Lawrence then told their commander, a V.C. of an Expeditionary Force of the First World War, what he had seen on his travels. The Brigadier smiled the smile of someone who had long since made his peace with his fate and said he knew it all. He and his men were there in order to keep the road from falling into Japanese hands until the Dutch forces had safely withdrawn into their inner defensive ring. That done his orders too were to break off battle – if he could – and follow suit. The ‘if he could’ was uttered with a homely Australian twang and accompanied by a wry smile.
Lawrence asked when he expected the enemy to attack? The commander replied that fast as the enemy was sweeping towards them he did not think it would be before dawn the next day. He thought the best plan would be for Lawrence to keep his unit where it was. The moment the Australian had contact with the Japanese he would communicate with Lawrence and suggest a position which offered the best chance of getting round and behind the enemy when, and if, the battle was broken off.
Before sunset Lawrence was back with his unit. Near as the Australian positions had appeared to the village on his map it was a shock to find that it took him barely twenty minutes by car to reach it. That decided him immediately to send a dispatch rider of his own to the Australian headquarters in case the enemy infiltrated in the night and cut the telephone lines between them. He posted extra sentries on the roads leading into the village and detailed a Signals warrant officer to take over the telephone exchange in the hotel. He also gave orders that the entire unit was to breakfast at first light and stand to, thereafter ready instantly to move off. To give them a clearer understanding of his orders he told them, in the least negative way possible, what he had learned on his reconnaissance. He dwelt at some length on the presence of the small Australian force and stressed how impressed he had been by their spirit and bearing. With luck and good management, he ended, the next forty-eight hours should set them free of entanglement with retreating forces and safely in their own native guerrilla element of the jungle. Then taking his second-in-command aside he told him he was going to the hotel to try and get a good night’s sleep which he had not had for some days. He was not, he emphasized, to be disturbed unless it was absolutely imperative.
By that time the sun had vanished below the horizon but the whole western sky was still aflame with its light. One thunder-cloud in particular glowed from base to summit with a vivid pomegranate fire. In the ditches and along the hedges the fireflies were massing for their nightly fiesta and bats and flying foxes in prodigious numbers beat the brown air around him, emitting as they did so that strange silky squeak of theirs. Unlike the night when he had first arrived, not a glimmer of light showed anywhere in the hotel.
‘The proprietor’s done then what I asked and they’ve evacuated the women and children,’ he told himself. The conclusion was confirmed by the officer who had stood in for him at the hotel during his absence. Lawrence met him taking the air at the main entrance to the building. Lawrence took his report and before dismissing him asked: ‘Why is it so quiet round here tonight?’
‘Oh! don’t you know, sir? They’ve been evacuating the women and children these past two days,’ the officer answered. ‘I believe the last of them went off just before sunset. The hotel is practically empty and if the proprietor’s to be believed most of the native staff have deserted as well.’
Lawrence left him to climb slowly up the stone steps leading to the hall where the telephone booth stood. ‘So that’s that. They’ve all gone, rats and all!’ The bitterness in his thought surprised him until he saw its meaning. He was merely telling himself in the plural that ‘she’ was gone. Though he had done what he could to make certain that the girl would be moved to safety when he returned, he must have secretly nourished a wholly inconsistent and wildly improbable hope that she would have remained.
‘All the better,’ he tried to tell himself. ‘I need all I’ve got to concentrate on my job ahead.’ But he was not at all convinced by himself.
Then from the direction of the entrance of the office at the far side of the hall he detected his first glimmer of light. At his desk, his head sideways on his arms, the proprietor was fast asleep, snoring loudly. Lawrence first called to him and when he did not respond, walked round the desk and shook him. He smelt of gin. After a while the man opened his eyes, smiled feebly at Lawrence and muttered something meaningless. Then the smile deserted him and, despite his obvious drunkenness, his one chink of consciousness showed in his face the full tide of horror welling up fast within him. So terrified was the look that Lawrence believed the proprietor already may have been in the grip of some mysterious intimation of his end. Thirty-six hours later, on the pretext that he had not bowed low enough to a Japanese officer, he was to be bayoneted on the steps of his hotel and his body propped up for days in the village square. But the look of terrible awareness quickly passed, the red eyes shut and the head fell back on his arms. He was asleep again.
‘Poor, poor devil!’ Lawrence thought, not trying to awaken him again. ‘Sleep all you can while the going’s good.’
He turned and retraced his steps towards the veranda-room to see if he could find a waiter who would take an order for dinner. The glass in the windows still burned with the last red of day and the big dark room looked abandoned and empty until out of the shadows at the far end came a very old waiter, his face, with its amber cheeks and skin wrinkled like an over-ripe grenadella, looking most incongruous under his brand-new black hat. He came towards Lawrence, bowed impersonally but elegantly as did all the indigenous peoples of the island and said gently: ‘Good evening, Tuan. Good evening, Lord.’
‘Could you get me some dinner in half an hour?’ Lawrence asked.
‘Yes, Tuan. What would the Tuan like?’
Lawrence ordered a light meal and at the end asked: ‘What’s happened to the other waiters? Are you alone on duty?’
‘The jongens,’ the old man said, using the term for boys which the Dutch applied to their native servants, ‘the jongens have all gone to their homes. There’s only the Tuan proprietor, the Tuan telephone, the operator, old Abdul and his wife in the kitchen, and I, left, Tuan.’
‘And why haven’t you gone home too?’ Lawrence could not resist asking.
‘We are very old, Tuan,’ he answered, ‘and this is all the home we know.’ He paused, then hastened to add as if further diversion into his private world with a superior would be too great a breach of native good manners. ‘Is there anything else the Tuan would like?’
‘Perhaps you would bring me a drink,’ Lawrence answered, suddenly aware of how tired he was and feeling that a drink before his bath and meal would do him good.
He seated himself by an open window and listened to the urgent night sounds of the abundant earth starting up without. Some Gibbon apes, afraid of the dark, settled themselves in for an uneasy sleep on the highest trees in the jungle at the back of the hotel and he heard their barks fade to a series of whimpers. The ape-sound was extraordinarily human as if it came straight out of the world’s beginning like a cry of anguish from the first man when he found himself hemmed in by powerful enemies. How old was the pattern wherein he was caught, Lawrence thought, and how deeply discredited. Yet when and how would life break free of it?