“I myself didn’t quite know at first why Dorrien wanted to stay out there. One would have to have more general curiosity than the Dorriens appeared to, in order to find Soerabaya interesting. I knew that if his wife weren’t along, he’d drag me into every kind of native dive; but I knew, too, that he hadn’t come for the dives. He didn’t seem to be very much in love with the place. Who could be? He swore at everything, beginning with the monkeys and ending with the prices. He just didn’t want to go home--as if he knew he’d be put to bed in the dark and have to go to sleep, when he got there. Queer guy! You remember how big he was? He had a trick of looking round any room as if it were too small for him. And that voice of his, with never a modulation, and those red-brown eyes that seemed to take in everything and give back no comment? Then, one night, I thought I had struck it. He came across to my corner of porch about midnight. “‘My wife’s gone to bed, and I think she’s gone to sleep,’ he said. ‘There’s no sleep in me, and I shall swear at the lizards if I turn in. I should wake her. You know what these fool partitions are. Let’s talk. You never have anything to do.’ It wasn’t very polite, but it was quite true. I haven’t anything to do except see what things are like. When I’ve made an exhaustive study of all the degrees of civilization, I’m going home to vote. I don’t see that, until then, I’m equipped to. “‘All right,’ I said. ‘I never sleep, I never write letters, and I never criticize. Go ahead.’ “Odd thing: that happened to be just what he wanted--to ‘go ahead’ indefinitely. I learned a lot of things about Dorrien that night. I made out from his talk that he must have mucked around a good deal with tuberculosis at home, but he’d dropped it. He told me some queer things about tuberculosis germs, but he had got tired of it. Exotic diseases were more in his line. He asked the most extraordinary number of questions about beri-beri and things like that. I never quite understood it all; but I think the commonness of tuberculosis bored him. The antipodes take men’s imaginations in different ways--who should know if I don’t?--and they had simply taken his, across all the world, by their physical malignancies. He didn’t give a copper cash for what you folk call psychology, but his brown eyes used to rake the meanest little streets in Soerabaya for any sign of disease. It might have been unpleasant if he hadn’t been such a loud-voiced, businesslike chap. If you ask me, I should say he had come to the East just as a sportsman goes to Africa for big game. There’s good hunting in Canada, I’m told, but some people want to hunt hippopotami just because hippopotami have such queer complexions. Dorrien could get interested in what the human body is capable of, regardless of unpleasantness. But he could as well have stayed at home and stuck to cancer, if he had wanted mere unpleasantness.