In a moment she was at the curtain that hung in the doorway2, and raised it with a steady hand. The conditions of their life in Samburan would have made peeping absurd; nor was such a thing in her character. This was not a movement of curiosity, but of downright alarm — the continued distress3 and fear of the dream. The night could not have been very far advanced. The light of the lantern was burning strongly, striping the floor and walls of the room with thick black bands. She hardly knew whether she expected to see Heyst or not; but she saw him at once, standing4 by the table in his sleeping-suit, his back to the doorway. She stepped in noiselessly with her bare feet, and let the curtain fall behind her. Something characteristic in Heyst’s attitude made her say, almost in a whisper:
“You are looking for something.”
He could not have heard her before; but he didn’t start at the unexpected whisper. He only pushed the drawer of the table in and, without even looking over his shoulder, asked quietly, accepting her presence as if he had been aware of all her movements:
“I say, are you certain that Wang didn’t go through this room this evening?”
“Wang? When?”
“After leaving the lantern, I mean.”
“Oh, no. He ran on. I watched him.”
“Or before, perhaps — while I was with these boat people? Do you know? Can you tell?”
“I hardly think so. I came out as the sun went down, and sat outside till you came back to me.”
“He could have popped in for an instant through the back veranda5.”
“I heard nothing in here,” she said. “What is the matter?”
“Naturally you wouldn’t hear. He can be as quiet as a shadow, when he likes. I believe he could steal the pillows from under our heads. He might have been here ten minutes ago.”
“What woke you up? Was it a noise?”
“Can’t say that. Generally one can’t tell, but is it likely, Lena? You are, I believe, the lighter6 sleeper7 of us two. A noise loud enough to wake me up would have awakened8 you, too. I tried to be as quiet as I could. What roused you?”
“I don’t know — a dream, perhaps. I woke up crying.”
“What was the dream?”
Heyst, with one hand resting on the table, had turned in her direction, his round, uncovered head set on a fighter’s muscular neck. She left his question unanswered, as if she had not heard it.
“What is it you have missed?” she asked in her turn, very grave.
Her dark hair, drawn9 smoothly10 back, was done in two thick tresses for the night. Heyst noticed the good form of her brow, the dignity of its width, its unshining whiteness. It was a sculptural forehead. He had a moment of acute appreciation11 intruding12 upon another order of thoughts. It was as if there could be no end of his discoveries about that girl, at the most incongruous moments.
She had on nothing but a hand-woven cotton sarong — one of Heyst’s few purchases, years ago, in Celebes, where they are made. He had forgotten all about it till she came, and then had found it at the bottom of an old sandalwood trunk dating back to pre-Morrison days. She had quickly learned to wind it up under her armpits with a safe twist, as Malay village girls do when going down to bathe in a river. Her shoulders and arms were bare; one of her tresses, hanging forward, looked almost black against the white skin. As she was taller than the average Malay woman, the sarong ended a good way above her ankles. She stood poised13 firmly, half-way between the table and the curtained doorway, the insteps of her bare feet gleaming like marble on the overshadowed matting of the floor. The fall of her lighted shoulders, the strong and fine modelling of her arms hanging down her sides, her immobility, too, had something statuesque, the charm of art tense with life. She was not very big — Heyst used to think of her, at first, as “that poor little girl,”— but revealed free from the shabby banality14 of a white platform dress, in the simple drapery of the sarong, there was that in her form and in the proportions of her body which suggested a reduction from a heroic size.
She moved forward a step.
“What is it you have missed?” she asked again.
Heyst turned his back altogether on the table. The black spokes15 of darkness over the floor and the walls, joining up on the ceiling in a path of shadow, were like the bars of a cage about them. It was his turn to ignore a question.
“You woke up in a fright, you say?” he said.
She walked up to him, exotic yet familiar, with her white woman’s face and shoulders above the Malay sarong, as if it were an airy disguise, but her expression was serious.
“No,” she replied. “It was distress, rather. You see, you weren’t there, and I couldn’t tell why you had gone away from me. A nasty dream — the first I’ve had, too, since —”
“You don’t believe in dreams, do you?” asked Heyst.
“I once knew a woman who did. Leastwise, she used to tell people what dreams mean, for a shilling.”
“Would you go now and ask her what this dream means?” inquired Heyst jocularly.
“She lived in Camberwell. She was a nasty old thing!”
Heyst laughed a little uneasily.
“Dreams are madness, my dear. It’s things that happen in the waking world, while one is asleep, that one would be glad to know the meaning of.”
“You have missed something out of this drawer,” she said positively17.
“This or some other. I have looked into every single one of them and come back to this again, as people do. It’s difficult to believe the evidence of my own senses; but it isn’t there. Now, Lena, are you sure that you didn’t —”
“I have touched nothing in the house but what you have given me.”
“Lena!” he cried.
He was painfully affected18 by this disclaimer of a charge which he had not made. It was what a servant might have said — an inferior open to suspicion — or, at any rate, a stranger. He was angry at being so wretchedly misunderstood; disenchanted at her not being instinctively19 aware of the place he had secretly given her in his thoughts.
“After all,” he said to himself, “we are strangers to each other.”
And then he felt sorry for her. He spoke16 calmly:
“I was about to say, are you sure you have no reason to think that the Chinaman has been in this room tonight?”
“You suspect him?” she asked, knitting her eyebrows20.
“There is no one else to suspect. You may call it a certitude.”
“You don’t want to tell me what it is?” she inquired, in the equable tone in which one takes a fact into account.
Heyst only smiled faintly.
“Nothing very precious, as far as value goes,” he replied.
“I thought it might have been money,” she said.
“Money!” exclaimed Heyst, as if the suggestion had been altogether preposterous21. She was so visibly surprised that he hastened to add: “Of course, there is some money in the house — there, in that writing-desk, the drawer on the left. It’s not locked. You can pull it right out. There is a recess22, and the board at the back pivots23: a very simple hiding-place, when you know the way to it. I discovered it by accident, and I keep our store of sovereigns in there. The treasure, my dear, is not big enough to require a cavern24.”
He paused, laughed very low, and returned her steady stare.
“The loose silver, some guilders and dollars, I have always kept in that unlocked left drawer. I have no doubt Wang knows what there is in it, but he isn’t a thief, and that’s why I— no, Lena, what I’ve missed is not gold or jewels; and that’s what makes the fact interesting — which the theft of money cannot be.”
She took a long breath, relieved to hear that it was not money. A great curiosity was depicted25 on her face, but she refrained from pressing him with questions. She only gave him one of her deep-gleaming smiles.
“It isn’t me so it must be Wang. You ought to make him give it back to you.”
Heyst said nothing to that naive26 and practical suggestion, for the object that he missed from the drawer was his revolver.
It was a heavy weapon which he had owned for many years and had never used in his life. Ever since the London furniture had arrived in Samburan, it had been reposing27 in the drawer of the table. The real dangers of life, for him, were not those which could be repelled28 by swords or bullets. On the other hand neither his manner nor his appearance looked sufficiently29 inoffensive to expose him to light-minded aggression30.
He could not have explained what had induced him to go to the drawer in the middle of the night. He had started up suddenly — which was very unusual with him. He had found himself sitting up and extremely wide awake all at once, with the girl reposing by his side, lying with her face away from him, a vague, characteristically feminine form in the dim light. She was perfectly31 still.
At that season of the year there were no mosquitoes in Samburan, and the sides of the mosquito net were looped up. Heyst swung his feet to the floor, and found himself standing there, almost before he had become aware of his intention to get up.
Why he did this he did not know. He didn’t wish to wake her up, and the slight creak of the broad bedstead had sounded very loud to him. He turned round apprehensively32 and waited for her to move, but she did not stir. While he looked at her, he had a vision of himself lying there too, also fast asleep, and — it occurred to him for the first time in his life — very defenceless. This quite novel impression of the dangers of slumber33 made him think suddenly of his revolver. He left the bedroom with noiseless footsteps. The lightness of the curtain he had to lift as he passed out, and the outer door, wide open on the blackness of the veranda — for the roof eaves came down low, shutting out the starlight — gave him a sense of having been dangerously exposed, he could not have said to what. He pulled the drawer open. Its emptiness cut his train of self-communion short. He murmured to the assertive34 fact:
“Impossible! Somewhere else!”
He tried to remember where he had put the thing; but those provoked whispers of memory were not encouraging. Foraging35 in every receptacle and nook big enough to contain a revolver, he came slowly to the conclusion that it was not in that room. Neither was it in the other. The whole bungalow36 consisted of the two rooms and a profuse37 allowance of veranda all round. Heyst stepped out on the veranda.
“It’s Wang, beyond a doubt,” he thought, staring into the night. “He has got hold of it for some reason.”
There was nothing to prevent that ghostly Chinaman from materializing suddenly at the foot of the stairs, or anywhere, at any moment, and toppling him over with a dead sure shot. The danger was so irremediable that it was not worth worrying about, any more than the general precariousness38 of human life. Heyst speculated on this added risk. How long had he been at the mercy of a slender yellow finger on the trigger? That is, if that was the fellow’s reason for purloining39 the revolver.
“Shoot and inherit,” thought Heyst. “Very simple.” Yet there was in his mind a marked reluctance40 to regard the domesticated41 grower of vegetables in the light of a murderer.
“No, it wasn’t that. For Wang could have done it any time this last twelve months or more —”
Heyst’s mind had worked on the assumption that Wang had possessed42 himself of the revolver during his own absence from Samburan; but at that period of his speculation43 his point of view changed. It struck him with the force of manifest certitude that the revolver had been taken only late in the day, or on that very night. Wang, of course. But why? So there had been no danger in the past. It was all ahead.
“He has me at his mercy now,” thought Heyst, without particular excitement.
The sentiment he experienced was curiosity. He forgot himself in it: it was as if he were considering somebody else’s strange predicament. But even that sort of interest was dying out when, looking to his left, he saw the accustomed shapes of the other bungalows44 looming45 in the night, and remembered the arrival of the thirsty company in the boat. Wang would hardly risk such a crime in the presence of other white men. It was a peculiar46 instance of the “safety in numbers,” principle, which somehow was not much to Heyst’s taste.
He went in gloomily, and stood over the empty drawer in deep and unsatisfactory thought. He had just made up his mind that he must breathe nothing of this to the girl, when he heard her voice behind him. She had taken him by surprise, but he resisted the impulse to turn round at once under the impression that she might read his trouble in his face. Yes, she had taken him by surprise, and for that reason the conversation which began was not exactly as he would have conducted it if he had been prepared for her pointblank question. He ought to have said at once: “I’ve missed nothing.” It was a deplorable thing that he should have let it come so far as to have her ask what it was he missed. He closed the conversation by saying lightly:
“It’s an object of very small value. Don’t worry about it — it isn’t worth while. The best you can do is to go and lie down again, Lena.”
Reluctant she turned away, and only in the doorway asked: “And you?”
“I think I shall smoke a cheroot on the veranda. I don’t feel sleepy for the moment.”
“Well, don’t be long.”
He made no answer. She saw him standing there, very still, with a frown on his brow, and slowly dropped the curtain.
Heyst did really light a cheroot before going out again on the veranda. He glanced up from under the low eaves, to see by the stars how the night went on. It was going very slowly. Why it should have irked him he did not know, for he had nothing to expect from the dawn; but everything round him had become unreasonable47, unsettled, and vaguely48 urgent, laying him under an obligation, but giving him no line of action. He felt contemptuously irritated with the situation. The outer world had broken upon him; and he did not know what wrong he had done to bring this on himself, any more than he knew what he had done to provoke the horrible calumny49 about his treatment of poor Morrison. For he could not forget this. It had reached the ears of one who needed to have the most perfect confidence in the rectitude of his conduct.
“And she only half disbelieves it,” he thought, with hopeless humiliation50.
This moral stab in the back seemed to have taken some of his strength from him, as a physical wound would have done. He had no desire to do anything — neither to bring Wang to terms in the matter of the revolver nor to find out from the strangers who they were, and how their predicament had come about. He flung his glowing cigar away into the night. But Samburan was no longer a solitude51 wherein he could indulge in all his moods. The fiery52 parabolic path the cast-out stump53 traced in the air was seen from another veranda at a distant of some twenty yards. It was noted54 as a symptom of importance by an observer with his faculties55 greedy for signs, and in a state of alertness tense enough almost to hear the grass grow.
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1
desolate
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| adj.荒凉的，荒芜的；孤独的，凄凉的；v.使荒芜，使孤寂 | |
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2
doorway
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| n.门口，(喻)入门；门路，途径 | |
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3
distress
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| n.苦恼，痛苦，不舒适；不幸；vt.使悲痛 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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veranda
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| n.走廊；阳台 | |
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lighter
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| n.打火机，点火器；驳船；v.用驳船运送；light的比较级 | |
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sleeper
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| n.睡眠者，卧车，卧铺 | |
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8
awakened
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| v.（使）醒( awaken的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）觉醒；弄醒；（使）意识到 | |
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9
drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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smoothly
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| adv.平滑地，顺利地，流利地，流畅地 | |
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appreciation
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| n.评价；欣赏；感谢；领会，理解；价格上涨 | |
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12
intruding
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| v.侵入，侵扰，打扰( intrude的现在分词)；把…强加于 | |
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13
poised
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| a.摆好姿势不动的 | |
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14
banality
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| n.陈腐；平庸；陈词滥调 | |
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15
spokes
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| n.（车轮的）辐条( spoke的名词复数 )；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 | |
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16
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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17
positively
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| adv.明确地，断然，坚决地；实在，确实 | |
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affected
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| adj.不自然的，假装的 | |
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19
instinctively
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| adv.本能地 | |
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20
eyebrows
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| 眉毛( eyebrow的名词复数 ) | |
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21
preposterous
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| adj.荒谬的，可笑的 | |
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22
recess
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| n.短期休息，壁凹（墙上装架子，柜子等凹处） | |
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23
pivots
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| n.枢( pivot的名词复数 )；最重要的人（或事物）；中心；核心v.（似）在枢轴上转动( pivot的第三人称单数 )；把…放在枢轴上；以…为核心，围绕（主旨）展开 | |
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24
cavern
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| n.洞穴，大山洞 | |
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25
depicted
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| 描绘，描画( depict的过去式和过去分词 )； 描述 | |
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26
naive
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| adj.幼稚的，轻信的；天真的 | |
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27
reposing
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| v.将（手臂等）靠在某人（某物）上( repose的现在分词 ) | |
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28
repelled
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| v.击退( repel的过去式和过去分词 )；使厌恶；排斥；推开 | |
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29
sufficiently
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| adv.足够地，充分地 | |
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aggression
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| n.进攻，侵略，侵犯，侵害 | |
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perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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apprehensively
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| adv.担心地 | |
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33
slumber
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| n.睡眠，沉睡状态 | |
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assertive
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| adj.果断的，自信的，有冲劲的 | |
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35
foraging
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| v.搜寻（食物），尤指动物觅（食）( forage的现在分词 )；（尤指用手）搜寻（东西） | |
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36
bungalow
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| n.平房，周围有阳台的木造小平房 | |
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profuse
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| adj.很多的，大量的，极其丰富的 | |
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38
precariousness
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39
purloining
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| v.偷窃( purloin的现在分词 ) | |
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40
reluctance
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| n.厌恶，讨厌，勉强，不情愿 | |
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41
domesticated
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| adj.喜欢家庭生活的；（指动物）被驯养了的v.驯化( domesticate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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42
possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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43
speculation
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| n.思索，沉思；猜测；投机 | |
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44
bungalows
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| n.平房( bungalow的名词复数 )；单层小屋，多于一层的小屋 | |
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45
looming
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| n.上现蜃景（光通过低层大气发生异常折射形成的一种海市蜃楼）v.隐约出现，阴森地逼近( loom的现在分词 )；隐约出现，阴森地逼近 | |
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46
peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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47
unreasonable
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| adj.不讲道理的，不合情理的，过度的 | |
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48
vaguely
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| adv.含糊地，暖昧地 | |
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49
calumny
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| n.诽谤，污蔑，中伤 | |
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50
humiliation
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| n.羞辱 | |
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51
solitude
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| n. 孤独; 独居,荒僻之地,幽静的地方 | |
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52
fiery
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| adj.燃烧着的，火红的；暴躁的；激烈的 | |
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53
stump
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| n.残株，烟蒂，讲演台；v.砍断，蹒跚而走 | |
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54
noted
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| adj.著名的，知名的 | |
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55
faculties
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| n.能力( faculty的名词复数 )；全体教职员；技巧；院 | |
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