“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?”