The Narrow Corner Page 11

  Fred smiled into Erik’s eager, gentle eyes.

  “That’s bloody rot, old boy. It’s no good thinking the earth of something and when you come down to brass tacks finding out to your cost that it’s a wash-out. One doesn’t get much forrader by not facing facts. Where d’you expect to get to if you just take things at their face value?”

  “The Kingdom of Heaven,” smiled Erik.

  “And where is that?” asked Fred.

  “In my own mind.”

  “I do not wish to intrude upon this philosophic conversation,” said the doctor, “but I’m bound to tell you that I’m suffering from the pangs of thirst.”

  Erik, with a laugh, raised his huge body from the wall on which he had been sitting.

  “The sun will be setting soon anyhow. Let’s go down and I’ll give you a drink in my house.” He pointed to the volcano that stood over against the west, a bold cone that was silhouetted with exquisite precision against the darkening sky. He addressed himself to Fred. “Would you like to come for a climb to-morrow? You get a grand view from the top.”

  “I don’t mind if I do.”

  “We must start early, on account of the heat. I could fetch you on the lugger just before dawn, and we’d row over.”

  “That’ll do me.”

  They strolled down the hill and soon found themselves back in the town.

  Erik’s house was one of those they had passed in the morning when on landing they had wandered down the street. Dutch merchants had lived in it for a hundred years, and the firm for which he worked had bought it lock, stock and barrel. It stood within a high, whitewashed wall, but the whitewash was peeling and in places green with damp. The wall enclosed a little garden, wild and overgrown, in which grew roses and fruit trees, wantoning creepers and flowering shrubs, bananas, and two or three tall palms. It was choked with weeds. In the waning light it looked desolate and mysterious. Fire-flies flitted heavily to and fro.

  “I’m afraid it’s very neglected,” said Erik. “Sometimes I think I’ll put a couple of coolies to clear up all the mess, but I think I like it like that. I like to think of the Dutch mynheer who used to take his ease here in the cool of the evening, smoking his china pipe, while his fat mevrou sat and fanned herself.”

  They went into the parlour. It was a long room with a window at each end, but heavily curtained; a boy came and, standing on a chair, lit a hanging oil-lamp. There was a marble floor, and on the walls paintings in oil so dark that you could not see the subjects. There was a large round table in the middle, and round it a set of stiff chairs covered with green stamped velvet. A stuffy and uncomfortable room, but it had the charm of incongruity, and it brought vividly to the mind’s eye a demure picture of nineteenth-century Holland. The sober merchant must have unpacked with pride the furniture that had come all the way from Amsterdam, and when it was neatly arranged he must have thought it very well became his station. The boy brought beer. Erik went over to a little table to put a record on the gramophone. He caught sight of a bundle of papers.

  “Oh, here are the papers for you. I sent up for them.”

  Fred rose from his chair, taking them, and sat down at the big round table under the lamp. Because of the doctor’s remark while they were up in the old Portuguese fort, Erik put on the beginning of the last act of “Tristan.” The recollection gave an added poignancy to the music. The strange and subtle little tune that the shepherd played on his reed, when he scanned the wide sea and saw no sail, was melancholy with blighted hope. But it was another pang that wrung the doctor’s heart. He remembered Covent Garden in the old days and himself, in evening clothes, sitting in a stall on the aisle; in the boxes were women in tiaras, with pearls round their necks; the King, obese, with great pouches under his eyes, sat in the corner of the omnibus box; on the other side, in the corner, looking over the orchestra, the Baron and the Baroness de Meyer sat together, and she catching his eye bowed. There was an air of opulence and of security. Everything in its grand manner seemed so well-ordered, the thought of change never crossed the mind. Richter conducted. How passionate that music was, how full and with what a melodious splendour it unrolled itself sonorously upon the senses! But he had not heard in it then that something shoddy, blatant and a trifle vulgar, a sort of baronial buffet effect, that now somewhat disconcerted him. It was magnificent, of course, but a little frowsty; his ear had grown accustomed in China to complications more exquisite and harmonies less suave. He was used to a music pregnant with suggestion, illusive and nervous, and the brutal statement of facts a trifle shocked the fastidiousness of his taste. When Erik got up to turn the record over Dr. Saunders glanced at Fred to see what effect those strains were having on him. Music is queer. Its power seems unrelated to the other affections of man, so that a person who is elsewise perfectly commonplace may have for it an extreme and delicate sensitiveness. And he was beginning to think that Fred Blake was not so ordinary as he had at first imagined. He had in him something, scarcely awakened and to himself unknown, like a little flower self-sown in a stone wall that pathetically sought the sun, which excited sympathy and interest. But Fred had not heard a note. He sat, unconscious of his surroundings, staring out of the window. The short twilight of the tropics had darkened into night, and in the blue sky one or two stars twinkled already, but he did not look at them, he seemed to look into some black abyss of thought. The light of the lamp under which he sat threw strange, sharp shadows on his face so that it was like a mask that you hardly recognised. But his body was relaxed, as though a tension had been suddenly withdrawn, and the muscles under his brown skin were loose. He felt the doctor’s cool stare and looking at him forced his lips to a smile, but it was a painful little smile, oddly appealing and pathetic. The beer by his side was untouched.

  “Anything in the paper?” asked the doctor.

  Fred suddenly flushed scarlet.

  “No, nothing. They’ve had the elections.”

  “Where?”

  “New South Wales. Labour’s got in.”

  “Are you Labour?”

  Fred hesitated a little, and into his eyes came that watchful look that the doctor had seen in them once or twice before.

  “I’m not interested in politics,” he said. “I don’t know anything about them.”

  “You might let me have a look at the paper.”

  Fred took a copy from the bundle and handed it to the doctor. But he did not take it.

  “Is that the latest?”

  “No, this is the latest,” answered Fred, putting his hand on the one he had just been reading.

  “If you’ve done with it I’ll read that. I don’t know that I’m very keen on news when it’s too stale.”

  Fred hesitated for a second. The doctor held him with smiling but determined eyes. Obviously Fred could think of no plausible way to refuse the very natural request. He gave him the paper, and Dr. Saunders drew forward to the light to read it. Fred did not take up any of the other copies of the Bulletin, though certainly there were some he could not have seen, but sat pretending to look at the table, and the doctor was conscious that he was closely watching him from the sides of his eyes. There was no doubt that Fred had read in the paper he now held in his hand something that deeply concerned him. Dr. Saunders turned over the pages. There was much election news. There was a London letter and a certain amount of cabled information from Europe and America. There was a good deal of local intelligence. He turned to the police news. The election had given rise to some disorder, and the courts had dealt with it. There had been a burglary at Newcastle. Some man had received a sentence for an insurance fraud. A stabbing affray between two Tonga Islanders was reported. Captain Nichols suspected that it was on account of murder that this disappearance of Fred had been arranged, and there were two columns about a murder that had taken place at a farmstead in the Blue Mountains, but this arose out of a quarrel between two brothers and the murderer, who had given himself up to the police, pleaded self-defence. Besides, it had taken place aft
er Fred and Captain Nichols had sailed from Sydney. There was the report of an inquest on a woman who had hanged herself. For a moment Dr. Saunders wondered whether there was anything in this. The Bulletin is a weekly, of literary tendencies, and it dealt with the matter, not summarily, but in a fashion natural to a paper catering to a public to whom the facts in detail had been made known by the dailies. It appeared that the woman had been under suspicion of the murder of her husband some weeks before, but the evidence against her was too slight for the authorities to take action. She had been repeatedly examined by the police, and this, together with the gossip of neighbours and the scandal, had preyed on her mind. The jury found that she had committed suicide while temporarily insane. The coroner, commenting on the case, remarked that with her death vanished the last chance the police had of solving the mystery of the murder of Patrick Hudson. The doctor read the account again, reflectively; it was odd, but it was too brief to tell him much. The woman was forty-two. It seemed unlikely that a boy of Fred’s age could have had anything to do with her. And, after all, Captain Nichols had nothing to go on; it was pure guesswork; the boy was an accountant; he might just as well have taken money that did not belong to him, or pressed by financial difficulties, forged a cheque. If he was connected with some important person politically, that might have been enough to make it advisable to spirit him away for a period. Dr. Saunders, putting the paper down, met Fred’s eyes fixed upon him. He gave him a reassuring smile. His curiosity was disinterested, and he was not inclined to put himself to any trouble to gratify it.

  “Going to dine at the hotel, Fred?” he asked.

  “I’d ask you both to stay and have pot-luck with me here,” said the Dane, “but I’m going up to have supper with Frith.”

  “Well, we’ll be toddling.”

  The doctor and Fred walked a few steps in silence along the dark street.

  “I don’t want any dinner,” the boy said suddenly. “I can’t face Nichols to-night. I’m going for a tramp.”

  Before Dr. Saunders could answer he had turned on his heel and rapidly walked away. The doctor shrugged his shoulders and continued on his unhurried way.

  xviii

  HE WAS drinking a gin pahit before dinner, on the verandah of the hotel, when Captain Nichols strolled up. He had washed and shaved, he was wearing a khaki stengah-shifter, with his topi set at a rakish angle, so that he looked quite spruce. He reminded you of a gentlemanly pirate.

  “Feelin’ better to-night,” he remarked as he sat down, “and quite peckish, to tell you the truth. I don’t believe the wing of a chicken could do me any ’arm. Where’s Fred?”

  “I don’t know. He’s off somewhere.”

  “Lookin’ for a girl? I don’t blame him. Though I don’t know what he thinks he’s goin’ to find in a place like this. Risky, you know.”

  The doctor ordered him a drink.

  “I was a rare one for the girls when I was a young fellow. Got a way with me, you know. The mistake I made was to marry. If I ’ad my time over again.… I never tell you about my old woman, doc.”

  “Enough,” said the doctor.

  “That’s impossible. I couldn’t do that, not if I was to tell you about ’er till to-morrow morning. If ever there was a devil in ’uman form, it’s my old woman. I ask you, is it fair to treat a man like that? She’s directly responsible for my indigestion; I’m just as sure of that as I am that I’m sittin’ and talkin’ to you. It’s ’umiliatin’, that’s what it is. I’m surprised I ’aven’t killed her. I would ’ave, too, only I know that if I was to start anything, and she said to me: ‘You put that knife down, Captain,’ I’d put it down. Now I ask you, is it natural? And then she’d just start on me. And if I was to edge towards the door, she’d say: ‘No, you don’t, you stay ’ere till I’ve said all I’ve got to say to you, and when I’ve finished with you, I’ll tell you.’ ”

  They dined together, and the doctor lent a sympathetic ear to the recital of Captain Nichols’ domestic infelicity. Then they sat again on the verandah, smoking Dutch cigars, and drank Schnapps with their coffee. Alcohol mellowed the skipper, and he grew reminiscent. He told the doctor stories of his early days on the coast of New Guinea and about the islands. He was a racy talker, with an ironic vein of humour, and it was diverting to listen to him, since false shame never tempted him to depict himself in a flattering light. It never occurred to him that anyone would hesitate to diddle another if he had the chance, and he felt just the same satisfaction in the success of a dirty trick as a chess-player might in winning a game by a bold and ingenious move. He was a scamp, but a courageous one. Dr. Saunders found a peculiar savour in his conversation when he remembered the splendid self-confidence with which he had weathered the storm. It had been impossible then not to be impressed by his readiness, resource and coolness.

  Presently the doctor found occasion to slip in a question that had been for some time on the tip of his tongue.

  “Did you ever know a fellow called Patrick Hudson?”

  “Patrick ’udson?”

  “He was a resident magistrate in New Guinea at one time. He’s been dead a good many years now.”

  “That’s a funny coincidence. No, I didn’t know ’im. There was a fellow called Patrick ’udson in Sydney. Come to a sticky end.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. Not so very long before we sailed. The papers was full of it.”

  “He might have been some relation of the man I mean.”

  “He was what they call a rough diamond. Been a railway man, they said, and worked ’is way up. Took up politics and all that. He was member for some place. Labour, of course.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Well, ’e was shot. With his own gun, if I remember right.”

  “Suicide?”

  “No, they said ’e couldn’t ’a’ done it ’imself. I don’t know any more than you do what ’appened, on account of my leavin’ Sydney. It made quite a sensation.”

  “Was he married?”

  “Yes. A lot of people thought ’is old woman done it. They couldn’t prove anythin’. She’d been to the pictures, and when she come ’ome she found ’im lyin’ there. There’d been a fight. The furniture was all over the shop. I never thought it was ’is old woman meself. My experience is they don’t let you off so easy. They want to keep you alive as long as they can. They ain’t going to lose their fun by puttin’ you out of your misery.”

  “Still, a lot of women have murdered their husbands,” objected the doctor.

  “Pure accident. We all know that accidents will ’appen in the best regulated families. Sometimes they get careless and go too far, and then the poor bastard dies. But they don’t mean it. Not them.”

  xix

  DR. SAUNDERS was fortunate in this that, notwithstanding the several deplorable habits he had, and in some parts of the world they would certainly have been accounted vices (vérité au delà des Alpes, erreur ici), he awoke in the morning with a clean tongue and in a happy frame of mind. He seldom stretched himself in bed, drinking his cup of fragrant China tea and smoking the first delicious cigarette, without looking forward with pleasure to the coming day. Breakfast in the little hotels in the islands of the Dutch East Indies is served at a very early hour. It never varies. Papaia, œufs sur le plat, cold meat, and Edam cheese. However punctually you appear, the eggs are cold; they stare at you, two large round yellow eyes on a thin surface of white, and they look as if they had been scooped out of the face of an obscene monster of the deep. The coffee is an essence to which you add Nestlé’s Swiss Milk brought to a proper consistency with hot water. The toast is dry, sodden and burnt. Such was the breakfast served in the dining-room of the hotel at Kanda and hurriedly eaten by silent Dutchmen, who had their offices to go to.

  But Dr. Saunders got up late next morning, and Ah Kay brought him his breakfast out on the verandah. He enjoyed his papaia, he enjoyed his eggs, that moment out of the frying-pan, and he enjoyed his scented tea. He reflected that to
live was a very enjoyable affair. He wanted nothing. He envied no man. He had no regrets. The morning was still fresh and in the clean, pale light the outline of things was sharp-edged. A huge banana just below the terrace with a haughty and complacent disdain flaunted its splendid foliage to the sun’s fierce heat. Dr. Saunders was tempted to philosophize: he said that the value of life lay not in its moments of excitement but in its placid intervals when, untroubled, the human spirit in tranquillity undisturbed by the recollection of emotion could survey its being with the same detachment as the Buddha contemplated his navel. Plenty of pepper on the eggs, plenty of salt and a little Worcestershire sauce, and then when they were finished a piece of bread to soak up the buttery remains, and that was the best mouthful of all. He was intent on this when Fred Blake and Erik Christessen came swinging down the street. They leaped up the steps and, throwing themselves on chairs at the doctor’s table, shouted for the boy. They had started for their walk up the volcano before dawn, and were now ravenous. The boy hurried out with papaia and a dish of cold meats, and they finished this before he brought them eggs. They were in great spirits. The enthusiasm of youth had ripened the acquaintance made the day before into friendship, and they called one another Fred and Erik. It was a stiff climb and the violent exercise had excited them. They talked nonsense and laughed at nothing. They were like a couple of boys. The doctor had never seen Fred so gay. He was evidently much taken with Erik, and the companionship of someone only a little older than himself had loosened his constraint so that he seemed to flower with a new adolescence. He looked so young that you could hardly believe he was a grown man, and his deep, ringing voice sounded almost comic.

  “D’you know, he’s as strong as an ox, this blighter,” said he, with a glance of admiration at Erik. “We had one rather nasty little bit of climbing to do, a branch broke and I slipped. I might have taken a nasty toss, broken my leg or something. Erik caught hold of me with one arm, damned if I know how he did it, and lifted me right up and set me on my feet again. And I weigh a good eleven stone.”