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 lamplight 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, chee-chak, 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 anyone 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 anyone 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 hopscotch, 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.