But we entered a region of Java where it was raining—where it had rained, apparently, for a period approaching forty days. Gray clouds were close to us. If we saw a mountain it had the appearance of the severe personification of the Creator at the Flood presiding over the drowning of the earth. The hurrying rivers were alarming. Their yellow floods were above the lower branches of the forests. The toy hamlets, which had looked so delightful in the sun, stood in shadow and inundation, with the water up to the veranda ladders, and from their perches on those ladders the dejected natives watched the rain still falling. Then the railway track dissolved ahead of us and we had to wait till another was made. So we were very late in reaching Jokyacarta, and it began to appear as though the rain would wash away the Buddhist temple, so far as I was concerned. Jokyacarta is an old native capital of Java, and the place where the last rebellion of the island broke out against the Dutch, in 1825. It must have been a good rebellion. It lasted for five years. Though I was not anxious to see historic relics, I was at least curious to see the Javanese in an ancient center of their culture, because their mild and docile demeanor elsewhere no more suggested rebellion than do the timid orphans of a charity school.
In the hotel at night I argued myself into a corner. What about visiting this temple, and doing what all travelers do? At length I surrendered. It was clear I could not dispute with everybody who asked me what I thought of Borobudor—for it would come to that; it would be assumed that I had seen it and was awed—so I ordered a conveyance for the morning. The temple was thirty miles distant. I had better get it over.
In the morning, before my very door, the folk of Jokyacarta were going to market. They were gossiping, and looking this way and that, as casual as though all days were holidays and obsessions of the human mind had never been perpetuated in monumental stone and enduring empires. Nothing was dark in that throng. It was as varied as a garden and as engaging as birds on a June morning. I joined it. It is pleasant to go to market, for markets are places where people live and where even small change is more important than lost and awful fortunes. A motor-car stood at my door and its driver salaamed, but I gave him good morning and passed on.
Jokyacarta, even to my inexperienced eye, was an important city, for its people seemed unaware of the urgency of the outer world. They were going their own way. The walls of the Sultan’s palace, about which even the great trees are trimmed and subdued to the shape of the Royal Umbrella, the Javanese sign of right and might, are said to inclose the ten thousand people of his court. It was easy to believe it of such walls, for they were prolonged beyond the extent of a merely ordinary interest in walls, beyond a modern indifference to the prerogatives of divine right, and beyond a simple wayfarer’s knowledge of the requirements of a thousand wives and concubines. Such walls will arise, of course, out of an intricate compost of Brahma, Buddha, and Mohammed, when the many laboring rice-growers of a country are industrious, tolerant, and credulous. Something like it can be done almost anywhere. Other nations have made an ornate muddle not so vastly inferior out of the worship of the steam engine and the cotton jenny. Those portentous gates and buildings, and whispers of an elaborate royal ritual within so overwhelming and anciently traditional as to appear insane to an uninstructed stranger, were confidently supposed to be inducements to me to enter. Yet, no. I could see no hope there; and I was traveling on the bare chance of finding plain daylight. I did hear that in all affairs of state in Jokyacarta to-day a Dutchman sits potent but unobtrusive, and that thus the impressive display of divine right is almost sterilized of its divinity; yet for all I could hear, that Dutchman might represent only another kind of righteous power, and, as compulsion of any kind will almost certainly rouse resistance in my wicked heart and I did not want to excite evil on a pleasant day, I turned aside.
How faithful and bounteous a spring of original life—common humanity everywhere! It is like rain and grass and the sun. To read the history of Java from the Hindu to the Dutch would lead a distant student to imagine that its people must have had every spark and airy bubble compressed out by the strong governments of fifteen centuries, and that there is left but a flat and doleful residue of homogeneous obedience. But some joy will remain after the strongest governance has done its best. That market place, though at least as old as sultanic prejudice in concubines, and vastly more ancient than the Prophet’s victories in Java, might only that morning have come into bloom. Its leisurely throng had forgotten that the military roads of their island garden are built of their bones. They have risen again. You may look for their conquerors in the old library of the museum at Batavia, if you so much as remember their names; but the unimportant victims of great triumphs, secure with a secret which is hidden from mogulship no matter what its cavalry and batteries, looked as though they, after all, were the favorites of the sun. I don’t know what the positive evidence for immortality may be. I have never seen it. I don’t know how it can be proved that we are the sons and daughters of God. But when I remember the sergeant who called to his men toiling through the mud and wire where the shells were falling, “Come on, you! Do you want to live forever?” and when I recall, as I must when most fearful for the meek at heart, the smiling forbearance of another man when he looked at the error and hate that were to extinguish his good will, then I think there must be a light that can never go out.
That was an assurance worth going to market to get. It was procurable at any stall in Jokyacarta. What you bought was wrapped up in it. It was certain these people could do very well without the aid of sultans, priests, or governors, whose assistance, somehow, they had survived, so far. What promise of Java’s development could be better than the figures and poise of those girls who were selling their batik to a Chinaman? They were there when the Hindus came, they had survived every conquest, and there they were still, with eternity in which to have their own way if Chinamen were obdurate. Their gestures and pose proved them to be of an ancient and noble line. The great dove-colored bull beside them, his nose and ears of black velvet and his eyes tranquil with drowsy pride, had come with them all the way from the past. That market place, with its craftsmen and women, could light the fire of humanity again on the abandoned hearths of a bare continent.
I was already settled with this comfortable thought in the train for Sourabaya next day when an official from my hotel, whose anxious face was peering into every coach, presently found me. There had been a mistake. I had not paid for my motor-car to Borobudor. It had waited for me all day. Borobudor?
CHAPTER XVI
July 1.—The hotel omnibus which met me at Sourabaya station last night was like a processional car. The horse’s harness was covered with bells, and I jingled off like an Oriental bride. When I woke this morning and moved, a lizard flicked from sight behind a wall mirror. It was just as though the wall had cracked in a ghostly way. There was no crack when I looked again. On the floor an army of ants was doing to death a large caterpillar. The giant heaved and threw the mites, but he was doomed. The unhurried resolution and certitude of his enemies shocked me. I felt like God on his dais watching a victory, and was half inclined to abolish the lot—drop a boot on the tragic drama like a comet. It was so obtuse and loutish an affair. But what could I do? My comet would only have worsened the distressing mess. I was glad I was not God; I felt no responsibility. A hot day; and the streets of Sourabaya sprawl into infinity. As usual, the most interesting quarter of this East Indian city is the Chinese. The shops of the narrow streets by the canal, and the canal, the Kali Maas, with its gaudy sampans, are pleasing with curious stratagems and devices. I might have bought one porcelain bowl, of a blue which conquered me, but a gramophone in that shop was revolving Flowery Land music, and I was hypnotized. The bowl was remembered again only when I had wandered off. It was too hot to go back. Besides, the bowl was probably fraudulent. I met a Mohammedan funeral. Behind it was an Arab on a bicycle. He wore a red fez, white linen jacket, zebraic shirt and tie, cerise pantaloons, brown boots, and his purple socks were racked taut with suspenders. I found a big store with many English books. Yet I noticed the usual distinction made there between Dutch and English travelers. The Dutch, in translation, get the best of everything of ours. There, amid the coffee berries, rice, tennis shoes, tinned tripe, and white shirts, was a great assortment of our literature; but it was unapproachable in its Dutch guise. For me there was only tinned tripe. I will not mention titles and names, but I went through hundreds of books in English, hoping for the best, with the ready guilders in my willing hand. A bald-headed man might as well have searched the rows of bottles and pots in a hairdresser’s shop devoted to the ladies. But it was possible in that shop for a connoisseur to find exactly what he wanted in a display of the choicest brands of English tennis racquets.