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 th