CHAPTER XXX
That romantic seaport town of the Orient made him uneasy. He wanted to get away from it. Yet how it had attracted him once—but that was when it was only a fine name on the map of the coast where the Indian Ocean meets the China Sea. Its upheaval of life startled him with a hint that it was without mind and did not know its power and what it was doing. This life seemed to have no intelligence; it was driven by blind impulse, even to its own destruction. Humanity would go on, without knowing why, and without getting anywhere, till its momentum failed.
He would have to get away from the place. If Christ himself were there he would have to pull a jinrickshaw till he dropped, or sweat from sunrise to dark in an evil barge, even if he were lucky enough to escape one of those many diseases with a course as certain, in that climate, as a spark in tinder. He would have no name, though he had God’s last word to men. He would be only a bubble on that broad tide, and when he went out, who would notice it on such a flood?
But questions about human life in the East might just as well be addressed to the silent jungle at the back of the town. That was fecund, coarse, and rank. No way was to be found through it. It climbed for air and light and clung to its neighbors, glued itself to them and choked them or was choked, coiled in strong sappy lengths, was full of thorns and poisons, though sometimes it had a beautiful blossom and a sweet smell. The seaport was like the jungle. Its people flowing in dense streams incessantly through its streets were moved by powers without more purpose or conscience than the unseen causes of the jungle and the coral reefs. These Chinese were not men and women, but conflicting torrents. And the white people only appeared to be different. But they were not. They were fewer, and so more noticeable. They were drifting on the same casual flood. They kept themselves cleaner and safer by superior cunning; but they were going the same way, with the same barbarous indifference. Duty was whatever was most pleasant. Beauty was as far as the sunrise and sunset. Conscience was a funny prohibition of freedom. He would have regretted that he had left England, only he began to see that the Orient, London, and the jungle were all driven by the same unknown causes to an undesigned end. Human life had come to the earth just as fungus comes at a certain incidence of moisture and warmth, and as it would slough when the right focus faded. All these movements of life would slow and stop as unreasonably as they began and continued, and nobody would ever know why.
Some of the men he met there enjoyed it. They preferred life without any restrictions. They quoted Kipling—they were always quoting Kipling. You were broadminded if you did as you pleased. Places like Malay Street were in the nature of things in the tropics, like hibiscus blossoms and fevers. It was no good expecting tabernacle notions to be helpful in that climate. Nothing mattered in life except to see that you did not get stung through carelessness when taking the honey.
He would have to get out of it. He boarded a little coasting steamer, and then learned she was bound for Siam. Anywhere would do. Bangkok would be another heaving pool of men, but there would be an interval of the sea between, which would take some time to cross. He had thought, when he left London, that he was escaping the shadow of the war, which was the shadow of humanity without a head; but either that shadow was everywhere or else it was indistinguishable from his own. She was an old, neat, and homely little steamer. The Brunei could have been lowered into the hold of a liner. She might have been a token out of the past of what had been good and solid. Yet her character would have been plain only to a sailor or an experienced traveler, because her lower deck was a tumult of Malay and Chinese passengers and her crew of natives, and parrots, and shouting Chinese stevedores, and cargo hurtling through the air on hooks and slings.
There were four other saloon passengers—English planters and traders. One shared his cabin. That fellow was already occupying it, grunting as he stripped himself, “to get into something dry.” The cabin smelled of his acrid body. “I’ve been ringing for that damn Chinese steward for ten minutes. Seen him about? I want a drink.... But I know what it is. They’re trying to hold me off. I’ll have it, though; I’ll have that drink and another. Bible Brown can’t stop me.”
“Who’s he?”
“Don’t you know him? He’s the skipper. The only man out here who thanks God at table with his head bowed over tinned food. It’s a fact.” His cabin mate chuckled while his head struggled with his shirt. “And he’s against the booze and the ladies. But I ain’t. Not in this God-forsaken world. How does he live?” His cabin mate dropped his heavy bulk suddenly on the settee and began to pull off his drawers.
So he left that small place to his chance companion. The collars, hair brushes, cigar boxes, boots, and clothes of that big, prompt, perspiring fellow were scattered over both bunks, the hooks, and the floor. Just forward of the cabin a little man in uniform was leaning over the rail, and in a mild voice was calling some advice to the lower deck. Then the little man turned wearily and absently, but saw him and surveyed him with friendly eyes for a moment in a detachment which seemed to put centuries between them.
“Good morning. Are you Mr. Royden? I’ve a parcel for you. Come with me.” The little man led young Royden to a door over the top of which was the word “Captain.” The uproar of the anchorage remained outside that cabin; it might have been an insulated compartment. Over a table by the forward bulkhead, between two port windows looking ahead, was a card with a bright floral design round the text, “Lo, I am with you alway.” A pair of spectacles rested on a large Bible, which lay beside a blotting-pad covered with shipping documents.
“We shall be leaving in an hour, Mr. Royden. I hope you will be comfortable aboard. She’s very small, this ship, and bad when she rolls, but she’ll stand anything.” The captain looked up at his tall young passenger, and touched his arm in a reassuring way; he seemed tired and gray, as if he were holding on to a task of which now he knew the best and worst. His clipped and grizzled mustache and square chin checked an easy presumption on his good nature which might have been encouraged by his kindly brown eyes.
“If you want any books to read, there you are,” said the captain. He nodded to a small glass-fronted cupboard. Royden took one step and glanced at the books with interest. Then he shook his head. He would not have shown a smile about it, only when he turned the captain met his look with whimsical amusement.
“I thought not,” said Bible Brown. “Yet I don’t know how I should have lived without them, out here, out here.” The captain talked of politics, of the war, and of the affairs of the big town just outside, as though these were matters he had certainly heard about, were matters which experience teaches a man he should expect to meet in this world, and may take his notice for a moment from the real concerns of life. So Royden had been in the war, in France? Yes? He gazed at his passenger thoughtfully for a second, but asked no questions. Royden felt a little indignant. That had been the most awful thing in history; and he had seen it. But this cold little man, with his Bible, thought nothing of human life. That didn’t worry him. He didn’t care what became of it.
Macassar Is a Convenient Meeting Place for Traders
All that day they were passing the land, close in. That coast must have been the same when the earliest travelers saw it. Man had made no impression on it. It had defeated his feverish activities with a tougher and more abundant growth. The gloom of its forests looked like a sullen defiance. It would give no quarter. The turmoil of humanity at the big seaport from which they had sailed that morning appeared to have less significance than ever. This jungle, with the least chance, would push that swarm of men and women into the sea again. The day died in flames behind the forest, a dread spectacle of wrath, as in a final effort, soon surrendered, to light an earth abandoned to dark savagery. Let it go.
The Brunei was in ultimate night, carrying her own frail glints, apparently nowhither. There was nothing in sight. The stars were hidden. There was only the melancholy chant of the surge, the song of the bodiless memory of an earth which had passed. On the lower deck, just showing in the feeble glow of a few lamps hanging from the beams, was what appeared to be a cargo of bundles of colored rags. The native passengers were compliant. Not a sound came from there. Beneath the nearest of the lamps a little child lay asleep on its back beside a shapeless heap of crimson cloth. With its ivory skin it looked as though it were dead, in that light. Its tiny face expressed repose and entire confidence. One arm was stretched out, as though it had reached for something it wanted before it died, but the hand was empty and the forgetful fingers were half closed over the palm. On the deck above, the three planters, round a table, were sitting in their pajamas, drinking. They were not talking. They appeared to have surrendered to everything, after trying to escape together under the one light in night for company and refuge. They did not look at him.
Royden remembered that the captain had told him he might go up to the bridge whenever he felt like it. He fumbled in the gloom forward of the deck house for the handrail of the ladder to the bridge, and felt his way up. For a moment he thought nobody was there, that the ship had been left to go where she pleased. Then he saw the head of a Malay, just the head in the darkness, apparently self-luminous, suspended, and with its eyes cast downward, as though steadfastly contemplating the invisible body it had left. In another moment Royden saw the head was bent over the binnacle. Then he heard a mild voice, as though it came from the sea beyond the ship, “Here I am.” The captain was at the extremity of the starboard side of the bridge. The little man was only a shadow even when Royden stood next to him. He was leaning his arms on the rail, looking ahead. Neither spoke for some time. Nothing was to be seen ahead. There was no light and no sea.
“I suppose,” said Bible Brown, presently, “the other passengers below are drinking.”
“Yes. Well, some are sleeping.”
The captain made no comment. Royden said, after a pause: “You must get a curious view of us. You see an odd habit or two of ours, for a few days, and then you see us no more.”
Still the captain was silent. When he spoke, he said: “You are mostly alike. You are simple enough. I know you.”
Royden was slightly startled. The old fellow had never seen him before. But he smiled to himself when he thought that these cranks, too, were all alike.
“You are all alike,” continued the captain. “I see you once—once or twice—and not again. You cannot help yourselves.... Sometimes I wish I could help you, but there is no time. You all know where you are going, and you are gone too quickly.”
The complete assurance of the old fellow! But what did he care for humanity, after all?
“You are going to Bangkok, Mr. Royden, aren’t you?” asked the captain. “Some voyages ago I had a passenger for there. Young like you, but a girl, a child. She had come out from England. She was a little different from the rest of you. I thought she looked like my own daughter. Couldn’t make out what she was going to do in a place like that—an innocent girl of about twenty. She asked me some funny questions about Bangkok. I could see she was frightened. Then it came out. A native prince had sent her money, and there she was, going to marry him. Do you know what that means? Well, I told her. Told her how many wives he had already. She cried. She didn’t know till then. But do you think I could help her? No, Mr. Royden. She had taken the money, and spent it, and there she was. She said she was forced to do it now. It was her duty. I had to leave her at Bangkok. She was bound to go, she said.... Poor little soul!”
They both stared ahead. There it was entirely dark. The sound of the surge, to Royden, was like the droning of his own thoughts. All were drifting. Nobody really knew where he was going, nor why. Not even Bible Brown.
“I can’t make out, Captain,” he said, “how you find your way in a darkness like this.”
“Find my way? This darkness is nothing. It is a fine night. I know my course. There is the compass. The darkness is nothing. I keep my course. To-morrow we shall be off Tumpat. I know where I am.”