Gallions Reach (20 page)

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.

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 subtle 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.

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.