CHAPTER XIII
The trains of Java move only by day. The island is of great length, and in some areas its surface is subject without warning to dissolution by flood or earthquake. I was uncertain whether I ought to return to the ship and face the mosquitoes, or risk the failure of a locomotive to coincide with my ship at the other end of the land. When in doubt, the risk should be put into the future. The longer the shot, the more likely Fate may miss us. For a time, however, after I boarded a train at Batavia, this indolent reasoning seemed to have a catch in it. Java appeared to be of slight interest in the initial stage of the journey; and of the four or more languages which are common in the island I had but a faint knowledge of one, and even that amount of knowledge was denied me by those who spoke it. As for the Dutch tongue, the animated conversations of my fellow passengers exiled me as far as a foreigner ever feels his distance from home. Yet how many of our experiences are desolating simply because of our way of looking at them? I remember one day when my Javan train was stopped in a jungle. Floods had washed away lengths of the track ahead of us. That day began to fall toward the quick sunset of the tropics, but the train remained as still as the giant leaves which hung over us. Scarlet dragonflies were hawking about a pool below my window, and above the pool, high in a tangle of leaves, an ape, who appeared to suppose he was securely ambushed, eyed us in imbecile curiosity. Were we to be buried all night there? I could not learn. I tried to find out, but, though possibly my acquaintance with Malay could lead to a railway accident, it will never be able to discuss it.
Then the rain began again with a steady force which made me fear for other sections of that line, and for the coincidence of a future train with my ship. The other end of the island was very far. But I had only enough words to secure coffee and food. I could learn nothing. An elderly and severe Dutch lady was sitting near me. She had been reading closely a large volume—probably of affairs concerning the Seventh Day Adventists—since the morning, with hardly a lift of her face. The long halt, the continued rain, the gloomy forest in which we stood without hope, the night we should probably spend in it, were nothing to her. She read on, as though she had secured for her own eye alone a veritable judgment or two from the yet unpublished Decrees of Doom. Compared with her countenance, that unknown forest darkening to absolute night in the rain was a May-time pleasaunce. Anyhow, I could easily presume that she had no more ability to communicate with me than with a Hottentot. A native brought me food, was paid, and went away. The lady then put down her book, frowned at me over the top of her glasses, and remarked with slow distinction: “You have paid far too much for that. Let me see your change.” (Mechanically and meekly I displayed some insignificant coins.) “So. Far too much you have paid. It is not useful. It also makes it very bad for other travelers.”
My embarrassed eyes fell before the direct attack of her steel spectacles, and I glanced apologetically at her book. It was the Swiss Family Robinson, in a primitive English edition which resembled a veritable fragment of a London home I have not seen since I was a child, and shall never see again.
It is as easy as cheating the innocence of a wondering babe to get credence at home for tales of travel when they are of tigers, men with tails, cannibal dwarfs, head-hunters, islands where the women are so lovely that it would be wicked to give the latitude and longitude, and South Sea adventures more sensational than could be devised by a select committee of desperate theatrical managers. But who would accept stories of surprises by the plain truth? Yet it is fair to claim that even the Robinson family on its obliging island never had a more incredible adventure than my own with the Dutch lady in the equatorial forest.
I left Batavia for Sourabaya without regret, but with no hope, except that my ship would be at Sourabaya to take me away. The orchestras which played negro music to Dutchmen eating messes of rice, the cinema drama which made one ashamed of belonging to a better race, the advertisement posters that might have been continuations of the hoardings of Ostend, had shattered another dream. I settled down to regard its bright fragments in patience and resignation. Yet too soon! For there may be more delightful islands in the world than Java, but the evidence for them will have to be very well assembled. The likeness of some scenes in Java to the colored pictures of the Garden of Eden in an illustrated Bible of Victorian days is ridiculous. You suspect, as I did the monkeys beside the Tanjong Priok railway, that those fair prospects are artfully arranged by a clever government for the delectation of the credulous. But there are too many of them. They continue uninterrupted in fortuitous variety. Not far from Batavia a high serration of mountains appeared in the distance, so very blue in that bright day that it was easy to believe a scene-shifter was at work upon the background for the staging of a lavish tropical romance. Soon we began to wind among the heights and to cross dramatic ravines. Very cleverly done it was, too. I liked that brown child dressed only in a hat as big as a parasol, who sat on the back of a buffalo, resting one elbow on his living couch while watching our train go by. That was a cunning touch. Just beyond him was a group of amber houses, of bamboo thatched with palm fronds. They were, as you have guessed, screened by the green pennants of plantains, and were shadowed by cocoanut palms; and—as they would, of course, in such a composition—they stood on the brow of a hill which descended in steps of radiant emerald, in terraces of young rice, to a plain so far below us that the river there was only a silver wire threading checker-work too distinct and vivid to be anything but the masterpiece of an imaginative decorator. Beyond that plain one saw then the full artful value of the blue crags of the volcanic range with which the picture began.
He Had Skimmed about Singapore in a Jinrickshaw All the Morning
The orchards of Kent and California are not more assiduously cultivated than is most of the island of Java. The Javanese agriculturalists, ever since they had a civilized government—and that was early in the Christian era—have had to make their fields meet the extortions of so many conquerors before they dared to call any rice their own that now they deserve the glowing testimonial of all directors of empire and great business affairs. Their training has been long and thorough. Hindu, Mohammedan, and European each has taught them the full penalty for Adam’s fall; and so the habit of very early rising, and of a long day in the sun, with but a meager expectation of any reward, give them the right aspect of sound and reliable workers. You cannot rise at an hour in the interior of Java, unless you never sleep, which will get you on the road sooner than the country folk going to market. My first shock with a motor-car in the mountains of central Java came through just avoiding, long before dawn, a man carrying several thirty-foot bamboo poles. It was so early that I thought he must be an Oriental student of William Cobbet, or a corresponding member of one of the American colleges which make one better than one’s fellow at a nominal charge. In keeping his poles out of the wind screen we nearly ran down some silent children, discovered instantly by the headlight, who were carrying trays of fruit. This made us careful; but only just in time, for we had then to move cautiously in a road full of the sudden ghosts of dumb folk who were getting about the business of the day which had not yet called them. I never saw people of the Malay race in any other island who were nearly so finely trained as the Javanese land workers. There could not have been a better demonstration of the value of learning one’s place in life early—say not less than ten generations back. With plenty of time and few interruptions it is clearly possible for a superior caste to evolve a race of skilled workers who will do everything and yet expect nothing. These people have terraced the hill-slopes of Java with padi fields till the gradient is past human skill. Vast landscapes that once were dark with jungle are now spectacular gardens. The decorative terraces, the sawahs, bearing growing crops, have caught the hills in what appears to be a bright and infinite mesh. Nothing can be lost on those hills now, nothing of their immense fertility, not a drop of rain. Elaborate irrigation works deflect and address myriads of natural rills to fill with water the hollow steps of the slopes, which shine with rice. The rills grow from threads to docile streams, descending disciplined courses from high altitudes to the main rivers in the plains. Humanity has nothing to learn from the ant. Its patient industry must astonish the angels.
Through such scenery my train meandered all one day, as though consciously it intended to make me apologize to Java. There was fun to be got even in guessing from the color or form of the distant crops their nature—rice that was just planted, was a month old, was just grown, was in the ear, was sere stubble; and yams, cassava, tea, coffee, rubber, teak, sugar, tobacco, pulse. The country folk themselves, conscious of their ornate setting, were dressed for the part. A group of these women, moving in a musical comedy, would give a manager complete assurance in the matter of his box-office receipts. They are so modest and polite that they never stare at a stranger; though with such figures, eyes, and coloring, I doubt whether he would object greatly if they did. Their manners are perfect, except that most of them chew betel nut and casually make railway platforms and footpaths startling with red maculations. It is distressing to see a beautiful woman laugh, when her opened mouth looks as though a savage blow had just wounded it.
The railroads of Java are a novelty in inconsequential idling, and they have so many surprises that are not in the schedules and the guide books that I became the less anxious about my ship—there are other ships—and forgave the posters of Batavia. Javanese trains should not be hurried. That would spoil their sauntering. I began to regret there were other islands of Indonesia to which I was bound. In the midst of huts and foliage which pretended to be real the train would come to a standstill. What was the name of this village which no one applauded? The old sport of hunting for the name of a strange railway station acquired a new zest; but as a rule I could find only the Malay word for a famous soap. To add to my bewilderment everybody there was looking at my train, which clearly was the real event. We had an audience of people so decorative that they must have been attired in our honor. A diminutive brown lady in a yellow wrapper, with elaborate combs in her hair, held up to my window a tray with fruit, chocolate, and less well authenticated sweetmeats, and a small selection of the novels of Miss Dell; and by her dawdling smile I judged that she had sold Miss Dell’s romances to Englishmen before ever my train was there.