‘That was a mistake, a grave mistake,’ the tired old voice again commented, and went on without respect for the purity of its metaphors. ‘That milk was just the thin edge of the wedge trying out your husband’s grip on this confused situation. I bet that chap was back within the hour asking for more! Give these fellows a teat and they take the whole cow! Hé, he, hé!’
He cackled, pleased with his joke. But no one else joined him.
‘I’m afraid I don’t know whether he came back or not,’ the woman said. ‘The alarm came through almost immediately after. Within the hour I was gone with the children. But ever since I’ve been quite unable to get the thing out of my mind. I feel it means something but I don’t know what.’
She stopped speaking, her words darting through that dim-lit room like a bat carrying in the twilight hour the full message of the night about to fall. So quiet had it become, Lawrence said, that you could almost hear the silence squeak. He had just time to think – this is meaning in pantomime: it was the milk of human kindness that these indigenous people were thirsting for all these years – when the voice of another woman broke in: ‘And I’ll tell you something else that I can’t understand: the owner of this hotel allowing these waiters to go about in those awful black hats and doing nothing, absolutely nothing about it at all?’
‘Hush, hush, my dear,’ another woman exclaimed as a waiter moved deftly without a sound on neat, small bare feet into the room. Silently, he tripped his way between the tables to serve drinks to some people near Lawrence. Ice fell with a sudden, precise, cool and utterly impersonal tinkle in several glasses, and the waiter vanished through the open door but not before Lawrence had seen clearly outlined against the glow within it the black hat on his head. Then the voice of appeasement spoke up again: ‘Hush! my dear, you must really be more careful! I know we never speak Dutch to these people but they must have picked up a phrase or two by now and could easily understand what you’re saying. . . .’
‘And what do I care if he does? I would like all the world to hear!’ The woman who had started it answered shrilly, with an overtone of hysteria in her voice: ‘If that proprietor were only half a man, he would never have allowed such insolence to begin, let alone tolerate it for so long. Ag! Dear God! What is to become of us with only such men left to protect us?’
She started to cry without restraint so that the whole room was affected by it. Lawrence feared they would all lose their self-control and join in but just at that moment, the siren of a nearby sugar-mill proclaimed the end of the air-raid alarm. At once all the lights went on, and the shock of light was as good as a slap in the face and removed the danger of any spread of that particular form of hysteria. The women sat up straighter in their chairs, automatically patting and smoothing their dresses.
Lawrence then saw that the room was filled with women of all ages, except for the one old man who sat crumpled over a drink in his chair, his red-rimmed eyes blinking at the light. At a table opposite Lawrence a middle-aged woman had her arms round a younger one and was trying to comfort her. As Lawrence watched her sobs grew less and presently she allowed the older woman to help her to her feet and begin leading her from the room.
As she did so, someone at a table behind Lawrence made a remark he could not catch. It was uttered low but in a tone of such unusual quality that Lawrence turned his head to look. He heard another woman loudly rebuke the owner of the voice: ‘It is easy enough for you, my dear, to disapprove. If you had three little children to think about as she has, poor dear, you would understand her outburst better. Believe me, you are very, very lucky not to be married and to have no husband and children to worry about at a time like this: very lucky indeed!’
Lawrence heard the reply distinctly: ‘I wasn’t disapproving. And it was precisely because of the children that such hysteria worried me.’ The voice paused as if in two minds to go on or not, then decided to do so. ‘And my dear, what strange ideas human beings have about luck.’ It was said quietly without bitterness or reproach but with a strange sort of nostalgia.
So interested were the women in each other that Lawrence was free for a moment to watch them unobserved. What the one woman looked like he had no special recollection except that she resembled many others present: a large, full-bosomed matron, the worthy wife no doubt of another experienced planter in the outer islands, and with an air of basic well-being which even the anxieties of the moment could not altogether obscure. Of the other, the owner of the voice, the detail was extraordinarily fresh in his memory.
She was young, perhaps twenty-two or three, and tall for a woman. He could tell that even as she sat at the side of the table, one long, well-shaped bare leg over the other and hands with unusually broad palms and long fingers together in her lap. She had on leather sandals and unlike any of the other women in the room wore a loose skirt of native material, a deep, rich, brown batik with blue and yellow butterflies and flowers printed on it. Tucked into it like a blouse she had on a boy’s plain white open-necked shirt, a red silk handkerchief nonchalantly inserted in the pocket over the heart, and the sleeves neatly rolled up to just above the elbows. On her left wrist she wore a bracelet of burnt Djokja silver and round her throat a delicate gold chain with a locket of what looked like a virgin Sundanese nugget, the size of a pigeon’s egg. Her shoulders were neat, her neck long and elegant; her head well poised and shapely. Her forehead seemed high and broad for a woman, her face longish and inclined to an oval. She was not thin and yet had nothing fat about her. The cheeks below their high almost mongolian bone, indeed, were slightly curved inwards. Her wrists and ankles were slim and the bone beneath the skin of hands and face gave him the impression of being so fine that she looked in that assembly like a well-bred hunter in a paddock full of carthorses. Her mouth was full and the eyes well apart, big, slightly slanted and of a blue so intense that they looked almost purple. Her hair was extremely fair, thick and yet of so fine a texture that as it fell straight from the parting in the middle to her neat shoulders it shone like lamplight about her head. She used no make-up of any kind and the smooth European skin had not yet been stained by the climate to a weak coffee colour, as those of the other women present were. In fact it was still of a whiteness so fresh and intense that he could only describe it as brilliant. There was indeed, Lawrence now told us, an early Marie Laurencin painting of which she might have been the model. Though Laurencin was by no means his favourite painter, she was the only painter who had conveyed something of the impression this young woman made on him. Laurencin’s vision, whatever else one might care to say against it, was fundamentally of woman as woman saw herself when her own vision was still fresh and she had painted a young French girl who looked just like that refugee girl, sitting with her long hands in her lap in the hotel drawing-room in Insulinda, the face a little heraldic, but with spirit behind it, vivid as a dream; woman in fact he would suggest, before her encounter with man. Yes, that was how she had appeared to him, in that blinding movement immediately after the lights were turned full on, not only a woman but the woman in all women. Tired, preoccupied, filled as he was with a sense of fast-approaching disaster and totally unready for such a reaction, an emotion as of having made a great discovery possessed him.
Long as it takes in the telling all these impressions were contained in the briefest of moments, because very soon the woman became aware of him too and looked up straight into his eyes. He had felt forced to turn quickly away then, but not before he had seen her interest at seeing a stranger in strange uniform watching her so closely startle the clear look in her eyes like water on a still bright day troubled by a cats-paw of wind. He hoped to look at her again but just then the proprietor came to take him to his room. As Lawrence walked out, the rest of the women too saw him clearly for the first time. They stopped talking at once and watched him amazed; even the crumpled old man came erect in his seat. Lawrence was not out of the door before the sound of excited speculation about him and his purpose there broke out like a beehive resuming work at dawn.