It had better be confessed. I was anxious to see the news of England, yet the first sight of leeches hanging to my body did not give me a worse shock than that opened page. News from England! O my country! Those blood-sucking worms, those jungle bugs which raised weals, the warnings of fever, the dark forests and the cataracts, the night call of the tiger—if all that were savagery, then what was the word for this? Now the natives we had met, even the peasants far inland, were certainly not barbarians. One learns to respect and to like the Malays. They are a quiet, well-mannered, humorous, and hospitable people; and so I felt I should be disinclined to expose these pictorial representations of contemporary English life to a Malay gentleman, especially the pictures showing our ladies playing tennis (useless to explain to a Malay that such a popular picture is got by holding the camera close to the ground when the lady kicks) and that page full of bathers and dancers, who might remind him of the scandalous days when the house of the rajah caused so much talk in the village. From that newspaper, at a distance from home where it was impossible to get the counterpoise, you might have supposed that England, despairing of her wreckage, was abandoned to vulgar inanities.
In the forest, on some anxious nights when sleep would not come, I had been sustained by the comforting memory of Waterloo Bridge at midnight, and a nook in Surrey, and some corners of Devonshire; in this world things like that, it was strangely certain, did exist, and they were heartening. But by the China Sea I felt a sudden despair for England as I turned those pages, and saw the home life reflected only in such pictures, unqualified anywhere by a word that was not addressed to the mentally deficient. To open those popular sheets seemed to let fly an insane and fatuous blare. There was no sense in the packet. It was only a silly noise. Without a single humorous or serious comment to correct them, those photographs and idiotic paragraphs gave me the first real scare I had had in nearly six months’ travel among the Malay Islands. It was a very subdued adventurer who handed the volume of a week’s news of home back to the nice captain; for it was unpleasant to realize that, though out of the jungle, there was that to go back to.
I had become used to the Malays. I had learned to understand, in a measure, their ways of living and of looking at life. They have solved successfully the problem of accommodating themselves to their circumstances. They are a happy folk. You rarely see an anxious face among them, and never a hungry child. They are not required to regard, as are Christians, the problem of reconstructing their society because they have dismantled it in a grand and protracted mania. They need no old-age pension. Their future is secure, if they will but give a brief time yearly to rice fields, cocoanuts, and fishing nets. But I felt, even with the assurance about me of those rosebud curtains, and the knowledge that the Red Ensign was overhead, a sudden black doubt that I understood my own people, which was a curious accident to happen so far off as the China Sea merely through glancing at some illustrated daily papers from London.
CHAPTER XL
September 10.—I suppose I am as interested in Singapore as in any place I have ever seen. It is, sometimes, a fearful interest. Singapore seethes with human life, and can be as fascinating and repellent as an exposed formicarium where the urgent streaming of instinctive protoplasm, even if you are a naturalist, can be worse than the silence of the Sphinx. In the name of God, why is it, what is it doing? You get the idea that even the rank smells of Singapore are of its fecundity. Such odors are beyond merely ordinary carelessness. The gush of its life is from no failing source. It spurts and eddies in lusty brown swashes unceasingly through every street and alley. That tide is never low; it is always rising higher. China need not be a military nation; she merely overflows into neighboring lands. Yet perhaps humanity anywhere in the mass will not bear looking at for long. It is dominant on earth, but its movements are as unreasonable and incalculable as seismic convulsions. The mob of any great city flattens and nullifies reason, even in reasonable men. The movements of the herd are more infectious than plague, and can be as ruinous; for the instinct to self-preservation, so easily moved by fear, may be the same as social suicide, and may wreck all that fine minds have accomplished. Of an evening, though, quiet within the bungalow of some English friends which overlooks the city’s delightful botanical gardens—a house where I have been sheltered, often to my embarrassment, as though my desires in Singapore’s broad and undirected flood of human bodies were of importance—this dread of the inscrutable mass movements of humanity was lessened. After all, fine minds, I could see, have a persistence which is as natural as the instinctive movements of the herd. The lady of the house somehow maintained in that alien place the repose of an English garden, and the young men, occupied by the problems of wide commercial and administrative affairs, appeared to me to be as apart from the trend of mankind’s instinctive movements as though they were not quite of that stock. (Another dream, evoked by the evening’s peace and well-being?) After a bewildering day of mine in the alleys at the back of the city where the enigmatic stream of humanity give no sign of its destiny, except the temples to Dragons and to Siva, to Buddha and Mohammed, in that cool bungalow one young man would talk of the English poets, of the studies of Orientalists, and of Amiens cathedral, as though a unanimous folly of all mankind that should presently rise to founder the whole achievement of industrious human hands would still leave high and immune those peaks from which a few men have surmised a day not yet come. And his companion, whose habit it was after dinner to get into Malay dress, appeared to be even unaware that his fellows are liable to destructive manias—though he himself counted as a survivor of the first affair at Gheluvelt. As a Malay official, he is now, apparently, forgetful of Europe; he was silent when we talked of the West; but when the forests were mentioned, and the language and lore of the Malay peasants, and the annals of this corner of Asia, you might have supposed that he was aware of nothing but the jungle and the bazaars. Yet common humanity remains as unconscious of the thoughts of fine minds as it is of the eccentricities of the earth’s polar axes—those little wabbles which are supposed to give this planet its alternating glacial and genial periods.
September 11.—Sailed for London at four o’clock this afternoon. The Patroclus has even a nursery, which reminds me that this will be my first long voyage in a big passenger ship. I was taken to my cabin—passing a barber’s shop on my journey—and afterward I had to stop in an alleyway to think out the route before I knew how to return to my own address in this community. I did find it, after taking several false turnings—for I was determined not to ask a steward to take me home—and was sitting there nursing the conviction that in such a town one could drop overboard and it would never be known, when a stiff little man came in and looked at me as if he were determined to be able to swear to me when the charge was at last formulated. He did not have to admit he was the master of that ship. I could see he was. And now it seems to me that, with the nursery and the laundry, I am under a comprehensive eye.
It Was a Larger House Than the Rest, with an Unusual Length of Irregular Ladder to Its Veranda