TIDE MARKS
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
[Illustration: “_All Was Quiet Again, Except for the Flames_”
(_See p. 80_)]
TIDE MARKS
BEING SOME RECORDS OF A JOURNEY
TO THE BEACHES OF THE MOLUCCAS
AND THE FOREST OF MALAYA IN 1923
_By_
H. M. Tomlinson
AUTHOR OF “THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE”
_With Illustrations from Drawings by_
KERR EBY
[Illustration]
Harper & Brothers Publishers
New York and London MCMXXIV
TIDE MARKS
Copyright, 1924
By Harper & Brothers
Printed in the U. S. A.
K-Y
TO RICHARD DURNING HOLT
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
“All Was Quiet Again, Except for the Flames” _Frontispiece_
A Group of Chinese Firemen _Facing p._ 22
Port Said Is More West than East ” 42
Old and New on the Suez Canal ” 62
This Sea Was Plainly the Setting for Legend and Fable ” 84
He Had Skimmed About Singapore in a Jinrickshaw All the
Morning ” 100
The Road Was Empty, Except for a Bullock Cart ” 122
“One of ’Em Looked at Me as He Came Aboard” ” 140
He Sits in Front of His Shop in Macassar ” 160
The Malays Sit on Their Decks, Cooking Breakfast ” 180
Gathered from the Submarine Gardens of the Tropics ” 200
Macassar Is a Convenient Meeting Place for Traders ” 220
The Fighters Stood with Horns Interlocked, Waiting
for Each Other to Move ” 232
He Began to Treat His Foothold Too Punctiliously ” 252
The Heavy Shadows Were Hardly Disturbed by a Little
Oil Lamp ” 264
It Was a Larger House than the Rest, with an Unusual
Length of Irregular Ladder to Its Veranda ” 282
TIDE MARKS
Tide Marks
[Illustration]
CHAPTER I
From his high window he could see where the Thames, once upon a time, was
crossed by Charing Cross Bridge. But not on that winter afternoon. The
bridge was a shadow in a murk. It did not cross the Thames. There was no
Thames. It was suspended in a void which it did not span; there was no
reason to cross, because the other side had gone. The bridge ended midway
in space. It was but a spectral relic, the ghost of something already
half forgotten above a dim gulf into which London was dissolving in the
twilight and silence at the end of an epoch. For the twilight did not
seem merely of a day at the end of another year, but the useless residue,
in which no more could be accomplished, of a period of human history,
long and remarkable, that had all but closed.
He wondered whether he would ever cross that bridge again, outward bound.
What, a broken bridge? And is there any escape from your own time, even
though its end seems so close that you feel you could take one step and
be over in the new era? No. There is nothing to do but to put up with the
disappearance of the everlasting hills and safe landmarks, and grope
about in this fog at the latter end of things, like everybody else.
The bridge that day went but halfway across. Once it carried men over
to France. It was not wanted for that now. The rocket which he heard
burst above it to announce the long-desired arrival of a lovely dove was
welcomed four years ago; and the dove either did not stay long or else it
had turned into a crow.
A postman burst in with a parcel, and went, leaving the door open.
Another book! He cut the string, in his right as guardian of literature
in that newspaper office. The volume disclosed had a colored wrapper
with the seductive picture of a perfect little lady smiling so fatuously
that St. Anthony would have laughed miserably at the temptation. Again
a novel! He dropped it on the heap behind him—a detritus of beautiful
fiction piled in a slope against the wall, a deposit of a variety of
glad eyes and simpers. What a market for green gooseberries this world
must be! That deposit slithered over a wider area whenever the energetic
editor in the next room was trampling to and fro in another attack on the
Prime Minister. Then some of it had to be kicked back. But kicking never
made that deposit of literature better or different, any more than it did
the Premier. Only the cleansing junk-shop man with his periodical cart
for the removal of refuse ever did that. And the same trouble sprouted
again next day. Trouble generally does. A literary editor, he thought,
might be better employed peddling bootlaces, for all the traffic he has
with literature; yet it was plain that if he began to edit bootlaces
instead, then most likely people would take to wearing buttoned boots, or
even jemimas. For, in spite of the Sermon on the Mount, crystal-gazing,
spiritualism, Plato, wireless telegraphy, Buddha, and Old Moore’s
Almanac, there is no telling what the world will be doing next. The
barbarian of ancient Europe who trusted to his reading of the entrails of
a fowl when looking for the hidden truth was quite as reasonable as the
editor in the next room frowning at the signs of the times through his
spectacles. Moreover, at the moment, the editor was not doing even that.
He was on a journey to interview the proprietor, to learn whether he
should continue to hold up a lamp in a dark and naughty world, or blow it
out. Oil costs money.
The open door let in a draught, and with the draught blew in a figure
which might have been a poet, but was certainly not an advertising agent.
It was a bundle of clothes which looked as though it had been abandoned
under the seat of a railway carriage and had crawled out because nobody
had troubled to remove it. But its face was still new. It had diffident
eyes and a grayish beard. Most likely it was another poet. The lines of
that thin face had come of contemplating the glory of the world, and had
been deepened by lack of bread. The figure hesitated, knowing that it
ought to have remained where it had been thrown. It did not speak. It
took off a matured cloth cap and offered for sale some Christmas cards.
It had a difficulty in getting them out of its pocket, because one sleeve
of its jacket was limp, being empty. But the literary editor was patient;
for this visitor had a rare and attractive virtue. He was modest; more
modest even than the veiled ladies who brought secret information from
Poland, or an editor with a new idea. He seemed uncertain of his rights,
unlike the publisher who had called because his important work had been
overlooked, and the politician who was cruelly wronged because the reward
he had earned in bolting his principles had gone elsewhere. What had
purified this human wreck? He seemed to be unaware of what in justice
should be done to him, and was in enjoyable relief from the reviewer who
could have handled the job so much better than the fool who did, the
inventor of the machine for converting offal into prime cuts, and the
superior mystic who knew it long before Einstein. In what school had he
learned to be a gentleman?
The man of letters examined the Christmas cards, and read on most
of them, “Love One Another.” This spiritual injunction was made
authoritative with realistic sprays of mistletoe.
“Where,” asked the literary editor, rising and pointing to the place
where his visitor’s right arm used to be—“where did you stop your packet?”
The visitor became very embarrassed. “Well,” he said, in doubt—“well, if
you were a nice lady, I’d say it was cut off by a German on the Somme,
if you understand me. But it was an army mule at Arras. It bit me. And
heroes ain’t bitten by their own mules. Not in war, sir. Not for home
consumption, as you might say.”
“But there must be accidents in war.”
The visitor rubbed his nose briskly with a dark white handkerchief. “No,
sir. Believe me, no. I saw a pal o’ mine drowned in a mud hole, but he
had to be killed in action, being a gunner, for his friends’ sake, like.
In war, heroes are either shot through the heart at the moment of victory
or else they gets their arms in slings. Don’t you believe nothing else.”
“You’ve come to the wrong office. Everybody here knows that mules are
ugly brutes, and never rise to Christian feelings even when war ennobles
them.”
“Not at all, if I may say so. You don’t understand, sir. If I tell people
that our mules kicked the enemy, that’s all right. But if I tell ’em one
of our gun mules bit me, why, I don’t know but what they’d think the
artful patriotic swine saw through me, if you know what I mean. Got to be
careful. Besides, that’s nothing now.”
“What, nothing to lose your arm?”
The shabby figure stared over the literary table to the shadow of the
bridge beyond. He spoke with the quiet confidence of a man whose rich
uncle had unexpectedly left a fortune to him. “Nothing at all, sir. I’ve
found God. I’ve found God.” Then he looked at the journalist. “Do you
believe in God? You don’t begin to live until you do.”
The journalist rose in alarm. Not in all his life had another fellow
creature asked him whether he believed in God. In that office it was
assumed that the name of God should never be used except rhetorically.
“Of all the swindling rogues! You talk to me like that, after telling me
you’d have lied, if I’d been an old woman!”
“Sorry, sir, but you were not an old lady, so I give it to you straight.
I give people what they can take, just to make the world go around, you
understand. What does it matter? People who can’t see the light—well,
you can’t blame ’em.”
“So you think there’s a chance I may see it? I wish I knew how to tell
whether you are only another hypocrite or not. Here, I’m living in
darkness, too, but I’ll buy your stock of cards if you’ll tell me whether
you’d have mentioned God to me if I’d been a nice old lady. What about
it?”
“Not a word about God to the old lady, sir. Not a word. On my oath. And
for the same reason. She wouldn’t have known what I meant. She wouldn’t
understand that a hero nearly lost his life in a righteous war through
the bite of an allied bastard, if you understand me, sir, but if I said
I’d found God she’d take it for granted I was all right, like herself.
Why get her mixed up, the old dear?”
“So you’re all right, are you?” said the envious man of letters,
mournfully, who had no God to whom he could give a name. He pointed to
the vision of the dissolution of London in the murk. “How do you feel
about being at the fag end of everything in that?”
The peddler looked puzzled. “Me? Do you mean the fog? What’s that to do
with me?” He had accepted a coin, and now he eyed it on his palm and
graciously spat upon it before putting it in his pocket. He sidled to the
door, and from there he said: “Gov’nor, I’ll tell you something. Do you
know what we’re told?...” But the oracle was not revealed, for the fellow
turned as though he knew of an interrupter outside, closed the door
respectfully, and was gone.
The eye of the bookman wandered to the bridge again. Where did it go to
now? That was a rum fellow who had just gone. Had he really seen a light
which could shine clear through the fog and confusion of the earth? But
what was the good of trying to see such a light because another man said
it was there? Besides, to distinguish between shell shock and God wanted
a bit of doing nowadays. Damn that bridge! Why wasn’t it blotted out
altogether? What was the good of half of it? It used to go to France. Now
it projected over a bottomless gulf of time, and was lost midway. It was
broken. Where were the fellows who once crossed it? Now they could never
get back. It ought not to be looked at. One’s thoughts got on to it, fell
into the emptiness beyond, and were lost. Yet it was hard to keep the
eyes from it. The printer’s proofs were the same dust and ashes as ever.
No light or humor in them except the places where the compositor had
happily blundered. And there the blessed relic still floated in the outer
fog, an instant road for vagrant thoughts. And odd visitors, like poets
with messages from a world not this or from no world at all, or like
the armless man with his seasonable message to love one another, kept
blowing in with the cold draught when the careless door was ajar. Perhaps
a ghostly traffic moved on that spectral relic. That bridge should be
either abolished or adventured upon again. What was the good of sitting
and staring at it, while fiction not fit for dogs accumulated against the
wall behind? Life was standing still.
At that very instant some of the fiction shot fanwise abruptly over the
floor. Was the editor back in the next room? Literary editors might be at
the dead end of things, but was life? He went to interview his chief.
But the great man—all editors are that, naturally—was not at his desk. He
stood at the window, looking out, though not as if he saw anything there
worth having. He turned to his assistant, and began to unwind his muffler.
“Well?”
“Not at all,” said the editor, cheerfully, “by no means. We blow out the
lamp of our vestal, and the chaste darling is to be sold as a slave.”
They stood regarding each other.
“What about us?”
The editor smiled and poked his finger at the bridge in the fog. “We get
a move on. Out into the snow, my child, out into the snow.”