“I have a pretty story to tell you,” were the last words I heard. The bitterness of tone was remarkable.
I went away from the door, of course. For the moment I had no crew on board; only the Chinaman carpenter, with a canvas bag hung round his neck and a hammer in his hand, roamed about the empty decks knocking out the wedges of the hatches and dropping them into the bag conscientiously. Having nothing to do I joined our two engineers at the door of the engine-room. It was near breakfast-time.
“He’s turned up early, hasn’t he?” commented the second engineer, and smiled indifferently. He was an abstemious man with a good digestion and a placid, reasonable view of life even when hungry.
“Yes,” I said. “Shut up with the old man. Some very particular business.”
“He will spin him a damned endless yarn,” observed the chief engineer.
He smiled rather sourly. He was dyspeptic and suffered from gnawing hunger in the morning. The second smiled broadly, a smile that made two vertical folds on his shaven cheeks. And I smiled too, but I was not exactly amused. In that man, whose name apparently could not be uttered anywhere in the Malay Archipelago without a smile, there was nothing amusing whatever. That morning he breakfasted with us silently, looking mostly into his cup. I informed him that my men came upon his pony capering in the fog on the very brink of the eight-foot-deep well in which he kept his store of guttah. The cover was off, with no one near by, and the whole of my crew just missed going heels over head into that beastly hole. Jurumudi Itam, our best quartermaster, deft at fine needlework, he who mended the ship’s flags and sewed buttons on our coats, was disabled by a kick on the shoulder.
Both remorse and gratitude seemed foreign to Almayer’s character. He mumbled:
“Do you mean that pirate fellow?”
“What pirate fellow? The man has been in the ship eleven years,” I said indignantly.
“It’s his looks,” Almayer muttered for all apology.
The sun had eaten up the fog. From where we sat under the after awning we could see in the distance the pony tied up in front of Almayer’s house, to a post of the verandah. We were silent for a long time. All at once Almayer, alluding evidently to the subject of his conversation in the captain’s cabin, exclaimed anxiously across the table:
“I really don’t know what I can do now!”
Captain C⸺ only raised his eyebrows at him, and got up from his chair. We dispersed to our duties, but Almayer, half-dressed as he was in his cretonne pyjamas and the thin cotton singlet, remained on board, lingering near the gangway as though he could not make up his mind whether to go home or stay with us for good. Our Chinamen boys gave him side glances as they went to and fro; and Ah Sing, our young chief steward, the handsomest and most sympathetic of Chinamen, catching my eye, nodded knowingly at his burly back. In the course of the morning I approached him for a moment.
“Well, Mr. Almayer,” I addressed him easily, “you haven’t started on your letters yet.”
We had brought him his mail and he had held the bundle in his hand ever since we got up from breakfast. He glanced at it when I spoke and, for a moment, it looked as if he were on the point of opening his fingers and letting the whole lot fall overboard. I believe he was tempted to do so. I shall never forget that man afraid of his letters.
“Have you been long out from Europe?” he asked me.
“Not very. Not quite eight months,” I told him. “I left a ship in Samarang with a hurt back and have been in the hospital in Singapore some weeks.”
He sighed.
“Trade is very bad here.”
“Indeed!”
“Hopeless! … See these geese?”
With the hand holding the letters he pointed out to me what resembled a patch of snow creeping and swaying across the distant part of his compound. It disappeared behind some bushes.
“The only geese on the East Coast,” Almayer informed me in a perfunctory mutter without a spark of faith, hope or pride. Thereupon, with the same absence of any sort of sustaining spirit, he declared his intention to select a fat bird and send him on board for us not later than next day.
I had heard of these largesses before. He conferred a goose as if it were a sort of Court decoration given only to the tried friends of the house. I had expected more pomp in the ceremony. The gift had surely its special quality, multiple and rare. From the only flock on the East Coast! He did not make half enough of it. That man did not understand his opportunities. However, I thanked him at some length.
“You see,” he interrupted abruptly in a very peculiar tone, “the worst of this country is that one is not able to realise … it’s impossible to realise …” His voice sank into a languid mutter. “And when one has very large interests … very important interests …” he finished faintly … “up the river.”
We looked at each other. He astonished me by giving a start and making a very queer grimace.
“Well, I must be off,” he burst out hurriedly. “So long!”
At the moment of stepping over the gangway he checked himself, though, to give me a mumbled invitation to dine at his house that evening with my captain, an invitation which I accepted. I don’t think it could have been possible for me to refuse.
I like the worthy folk who will talk to you of the exercise of free will “at any rate for practical purposes.” Free, is it? For practical purposes! Bosh! How could I have refused to dine with that man? I did not refuse simply because I could not refuse. Curiosity, a healthy desire for a change of cooking, common civility, the
