Colet felt his inferiority. “I must learn to talk with them.”
“It’s really easy to learn their language. And they’re jolly nice people. I get along fine with them.”
He adventured into some personal history allusively, but with oiled enjoyment. There was a Malay girl, an apt pupil of love. He sweetened his narrative with a touch of sentiment. He tried to picture the girl for Colet, and Colet realised that she was a female. But she married a chief; only another addition to that populous household. An elderly chief. A friend of his, too. Then the girl ran away from her new home. She came back, in fact, to him. The young man could not help showing how much he appreciated this demonstration of affection; nevertheless, he was frightened.
“So would you have been, if you knew these people.”
“What did you do?”
“Why, you see, that rajah kept a regiment of young men about him. No joke. One of them was the girl’s brother. Real hot stuff. If the chief had nodded—no need to say anything—I should have looked a pretty mess one morning, take it from me.”
When the delectable morsel of girlhood appeared again at his bungalow, therefore, the Englishman, seeking safety, went to the lion’s den. The best thing to do. He went straight to the rajah and said the girl had come to him that morning. But the old man, who knew girls, waived this one aside royally. Too trivial for a dispute between friends. Nothing in it. Colet gathered, too, that the episode was now entirely closed. His fellow-traveller had given up the girl. All right now. One should not keep them too long. They grow fond of you, and it doesn’t do.
“There—you see that fellow there?” His companion nudged Colet. He indicated a Malay squatting on his hams, among other native passengers, his back to the bulwarks. Colet remarked him.
“Well, he’s very like that girl’s brother.”
It was a scowling figure notably attired in a bright sarong and jacket, and a black velvet cap.
“They look fine people, don’t they?”
That one was a picturesque example, from what could be seen of him; and while still idly noted so handsome a presentment of a folk strange to him, Colet unlearned much that he had accepted of the East. Not much today in all that. It had all become ordinary. The natives, he was advised, were not difficult to understand. They admired the English. They would do anything for us, take it from him. Orang puteh, white men, they call the English, and orang blanda, yellow men, the Dutch. That shows you, doesn’t it? These Malays know gentlemen when they see them. When once you were used to their funny little ways the rest was easy. They were only strange until you had lived with them and could talk their language. It was a good thing to take one of their girls. Some of them were very pretty. The girl could soon teach you a lot. Take it from him, a man like himself got to know more of the guts of things, out there, than all the interfering officials who were so touchy over this and that.
A group of Chinamen below stood bent in appreciation of some cocks, each in its own wicker cage. The cocks stridently challenged each other. One cage was carelessly handled, and the gladiator hustled out. A bystander grabbed at it, but it flustered to the topside of the ship, and another indiscreet clutch at its tail sent it protesting into the sea. For an instant it was a frantic bunch of feathers there, and then an unseen body from below swirled the water ponderously and the cock had gone.
Colet was shocked. This was not in accord with what was familiar. The penalty had come so suddenly, just when he had allowed the motorcar, in spite of its size and appearance, to displace some old conceptions, to occupy with the certainty of a late solid engine the ancient mystery of the East. Yet nobody else seemed affected by the incident. The Chinamen stared indifferently at the place where the water had swirled, but the others might not have been aware that anything had happened. His companion made a humorous reference to the incident, but returned with soft pleasure to some more intimate words on the pleasantries of native ways. Colet, with a divided mind, listened while his eyes still rested absently on the Malay below who had been used to illustrate a little colourful drama of no value except to show to a stranger the delights and simplicity of the things he did not know.
What his fellow-passenger was telling him Colet did not clearly hear, but the narrator was at least cheerful and pert. The heat made one slack. A Chinese cooly was passing the crouching Malay, who rose, and was seized with a sudden convulsion. The Chinaman fell. Colet noticed in disbelief that the man’s head was off. Colet did not move. He had not decided yet that the head was dead, for a little cigarette smoke still moved from its nostrils.
The crowd below, which for a pause as long as Colet’s incredulity had remained still, began to swirl, as had the sea just before. The Malay was running. Several men vaulted into the water. As though it were not real, Colet watched that trotting figure cut down two more men who also were uncertain of its reality, and then disappear into the forecastle. The deck below was now empty, but for several figures in ungainly postures. There were noises in the forecastle. Colet stared at the dark and empty rectangle of its entrance, fixed his attention to those sounds. The Malay came within
