There was Java. Under some mountains so distant and of so delicate a
color that they were only a deeper stain of the sky were spread the flat
buildings of Tanjong Priok. To my surprise, I discovered the _Savoe_
had a crowd of passengers for Java. Where those Malays had been hiding
themselves I forgot to ask in my surprise, for they did not in the least
bear themselves like a subject race. I saw at once why the English
administrators of Malaya delight in these folk—learn their language
and live with them if that luck can be associated with duty, as the
bibliography of the Malay Peninsula plainly shows. One group of these
people was especially attractive. Its central figure was an elderly man,
perhaps an _orang kaya_, or a chief of some kind, in a tartan _sarong_,
a tunic, and the little white cap of one who has been to Mecca. From
the way he stood he might have been the captain. His was a natural and
unaffected dignity which showed that stature is of no consequence. He
was a small man. His complexion was a light bronze, and his high cheek
ridges and a slightly flattened nose were comely with those proud but
gracious eyes set apart in wide intelligence. His women were with him,
some attendants, and a school of children. They spread themselves across
the upper deck like a rainbow, for the bright scarf over the head of each
woman was a different wonder. One girl I thought was an elder daughter.
She seemed on easy terms with her father. Her scarf was blue silk in
which gilt crescents were sprinkled. The numerous buttons of her jacket
were English sovereigns. Her feet and arms were bare, except for silver
bangles, and her pose would have attracted the attention of any lady in
musical comedy who was supposed to learn that the tradition of a duchess
is different. As with one hand she held a younger child, whose head in
a yellow silk scarf peeped out nervously and wonderingly from behind
her, this Malay girl would touch her father; I think she must have been
amusing him with jokes about the dominant white race that was so active
about them.
Her sly but constant smiles were bright with an array of gold-plated
teeth. But only once or twice did her father answer her with a faintly
ironic grimace, as he listened to her and watched the busy officials who
had boarded us. The Malays, one hears, do not work, if they can avoid it.
They leave work to the whites and Chinese. Yet on that moral problem I
suspect the old _orang kaya_ would have had an entertaining word or two.
Life to him would be subtle and varied, and he would be a little apart
from it, and he would have a rich variety of names for its finer shades.
I regretted I could not seek his opinion about Java, a land that was a
serious disappointment to me some time before I reached it. The gorgeous
East obviously could not be, and ought not to be, so gorgeous as Java’s
holiday posters, which are in the style of the loudest Swiss art. “Come
to Java!” Well, perhaps not. Not while the East Indies are so spacious
and have so many other islands; not if Java is like its posters. Why
should the East call itself mysterious when it advertises itself with
the particularity of a Special Motor Supplement? I felt I ought to keep
away from Java. I thought I would prefer to leave it to those who enjoy
traveling round the earth in eighty days, and who see all the wonders of
it from the deck of a twin-screw composite restaurant and tennis court.
The fact that some important people feel, even while at sea, the mind
growing slack when withdrawn from the resources of the bridge table and
the golf course, is probably at the bottom of the world’s more violent
forms of Bolshevism. But Java stood in the way of my coasting steamer,
which had to call at every port, and at some places which are not ports
but merely wish they were, along the north coast of it. This hindrance
had to be endured for the privilege of seeing the outer islands, those
unimportant beaches which will have no posters of their own, for which we
should thank God and fevers, for some time to come.
Our first Javan port, Tanjong Priok, is the harbor for Batavia. And here
the mosquitoes came aboard in hosts so ravenous that they tried to bite
their way into the cabins, and so stuck to the new paint. I abandoned the
ship. Java may be a perfectly healthy island, and malaria there—as one
is led to infer—as rare and inconsequential as falling upstairs; but the
ship’s new paint scared me. It broke down my resolution not to see Java,
and I fled ashore. Even the hotels which sell picture post cards, and
offer the Javanese equivalents of the art products one pays for at Zurich
and leaves behind, might prove a shade better than such mosquitoes.
There is a railway from Tanjong Priok to Batavia. Black monkeys dwell one
side of the line, and gray on the other. The black monkeys never leave
their palms to cross the metals to mix with the grays in the opposite
palms. The grays observe carefully the same etiquette. The guide book has
no doubt about this, and some one on the ship is bound to give you the
same advice with such particularity that its truth cannot be questioned
by the polite. By the time you have persuaded the customs officer that
you have no explosives in your luggage, that your face and its photograph
in the passport really do approximate, and have got the man from the
hotel at Weltevreden to understand that you intend to go up by train and
not in an automobile already wrecked, the monkeys are forgotten. Yet not
by everybody. My train had not gone far when a Dutch traveler drew my
attention again to the curiosity. “You see? There are black monkeys on
that side. Here are gray. They do not meet. No. They do not cross the
railway, not each of them. Yes.” I was going to ask him whether they
would forfeit the government subsidy if they broke the contract and
spoiled the story; but the Dutchman looked so kindly, and so plainly
wished to save a foreigner from boredom, that the question would have
been a rank crime. I nodded, and looked first at the black tribe, and
then at the gray, to show him that his good nature was not wasted on me.
The hotels in the Dutch East Indies, in spite of an occasional Russian
String Quartette which plays hotel music at dinner if the lights do
not fail, cannot help letting you know that home is very distant. They
can do this without the aid of the banyan trees, the natives in their
bright sarongs and jackets, and the dead weight of the heat. Your
bedroom is isolated from the central public rooms by shrubberies. You
live there literally a cloistered life with lizards and flies. The
notions entertained by Malays of time and space are purely relative and
are easily disarranged; and so even when you ring for a servant you may
still remain lonely, with the lizards, and your finger firm but hopeless
on the electric button. You may watch the hawks poised in the upper
blue, or the fight between a hunting spider and a mantis in a corner of
the veranda. Nothing else is likely to happen. And it is hard to tell
one Malay servant from another, where they all recline on flagstones in
the shade, listening in beautiful patience to the appealing bells and
watching the grasshoppers. When not asleep Malays will observe nature for
hours without moving. But it would be wrong, for it would increase the
weight of the heat, to get angry with them. They are but children living
in eternity; and how can time be wasted by those who possess all of it?
Yet though one’s annoyance quickly evaporates, the tropical sweat which
it has caused does not. It is then that the happy nature of the Eastern
bath may be learned. At first that dank recess behind the bedroom, where
there is nothing but some toads, an earthenware cistern, and a brass
dipper, is puzzling, as well as repellent. How does one manage it?
Newcomers have been known to climb into the earthenware tub, and at once
upset themselves, with the water, on the flags. That is not the way to
do it. While the toads sit up to watch, you spill waterfalls over your
body from the dipper. The water is tepid, but occasionally it is almost
possible to believe that it has shocked you a little way toward an active
existence. And after this pretense in Batavia, what is there to do? A
man might be thought eccentric if he stood watching the Javanese ladies
up to their waists in yellow canal ooze, washing the household linen
while gossiping with the bronze figures of men who are posed near them
on bamboo rafts. Yet they make a picture which is worth attention, for
it is heartening to learn that the human form may be as good as that.
There is, too, the Portuguese cannon, an antiquity from the days of
the early navigators, which these ladies keep polished through sitting
upon it when prayerfully desiring a child; but its interest is soon
exhausted. They never sit there while being watched. For that reason, and
to make the shy practice of this ancient religious rite as obscure as
possible, the gun is secreted near some unlikely sheds, with a screen of
plaited rushes round it. It is framed with paper flowers, and it has a
little altar for the burning of incense at its butt. Strange, that faith
in a phallic shape should still be able to overcome all the superior
prejudices acquired from Brahma, Buddha, Mecca, and even from Jerusalem!
For it is said that European ladies know where to find this instrument
of generative magic, and to trust its power; which, if true, is much
more astonishing in our cautious days of limited families than even the
survival of a simple faith all the way from the dateless silence in which
sleeps Palæolithic man.
There is the observance of another rite in the Dutch East Indies that is
less worthy of respect but is no less remarkable; and watch it you must.
It is called the Rice Table. It is impossible to practice this rite in
secret. It takes more room than an old cannon; and the simple faith which
holds to its ultimate beneficence before all the derisive unbelievers in
a public dining room must be as strong as death and nearly as fatal.
I never got quite hardened enough to sit at dinner unperturbed beside
another man while he steadily overcame a Rice Table. Before he had more
than half vanquished his array of dishes I felt it better to creep
silently away, leaving my own dinner unfinished; for who could tell what
divine wrath might not be loosed in a time of food shortage if a human
creature were detected buried up to the neck in boiled rice and spiced
comestibles, and still was burrowing into it deeper with every mouthful?
Heaven may be tried too much, and a Rice Table is the kind of dinner
which might cause astonishment at the distance of the Milky Way. It is
not a meal, but a buffalo wallow. I said buried up to the neck. I should
not like to do violence to a figure of speech. I must insist on the
neck—the nape of it; that is all of a man’s features which are exposed
when he is bowed in the act of eating his Rice Table. It is proper when
relating the incidents of travel to be strictly accurate.
The first time I witnessed a man performing at this meal his campaign was
well forward before I noticed anything was strange, because it happened
that, at the time, my knowledge of Malay was being firmly disputed by
a Malay waiter. I got at length within a few degrees of my own course,
and then saw that the man opposite, before whom was a high mound of
boiled rice, was not attended by one servant, but by a long queue of
servants, and that each was bearing a salver, and that each was waiting
for the moment when he could take another step forward in the congested
procession. They moved up to the diner, shuffle by shuffle. As far as he
could—and that Dutchman was as deft and businesslike as a letter-sorter
on St. Valentine’s day—he selected portions of food from the long vista
of salvers and placed them with his rice. It would be mere vanity to
pretend that my knowledge of natural history is wide enough to unravel
everything the hotel kitchen had mystified for that Dutchman, but fish
was just recognizable, and chicken, eggs, nuts, prawns, seaweed, and
bamboo shoots. All these, and more, either went direct into the mound of
rice, or were deposited in satellitic vesicles arranged in orbits round
the solar plate. Then the diner pulled his mustache upward, adjusted his
spectacles, and briskly mixed the central mound into a discolored muck,
frowning shrewdly as he did it, while the Malays looked on with faces
subdued to resignation. Before it was possible to wonder what he intended
to do with it all his face plunged and the back of his neck stared
entranced at the ceiling. I don’t know when he came up. My own escape
into the hot night was before that.
A fitful display of ruby and emerald light, in which the shapes of palm
trees wavered, attracted me outside, for it was faintly reminiscent of
the bright illustrations to youth’s nicely expurgated edition of the
_Thousand and One Nights_. It proved to be only a cinematograph show.
In the open air, while limelight changed the surrounding foliage into a
fantasy, and noiseless bats as big as ravens made the shadows startling,
a mild Javanese crowd sat watching the history of “Faithless Wives,” and
other pleasing pictorial narratives of Anglo-Saxon fraud, infidelity,
treachery, silliness, and robbery under arms, with comic interludes as
unmistakenly funny as the brick which hits the policeman on the head.
What the Orientals thought of us, while getting privy knowledge at long
last of white society on its usual behavior from these frank confessions
by our leading cinema artists, they did not disclose. They silently
drifted home to their bamboo shelters. But if the magic lantern with such
vital and unquestioned revelation of our curious conduct when we are
comfortably at home does not accomplish more than all the propaganda of
Moscow in encouraging the Orient to suppose that white folk ought to be
treated with contempt, then there is nothing in common sense. There is a
pallid rumor—it can be as pallid as a nervous child who has dreamed of
a ghost—of a rising of the East against the West. If there is anything
behind it, then blame the cinematograph. Our best representative artists
are showing the East that its revolt would be merely a duty owed to
decency, a sort of righteous war to end inanity.