CHAPTER II
The letter, there could be no doubt, was addressed to me. This fact, apparently so doubtful, I was careful to verify at once. And so far as English can be plain it told me to go to the Moluccas. Nor was its purpose merely abusive and figurative, as would be the letter of a friend. The letter was typewritten on a commercial form; it was direct and curt; it gave telephone and reference numbers in case I wished to answer back. The letter advised me to pack up, and the place it told me to go to lies—as anyone may see who uses a magnifying glass—between Celebes and New Guinea. But it would take more than a business letter, however formal, to compel us into a belief that we are to travel to a place with a name which can be spelled out only with a strong glass. You experiment with such news on your friends. They will not contradict you; they will be too polite. They will merely stare for an instant, and perhaps nod as though they saw good reason for hoping that you would soon get over this little trouble. Curious things happen to people after war, of course, but time works wonders. That was how they took it from me. It was no good trying to persuade them that this sudden revelation which had come to me by post, this wild dream disguised as a business letter (in exactly the silly way of a dream), suggested anything more than the need of rest and quiet in a room with primrose walls and windows opening south.
Of course. What else could a man expect of the straightforward, practical minds of his friends? In my best moments I myself laughed at the letter. Though I admit that I played with the pleasing dream the letter had aroused. I used the lens on the chart secretly. I stopped work now and then to think it over. I asked one or two sailors whether they knew the Moluccas; but they appeared to wish to avoid such a subject, as though this sort of talk was childish. Nevertheless, it became plain that so extraordinary a portent as that letter could not be treated lightly. Sometimes, when alone—for it was natural that I did not wish the puerile act to be witnessed in such earnest days of reconstruction as these—I took down the Malay Archipelago. Then I found, despite the urgency of our times, it was natural to drop at once on the very place where Wallace becomes, for a man of science, almost lyrical from his boat over the sea meadows of Amboina. And yet that chanting prose passage appeared to settle it. By artificial light in an English winter it was ridiculous. When we know the world to be what it is, who is going to find faith in an open boat afloat in a transparency where sponges and corals are on the floor, and fishes as bright as parrots dart among fronds in the sunlight far below the keel?
It was no good. Ternate and Banda faded away toward the days of Henry the Navigator. The Portuguese, English, Dutch, and Spanish navigators of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries knew how to find them; but not one of my friends who, for whatever privileged reason, might advise me to go to Hades or anywhere, could also readily separate the Moluccas from the Pleiades. The Spice Islands are forgotten. So I was unable to take that business instruction seriously. Wallace, with his outburst over his sea meadows, canceled the letter for me. The mirage dissolved, in the way of dreams that are fair—dissolved reluctantly, like one’s faith in a Golden Age—vanished! What to us in Europe are islands poised in a visionary sea, a sea vast and mute, Paradise set in Eternity? Well, we know what they are. Beauty of that kind is merely a stock of sensational stuff, which is safe and easy for the use of hearty novelists and short-story writers who require, to make their books move at all, pirates, trepang, beach-combers, copra, head-hunters, schooners full of rice, and similar matter which easily takes coal-tar dyes in the rapid output of bright and lusty fudge. Otherwise they do not exist. Nor did the conquest of space, as it is called, by flying and wireless telegraphy, give me any heart. Those wonders of human progress brought such islands no nearer to me than they were to Plymouth in Drake’s time. Do we imagine we are gods, and may order the world to be re-created superiorly to a geometrical design of petrol tanks and telephone stations? We forget that gods would never do anything of the kind. The gods may be, and perhaps are, anything we choose to make them, but they should be allowed more sense than that. Are we able, with all our aids to progress, to conjure apparitions like those sea meadows any nearer to us? They are where they were, if ever they were anywhere. They are in the same world as the Hesperides. We see them only in idleness, as we see mankind at peace, and the star again over Bethlehem. No flying machine will ever reach the Hesperides. You will never, even in the quiet of midnight when hopefully listening in, hear a whisper from that seclusion. How it is some lucky men become assured, and sometimes quite suddenly and without the aid of wireless, the encyclopedias, or any help of ours, of such islands, of such sanctuary from the deadening uproar of error and folly, and so are immune from fogs of every kind, the lessons of the war, the gravest of political disclosures, revolutions, signs of the times, mysticism, and anything the public seems urgently to want, is a wonder to me; but there are such men, and I wish I knew whether they are really mad, or whether their bright serenity is only madness when compared with our practical cynicism and our sane motives of enlightened self-interest.
Yet even we ourselves at times—and there is no serene brightness of madness about us—are startled now and then by a hint of easy escape, as though an unknown door somewhere had opened on light and music which we do not know. Where did that come from? The door closes before we can be sure so curious a light and strange a sound were more than our own hope deceiving itself. And dreary experience has taught us that it is wasting time to look for that door. Either it does not exist or we cannot find it. So that letter was a release, though in a way far inferior to the momentary escape of celestial music. It pretended there was a door. I could fancy a decision had been made in my favor in that invisible sphere where our circumstances are devised, those little incidents which move us this way and that without our ever knowing why. And other hints continued to drop through my letter box, all at the same angle of incidence. The last one was more than a hint. It named a ship, a place of embarkation, and a day. The day was not far off, either.
This began to make me feel acutely nervous. There could be hardly a doubt that I myself was designated. But could I really accept this mysterious decree? I could not, and I did not. Man never accepts his fate. He has a faith, which nothing ever shakes, that his habits are stronger than destiny. He believes that from the fortress of his daily routine, within which he feels secure, the urgent messengers from the gods will recoil, baffled. Nevertheless, I felt certain by now that one of those dangerous messengers had assaulted my citadel again, so I arranged about me a few mascots, for luck. If that messenger forced his way in, then I was ready for him.
A final imperative knock came at last. No doubt about it. It was on the very day, I noticed, which fate had indicated. Others in that room stood up at the sound, and looked at me. I could see they knew for whom the messenger had come. Apparently the hour had struck. My routine had fallen down. It was a cab-driver who had knocked. And not till I saw some of my mascots, which were traveling bags, already on his chariot, did I look back at my porch and understand that that cab was to take me over the first stage to the Moluccas. Was I exalted at that moment? I shall not say. But what the deuce, I said to myself, as I climbed into the cab, do the blessed sponges of the Pacific matter to me? Have the presiding gods, I silently exclaimed, ever heard me complain about my pleasing suburb? What have I done? But the cabman had a face like the shutter of an empty house. He was clearly in the conspiracy to get me out of it. He drove on.