In the early morning, which did not come too soon, I found the missionary
out by the beach. He told me my bed had been frightened because the
island itself had moved. Indeed, some nervous people left their beds
long before sunrise to watch flames at the crater. The missionary threw
up his chin to look at the summit. That was as peaceful then as a chalk
down. He suggested that trouble was coming. There were signs, he said,
that the present outlines of sea and land about there were disapproved
by whatever artist was surveying them. The resolve was accumulating for
a more comfortable adjustment, and some folk, living somewhere about
the line of volcanoes running through Sumatra, Java, the Sundas, the
Moluccas, the Philippines, and up to Japan, would presently know that
they had to pay for the relaying of the earth’s floor thereabouts.[2]
This missionary, himself resigned to the will of God, had seen it happen
in the past, but he complained that he would prefer not to be a witness
if our basement were withdrawn suddenly because another place required it
as a first floor. Just off the pier on which we stood a Malay in a canoe
was straining at a cast net so full of a sort of little herring that it
seemed to be as heavy as a load of silver.
After breakfast, as rain threatened, my Christian friend presented me,
as an unexpected treat, with a various donation of the kind of magazine
which is currently popular in England. He told me that he is in the habit
of sharpening his knowledge of English upon them. I glanced at them, but
wondered what he could mean. I had thought his knowledge of our language
was different from magazine English, which it would be unfair to teach to
Papuans. There was nothing else to do, so I toiled steadily, as a sort of
propitiatory penance for my leisure on a tropical beach, through number
after number, in a fatuous effort to discover why and how they were made.
What first drew me to this quest was the discovery that quite a number
of the stories oddly concerned the South Seas and the Malay Islands.
For some reason well known to the wholesale milliners who trimmed those
pages the Orient and the South Seas are the decorations favored by those
who enjoy popular magazines. On the whole, perhaps a Malay or a Solomon
Islander, when imagining the marvels of London and Manchester for the
wonder of his neighbors, might conceive something stranger than those
English yarns about the oceanic dots of the tropics; yet it is proper
for us to bear in mind that at home we are supposed to be not as unaware
as Solomon Islanders. We ought to know more about them than they know
about us. And, anyhow, there is no escape from the fact that English
is our language, and that we ought to use it to better purpose than do
the less fortunate their feathers, shells, and glass beads. There can
be no excuse for our untutored abandon with the words which once were
ordered into “Macbeth” and “Endymion.” When we see our fellows, nearly
five hundred years after their renaissance, when Athens and Rome and a
New World together called them out of darkness into light, using to-day
their heritage as though it were no better than the wash in which may be
floated the delectable oddments for the trough, then it is certain that
Malay fishermen, chanting traditional songs at their paddles, know better
what to do with their life and letters. In one magazine an Englishwoman
wrote about a ship as though the English had never seen a ship since the
_Mary Rose_ foundered; a Papuan, before he had got over his excitement,
and before fully recovering his speech, might make the same display
over an airplane. In another magazine there was a tale of Borneo. Its
writer was moved to describe for us the forest of that great island, and
from him I learned that “the aged and unprofitable jungle monarchs—like
elderly bigoted ministers of a past decade—must give way to the eternal
advances of the younger generation. Henceforth there would be no
shackling, clogging weeds, no more overcrowding, nothing but clear-cut,
regularly planted yielders of latex.” True, we know that kind of writing
is always possible, and comes up anywhere when the ground is neglected
among the brickbats and the old meat tins on the outer marches of our
culture. What is original about it now is that we should display it for
sale, as though it were a gardener’s triumph. And how well it symbolizes
the happy mind of the civilized man as he contemplates in confidence the
superiority of his state! He has never seen the forest of Borneo; but he
does know the beauty of motor tires. He has never seen the dismal rows of
mean Para rubber trees, exiled and regimented, and does not know that a
close and long association with such a plantation would be excuse enough
for an outburst of crime on the part of a gentle and sensitive gorilla.
He recognizes motor tires at a glance, but he has never stood alone in
the silence of the Bornean forest, and so is unaware that in kanary and
gum-dammar trees there is a somber and Gothic majesty which man has never
attained except in those cathedrals he has now forgotten how to build,
and that about the capitals and pediments of those columns a wealth of
ferns and epiphytes is so airily poised and startling in that spectral
light that a watcher is inclined to wonder whether he should trespass
further. Unprofitable and clogging weeds! No wonder we have forgotten how
to build cathedrals and to compose symphonies when rubber plantations
are taken to symbolize the conquest of mind over matter! Is modern man
degenerating into a noisy and destructive urchin who will use the whole
planet as once the Vandals did Rome? Certainly his behavior is becoming
alarming, and his confident guffaws under the eternal stars must warn
them that life below has taken another awkward turn. Yet it is idle to
complain. Science has put the tools into his hands which he for himself
could never have discovered, and it looks as though he will maim himself
and all else with them, unless some one brings a light and a mirror
before it is too late, and persuades him to take a long and steady look
at himself.
I crept into the room of my benefactor, the missionary, and left with
him the incubus of that printed matter. It was sufficient to sink the
Moluccas. It would justify any earthquake. I wanted it to be where I
should not be reminded of what it represented, and departed to the
evening beach to forget it. The rain had cleared. The sky was ready for
the sunset. The Malay women, in colors which would make Monte Carlo
seem like an outing of Calvinists, were gossiping in the streets of
the village. The Chinese shopkeepers sat by their doors, smoking and
watching their children at play. The fishermen were on the beach, slowly
making fast their boats. There was a smell of drying sea-pulse, but no
head-hunters and no noticeable murderers; and I was the deplorable and
only representative of the whole tribe of beach-combers. The sea, that
deceptive sea of tide-rips and reefs, was as radiant and benign as though
it had confessed its sins, and peace was now in its ancient heart and not
sharks. Gilolo and Tidore were built of lapis-lazuli, but Ternate was of
olivine, and about its head were clouds which, after various dyes, became
bright gold after sunset, and reflected about us briefly the aura of a
day we had lost. Lights appeared in the deeps of the shadow of earth, and
stars in the sky. The beach of Ternate, at sunrise and sunset, changed
thus every day. I never saw it repeat itself. Why should it, with all
those colors? That light, and those islands, cleared the last doubt, the
last stain of misgiving left by the memories of Europe, that our own star
might be one now omitted from the regard of Heaven. It still had the full
celestial benefit.
FOOTNOTES
[2] Not till I returned to Singapore did I learn that it was Japan which
had to pay.