CHAPTER XL
September 10.—I suppose I am as interested in Singapore as in any place I have ever seen. It is, sometimes, a fearful interest. Singapore seethes with human life, and can be as fascinating and repellent as an exposed formicarium where the urgent streaming of instinctive protoplasm, even if you are a naturalist, can be worse than the silence of the Sphinx. In the name of God, why is it, what is it doing? You get the idea that even the rank smells of Singapore are of its fecundity. Such odors are beyond merely ordinary carelessness. The gush of its life is from no failing source. It spurts and eddies in lusty brown swashes unceasingly through every street and alley. That tide is never low; it is always rising higher. China need not be a military nation; she merely overflows into neighboring lands. Yet perhaps humanity anywhere in the mass will not bear looking at for long. It is dominant on earth, but its movements are as unreasonable and incalculable as seismic convulsions. The mob of any great city flattens and nullifies reason, even in reasonable men. The movements of the herd are more infectious than plague, and can be as ruinous; for the instinct to self-preservation, so easily moved by fear, may be the same as social suicide, and may wreck all that fine minds have accomplished. Of an evening, though, quiet within the bungalow of some English friends which overlooks the city’s delightful botanical gardens—a house where I have been sheltered, often to my embarrassment, as though my desires in Singapore’s broad and undirected flood of human bodies were of importance—this dread of the inscrutable mass movements of humanity was lessened. After all, fine minds, I could see, have a persistence which is as natural as the instinctive movements of the herd. The lady of the house somehow maintained in that alien place the repose of an English garden, and the young men, occupied by the problems of wide commercial and administrative affairs, appeared to me to be as apart from the trend of mankind’s instinctive movements as though they were not quite of that stock. (Another dream, evoked by the evening’s peace and well-being?) After a bewildering day of mine in the alleys at the back of the city where the enigmatic stream of humanity give no sign of its destiny, except the temples to Dragons and to Siva, to Buddha and Mohammed, in that cool bungalow one young man would talk of the English poets, of the studies of Orientalists, and of Amiens cathedral, as though a unanimous folly of all mankind that should presently rise to founder the whole achievement of industrious human hands would still leave high and immune those peaks from which a few men have surmised a day not yet come. And his companion, whose habit it was after dinner to get into Malay dress, appeared to be even unaware that his fellows are liable to destructive manias—though he himself counted as a survivor of the first affair at Gheluvelt. As a Malay official, he is now, apparently, forgetful of Europe; he was silent when we talked of the West; but when the forests were mentioned, and the language and lore of the Malay peasants, and the annals of this corner of Asia, you might have supposed that he was aware of nothing but the jungle and the bazaars. Yet common humanity remains as unconscious of the thoughts of fine minds as it is of the eccentricities of the earth’s polar axes—those little wabbles which are supposed to give this planet its alternating glacial and genial periods.
September 11.—Sailed for London at four o’clock this afternoon. The Patroclus has even a nursery, which reminds me that this will be my first long voyage in a big passenger ship. I was taken to my cabin—passing a barber’s shop on my journey—and afterward I had to stop in an alleyway to think out the route before I knew how to return to my own address in this community. I did find it, after taking several false turnings—for I was determined not to ask a steward to take me home—and was sitting there nursing the conviction that in such a town one could drop overboard and it would never be known, when a stiff little man came in and looked at me as if he were determined to be able to swear to me when the charge was at last formulated. He did not have to admit he was the master of that ship. I could see he was. And now it seems to me that, with the nursery and the laundry, I am under a comprehensive eye.
It Was a Larger House Than the Rest, with an Unusual Length of Irregular Ladder to Its Veranda
September 13.—Yesterday at Kuala Lumpor, to which I motored while the ship was at Port Swettenham, I entered an editorial office, and stood unannounced over an old friend, now an exile, while he corrected his proofs. He flung up petulantly a blue-penciled sheet at me, because no doubt mine was only the shadow of another coolie. His astonishment and unbelief on his discovery that I refused to take it suggested that the boundary between belief and doubt can never be drawn in this world. I felt almost sorry that I could not fade away before his staring and questioning eyes, and so convince him of the mysterious dimension. But there is never much in a miracle, when it is explained.
In the next dawn we approached Penang. The day, which was still behind the heights of the mainland, was announced in old rose and gold. A little of that light had just touched Penang Island ahead of us; that was a faint augury of coast, with but one blue-and-white building on a hill awake and bright, though the yellow eye of its lighthouse on the sea level still watched us in the night. A junk appeared to be in midair. There was a smell of spice.
September 15.—Pulo Way in sight, some distance to port. This time it is the last of the Malay Islands. Farewell, the East Indies!