Tidemarks : some records of a journey to the beaches of the Moluccas and the forest of Malaya, in 1923

Front matter

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Chapter II

THE letter, there could be no doubt, was addressed tome. This fact, apparently so doubtful, I was careful to verify at once. And so far as English can be plain it told me to go to the Moluccas. Nor was its purpose merely abusive and figurative, as would be the letter of a friend. The letter was typewritten on a commercial form; it was direct and curt; it gave telephone and reference numbers in case I wished to answer back. The letter advised me to pack up, and the place it told me to go to lies—as anyone may see who uses a magnifying glass—between Celebes and New Guinea. But it would take more than a business letter, however formal, to compel us into a belief that we are to travel to a place with a name which can be spelled out only with a strong glass. You experiment with such news on your friends. They will not contradict you; they will be too polite. They will merely stare for an instant, and perhaps nod as though they saw good reason for hoping that you would soon get over this little trouble. Curious things happen to people after war, of course, but time works wonders. That was how they took it from me. It was no good trying to persuade them that this sudden revelation which had come to me by post, this wild dream disguised as a business letter (in exactly the silly way of a dream), suggested anything more than the need of ne]

rest and quiet in a room with primrose walls and windows opening south.

Of course. What else could a man expect of the straightforward, practical minds of his friends? In my best moments I myself laughed at the letter. Though I admit that I played with the pleasing dream the letter had aroused. I used the lens on the chart secretly. I stopped work now and then to think it over. I asked one or two sailors whether they knew the Moluccas; but they appeared to wish to avoid such a subject, as though this sort of talk was childish. Nevertheless, it became plain that so extraordinary a portent as that letter could not be treated lightly. Sometimes, when alone—for it was natural that I did not wish the puerile act to be witnessed in such earnest days of reconstruction as these—I took down the Malay Archipelago. Then I found, despite the urgency of our times, it was natural to drop at once on the very place where Wallace becomes, for a man of science, almost lyrical from his boat over the sea meadows of Amboina. And yet that chanting prose passage appeared to settle it. By artificial light in an English winter it was ridiculous. When we know the world to be what it is, who is going to find faith in an open boat afloat in a transparency where sponges and corals are on the floor, and fishes as bright as parrots dart among fronds in the sunlight far below the keel?

It was no good. Ternate and Banda faded away toward the days of Henry the Navigator. The Portuguese, English, Dutch, and Spanish navigators of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries knew how to find them; but not one of my friends who, for whatever privileged reason, might advise me to go to Hades or anywhere, could also readily separate the Moluccas from the Pleiades. The Spice Islands are forgotten. So I was unable to take that business instruction seriously. Wallace, with his outburst over his sea meadows, canceled the letter for me. The mirage dissolved, in the way of dreams that are fair—dissolved reluctantly, like one’s faith in a Golden Age—vanished! What to us in Europe are islands poised in a visionary sea, a sea vast and mute, Paradise set in Eternity? Well, we know what they are. Beauty of that kind is merely a stock of sensational stuff, which is safe and easy for the use of hearty novelists and short-story writers who require, to make their books move at all, pirates, trepang, beach-combers, copra, head-hunters, schooners full of rice, and similar matter which easily takes coal-tar dyes in the rapid output of bright and lusty fudge. Otherwise they do not exist. Nor did the conquest of space, as it is called, by flying and wireless telegraphy, give me any heart. Those wonders of human progress brought such islands no nearer to me than they were to Plymouth in Drake’s time. Do we imagine we are gods, and may order the world to be re-created superiorly to a geometrical design of petrol tanks and telephone stations? We forget that gods would never do anything of the kind. The gods may be, and perhaps are, anything we choose to make them, but they should be allowed more sense than that. Are we able, with all our aids to progress, to conjure apparitions like those sea meadows any nearer to us? They are where they were, if ever they were anywhere. They are in the same world as the Hesperides. We see them only in idleness, as we see mankind at peace, and the star again over Bethlehem. No flying machine will ever reach the Hesperides. You will never, even in the quiet of midnight when hopefully listening in, hear a whisper from that seclusion. How it is some lucky men become assured, and sometimes quite suddenly and without the aid of wireless, the encyclopedias, or any help of ours, of such islands, of such sanctuary from the deadening uproar of error and folly, and so are immune from fogs of every kind, the lessons of the war, the gravest of political disclosures, revolutions, signs of the times, mysticism, and anything the public seems urgently to want, is a wonder to me; but there are such men, and I wish I knew whether they are really mad, or whether their bright serenity is only madness when compared with our practical cynicism and our sane motives of enlightened self-interest.

Yet even we ourselves at times—and there is no serene brightness of madness about us—are startled now and then by a hint of easy escape, as though an unknown door somewhere had opened on light and music which we do not know. Where did that come from? The door closes before we can be sure so curious a light and strange a sound were more than our own hope deceiving itself. And dreary experience has taught us that it is wasting time to look for that door. Either it does not exist or we cannot find it. So that letter was a release, though in a way far inferior to the momentary escape of celestial music. It pretended there was a door. I could fancy a decision had been made in my favor in that invisible sphere where our circumstances are devised, those little incidents which move us this way and that without our ever knowing why. And other hints continued to drop through my letter box, all at the same angle of incidence. The last one was more than a hint. It named a ship, a place of embarkation, and a day. The day was not far off, either. |

This began to make me feel acutely nervous. There could be hardly a doubt that I myself was designated. But could I really accept this mysterious decree? I could not, and I did not. Man never accepts his fate. He has a faith, which nothing ever shakes, that his habits are stronger than destiny. He believes that from the fortress of his daily routine, within which he feels secure, the urgent messengers from the gods will recoil, baffled. Nevertheless, I felt certain by now that one of those dangerous messengers had assaulted my citadel again, so I arranged about me a few mascots, for luck. If that messenger forced his way in, then I was ready for him.

A final imperative knock came at last. No doubt about it. It was on the very day, I noticed, which fate had indicated. Others in that room stood up at the sound, and looked at me. I could see they knew for whom the messenger had come. Apparently the hour had struck. My routine had fallen down. It was a cab-driver who had knocked. And not till I saw some of my mascots, which were traveling bags, already on his chariot, did I look back at my porch and understand that that cab was to take me over the first stage to the Moluccas. Was I exalted at that moment? I shall not say. But what the deuce, I said to myself, as I climbed into the cab, do the blessed sponges of the Pacific matter to me? Have the presiding gods, I silently exclaimed, ever heard me complain about my pleasing suburb? What have I done? But the cabman had a face like the shutter of an empty house. He was clearly in the conspiracy to get me out of it. He drove on.

Chapter III

TuE lethargy of soul is proof against all the facts we do not care to look at. No immortal soldier ever accepted the nature of his destiny in France till the moment when he saw his pal drop. And therefore I still thought there was a chance that this cab was a misdirection. I had been mistaken for another man. But promptly to the minute I was left at Euston. Still, Euston was real enough to be not at all ominous. There can be nothing in all this world less fay than the London and North Western Railway and its officials. There is little in them to make anyone suspect the subtle and transforming art of what is faery. So I fell asleep in moderate confidence, and the wheels went around.

I don’t know how long they had been revolving, with many a jolt and bump through the night, but I woke with a conviction of the need that day to give attention to those old volumes in the cupboard . . . if the mice were really nesting there, as I was told... . Where was I? Odd! I could see through a window the dark waste of a railway siding. By the look of it this was the dead end of all railway tracks. Beyond this no man could go. The dawn had barely glanced at it, because, I suppose, it was not going to spoil good sunshine on such a place as that. It was littered with old newspapers with dates that would be in the week before last. Nothing else could be seen, except a wall the color of soot, which was high enough to screen us from all that was lovely and of good report. Now, I thought, my misdirection has been discovered. Here I am, shoved into a celestial pigeonhole for lost souls, till there is time to find my right label and post me back to my old volumes. It was then that a familiar appeared, in a gold-braided uniform, and whispered craftily that this was Birkenhead. How I got there I don’t know.

Outside it was drizzling. I was dubious about that, for I have noticed that an ominous sign that I have been uprooted and am drifting again is that I am in a strange place and that it is raining there.

A man came out of a dank wall and begged for the privilege of carrying my two heavy bags. He could only have been evolved by the progressive lines of a highly complex civilization. His mouth was a little open, and perhaps it had not been shut since his last meal, some days before. It was open and waiting for the next, and to save time in coughing. As he was the only visible agent in the strange scheme which had got me to Birkenhead, I invited him to try the luggage. At the word, he took off the belt of his trousers. Why his trousers remained in their place is known only to the powers which were getting me to the Moluccas because, so far as I could see, the man had no stomach; which was lucky for him, as it turned out, because he explained that his average fortune was seven shillings a week, and that, take it by and large, Ypres was as good as the commercial facilities of that fine port. We halved the weight, and trudged off. I saw no signs anywhere of the Far East. All the streets were alike; yet this fellow with me, who never looked up, but stared at the pavement and breathed hard, seemed to have prior advice as to what to do with me. He knew; for, turning a corner, I saw above dingy roofs a tall funnel of a ship. It was the color of a genuine sky, though its top was black, like the sky we had. From the mainmast head of that hidden steamer the blue peter was flying. “Your ship,” coughed the wraith shambling beside me. I was sure he knew. The whole affair was foreordained.

Carefully observe what happened next! That ship had a name out of the Iliad. I had never seen her before. The way to her was cumbered with packages marked for Singapore, and places beyond which we forget after we leave school. Nor could I make out what she was like, from the quay. She was a mass in which white boats were mixed, and a length of black wall, a blue smokestack, two men looking down from a rail, a flag, some round windows with brass rims, a shout or two, a roar that stopped when some cases checked in midair and swung on a pack-thread; a height topped by brown derricks and ventilators. She could not be seen. There was no beginning to her and no end. I went through a door in the upper works of the structure, expecting to be thrown out. That place was nothing to do with me. I could see and smell that. But a man whose smile indicated that he had known me all my life met me in a passage, knew my name, and invited me to follow him. What else could I do? I followed in resignation. He took me to a room. It had been prepared for me. He went to a drawer and handed me some letters whose senders clearly knew where next I would be found. “If you want anything,” he said, ‘touch that button’’; and vanished.

Thereupon I surrendered. I sat on the couch and wondered who I was, why all this had happened, how long it would last, what I should do about it, and whether any man since the world began ever knew for certain why and by what means his affairs were shaped for him. I found no answer to this, though the ship hooted once in an insistent way. I took no notice of that till, looking through my round window, I noticed that the shed just outside—a shed which, after all, represented England—was stealing away from me. The shed disappeared. Nothing could be seen then but two ropes, and they were blithely dancing a hornpipe over some hidden joy.

I went outside to see what made them so gay. But the sky was still drizzling. Those dancing ropes were aware of something hidden from me, and I determined to find it. Our ship, which I have reported was a hero of the Iliad, was athwart a great rectangle of water and in the midst of her peers. They stood about her— and here I will declare that though a ship is named after a warrior in a bronze helmet I am not going to call her him—she was, then, in the midst of her peers: Shires, Clans, White Stars, Halls, and her family Blue Funnels. It seemed to me she knew her family tradition and her worth. There was such a stateliness about her, so easy a dignity, and her commands were so peremptory and haughty, that it was clear she had the idea that nothing afloat could deny her house flag.

By the Bar Lightship some steamers we passed were making a fuss about the weather. But our Trojan took no notice of it. I will even confess that off the Isle of Man roast pork was conspicuous on the lunch card, and that I knew of no reason why it should not be. With the dark obstinacy of its northern character the spring pursued us south. The northwest wind was bleak and sullen. The sun hid his face. We were alone in the Western ocean on the second day. We had the wind and the desolation to ourselves, except for a dozen lesser black-back gulls which were following us because, perhaps, those waters were the same as all the seas of the north, and so it did not matter to them where they were. The surge mourned aloud, sometimes rising to a concluding and despairing diapason. The blue jeans of the sailors busy on the exposed parts of the ship quivered violently in the perishing cold. Once, I remembered, some dauntless men pulled galleys westward through the Pillars for the first time, and then turned northward toward the top of the world. How did they find in that ocean the spirit to maintain a determined course? I do not know. They must have been good men, and hard sailors. I will never believe that the thought of more and easier shekels kept them facing the gloom of those sweeping ranges of water and the bitter heartless wind. It is a lie that men are never moved except by the hope of gain. It is a miserable lie of the money-changers, and it is time to kick their tables outside once more. Why, fellows even as stout as those earliest navigators must have seen in dismay that their gods to whom they had sacrificed would be helpless in seas that were beyond all known things, where they could guess they had entered the realm of the powers of darkness, and that the warmth of human and friendly hearts would go to leeward with the spindrift, and hope could be abandoned. It was while I was seeing this so plainly that a youth in uniform caught hold of a stanchion and flung himself into the wind toward me. He handed me a familiar yellow telegram. It was from home, praying a good voyage for us. The sightless message had just been picked out of that gale and that sky. I glanced beyond the telegraph messenger, and wondered if he had left his bicycle round the corner.

The English spring gave up the hunt just beyond Finisterre. The sun, glad of the chance, came out to look at us, and made a habit of a magnificent appearance each day at the due hour. We found another wind. It allowed me to loaf on the exposed forecastle head, watch the flying fish glance away from the noisy snow of our bow wash, and listen to the lookout, standing at the stem, answer the bridge when its bell gave the ship’s hour. But Ternate seemed no nearer than it did at Birkenhead. It was still an incredible fable, a jest by an old traveler which he tries on the foolish. All the East I had seen so far was no more than three Chinamen squatting on their hams on our after deck, chanting together while one punched a hole in a paint keg and the others admired it; that, and a smell of curry. Anyhow, it was a strong smell of curry.

One morning the lookout signaled land. It was a thin shadow over the port bow. There was no other cloud in the sky. That shadow grew in height, darkened, and closed in on us. Then the shadow of Africa approached our other beam. Toward evening we passed between the Pillars. We may have been no nearer to the Moluccas, but we had escaped from the darkness of the north. That was certain at sunset, when we might have sailed off the waters of earth and were elevated to a sea where there were no soundings, and logs would be profane. We were not alone there. A felucca was in the vacancy between us and the phantom of a high coast. Our own yellow masts were columns of light. The foam at the bows was flushed with hues never seen in water. And ahead of us, that sea we were to enter was the smooth expanse of an unknown and lustrous element. It was brighter than the sky. From the lower wall of a vault of saffron a purple veil dropped to the rim of a vast mirror. I do not know what was hidden by that veil. It was a dusky curtain circling the brightness and its folds rested on the mirror. Down on a hatch below me some of our fellows started a gramophone with a fox trot.

Chapter IV

We had seen the shadow of Crete in the north, and the next noon our ship was somewhere off the Nile. Despite its antiquity the sky was still in its first bloom, and the sea was its perfect reflection. It was easy to feel older than the sky and the sea, for our ship was solitary in the very waters where, out of the traffic in ideas and commodities between Knossos and Memphis, had grown the Athens of Pericles, and Rome and Paris, London and New York. If there is anything to be said of that awful thought, perhaps it would never do to say it here. It may be altogether too late in the day to brood with fond and kindling eye upon the cradle of that particular deep which rocked our childhood into the beginnings of Chicago and Manchester. Let us say nothing about it.

The next sunrise it was the skipper himself who called me. This was a genuinely surprising event. His white figure was even startling, for to me then he had become a senior master mariner in a service so august as our blue funnel, the house flag of which is, I suspect, east of Suez, more potent than the emblems of not a few proud states. The honor was unusual enough to cause me to strike my forehead against the opened port as I sat up respectfully. Our master has been at sea for forty years, so his appearance of weariness and of ironic understanding may mean that his experience of men has been extensive, or it may mean nothing. “We are enter-

A Group oj Chinese Firemen ing Egypt,” was all he said, while his lean hands rested on the edge of the bunk; he then turned away as if he supposed this sort of thing would never end. But possibly he had been up all night.

There was an apparition of a city over the sea ahead of us. It was so delicate that the primrose of sunrise, deepened in inclosed and quiet waters, might in that place have conspired to produce a mirage of one’s _ bright expectations. That was the gate to all that romantic folk with a meaning eager but scarcely articulate call the Orient. Yet which of us is not romantic when we see it for the first time? I watched that gate heighten and become material as our ship insensibly approached it, till I could read on the seaward brow of this entrance to romance the famous legends, ““Topman’s Tea” and “Macgregor’s Whisky.” Port Said, you soon discover, is just like that.

If it is anything at all it is more West than East. A somber flotilla of barges manned by a multitude of dark fiends was waiting for us, and our ship hardly had way off her before she became Tophet with coal dust, unholy activity, and frightful jubilation. It is the privilege of civilized men to give their appetites and repulsions the sanction of reason with its logic, and therefore I did not accept Port Said because I did not like it. It is certainly not the Orient, and I hoped it was not even its gate. Its address and its manners are as abrupt and threatening as is the Stock Exchange to a timid stranger who has misadventured within its sacred precincts. I went ashore, but soon returned to the ship, for I fancied that our Chinamen might be closer to a simple heart than the oblique calculation of that port.

For what are the significant things in travel? Let travelers candidly own up. He is a wise traveler who has few doubts about that, and such a man would be silent, of course, being wise. Who would believe him if he spoke? There was, for example, the French mail steamer close to us at Port Said, homeward bound. Her saloon passengers, the ultimate Parisian reflection of the grandeur that was Rome, surveyed in aloof elegance and in static hauteur the barbaric coarseness of Port Said. But for a chance hint I would most certainly have saluted, as is the Anglo-Saxon habit, the refinement and pride of the folk on the Frenchman’s promenade deck as the very luster—which is so hard to attain —of Western civilization’s most exquisite stuff. But my glance drew away to the Frenchman’s forward deck, and there I saw something which tumbled down my hitherto unquestioned convictions about those qualities which make, as we should put it, the right folk. That deck was loaded with passengers from Cambodia and Cochin China, people of quite another culture—or of no culture. They did not seem to be travelers by deliberation or decision, like ourselves. It was easy to guess they had merely obeyed, like little children, the stern directing finger of fate. They showed no curiosity in us, or in Port Said. They were as still, and as watchful or as indifferent, as delightful images. They stayed where they had been placed. Yet if the French ladies were beautiful, then what shall we say of those little figures? By what means, by what habitual, tranquil, and happy thoughts, did they attain without wish or effort to a countenance which made the refinement and haughty demeanor of the first-class passengers above them identical with the barbaric challenge and insolence of Port Said? It did not surprise me that for our exhibition of Western enterprise and energy those children of another clime had but shy and mild astonishment. One of them, who might have been an attractive piece of craftsmanship in ivory and ebony, did give to the busy and heated scene the faintest of smiles. A doubt as to what made him smile blurred for me later the enduring testimony to Western skill and activity in the Suez Canal, and even the still more remarkable evidence of our energy at Kantara, a wilderness of abandoned railways and earthworks, with square miles of abandoned airdromes and rusting and sand-blown wreckage, where Anglo-Saxon genius for scientific organization, and British wealth, had built the camp and engines for the last conquest of the Holy Land. It is most disquieting to get a hint that the established way of life of one’s kin may be foolish after all, and that there are other ways.

Why should a Cambodian smile have so haunted me that my hope and endurance in travel were not rewarded with the satisfaction I had a right to expect, when witnessing the marvels in foreign lands created there by the superior culture of my dominant race? Did I go to sea for that? Nothing like it. And next morning, when I looked out from my cabin port, there still was the mere canal. Beyond it was the desert, and over that gray and vacant plain was an announcement of the coming sun. The sky was empty, like the desert. Notking unusual was expected, evidently. But it was only with the first half-awakened glance that I guessed it was the common sun which was to come. In another instant I was aware that that hushed and obscure land was humbly awaiting its lord. The majestic presence suddenly blazed, and ascended to overlook his dominion. A terrifying spectacle! It would have frightened even a poet in the mood to hail the beneficence of one of man’s earliest gods. The glances of that celestial incandescence were as direct as, white blades.

In the south, to which we were headed, a high range of Africa’s stark limestone crags stood over a burnished sea. The sun looked straight at them. And just above them, parted from their yellow metallic sheen by a narrow band of sky, was the full globe of the declining moon; and the moon herself was no more distant and no more spectral than earth’s bright rocks beneath her. It was not surprising that that scene was motionless and constant. There was no wind, there was no air, or all would have vanished like a vision of what has departed. Those luminous bergs shone like copper. Their markings were as clear and fine as the far landscape of a newly risen harvest moon. Suez was not far away, and its lilac shadows were as unearthly as the desert. But there was substance alongside our ship. Some villas were immediately below, arbored in tamarisk and cassia. A few trees in that green mass were in crimson flower. I could smell the burning ashore of aromatic wood. A child in a cerise gown stood under a tree, but she was so still that, like the polished water, like the hills of brass and the city built of tinted shades, she might have been the deceit of an enchantment.

A tugboat rounded a point, shattered the glass of the sea, and the child, released from the spell, moved from under the tree. Men in our ship were shouting. Mail bags for Singapore, Hongkong, Shanghai, and other places as well defined were thrown aboard. Life began to circulate. These men gave no attention to dead hills and the tyrant in the heavens. I am prepared to believe they would have been incredulous concerning any town about there built of lilac shadows. Our ship rounded away into the Gulf of Suez, the northern corner of the Red Sea.