In the Botanical Gardens at Buitenzorg, I found myself unexpectedly reminded—in spite of the pervasive greenness, the palms, the fantastic flowers—of a winter scene in England. For the strong sullen illumination, which I have tried to describe and which is so characteristic of our December landscapes, was the same as that which lay on these tropical gardens. Under the white dead sky, the colours potentially so much stronger than any that are seen in our more rarefied landscapes, shone with a dark intensity, muffled yet violent, as though resentful of their suppression. We walked enchanted, but in a kind of horror, under huge trees, heavy with foliage that seemed as though darkly and morbidly suffused with an excess of coloured life.
And when at last the sun came out, how unrestrainedly, with what a savage and immoderate exultation, the gardens responded to its greeting! The hard and shiny leaves reflected the light as though they had been made of metal, and burnished. On every tree there hung, according to the shape, the size and growth of its leaves, a multitude of shining sequins, of scythes and scimitars, of daggers and little ingots, a hundred various forms of colourless and dazzling sunshine. And where the leaves did not look towards the sun, their colour, stripped by the light of all the veils which the clouds had wrapped about it, glared out in all its intensity: the violent blue-tinged emerald of equatorial foliage.
BUITENZORG
There is a certain type of ingenious mind to which the function of decorative and applied art is simply and solely to make one object look like another and fundamentally different object. Wordsworth’s Needlecase in the form of a Harp is classical. The same perverse ingenuity has begotten and is still begetting monsters as silly.
Personally, I have a weakness for these absurdities. I love the stucco that mimics marble, the washstands in the form of harpsichords, the biscuit boxes that look like Shakespeare’s Complete Works tied together with an embroidered ribbon. My affection for these things prepared me to feel a special admiration for the flora of the equator. For the special and peculiar charm of tropical botany is that you can never be quite sure that it isn’t zoology, or arts and crafts, or primitive religion. There are lilies in Malaya whose petals have become attenuated to writhing tentacles, so that they dangle on their stalks like perfumed spiders.
There are palms whose fruits are vegetable porcupines. Dessert in Java is an affair of scarlet sea-urchins and baked potatoes: open the first—it contains the semblance of a plover’s egg, hard-boiled and peeled of its shell; and the potato proves to be full of a purplish custard flavoured with sherry, turpentine and chocolate. There are orchids in Singapore that might be pigeons, and others from which one recoils instinctively as though from the head of a snake. The gardens of the equator are full of shrubs that bloom with votive offerings to the Great Mother, and are fruited with coloured Easter eggs, lingams and swastikas.
There are trees whose stems are fantastically buttressed to look like specimens of a late and decadent Gothic architecture; banyans pillared like the nave of a basilica; Fici Elastiae that trail the ropes and halters of a torture-chamber. There are red varnished leaves and leaves of shiny purple that look as though they were made of American cloth or patent leather. There are leaves cut out of pink blotting-paper; leaves mottled like the cover of a school notebook; leaves whose green is piped with lines of white or rose in a manner so sketchily elegant, so daring, so characteristically “modern,” that they are manifestly samples of the very latest furniture fabrics from Paris.
AT SEA
At sea I succumbed to my besetting vice of reading: to such an extent that the sand-fringed, palm-crowned islands; the immense marmoreal clouds that seem for ever poised, a sculptor’s delirium, on the dividing line between chaos and accomplished form; the sunsets of Bengal lights and emeralds, of primroses and ice-cream, of blood and lampblack; the dawns when an almost inky sea, reflecting the Eastern roses from its blue-black surface, turns the colour of wine; the stars in the soot-black sky, the nightly flashings of far-away storms beneath the horizon, the green phosphorescence on the water—all the lovely incidents of tropical seafaring float slowly past me, almost unobserved; I am absorbed in the ship’s library.
Ships’ libraries, I suppose, are bought either by length or by weight. Stones of prime fiction, yards of romance fill the shelves. The chief steward’s key releases from their glass cages books which on land one never sees, one hardly dreams of: books about cow-punchers and sweet American heroines, all in the Great Open Air; more serious and touching novels about heroes who are misunderstood, who have appearances against them and are suspected, oh! quite unjustly, of cohabiting with pure young ladies, and who are too virtuously proud to explain, until they, the heroines and every one else concerned have been put to the greatest possible inconvenience; sociological novels about the Modern Girl, the Poor, Night Life in London and a Decent Day’s Work for a Decent Day’s Wage; innumerable nondescript tales that end, instead of beginning, with long slow kisses and arrangements for the wedding. Amazing works! Drifting through the tropics, I read them at the rate of three a day and found the process a liberal education.
Sometimes, surprisingly, one finds a real book, buried like a hard precious pebble in the spiritual mud of the ship’s library. A real book. The discovery comes as a shock. One feels like stout Cortez, or Robinson Crusoe confronted by the footprints, or Dr. Paley when he picked up that symbolical half-hunter in the desert. What is it? How did it get there? By accident or design? In certain cases the questions admit of speciously satisfying answers. Those George Eliots, for example, so common in the Eastern seas—those can be easily accounted for by the hypothesis of a new edition, overprinted and remaindered. And perhaps the mere cheapness of the Everyman volumes would explain more than one appearance of Macaulay’s History. Nor should one be too much astonished at finding Anatole France on the ships of the Rotterdam Lloyd; for the Dutch are polyglots and believe in culture.
Miraculously so, as I discovered earlier in my wanderings. In Kashmir I met a young and charming Dutch lady who had just returned from a six months’ journey of exploration in Chinese Turkestan. We were introduced, entered into conversation; she began talking, judiciously and in a flawless English, about my last novel. I was extremely gratified; but at the same time I was overwhelmed. If ever I go to Chinese Turkestan, I shall return, I am afraid, as deeply ignorant of contemporary Dutch fiction as I was before I started. But if the presence of Thaïs among the Dutch was explicable, the presence of Edmund Gosse’s Diversions of a Man of Letters in the library of a small Australian vessel was almost terrifyingly unaccountable.
And how on earth did the Howard’s End of E. M. Forster introduce itself into the coastwise traffic of Burma and Malaya? How was it that Mark Rutherford became a passenger from Sandakan to Zamboanga? And why, oh why, was Bishop Berkeley travelling from Singapore with his almost eponymous namesake of The Rosary? After the first disquieting bewilderment, I accepted the books with thankfulness, and whenever I needed a little holiday from my studies in popular fiction, turned to them for rest and refreshment.
Among the genuine books which I discovered imbedded in a ship’s library was Henry Ford’s My Life and Work. I had never read it; I began, and was fascinated. It is easy enough in a book to apply destructive common sense to the existing fabric of social organisation and then, with the aid of constructive common sense, to build up the scattered pieces into a more seemly whole. Unsystematically and in a small way I have done the thing myself. I know how easy it is. But when Ford started to apply common sense to the existing methods of industry and business he did it, not in a book, but in real life. It was only when he had smashed and rebuilt in practice that he decided to expound in a book the theory of his enormous success.
It was somewhere between the tropic and the equator that I read the book. In these seas, and to one fresh from India and Indian “spirituality,” Indian dirt and religion, Ford seems a greater man than Buddha. In Europe, on the other hand, and still more, no doubt, in America, the Way of Gautama has all the appearance of the way of Salvation. One is all for religion until one visits a really religious country. There, one is all for drains, machinery and the minimum wage. To travel is to discover that everybody is wrong. The philosophies,
