Gallions Reach (22 page)

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 nobs 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 cheek-bone 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 to-night? 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.

They had wandered beyond the verifications of the map, which for some time had been little better than the nearest a cartographer could do with what was mainly hearsay. When the country about a camp gave them no hope of gain it was easy to build a house elsewhere; four corner props, some palm leaves laid on cross beams, and a floor of boughs raised well above the ground. A constant fire dried the gear, for the rain, though terse as a rule, made no mistake about it while it was speaking; the fire kept the fanatical leeches at bay, and discouraged the curiosity of night prowlers. Norrie was cleaning his gun. This was one of the mornings when, bent and patient, he sat at a small task suitable for meditation, occasionally pausing to consider the ground before him. His thoughts at such times he did not always avow; they were, usually, but the prelude to packing, and another departure; taking with them again, so far, no more than the hope of a luckier site.

Colet was getting used to it. He had never known what morning was till he saw the dawn from a camp by the side of a jungle stream, a brief inauguration of the earth. He could wake at night now, hear the snarling moan of the tiger on the hill, rise to give the fire a plentiful feed, and forget it. He could work all day and not pass a word to his companion. And that was a good thing. He and Norrie did not have to speak, unless it was necessary, nor even look at each other. There might be a comment from Norrie, late at night, after he put aside the book he had been reading, and began to watch the firelight convulsive on a tree trunk, making the tree move in and out of the forest.

“Listen, Colet.”

Colet would listen. The hush was that at the world's end. No. There was something beneath the silence. Perhaps the sap rising in the trees; the breathing of creatures; the pulse of the forest. But all was dark, the darkness over which had never been pronounced the call to light. The collapse of a little ash in the fire was notable. One looked at it instantly.

“Listen to what?”

Norrie smiled.

“To what we can't hear. Suppose we heard begin the Andante from the Fifth Symphony—out in the trees beyond our light. Or if a choir suddenly exploded with ‘Worthy is the Lamb.' What about it? The leopards would change their spots with fright. And what would you make of it? You'd think it was the Last Day and your number was up.”

Sometimes you considered Norrie as though you had never met him before. He knew that, though, and before you could recognise him he was behind the door.

Now he was cleaning his gun. The Chinaman was squatting by the stream below, washing the dishes. They could hear the Malays cutting firewood. All the immobility of the forest was but the whirr of a grasshopper. The gun was put aside.

“How long have we been on this pitch?”

“I dunno.” Collet went into the shelter to find a date. “Eight days.”

“Nothing here but signs. Good signs, too. All the bright promises of earth, Colet. Isn't she kind to her children? But they lead nowhere.”

“But if they were not meant for promises! They may not have been. Not meant for signs at all. What could you expect them to lead to more than they have?”

“Dear old Colet. There he goes. But I'll tell him again. I want to give the moths and rust a chance to corrupt something that belongs to me. I'll moth 'em, if they come near it.”

“I don't feel that way about it. But look here. If you do lift the lid off a hoard, watch me do the Highland fling with the accordant triumphant noises.”

“I know. You are like that. But it's not the right spirit. It's simply devilish. It's only your damned playful sympathy. You'd have been a nice Christian all complete with another touch of dreary misfortune. Colet, it makes me doubt you. You'll come to no good end. You really won't. I'm inclined to think that you might even fold your hands like a pale martyr, or a skinned rabbit, some day, and let the other fellow have the girl. It's wicked, you know. It's unfair to the poor darling. Don't you ever love your neighbour as yourself, unless you want him to know what a fool you are.”

“I should like to hear your own answer to that.”

“Then you'll have to wait till I'm perfectly safe.”

“No point in it, then.”

“Oh, there will be, though. There will be. That is the point. It's the right time to embrace the sad victims of fate when you have got nothing better to do. No point in being another victim.”

He waited a minute, and then picked up his gun again.

“I wouldn't have the nerve to look at the world unless I were sure of a cushioned corner in it. It would be a terror of a hole. There's no sense in it unless we put it there, so don't you try to find it. Just think of humanity messing up its planet with progress—shoving things about, piling 'em up, and especially getting cock-eyed with deep religious conviction when making its worst muck of its place. It's enough to bring down on us the Olympian sanitary inspector. I want a clear space in that jolly old riot. Then I shan't mind the Gadarene rush so much. It might be comic to watch it then, something to pass the time; but I've no fancy to be among the hooves.”

“Well, by God, Norrie, I never thought of it before. But you're afraid.”

“I am, when it comes down to it. You've given it a name. When I look at life in the eyes, in the hope of finding reason in it, my little inside turns pale. Cast your mind back to the Thames embankment and its outcasts at midnight, and get the horrors. Here, we'll be off. Let's go and do a little healthy gravel washing.”

A shallow stream so clear that its bed of quartz granules appeared to be under glass, came down in an easy glide from a valley head. It coiled about the lower buttresses of the forest. Only in brief stretches of quieter water was its surface open to the sky. The trees enclosed it, and muffled its voice, which was the only one there in the heat of the day. To Colet its bed was but unusually clean and white. The angular grains were displayed by the clarity of the water. Yet for his companion the stones had various names and implications. They were more than stones. Norrie must have known a lot. If he could find in the eternal forest an outlook from a ridge, he could guess the nature of a distant valley by the tone of its foliage, which all appeared to be of a sombre green; an ocean of rounded billows. He could read a spread of gravel in his palm as though it were a page of a book. Show him a lump of local mud in a new place at night and he would tell you what you would see in the morning, with instances of detail according to his humour; what vegetation would be infernal there, whether they would still be as hungry as they were then, and whether the inflammatory patches on their feet would improve or suppurate.