XXXII

Now they had found it, now they stood firmly upon the security which most men desire but usually fail to reach, their campfire, somehow, burned with less of its old companionable light. This was the end of the hunt. Norrie had explained, rather seriously, with hardly a lift of his usual buoyancy, what the law of averages, or something mathematical, had calculated against the chance of good luck coming to men on a rummage like theirs. This good luck, nevertheless, had coincided with their track in space; and to some extent, it appeared, that was not wholly because of blind chance; it had happened, too, because of a little artful designing by knowledge and intelligence. Norrie, with that, then looked round the camp, not perhaps as if his interest in life had gone, but as if that particular day and place had failed in savour for him.

“We shall get used to this scene, Colet. A sort of home.”

Colet followed his friend’s glance. The immense front of the forest on the opposite bank was still majestic and illegible. It was the same forest? Well, when he saw it first it had seemed outside time. Once he had seen it as a symbol of that which does not pass with the episodes of passing men; it was superior to days and nights. The cry of the tiger in the night, while he was sleepless, watching the stars, not knowing what was to happen on the morrow, was only a disturbing but relevant note in a great passage. Yet something hardly definable had happened to his view of it all. Good fortune had changed it. Perhaps the forest itself was no different; maybe he was not exactly the same man, and so could not see things as he did before. What was lost?

It was extraordinary, but the discovery of the hoard afforded them less to talk about than had such a trivial matter as the song of an unknown bird. Yet now the song of the bird passed unremarked. Tin did not prompt Norrie, now he had plenty of it, to a pleasing similitude of his old relish of Malay fables, which have no market value, though they can keep a campfire bright till late. The assurance of much tin induced in Norrie even a certain correctitude. He could no longer abjure their Chinaman with his accustomed histrionic abandon. He was direct, and saved time.

Colet, reviewing it all, while Norrie was diligently drawing a map, rebuked himself. He ought to feel excited. No good. He didn’t. What does not excite the interest cannot be made to do so by any deliberate concentration of reason. If intelligent discontent is the beginning of progress, is it also the end of happiness? Of all the frauds of the sensational drama, this joy on access of riches, this elation on the discovery of the treasure chest, as though it were wealth, was the silliest. There was nothing in it. More seemed to be lost than was gained. That was hardly fair of the law of compensation. One’s light was not turned up, but down. Colet had hinted to Norrie that there was not so much blithe interest in these abundant and exclusive details of business, this strict adherence to the mining law of the country, as there used to be in his sparkling nonsense. Norrie’s eyebrows moved in surprise at a consequence of good fortune which he had not remarked. Then he assumed a show of his drollery.

“Of course, I’m purged of dross. Fever and the tin have done it. I’m pure now. I’ve got salvation, I feel almost kind. Too kind to be lighthearted.”

Almost impious to say damn the tin, but Colet had that desire.

It was night, and Norrie, still at his work, not present enough in the body to notice that his pipe was out, sat beside a lamp. An apparition formed by the campfire.

“Sorry to disturb you. May I come in?”

Norrie scrambled to his feet in quick alarm, but before he was upright he had recovered himself. A glance had satisfied him.

“Come along in.”

The stranger entered, and sat on a box between the friends, looking in appeal from one to the other, as would a child that had been naughty, but was sick. This elderly and bearded man, with the tired, but open and wondering eyes, was sick. His wrecked shirt held to but one shoulder, and its neglect of the other exposed an ugly boil on the upper arm. Only his grizzled beard filled the hollows of his cheeks. He took off a soiled helmet, and arranged it on the floor with what might have been an amusing care for the battered relic, or it was the hesitancy of a man who was preoccupied. His delicate cranium was bald, except for a monk-like but untidy tonsure.

“I was very glad to see your campfire. My Malay guide, an exceptionally good man, was lost. Is the river here the Sungei Buloh?”

“No,” said Norrie, “you’ve taken the wrong turning. The Buloh is five miles down stream. What are you making for?”

“Mount Berching. I shall cross the divide into Perak about there. My name, by the way, is Parsell.”

Norrie, astonished, had taken his pipe out of his mouth, and had held it away for an intent inspection of their visitor. Now he put his pipe beside him and leaned forward, with his hands clasped.

“Parsell the ethnologist, the author of the Mon-Khmer Influence in Southeastern Asia?”

The veteran gnome looked quite pleased.

“You know my name, then? Curious, curious!”

Norrie was clearly perplexed. He sang out for the Chinaman, and gave him some instructions. He stroked his nose. He looked with wariness at Colet, as if for a cue.

“No need to ask you, sir, what you are doing here. Didn’t you mention Gunong Berching?”

“I am making for that point.”

To Colet it was plain that if Norrie had addressed him in the matter of that mountain, it would have been in a few choice words to demolish a folly.

“Do you think you can manage it, Mr. Parsell?”

“Of course I can; why not? That is part of my plan.”

“A good plan. But here, what with the want of food, and the floods and fevers, we have to alter our plans occasionally. It is rough going to Berching, and I should fancy that beyond it the going would be worse. Hardly anything is known about it.”

“Very likely, very likely.” Mr. Parsell spoke with decision, and a hint of asperity. He was unwell and a little crabbed. Nor did he promise to be the kind of man who would listen at any time to the warnings of common sense, not when he was mounted on his hobby.

Norrie, tactfully, tried to draw from him confessions about his supplies, his guide, his men, and the time he had estimated would be necessary for the journey. But these to Mr. Parsell were only negligible details, of small account compared with the pursuit of truth. He was vague about them; he himself was barely concerned. The Chinaman came to them with dishes, Norrie polished his pipe thoughtfully, and Mr. Parsell addressed himself to food in an attitude of abstraction which allowed him but fitfully to acknowledge the nearness of nourishment. Indeed he would pause with entire detachment, fork held loaded and upright but forgotten, to seek, with the cool and disarming inconsequence of a barrister who knew his case, a betrayal of their own notions of the natives they had met. Had they seen any Sekais or Semangs?

Norrie humoured him. More than once Mr. Parsell sat round to look at Norrie squarely and with the unaffected curiosity of a pundit who is surprised by a suspicion that a layman may be not so ignorant as in fairness could be assumed. Yet, when the subject was not his own, he was, despite his bald head, a ragged and helpless infant one would have been prompted to nurse and cherish, if one had known but the way to hold it. The lifted appeal of his fearless but innocent blue eyes moved the paternal instinct in a man. It was not safe for him to be about.

Then, with talk and food, his nervous energy flagged; would they excuse him? He thought he would rest. He would have to make an early start in the morning. Norrie led him to the hammock, which would be easier for his bad shoulder than the floor, and tended him as carefully as though their guest were a wilful but royal orphan. When Mr. Parsell was out of the way, Norrie stood, for a time, staring into the night; then he turned to Colet with a wry smile.

“We shall have to stop this,” he whispered. “There’s enough hantus here.”