Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/324

 belief, and the skin was stretched across his hollow checks like the goat hide on a drum face.

Painfully and very slowly he crept aft, going on all fours like some crippled animal, until he had reached the shelter in the stern. The girl and the white man followed, and they all three squatted down on the creaking bamboo decking. The man sat all of a heap, moaning at short intervals, as Malays moan when the fever holds them. The girl sat unconcernedly preparing a quid of betel nut, and the white man inhaled his cigarette and wailed for them to speak. He was trying to get the hang of the business, and to guess what had caused two people, whom he did not know, to seek an interview with him with so much secrecy and precaution in this weird place and at such an untimely hour.

The girl, the moonlight showed him, was pretty, She had a small, perfectly shaped head, a wide, smooth forehead, abundant hair, bright, laughing eyes, with eyebrows arched and well defined—"like the artificial spur of a game-cock," as the Malay simile has it—and the dainty hands and feet which are so common among well-born Malayan women. The man, on the contrary, was a revolting object. His shrunken and misshappen body, his features distorted by perpetual twitchings, his taut and pallid skin, and his air of abject degradation were violently repellent. Looking at him, the white man was moved by the feeling which is pity driven to desperation—the instinctive impulse to hustle the creature out of sight, or to put it out of its misery once for all—so