XXIII
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 hearthrug 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
