“Well, I can’t!” He flung both his arms out, as if to push her away, and strode from the room.  The door swung to with a click.  She made three quick steps towards it and stood still, looking at the white and gold panels.  No sound came from beyond, not a whisper, not a sigh; not even a footstep was heard outside on the thick carpet.  It was as though no sooner gone he had suddenly expired—­as though he had died there and his body had vanished on the instant together with his soul.  She listened, with parted lips and irresolute eyes.  Then below, far below her, as if in the entrails of the earth, a door slammed heavily; and the quiet house vibrated to it from roof to foundations, more than to a clap of thunder.

He never returned.

THE LAGOON

The white man, leaning with both arms over the roof of the little house in the stern of the boat, said to the steersman—­

“We will pass the night in Arsat’s clearing.  It is late.”

The Malay only grunted, and went on looking fixedly at the river.  The white man rested his chin on his crossed arms and gazed at the wake of the boat.  At the end of the straight avenue of forests cut by the intense glitter of the river, the sun appeared unclouded and dazzling, poised low over the water that shone smoothly like a band of metal.  The forests, sombre and dull, stood motionless and silent on each side of the broad stream.  At the foot of big, towering trees, trunkless nipa palms rose from the mud of the bank, in bunches of leaves enormous and heavy, that hung unstirring over the brown swirl of eddies.  In the stillness of the air every tree, every leaf, every bough, every tendril of creeper and every petal of minute blossoms seemed to have been bewitched into an immobility perfect and final.  Nothing moved on the river but the eight paddles that rose flashing regularly, dipped together with a single splash; while the steersman swept right and left with a periodic and sudden flourish of his blade describing a glinting semicircle above his head.  The churned-up water frothed alongside with a confused murmur.  And the white man’s canoe, advancing upstream in the short-lived disturbance of its own making, seemed to enter the portals of a land from which the very memory of motion had forever departed.

The white man, turning his back upon the setting sun, looked along the empty and broad expanse of the sea-reach.  For the last three miles of its course the wandering, hesitating river, as if enticed irresistibly by the freedom of an open horizon, flows straight into the sea, flows straight to the east—­to the east that harbours both light and darkness.  Astern of the boat the repeated call of some bird, a cry discordant and feeble, skipped along over the smooth water and lost itself, before it could reach the other shore, in the breathless silence of the world.