“I could tell you to go and drown yourself, and be damned to you,” he said, with an unsuccessful assumption of brutality in his manner, “but I won’t. We are responsible for one another—worse luck. I am almost ashamed of myself, but I can understand your dirty pride. I can! By . . .”
He broke off with a loud sigh and walked briskly to the steps, at the bottom of which lay his boat, rising and falling gently on the slight and invisible swell.
“Below there! Got a lamp in the boat? Well, light it and bring it up, one of you. Hurry now!”
He tore out a page of his pocketbook, moistened his pencil with great energy and waited, stamping his feet impatiently.
“I will see this thing through,” he muttered to himself. “And I will have it all square and ship-shape; see if I don’t! Are you going to bring that lamp, you son of a crippled mud-turtle? I am waiting.”
The gleam of the light on the paper placated his professional anger, and he wrote rapidly, the final dash of his signature curling the paper up in a triangular tear.
“Take that to this white Tuan’s house. I will send the boat back for you in half an hour.”
The coxswain raised his lamp deliberately to Willem’s face.
“This Tuan? Tau! I know.”
“Quick then!” said Lingard, taking the lamp from him—and the man went off at a run.