The first time I witnessed a man performing at this meal his campaign was well forward before I noticed anything was strange, because it happened that, at the time, my knowledge of Malay was being firmly disputed by a Malay waiter. I got at length within a few degrees of my own course, and then saw that the man opposite, before whom was a high mound of boiled rice, was not attended by one servant, but by a long queue of servants, and that each was bearing a salver, and that each was waiting for the moment when he could take another step forward in the congested procession. They moved up to the diner, shuffle by shuffle. As far as he could—and that Dutchman was as deft and businesslike as a letter-sorter on St. Valentine’s day—he selected portions of food from the long vista of salvers and placed them with his rice. It would be mere vanity to pretend that my knowledge of natural history is wide enough to unravel everything the hotel kitchen had mystified for that Dutchman, but fish was just recognizable, and chicken, eggs, nuts, prawns, seaweed, and bamboo shoots. All these, and more, either went direct into the mound of rice, or were deposited in satellitic vesicles arranged in orbits round the solar plate. Then the diner pulled his mustache upward, adjusted his spectacles, and briskly mixed the central mound into a discolored muck, frowning shrewdly as he did it, while the Malays looked on with faces subdued to resignation. Before it was possible to wonder what he intended to do with it all his face plunged and the back of his neck stared entranced at the ceiling. I don’t know when he came up. My own escape into the hot night was before that.
A fitful display of ruby and emerald light, in which the shapes of palm trees wavered, attracted me outside, for it was faintly reminiscent of the bright illustrations to youth’s nicely expurgated edition of the Thousand and One Nights. It proved to be only a cinematograph show. In the open air, while limelight changed the surrounding foliage into a fantasy, and noiseless bats as big as ravens made the shadows startling, a mild Javanese crowd sat watching the history of “Faithless Wives,” and other pleasing pictorial narratives of Anglo-Saxon fraud, infidelity, treachery, silliness, and robbery under arms, with comic interludes as unmistakenly funny as the brick which hits the policeman on the head. What the Orientals thought of us, while getting privy knowledge at long last of white society on its usual behavior from these frank confessions by our leading cinema artists, they did not disclose. They silently drifted home to their bamboo shelters. But if the magic lantern with such vital and unquestioned revelation of our curious conduct when we are comfortably at home does not accomplish more than all the propaganda of Moscow in encouraging the Orient to suppose that white folk ought to be treated with contempt, then there is nothing in common sense. There is a pallid rumor—it can be as pallid as a nervous child who has dreamed of a ghost—of a rising of the East against the West. If there is anything behind it, then blame the cinematograph. Our best representative artists are showing the East that its revolt would be merely a duty owed to decency, a sort of righteous war to end inanity.
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.
