“Ah, there you are, Templar. I see you made it.”
“That’s a relief,” said the Saint seriously. “I wasn’t altogether sure that I was here myself.”
The Major looked a trifle puzzled, but disciplined himself to suppress it.
“You shouldn’t have anything to worry about on the trip,” he said. “They haven’t wrecked a train for ages.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. I’ve always wanted to be in a good train wreck.”
“Give my best to Teddy and Eve, will you? And tell ’em I mean to come up myself the first chance I have to take a few days off.”
“I will.”
There was a blowing of whistles and a rising tempo of shouts and jabbering around the second- and third-class carriages as the train crew struggled to separate the travelers from the farewell deputations and pack the former on board so that the train could start. Ascony handed a book through the window.
“Thought you might like something to read on the trip.”
“Why, thank you.”
“Not at all. You can return it when you come back.”
It was a bulky volume entitled Altogether, by W. Somerset Maugham, and a glance inside showed that it was a collection of short stories.
“I believe I’ve read some of these before,” Simon said.
“Well, you get more out of some of ’em the second time, I think. Besides, it’s more fun to read ’em right where they’re supposed to have happened. Might give you a feeling about some things, if you know what I mean.”
“They’re almost historical now, aren’t they?” said the Saint, trying not to sound captious. “Maugham was here long before even my last time, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, I dare say he was. But human nature doesn’t change much.”
The whistling and shouting and jabbering reached a crescendo, and the train gave an authoritative clattering jolt and began to creep forward. Ascony strolled along with it for a few steps, beside the window.
“There’s one story especially I’d like to get your reaction to,” he said.
“Which one?”
“You’ll come to it. Hope you have a good time. So long, old chap.”
And merely by ceasing to walk, with a cordial gesture that was half wave and half salute, Ascony made an incontestable exit, being left behind in a moment as the train drew away from him.
2
Simon did little reading on the trip, for he had barely started to turn the pages of the book when he was sociably conscripted by three planters in search of a fourth for bridge. Then there was lunch, the inevitable curry, and afterwards almost everyone fell into a doze, and the Saint himself found it lazily easy to fall in with the custom of the country. He awoke with one of the Malay guards shaking him gently by the shoulder, as he had been enjoined to do, and saying “The next stop will be Ayer Pahit, tuan.”
During such opportunities as he had had to let his mind wander, he had tried to figure what could lie behind Major Ascony’s peculiar behavior, and had had conspicuously negative success. He was reasonably certain that Ascony was not dreaming that the Saint would personally solve the problem of the Red guerrillas, when a prolonged and large-scale military operation had not completely succeeded in eradicating them. It had to be something much less far-fetched and more limited than that. But the only further assumption that seemed safe was that it must be something involving the personalities he was going to meet, and Simon stepped out on the platform not quite literally like an outlaw entering a hostile city, but with a similar feeling of keeping his weight lightly on his toes and his eyes alert for more than the ordinary visitor would see.
Almost as soon as he stepped off the Malay guards clambered aboard again with their rifles slung, some of them riding on the engine, and the train tooted its whistle and was off again with its usual disjointed preliminary lurch. As it pulled out it revealed on the other side of the tracks a half-dozen, atap-thatched ramshackle buildings, one of which had double doors wide open and from what could be seen of its murky mysteriously cluttered interior appeared to be a combined general store and saloon, and behind those buildings was the solid jungle, crowding in on them obtrusively as if it actively resented the few square yards that they had usurped from it and was impatient to absorb them again; this was all that could be called the village, if it could be dignified even by that name. On the side of the tracks where the Saint stood was the Lavis estate, the center and only reason for existence of the settlement called Ayer Pahit or its railway station, which consisted of a ten-foot-square wooden hut at the side of the platform. Close behind that was a very large corrugated iron shed like a warehouse, and a little farther back still was a large rectangular building of smoke-streaked concrete topped with an incomprehensible tangle of pipes, with an incongruously modern and industrial look to it. The concrete building was set right into the side of a cleared hill that rose away from the railroad. A little above it were two long stark buildings like barracks, recognizable as coolie quarters, and much further up was what had to be the manager’s house, also of wood and atap, but set up on pilings and with a long shady screened verandah running the whole length of it. Even the big house was not on the very hilltop, but some thirty feet below it, the crest itself being taken up with something with square low white walls which at first sight looked like a kind of fortification but which Simon reminiscently identified as the top of a water storage tank. There were a couple of small individual cottages, probably for native foremen, on the flanks of the hill between the barracks and the big house, and for background again the dense dark green all-smothering jungle.
Simon took in the essential topography with one deliberate panoramic survey before he lowered his gaze to explore the vicinity of the platform. He saw a handful of idlers of the nondescript and seemingly purposeless kind who can be found hanging around every wayside railroad station on earth, and two smart-looking young Malays in khaki shorts and shirts who carried Lee-Enfield rifles and who at first he thought must be guards left over from the train until he realized from their rather more informal uniforms that they must be constabulary attached to the estate; and then he saw Eve Lavis coming towards him from the hut that served as a station office, and for a definite time thereafter he had no eyes for anything else.
Ascony had called her “stunning,” but the cliché was not truly descriptive at all. She was not an impact, she was an experience, which, from being more gradual was all the more enduring in its effect. His first impression of her, foolishly it seemed at the time, was one of coolness. Even at a little distance he noticed that the plain white skirt and shirt that she wore had a crackling fresh look, and yet the holster belt with a revolver hanging low on the right side did not look as if it had just been put on. She had very fine ash-blonde hair of the natural kind which often looks almost gray, yet in spite of the sweltering humidity there was nothing dank or bedraggled about it. As she came closer still he saw that her wide-set level eyes were another gray, clear and cool as mountain lakes under a clouded sky.
The experience continued to build impressions into an inevitable structure. He had only observed at first that her figure appeared to be pleasantly normal in size and proportions; it became a conviction later that the only right word for it was “perfect.” Because it was so perfectly without deficiencies or exaggerations it was not immediately striking, but after a while you were aware of it as the most symmetrical and shapely and desirable body that a woman could have. In the same way her face was not beautiful with the startling prettiness that snaps heads around and evokes reflex whistles. You became fascinated one by one with the broad brow, the small chiseled nose, the delicately contoured cheekbones, the wide firm-lipped mouth that opened over small teeth like twin rows of graduated pearls, the strong chin, and the smooth neck that carried it with queenly poise, and presently you felt that you were looking at Beauty itself made carnal in one assemblage of wholly satisfying features.