Fatigay’s feet, as he sat at dinner on the veranda; who would have thought, seeing all this, that beneath that rather Charlotte Brontë exterior, there was actually a Charlotte Brontë interior, full of meek pride, hopeless hope, and timid determination. At one moment, in fact, it became positively Emily B., and that was when Mr. Fatigay, swallowing the last mouthful of his yam, said, with unwonted coarseness:

“Well, Emily, here you are again! I thought you’d got skittish. Thought there must be a tom about, you know, and you’d gone off for the night.”

And, in his blindness, the foolish fellow actually hummed a bar or two from the suggestive chorus of his latest syncopated record, “Those BABoon Blues.”

Emily turned her face to the wall. She little thought, as neither did Mr. Fatigay, that this unusual gaucherie of his was expressive of his pleasure at seeing her safely back again. She tried to concentrate on the idea that he, like lesser men, was at heart just a great big boy, with a boy’s capacity for the sudden careless blow. This, while it assisted, but perhaps unnecessarily, in repressing any impulse towards anger, did little to salve the new hurt in the barely stanched wound of that afternoon.

As she sat motionless in the gathering darkness, and watched her childhood’s home, the jungle, she pondered once more the advisability of withdrawal. The cloudy, smoke-blue billows of that forest washed up almost to where they were sitting, as the sea did to the palace steps in The Little Mermaid, and with the same tremendous appeal of depth on depth on depth to dissolve in. It appeared to go on so far that the actual horizon was lost in it, and the moon, which then began to lift directly opposite them, rose like a silver bird from a twiggy blue nest. As the moon rose it got smaller, and time, which it took up with it, got smaller also, and the forest swept on infinite and eternal beneath. Large enough to be a grave for sorrow. A timeless cloudy sea to melt memory away.

“Switch on the light,” said Mr. Fatigay, and it was gone.

Before the chimp was a white-painted handrail, a bamboo table with pipes, a whiskey and soda, and the Overseas Daily Mail. Beyond these was a wall of darkness in which the moon hung like a word of reminiscence which must pass unnoticed. The white rail and the table stood at the threshold of a new life, stretching beyond her vision, but full, as far as she could see, of strangeness and of pain.

Chapter 2

Dust hath closed Helen’s eye

Six months slipped swiftly by in the little clearing of Boboma. The seasons, as we know them, are of course tangled up in that locality, caught as they are in the sun’s heel, which passes over twice in the course of the year. Spring flew overhead without settling, like a wild bird, tardy migrant! on its way to Hampshire. But Boboma, all unconscious of its distinction, had a little private spring going on in its very center. The new world, which Emily had visualized as opening so aridly before her, had in fact contained one element more than she had bargained for, and that of such aureate quality as to shed a glow even upon the stark and forbidding outlines of her relationship to Mr. Fatigay. Culture this was, in its wider aspects, that made the future seem incredibly rich, not in color and sensation merely, but in possibilities. And at the thought of these possibilities the living principle awoke, like sap, in Emily’s heart, so cramped and contracted by an iron resolution she had made to feel and hope no more. This, as when the spring grass cracks stone slabs of pavement, was a signal instance of the futility of the strongest antivital contrivances, when pitted against the forces latent in even the very softest of living tissue. Mr. Bernard Shaw would have been delighted.

So was the chimp. The dawn, spiritually speaking, had come for her when she had passed from reading the flavorless simplified passages in the children’s lesson books to groping at the tough and prickly sweetness at the core of her master’s little stock of well-chosen classics. The dawn, we must remember, is remarkable for its high and transitory colors, and its deceiving mists. Emily’s mind was in many important respects too unsophisticated, too unsuspicious, too generous and eager, for her to estimate at their true worth the various pictures of life which she found in Mr. Fatigay’s favorite authors.