July 5:—I find myself at a civic reform rally late this afternoon, after business hours. I am still the Malay servant. I am sent by Mara, the good and beautiful, to watch from a distance the doings of the young artist, altar-builder, coal miner, bricklayer, exquisite and civic patriot:—Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third. He is her adorer. She sends me with a note to him, urging him to come to a suddenly improvised Sumatra chess party. Like Cleopatra, she urges me to observe his doings narrowly, and his moods when he reads her note.
Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, is on the back row of seats. He will take no part in the meeting, though urged to do so by many friends around him. The Mayor’s proposition has been voted down at the polls, his desired legislation to let great masses of unskilled labor into the city’s double walls without a time limit on their stay and without the usual University examination. Now he proposes another referendum. He wants to introduce his huskies temporarily, especially Singaporian bricklayers from California, since, as he says, our bricklaying machines have broken down and there is great haste to complete, in time, the building of the Street of Past History of the World’s Fair of the University of Springfield.
The meeting, squeezed in between the coffee house chats and dinner time, has been called by Michael the Third’s best chums among the older men:—Boone, and the Rabbi, who hope to defeat the new measure. The speakers maintain that, once these laborers are admitted inside our double Gothic walls, it will be impossible to expel them, even after the Street of Past History is finished. They prove that there are enough bricklaying machines to fill all the present contracts on time. They maintain that there are endless boys in the High School Labor Department trained to follow up and finish the work in the wake of such machines as may surely be impressed into service.
All this while that solemn conceited pumpkin Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, thinks he is brooding like Prince Hamlet himself. He will not say how much he believes of these accusations hurled about.
Now rises old Black Hawk Boone and I am indeed amazed to see him through Singaporian eyes. He looks almost like a whey-faced creature, he is so much whiter than my master. And he looks like the world’s greatest fidget, my master is such a languorous cat. And for all Boone’s shrewd, cinnamon bear countenance, he seems to me a simple baby, my master looks so wise. And when he speaks of my master by implication, I cannot but be insulted. For my body and nerves tonight are Malay, whatever my soul may be. And at the same time I am in a terrible fear of Boone as one would be of a child with lighted matches in a powder mill. There is in him a certain divination by force of fury that I cannot but shrink to apprehend, though I utterly despise his mind, as long as I wear this Malay body as a garment and make shift with these Malay eyes and ears and this Malay sixth sense.
Boone’s fury is everything. His words are nothing. In his capacity as editor and citizen, and not as President of the Board of Education, he denounces my master, who is entitled to official courtesy as a member of the University faculty. But it is plainly in Boone’s thought that the time has almost come for the parting with the course in Malay Arts and Letters and Allied Studies, and the dismissal of all oracles therein, though they be the most learned oracles in the whole world, and the most courteous creatures above ground. Boone snaps out his words like a beast straining at a chain.
He says these conspirators have long thought they could buy everything, including the souls of all state capitals. He tells how, nearly a century ago, Singapore purchased its freedom from the British Government at an enormous fee, furnished by the Chinese Chamber of Commerce of that city. He tells how the port was immediately lifted from the rank of seventh to the rank of first in the world. He shows how, after the death of the prophet of the Cocaine Buddha and the local triumph of the religion, this zeal for purchase became Singapore’s most eloquent service in that Buddha’s name. They bought at any price every island north of Australia and south of Japan, including America’s own Philippines. He charges that the war in southeast Asia, a generation ago, was stirred up by their spies, and while they were ostensibly with the World Government, the war ended with a vast increase of their territory by direct purchase of land and the bribing of many new and feeble legislatures to vote themselves into the Singaporian Union. Finally he rises to the height of mere abuse. He lets slip a most appalling avalanche in the name of his western God. And he says this Mayor and his boss have in some way been over-persuaded by a Singaporian spy, present in the city or writing to them, and petitioning that they send for these workmen, who come in as rough labor. But that “labor” will send by wireless, code reports to the high priests of the Cocaine Buddha.
The whole house rises, and the harder Boone denounces, the more they seem to approve, and some of them seem to have the hydrophobia. Race hate sweeps the hall like a blasting wind. And Boone crouches at the very edge of the footlights, and roars on.
He declares that some of this alleged rough labor is morally certain to be a group of high officers of the army, here to paralyze America at the exact second the high priests of Singapore shall choose, using that dreadful secret gun, that it is whispered through all the world, is two steps beyond the terrible lens gun.
Meanwhile these Singaporians, open and secret, will corrupt the wild and innocent young blood of our city. Boone charges that the island capital is the world’s Barbary coast, the one infamy beyond Suez. Among all the world’s red-eyed and fish-eyed human derelicts, where cocaine is used to over-energize, and to make men flashy and reckless, there always their spies are busiest, and their missionaries are most pertinacious and successful. The world around, “SINGAPORE IS COCAINE.”