The new assistant arrived in the afternoon.
The story opens simply and with pertinent information. Everything of importance that occurs in the story moves forward from this point. Although nobody might have guessed it from his appearance, the new assistant spells trouble for an enterprise which is running like clockwork.
The river flowed ominously silent. It was like a great serpent gliding with sluggish movement towards the sea. And the trees of the jungle over the water were heavy with a breathless menace.
The sensation of a menace arriving to threaten the carefully constructed Garden of Eden that Warburton has built for himself is an example of foreshadowing. The river is a recurring symbolic motif identified specifically with Warburton’s view of himself as kind of exiled lord managing an important estate.
“I always dress for dinner.”
And not just dress in the sense of putting on clothes. Dress in the sense of a white dinner jacket, shirt with high collar, silk socks and leather shoes. Mr. Warburton puts on the Ritz every single night when he dines, even if it is just him alone in a sweaty bungalow in Borneo. The fancy dress is a part of his obsessive-compulsive behavior to hold onto British traditions as a means of convincing others—but mostly himself—that he has not and, indeed, could not go native. (Spoiler alert: he has, but not in a crazy Mistah Kurtz kind of way.)
“I was what was called a Colonial. I hadn’t been to a public school and I had no influence.”
Mr. Cooper is the aforementioned new assistant and he comes to the island from another one on which he was born—Barbados—with an enormous chip on his shoulder. It is easy enough to understand his resentment toward the privileged Warburton who once palled around the casinos of Europe with the future King of England. What is more difficult to discern is Cooper’s equally acidic disdain for his fellow Colonialists whom his assistance is helping to manage.
“You are very ignorant.”
After Cooper makes an especially offensive display of his uninformed racism, Warburton can no longer hold back an opinion that Cooper should even by then have already gleaned. Warburton does not like Cooper and to his credit, this dislike has nothing to do with differences in class. Warburton may well be a snob, but if so then he is an enlightened one and he quickly recognizes a distant cousin when he sees one. Cooper doesn’t realize it, but he is himself a snob. And most certainly not an enlightened one.
“You’re very lucky to get a boy like that.”
Another instance of foreshadowing and perhaps the most obvious instance of irony, though that can only be gleaned afterward. The “boy” to which Warburton is referencing is a house boy; a local native who becomes Cooper’s paid servant. It is the employment of this young man and Warburton’s part in Cooper getting “lucky” that will transform this exchange into the plot’s turning point and edge the story inexorably toward violence.
“I borrowed your Times. I brought them back again. I knew you wouldn’t mind.”
And here is the point at which the already brittle relationship between Warburton and Cooper breaks down completely and thus becomes another element in unstoppable march toward tragedy. The Times which Cooper is references represent another of Warburton’s OCD rituals to maintain his connection to England. The news they carry are six weeks old, but his ritual of reading them in precise order of date is heavily invested in neurosis and to some may seem precariously close to psychosis. The point being that Mr. Cooper could not be more wrong about anything. Mr. Warburton does mind. Mr. Warburton minds very, very much.
“The Malays are very sensitive to injury and ridicule. They are passionate and revengeful. It is my duty to warn you that if you drive this boy beyond a certain point you run a great risk.”
Despite their differences and despite his personal dislike of Mr. Cooper and despite the assistant stepping across a boundary considered inexcusable, Warburton reveals that above all he really is an accomplished colonial administrator in this exchange. Cooper’s relationship with his “boy” has deteriorated almost from the moment he first showed up and now is fast approaching a point of critical mass. He does what is expected of him and try to warn him of this danger, but Cooper’s response is once again to demonstrate a seemingly bottomless capacity for ignorance.
