orously each
day, and led nowhere. It all led nowhere. Within each house was the
wearied, stupid wife of some petty official, and sometimes there were
stupid, pallid children as well, tended by convicts on parole. Nowhere
could he turn to find intellectual refreshment. The community offered
nothing--there was no society--just the dull daily greetings, the
dull, commonplace comments on island doings or not doings, for all lay
under the spell of isolation, under the pall of the great, oppressive,
overwhelming heat. How deadly it all was, the monotonous life, the
isolation, the lack of interests and occupation. As he passed along, a
frowzy woman in a Mother Hubbard greeted him from a verandah and asked
him to enter. Years ago she had come out fresh and blooming, and now
she was prematurely aged, fat and stupid--more stupid, perhaps, than
the rest. Yet somehow, because there was nothing else to do, Mercier
pushed open the flimsy bamboo gate, walked up the gravelled path, and
flung himself dejectedly upon a chaise longue which was at hand. And
the woman talked to him, asked him how many cattle had come over that
morning, whether they were yet unloaded, when they would be finally
landed and led to the slaughter pens a little way inland. It was all
so gross, so banal, yet it was all there was of incident in the day,
and most clays were still more barren, with not even these paltry
events to discuss. And he felt that he was sinking to the level of
these people, he who had dreamed of high romance, of the mystery of
the Far Eastern Tropics! And this was what it meant--what it had come
to! A fat woman in a Mother Hubbard asking him how many bullocks had
come in that day, and when they would be ready to kill and eat!

She clapped together her small, fat hands, and a servant entered, and
she ordered grenadine and soda and liqueurs, and pushed towards him a
box of cheap cigarettes. Where was her charm? Why had he married her,
her husband--who was at the moment in the Administrator's bureau,
compiling useless statistics concerning the petty revenues of the
prison colony? But he was just like her, in his way. All the men were
run to seed, and all their women too. And these were the only women on
the island, these worn, pale, bloated wives who led an idle life in
the blazing heat. Seven such women, all told. He relapsed into
silence, and she likewise fell silent, there being nothing more to
get nor give. They were all gone, intellectual