He stopped suddenly. Desmond shrank back slowly against the wall of the bunk, his eyes staring on them as a man stares on death, a fleck of froth on his lips. There was no sound in the shack but the quick breathing of four men.
Ransome said that you might pick up specimens of all the unprettiest afflictions of body and soul in Herares ten years ago. He also said that when he saw any particularly miserable bit of human wreckage, white or brown, adrift on the languid tides of life about the jetty, he always said without further inquiry, “It’s Henkel’s house you’re looking for. Turn to the left, and keep on turning to the left. And if God knew what went on under these trees, He’d have mercy on you. . . . .”
The house was the last house on the last road of the town. You won’t find it now, for no one would live in it after Henkel, and in a season or two the forest swamped it as the sea swamps a child’s boat on the beach. It was a white house in a garden, and after rain the scent of vanilla and stephanotis rose round it like a fog. The fever rose round it like a fog, too, and that’s why Henkel got it so cheap. No fever touched him. He lived there alone with a lot of servants—Indians. And they were all wrecks, Ransome said, broken down from accident or disease—wrecks that no one else would employ. He got them very cheap. When they died he got more.
Henkel was a large, soft, yellowish man. Ransome said, “I don’t mind a man being large and yellowish, or even soft, in reason, but when he shines too, I draw the line.” Henkel had thick hands with bent fingers, and large brown eyes. He was a Hollander Jew, and in that place he stood apart. For he didn’t drink, or gamble, or fight, or even buy rubber. He was just a large, peaceful person who bought things cheap.
He was very clever. He always knew the precise moment, the outmost low-water mark, of a bargain. His house was full of things he’d bought cheap from wrecked companies or dying men, from the mahogany logs in the patio to the coils of telegraph wire in the loft. His clothes never fitted for they belonged to men whom the fever had met on the way up the Mazzaron, and who had, therefore, no further use for clothes. The only things Henkel ever paid a fair price for were butterflies.
