But the untutored mind of the poor Indian does not know it. He sees the films, he thinks they represent Western reality, he cannot see why he should be ruled by criminal imbeciles. As we turned, disgusted from the idiotic spectacle and threaded our way out of the crowd, that strange aquarium silence of the Javanese was broken by a languid snigger of derision. Nothing more. Just a little laugh. A word or two of mocking comment in Malay and then, once more, the silence as of fish. A few more years of Hollywood’s propaganda and perhaps we shall not get out of an Oriental crowd quite so easily.
GAROET
At this season of the year—which, the month being March, I must call spring, though it is never anything in Java but a more or less rainy midsummer—at this season the hill station of Garoet is like Paradise from dawn till lunch time and like Scotland all the afternoon. You wake up each morning to find the sky pale blue, the row of jagged volcanoes opposite your bedroom window all rosy with sunrise, the valley in the foreground miraculously green.
All morning a process of cloud-making goes on. White mountains of vapour, more fantastically shaped even than the rocks of Java, build themselves up behind the volcanoes, rise higher and ever higher into the sky, throw off white islands from their summits to float out into the welkin—until at last after a marvellous drama of light and shadow, a slow soundless pageant of ineffable illuminations and solemn quenchings, the whole sky is overcast with vapours that, from being white and sunlit, have almost suddenly turned grey, and the whole scene below is lifeless and sad.
Punctually, at about two o’clock, the first drops fall, and from that time forward the rain comes pouring down with undiminished violence till far into the night. The valley, the volcanoes, the near palms and the bamboos disappear behind grey veils of water. It is almost cold. Looking out from your veranda, you might almost believe you were sitting somewhere on the Moor of Rannoch.
But what matters Rannoch all the afternoon, if you may walk in Eden all the morning? Eden indeed; for the whole impossibly beautiful land is one great garden—but a garden on which, alas, the curse of work has fallen most heavily. Tourists in Paradise admire; but the gardeners labour incessantly. The tourists’ white-skinned cousins duly see to that.
At Garoet we walked out each morning among the paradisiacal parterres. Every slope was terraced and planted with rice; and at this season all the terraces were flooded. Flights upon flights of watery steps climbed from the valleys up the hillsides. Lovingly they followed each contour of the hill, making visible and, as it were, underlining artistically the advance and recession of the curving slopes. Some of the terraces shone within their little retaining walls of clay, like mirrors of colourless glass. In some the rice had already sprouted and the surface of the water reflected innumerable shoots of emerald. In little torrents, from the mouth of bamboo conduits, the water poured and splashed.
But not all the fields were under water. In some they were growing sugar-cane. In some they had just cut the maize. We walked by little paths up and down through the mountainous garden. Enormous butterflies, their brown wings eyed with staring purple; butterflies metallically blue; orange and swallow-tailed; or richly funereal, as though they had been cut out of black velvet; passed and repassed with the strong swift flight of birds. In the hedges, the hibiscus flowers hung open-mouthed and their long pistils lolled like red and furry tongues. A bush covered with little flowers, star-shaped and many-coloured, blossomed along every path. But brighter than the butterflies and the flowers were the Javanese. Gaudy in their batik and fantastically patterned, they passed along the paths, they stood working in the fields.
The country swarmed with them. And every two or three furlongs we would walk into a village—a hundred little houses made of bamboo and thatch and woven matting, perched on long stilts above their artificial fish ponds (for almost every house in Java has its muddy pool) and teeming with copper-coloured life. Suspended from the tops of long bamboos, the tame birds twittered in their cages. And in larger cages, raised only a few feet above the ground, we could see through the rattan bars, not birds, but—astonishingly—tall piebald sheep, one woolly prisoner in each cage.
I have never seen any country more densely populous than Java. There are places within thirty miles of London where one may walk for half an hour without meeting a soul and almost without seeing a house. But in Java one is never out of sight of man and his works. The fields are full of industrious labourers. No village seems to be more than ten minutes’ walk from its nearest neighbours. Authentically paradisiacal, the landscape is very far from being a “bowery loneliness.” By comparison with Java, Surrey seems underpopulated. And for once, statistics confirm personal impressions. The best part of forty million people live on the island—the population of crowded Italy in a mountainous land of half its area.
When, in the afternoons, the rain came down and I had time to do something besides gasp with admiration at the fabulous and entirely unbelievable beauty of the landscape, I could not help thinking about this portentous populousness. I remembered those lines of Byron’s—if Byron indeed it was who wrote that in every sense “curious” poem, Don Leon—those classical lines, in which the whole theory of overpopulation is briefly and brutally summed up:—
Come, Malthus, and in Ciceronian prose
Show how a rutting Population grows,
Until the produce of the Soil is spent,
And Brats expire for lack of Aliment.
How soon the brats will start expiring in Java, I cannot say. Into what is perhaps the most fertile country in the world, they are already importing food. But that means very little. Agricultural methods may be improved; new lands opened up. In the future, who knows? Java may support eighty or a hundred, instead of a mere forty millions.
What interests me in the general problem is the particular case of the child of talent born in the lowest strata of an excessive population. What are his chances of living, in the first place; of developing and extrinsicating his talents, in the second? Brats, tout court, constitute the stuff of which our world is made. They may expire; but unless they do so on such an enormous scale as to imperil the whole fabric of society, it will make no difference to the world. Brats of talent, on the other hand, have it in them to change the world in one way or another. The suppression of their talent, by death or by the unpropitious circumstances of life, deprives the world of part of its vital principle of growth and change.
The lot of a human being born in the basements of any population, whether excessive or small, is at the best of times unenviable. Layer upon layer of organised society lies above them; he is buried alive under a living tombstone whose interest it is to keep him buried. In the West, where the standard of living is relatively high, where the State is rich and humanitarianism is one of the principles of government, the brat of talent is given certain chances. The State provides certain educational levers and pulleys for lifting the tombstone. The child of talent—at any rate, if his talent happens to be of the examination-passing variety—can worm his way up quite early in life from the pit into which he was born.
But in the East universal primary education does not exist, the State is not run on humanitarian principles, and, even if it were would be too poor to provide the brats of talent with the costly machinery for lifting the tombstone. Nor, perhaps, are the brats even conscious of a desire to climb out of their grave. The bands of ancient custom are wound round them like a shroud; they cannot move, they do not wish to struggle. And then, consider the weight of the tombstone. In China, in India it lies like a pyramid upon them. Even if he should survive infancy—and in an Oriental city anything from three to nine hundred of every thousand children die before completing their first year—how can the brat of talent hope, unaided, to lift the pyramid? Choirs of mute Miltons, whole regiments of guiltless Cromwells are without doubt at this moment quietly putrefying in the living graves of China and lower-caste India.
Java, like all the other Malayan countries, evolved no civilisation of its own, and its barbarous record, so different from the splendid histories of China and India, does not authorise us to believe it fertile in men of talent. Still who knows what genius may not by chance be buried under the thick layers of its population? In the pyramid above the grave of talent there are the best part of forty million stones. If I were a Javanese patriot, I should have that all too efficaciously fertilising cannon at Batavia surreptitiously dragged from its place by the Penang Gate and thrown into the sea.
BUITENZORG
There
