CHAPTER XXII
Before this book is done I shall have to speak of Maguire; and it had better be here while there is nothing else to do. Borneo is on one side of us and Celebes on the other, and I don’t know which the Savoe will visit next, for both are at the same distance, and she appears to be heading for neither.
I had heard of Maguire in the most unlikely places. His name would slip into a conversation early and naturally, but, so far as I could see, without occasion. It might have been waiting about, in the air, in the shadows, ready to take any excuse for prolonging its mortality. “Once when I was with Maguire ...” It was always supposed that I must know him. There was never a prelude, no hint of a face or a figure. Everybody ought to know Maguire, I had to suppose, or else lose the richness of the stories about him. But I had never met Maguire, and nothing that I was told of him made me feel that in him something rare had eluded me. For nothing was ever said which made him plain. Yet this man had so impressed himself upon those who knew him that they could not pass a few odd days with a stranger in a coasting steamer or a government rest-house without thinking of him.
When two or three travelers somehow got round to Maguire again, by candle light after dinner in a rest-house, I then began to watch the shadows alter as the silent Malays troubled the darkness beyond us, or gaze into thatch, searching for the rustling lizards I could hear but could not make out. It was not much good listening to what was said about that man. I knew it would be no more than hints, with all the clews left out for me. They seemed to think it was unnecessary to say more.
What was curious was their note of respect. They were not respectful men. Respect out here for an absent wayfarer is certainly strange. The climate and customs of this coast and forest do little to put us in a good light. But even so, I could not glimpse Maguire as a reality. He was an amusing myth, if anything at all. Besides, nobody is expected to take quite seriously much that he is likely to hear in the ships and the coastal towns from Singapore to Zamboanga by way of Borneo. One hears many odd tales, but their chief virtue is that usually one has plenty of time for them. Maguire was like the stories one heard of adventures on unfrequented distant islands, of queer native customs, of accidents in grotesque circumstances which could have reached their perfection of monstrous form only after long usage and polishing in the cabins of many ships and in many random hostels. Perhaps once there had been a man named Maguire, and a few words about him were still being passed round because they could not be stopped, and because nobody really knew whether he was alive or dead, and did not care.
One day a chance companion I found in a village on the coast of Borneo, after mentioning the now familiar legend, said he was going to see Maguire that afternoon. Would I come? The Irishman was staying in the place.
Was that an invitation to add an aspect of veracity to an unsubstantial story? Of course! It was supposed that I would forget it—have something else to do that afternoon; for out East there is rarely a need to see in these invitations more than idle politeness, because conversation, too, in this moist heat, becomes slack and aimless, and therefore easily friendly. So I was greatly surprised, when comfortably reading, to see my friend stroll in and affect reproach that I was not dressed like himself, for an immediate visit to the substance of this familiar legend.
I had to go. There was a large native house built on stilts above the ground, with the usual groups of cocoanut and betel palms about it. We saw an elderly Malay, a lean and dignified figure—a datoh, or chief, I understood—who met us at the foot of a ladder which led up to the door of a great hut. Within the shadow of that door some figures watched us, which we knew were women by the brightness of their dress. Near the chief were several little children staring at us, all of them naked but one tiny girl, who wore a silver leaf pendent from a silver chain round her hips. My friend and the chief conversed apart.