Then near the hotel this urgent rhythm of sound and light and this song of the unrest of secret creation was joined by a new sound. The shock of it made him stand still for a moment, and listen to a thin, protracted wailing. He looked around and could just make out the dark outline of a long veranda running right round the L-shaped wings of bedrooms which branched out from the main body of the hotel and stretched right up to the entrance from the road. There a shimmer of light (which provoked a wordless grumble in the policeman’s throat), shone behind a curtained window. The wail suddenly ceased, to be followed by a fresh-born sneeze and a murmur of relief and a volume of subdued but satisfied and affectionate whisperings. Obviously a child had just been born to some refugee mother. But so bleak and locked-out did Lawrence feel himself to be from all creative processes that the realization merely added to the pressure of his apprehensions of the horrors to come. Indeed he stood there instinctively repeating in his mind, as he was destined to many times in the days ahead, the last verse of his favourite psalm: ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’. But that did not really help much just then, and he walked on to the main building noticing as he went up the steps the shadowy outlines of slight Indonesian ayahs moving to and fro along the verandas with babies in their arms all of whom they were trying to rock to sleep in the fresh air outside their tepid blacked-out rooms. The shuffle of their feet was only just audible in the glittering sound going up from the earth to the spawn-star sky with its urgent pulse of thunder and wings of lightning beating the bounds of night.
Inside the hotel reception hall he found the proprietor making a perfunctory show of working by candlelight at his desk. He was obviously in a tense nervous state because as Lawrence walked in, he jumped up nervously. To Lawrence’s dismay he was another huge fat man smelling strongly of drink. Yet he was not drunk. That was one of the odd things about the island. Lawrence had not seen a single drunk among the island Europeans though many among the British and American troops who could drink only a fraction of the liquor that people like the proprietor could consume.
However, reassured by Lawrence’s uniform and the presence of a policeman whom he knew, the proprietor now greeted him with meticulous politeness. That done he apologized for the darkness inside the hotel saying that as soon as the air-raid alarm was cancelled he would switch on the electric light. He explained that on such sultry evenings he and his guests would rather have little light and open windows than bright lights with doors and windows shut against the blackout. He suggested, therefore, that as the air-raid alarms had never lasted long he would show Lawrence to the hotel drawing-room, give him a drink and leave him there in comfort until he could occupy his bedroom by proper light. It was not much of a room, he added, because God knew, the hotel was hopelessly overcrowded with distraught women, feeble old men in their dotage and tired overwrought children, but at least it had its own telephone and . . .
He broke off suddenly to ask out of longing for reassurance against the shadow of the intolerable fear which was darkening the intuitions of the island community: ‘Is it true that the American Navy has destroyed the Japanese invasion fleet off Bali and that fifteen divisions of Marines are now landing at Sourabaya to help us?’
Knowing what he did Lawrence could have denied the rumour outright but he did not have the heart to do so. He merely answered that he had heard nothing either about so stupendous a naval victory or so great a landing. Whereupon the man, his bloodshot eyes tragic in the candlelight, sighed deeply and exclaimed: ‘Ag! Even if the news is not entirely accurate, there must be something in it. No smoke without fire, you know! In any case I believe we’ll have good news soon. It cannot go on like this, always being bad, then worse and yet still worse. I’m certain the Americans won’t leave us in the lurch, as . . .’
Lawrence believed he was about to add ‘as the British have done’ but he stopped and cut short a note of rising emotion just in time in order to ask artlessly in the eager voice of a fundamentally kindly and simple person: ‘Do you know whether it is true that Princess Juliana gave birth to a son last night?’
Lawrence replied again that he was sorry he could not confirm the rumour. At that he was led into a large, dimly lit veranda-room and shown to a chair by a small vacant table. It was the last empty place. The room was crowded with people indistinct in candlelight made dimmer with cigarette smoke. Judging by what he could see as well as by the quality of subdued voices surging around him, the people in the room were mostly women. No one appeared to have noticed his entrance and he sat there for half an hour undisturbed, listening to the conversation and from time to time seeing the unheeded lightning like an arch-angel messenger alighting on the sill of an open window.
Everybody as far as he could gather was talking about the war and from time to time being bitter about the British. Indeed, he felt uncomfortably like an eavesdropper. However, more striking and significant to him was the undercurrent of fear tugging at the sleeve of the uncomprehending spirit of these islanders, and over all the air of tension produced by a stubborn determination to go on as if the present were but a brief interlude and nothing in their lives really had changed for ever. At all sorts of odd moments this fear would break through their conscious defences. Some apparently meaningless trifle from their recent experience, the insignificant shell enclosing the subtle poison of decline and fall, would appear in the surf of their conversation like a small unpalatable crustacean dragged to the shore in a fisherman’s net. Thus he heard a woman near him suddenly put an end to a conversation about the Dutch royal family by saying: ‘You know an odd thing happened the morning we left our home outside Palembang. Just before the news came through from the Governor’s palace that all the children, women and old men were to hurry to their evacuation centres, the eldest of our Mandursfn1 came to the estate office and asked to see my husband. He had been with us for thirty years and was the head of all our coolies. I can’t tell you how good, decent and respectful he has always been. But suddenly there he was at the door of the estate office, asking, if you please, for three dozen tins of condensed milk!’
‘What on earth are you saying, Mevrouw?’ the voice of an old man exclaimed in the dark nearby. He sounded outraged as if there had been some enormity in the head coolie’s request. ‘What are you saying? a mandur made ‘zo ’n Brutale verzoek’ (such an impertinent request?).
‘Indeed, he did.’ The woman confirmed emphatically. Evidently reassured because someone else found the episode as untoward as she did she went on more confidently. ‘What’s more, my husband asked him why he wanted the milk. Was he not satisfied with the lavish rations he had drawn all these years? But the man just looked past my husband, and said he had no particular reason for asking: he just wanted three dozen tins of condensed milk!’
‘I hope your husband told him where to take himself and his impudence,’ that blurred old voice, or another one, intervened.
‘Not at all,’ the woman replied her voice riding high with emotion. ‘That was the strangest part of it all! A week before my husband would have dealt most firmly with the Mandur because we’ve been far too good to him to justify such demands. But my husband, completely taken aback, just stared at the man for a moment or two, then took out his keys, unlocked the store and tamely gave him the milk!’