“You are all alike,” continued the captain. “I see you once—once or twice—and not again. You cannot help yourselves.... Sometimes I wish I could help you, but there is no time. You all know where you are going, and you are gone too quickly.”
The complete assurance of the old fellow! But what did he care for humanity, after all?
“You are going to Bangkok, Mr. Royden, aren’t you?” asked the captain. “Some voyages ago I had a passenger for there. Young like you, but a girl, a child. She had come out from England. She was a little different from the rest of you. I thought she looked like my own daughter. Couldn’t make out what she was going to do in a place like that—an innocent girl of about twenty. She asked me some funny questions about Bangkok. I could see she was frightened. Then it came out. A native prince had sent her money, and there she was, going to marry him. Do you know what that means? Well, I told her. Told her how many wives he had already. She cried. She didn’t know till then. But do you think I could help her? No, Mr. Royden. She had taken the money, and spent it, and there she was. She said she was forced to do it now. It was her duty. I had to leave her at Bangkok. She was bound to go, she said.... Poor little soul!”
They both stared ahead. There it was entirely dark. The sound of the surge, to Royden, was like the droning of his own thoughts. All were drifting. Nobody really knew where he was going, nor why. Not even Bible Brown.
“I can’t make out, Captain,” he said, “how you find your way in a darkness like this.”
“Find my way? This darkness is nothing. It is a fine night. I know my course. There is the compass. The darkness is nothing. I keep my course. To-morrow we shall be off Tumpat. I know where I am.”
CHAPTER XXXI
After our little coasting steamer had worked clear of the noisy bewilderment of Singapore’s crowded harbor the reality of the East dissolved. The East again was only a silent presentiment. For several days I saw to port the somber hills of Johore, Pahang, and Trengganu, and behind them each day the sun disappeared in an appalling splendor of thunder and flames. But those hills by the China Sea and the wrack of day above them were in the same world; one was no nearer to me than the other. The weather was heated and calm, and the sea was glazed, for the monsoon was northeast. I was bound for Bangkok. Yet Malaya was implicit in that magnificent dread to port at dayfall; though how could I enter it? How does one reach the sunset clouds? I had come to see that land, but I had given it up. I was going to Bangkok instead. Singapore is not Malaya—it is more Chinese than anything else; nor Penang; nor even Malacca. You may drift about from one anchorage to another in the China Sea and the Bay of Bengal—voyage along both sides of that strip of Asia which reaches down to the equator and is called the Malay Peninsula; or travel leisurely in a railway coach for days past inland stations with pleasing native names, or career for weeks over excellent roads, through miles of rubber plantations, jungle, tin-mining districts, old Malay hamlets, and modern Chinese compounds, and feel all the time that you will never enter Malaya. I had tried every device in an effort to glimpse it, but it had eluded me; and soon I must go home. We ought to have more sense, of course, than to try to touch a dream, or to reach that place which exists but in the glamour of a name.