“That couple surely are not typical here.”
“What an idea. They wouldn’t be typical in Chelsea. Nothing good is typical. It’s a surprise. I don’t know where my corkscrew is. Where is yours?”
“I haven’t got one. I haven’t got even a stepladder.”
“Now, what a traveller. He hasn’t got a corkscrew. I wonder you’ve got a shirt. Press the button for a boy. There it is, just behind you.”
Colet went outside. The island of Penang was already a place apart, and they were leaving fishing stakes, sampans, steamers, and junks behind them. He did not always know what the queer objects signified, those marks of strange human handiwork on another order of nature, but he was satisfied that they were amiable. The waters of the Malacca Strait were the reflections of an upper light, desultory with its display, as though the celestial operator had time to waste, and wanted to see what would happen to the human stage when oriels, seldom used, were opened in the supernal. Norrie was in a hurry to get round to the coast of the China Sea, but there was no need to hurry along this coast on his account.
There were a score of superior passengers at the saloon table. The table was full. Norrie insisted that Colet should sit beside him. He was to talk eagerly whenever the man on the other side showed the least sign of affability.
“I can’t stand it. It isn’t natural. If that planter once begins with his insufferable rubber, I shall have to kill him with the water-bottle, or else sit with the Malays on deck and eat bananas and dried fish.”
Colet thought the deck passengers would be an attractive alternative.
“I’ll squat there with you, if you insist. It’s fun, that crowd on the deck aft.”
“You’ve made a nice start. You do like it?”
“Never seen anything better.”
“That’s the way to look at it, when you must. But there’s no hurry for it. You’ll smell lots of ripe fish presently, heightened by durians.”
“Let ’em come in their due season. Though I’ve never met durians.”
“You will. They’re as sure as death. It’s a fruit, but you’d think it was a gas escape in a mortuary. Our pleasures are before us, and yet you think I’m too particular now over trifles, like corkscrews and chatty fellow-passengers.”
“I was down on the deck this morning. Not easy to keep away from it. I’d give a good deal to know what goes on inside those people.”
“The devil you would. All right, Colet, but don’t learn it while you’re with me. There’s an odd chance you would get a real inkling of it. You seem built in that wasteful way.”
Norrie, leaning on the ship’s rail, considered the blue heights and opalescent cloud masses of Malaya.
“No, it’s no good. It’s rather different. They begin their ideas at another mark, where we have too much gumption to begin. I do my best not to see it. It’s disturbing. Dammit, you and I might be wrong after all, and then where should we be? We might have to scrap home and altar, and I can’t bear the thought of it. God bless Clapham Junction. You be careful. The Oriental is dangerous, once you begin to monkey with his notions.”
They got well down the coast. The same things occurred daily, and were getting usual. The loading of the steamer at one of the small ports was nearly completed. Norrie was asleep in the cabin. On the leeward side a few empty sampans and prahus were rocking slowly. The shore was about two miles away, and their port of call a mangrove creek, by the look of it, inhabited only by crocodiles. The hills inland were no more than the lurking masses of a thunderstorm in reserve for the evening. They were distant, whether clouds or mountains, and a warning which need not be heeded before noon. The sea about the estuary was shallow, a level of opaque olive-green, and only the lighters, and the coolies in them who had nothing now to do but to smoke and watch the life of the steamer while waiting for a tow, were an assurance that this anchorage was merited by a veritable and inhabited shore.
From the bridge of the steamer Colet and another saloon passenger watched a derrick manoeuvring the last piece of freight, a motorcar. It was too awkward for the hold, and its bulk made the restricted foredeck of the coaster appear to be dangerously encumbered. Colet remarked to the man beside him that the car was an incongruous interjection. It had no real part in the drama of Chinese, Malays, and Hindus on that deck.
His companion, a young man who had been prompt with knowledge, made his monocle comfortable to regard with kindly amusement that lively huddle of chromatic humanity.
“Oh, hasn’t it a part? That car is as much a part of the East now as the natives. We’re here now, you know.”
Colet ventured to regret that aspect of our presence.
“You must have seen a lot of it?”
“Oh, rather.” The young man freely acknowledged it, “All round this coast and the islands.” He indicated with a generous gesture all that was beyond, in the east. “Travelling here for two years now.”
“Fun?”
“No. Hardware.”
That tickled him. The monocled stranger asked for some news of London. Stood Leicester Square where it did? He hoped to learn that before the year was out.
Colet was trying to imagine the Orient in the terms of a captivating prospect for hardware. That was not easy. But this commercial traveller was bright and explicit, if his confidence had not lost all the jaunty indiscretion of
