‘My friend said, “No. He seemed rather touched and distressed. There really was no one he could ask to relieve him, mainly because he intended to make a call in some Godforsaken creek to look up a fellow of the name of Bamtz, who apparently had settle there.”

‘And again my friend wondered.

“‘Tell me,” he cried, “what connection can there be between Davidson and such a creature as Bamtz?”

‘I don’t remember now what answer I made. A sufficient one could have been given in two words: “Davidson’s goodness.” That never boggled at unworthiness if there was the slightest reason for compassion. I don’t want you to think that Davidson had no discrimination at all. Bamtz could not have imposed on him. Moreover, everybody knew what Bamtz was. He was a loafer, with a beard. When I think of Bamtz, the first thing I see is that long, black beard and a lot of propitiatory wrinkles at the corners of two little eyes. There was no such beard from here to Polynesia, where a beard is a valuable property. It was a unique beard, and so was the bearer of the same. A unique loafer. He made a fine art of it, or rather a sort of craft and mystery. One can understand a fellow living by cadging and small swindles in towns, in large communities of people; but Bamtz managed to do that trick in the wilderness, to loaf on the outskirts of the virgin forest.

‘He understood how to ingratiate himself with the natives. He would arrive in some settlement up a river, make a present of a cheap carbine or a pair of shoddy binoculars, or something of that sort, to the Rajah, or the head man, or the principal trader, and on the strength of that gift ask for a house, posing mysteriously as a very special trader. He would spin them no end of yarns, live on the fat of the land for a while, and then do some mean swindle or other—or else they would get tired of him and ask him to quit. He had been known to loaf up and down the wilderness as far north as the Gulf of Tonkin.^* Neither did he disdain a spell of civilization from time to time. And it was while loafing and cadging in Saïgon, bearded and dignified (he gave himself out there as a bookkeeper), that he came across Laughing Anne.

‘The less said of her history the better, but something must be said. We may safely suppose there was very little heart left in her famous laugh when Bamtz spoke first to her in some low café. She was stranded in Saïgon with precious little money and in great trouble about a kid she had, a boy of five or six.

‘A fellow I just remember, whom they called Pearler Harry, had brought her out into those parts—from Australia, I believe. He brought her out and then dropped her, and she remained knocking about here and there, known to most of us by sight, at any rate. Everybody in the Archipelago had heard of Laughing Anne. She had really a pleasant silvery laugh always at her disposal, so to speak, but it wasn’t enough apparently to make her fortune. The poor creature was ready to stick to any half-decent man if he would only let her, but she always got dropped, as it might have been expected.

‘To pick up with Bamtz was coming down pretty low in the world even from a material point of view. She had been always decent, in her way, whereas Bamtz was, not to mince words, an abject sort of creature. On the other hand that bearded loafer, who looked much more like a pirate than a bookkeeper, was not a brute. He was gentle, rather, even in his speech. And then despair, like misfortune, makes us acquainted with strange bedfellows. For she may well have despaired. She was no longer young—you know. They vanished from Saïgon together. And, of course, nobody cared what had become of them.

‘Six months later Davidson experienced a shock. It was that, no less. He came in to the Mirrah Settlement. It was the very first time he had been up that creek, where no European vessel had ever been seen before. A Javanese passenger he had on board offered him fifty dollars to call in there—it must have been some very particular business—and Davidson consented to try. It was a small settlement. Some sixty houses, most of them built on piles over the river, the rest scattered in the long grass; the usual pathway at the back; the forest hemming in the clearing and smothering what there might have been of air into a dead, hot, stagnation.