Colet was getting used to it. He had never known what morning was till he saw the dawn from a camp by the side of a jungle stream, a brief inauguration of the earth. He could wake at night now, hear the snarling moan of the tiger on the hill, rise to give the fire a plentiful feed, and forget it. He could work all day and not pass a word to his companion. And that was a good thing. He and Norrie did not have to speak, unless it was necessary, nor even look at each other. There might be a comment from Norrie, late at night, after he put aside the book he had been reading, and began to watch the firelight convulsive on a tree trunk, making the tree move in and out of the forest.
“Listen, Colet.”
Colet would listen. The hush was that at the world’s end. No. There was something beneath the silence. Perhaps the sap rising in the trees; the breathing of creatures; the pulse of the forest. But all was dark, the darkness over which had never been pronounced the call to light. The collapse of a little ash in the fire was notable. One looked at it instantly.
“Listen to what?”
Norrie smiled.
“To what we can’t hear. Suppose we heard begin the Andante from the Fifth Symphony—out in the trees beyond our light. Or if a choir suddenly exploded with ‘Worthy is the Lamb.’ What about it? The leopards would change their spots with fright. And what would you make of it? You’d think it was the Last Day and your number was up.”
Sometimes you considered Norrie as though you had never met him before. He knew that, though, and before you could recognise him he was behind the door.
Now he was cleaning his gun. The Chinaman was squatting by the stream below, washing the dishes. They could hear the Malays cutting firewood. All the immobility of the forest was but the whirr of a grasshopper. The gun was put aside.
“How long have we been on this pitch?”
“I dunno.” Collet went into the shelter to find a date. “Eight days.”
“Nothing here but signs. Good signs, too. All the bright promises of earth, Colet. Isn’t she kind to her children? But they lead nowhere.”
“But if they were not meant for promises! They may not have been. Not meant for signs at all. What could you expect them to lead to more than they have?”
“Dear old Colet. There he goes. But I’ll tell him again. I want to give the moths and rust a chance to corrupt something that belongs to me. I’ll moth ’em, if they come near it.”
“I don’t feel that way about it. But look here. If you do lift the lid off a hoard, watch me do the Highland fling with the accordant triumphant noises.”
“I know. You are like that. But it’s not the right spirit. It’s simply devilish. It’s only your damned playful sympathy. You’d have been a nice Christian all complete with another touch of dreary misfortune. Colet, it makes me doubt you. You’ll come to no good end. You really won’t. I’m inclined to think that you might even fold your hands like a pale martyr, or a skinned rabbit, some day, and let the other fellow have the girl. It’s wicked, you know. It’s unfair to the poor darling. Don’t you ever love your neighbour as yourself, unless you want him to know what a fool you are.”
“I should like to hear your own answer to that.”
“Then you’ll have to wait till I’m perfectly safe.”
“No point in it, then.”
“Oh, there will be, though. There will be. That is the point. It’s the right time to embrace the sad victims of fate when you have got nothing better to do. No point in being another victim.”
He waited a minute, and then picked up his gun again.
“I wouldn’t have the nerve to look at the world unless I were sure of a cushioned corner in it. It would be a terror of a hole. There’s no sense in it unless we put it there, so don’t you try to find it. Just think of humanity messing up its planet with progress—shoving things about, piling ’em up, and especially getting cockeyed with deep religious conviction when making its worst muck of its place. It’s enough to bring down on us the Olympian sanitary inspector. I want a clear space in that jolly old riot. Then I shan’t mind the Gadarene rush so much. It might be comic to watch it then, something to pass the time; but I’ve no fancy to be among the hooves.”
“Well, by God, Norrie, I never thought of it before. But you’re afraid.”
“I am, when it comes down to it. You’ve given it a name. When I look at life in the eyes, in the hope of finding reason in it, my little inside turns pale. Cast your mind back to the Thames embankment and its outcasts at midnight, and get the horrors. Here, we’ll be off. Let’s go and do a little healthy gravel washing.”
A shallow stream so clear that its bed of quartz granules appeared to be under glass, came down in an easy glide from a valley head. It coiled about the lower buttresses of the forest. Only in brief stretches of quieter water was its surface open to the sky. The trees enclosed it, and muffled its voice, which was the only one there in the heat of the day. To Colet its bed was but unusually clean and white. The angular grains were displayed by the clarity of the water. Yet for his companion the stones had various names and implications. They were more than stones. Norrie must have known a lot. If he could find in the eternal forest an outlook from a ridge, he could guess the nature
