'HIS HEART'S DESIRE'
They wrench my back on a red-hot rack,
They comb my nerves with wire,
They poison with pain the blood of my brain
Till the Devils of Devilry tire;
They spit from Above on the name of my Love,
They call my Love a liar;
But they can't undo the joy I knew
When I knew my Heart's Desire.The Song of the Lost Soul.—ANON.Where and when these things happened does not signify at all. The East Coast is
a long one, and the manners of the Malay Râjas who dwell thereon have suffered
but little change for centuries. Thus, both in the matter of time and of space,
there is a wide choice, and plenty of exercise may be given to the imagination.
The facts anyway are true, and they were related, in the watches of the night, to a
White Man—whose name does not matter—by two people, with whose identity
you also have no concern. One of the latter was a man whom I will call Âwang
Îtam, and the other was a woman whose name was Bêdah, or something like it.
The place in which the tale was told was an empty sailing boat which lay
beached upon a sandbank in the centre of a Malay river, and, as soon as the
White Man had scrambled up the side, the dug-out, which had brought him,
sheered off and left him.
He had come to this place by appointment, but he did not know precisely whom
he was to meet, as the assignation had been made in the secret native fashion,
which is as different from the invitation card of Europe as most things in the
East are different from white men's gear. Twice that day his attention had been
very pointedly called to this deserted sailing boat; once by an old crone who was
selling sweetstuff from door to door, and once by a young chief who had stopped
to speak to him, while passing up the street of the native town. By both of these
some reference had been made to the moon-rise and to 'a precious thing'; and