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 siren 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 anyone. 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 forever 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
