Moreover, it was a hygienic precaution.  Worn wide open in front, a short jacket of some airy silken stuff floated from his shoulders.  His fluffy, fair hair, thin at the top, curled slightly at the sides; a carefully arranged mustache, an ungarnished forehead, the gleam of low patent shoes peeping under the wide bottom of trowsers cut straight from the same stuff as the gossamer coat, completed a figure recalling, with its sash, a pirate chief of romance, and at the same time the elegance of a slightly bald dandy indulging, in seclusion, a taste for unorthodox costume.

It was his evening get-up.  The proper time for the Sofala to arrive at Batu Beru was an hour before sunset, and he looked picturesque, and somehow quite correct too, walking at the water’s edge on the background of grass slope crowned with a low long bungalow with an immensely steep roof of palm thatch, and clad to the eaves in flowering creepers.  While the Sofala was being made fast he strolled in the shade of the few trees left near the landing-place, waiting till he could go on board.  Her white men were not of his kind.  The old Sultan (though his wistful invasions were a nuisance) was really much more acceptable to his fastidious taste.  But still they were white; the periodical visits of the ship made a break in the well-filled sameness of the days without disturbing his privacy.  Moreover, they were necessary from a business point of view; and through a strain of preciseness in his nature he was irritated when she failed to appear at the appointed time.

The cause of the irregularity was too absurd, and Massy, in his opinion, was a contemptible idiot.  The first time the Sofala reappeared under the new agreement swinging out of the bend below, after he had almost given up all hope of ever seeing her again, he felt so angry that he did not go down at once to the landing-place.  His servants had come running to him with the news, and he had dragged a chair close against the front rail of the veranda, spread his elbows out, rested his chin on his hands, and went on glaring at her fixedly while she was being made fast opposite his house.  He could make out easily all the white faces on board.  Who on earth was that kind of patriarch they had got there on the bridge now?

At last he sprang up and walked down the gravel path.  It was a fact that the very gravel for his paths had been imported by the Sofala.  Exasperated out of his quiet superciliousness, without looking at anyone right or left, he accosted Massy straightway in so determined a manner that the engineer, taken aback, began to stammer unintelligibly.  Nothing could be heard but the words:  “Mr. Van Wyk . . .  Indeed, Mr. Van Wyk . . .  For the future, Mr. Van Wyk”—­and by the suffusion of blood Massy’s vast bilious face acquired an unnatural orange tint, out of which the disconcerted coal-black eyes shone in an extraordinary manner.

“Nonsense.  I am tired of this.  I wonder you have the impudence to come alongside my jetty as if I had it made for your convenience alone.”