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.”
XXII
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.
