The Narrow Corner (15 page)

“Who is this fellow Frith that we’re going up to this afternoon?” asked the doctor.

“He’s got a plantation. He grows nutmeg and cloves. He’s a widower. He lives there with his daughter.”

I
T WAS
about three miles to Frith’s house, and they drove out in an old Ford. On each side of the road grew densely huge trees, and there was a heavy undergrowth of ferns and creepers. The jungle began at the outskirts of the town. Here and there were miserable huts. Ragged Malays lay about the verandahs and listless children played among the pigs under the piles.
It was humid and sultry. The estate had once belonged to a perkenier, and it had a stucco gateway, massive but crumbling, of pleasing design. Over the archway on a tablet were the old burgher’s name and the date of erection. They turned down an earth road and bumped along over ruts, hillocks and holes till they came to the bungalow. It was a large, square building not on piles, but on a foundation of masonry, covered with an attap roof and surrounded by a neglected garden. They drove up, the Malay driver sounding his horn with energy, and a man came out of the house and waved to them. It was Frith. He waited for them at the top of the steps that led down from the verandah, and as they came up and Erik mentioned their names, shook hands with them one by one.

“Delighted to see you. I haven’t seen any Britishers for a year. Come in and have a drink.”

He was quite a big man, but fat, with grey hair and a small grey moustache. He was growing bald and his forehead was imposing. His red face, shining with sweat, was unlined and round, so that at the first glance he looked almost boyish. He had a long yellow tooth in the middle of his mouth, which hung loosely, giving you the impression that with a sharp pull it would come out. He wore khaki shorts and a tennis shirt open at the neck. He walked with a pronounced limp. He led them into a very large room, which served at once as
parlour and dining-room; the walls were adorned with Malay weapons, antlers of deer and horns of sladang. On the floor were tiger skins that looked a trifle mouldy and moth-eaten.

When they entered, a tiny little old man got up from a chair and without taking a step towards them stood and looked at them. He was wrinkled, battered and bowed. He seemed very old.

“This is Swan,” said Frith, with a casual nod of his head. “He’s by way of being my father-in-law.”

The little old man had very pale blue eyes with red-rimmed, hairless lids, but they were full of cunning, and his glance was darting and mischievous like a monkey’s. He shook hands with the three strangers without speaking and then, opening a toothless mouth, addressed Erik in a language the others did not understand.

“Mr. Swan is a Swede,” said Erik in explanation.

The old man eyed them one after the other, and in his gaze was a certain suspicion and at the same time, hardly concealed, something of mockery.

“I came out fifty years ago. I was mate of a sailing vessel. I never been back. Maybe I go next year.”

“I’m a seafarin’ man meself, sir,” said Captain Nichols.

But Mr. Swan was not in the least interested in him.

“I been pretty well most things in my day,” he went on. “I been captain of a schooner in the slave trade.”

“Blackbirding,” interrupted Captain Nichols. “There was a nice little bit of money to be picked up that way in the old days.”

“I been a blacksmith, I been a trader. I been a planter. I don’t know what I haven’t been. They tried to kill me over and over again. I got a hernia on my chest, I have. That come from a wound I got in a scrap with the natives in the Solomons. Left me for dead, they did. I’ve had a lot of money in my time. Haven’t I, George?”

“So I’ve always heard.”

“Ruined by the great hurricane, I was. Destroyed my store. Lost everything. I didn’t care. Got nothing left now but this plantation. Never mind, it gives us enough to live on and that’s all that matters. I’ve had four wives and more children than you can count.”

He talked in a high cracked voice with a strong Swedish accent, so that you had to listen intently to understand what he said. He spoke very quickly, almost as though he were reciting a lesson, and he finished with a little cackle of senile laughter. It seemed to say that he had been through everything and it was all stuff and nonsense. He surveyed human kind and its activities from a great distance, but from no Olympian height, from behind a tree, slyly, and hopping from one foot to another with amusement.

A Malay brought in a bottle of whisky and a syphon, and Frith poured out the drinks.

“A drop of Scotch for you, Swan?” he suggested to the old man.

“Why do you ask me that, George?” he quavered. “You know very well I can’t abide it. Give me some rum and water. Scotch has been the ruin of the Pacific. When I first come from Sweden nobody drunk Scotch. Rum. If they’d stuck to rum and stuck to sail things wouldn’t be what they are now, not by a long way.”

“We ran into some pretty rough weather on the way ’ere,” Captain Nichols remarked, by way of making conversation with a fellow seaman.

“Rough weather? You don’t have rough weather nowadays. You should have seen the weather you had when I was a boy. I remember on one of the schooners I had, I was taking a parcel of labour to Samoa, from the New Hebrides, and we got caught in a hurricane. I told them savages to pop over the side pretty damn quick, and I put out to sea, and for three days I never closed my eyes. Lost our sails, lost our mainmast, lost our boats. Rough weather. Don’t talk to me about rough weather, young fellow.”

“No offence meant,” said Captain Nichols, with a grin that showed his broken, decayed little teeth.

“And no offence taken,” cackled old Swan. “Give
him a tot of rum, George. If he’s a sailor-man he don’t want that stinking whisky of yours.”

Presently Erik suggested that the strangers would like to walk round the plantation.

“They’ve never seen a nutmeg estate.”

“Take ’em over, George. Twenty-seven acres. Best land on the island,” said the old man. “Bought it thirty years ago for a parcel of pearls.”

They got up, leaving him, like a little strange bald bird, hunched up over his rum and water, and walked out into the garden. It ended casually and the plantation began. In the cool of the evening the air was limpid. The kanari trees, in the shade of which grew the portly and profitable nutmeg trees, were enormously tall. They towered like the columns of a mosque in the Arabian Nights. Underfoot was no tangle of undergrowth but a carpet of decaying leaves. You heard the boom of great pigeons and saw them flying about with a heavy whirr of wings. Little green parrots in flocks flitted swiftly over the nutmeg trees, screeching, and they were like living jewels darting through the softly sparkling air. Dr. Saunders had a sense of extreme well-being. He felt like a disembodied spirit and his imagination was pleasantly, but not exhaustingly, occupied with image after image. He walked with Frith and the skipper. Frith was explaining the details of the nutmeg trade. He did not listen. There was an idle sensuousness
in the air that was almost material, so that it reminded you of the feel of a soft, rich fabric. Erik and Fred were walking a step behind. The declining sun had found a way under the branches of the lofty kanaris and shone on the foliage of the nutmeg trees so that their dense, opulent green glistened like burnished copper.

They strolled along a winding path, made by the accident of people having long followed it, and all at once saw a girl coming towards them. She was walking with eyes cast down, as though absorbed in thought, and it was not till she heard voices that she looked up. She stopped.

“There is my daughter,” said Frith.

You might have fancied she had stopped in a momentary embarrassment at the sight of strangers; but she did not move on, she stayed still, watching with a singular calm the men who advanced towards her; and then you received an impression, not exactly of self-assurance, but of tranquil unconcern. She wore nothing but a sarong of Javanese batik, with a little white pattern on a brown ground; it was attached tightly just over her breasts and came down to her knees. She was barefoot. Besides the little smile that hovered on her lips, the only signs she gave that she noticed the approach of strangers were a little shake of the head, almost involuntary, to loosen her hair and an instinctive gesture of the hand through it, for it was long and hung down
her back. It spread in a cloud over her neck and shoulders, very thick, and of a fairness so ashy pale that, but for its radiance, it would have looked white. She waited with composure. The sarong tightly wrapped round her concealed nothing of her form; she was very slim, with the narrow hips of a boy, long-legged, and at first sight tall. She was burned by the sun to a rich honey colour. The doctor was not as a rule captivated by feminine beauty; he could not but think the manner in which a woman’s frame was made for obvious physiological purposes much detracted from its aesthetic appeal. Just as a table should be solid, of a convenient height and roomy, so a woman should be large-breasted and broad in the beam; but in both cases beauty could only be an adjunct to utility. You might say that a table which was solid, roomy and of a convenient height was beautiful, but the doctor preferred to say that it was solid, roomy and of a convenient height. The girl standing there in an attitude of indolent beauty reminded him of some statue he had seen in a museum of a goddess attaching her peplum; he could not remember it very exactly. Greco-Roman, he thought. She had the same ambiguous slenderness as the little Chinese girls in the flower-boats at Canton, in whose company in his younger days he had on occasion passed moments of somewhat detached amusement. She had the same flower-like grace, and her fairness in that tropic scene
gave the exotic sensation that made them so charming. She recalled to his mind the pale, profuse, delicate flowers of the plumbago.

“These are Christessen’s friends,” said her father as they came up to her.

She did not hold out her hand, but slightly and graciously inclined her head as first the doctor and then Captain Nichols were introduced to her. She gave them both a cool survey in which was inquiry and then swift appraisement. Dr. Saunders noticed that her brown hands were long and slender. Her eyes were blue. Her features were fine and very regular. She was an extremely pretty young woman.

“I’ve just been having a bathe in the pool,” she said.

Her glance travelled to Erik, and she gave him a very sweet and friendly smile.

“This is Fred Blake,” he said.

She turned her head a little to look at him, and for an appreciable time her eyes rested on him. The smile died away on her lips.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Fred, holding out his hand.

She continued to look at him, not with pertness or brazenly, but as though she were a little surprised. You might have thought she had seen him before and was trying to remember where. But the incident lasted no more than a minute, and no one would have been conscious
of a pause before she took the proffered hand.

“I was just going back to the house to dress,” she said.

“I’ll come with you,” said Erik.

Now that he stood beside her you saw that she was not really very tall; it was only her straightness of limb, her slenderness and her carriage, that gave the impression of more than common height.

They sauntered back towards the house.

“Who is that boy?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” answered Erik. “He’s in partnership with the thin, grey one. They’re looking for pearl-shell. They’re trying to find some new beds.”

“He’s good-looking.”

“I thought you’d like him. He’s got a nice nature.”

The others continued their tour of the estate.

W
HEN
they came in they found Erik sitting alone with Swan. The old man was telling an interminable story, in an odd mixture of Swedish and English, of some adventure he had had in New Guinea.

“Where’s Louise?” asked Frith.

“I’ve been helping her to lay the table. She’s been doing something in the kitchen and now she’s gone to change.”

They sat down and had another drink. They talked somewhat desultorily as people do when they don’t know one another. Old Swan was tired, and when the strangers appeared lapsed into silence, but he watched them, with his sharp, rheumy eyes, as though they filled him with suspicion. Captain Nichols told Frith that he was a martyr to dyspepsia.

“I’ve never known what it is to have a pain in my tummy,” said Frith. “Rheumatism’s my trouble.”

“I’ve known men as was martyrs to it. A friend of mine at Brisbane, one of the best pilots in the business, was just crippled by it. Had to go about on crutches.”

“One has to have something,” said Frith.

“You can’t ’ave anythin’ worse than dyspepsia, you take my word for it. I’d be a rich man now if it ’adn’t been for my dyspepsia.”

“Money’s not everything,” said Frith.

“I’m not sayin’ it is. I’m sayin’ I’d ’ave been a rich man to-day if it ’adn’t been for my dyspepsia.”

“Money’s never meant anything very much to me. So long as I have a roof over my head and three meals a day I’m content. Leisure’s the important thing.”

Dr. Saunders listened to the conversation. He could not quite place Frith. He spoke like an educated man.
Though fat and gross, shabbily dressed and in want of a shave, he gave the impression, scarcely of distinction, but of being accustomed to the society of decent people. He certainly did not belong to the same class as old Swan and Captain Nichols. His manners were easy. He had welcomed them with courtesy and treated them not with the fussy politeness an ill-bred person thinks it necessary to use towards strange guests, but naturally, as though he knew the ways of the world. Dr. Saunders supposed that he was what in the England of his youth they would have called a gentleman. He wondered how he had found his way to that distant island. He got up from his chair and wandered about the room. A number of framed photographs hung on the wall over a long book-case. He was surprised to find that they were of rowing eights of a Cambridge College, among which, though only by the name underneath, G. P. Frith, he recognised his host; others were groups of native boys at Perak in the Malay States, and at Kuching in Sarawak, with Frith, a much younger man than now, sitting in the middle. It looked as though on leaving Cambridge he had come to the East as a schoolmaster. The book-case was untidily stacked with books, all stained with damp and the ravages of the white ant, and these, with idle curiosity, taking out one here, one there, he glanced at. There was a number of prizes bound in leather from which he learned that Frith had
been at one of the smaller public schools, and had been an industrious and even brilliant boy. There were the text-books that he had used at Cambridge, a good many novels, and a few volumes of poetry which gave the impression that they had been much read, but long ago. They were well-thumbed and many passages were marked in pencil or underlined, but they had a musty smell as though they had for years remained unopened. But what surprised him most was to see two shelves filled with works on Indian religion and Indian philosophy. There were translations of the Rig-Veda and of certain of the Upanishads, and there were paper-bound books published in Calcutta or Bombay by authors with names odd to him and with titles that had a mystical sound. It was an unusual collection to find in the house of a planter in the Far East, and Dr. Saunders, trying to make something of the indications they afforded, asked himself what sort of man they suggested. He was turning the pages of a book by one Srinivasa Iyengar called “Outlines of Indian Philosophy”, when Frith somewhat heavily limped up to him.