive alternative.
“I’ll squat there with you, if you insist. It’s fun, that crowd on the deck aft.”
“You’ve made a nice start. You do like it?”
“Never seen anything better.”
“That’s the way to look at it, when you must. But there’s no hurry for it. You’ll smell lots of ripe fish presently, heightened by durians.”
“Let ’em come in their due season. Though I’ve never met durians.”
“You will. They’re as sure as death. It’s a fruit, but you’d think it was a gas escape in a mortuary. Our pleasures are before us, and yet you think I’m too particular now over trifles, like cork-screws and chatty fellow-passengers.”
“I was down on the deck this morning. Not easy to keep away from it. I’d give a good deal to know what goes on inside those people.”
“The devil you would. All right, Colet, but don’t learn it while you’re with me. There’s an odd chance you would get a real inkling of it. You seem built in that wasteful way.”
Norrie, leaning on the ship’s rail, considered the blue heights and opalescent cloud masses of Malaya.
“No, it’s no good. It’s rather different. They begin their ideas at another mark, where we have too much gumption to begin. I do my best not to see it. It’s disturbing. Dammit, you and I might be wrong after all, and then where should we be? We might have to scrap home and altar, and I can’t bear the thought of it. God bless Clapham Junction. You be careful. The Oriental is dangerous, once you begin to monkey with his notions.”
They got well down the coast. The same things occurred daily, and were getting usual. The loading of the steamer at one of the small ports was nearly completed. Norrie was asleep in the cabin. On the leeward side a few empty sampans and prahus were rocking slowly. The shore was about two miles away, and their port of call a mangrove creek, by the look of it, inhabited only by crocodiles. The hills inland were no more than the lurking masses of a thunderstorm in reserve for the evening. They were distant, whether clouds or mountains, and a warning which need not be heeded before noon. The sea about the estuary was shallow, a level of opaque olive-green, and only the lighters, and the coolies in them who had nothing now to do but to smoke and watch the life of the steamer while waiting for a tow, were an assurance that this anchorage was merited by a veritable and inhabited shore.
From the bridge of the steamer Colet and another saloon passenger watched a derrick manoeuvring the last piece of freight, a motor-car. It was too awkward for the hold, and its bulk made the restricted foredeck of the coaster appear to be dangerously encumbered. Colet remarked to the man beside him that the car was an incongruous interjection. It had no real part in the drama of Chinese, Malays, and Hindus on that deck.
His companion, a young man who had been prompt with knowledge, made his monocle comfortable to regard with kindly amusement that lively huddle of chromatic humanity.
“Oh, hasn’t it a part? That car is as much a part of the East now as the natives. We’re here now, you know.”
Colet ventured to regret that aspect of our presence.
“You must have seen a lot of it?”
“Oh, rather.” The young man freely acknowledged it, “All round this coast and the islands.” He indicated with a generous gesture all that was beyond, in the east. “Travelling here for two years now.”
“Fun?”
“No. Hardware.”
That tickled him. The monocled stranger asked for some news of London. Stood Leicester Square where it did? He hoped to learn that before the year was out.
Colet was trying to imagine the Orient in the terms of a captivating prospect for hardware. That was not easy. But this commercial traveller was bright and explicit, if his confidence had not lost all the jaunty indiscretion of youth. His judicious monocle and accent, well maintained in excellent simulation of what was authentic, perhaps made an advance with ironmongery among palm groves the less noticeable. Still, the young man quite evidently knew something of the East. He confessed to a familiarity with Malay. He knew these people.
Colet felt his inferiority. “I must learn to talk with them.”
“It’s really easy to learn their language. And they’re jolly nice people. I get along fine with them.”
He adventured into some personal history allusively, but with oiled enjoyment. There was a Malay girl, an apt pupil of love. He sweetened his narrative with a touch of sentiment. He tried to picture the girl for Colet, and Colet realised that she was a female. But she married a chief; only another addition to that populous household. An elderly chief. A friend of his, too. Then the girl ran away from her new home. She came back, in fact, to him. The young man could not help showing how much he appreciated this demonstration of affection; nevertheless, he was frightened.
“So would you have been, if you knew these people.”
“What did you do?”
“Why, you see, that raja kept a regiment of young men about him. No joke. One of them was the girl’s brother. Real hot stuff. If the chief had nodded—no need to say anything—I should have looked a pretty mess one morning, take it from me.”
When the delectable morsel of girlhood appeared again at his bungalow, therefore, the Englishman, seeking safety, went to the lion’s den. The best thing to do. He went straight to the raja and said the girl had come to him that morning. But the old man, who knew girls, waived this one aside royally. Too trivial for a dispute between friends. Nothing in it. Colet gathered, too, that the episode was now entirely closed. His fellow-traveller had given up the girl. All right now. One should not keep them too long. They grow fond of you, and it doesn’t do.
“There—you see that fellow there?” His companion nudged Colet. He indicated a Malay squatting on his hams, among other native passengers, his back to the bulwarks. Colet remarked him.
“Well, he’s very like that girl’s brother.”
It was a scowling figure notably attired in a bright sarong and jacket, and a black velvet cap.
“They look fine people, don’t they?”
That one was a picturesque example, from what could be seen of him; and while still idly noted so handsome a presentment of a folk strange to him, Colet unlearned much that he had accepted of the East. Not much to-day in all that. It had all become ordinary. The natives, he was advised, were not difficult to understand. They admired the English. They would do anything for us, take it from him. Orang puteh, white men, they call the English, and orang blanda, yellow men, the Dutch. That shows you, doesn’t it? These Malays know gentlemen when they see them. When once you were used to their funny little ways the rest was easy. They were only strange until you had lived with them and could talk their language. It was a good thing to take one of their girls. Some of them were very pretty. The girl could soon teach you a lot. Take it from him, a man like himself got to know more of the guts of things, out there, than all the interfering officials who were so touchy over this and that.
A group of Chinamen below stood bent in appreciation of some cocks, each in its own wicker cage. The cocks stridently challenged each other. One cage was carelessly handled, and the gladiator hustled out. A bystander grabbed at it, but it flustered to the topside of the ship, and another indiscreet clutch at its tail sent it protesting into the sea. For an instant it was a frantic bunch of feathers there, and then an unseen body from below swirled the water ponderously and the cock had gone.
Colet was shocked. This was not in accord with what was familiar. The penalty had come so
suddenly, just when he had allowed the motor-car, in spite of its size and appearance, to displace some old conceptions, to occupy with the certainty of a late solid engine the ancient mystery of the East. Yet nobody else seemed affected by the incident. The Chinamen stared indifferently at the place where the water had swirled, but the others might not have been aware that anything had happened. His companion made a humorous reference to the incident, but returned with soft pleasure to some more intimate words on the pleasantries of native ways. Colet, with a divided mind, listened while his eyes still rested absently on the Malay below who had been used to illustrate a little colourful drama of no value except to show to a stranger the delights and simplicity of the things he did not know.
What his fellow-passenger was telling him Colet did not clearly hear, but the narrator was at least cheerful and pert. The heat made one slack. A Chinese cooly was passing the crouching Malay, who rose, and was seized with a sudden convulsion. The Chinaman fell. Colet noticed in disbelief that the man’s head was off. Colet did not move. He had not decided yet that the head was dead, for a little cigarette smoke still moved from its nostrils.
The crowd below, which for a pause as long as Colet’s incredulity had remained still, began to swirl, as had the sea just before. The Malay was running. Several men vaulted into the water. As though it were not real, Colet watched that trotting figure cut down two more men who also were uncertain of its reality, and then disappear into the forecastle. The deck below was now empty, but for several figures in ungainly postures. There were noises in the forecastle. Colet stared at the dark and empty rectangle of its entrance, fixed his attention to those sounds. The Malay came within that frame, cool and leisured, his blade in his hand, the appearance once more of the principal actor in a play, and stared sullenly at his sole audience of two white men in the gallery. With his gaze on them he trotted for the bridge ladder. Colet discovered, as the man began to run, that now he was alone, and that his two hands which gripped the rail did not know they ought to let go. He desired to run, but was held to the spot by himself. How run from a dream?
A gun-shot released Colet’s grip. There below him was the tall figure of an engineer, standing at the foot of the ladder in singlet and trousers, his uniform cap on the back of his head. He was pointing a revolver at the Malay. The gun clicked with a silly inconsequence as the coloured figure reached the ladder, and the engineer crumpled. When Colet got to his cabin door the eyes of the Malay on the ladder stared up at him from the deck planking, and were coming higher. The door shook while he was making it fast, and then the face of the man darkened the open port window. The shadow passed. Colet stood holding the handle of the door till the silence told him his arm was aching with an unnecessary effort.
“What are you standing there for? Do open that door. I’m breathing steam.” Norrie was sitting up, looking sleepy.
“Can’t open it. There’s a johnny outside knifing everybody.”
“Keep the devil out, then. Is it locked?”
“Yes. It’s fast all right, now.”
“I should close the port. He might throw something in.”
Norrie got up, and made the port fast, and then sat listening, on the couch. He stretched himself again.
“Lucky you got here first. Why doesn’t someone shoot him?”
Colet looked round for a weapon. There was only the water-bottle. The ship was very quiet. It might have been deserted. Were they left aboard with that lunatic?
“Norrie, have you got a gun?”
“Several, in that trunk under the bunk. But no ammunition, of course. But he’ll be downed by some one. Don’t worry. They’re slow about it, though.”
Once cries broke out in the after-part of the ship. Once feet pattered rapidly past their cabin. Once there was a challenge in a strange language, but nobody answered it. Something warm trickled down his nose. He put his hand to his face quickly. Sweat.
How much more of this? Norrie was a cool customer. Colet peered out of the port. There was nothing to be seen; only the usual patch of deck and the rail. But heading for the ship was a steam launch. He watched its progress. It was bringing four Malay policemen with rifles, and a white officer. The launch reached them and got under the ship, out of sight.
Nothing could be heard. Two of the little noiseless policemen, with their officer, went by the cabin. Then they heard the white man’s voice calling some orders at the head of the ladder. They opened the door and went out. All the police were there, and were beginning to descend to the fore-deck. The men advanced cautiously towards the empty forecastle entrance, and one of the policemen chanted to that vacant door words which sounded like taunts. There came the Malay again. He was still cool and leisured, and answered the taunting with dignity. The police halted. The white officer talked quietly to that figure in the doorway and signed for him to drop his parang. But the fellow jumped for the police, toppled into a sliding heap, and was still.
Chapter XXVII
One day on the China Sea side, well up the coast from Singapore, they reached a hut. It was night, and it rained. Here they would begin their inland journey. It was somewhere near a beach. It had no other description. When coming up from the landing-place Colet had no faith that any roof could have resisted that abrupt smash of rain, even if a roof once had graced that outlandish shore, which did not seem likely. Yet Norrie moved as though he used to believe it, and knew of no reason yet to give up the idea. There was a sleeping-place, cavernous and bare, partly discovered by a mournful lamp; and one of its shadows, and a large one, did not behave normally like the rest. The lamp set it going. It gyrated ceaselessly amid the stationary shadows. Colet was satisfied that it was a bat. It might have been a black cloth circulated about by silent magic.
Then came morning, and the morning when they were to start for the interior of the land. Colet, on the verandah of the house, with the packs for travel about him, did not share Norrie’s annoyance over the delay. Any later time would do to start from there. Don’t let a good thing go too soon. It was folly to hurry from a place like Kuala something or other. By the map, these coastal hamlets were nearly always kualas, or river mouths, and he was not quite sure which one this was. But Norrie knew. There was Norrie now, outside the chief’s house, gossiping with a bunch of men as though he had lived in that kampong for years. Perhaps he had. A character of that place. If anything, Norrie knew too much—more than was good for him. He seemed to be amusing those informal Malays, who somehow gave themselves an air of distinction and good mettle, though Norrie was a head taller. They certainly accepted Norrie as an equal. The village headman was smiling knowingly. Now and then one of the men in the group would glance his way, as though he too had been accepted. A quiet and understanding people. Norrie himself could not hurry them, though from the ease of his manner he did not appear to be attempting it. Women, slight and limber, who walked slowly in a way you had to watch, strolled past the group of gossiping men, but pretended to be unaware even of Norrie’s prevailing shape.
Why fidget over a delay in getting out of that village? It was not likely to come twice in a lifetime. Let’s have the full taste of it, at leisure. We resurrect from the dead only in odd moments—might as well let the moment live itself out. Wasteful to hurry over a sudden flavour of the richness of the earth, as though it were the invasion of a licentious and inappropriate thought. It would take about a week for him to make sure that he was really there. He had had no time to ascertain that. The fact then seemed doubtful. In an unusual fancy dress which anticipated, when its wearer did not, an unaccustomed mode of living, Colet was uncertain of his own identity. This was just a bit absurd. He was only a self-conscious character in an unusual theatrical setting—round about Drury Lane—and the limelight was too bright. A mass of rigid metallic fronds shadowed the house, and formed motionless crenated black patterns on the road. There was a glimpse of the China Sea at the end of the street, a name which suited it. Too much like the China Sea. One could have guessed its name. Th
e Chinese shopkeepers opposite were waiting for custom beside wares which would have been useless, without descriptions, in a museum. Not easy to believe all this. The sun now was full on the street, and Colet began to wonder how he would shape, marching in that white intensity. But he could sit and look at it for ever.
Norrie left the men and strolled over to Colet, affecting a complete faith in the outcome of eternity.
“No carriers yet. We’ve got to pay for that entertainment on the ship coming round. We were expected by the last steamer.”
“Shall we get away this morning?”
“We may, as you don’t happen to be able to tell them all about the amok. It’s such a juicy story. They don’t often get one, and they’re so sorry you can’t tell ’em about it. All. Every crimson wound.”
“So am I.”
“They can’t bear to lose us so soon. That’s what it is. We’ve brought bright news—all about a butchery. They’ve no newspapers. Don’t you think we ought to be kind to them?”
“You could make it better for them than it was, Norrie. Let yourself go. You couldn’t make it worse than it was. Give it a little art.”
“I haven’t got the cosy love for it. The story would be prettier if your friend the ass in the eyeglass was one of the coloured exhibits. But it is tame without him.”
“Queer. I’ve been watching them. These villagers don’t seem to be made of the stuff which goes off with a bang, like that Malay on the ship. They’re sane enough.”
“Of course they are. So are you. So was he. We’re all fine, till some button is touched. That Malay was all right. He only wanted to commit suicide, but his God said no to it. So what’s the poor beggar to do? Only one thing in reason, Colet. You can see that yourself. Make others do the dirty work. But don’t let us talk about it any more. It’s such a fine morning. If we begin to chin over the springs of human conduct we should be here when Gabriel tootled, and so intent with enjoyment that we shouldn’t hear him. We’ll surprise God Himself on the Judgment Day. He thinks He knows us, but does He, Colet, does He?”
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