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. The 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 forever.

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?”

The sun was lord of that country when at last they got going. Beyond the village they entered level rice-fields, and moved towards a dark escarpment of trees, low with distance, which in that torrid light suggested the unapproachable. Norrie led the way, solidly, at an enduring gait; the Malay carriers followed him, and Colet marched at the end of the line, behind the Chinese cook. They had to walk indirectly across that half-dried marsh, one step behind the other arduously along the ridges which parcelled the expanse into square aqueous areas. Some of the ridges were as hard as rock, and others sank under them into a black sludge with a stink of its own. Colet occasionally glanced in hope towards the trees. They took their time over getting higher and plainer. A buffalo bull ahead, broad and black as a rhinoceros, with horns as lengthy as a ship’s yard, snorted at Norrie. Colet heard him, and knew that he must pass the same way. He would be the beast’s last opportunity. The bull had its nose up, waiting, sunk to its belly in mud, just aside from the ridge along which they were looking for a sound patch for each step. If that brute attacked he was done. It snorted again when Colet was level with its nose, and heaved its bulk impatiently. Colet saw the bubbles stir in the mire about it, and realised what moral control is required, at times, for even so simple an act as putting your foot in the right place with care.

The cliff of trees rose over them. There was a clear deep stream bridged by a fallen trunk. When Colet removed his strict attention from a difficult poise over that greasy bole he saw that the rest of the party, even the Chinaman, had disappeared. There was a portal of two great tree trunks, and gloom beyond it. He saw it was the gate to the stuff of the legends. That must be the door through which the party had gone. He entered it, too, and at once relished the coolness of the forest. The track ascended. It was sandy. The twilight was green. Once he was assured by a glimpse of a man ahead that he was not alone in the silence, for the quiet had quickened his pace; the anxious thought had moved him that he would be comforted there by a contiguous human creature. He foresaw that solitude in the jungle might plumb to an unexpected deep in the soul. Only fellowship would keep him buoyed above that dark pit. Well, he would go anywhere with Norrie, over any pit, perhaps into it.

The track was often unmistakable; usually it was compulsory; there could be no divergence. A riot of green cordage as repellent as flourishing cusps, antlers, spines and bodkins, was piled between the trees on either hand; hooked fronds were suspended to catch in the neck and the helmet; the track was reduced to a loose tunnel meandering through edged foliage. Sometimes a prone giant had to be mounted, for it had fallen across the path, a tree that was a hilly jungle in itself, to be climbed, its vegetation forced, and a descent discovered through its bastions to the other side. Roots like low easy walls, or coiled like pythons, made a maze of the track. It descended into a morass where, apparently, monsters had floundered, leaving wallows and pits which compelled Colet into the trees to find a way; and there he paused, while avoiding the taloned raffle, to pick a sound out of the heavy quiet to get the direction of his friends. Nothing moved there but themselves, except flies which hovered and flashed wherever a beam of sunlight fell through a hole in the roof. They waded across streams, and picked leeches off their bodies; as if clothes were meant to be kept constantly wet, and bodies were the normal feeding-ground for worms. Colet compelled his mind to fight against the desire for cleanliness and dryness, and to regard without surprise a bloated and pendant black parasite taking the blood from a white limb. But he was surprised, nevertheless. That worm was the emblem of a world which was new, potent, inimical, and besieging; and not very particular. It waited silently, without respite, for its chances. You couldn’t be always on your guard. It had you, whenever you were not. Colet became wary even of trifles. They stung.

The sun was going when they sighted areca palms ahead. Colet already knew that glad sign. The slender mast of the betel-nut palm, with its cluster of stalked knobs just below its graceful crown, was the sign that fellow-creatures were near. The brown thatches of huts appeared, like haven to seafarers. Nobody was about, but huge shadows rose from the ground as they arrived, and then went walloping loudly among the frail structures, a black torrent of buffalo. Colet felt so limp then that he would not have cared if they had been elephants, so long as they left the house props intact.

A brown little man came out to the verandah of one dwelling to see what all this was about. Like the others, that house stood on stilts, well above the earth, and now, as night was at hand, with a stowage of darkness already underneath it. The old fellow, in a tartan sarong, descended the ladder of his home to them as coolly as though such visits were usual. He conversed with Norrie in a gentle voice which was part of the quietude. Their carriers had disappeared. Except for two children above them on the verandah of the chief’s place, nobody in that hamlet had the curiosity to note this invasion of its solitude. Perhaps the huts stood there to serve as chance sanctuary for wayfarers caught by night in the forest. Or, perhaps, except for that one home, the huts were abandoned, and the old man and the children were alone in the forest.

They went up the ladder of rough beams, its steps slippery with clay, and catchy in their spacing for legs careless through travel. Norrie and Colet reclined on mats of grass, mats which did something towards levelling the floor of separated boughs. They put themselves at ease in native dress. Other men joined the chief; they betrayed no surprise to find white men there. Now and then a newcomer hailed Norrie with mild jocularity. There was a brass lamp on the floor, and brass dishes with fruit about it. The figures murmured to each other. Somewhere, perhaps in the rafters, Colet thought he heard the subdued whispering of women and children. He relished the picture of those men, with their apocryphal background. It was as unconformable as the chiaroscuro of a book belonging to another age. Yet he felt more at home than ever he did at the Gridiron in Soho. He knew only a few words of their speech, but he understood that it could be trusted. They did not move their heads, and scarcely their lips, as they spoke, which was soberly, as men would at night in a house with the wild at its door. Colet, through interstices of one of the walls, could watch sections of palm fronds motionless in moonlight. These fellows had a lot to say to Norrie. If one of them retired but slightly from the lamp, then the shadow almost absorbed him. Several of the men were only bright eyes; or they showed the ridge of a cheekbone when the head turned, and the feeble glow put a polish on bronze skin. But even the figures in the obscurity were not more strange than the smell of the quiet place, a smell faint, but zealous and nameless.

Norrie, later, was appealed to sombrely by the Malays. They wanted his wise confirmation. Anyhow, he was assuring them, that was plain enough, of his warm agreement that a conclusion of theirs was just and right. His wary and skittish eye, his ironical mouth, his expression of intelligence too drowsy and good-natured to contradict anybody, for he was comfortable, stirred a little curiosity in Colet, who divined this phase in his companion more readily than would these simple folk.

“Now, what’s this you are telling them? What’s the game?”

“Game? Not at all, my son. It’s about a mystery. I love mysteries, and treat them with proper respect. I wish you could have picked up the yarn that the penghulu had been telling me. It’s a true story. All these men know it is true.”

Norrie addressed himself to the penghulu; the chief answered him with gentle explicitness; and Norrie turned again to Colet, grave as the deep shadows and the brooding night. The Malays were watching the two travellers sadly but closely.

“It was only last week, Colet. You are now as near as that to the old original once upon a time. You’ve marched all the way back in one day. It only shows you what a fraud time is. You’ll learn something, before we’ve done with you; but don’t you grin, don’t look at all superior, or the magic will pass, and so may you. Keep your face as confiding as if I were flattering your sound moral character. There’s been a tiger about this patch. These men were too artful, just now, to call him that. They don’t want to hear him again, so they gave him polite and allusive names. You can’t be too careful here.

“But they knew he was a tiger, and more. He took their buffalo and chickens. Any tiger might do that, but soon they had doubts about the sort of tiger this one was. They heard him after dark, for he was an insolent thing, and used to prowl under where you are sitting, night after night. They sat and listened to him snarling. They don’t mind tigers; not very much; they don’t mind tigers who keep their place, and eat pigs and deer. But they do dislike what is more than a tiger when all good people are indoors. Are you listening? These foresters are watching you. They know more about tigers than we ever shall. If you think I am trying to be funny you don’t know me. There is more in the forest about us than these people would care to whisper, at this time of night. There’s a woman they know of, for one thing. She is only a lovely head trailing a length of entrails, and it is the end of you to meet her; and there are voices where nobody will ever be seen; and there was this tiger.

“He was only heard; they never saw him; only his pug marks were seen, but they were plain enough. And he was never heard snarling except when a certain old Malay peddler, a fellow from Sumatra, was in the neighbourhood. First they lost two buffalo, and he had the nerve to eat them where these people could hear him enjoying himself. But the buffalo grew wary after that, and bunched, and he didn’t dare to touch them. Then the chickens went. That was when snarling was heard under this house, after dark, and a tiger’s tracks were found in the morning. One day, though, after the peddler had gone beyond the village, they could hear him, being sick. Somebody had to pass that place afterwards, and, you would hardly believe it, but he saw feathers where that fellow had vomited.

“Well, you ought not to shoot a man, of course, but a tiger is not a man, is it? Especially when it robs you of cattle and chickens, and might take to cannibalism when the fowls were finished. That sort of thing can’t go on. So these men got a gun, rigged it to the proper bait, and put it where a tiger, in the boldness of his confidence, was likely to find it. The end of the story shows that all the suspicions of these people pointed to the truth of the matter. That night they sat here talking, just as we are now, and they heard the brute snarling again. Nobody dared go out. He was certainly hungry. He insulted these people. Once he sprang on to the verandah here, and shook the flooring. Tigers are heavy brutes. He kept sniffing at the door. The penghulu says he could smell the thing. Presently they heard the gun go off, and the tiger roared; it had got him; and then they thought they could sleep. When daylight came they went to the trap, and sure enough there he was. The gun had shot the peddler. There can be no doubt, after that, as the penghulu says, that some men can turn themselves into tigers when they want to. The village buffalo have returned to their old habits. They know things are all right again. And do you think you will hear snarling under you tonight? No, Colet, the reason has gone.”

Colet nodded his head in sad confession of the dubious nature of things. He glanced at the Malays, as a comrade should to those with him in the midst of dark powers; for the Malays were waiting, watchful, expectant of his full understanding. All wise men know these things are true. Over Norrie’s head, high in the gloom of the opposite wall, was a glimpse of moonlit things without, a panel of luminous silver, with the grotesque black shape of a leaf set in it, like the profile of a leering mask.