Almayer without changing his attitude and speaking slowly, with
pauses, as if dropping his words on the floor. "As it is--what's

the use? You know where the gun is; you may take it or leave it.
Gun. Deer. Bosh! Hunt deer! Pah! It's a . . . gazelle you

are
after, my honoured guest. You want gold anklets and silk sarongs

for that game--my mightyhunter. And you won't get those for the
asking, I promise you. All day amongst the natives. A fine help

you are to me."
"You shouldn't drink so much, Almayer," said Willems, disguising

his fury under an affected drawl. "You have no head. Never had,
as far as I can remember, in the old days in Macassar. You drink

too much."
"I drink my own," retorted Almayer, lifting his head quickly and

darting an angry glance at Willems.
Those two specimens of the superior race glared at each other

savagely for a minute, then turned away their heads at the same
moment as if by previousarrangement, and both got up. Almayer

kicked off his slippers and scrambled into his hammock, which
hung between two wooden columns of the verandah so as to catch

every rare breeze of the dry season, and Willems, after standing
irresolutely by the table for a short time, walked without a word

down the steps of the house and over the courtyard towards the
little wooden jetty, where several small canoes and a couple of

big white whale-boats were made fast, tugging at their short
painters and bumping together in the swift current of the river.

He jumped into the smallest canoe, balancing himself clumsily,
slipped the rattan painter, and gave an unnecessary and violent

shove, which nearly sent him headlongoverboard. By the time he
regained his balance the canoe had drifted some fifty yards down

the river. He knelt in the bottom of his little craft and fought
the current with long sweeps of the paddle. Almayer sat up in

his hammock, grasping his feet and peering over the river with
parted lips till he made out the shadowy form of man and canoe as

they struggled past the jetty again.
"I thought you would go," he shouted. "Won't you take the gun?

Hey?" he yelled, straining his voice. Then he fell back in his
hammock and laughed to himself feebly till he fell asleep. On

the river, Willems, his eyes fixed intently ahead, swept his
paddle right and left, unheeding the words that reached him

faintly.
It was now three months since Lingard had landed Willems in

Sambir and had departedhurriedly" target="_blank" title="ad.仓促地，忙乱地">hurriedly, leaving him in Almayer's care.
The two white men did not get on well together. Almayer,

remembering the time when they both served Hudig, and when the
superior Willems treated him with offensive condescension, felt a

great dislike towards his guest. He was also jealous of
Lingard's favour. Almayer had married a Malay girl whom the old

seaman had adopted in one of his accesses of unreasoning
benevolence, and as the marriage was not a happy one from a

domestic point of view, he looked to Lingard's fortune for
compensation in his matrimonial unhappiness. The appearance of

that man, who seemed to have a claim of some sort upon Lingard,
filled him with considerableuneasiness, the more so because the

old seaman did not choose to acquaint the husband of his adopted
daughter with Willems' history, or to confide to him his

intentions as to that individual's future fate. Suspicious from
the first, Almayer discouraged Willems' attempts to help him in

his trading, and then when Willems drew back, he made, with
characteristic perverseness, a grievance of his unconcern. From

cold civility in their relations, the two men drifted into silent
hostility, then into outspoken enmity, and both wished ardently

for Lingard's return and the end of a situation that grew more
intolerable from day to day. The time dragged slowly. Willems

watched the succeeding sunrises wondering dismally whether before
the evening some change would occur in the deadly dullness of his

life. He missed the commercial activity of that existence which
seemed to him far off, irreparably lost, buried out of sight

under the ruins of his past success--now gone from him beyond the
possibility of redemption. He mooned disconsolately about

Almayer's courtyard, watching from afar, with uninterested eyes,
the up-country canoes discharging guttah or rattans, and loading

rice or European goods on the little wharf of Lingard & Co. Big
as was the extent of ground owned by Almayer, Willems yet felt

that there was not enough room for him inside those neat fences.
The man who, during long years, became accustomed to think of

himself as indispensable to others, felt a bitter and savage rage
at the cruel consciousness of his superfluity, of his

uselessness; at the cold hostilityvisible in every look of the
only white man in this barbarous corner of the world. He gnashed

his teeth when he thought of the wasted days, of the life thrown
away in the unwilling company of that peevish and suspicious

fool. He heard the reproach of his idleness in the murmurs of
the river, in the unceasing whisper of the great forests. Round

him everything stirred, moved, swept by in a rush; the earth
under his feet and the heavens above his head. The very savages

around him strove, struggled, fought, worked--if only to prolong
a miserableexistence; but they lived, they lived! And it was

only himself that seemed to be left outside the scheme of
creation in a hopeless immobility filled with tormenting anger

and with ever-stinging regret.
He took to wandering about the settlement. The afterwards

flourishing Sambir was born in a swamp and passed its youth in
malodorous mud. The houses crowded the bank, and, as if to get

away from the unhealthy shore, stepped boldly into the river,
shooting over it in a close row of bamboo platforms elevated on

high piles, amongst which the current below spoke in a soft and
unceasing plaint of murmuring eddies. There was only one path in

the whole town and it ran at the back of the houses along the
succession of blackened circular patches that marked the place of

the household fires. On the other side the virgin forest
bordered the path, coming close to it, as if to provoke

impudently any passer-by to the solution of the gloomy problem of
its depths. Nobody would accept the deceptive challenge. There

were only a few feeble attempts at a clearing here and there, but
the ground was low and the river, retiring after its yearly

floods, left on each a gradually diminishing mudhole, where the
imported buffaloes of the Bugis settlers wallowed happily during

the heat of the day. When Willems walked on the path, the
indolent men stretched on the shady side of the houses looked at

him with calm curiosity, the women busy round the cooking fires
would send after him wondering and timid glances, while the

children would only look once, and then run away yelling with
fright at the horrible appearance of the man with a red and white

face. These manifestations of childishdisgust and fear stung
Willems with a sense of absurdhumiliation; he sought in his

walks the comparativesolitude of the rudimentary clearings, but
the very buffaloes snorted with alarm at his sight, scrambled

lumberingly out of the cool mud and stared wildly in a compact
herd at him as he tried to slink unperceived along the edge of

the forest. One day, at some unguarded and sudden movement of
his, the whole herd stampeded down the path, scattered the fires,

sent the women flying with shrill cries, and left behind a track
of smashed pots, trampled rice, overturned children, and a crowd

of angry men brandishing sticks in loud-voiced pursuit. The
innocent cause of that disturbance ran shamefacedly the gauntlet

of black looks and unfriendly remarks, and hastily sought refuge
in Almayer's campong. After that he left the settlement alone.

Later, when the enforced confinement grew irksome, Willems took
one of Almayer's many canoes and crossed the main branch of the

Pantai in search of some solitary spot where he could hide his
discouragement and his weariness. He skirted in his little craft

the wall of tangled verdure, keeping in the dead water close to
the bank where the spreading nipa palms nodded their broad leaves

over his head as if in contemptuous pity of the wandering
outcast. Here and there he could see the beginnings of

chopped-out pathways, and, with the fixed idea of getting out of
sight of the busy river, he would land and follow the narrow and

winding path, only to find that it led nowhere, ending abruptly
in the discouragement of thornythickets. He would go back