Nobody cared to argue with him when he talked in this
strain. His earnestness could do no harm to anybody. There was no danger
of anyone taking seriously his dream of tropical coal, so what was the
use of hurting his feelings?
Thus reasoned men in reputable business offices where he had his entree
as a person who came out East with letters of introduction--and modest
letters of credit, too--some years before these coal-outcrops began to
crop up in his playfully courteous talk. From the first there was
some difficulty in making him out. He was not a traveller. A traveller
arrives and departs, goes on somewhere. Heyst did not depart. I met a
man once--the manager of the branch of the Oriental Banking Corporation
in Malacca--to whom Heyst exclaimed, in no connection with anything in
particular (it was in the billiard-room of the club):
"I am enchanted with these islands!"
He shot it out suddenly, a propos des bottes, as the French say, and
while chalking his cue. And perhaps it was some sort of enchantment.
There are more spells than your commonplace magicians ever dreamed of.
Roughly speaking, a circle with a radius of eight hundred miles drawn
round a point in North Borneo was in Heyst's case a magic circle. It
just touched Manila, and he had been seen there. It just touched Saigon,
and he was likewise seen there once.
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