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Updated: May 8, 2025
The white man should be despoiled with a strong hand! . . . He grew excited, spoke very loud, and his further discourse, delivered with his hand on the hilt of his sword, dealt incoherently with the honourable topics of throat-cutting, fire-raising, and with the far-famed valour of his ancestors. Babalatchi remained behind, alone with the greatness of his conceptions.
He saw there an indistinct shape of a boat, not quite alongside the landing-place. "Who speaks on the river?" asked Babalatchi, throwing a tone of surprise into his question. "A white man," answered Lingard from the canoe. "Is there not one torch in rich Lakamba's campong to light a guest on his landing?" "There are no torches and no men. I am alone here," said Babalatchi, with some hesitation.
With a contemptuous gesture she seemed to fling unutterable scorn on Almayer's weak-minded aversion to sudden bloodshed. "If he has the wish but not the strength, then what do we fear?" asked Babalatchi, after a short silence during which they both listened to Almayer's loud talk till it subsided into the murmur of general conversation. "What do we fear?" repeated Babalatchi again.
But when the whole household was reposing, Babalatchi and Lakamba passed silent amongst sleeping groups to the riverside, and, taking a canoe, paddled off stealthily on their way to the dilapidated guard-hut in the old rice-clearing.
His lips moved in an inaudible whisper and the beads passed through his fingers with a dry click. All waited in respectful silence. "I shall come if my ship can enter this river," said Abdulla at last, in a solemn tone. "It can, Tuan," exclaimed Babalatchi. "There is a white man here who . . ." "I want to see Omar el Badavi and that white man you wrote about," interrupted Abdulla.
"And he?" went on Omar, with sudden eagerness, and a drop in his voice. "Where is he? Not here. Not here!" he repeated, turning his head from side to side as if in deliberate attempt to see. "No! He is not here now," said Babalatchi, soothingly. Then, after a pause, he added very low, "But he shall soon return." "Return! O crafty one! Will he return?
"I shall not stay here any longer," broke in Babalatchi, angrily. "This is great foolishness. No woman is worth a man's life. I am an old man, and I know." He picked up his staff, and, turning to go, looked at Dain as if offering him his last chance of escape. But Dain's face was hidden amongst Nina's black tresses, and he did not see this last appealing glance.
"And do you doubt your power," he went on in a louder tone "you that to him are more beautiful than an houri of the seventh Heaven? He is your slave." "A slave does run away sometimes," she said, gloomily, "and then the master must go and seek him out." "And do you want to live and die a beggar?" asked Babalatchi, impatiently.
Babalatchi and Mrs. Almayer had listened curiously, their bodies bent and their ears turned towards the passage. At every louder shout they nodded at each other with a ridiculous affectation of scandalised propriety, and they remained in the same attitude for some time after the noise had ceased. "This is the devil of gin," whispered Mrs. Almayer.
The Rajah sat still, glaring stonily upon the table, and Babalatchi gazed curiously at the perplexed mood of the man he had served so many years through good and evil fortune. No doubt the one-eyed statesman felt within his savage and much sophisticated breast the unwonted feelings of sympathy with, and perhaps even pity for, the man he called his master.
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