Barzil Dunsack bowed his head over the table and pronounced a grace in startlingly resonant tones, the reverent humility of his words oddly emphasized by a sort of angry impatience. It seemed as if he at once subjected himself to his God and expressed a certain dissatisfaction with His forbearance. Edward Dunsack was plunged in the thought of the resolution he intended to fulfill that evening.
The throwing away of the opium had lost a part of its symbolic meaning. It now seemed even a little rash when he could find an immediate highly profitable market—the opium had cost him seven hundred dollars in China. But he must, he realized, be firm. Afterwards, in his room facing away from the street over darkening yards and gables and foliage, he stood gazing at the chest of mango wood that held the drug. Edward Dunsack unlocked and lifted the lid. On the tray before him were twenty balls, each the size of his two fists, wrapped in a hard skin of poppy leaves, and there was a similar number beneath. It was obvious that he couldn't carry a tray through the house, and he took out two balls, after which he secured the remainder.
He walked quickly down the stair and through the close turning of the lower hall that led through a side door to the yard. A pale rectangle of lamplight fell from the sitting room window over a brick path and ground tramped bare of grass; a clinking of dishes sounded in the kitchen. The sod was damp, and perhaps eight feet below the wooden buttress of the land the water showed impenetrably black.
Safely there he passed a tense hand over a brow suddenly wet; he was shaking as if in the grip of a chill. His condition needed drastic measures. The cold heavy opium gave out its tantalizing odor. In a minute it would be disposed of and he would go for more. He calculated that this necessitated twenty trips at the present rate—a bag might serve his purpose better. He raised an arm with an opium ball, but his hand remained suspended in air. An inarticulate protest seized him, a suffocating sense of impending loss. He would never be able to get Patna opium here; it was a valuable medical property. His nerves shook at the thought of its delights. Then as if without his volition and against every intention, his arm described a short arc and his hand was empty. There was the impact of a solid object striking the water, a faint ripple on the motionless expanse, and then absolute silence.
He was aghast at his wanton act, the irreparable waste of a precious substance, and cursed in a low audible Cantonese. Whose concern was it if he did, very occasionally, smoke a "pistol"? How could it possibly matter! The dreams about a great foreign commerce, a white house like the Ammidons', were futile; it was too late. He could expect nothing from life but the unspeakable monotony of his father's dwelling, the bare office. He had worked hard, been as full of splendid early resolutions as anyone, and he wasn't blamable if chance balked his ambition. A soul was nothing more than a twisting leaf in the wind of fate. There remained only to take what escape was offered—golden visions, luxury, beauty beyond all earth.
His contrary determination seemed of less actuality than the imagined echoing of the splash that still hung in his brain. It was a thing far away, belonging to another time, another man; like the memory of a period of charming ignorance. The thought of it wove a strand of melancholy into his present mature realization like the delicate scent of blossoming trees borne to him on the evening air, barely perceptible and then lost in the pungency of the opium. The latter became, mystically, all China, the irresistible fascination that had gradually possessed his imagination, dulling the associations of his heredity and birth, calling him further and further into its secretive heart.
He returned to his room, where he put back the second ball in the tray of its chest. An extraordinary weariness hung over him, there was a sense of leaden weight in his arms and feet. Flashes of a different perception pierced his apathy; a voice, seemingly outside his being, whispered of danger, evil and danger…. A twisting leaf, he told himself again with his deep fatalism.
The memory of Gerrit Ammidon's crisp blue gaze, his vigorous gestures and speech, became an intolerable affront, representing the far lost point of his own departure. His contrary feelings met and grappled in his mind; but in the end the past, Salem, was always defeated, weaker, more faintly perceived. In a great many essentials, he told himself, he had become Chinese in sympathy and fiber.
The lamp threw a smooth gleam over the mango wood chest, and he bent, turning the key in the ornamental brass lock. He could reconsider the disposal of the opium to-morrow; there was no hurry; he had no intention of becoming a victim to the drug. That would be an inconceivable stupidity, the negation of all the philosophy he had gained. Very occasionally—
His thoughts swung to the surprising fact of Ammidon's Chinese wife: if, as he had first suspected, she were a common woman of the port who had made a fool of the dull sailor he perceived the making of a very entertaining comedy. There would be the keenest irony in exposing her to himself before the complacent ignorance of her husband. He knew such women: convicted in Chinese, perhaps before the entire Ammidon family, not a muscle of her face would betray surprise or concern. She might try to murder him, very ingeniously, but never descend to the intrigue, the lies, of a Western woman placed in the same position. She'd stoically accept the situation. These visions ran rapidly, vividly, through his brain; he was accustomed to them; a greater part of his waking life was filled with such pictures, infinitely more alluring, persuasive, than the disappointing actuality. He got out of his clothes, and, in a loose gown of black silk, sat at his open window, his chin sunk in the palm of a hand, his face set against the night.