III. ELYSIUM
That garden, which sloped seaward to three areca palms, was a place which I felt might vanish, if I moved, or changed my thoughts. The daylight was the private illumination of an imagined land, and the strange fronds were a capricious revolt from the conventions of avenues and parks. Then a butterfly, immense in green and black, broke into the picture from above, and fanned his colours slowly over a white trumpet that was upheld noiselessly by an unseen hand from a shrub. He touched it, and the trumpet swayed. The picture was solid.
A tall, stiff figure came out of the rest-house and sat with me on the verandah. That elderly missionary’s white linen suit, neatly creased, and his collar and black bow, which would have been unremarked in Oxford Street, made me conscious of my own careless and limp attire. I always felt that that man might, as a reasonable and friendly neighbour—for we had the rest-house to ourselves—concede something in his dress. But he never relented. The Malay servants could be in no doubt as to which of us was the important Tuan. One of those silent familiars now shaped near us. He brought tea and two queer little cakes. I liked the look of those cakes, but the missionary whistled for the dog, and gave away the cakes perfunctorily. He rubbed his fingers with a handkerchief, and then turned his signet-ring into its right position. He inclined his head kindly to me in a little cross-examination. What had I seen to-day?
He stirred his tea, and shook his head in depreciation over some native wares I had bought. Poor stuff, he said. No good. Better bring it to him in future, before buying it. But it was very hard now to get the genuine old material. He had been collecting it all over the islands for years. He enumerated what rare treasure he had been able to acquire from time to time. The European collectors were willing to pay highly for it. But it was getting very scarce.
He carefully crossed his legs, for to keep neat an ironed linen suit for an hour or two in a moist heat demands the unremitting attention of a man whose self-control is automatic. Why, in the past, he continued, when he visited one of the islands of an isolated group, with some tact and wholesale baptism he could persuade a village to surrender all its totems, idols, carvings and copper drums. Not to-day, though. The whole region has been swept clean. Everybody is converted, or has no God, or is a Mohammedan. But you could buy plenty of English and American stuff. After a pause, which was like an interval for silent regret over good things lost in the past, he spoke, dispassionately, and with the forgiving voice of an ethnologist, who understood the deep springs of astonishing human conduct, of the immoralities of the islanders. He was no bigot. He did not tell me that, but I was sure he forgave irregularities in all but Europeans, and he understood even those.
He had spent fifteen years among the islands. The natives had the minds of children. I learned from him how they should be treated by any benefactor. I was looking at his moustache, for it was interesting to see how little his lips moved as he spoke. There was firmness even in those short iron-grey bristles. His eyes, under those shaggy brows, looked on me from a rectitude which now he could trust without bothering about it. The tropics had made no difference to him. His skin was fresh, and looked hard. He offered me one of his excellent Dutch cigars. He became grimly amused over the instructions left by a white trader for him to carry out. He had buried that man the week before last. That fellow had begged the missionary—because he knew his Malay mistress with her four half-caste children would be careless about it—to have erected a sort of shrine over his grave, with pictures from the Scriptures to hang in it, and this text in a principal place: “I am the resurrection and the life.”
A group of women, their bright gowns as noticeable in the quiet as a burst of gay music, idled slowly past the foot of the garden, and one of them turned her dark face shyly to look at the missionary, but very sternly he did not look at her. The tropics were outside his heart. He could not be invaded. His stiff figure could at any time assume its winter dress in Europe, and he could begin again as though sly but inviting glances across a tropical shrubbery, and sunny islands where life is different, were only like the phases of the moon, which may be observed, if the almanac is watched, and you are sufficiently interested.
The crowns of the areca palms changed, as the sun went down, into three high fountains of gold, which quickly sank into the shades. There were burning films of rose in the sky. Then their light, too, went out. A firefly began to glint in zigzags before the verandah, and a cricket shrilled. A servant brought a lamp. “These islanders come to my church, when I am here, or they go to the mosque,” said the missionary gravely, “but they are all pagans at heart. A man and woman will live together for years, and then come and be married for luck, and bring their children with them. They are baptised for luck. They try to be on the right side all round. I know them. I haven’t given them fifteen years of my life for nothing.”
“But you suggest that you have when you tell me they are still pagans.”
The missionary did not answer. He recrossed his legs carefully. “I like them,” he said simply. “They are good-hearted.”
“If ever you are on the main island come and see me,” he said late that night. “My home is there. You may like to look at my collection.”
The next day he had gone to another congregation across the water. When presently a ship came for me, and I left that beach, she touched on her way home at the village the missionary had named, and there was time to visit his home. The afternoon was almost done. The sun was setting over Borneo, across the water, in a clear saffron sky. I waited for the evangelist on his verandah, and could see through his dwelling of timber to the bright light in the west. The interior of the house was in darkness, but that further doorway was a shape of gold, in which distant coconut palms formed a design in black. I felt I had discovered in that home its resident and privy dream. I spoke of this to the missionary. He did not look at it. “It is very beautiful,” he said gravely.
He led me through that further door of gold to the garden that we might watch the sunset. “I have an arbour on the beach,” he said. A frail little woman was seated within that arbour. She wore an old-fashioned shape of crochet work on her grey hair. She smiled at me but did not speak. “My wife,” the missionary explained. I thanked her for lending me so beautiful an outlook on the world. There could be no nobler place anywhere from which to see the sun go down. She nodded, and smiled sadly, and said “Yes, isn’t it?”
The missionary interrupted my attempt to come to an understanding with my hostess. He had a request that I should take his mail with me. “You can take the letters with you when you board your ship to-night.” We both walked back to the house, leaving his wife in the arbour. She was still looking over the sea to the western light.
He turned to me and shook his head. He touched his forehead significantly.
“She sits there all day,” he said. “She sits there, and when she sees a ship going home, she weeps.”