Colet began to speak of Norrie, but Mr. Ah Loi smiled uneasily, moving an object or two about the table.
“My wife does not like him. Norrie is a little different for each of us.”
“A little? Mr. Norrie is evil,” she said.
Her husband protested ardently.
“No, no. He is not that. I know what you mean. He is naughty, but he is not evil.”
“Yet you tell me he understands.”
“Yes, and for me, that saves him. He is a sad man, for he knows too much, but he had accepted so very little. He is a little amused by all the gods. I am sorry for Norrie.”
“I like him, too, when I am talking to him,” she confessed. “But not after. Then I remember that he knows, yet smiles. He is only polite to you,” she advised her husband, “but he smiles when he goes away.”
“I know he does.” Ah Loi admitted it. “I know him. Yes. There is no ultimate value, for him. Think of that. It has been killed by his science, which is—what is it?—the formulation of dirt. He must pay for that, of course. But he does not understand the penalty.”
“Then he doesn’t understand after all,” she challenged.
“Well, no, not the last things. We must lose all the first good things if we do not understand the last. It is sad not to have ears to hear, especially if one hears so well as Norrie.”
XXV
In his Penang bedroom, alone with what he did not know of the tropics, Colet guessed he was inappropriate to that variety of dark. It was not only a covert dark. Its nature was foreign. It was unlike the nights of the north. The boards of the room were bare, and they were a deep red. The room was too large and high for one small glim, and it contained but a wardrobe, a table, a chair, and a bed enclosed in a muslin box. It resembled a large meat safe, that bed. At a glance by lamplight the gauze did not quite hide the fact that there was a body in his bed; but he saw it was a bolster lying fore and aft, the uninvited Dutch wife. It was there for some reason well known in the locality, of course, but it was a silly mitigation.
The hot night came close up to you. It tried to keep you from moving. It was an obstructing presence, mum and unseen, but heavy. Yet it was full of a sly stirring, though always behind you. Something was going on in it. Nothing there when you looked round. He went to the wardrobe, and the opening of its door surprised whatever was hanging about in that. A crack flashed in a zigzag across the back of the cupboard. He imagined he heard the movement, but when he looked closer there was no doubt the wood was all right. The crack had gone. Nothing in the cupboard. Nothing he could see.
He went to the table and began to write. His moist hands made the paper damp, and then the ink spread into blots; but if you tried to write while poising the hand, to give it air, then the paper became sportive under the pen. It was so ominously quiet that he heard a tiny voice at his ear. A mosquito was about. But that solitary beast had got at his bare foot. He held the light over the floor, and saw a dusky flight of gnats undulating about his ankles. Nothing for it but the inside of the meat safe.
Then a creature harsh and green, a sort of gaunt and membraneous moth, if it was a moth and not a heartless joke, plumped on his writing-pad. He immediately surrendered the pad, as that thing wanted it. What name among the bugbears had this beastly object? Its green wings were like a petticoat of leaves about its waist. There was a phantasmal head at the end of a stalk-like neck. It had a chin. It turned its cadaverous face lugubriously towards him, and waved its hands in dispraise. He didn’t like it. It didn’t like him, either. Its long thin arms, which wearily motioned him to keep off, had grappling hooks for hands. One of the Little People maybe; the Malayan sort. Not from the fairy rings and the daisies pied, but out of the jungle. When he moved it flew away to a corner of his ambiguous resting-place.
Better see where this thing went. As he lifted the lamp, shadows from the ceiling came down the walls to go with him. There the thing was, on the floor. Its grappling hooks were raised, as though in the act of malevolent prayer. But it took no notice of him. It had no time for him. It had other business. That triangular face was watching something else, straight before it. He followed its gaze. A shaggy spider, as large as a straddling mouse, with minute eyes like twin starboard lights, was observing the mantid. Colet was glad he was not either of them, glad that he was only the mystified audience of this show. The two horrors sat staring at each other, each waiting for midnight to strike, or else for the other to make the first move. Human life was not the only problem of life. The chimeras on the floor knew that; each of them knew something that is not in Plato. They did not move. Their apprehensions must have been tense enough to snap. Colet moved, and their thoughts snapped. He did
