At Sourabaya we sweltered for days while waiting for cargo, which was on the quay, but which we did not get. A fleet of steamers was waiting for sugar. The go-downs of Sourabaya were full of sugar; but the ships sail light, nevertheless. The follies of Europe blight even the crops in far tropical islands. I have seen the price of copra drop on a beach of Celebes at the bare rumor of another French movement in the Ruhr. We left that copra on the beach. The natives could not accept the price, and were frankly puzzled that their labors should have been wasted, and that now they were unable to give our captain their orders for hardware and cottons, which would have gone to Europe. From this distance, Europe does appear indecipherable. Paris and London might be, from their behavior, provincial villages. Europeans cannot see yet that steam and the telegraph have made one undivided ball of this planet. Careless makers of mischief throwing stones from the Quai d’Orsay may smash windows in the Pacific. That we should love our neighbors as ourselves is too much to expect of men who, just as compelled by dark thoughts as the masons of the temples of Baly, are elaborating gases for choking their fellows. When I read in the East Indies the last telegrams and wireless messages from Europe, and see the direct consequences on Malay beaches, my feelings are the same as when I looked at the leers and grimaces of that stonework celebrating the travail of Baly’s pagan soul. O little town of Bethlehem!
August 15.—Singapore was in view in a heat haze at 7 A.M. I was wondering what now I should do and to whom I could go. That array of vague buildings, and the crowded shipping of the anchorage, had no place for me. Everybody else on the ship was energetic and determined and knew precisely what he must do, and was getting ready for it. Now, I did meet at Singapore, when first I was there, a principal of an English line of ships who kept about him in the tropics, by some miracle, the coolness and divine certainty of an ancient British university; and somehow, by prescience, by hints, by cunning stratagems, he made the temperature of that city lower for me than it was for others. If only I could find him when I landed! But he did not know I was coming. Our ship had not got way off her when I saw one tug detach itself from the rest of the indeterminate shipping, and I thought it was making for us. We anchored; and that tug had to back a bit and then come ahead again on the stream while our gangway was lowered for health officers, our ship’s agent, and customs men. And there was my friend sitting in a wicker chair in the fore part of that tug like a god, cool, directive, with the gift of tongues, knowing all. And yet it is wondered why half the tonnage of the world is under the Red Ensign! His foot was on the gangway as soon as it was fast. The Dutch officers were very annoyed. Even their own agent had not arrived! Would not my friend wait a little? Wait? He calmly stepped aboard, stayed there till he saw all my belongings were in the right order, and steamed ashore with me to breakfast—which was laid—before the other passengers had done more than wipe their hot brows in a prefatory way.
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.”