Gallions Reach (18 page)

“Look out for the Mergui Islands. Be careful. Unless it blows hard you'll want to land on one of them. If you do you'll forget all that I've told you, and I shan't see you again.”

Here the islands were. But nobody, of course, ever had landed on them. They were unknown to man, except as fond reflections. They were as silent as unspoken thoughts. They were versatile. The thoughts changed. The next was better than the last. As the
Nibong
cruised through the vision Colet saw faceted stones interrupting that polished level of lapis-lazuli, small mounds of emerald on the mirror, bergs of white marble, glimpses of retirements with coral thresholds leading to palms and a forested mountain under a spell. A canoe or two was seen, but they melted round promontories. The secrets were undisclosed. The shades which haunted that seclusion faded when men approached from the outer world.

Colet was told, later, that they were nearing Penang. It was time, he thought, to do that, and to touch reality. The ship should not cruise off the map for too long, or they might never get on to it again. Now, at last, she was close to a proper shore, a high coast solid and brilliant as it looked to the setting sun. There were great ships, and the level light discovered pale houses recessed within the green of the hills. But as he found it, even as he reached it, it went. The sea was transfigured to a shining expanse of carnelian, and the very air was the rosy glow of a heatless fire. Penang and its sea assumed another nature as he watched. Its only affinity to earth was a faint odour of pepper, and the sound of a gong.

If he had landed on the further side of the moon he could not have been more in the dark. Those letters with which Norrie had armed him—chits, Norrie called them—they were all very well, but in a way they made the darkness of Penang a bit more questionable; not darker, but more eccentric. One of the letters was to a house called Senang. That suggested the local variety of Clovelly or Bella Vista. To ask for it might be like asking a London policeman for a prayer-meeting. Not worth risking it. One of Norrie's little jokes, possibly. His fun could be esoteric. His allusions were oblique. And there was another chit to a Mr. Ah Loi. But not likely. Not after dark. Much rather see this Ah Loi first in the daytime. A Chinese friend of Norrie's should be guardedly approached, in a morning light preferably.

He warned off a loitering Chinaman who attempted to grab his bag. The man did not go away, but stood there watching him, in fierce reproach. Still, if he attempted to carry that bag himself he would sweat till it guttered from his eyebrows. He was sticky already. The night was close. Night in a tropical city, to a stranger new from northern mud, was like the hearth-rug to a fish free from the aquarium. It was not according to custom. He watched men trotting past drawing passengers in light go-carts. One of these carts swept close to him, and stopped, its man picked up the bag as though he had come for that, and Colet climbed up after it. The man glided off in silence at a long easy lope. Colet called out to his man that he wanted an hotel, but the beggar swung on without taking any notice; didn't know
what he was talking about, naturally; but of course that fellow had guessed the right thing to do for a newcomer.

Colet saw that Penang was a city varied and curious enough to mislead a wayfarer easily to an interesting predicament. Its bazaars were involved, continuous, and their wares problematical. Yet it could not matter what was sold by shops illuminated with paper lanterns and advertised by scarlet banners covered with cabalistic symbols. The maze of people moved as would the characters of a ballet with an incomprehensible rhythm, or of a charade of which the secret would never be guessed. They had their ardours in pursuits not to be known by him. Somehow his orbit had coincided with theirs. He felt as absurdly conspicuous there, on his high perch, as though he had chanced on the stage where actors in a privily illuminated masquerade were rehearsing the Lord knew what. It had nothing to do with him, and yet there he was. Luckily, nobody there had an idea he had barged into them. He might have been watching the mystery while protected by the gift of invisibility. He was unseen.

Or else—had these figures agreed to allow him to deceive himself? For occasionally he thought that by some weakening of his protective magic he became faintly and transiently visible. Once a monstrously tall ogre with a black beard parted to hook its inordinate length behind the ears, a sentinel who once might have turned a dark and discerning eye on intruding Sinbad, appeared to have seen him. Yes, certainly that Sikh policeman saw him.

They came, beyond the last bazaar, to the design of a palm crown blacked high on the stars. It stood over a grotesque cornice, and under the framing eaves was the golden hollow of a room open to the night. Within that room three girls, three pale sibyls swathed in filmy tissue, sat absorbed in contemplation of the runes. Colet did not descend, though the Chinaman lowered the shafts of the jinrickshaw as
though here his service ended. The scene was too much like a picture story without a name to prompt anything more than a puzzled stare. One of the sibyls, whose pale face was not like Europe, but moonlight, and to whom, Colet fancied, had been delegated the announcement of whatever oracle had been resolved for a visiting stranger, languorously rose, looked towards him with eyes which entreated a release from a weird, and spoke at the window in a discreet and mild version of English. And Colet's Chinaman, though he did not understand that language, knew at once Colet's peremptory order. He knew he had made a mistake. He picked up his shafts and loped from the shade of that grove, leaving a tinkle of merriment behind.

Soon he was at a standstill again beside another conjuration of a welcome in the shades, and its light showed several frail idols in embroidered silk, with faces of chalk, their foreheads hidden in black fringes, oblique eyes which had no thoughts, and lips that were little crimson buttons. They resembled, for a moment, the illustration to a beautiful fable of Cathay, but Colet's loud voice shattered the spell before his man had ever lowered the shafts. The coolie turned about, with wondering disapproval, wiped his shaven crown with his disengaged hand, and tried again. This time he took longer, and when he halted it was before an Indian enticement, some with studs in their ascetic nostrils, their slight bodies bedight for the gaze of idling rajahs.

And then the 'rickshaw man knew he was right. He did not hesitate. With definition and relief he concluded his journey; and his astonishment was obvious when Colet leaped from the go-cart with savage energy. The Chinaman's recoil was that of innocence surprisingly attacked. Colet could see, by the light from the room, that his man was now at the end of his resources, and was obviously worried; the fellow was protesting that he had done all he could. Colet pointed to the glow of the city behind them, and made emphatic
indicatory noises. The man seemed to understand. He must have guessed that, somehow, he was at fault, though for no reason that he could ever know. He turned about, dolefully.

Colet, with his face to those lights, though now disturbed, sustained his faith that Penang somewhere must have a different roof to offer; and down by the water-front, within a short distance of the quay where the adventure had begun, there it was. The hotel, except that its servants in their white uniforms were of the East, and that the building was adjusted, as well as was possible, to a temperature not altogether within the control of its management, might have been on the Riviera. As far as it could, it excluded the tropics. The hotel used its ingenuity to suggest that it was not where it was, looking out over the heated dark which brooded, with lightning glimmering in its roof, above the Strait of Malacca. When the bluish glare was vivid, then sleeping palms appeared in the foreground like tracings in ink on burnished metal.

There was no difficulty, after all, in discovering a Mr. Ah Loi. The hotel people knew of him. Even a 'rickshaw man, when challenged, made almost satisfactory signs of intelligence. Colet viewed him suspiciously, speculating whether this was the genie of the night before, still hanging about in the hope of improved bewitchery. But Penang, on his first morning in Malaya, was superior to all the trickery of mortals. It was as fair as though this were the original daylight of the earth. The morning was certainly heated by a sun with pristine strength, but the air was perfumed, and it sparkled. He thought the sapphire between them and the island of Sumatra was younger, after all, than the tales of Marco Polo and the ancient voyagers. One junk was suspended in it, the first to explore that blue. As he rode through the bazaars and by the shrubberies beyond he was joyously confident that he was equal to the wiles of any Chinaman.

His man, this time, knew where to go, and turned in at a gateway flanked by a pair of porcelain beasts that were not dragons and ought not to have been dogs. Beyond a garden was a large pinkish house, not unlike a temple.

Its door was open, but the house, he was afraid, was deserted. Its interior smelt of teak, or some unusual wood. There was not a sound, except that of an insect making a dry whispering in the garden. The hall subdued its English visitor with its severe integrity, for its sombre panels receded in almost a bare perspective. It was relieved by only a few white silk hangings bearing delicate images of Buddha, water fowl, bamboos, and flowers. The tiled floor was muted
with old rugs which made Colet forget, as he looked at them, why he had called. And he had called with the unthinking courage of a fellow bringing a bill of exchange. The fine texture and quiet of this interior began to reduce his confidence with the challenge of another order of things. There was no bell; should he clap his hands?

Apparently his thought had been heard, for a genie in a blue tunic approached him, and kowtowed in perfect gravity though it did not speak. It led him to an inner room and left him.

What at once was seen there, and nothing else, was a bowl of pale jade that appeared to give the silence a faint light, as though it were a lamp. It was honourably isolated and elevated, as though it were the significance of a poet. It was then that Colet noticed that the backs of his hands were not only moist with sweat, but a little hairy. He did not care to approach that luminous fragility; he looked about and saw by his side some shelves of books. They were as unusual as the bowl; perhaps they were even stranger, in that place. They were of European mathematics, philosophy, and theology, and though a chance collection of books on such subjects is placed, usually, where it will not be in the way, the names on the backs of those volumes betrayed a knowledge of the latest mental enterprises of the Occident which shook Colet's confidence in the range of his own reading.

“You are interested in philosophy, Mr. Colet?”

How had that voice got there? Mr. Ah Loi was behind him. Interested in philosophy! Ah Loi had a friendly smile. He was a smile, but not much more than that; an interrogatory appraisement, tolerant and cheerful. His face was rather like his bowl of jade, delicate, pale, and bright. Colet would have preferred to wipe his hot large hands before taking the one which his host offered to him. This was confusing.

“It interested me to see those books here.”

“Why, Mr. Colet? Are they out of place?”

There it was. Colet knew his first words had been as hairy as his hands.

Ah Loi was not old. He was not young. His years were merely a clarity of the spirit. He spoke English as though his home overlooked an Oxford precinct. Behind him, no doubt the
portière
through which he had entered the room, were crimson silk hangings; they dropped in heavy folds from the high ceiling and were waved on the floor. They were lettered in gold with Chinese characters, and embroidered figures of men and dragons were ambushed in their coils. The slight figure of Ah Loi, in his western suit of linen, cool and friendly, with that draping of old China for his background, was as noticeable as a gentle word. Of course, Colet thought, this blessed Chinaman had those European books here to learn what the rude children were doing, when out of sight.

“The truth is, Mr. Ah Loi, I only looked at these books because I had not the courage to go closer to your fine bowl there.”

“That? That bowl? Come and handle it. Such things are made to be touched, as well as looked at. The touch should know as much as the eye.”

Colet nerved himself and turned the bowl about. He realised that its frailty was but simplicity and strength, which were unctuous and cool. Ah Loi took it, and replaced it.

“Sometimes,” said the Chinaman, “I have wondered whether Western culture turned into chimney smoke because of a neglected sense of touch. You see, you must pause and weigh it, when you handle an object. You have time to change your mind.”

The man in the blue tunic was there again, and Ah Loi spoke to him. The servant brought in bottles, ice, and a syphon.

“You will have a stengah, Mr. Colet?”

“I don't know what that is.”

“Then you are certainly new to this country. It is a small
whisky and soda, the half of a tonic, as you say. A Malay word. It means half. But you English use it, besides for whisky, for a person of mixed blood.”

“Thank you. But no stengah for me, if you please. Not now.”

“You have been in Penang only five minutes.” Ah Loi was amused. “Wait till Norrie comes,” he added. “At one time we Chinamen, who find it not easy to understand, kept champagne for our English guests. We heard so much about champagne that we thought it must be the same as your happiness. But now it is whisky. Well, let us talk about Norrie. He is our friend. You know him very well?”

“No. Only a little.”

“A little of him is good.”

“I met him on the voyage out.”

“He is going to Pahang?”

“I don't know quite what he intends to do.”

Ah Loi looked at his bowl.

“Nobody knows that. But he is going round to the other side of the peninsula, and he will know why. I like Norrie. He would have been the same as a Cantonese. Yet he is a Londoner.”