I picked up the pen again, and wrote on the last sheet, ‘I will wait here in the beach hotel for a word of forgiveness. If no answer comes by seven this evening, I shall shoot myself.’

Then I took the letter, rang for a boy, and told him to deliver the envelope at once. At last I had said everything—everything!”

 

Something clinked and fell down beside us. As he moved abruptly he had knocked over the whisky bottle; I heard his hand feeling over the deck for it, and then he picked it up with sudden vigour. He threw the empty bottle high in the air and over the ship’s side. The voice fell silent for a few minutes, and then feverishly continued, even faster and more agitated than before.

“I am not a believing Christian any more … I don’t believe in heaven or hell, and if hell does exist I am not afraid of it, for it can’t be worse than those hours I passed between morning and evening … think of a small room, hot in the sunlight, red-hot at blazing noon … a small room, just a desk and a chair and the bed … and nothing on the desk but a watch and a revolver, and sitting at the desk a man … a man who does nothing but stare at that desk and the second hand of his watch, a man who eats and drinks nothing, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t move, who only … listen to me … who only stares for three long hours at the white circle of the dial and the hand of the watch ticking as it goes around. That … that was how I spent the day, just waiting, waiting, waiting … but waiting like a man running amok, senselessly, like an animal, with that headlong, direct persistence.

Well, I won’t try to describe those hours to you … they are beyond description. I myself don’t understand now how one can go through such an experience without going mad. Then, at twenty-two minutes past three … I remember the time exactly, I was staring at my watch … there was a sudden knock at the door. I leap up … leap like a tiger leaping on its prey, in one bound I am across the room and at the door, I fling it open, and there stands a timid little Chinese boy with a folded note in his hand. As I avidly reach for it, he scurries away and is gone.

I tear the note open to read it … and find that I can’t. A red mist blurs my vision … imagine my agony, I have word from her at last, and now everything is quivering and dancing before my eyes. I dip my head in water, and my sight clears … once again I take the note and read it. “Too late! But wait where you are. I may yet send for you.”

No signature on the crumpled paper torn from some old brochure … the writing of someone whose handwriting is usually steady, now scribbling hastily, untidily, in pencil. I don’t know why that note shook me so much. Some kind of horror, some mystery clung to it, it might have been written in flight, by someone standing in a window bay or a moving vehicle. An unspeakably cold aura of fear, haste and terror about that furtive note chilled me to the heart … and yet, and yet I was happy. She had written to me, I need not die yet, I could help her … perhaps I could … oh, I lost myself in the craziest hopes and conjectures. I read the little note a hundred, a thousand times over, I kissed it … I examined it for some word I might have forgotten or overlooked. My reverie grew ever deeper and more confused, I was in a strange condition, sleeping with open eyes, a kind of paralysis, a torpid yet turbulent state between sleep and waking. It lasted perhaps for quarter of an hour or so, perhaps for hours.

Suddenly I gave a start. Wasn’t that a knock at the door? I held my breath for a minute, two minutes of perfect silence … and then it came again, like a mouse nibbling, a soft but urgent knock. I leaped to my feet, still dizzy, flung the door open, and there outside it stood her boy, the same boy whom I had once struck in the face with my fist. His brown face was pale as ashes, his confused glance spoke of some misfortune. I immediately felt horror. ‘What … what’s happened?’ I managed to stammer. He said, ‘Come quickly!’ That was all, no more, but I was immediately racing down the stairs with the boy after me. A sado, a kind of small carriage, stood waiting. We got in.