he ridge to attend something in the
nature of a wedding feast. Wang had invited them. But this was the only
occasion when any sound louder than the buzzing of insects had troubled
the profound silence of the clearing. The natives were never invited
again. Wang not only knew how to live according to conventional
proprieties, but had strong personal views as to the manner of arranging
his domestic existence. After a time Heyst perceived that Wang had
annexed all the keys. Any keys left lying about vanished after Wang had
passed that way. Subsequently some of them--those that did not belong
to the store-rooms and the empty bungalows, and could not be regarded
as the common property of this community of two--were returned to Heyst,
tied in a bunch with a piece of string. He found them one morning
lying by the side of his plate. He had not been inconvenienced by their
absence, because he never locked up anything in the way of drawers and
boxes. Heyst said nothing. Wang also said nothing. Perhaps he had always
been a taciturn man; perhaps he was influenced by the genius of the
locality, which was certainly that of silence. Till Heyst and Morrison
had landed in Black Diamond Bay, and named it, that side of Samburan had
hardly ever heard the sound of human speech. It was easy to be taciturn
with Heyst, who had plunged himself into an abyss of meditation over
books, and remained in it till the shadow of Wang falling across the
page, and the sound of a rough, low voice uttering the Malay word
"makan," would force him to climb out to a meal.

Wang in his native province in China might have been an aggressively,
sensitively genial person; but in Samburan he had clothed himself in
a mysterious stolidity and did not seem to resent not being spoken to
except in single words, at a rate which did not average half a dozen per
day. And he gave no more than he got. It is to be presumed that if he
suffered he made up for it with the Alfuro woman. He always went back to
her at the first fall of dusk, vanishing from the bungalow suddenly at
this hour, like a sort of topsy-turvy, day-hunting, Chinese ghost with a
white jacket and a pigtail. Presently, giving way to a Chinaman's ruling
passion, he could be observed breaking the ground near his hut, between
the mighty stumps of felled trees, with a miner's pickaxe. After a
time, he discovered a rusty but serviceable spade in one of the empty
store-rooms, and it is to be supposed that he got on fa