Gallions Reach (17 page)

His manner conveyed that he was explaining but the melancholy truth.

“Don't let me persuade you. I want you to come, but not if you don't feel like it.”

He began to fill that briar slowly, and once he rubbed it on his cheeks, as though caressing it. Colet considered the man, and thought of road metalling, levelled and hard. But there must be something in a fellow who could choose such a pipe, and treat it like that. Not easy to read that man, but easy to read his pipe. Go by the pipe, and jump for it?

Norrie began to form leisurely clouds, and to watch them unfold; and at his ease, in a reminiscent way, to insult the Orient attractively because he had nothing better to do just then.

Colet fumbled in a jacket pocket.

“Before you go any further, for the love of Heaven hand me your tobacco-pouch.”

“Oh, you smoke, do you? I thought you didn't. That was a count against you.”

“I don't know when last I had a pipe.” He held his nose over the smoke of his bowl. “Now, if you talk to me, I think I'd agree to go with you either to perdition or the pearly gates.”

“Then I shan't say any more about it; not yet. Neither of those two places is in my prospectus.”

“No? Well, the very smell of your mixture warns me that it must be one or the other, and there's no telling which.”

“Odd; I thought it was a better tobacco than that. I like to listen to you. That's why I've come in. But don't forget I'm a metallurgist. My only anodynes are the pipe and drink.”

“Is doubt about the nature of things an anodyne?”

Norrie was sadly emphatic. “Rather. That, or an infection. It's debilitating. It's worse than dysentery. It takes away a man's inside. When I want something, I don't doubt whether I ought to have it or not. The only doubt is, can I get it?
That's the miserable doubt, can I get it? Usually I can't. No doubt about that.”

Norrie, Colet thought, was a man worth looking at, large and satisfactorily indolent, but with quick and wary eyes which is usually looked down his nose when he was talking, as if his converse was self-communion which you overhead. There was nobody else for him to look at, of course; nobody who mattered so much as himself, anyhow. But the man was kindly; the purring, perhaps, of one of the larger carnivora when it was well fed. Now and then, when he had a question, a sly glance went with it, instant but casual, and you knew your answer would have to be precise; no use to hedge; but, if you hedged, then at least he would sympathise with so human a failing. His taut moustache was dark, but its hint of cruelty was forgotton in his abdundant hair, which was careless of definition, and allowed a few trumbles of grey waves to stray over his brow. His eyes and hair gave an assurance that he was often playfully human, while his long thin nose reminded Colet of a knife that would be always prompt to the usual bidding of that firm mouth with its lurking derision of scruples.

“Now, Colet, I've been talking of the jungle, not the pearly gates. I don't like the jungle, but it happens to be a verifiable fact. And please don't dwell on the thought of perdition. It makes me uncomfortable. Think of valuable deposits, which are much better. They might come in this life. Mine is a business notion. It isn't metaphysical. Leave metaphysics to the senile, who take to thin joys because they can't have babies. What I'm looking for is something a bank manager would respect; and yet it might come to nothing but quinine and another shot at the game later. Let me press the button for your steward. Let's have something to make us hopeful and foolish.”

They arrived at Rangoon before the day had begun; and though that city had a name which had the appeal of a call of the oboe, yet Colet discovered that he was in no hurry to leave his cabin. Something had gone out of him. He could feel no magic in the Gulf of Martaban. He rebuked himself for that. He could not be fully alive, to be in Burma, and yet not to have the sense of a strange occasion. He might be still in Billiter Avenue. But perhaps the ship and the open boat had given to him all he could accept, for a while. There is a limit. Burma could not be much after the old
Altair
; and her modest little master was more significant than all the pagodas and lotus ponds.

Norrie strolled in, to remind him that there were lodgings to be found, that he was concerned with a wreck over which officials would be nosey, and that there was work to be done.

“You are coming with me now, and you'll know it. Here's Burma, but you won't find any lotus about me, except after I've fed.”

“I was just thinking of that pond weed. How is it I don't feel very interested? And on the Irrawaddy, for the first time. Do you think I'm ill?”

“Not a bit,” Norrie told him. “It shows your sound health. It's just your blighting divination. You smelt the spicy breeze of this open counterfeit afar off. That's all. You'll smell it stronger presently.”

Off the two of them went. And Rangoon was not the expected vision of the Orient, nor was it fully of the West. It was an industrial western city which had got mislaid to
sprawl in fatigue in the tropics. Languor and warehouses. Its white people were too hot and bored to get it replaced. They wanted to do it, but they had no will and energy for that. The brown folk had been drawn into the city, but had learned that it was not of their sort. They were enduring the orderly and stagnant heat till they had the means of escape.

In a hotel bedroom hot and dim, where the electric light was needed though it was morning, Colet looked at the grey mosquito curtains of the bed and asked, involuntarily, how long they would have to stay there.

“Well, until the proper person within the meaning of the act has discovered to what extent you are stained criminally. You've gone and lost your ship, you know. As a seaman you are suspect, naturally. A man of your intelligence isn't a seaman for nothing, either. It's against nature. After I've bailed you out, you can make for Penang.”

“What shall I do there?”

“I don't know. They do funny things there. But I'll tell you carefully, at the proper time, what I want you to do there.”

Norrie surveyed him plaintively.

“I don't like your style, now I come to think of it. You can't go about with me like that. My friends would think I'd given up mining, and was going after locusts and wild honey with a sacred crank who would look more picturesque in goatskins. It would never do. You don't know how particular we are in the tropics. Come along.”

And Norrie, though he affected to be indolent, was casually familiar with the devious city; he wasted no time in his search for what was wanted. The stores, to Colet's surprise, would have been appropriate in the Brompton Road, and his companion was no better than a shrewd and ironic housewife who had been wearied by the ways of the keepers of shops, yet had to meet them as penance for existence, and so converted them into an opportunity for foolish amusement.
He knew too much of the secret motives for the trifling devices of commerce. He sported in a feline way with the disarming candour of salesmen, leading them on with unsmiling humbug till they were sure their skill was happy. Colet began to see that with Norrie he would be protected from the guile of the worldly, because to his companion that was only the cunning of children, simple and endearing. It was enough to make a diverting interlude when not engaged in the really serious task of beguiling the greater powers.

Colet was released early from the quiet questioning of officials whose knowledge of ships, he realised with a little alarm, would have been infernal, had it been applied with the intent to put gyves on the wicked. They knew too much about ships. He learned, in that brief cross-examination, that no enterprise on earth is under so many jealous eyes as a ship on the high seas. And when, immediately after that episode was closed, the little coaster
Nibong
put out from Rangoon for Penang, and he was its only white passenger, Sinclair said farewell. As the coaster's syren warned that she was about to depart, Colet had a suspicion that he would have been glad to be returning to London instead, with his old shipmate. Penang had but a minor inducement, and Norrie, though engaging, was new and unpredictable. It was not easy to know for certain which possessions were better worth cherishing, but at least he was reluctant to let Sinclair go. And Sinclair seemed reluctant to go. He was cheered by that. There could be genuine dubiety over the implications of what, in a hurry, people often called good luck, but his friend Sinclair, he was admonished to see, did not enjoy this inevitable break from a chance messmate; there was little to be said about such a trifle of human understanding and nothing about it at all to Sinclair, but it was of happier augury than the most hopeful hint of valuable deposits in Siam, or wherever they were.

Sinclair marched stiffly away in that brisk manner, and
he did not look back. Sinclair had gone; but chance had added Sinclair to his store of riches, anyhow, though no bank manager would look at that credit. Perhaps additions to good fortune were always so, imponderable, unaccountable, and of no use to any one. Yet they were positive. His knowledge of Sinclair and that bunch of men of his old ship gave to an aimless and sprawling world the assurance of anonymous courage and faith waiting in the sordid muddle for a signal, ready when it came. There were men like that. You could never tell where they were. They were only the crowd. There was nothing to distinguish them. They had no names. They were nobodies. But, when they were wanted, there they were; and when they had finished their task they disappeared, leaving no sign, except in the heart. Without the certainty of that artless and profitless fidelity of simple souls the great ocean would be as silly as the welter of doom undesigned, and the shining importance of the august affairs of the flourishing cities worth no more homage than the brickbats of Babylon. Those people gave to God any countenance by which He could be known.

The informal little steamer, the quiet, the radiant day, and the seclusion compelled by his difference from that crowd of noisy native passengers on the deck below, brought him back to a central loneliness. They were off. He began to hear from himself again. His brief glimpse of the East at Rangoon had not been disturbing only because he had gone about in the shadow of Norrie. But he remembered that Rangoon's slow flux of multitudinous people, like the movement in a nightmare, had been appalling with its reminder of a sightless ooze, without more distinction between fear and laughter in it than there is in the flat expanse of a grey river descending for ever to be lost in the deep. A slow pour of viscid life, just like the tide home-going over London Bridge for the trains, moving to a compulsion which was as dark in its nature as a starless patch in the clear sky of night;
What was there? Nobody would ever know. If you gazed too long at that abyss of night you would cover your eyes to hide your thoughts. It would not bear looking at. That mob below him on the fore-deck was as alien as anything nameless could be. It was a separated puddle, still slowly eddying with the original impulse.

A woman's voice in it brought his vague survey of the mixture of moving and noisy colours to a focus. A diminutive brown creature in a green sheath, with a silver stud in her nose, was wandering about and calling a name—it sounded like a name. She was seeking somebody in the mob, which took no notice of her, and she appeared to be anxious. She was as though the light of understanding had been let into that ship. She had separated from the agglomerate, and had a personal voice. Then she stopped below his rail. She was bending over a yellow bundle. A child was asleep there in a patch of shadow, with a face as pale and still as a flower upturned to the moon, and its frail hands curled as loosely as fallen petals. Of course, the dark patch in the sky is that only because we cannot do any better with it; not near enough to it; not our place in the sky. That child was as Sinclair, and the woman as himself. There is no such thing as humanity. There are men and women.

The day glowed and was lazy; it was a blue intensity loosened with a tincture of gold. No land was in sight. Yet, with a sea dreaming in so virtuous a sleep that peace itself would have thought that here was its home, a traveller did not look for land. The sky was gracious, brooding in solicitude over their little company of chattering innocents. Their modicum of a steamer—for her size checked Colet with the idea, when he boarded her, that she was venturesome—was enjoying herself as freely as though she knew nothing ever darkened that favoured region.

Colet began to feel, after the first day, that he had drifted into another sphere. He watched a company of brown people
squatting by a hatch, whose happy stoicism and doll-like figures were appropriate to ancient tranquillity and unchanging skies. They did not know harshness. They made on stringed instruments improbable music of a tenuous appeal which was heard by a part of his mind of which he knew nothing. It was music in accord with that aromatic fore-deck. That was a smell he did not know, any more than the music, but if they were foreign they were known to a dream that was mislaid somewhere in his memory.

The
Nibong
had many ports of call. Each place appeared unexpectedly, as though by chance. The ports had rare names. A legend, as it were, would precipitate as a silent appearance, and remain by the ship for an hour. If he came out from his cabin to look at it again, it had gone. It had melted into the sky. He began to suppose that this voyage was one without purpose, as vague as the drowsy afternoons. The course of their toy ship was set to nothing more than a fancy generated like the music, fixed by the whimsicality of a song. They paid calls to get settings for the music: Moulmein, Martaban, Tavoy, Mergui. It did not matter where they went. The company on the fore-deck changed from place to place, but its colours were the same, and music was always there.

They had a coast to port, after Moulmein; it was that, or a perennial enchantment. Probably it was but the promise of a kingdom, the auspice of a happier time. It was not the spectacle of solid earth. Beyond the indeterminate green where the foliage met the sea there were heights. They might have been mountains, but when you were not watching them their violet outlines changed. When next they were seen they had risen into stupendous ranges of cobalt and bitumen, too massive for clouds, too high for mountains; and that meridian range was hollowed, as lightning glared and quivered in its body, by profound gulfs, abysms seen for an incredible instant, and then gone. The clouds and the far
mountains were of the same nature as the constellation of islands through which the
Nibong
was threading. Norrie, when Colet was leaving him, had an afterthought. He mentioned a place called Mergui.