Since this Note is mostly concerned with personal contacts and the
origins of the persons in the tale, I am bound also to speak of Lena,
because if I were to leave her out it would look like a slight; and
nothing would be further from my thoughts than putting a slight on Lena.
If of all the personages involved in the "mystery of Samburan" I have
lived longest with Heyst (or with him I call Heyst) it was at her, whom
I call Lena, that I have looked the longest and with a most sustained
attention. This attention originated in idleness for which I have a
natural talent. One evening I wandered into a cafe, in a town not of the
tropics but of the South of France. It was filled with tobacco smoke,
the hum of voices, the rattling of dominoes, and the sounds of strident
music. The orchestra was rather smaller than the one that performed
at Schomberg's hotel, had the air more of a family party than of an
enlisted band, and, I must confess, seemed rather more respectable than
the Zangiacomo musical enterprise. It was less pretentious also, more
homely and familiar, so to speak, insomuch that in the intervals when
all the performers left the platform one of them went amongst the
marble tables collecting offerings of sous and francs in a battered
tin receptacle recalling the shape of a sauceboat. It was a girl.
Her detachment from her task seems to me now to have equalled or even
surpassed Heyst's aloofness from all the mental degradations to which
a man's intelligence is exposed in its way through life. Silent and
wide-eyed she went from table to table with the air of a sleep-walker
and with no other sound but the slight rattle of the coins to attract
attention. It was long after the sea-chapter of my life had been closed
but it is difficult to discard completely the characteristics of half
a lifetime, and it was in something of the Jack-ashore spirit that
I dropped a five-franc piece into the sauceboat; whereupon the
sleep-walker turned her head to gaze at me and said "Merci, Monsieur"