CHAPTER XXV
In the early morning, which did not come too soon, I found the missionary out by the beach. He told me my bed had been frightened because the island itself had moved. Indeed, some nervous people left their beds long before sunrise to watch flames at the crater. The missionary threw up his chin to look at the summit. That was as peaceful then as a chalk down. He suggested that trouble was coming. There were signs, he said, that the present outlines of sea and land about there were disapproved by whatever artist was surveying them. The resolve was accumulating for a more comfortable adjustment, and some folk, living somewhere about the line of volcanoes running through Sumatra, Java, the Sundas, the Moluccas, the Philippines, and up to Japan, would presently know that they had to pay for the relaying of the earth’s floor thereabouts.[2] This missionary, himself resigned to the will of God, had seen it happen in the past, but he complained that he would prefer not to be a witness if our basement were withdrawn suddenly because another place required it as a first floor. Just off the pier on which we stood a Malay in a canoe was straining at a cast net so full of a sort of little herring that it seemed to be as heavy as a load of silver.
After breakfast, as rain threatened, my Christian friend presented me, as an unexpected treat, with a various donation of the kind of magazine which is currently popular in England. He told me that he is in the habit of sharpening his knowledge of English upon them. I glanced at them, but wondered what he could mean. I had thought his knowledge of our language was different from magazine English, which it would be unfair to teach to Papuans. There was nothing else to do, so I toiled steadily, as a sort of propitiatory penance for my leisure on a tropical beach, through number after number, in a fatuous effort to discover why and how they were made. What first drew me to this quest was the discovery that quite a number of the stories oddly concerned the South Seas and the Malay Islands. For some reason well known to the wholesale milliners who trimmed those pages the Orient and the South Seas are the decorations favored by those who enjoy popular magazines. On the whole, perhaps a Malay or a Solomon Islander, when imagining the marvels of London and Manchester for the wonder of his neighbors, might conceive something stranger than those English yarns about the oceanic dots of the tropics; yet it is proper for us to bear in mind that at home we are supposed to be not as unaware as Solomon Islanders. We ought to know more about them than they know about us. And, anyhow, there is no escape from the fact that English is our language, and that we ought to use it to better purpose than do the less fortunate their feathers, shells, and glass beads. There can be no excuse for our untutored abandon with the words which once were ordered into “Macbeth” and “Endymion.” When we see our fellows, nearly five hundred years after their renaissance, when Athens and Rome and a New World together called them out of darkness into light, using to-day their heritage as though it were no better than the wash in which may be floated the delectable oddments for the trough, then it is certain that Malay fishermen, chanting traditional songs at their paddles, know better what to do with their life and letters. In one magazine an Englishwoman wrote about a ship as though the English had never seen a ship since the Mary Rose foundered; a Papuan, before he had got over his excitement, and before fully recovering his speech, might make the same display over an airplane. In another magazine there was a tale of Borneo. Its writer was moved to describe for us the forest of that great island, and from him I learned that “the aged and unprofitable jungle monarchs—like elderly bigoted ministers of a past decade—must give way to the eternal advances of the younger generation. Henceforth there would be no shackling, clogging weeds, no more overcrowding, nothing but clear-cut, regularly planted yielders of latex.” True, we know that kind of writing is always possible, and comes up anywhere when the ground is neglected among the brickbats and the old meat tins on the outer marches of our culture. What is original about it now is that we should display it for sale, as though it were a gardener’s triumph. And how well it symbolizes the happy mind of the civilized man as he contemplates in confidence the superiority of his state! He has never seen the forest of Borneo; but he does know the beauty of motor tires. He has never seen the dismal rows of mean Para rubber trees, exiled and regimented, and does not know that a close and long association with such a plantation would be excuse enough for an outburst of crime on the part of a gentle and sensitive gorilla. He recognizes motor tires at a glance, but he has never stood alone in the silence of the Bornean forest, and so is unaware that in kanary and gum-dammar trees there is a somber and Gothic majesty which man has never attained except in those cathedrals he has now forgotten how to build, and that about the capitals and pediments of those columns a wealth of ferns and epiphytes is so airily poised and startling in that spectral light that a watcher is inclined to wonder whether he should trespass further. Unprofitable and clogging weeds! No wonder we have forgotten how to build cathedrals and to compose symphonies when rubber plantations are taken to symbolize the conquest of mind over matter! Is modern man degenerating into a noisy and destructive urchin who will use the whole planet as once the Vandals did Rome? Certainly his behavior is becoming alarming, and his confident guffaws under the eternal stars must warn them that life below has taken another awkward turn. Yet it is idle to complain. Science has put the tools into his hands which he for himself could never have discovered, and it looks as though he will maim himself and all else with them, unless some one brings a light and a mirror before it is too late, and persuades him to take a long and steady look at himself.
I crept into the room of my benefactor, the missionary, and left with him the incubus of that printed matter. It was sufficient to sink the Moluccas. It would justify any earthquake. I wanted it to be where I should not be reminded of what it represented, and departed to the evening beach to forget it. The rain had cleared. The sky was ready for the sunset. The Malay women, in colors which would make Monte Carlo seem like an outing of Calvinists, were gossiping in the streets of the village. The Chinese shopkeepers sat by their doors, smoking and watching their children at play. The fishermen were on the beach, slowly making fast their boats. There was a smell of drying sea-pulse, but no head-hunters and no noticeable murderers; and I was the deplorable and only representative of the whole tribe of beach-combers. The sea, that deceptive sea of tide-rips and reefs, was as radiant and benign as though it had confessed its sins, and peace was now in its ancient heart and not sharks. Gilolo and Tidore were built of lapis-lazuli, but Ternate was of olivine, and about its head were clouds which, after various dyes, became bright gold after sunset, and reflected about us briefly the aura of a day we had lost. Lights appeared in the deeps of the shadow of earth, and stars in the sky. The beach of Ternate, at sunrise and sunset, changed thus every day. I never saw it repeat itself. Why should it, with all those colors? That light, and those islands, cleared the last doubt, the last stain of misgiving left by the memories of Europe, that our own star might be one now omitted from the regard of Heaven. It still had the full celestial benefit.
FOOTNOTES
[2] Not till I returned to Singapore did I learn that it was Japan which had to pay.