Came the devil month, crawling torrid day by day to the Devil’s Jubilee when all hungry and sad spirits are solemnly sent back to Hell. His little wife was heavy upon her feet, but went on cutting cloth; Big Dog Tsou had booked a bed for her at the hospital, wishing all to be done in a modern manner. He bought tins of Brand’s chicken essence, and followed the doctor’s advice religiously, but also let his wife paste charms and invocations in yellow paper above doors and windows, and mirrors at the entrance. He went into Singapore and bought soft gamgee cloth for nappies as he had seen upon the white babies of his clients. But he bought nothing else, lest the devils be aware of the new life sleeping; and he put the cloth away, saying loudly it was for shirts.

And so he revolved his little world of happiness and absorption with the woman carrying the child that was coming, absurdly reassured against the fear of that other world, the world of the Movement, once so full of power and triumph and now empty of meaning. And made all preparations within his power to the limit of tempting fate; but was never prepared for what he had prepared to happen:

Not expecting the smiling face of Pang, the detective, so friendly but for the too-white flash of too many teeth in too bared a grin; not expecting Pang, and the three other men, two detectives and the informer, a thin sallow-faced youth walking negligently whose hair thick with oil was held in place with a large aluminium clip.

Big Dog Tsou was standing behind his table, heaped with cottons and silks and nylons. The young coffee-shop waiter looked at him indifferently and looked away again, a little over his shoulder, at the wall. This look, like the kiss of Judas, betrayed Big Dog Tsou, but might buy his own freedom. ‘Okay,’ said Pang, grinning.

So the time had come, the end that was waiting since the beginning in the rubber trees when Meng, the latex weigher, had put up his hands begging mercy and obtained none. Only it was another Big Dog Tsou who had lifted the changkol till the screaming had stopped, indissoluble in body from the man now smiling for the last time, horribly, smiling with his world ebbing and dissolving as the detectives closed upon him, and who could not, did not believe that he was the same man until he heard his little child-wife scream and scream.

*  *  *

It held spirits of earth, the stolid ship lurching through flaccid green-oil sea, its black and orange prow sprouting phosphorescent arches on the night waters of the southern ocean.