He Had Skimmed about Singapore in a Jinrickshaw All the Morning
The orchards of Kent and California are not more assiduously cultivated than is most of the island of Java. The Javanese agriculturalists, ever since they had a civilized government—and that was early in the Christian era—have had to make their fields meet the extortions of so many conquerors before they dared to call any rice their own that now they deserve the glowing testimonial of all directors of empire and great business affairs. Their training has been long and thorough. Hindu, Mohammedan, and European each has taught them the full penalty for Adam’s fall; and so the habit of very early rising, and of a long day in the sun, with but a meager expectation of any reward, give them the right aspect of sound and reliable workers. You cannot rise at an hour in the interior of Java, unless you never sleep, which will get you on the road sooner than the country folk going to market. My first shock with a motor-car in the mountains of central Java came through just avoiding, long before dawn, a man carrying several thirty-foot bamboo poles. It was so early that I thought he must be an Oriental student of William Cobbet, or a corresponding member of one of the American colleges which make one better than one’s fellow at a nominal charge. In keeping his poles out of the wind screen we nearly ran down some silent children, discovered instantly by the headlight, who were carrying trays of fruit. This made us careful; but only just in time, for we had then to move cautiously in a road full of the sudden ghosts of dumb folk who were getting about the business of the day which had not yet called them. I never saw people of the Malay race in any other island who were nearly so finely trained as the Javanese land workers. There could not have been a better demonstration of the value of learning one’s place in life early—say not less than ten generations back. With plenty of time and few interruptions it is clearly possible for a superior caste to evolve a race of skilled workers who will do everything and yet expect nothing. These people have terraced the hill-slopes of Java with padi fields till the gradient is past human skill. Vast landscapes that once were dark with jungle are now spectacular gardens. The decorative terraces, the sawahs, bearing growing crops, have caught the hills in what appears to be a bright and infinite mesh. Nothing can be lost on those hills now, nothing of their immense fertility, not a drop of rain. Elaborate irrigation works deflect and address myriads of natural rills to fill with water the hollow steps of the slopes, which shine with rice. The rills grow from threads to docile streams, descending disciplined courses from high altitudes to the main rivers in the plains. Humanity has nothing to learn from the ant. Its patient industry must astonish the angels.
Through such scenery my train meandered all one day, as though consciously it intended to make me apologize to Java. There was fun to be got even in guessing from the color or form of the distant crops their nature—rice that was just planted, was a month old, was just grown, was in the ear, was sere stubble; and yams, cassava, tea, coffee, rubber, teak, sugar, tobacco, pulse. The country folk themselves, conscious of their ornate setting, were dressed for the part. A group of these women, moving in a musical comedy, would give a manager complete assurance in the matter of his box-office receipts. They are so modest and polite that they never stare at a stranger; though with such figures, eyes, and coloring, I doubt whether he would object greatly if they did. Their manners are perfect, except that most of them chew betel nut and casually make railway platforms and footpaths startling with red maculations. It is distressing to see a beautiful woman laugh, when her opened mouth looks as though a savage blow had just wounded it.
The railroads of Java are a novelty in inconsequential idling, and they have so many surprises that are not in the schedules and the guide books that I became the less anxious about my ship—there are other ships—and forgave the posters of Batavia. Javanese trains should not be hurried. That would spoil their sauntering. I began to regret there were other islands of Indonesia to which I was bound. In the midst of huts and foliage which pretended to be real the train would come to a standstill. What was the name of this village which no one applauded? The old sport of hunting for the name of a strange railway station acquired a new zest; but as a rule I could find only the Malay word for a famous soap. To add to my bewilderment everybody there was looking at my train, which clearly was the real event. We had an audience of people so decorative that they must have been attired in our honor. A diminutive brown lady in a yellow wrapper, with elaborate combs in her hair, held up to my window a tray with fruit, chocolate, and less well authenticated sweetmeats, and a small selection of the novels of Miss Dell; and by her dawdling smile I judged that she had sold Miss Dell’s romances to Englishmen before ever my train was there.
CHAPTER XIV
The moist heat of Java’s plains and seaports, even when the interest of a place is just a little more remarkable than the temperature, soon turns one to thoughts of escape, in the bare hope that Java somewhere in its garden has a bower which has not the peculiar virtue of a vapor bath. “Why, if you go to Garut,” I was told in a voice which suggested a wonder that I was not required to believe without Thomas’s proof, “you will want a blanket at night!”
I had never heard of Garut, but one place is as good as another to a traveler who is rewarded by whatever he can get. I found Garut in the mountains of central Java, somewhere behind Tjilatjap. There was no trouble in finding it. Everybody seemed to know it. But I shall remember Garut as I remember Sfax, Taormina, Chartres, Tlemçen, and other odd corners of the earth, some without even a name on the map, where we arrived by chance and disconsolate, and from which we departed with something in our memory, forgotten till then, that had been lighted briefly by what may have been a ray of moonshine. Can such an experience be communicated? But how shall a man define his faith?
Yet there Garut is—or there it was, for I am not going to assert the existence of any spot on earth that was, for all I know, revealed to me briefly by lunar means—there Garut is for me at least, high on a ridge above a confusion of tracks through rice and tobacco plantations. The bearings of the place as I saw it can be only vague, and are probably wrong. The women of its campongs cast down their eyes as you approach, the children run into their huts, and the men raise their big hats of grass politely. It is secluded within ranges of dark peaks, but its own fields are bright and have the warm smell of new earth. From a grove of bamboos which fringes the highest ledge of a vast amphitheater terraced with steps of rice you look out into space and down to an inclosed plain. The plain is remote enough to be the ceremonious setting for the drama of a greater race of beings; men would be insignificant there. But the stage is empty; only the cicadas and frogs fill that immense arena with their songs just before the day goes. The ridge of the opposite side of the theater dissolves in rainstorms and is reformed momentarily by lightning.