_September 10._—I suppose I am as interested in Singapore as in any place
I have ever seen. It is, sometimes, a fearful interest. Singapore seethes
with human life, and can be as fascinating and repellent as an exposed
formicarium where the urgent streaming of instinctive protoplasm, even
if you are a naturalist, can be worse than the silence of the Sphinx.
In the name of God, why is it, what is it doing? You get the idea that
even the rank smells of Singapore are of its fecundity. Such odors are
beyond merely ordinary carelessness. The gush of its life is from no
failing source. It spurts and eddies in lusty brown swashes unceasingly
through every street and alley. That tide is never low; it is always
rising higher. China need not be a military nation; she merely overflows
into neighboring lands. Yet perhaps humanity anywhere in the mass will
not bear looking at for long. It is dominant on earth, but its movements
are as unreasonable and incalculable as seismic convulsions. The mob of
any great city flattens and nullifies reason, even in reasonable men.
The movements of the herd are more infectious than plague, and can be as
ruinous; for the instinct to self-preservation, so easily moved by fear,
may be the same as social suicide, and may wreck all that fine minds
have accomplished. Of an evening, though, quiet within the bungalow of
some English friends which overlooks the city’s delightful botanical
gardens—a house where I have been sheltered, often to my embarrassment,
as though my desires in Singapore’s broad and undirected flood of human
bodies were of importance—this dread of the inscrutable mass movements
of humanity was lessened. After all, fine minds, I could see, have a
persistence which is as natural as the instinctive movements of the
herd. The lady of the house somehow maintained in that alien place the
repose of an English garden, and the young men, occupied by the problems
of wide commercial and administrative affairs, appeared to me to be as
apart from the trend of mankind’s instinctive movements as though they
were not quite of that stock. (Another dream, evoked by the evening’s
peace and well-being?) After a bewildering day of mine in the alleys at
the back of the city where the enigmatic stream of humanity give no sign
of its destiny, except the temples to Dragons and to Siva, to Buddha and
Mohammed, in that cool bungalow one young man would talk of the English
poets, of the studies of Orientalists, and of Amiens cathedral, as though
a unanimous folly of all mankind that should presently rise to founder
the whole achievement of industrious human hands would still leave high
and immune those peaks from which a few men have surmised a day not yet
come. And his companion, whose habit it was after dinner to get into
Malay dress, appeared to be even unaware that his fellows are liable
to destructive manias—though he himself counted as a survivor of the
first affair at Gheluvelt. As a Malay official, he is now, apparently,
forgetful of Europe; he was silent when we talked of the West; but when
the forests were mentioned, and the language and lore of the Malay
peasants, and the annals of this corner of Asia, you might have supposed
that he was aware of nothing but the jungle and the bazaars. Yet common
humanity remains as unconscious of the thoughts of fine minds as it is
of the eccentricities of the earth’s polar axes—those little wabbles
which are supposed to give this planet its alternating glacial and genial
periods.
_September 11._—Sailed for London at four o’clock this afternoon.
The _Patroclus_ has even a nursery, which reminds me that this will
be my first long voyage in a big passenger ship. I was taken to my
cabin—passing a barber’s shop on my journey—and afterward I had to stop
in an alleyway to think out the route before I knew how to return to my
own address in this community. I did find it, after taking several false
turnings—for I was determined not to ask a steward to take me home—and
was sitting there nursing the conviction that in such a town one could
drop overboard and it would never be known, when a stiff little man came
in and looked at me as if he were determined to be able to swear to me
when the charge was at last formulated. He did not have to admit he was
the master of that ship. I could see he was. And now it seems to me that,
with the nursery and the laundry, I am under a comprehensive eye.
[Illustration: _It Was a Larger House Than the Rest, with an Unusual
Length of Irregular Ladder to Its Veranda_
(_See p. 243_)]
_September 13._—Yesterday at Kuala Lumpor, to which I motored while the
ship was at Port Swettenham, I entered an editorial office, and stood
unannounced over an old friend, now an exile, while he corrected his
proofs. He flung up petulantly a blue-penciled sheet at me, because no
doubt mine was only the shadow of another coolie. His astonishment and
unbelief on his discovery that I refused to take it suggested that the
boundary between belief and doubt can never be drawn in this world. I
felt almost sorry that I could not fade away before his staring and
questioning eyes, and so convince him of the mysterious dimension. But
there is never much in a miracle, when it is explained.
In the next dawn we approached Penang. The day, which was still behind
the heights of the mainland, was announced in old rose and gold. A little
of that light had just touched Penang Island ahead of us; that was a
faint augury of coast, with but one blue-and-white building on a hill
awake and bright, though the yellow eye of its lighthouse on the sea
level still watched us in the night. A junk appeared to be in midair.
There was a smell of spice.
_September 15._—Pulo Way in sight, some distance to port. This time it is
the last of the Malay Islands. Farewell, the East Indies!