That garden, which sloped seaward to three areca palms, was a place
which I felt might vanish, if I moved, or changed my thoughts. The
daylight was the private illumination of an imagined land, and the
strange fronds were a capricious revolt from the conventions of avenues
and parks. Then a butterfly, immense in green and black, broke into the
picture from above, and fanned his colours slowly over a white trumpet
that was upheld noiselessly by an unseen hand from a shrub. He touched
it, and the trumpet swayed. The picture was solid.
A tall, stiff figure came out of the rest-house and sat with me on the
verandah. That elderly missionary’s white linen suit, neatly creased,
and his collar and black bow, which would have been unremarked in
Oxford Street, made me conscious of my own careless and limp attire.
I always felt that that man might, as a reasonable and friendly
neighbour--for we had the rest-house to ourselves--concede something
in his dress. But he never relented. The Malay servants could be in no
doubt as to which of us was the important Tuan. One of those silent
familiars now shaped near us. He brought tea and two queer little
cakes. I liked the look of those cakes, but the missionary whistled
for the dog, and gave away the cakes perfunctorily. He rubbed his
fingers with a handkerchief, and then turned his signet-ring into
its right position. He inclined his head kindly to me in a little
cross-examination. What had I seen to-day?
He stirred his tea, and shook his head in depreciation over some native
wares I had bought. Poor stuff, he said. No good. Better bring it to
him in future, before buying it. But it was very hard now to get the
genuine old material. He had been collecting it all over the islands
for years. He enumerated what rare treasure he had been able to acquire
from time to time. The European collectors were willing to pay highly
for it. But it was getting very scarce.
He carefully crossed his legs, for to keep neat an ironed linen suit
for an hour or two in a moist heat demands the unremitting attention of
a man whose self-control is automatic. Why, in the past, he continued,
when he visited one of the islands of an isolated group, with some
tact and wholesale baptism he could persuade a village to surrender
all its totems, idols, carvings and copper drums. Not to-day, though.
The whole region has been swept clean. Everybody is converted, or has
no God, or is a Mohammedan. But you could buy plenty of English and
American stuff. After a pause, which was like an interval for silent
regret over good things lost in the past, he spoke, dispassionately,
and with the forgiving voice of an ethnologist, who understood the
deep springs of astonishing human conduct, of the immoralities of the
islanders. He was no bigot. He did not tell me that, but I was sure he
forgave irregularities in all but Europeans, and he understood even
those.
He had spent fifteen years among the islands. The natives had the
minds of children. I learned from him how they should be treated by
any benefactor. I was looking at his moustache, for it was interesting
to see how little his lips moved as he spoke. There was firmness
even in those short iron-grey bristles. His eyes, under those shaggy
brows, looked on me from a rectitude which now he could trust without
bothering about it. The tropics had made no difference to him. His skin
was fresh, and looked hard. He offered me one of his excellent Dutch
cigars. He became grimly amused over the instructions left by a white
trader for him to carry out. He had buried that man the week before
last. That fellow had begged the missionary--because he knew his Malay
mistress with her four half-caste children would be careless about
it--to have erected a sort of shrine over his grave, with pictures from
the Scriptures to hang in it, and this text in a principal place: “I am
the resurrection and the life.”
A group of women, their bright gowns as noticeable in the quiet as a
burst of gay music, idled slowly past the foot of the garden, and one
of them turned her dark face shyly to look at the missionary, but very
sternly he did not look at her. The tropics were outside his heart.
He could not be invaded. His stiff figure could at any time assume
its winter dress in Europe, and he could begin again as though sly
but inviting glances across a tropical shrubbery, and sunny islands
where life is different, were only like the phases of the moon, which
may be observed, if the almanac is watched, and you are sufficiently
interested.
The crowns of the areca palms changed, as the sun went down, into three
high fountains of gold, which quickly sank into the shades. There
were burning films of rose in the sky. Then their light, too, went
out. A firefly began to glint in zigzags before the verandah, and a
cricket shrilled. A servant brought a lamp. “These islanders come to my
church, when I am here, or they go to the mosque,” said the missionary
gravely, “but they are all pagans at heart. A man and woman will live
together for years, and then come and be married for luck, and bring
their children with them. They are baptised for luck. They try to be
on the right side all round. I know them. I haven’t given them fifteen
years of my life for nothing.”
“But you suggest that you have when you tell me they are still pagans.”
The missionary did not answer. He recrossed his legs carefully. “I like
them,” he said simply. “They are good-hearted.”
“If ever you are on the main island come and see me,” he said late that
night. “My home is there. You may like to look at my collection.”
The next day he had gone to another congregation across the water.
When presently a ship came for me, and I left that beach, she touched
on her way home at the village the missionary had named, and there
was time to visit his home. The afternoon was almost done. The sun
was setting over Borneo, across the water, in a clear saffron sky. I
waited for the evangelist on his verandah, and could see through his
dwelling of timber to the bright light in the west. The interior of the
house was in darkness, but that further doorway was a shape of gold,
in which distant coconut palms formed a design in black. I felt I had
discovered in that home its resident and privy dream. I spoke of this
to the missionary. He did not look at it. “It is very beautiful,” he
said gravely.
He led me through that further door of gold to the garden that we might
watch the sunset. “I have an arbour on the beach,” he said. A frail
little woman was seated within that arbour. She wore an old-fashioned
shape of crochet work on her grey hair. She smiled at me but did not
speak. “My wife,” the missionary explained. I thanked her for lending
me so beautiful an outlook on the world. There could be no nobler place
anywhere from which to see the sun go down. She nodded, and smiled
sadly, and said “Yes, isn’t it?”
The missionary interrupted my attempt to come to an understanding with
my hostess. He had a request that I should take his mail with me. “You
can take the letters with you when you board your ship to-night.” We
both walked back to the house, leaving his wife in the arbour. She was
still looking over the sea to the western light.
He turned to me and shook his head. He touched his forehead
significantly.
“She sits there all day,” he said. “She sits there, and when she sees a
ship going home, she weeps.”