A week later we were lodged in the big hut that went by the name of
hotel, with the old English half-caste woman. What a hotel it was! The
walls were of clay, with a little wood, and the wood was eaten through
by the white ants that crawled about everywhere. I lived in a room next
the main parlor, with a green glass window looking on to the street--a
single pane, not very clear at that--and Glahn had chosen a little bit
of a hole up in the attic, much darker, and a poor place to live in. The
sun heated the thatched roof and made his room almost insufferably hot
at night and day; besides which, it was not a stair at all that led up
to it, but a wretched bit of a ladder with four steps. What could I do?
I let him take his choice, and said:
“Here are two rooms, one upstairs and one down; take your choice.”
And Glahn looked at the two rooms and took the upper one, possibly to
give me the better of the two--but was I not grateful for it? I owe him
nothing.
As long as the worst of the heat lasted, we left the hunting alone and
stayed quietly in the hut, for the heat was extremely uncomfortable. We
lay at night with a mosquito net over the bedplace, to keep off the
insects; but even then it happened sometimes that blind bats would come
flying silently against our nets and tear them. This happened too often
to Glahn, because he was obliged to have a trap in the roof open all the
time, on account of the heat; but it did not happen to me. In the
daytime we lay on mats outside the hut, and smoked and watched the life
about the other huts. The natives were brown, thick-lipped folk, all
with rings in their ears and dead, brown eyes; they were almost naked,
with just a strip of cotton cloth or plaited leaves round the middle,
and the women had also a short petticoat of cotton stuff to cover them.
All the children went about stark naked night and day, with great big
prominent bellies simply glistening with oil.
“The women are too fat,” said Glahn.
And I too thought the women were too fat. Perhaps it was not Glahn at
all, but myself, who thought so first; but I will not dispute his
claim--I am willing to give him the credit. As a matter of fact, not all
the women were ugly, though their faces were fat and swollen. I had met
a girl in the village, a young half-Tamil with long hair and snow-white
teeth; she was the prettiest of them all. I came upon her one evening at
the edge of a rice field. She lay flat on her face in the high grass,
kicking her legs in the air. She could talk to me, and we did talk, too,
as long as I pleased. Glahn sat that evening in the middle of our
village outside a hut with two other girls, very young--not more than
ten years old, perhaps. He sat there talking nonsense to them, and
drinking rice beer; that was the sort of thing he liked.
A couple of days later, we went out shooting. We passed by tea gardens,
rice fields, and grass plains; we left the village behind us and went in
the direction of the river, and came into forests of strange foreign
trees, bamboo and mango, tamarind, teak and salt trees, oil--and
gum-bearing plants--Heaven knows what they all were; we had, between us,
but little knowledge of the things. But there was very little water in
the river, and so it remained until the rainy season. We shot wild
pigeons and partridges, and saw a couple of panthers one afternoon;
parrots, too, flew over our heads. Glahn was a terribly accurate shot;
he never missed. But that was merely because his gun was better than
mine; many times I too shot terribly accurately. I never boasted of it,
but Glahn would often say: “I'll get that fellow in the tail,” or “that
one in the head.” He would say that before he fired; and when the bird
fell, sure enough, it was hit in the tail or the head as he had said.
When we came upon the two panthers, Glahn was all for attacking them too
with his shot-gun, but I persuaded him to give it up, as it was getting
dusk, and we had no more than two or three cartridges left. He boasted
of that too--of having had the courage to attack panthers with a
shot-gun.
“I am sorry I did not fire at them after all,” he said to me. “What do
you want to be so infernally cautious for? Do you want to go on living?”
“I'm glad you consider me wiser than yourself,” I answered.
“Well, don't let us quarrel over a trifle,” he said.
Those were his words, not mine; if he had wished to quarrel, I for my
part had no wish to prevent him. I was beginning to feel some dislike
for him for his incautious behavior, and for his manner with women. Only
the night before, I had been walking quietly along with Maggie, the
Tamil girl that was my friend, and we were both as happy as could be.
Glahn sits outside his hut, and nods and smiles to us as we pass. It was
then that Maggie saw him for the first time, and she was very
inquisitive about him. So great an impression had he made on her that,
when it was time to go, we went each our own way; she did not go back
home with me.
Glahn would have put this by as of no importance when I spoke to him
about it. But I did not forget it. And it was not to me that he nodded
and smiled as we passed by the hut! it was to Maggie.
“What's that she chews?” he asked me.
“I don't know,” I answered. “She chews--I suppose that's what her teeth
are for.”
And it was no news to me either that Maggie was always chewing
something; I had noticed it long before. But it was not betel she was
chewing, for her teeth were quite white; she had, however, a habit of
chewing all sorts of other things--putting them in her mouth and chewing
as if they were something nice. Anything would do--a piece of money, a
scrap of paper, feathers--she would chew it all the same. Still, it was
nothing to reproach her for, seeing that she was the prettiest girl in
the village, anyway. Glahn was jealous of me, that was all.
I was friends again with Maggie, though, next evening, and we saw
nothing of Glahn.