Tide marks

by H. M. Tomlinson

CHAPTER XII

There was Java. Under some mountains so distant and of so delicate a color that they were only a deeper stain of the sky were spread the flat buildings of Tanjong Priok. To my surprise, I discovered the Savoe had a crowd of passengers for Java. Where those Malays had been hiding themselves I forgot to ask in my surprise, for they did not in the least bear themselves like a subject race. I saw at once why the English administrators of Malaya delight in these folk—learn their language and live with them if that luck can be associated with duty, as the bibliography of the Malay Peninsula plainly shows. One group of these people was especially attractive. Its central figure was an elderly man, perhaps an orang kaya, or a chief of some kind, in a tartan sarong, a tunic, and the little white cap of one who has been to Mecca. From the way he stood he might have been the captain. His was a natural and unaffected dignity which showed that stature is of no consequence. He was a small man. His complexion was a light bronze, and his high cheek ridges and a slightly flattened nose were comely with those proud but gracious eyes set apart in wide intelligence. His women were with him, some attendants, and a school of children. They spread themselves across the upper deck like a rainbow, for the bright scarf over the head of each woman was a different wonder. One girl I thought was an elder daughter. She seemed on easy terms with her father. Her scarf was blue silk in which gilt crescents were sprinkled. The numerous buttons of her jacket were English sovereigns. Her feet and arms were bare, except for silver bangles, and her pose would have attracted the attention of any lady in musical comedy who was supposed to learn that the tradition of a duchess is different. As with one hand she held a younger child, whose head in a yellow silk scarf peeped out nervously and wonderingly from behind her, this Malay girl would touch her father; I think she must have been amusing him with jokes about the dominant white race that was so active about them.

Her sly but constant smiles were bright with an array of gold-plated teeth. But only once or twice did her father answer her with a faintly ironic grimace, as he listened to her and watched the busy officials who had boarded us. The Malays, one hears, do not work, if they can avoid it. They leave work to the whites and Chinese. Yet on that moral problem I suspect the old orang kaya would have had an entertaining word or two. Life to him would be subtle and varied, and he would be a little apart from it, and he would have a rich variety of names for its finer shades.

I regretted I could not seek his opinion about Java, a land that was a serious disappointment to me some time before I reached it. The gorgeous East obviously could not be, and ought not to be, so gorgeous as Java’s holiday posters, which are in the style of the loudest Swiss art. “Come to Java!” Well, perhaps not. Not while the East Indies are so spacious and have so many other islands; not if Java is like its posters. Why should the East call itself mysterious when it advertises itself with the particularity of a Special Motor Supplement? I felt I ought to keep away from Java. I thought I would prefer to leave it to those who enjoy traveling round the earth in eighty days, and who see all the wonders of it from the deck of a twin-screw composite restaurant and tennis court. The fact that some important people feel, even while at sea, the mind growing slack when withdrawn from the resources of the bridge table and the golf course, is probably at the bottom of the world’s more violent forms of Bolshevism. But Java stood in the way of my coasting steamer, which had to call at every port, and at some places which are not ports but merely wish they were, along the north coast of it. This hindrance had to be endured for the privilege of seeing the outer islands, those unimportant beaches which will have no posters of their own, for which we should thank God and fevers, for some time to come.

Our first Javan port, Tanjong Priok, is the harbor for Batavia. And here the mosquitoes came aboard in hosts so ravenous that they tried to bite their way into the cabins, and so stuck to the new paint. I abandoned the ship. Java may be a perfectly healthy island, and malaria there—as one is led to infer—as rare and inconsequential as falling upstairs; but the ship’s new paint scared me. It broke down my resolution not to see Java, and I fled ashore. Even the hotels which sell picture post cards, and offer the Javanese equivalents of the art products one pays for at Zurich and leaves behind, might prove a shade better than such mosquitoes.

There is a railway from Tanjong Priok to Batavia. Black monkeys dwell one side of the line, and gray on the other. The black monkeys never leave their palms to cross the metals to mix with the grays in the opposite palms. The grays observe carefully the same etiquette. The guide book has no doubt about this, and some one on the ship is bound to give you the same advice with such particularity that its truth cannot be questioned by the polite. By the time you have persuaded the customs officer that you have no explosives in your luggage, that your face and its photograph in the passport really do approximate, and have got the man from the hotel at Weltevreden to understand that you intend to go up by train and not in an automobile already wrecked, the monkeys are forgotten. Yet not by everybody. My train had not gone far when a Dutch traveler drew my attention again to the curiosity. “You see? There are black monkeys on that side. Here are gray. They do not meet. No. They do not cross the railway, not each of them. Yes.” I was going to ask him whether they would forfeit the government subsidy if they broke the contract and spoiled the story; but the Dutchman looked so kindly, and so plainly wished to save a foreigner from boredom, that the question would have been a rank crime. I nodded, and looked first at the black tribe, and then at the gray, to show him that his good nature was not wasted on me.

The hotels in the Dutch East Indies, in spite of an occasional Russian String Quartette which plays hotel music at dinner if the lights do not fail, cannot help letting you know that home is very distant. They can do this without the aid of the banyan trees, the natives in their bright sarongs and jackets, and the dead weight of the heat. Your bedroom is isolated from the central public rooms by shrubberies. You live there literally a cloistered life with lizards and flies. The notions entertained by Malays of time and space are purely relative and are easily disarranged; and so even when you ring for a servant you may still remain lonely, with the lizards, and your finger firm but hopeless on the electric button. You may watch the hawks poised in the upper blue, or the fight between a hunting spider and a mantis in a corner of the veranda. Nothing else is likely to happen. And it is hard to tell one Malay servant from another, where they all recline on flagstones in the shade, listening in beautiful patience to the appealing bells and watching the grasshoppers. When not asleep Malays will observe nature for hours without moving. But it would be wrong, for it would increase the weight of the heat, to get angry with them. They are but children living in eternity; and how can time be wasted by those who possess all of it?

Yet though one’s annoyance quickly evaporates, the tropical sweat which it has caused does not. It is then that the happy nature of the Eastern bath may be learned. At first that dank recess behind the bedroom, where there is nothing but some toads, an earthenware cistern, and a brass dipper, is puzzling, as well as repellent. How does one manage it? Newcomers have been known to climb into the earthenware tub, and at once upset themselves, with the water, on the flags. That is not the way to do it. While the toads sit up to watch, you spill waterfalls over your body from the dipper. The water is tepid, but occasionally it is almost possible to believe that it has shocked you a little way toward an active existence. And after this pretense in Batavia, what is there to do? A man might be thought eccentric if he stood watching the Javanese ladies up to their waists in yellow canal ooze, washing the household linen while gossiping with the bronze figures of men who are posed near them on bamboo rafts. Yet they make a picture which is worth attention, for it is heartening to learn that the human form may be as good as that. There is, too, the Portuguese cannon, an antiquity from the days of the early navigators, which these ladies keep polished through sitting upon it when prayerfully desiring a child; but its interest is soon exhausted. They never sit there while being watched. For that reason, and to make the shy practice of this ancient religious rite as obscure as possible, the gun is secreted near some unlikely sheds, with a screen of plaited rushes round it. It is framed with paper flowers, and it has a little altar for the burning of incense at its butt. Strange, that faith in a phallic shape should still be able to overcome all the superior prejudices acquired from Brahma, Buddha, Mecca, and even from Jerusalem! For it is said that European ladies know where to find this instrument of generative magic, and to trust its power; which, if true, is much more astonishing in our cautious days of limited families than even the survival of a simple faith all the way from the dateless silence in which sleeps Palæolithic man.

There is the observance of another rite in the Dutch East Indies that is less worthy of respect but is no less remarkable; and watch it you must. It is called the Rice Table. It is impossible to practice this rite in secret. It takes more room than an old cannon; and the simple faith which holds to its ultimate beneficence before all the derisive unbelievers in a public dining room must be as strong as death and nearly as fatal. I never got quite hardened enough to sit at dinner unperturbed beside another man while he steadily overcame a Rice Table. Before he had more than half vanquished his array of dishes I felt it better to creep silently away, leaving my own dinner unfinished; for who could tell what divine wrath might not be loosed in a time of food shortage if a human creature were detected buried up to the neck in boiled rice and spiced comestibles, and still was burrowing into it deeper with every mouthful? Heaven may be tried too much, and a Rice Table is the kind of dinner which might cause astonishment at the distance of the Milky Way. It is not a meal, but a buffalo wallow. I said buried up to the neck. I should not like to do violence to a figure of speech. I must insist on the neck—the nape of it; that is all of a man’s features which are exposed when he is bowed in the act of eating his Rice Table. It is proper when relating the incidents of travel to be strictly accurate.