CHAPTER X
He had skimmed about Singapore in a jinrickshaw all the morning. He wanted to find Mr. Kow Watt Loon. That Chinaman was as elusive as the glamour of the East. And he was not used to ’rickshaws. He was sure he looked a lazy fool when being dragged about in the heat on a high perch and a pair of silent wheels by a sweating fellow creature. It had been nearly a week before he could summon the courage to travel in a little cart drawn by another man. It made him feel like the hated subject of a revolutionary cartoonist’s satire.
He could not find Mr. Kow Watt Loon, who kept a pawnshop somewhere in Singapore, so he had been told, where Kelanton sarongs of silk were to be found occasionally, rare krises, and silverware from the Linga Islands. Not that Mr. Loon would be sure to sell those things if his shop were found and if he had them, for he was reported to be suspicious and morose; an embarrassing shopkeeper who would forget all his English and decline to sell to you if he misliked your appearance. But Mr. Loon could not be found; and a city near the equator is much more extensive, relatively, than a city with a wholesome climate. Singapore’s streets in their heavy and slumbering heat seemed to his despairing eye prolonged to an impossible distance. Oh, Heaven! Where was this Mr. Loon?
This coolie was the third experiment that morning with a ’rickshaw. Young Bennett from London, in his quest of the romance of the East, watched below him the old man’s back muscles playing under the glistening drab skin. He ought to tell the old fellow to walk—to stop. It was too hot for this game. Besides, the coolie didn’t know where to go, though he pretended he did; no doubt he was merely running about. They always did that. The first, picked up near Raffles Place, was a bronze giant, a wonderful youngster, whose hat was a round straw thatch with a pinnacle. As soon as he was spoken to he made cheerful noises of understanding, lifted his shafts in confident play, took a strange side turning promptly (how lucky—this fellow knew!), loped off swiftly, and they were completely lost in ten minutes, though Bennett did not know that at the time. His coolie loped along swiftly but leisurely. That running figure and its style would have inspired the poets of old Athens, but in the romantic East it was only a blob of life. The sun and the easy gait infected the passenger with a haughty languor. The coolie’s pale-blue cotton shorts and shirt became dark and limp with sweat; but the fellow ran on, deliberately, unerringly, taking unlikely byways into queer seclusions where brown life poured in noisy streams. Evidently this fellow knew where to go.... But did he? Or did he just run on? Where the devil were they? Brente! Stop! As cheerful as ever, sweating but fresh, that coolie did not appear to know where he was, and evidently his glad smile would be unchanged even in death. He was an imbecile.
The second coolie, who had stopped to be entertained by the language thrown at the first, was a lean and elderly man, and big veins corded his arms in a mesh. His torso was bare. He ran his ’rickshaw elsewhere, occasionally looking back over his shoulder doubtfully at his fare. He was shy of any street in which he saw the khaki uniform of a Malay or a Sikh. That journey came to nothing in a strange market place in the middle of a horrible smell. The coolie walked to a curb; there he gently rested his shafts, turned and shook his head dolefully, and held out his hand for largess.
Another hour wasted! It was blazing noon, and a row of Chinamen were squatting in the shade, eating slops from basins with two sticks. They did not even look up. The naked children at play did not appear to see him. Nobody in Singapore knew anything, and did not care what happened to anybody. He had never seen this part of the city before. Was it Singapore? It might have been the grotesque country of a dream, all these people inimical shadows who did not even glance at their victim, and he the only live man, caught in an enchantment, lost and imprisoned in an illusion where the face of things had a meaning which he could not guess, though it was important for him. The man from London wiped the perspiration from his hands and looked round. A high wall was opposite, with a gateway, and crouched on the top of the wall, on either side of the opening, were two big bulls in pink stone. In the shadow on the pavement beneath were heaps of colored rags, fast asleep. Was that a temple to Siva? It was then that the third ’rickshaw man entered the dream, stopped and looked at Bennett as though he knew at once the man for whom he was seeking, and drew near seductively. This figure of evil, its face pock-marked, had only a rag about its loins and his ’rickshaw was a self-supporting wreck. Well, it would serve to escape from those pink bulls and that unmoving smell. By luck, too, they might pass into a part of the city he recognized, and then he would be released from the spell and wake up. But he went farther, and saw nothing that he knew. He was abandoned under some cocoanuts, and outside the city, by the look of it.
The road was empty, except for a bullock cart at a standstill. A haze of little flies quivered about the sleepy heads of the two animals, and the shadows under their bellies were black. The dark folk, Klings and Malays, who padded by occasionally, were probably in another world. They were certainly not in his. He could not speak with them. The heat was so still and heavy that he felt he could not move in it, especially as he did not know which way to take.
“Can I help you? Are you looking for anyone about here, sir?” The voice was so like Oxford that it exorcized the spectral East completely; for a moment it steadied his bewilderment in the midst of what was quick, but was alien and enigmatic. He was too surprised to answer at once, but in the shade of those palms stared at a young fellow who was so attractively dressed in neat and unctuous white, with a flourishing black silk bow to a collar not in the least stained, though the heat was many hours old, that Bennett felt mean and soiled in the regard of that friendly curiosity. Bennett explained. He was lost. He had been unable to make the ’rickshaw men understand. What he wanted now was the Europe Hotel.
“Some distance, the Europe. This is the Ayer Laut Estate. Sorry, but our cars are out. Would you come with me? Then we can telephone to your hotel.”
They went off through somber avenues of sleeping trees. Their trunks were scored with pale scars and under the wounds were stuck small glass cups. His companion said nothing, but strode briskly forward. The crepuscular aisles were deserted, though Bennett noticed that he and his companion were not alone in that silent and shadowy plantation. But what were the figures he could see in the distance he did not know. They might have been Dryads, those slender and motionless forms in robes of scarlet, orange, and emerald, who were intent on some ritual among the trees. They were retired into the twilight quiet of the aisles, and seemed unaware of the intruding Englishmen. But Bennett was startled by one of those figures. It had been hidden by the gray column of a tree near the path. As he went by it raised its head, with its piled black hair and a gold comb diminishing its dark and delicate face, which had a gold stud in the bold curve of a nostril. Her drowsy eyes looked at him, but he remembered only the spot of gold in her nose, and the astonishing orange of the silk wound round her lithe figure.
They came to a house in a shrubbery of crotons, and ascended a flight of wooden steps to a veranda. A Malay was there, crouched in the portico; but he might have been inanimate. His gaze was fixed beyond them. And the house was deserted. Their footsteps made an embarrassing din on the boards. Bennett with his brisk friend, who seemed to know exactly what to do, went to an upper room, open to the air on three sides, and overlooking everywhere the green roof of the plantation.
The skin of a tiger was on the floor. Its head grinned toward the door in shabby and fatuous defiance. Dusty native weapons were disorderly on the wooden partition at the back. There was a picture of Salisbury Cathedral hanging next to a photograph of a dead elephant with a man nursing a gun sitting on its head.
“Wait a minute,” said the young fellow in white, and went to the most noticeable object in the dingy and neglected apartment, a bright telephone instrument. He leaned against the wall in superior and casual attention with the receiver to his ear. While waiting like that, suddenly and brusquely he spoke to Bennett.
“I say, sorry, what’s your name?” Then he turned in a tired way to the instrument, murmured softly and allusively to the wall for a few seconds, and came away. “That’s all right. The car will be here presently. I must go. But you wait here. Whisky and soda on that sideboard. Make yourself at home”; and he was gone.
Bennett sat down. Singapore was an unexpected sort of place. He felt imprisoned now in the silence. Nothing moved. There was no sound but once, when a wasp as big as a bird bolted in heavily, blundered and hummed among the wooden rafters, and went again so straight and suddenly that Bennett thought something in the overhead shadows had flung it out. He began to feel bitter about that romance of the East. Sometimes it seemed lost in a brooding quiet, or else it stirred into episodic and irrelevant activity directed to God knew what. He put his sun helmet on the floor, wiped his brow, and regretted the childish folly which had sent him to look for what perhaps did not exist on earth. What did people mean by romance? What was it? How could it be found in ’rickshaws and rubber plantations? He could not get the hang of Singapore. Ships, temples to all the gods, cocoanuts, and men and women of so many different colors that they could not talk to one another. And who was that fellow who had just gone out? How did he come into the picture? It was a life which went on outside his own, and he could not follow it. Didn’t even know that fellow’s name. He might have been created among those trees just to let a Londoner know that the East, though it pretended never to observe him, yet wanted him to understand that he was making a fool of himself in a place not his. He might as well have some of that drink.
The siphon made so immense a noise that he thought the invisible watchers must hear it and send another messenger to mock him politely. He began to drink gratefully.
“Mix me one,” grumbled a deep voice.
He almost dropped the glass, and looked round in a little panic. He could not see anybody. A lounge chair with its back to him stood by the veranda at the far end of the room. He went to it. An old man, with a mass of riotous white hair and a white beard stained brown about the lips, reclined there at full length. His eyes were shut. His open shirt showed gray hair on his ribs.
“Did you speak?” asked Bennett.
“Of course,” said the man, without opening his eyes. “You heard me. I want a drink.”
Bennett brought it. The old man sat up sideways in his chair with surprising swiftness, opened his eyes at the glass in sullen criticism, and emptied it at once. He sat looking at the tumbler thoughtfully, while Bennett stood by, hoping that the car would arrive soon. Then the bearded figure looked up at him and surveyed him with dark disapproving eyes.
“Who are you?”
Bennett felt very modest. “Oh—nobody—just out from London. I found this estate by chance—got lost, you know. A good friend here, whose name I don’t know, has telephoned for a car.”
“Well, Mr. Nobody, sit down. No. Get me another drink. Put more whisky in it.”
Bennett was meekly obedient.
“Now you can sit down. Go on. Sit down.”
Bennett felt that the heat of the day was much worse as he took a near chair. The stranger flung up his glass again with the suggestion that the liquid must fall into a hollow, held the tumbler away from him, turned it about reflectively, put it on the floor, and lay back, closing his eyes. He sighed. His feet were bare, except for a pair of crimson slippers which hung loosely from his toes. Bennett listened through five minutes of tense silence for sounds of an approaching car. The figure reclining on the chair then opened its querulous eyes, raised its head, and spoke.
“My name’s Hopkins. Ever heard of me, Mr. Nobody?”
“No, sir. I’m afraid not. I’m only just out, you see.”
Mr. Hopkins chuckled in his beard. “Then don’t stop unless you want to.”
“Never heard of me,” mumbled Mr. Hopkins, several times. “Never heard of me.”
This old fellow, thought Bennett, is not in his right mind, and here I am, told to wait till somebody comes for me, though I’m not sure that they know I’m here. How can I keep this graybeard amused? He’s a truculent old ruffian. Bennett looked out over the treetops in the sun. The crowns of some palms were individual above the mass of green. They were lifeless. A bird or something was calling, “Raup, Raup.” What could he talk about to an old reprobate like that?
“What ship did you come out in?” asked Mr. Hopkins, playing with the end of his beard.
“The Trojan.” The young man relapsed at once into a bankrupt memory.
Hopkins stared at him fixedly, as though waiting. “Well, is that all? But I suppose it is. You came out, and here you are. That’s how it’s done. Not in my time, though. Not when I was alive.”
“Have you been here long, sir?”
“Me? I’ve been here too long. Seen too much for some of them. I’m old Hopkins—but what’s the good of talking to you? You just came, and here you are.” Mr. Hopkins rubbed his bare ribs plaintively. “The ships I knew couldn’t just come and go.” He leaned forward with one of his sly chuckles, and looked round furtively while secretly enjoying a recollection. “I was in the Nellie Bligh.” He nodded his head at Bennett, and watched for the full effect of his news.
Bennett smiled awkwardly, but nodded back to his companion appreciatively. It was better to keep him in a good humor.
“Yes. You don’t know what ships are like, not you fellers. Nor men. No Billy Ringbolts now.” Mr. Hopkins began to shake in silent laughter over something that had occurred to him.
“Oh, I don’t know, Mr. Hopkins. I’ve heard about the clippers, and Whampoa, and Java Head. But I never saw a sailing ship during all the voyage out. Not one. And yet I know the East India Dock Road, too.”
Mr. Hopkins looked startled for a moment. “Poplar,” he mumbled. “You say you know the Dock Road! And not a sailing ship.” His beard about his mouth continued to move, as though he were talking to himself.
“The Nellie Bligh came out from Poplar,” mused Mr. Hopkins. “So did I. But not in her. She found me in Java because—well, because I was there.” The old man looked very artful and amused.
“She picked me up at Sourabaya. She was in the coolie trade to the Chinca Islands then, and her skipper was a Chilean. She was going to China to take in coolies. Ever heard of the trade? You were paid for what you delivered. So it was no good taking in just enough to fill the ship. Some died.”
Bennett smiled politely at this little joke. “Some died, did they?”
“The Nellie,” went on Mr. Hopkins, “was not the ship to choose if you knew of a better. I didn’t. She was all Dago, but there are worse things. We got up to China—are you listening?—I say we got out all right. She found her own way, though she nearly finished up on Borneo. The wind fell and she was set inshore on a current.... What a damn noise those big wasps make! There’s another just come in.... Did you hear of a man named Smollet in London? I’m told he’s often in the papers, very important, and gives a lot to the missionaries. So he ought. Buying off his dad below, I suppose. His dad was in the coolie trade. I know. I didn’t do so bad, myself. But the missionaries get nothing out of me. I wouldn’t worry over a few Chinks more or less. They’re not human. We took in three hundred on the Nellie. One of ’em looked at me as he came aboard. After that I went to have a look at the hatch gratings—I wanted to see whether they were sound and handy.”
Mr. Hopkins sank back languorously on his long chair, closed his eyes, and lapsed into silence. His long bony hands were folded limply on his bare chest. Somewhere outside, a bell sunk in the depths of the foliage began to toll. The silly story was finished, Bennett thought. There was a smell which reminded him of incense. Mr. Hopkins’s cane chair creaked. Where was that car, to get him out of this?
The old man began to drawl again. He spoke with his eyes shut, as though wearily confessing his sins. He looked like a dying man, too, Bennett thought, for his white beard hung from cheek bones that were projecting eaves, and the skin of his long hooked nose was so white over the sharp bridge that a touch might have broken it. His eyes were pits, with white bushes overhanging their shadows. One of his slippers fell to the boards. “It was lucky we sighted the Pelew Islands. Our old man might have passed muster for a sailor with a fair wind and plenty of room. If ever he knew where he was he must have guessed it. But he was the admiral of the Pacific in good weather. Three days after we sighted the Pelews, near eight bells in the morning, the Nellie was doing so well that I wasn’t so sorry as I had been that I’d left Java when I had to. I’d forgotten we had any Chinamen aboard. Just as eight bells was being struck there was a howl below, like a man knifed. Then I heard a rush and I looked down. The Chinks were swarming for the deck. They hung on the ladder like bees and were armed with boards they’d stripped from below. The first of ’em was scrambling over the coaming close to me. I lifted him clean by his pigtail and dropped him on the others.” The old man smiled in his sleep. “We made those hatch gratings fast, somehow. We got the Chinks booked. Wolves would have looked prettier. Their faces were turned up and they were howling at us. Then a pistol went off. That Dago in his gold lace had come at last. He was trembling and whimpering, and firing pistols into those faces. It made the noise worse. The Chinks began to leap and scream.” Mr. Hopkins paused and rubbed the hair about his mouth slowly.
“As one jumped a shot caught fire to his shirt, and it was funny to see the way he tore the burning rag off his arm. But it wasn’t so funny when I saw that chap pushing through the crowd, blowing on the rag to keep it alight. I half guessed his game and grabbed a pistol for a go at him. He dropped, but another Chink snatched the burning rag from his hand and got away with it.” Mr. Hopkins opened his eyes in a smile. “Wanted to light his pipe, eh?”
A motor horn sounded in the grounds. Then a Malay appeared. “Tuan Bennett. Motor pergi Europe.”
“Thank you, Mr. Hopkins,” said young Bennett, rising slowly, for he feared it might be polite to wait for the end of the story, supposing it were not ended. “Good-morning.” Mr. Hopkins did not speak. He was staring into the rafters.
The quick journey to the hotel gave Bennett the impression that it had been in hiding just round the corner all the time. What he had seen and heard that day might have been the recollections, unreasonable, unrelated, and prolonged to no end, which are jumbled in the mind when one wakes up and sees in surprise the familiar objects of the plain morning. “Another day wasted,” thought Bennett. “I don’t spend one more hour of it looking for romance. I doubt whether the East has got any. All gone before I got here.” He thought he would bathe, and then sit on the veranda; waste the rest of the day looking at the world till dinnertime. He sat in that corridor, a long shady vista of wicker chairs and marble-topped tables, where men and women of his own kind, as much apart from the East as he was himself, gossiped idly as though waiting for the hour when they could escape. Apologetic Chinamen in white uniforms were gliding about like ghosts, ministering to weary guests. The broad thoroughfare outside moved in silent eddies of jinrickshaws and motor-cars. Bennett was amused by a Chinaman in goggles so fat that he filled the perch of his ’rickshaw, sitting there with his short legs wide apart and a child like a solemn idol on one knee. The little coolie who drew them was trotting along limply with his mouth wide open. A group of Klings stalked by, figures with long black hair and smooth faces, each in a stiff cocoon of frail colored cloth. Were they men or women? A gigantic Sikh domineered with the traffic at the corner. Across the road, fringing the turf of the esplanade, flat-topped trees were in crimson bloom, a line of gigantic flambeaux. Through their columns he could see the roadstead, a plain of burnished pewter to which were fixed the black shapes of a few ships, a barque, some sampans, coasting steamers like toys, high-pooped junks, all distinct and remarkable, even when they were far out toward the indigo islands beyond. The sun was setting. Immense purple clouds piled from the horizon like the vapors of a planet which had burst, smoke too heavy for any wind to disperse and shot with the glow of exposed internal fires. They were high enough to kindle the sky. The sky was burning. Lightning was exploding in the summits of the clouds. The ships and the sea were suddenly caught, too, and the surprised faces of the watchers on that veranda reflected the glow of a vast catastrophe. The fires died. The islands congealed to cold iron. The only light was the quivering opalescence of the storm in high clouds. A group of Chinamen went by, shadows carrying lanterns, beating a tom-tom and shrilling on curdling instruments.
Bennett, almost fearful without knowing why, looked round at the guests assembling. They reassured him. The electric fans were spinning above them. They were drinking cocktails. He thought he would go and dress, but then saw a man signaling to him, and recognized his nameless young friend of the morning. Beside him was a lady whose little head, in a shadow, seemed lively and detached above a rosy cloud of gauzy silk upon which fell the light of a glow-lamp. Bennett went over. Another man was at that table, but Bennett did not look at him.
“Well, you got your car all right?”
“Yes. You helped me out of that trouble nicely.”
His friend laughed, and turned to the lady to explain the fun of it. “Found him on our plantation, near the Kling compound, looking for the Europe.” Bennett smiled shyly, and the lady glanced at him with tired and faintly insolent eyes. “Why ever was he doing that?” she asked, indifferently, looking away across the room.
Bennett said, with an attempt at humor, that he was looking for the romance of the Orient. The lady did not appear to hear him. She began a conversation in a low tone with her companion. Bennett was about to leave, with an excuse, when he felt his arm nudged, and saw Mr. Hopkins beside him in the next chair, severe and correct in evening dress, his white beard and hair scrupulously groomed. “Hullo, Mr. Nobody!” he rumbled. “Strictly proper and comfortable here, cocktails and all. Have one.” He plunged a bell, and when the Chinese apparition appeared, merely looked at it. The apparition vanished, but almost at once returned with two little glasses containing a golden liquor in which were scarlet cherries on match sticks.
“I didn’t finish that story. You were in a hurry to get away, but you can’t go now.” Mr. Hopkins pushed over a cocktail, holding away a finger on which was a remarkable topaz. “Men who just come out, and here they are! But you can tell Poplar about the Nellie Bligh, when you get back. They may wonder where she went. And you can say I said so. Hopkins—there’s been lots of Hopkinses, perhaps even in my family.” The old fellow had an interval of private mirth. The young man opposite, and the lady in rosy silk, were conversing in oblivious animation. “Wasn’t that Chinaman just getting away with a burning rag when you ran out? I couldn’t stop him. And the Dago, who was a fool, thought we had finished with the mutiny. But he soon knew better. He knew when he saw some smoke coming up by the fore hatch. Of course, Chinks are almost reasonable creatures. Almost reasonable, Mr. Nobody. We couldn’t let them roast, could we? Of course not. Not if we wanted to put the fire out. Our Dago had the puzzle of his life before him. The Chinks were below us again, clamoring to be let out and pointing back at the fire. They thought they’d got the right argument that time. And that Dago was going to do it, too, and save his ship, I suppose, with hundreds of murderous maniacs round him. Not when I was there, though. Not when I had a gun. Let ’em roast. There’s lots of Chinks, but only one Mr. Hopkins, and the Pelews were only three days back. I don’t think, Mr. Nobody, you’ve ever seen anything like it. But by the time we had the boats provisioned and away all was quiet again, except for the flames. We made the Pelews. Anyhow, my boat did. I never heard what became of the other two.”
The lady in rose laughed prettily. Bennett, shocked, stared at her instantly, but she was not looking at Mr. Hopkins. The other pair had a joke between them.
“Well, come along, you two. Dinner!” Mr. Hopkins rose, a tall patriarch, a venerable image of disillusioned wisdom. The young man rose, too, and moved his chair to allow the lady a path to the dining room. He turned with a polite smile to Bennett. “Let me hear when you’ve found any romance in the East. But don’t come looking for it on our plantation. We haven’t got any there.”