Tales of Unrest | Page 6

of fruit-trees marked the villages; slim
palms put their nodding heads together above the low houses; dried
palm-leaf roofs shone afar, like roofs of gold, behind the dark
colonnades of tree-trunks; figures passed vivid and vanishing; the
smoke of fires stood upright above the masses of flowering bushes;
bamboo fences glittered, running away in broken lines between the
fields. A sudden cry on the shore sounded plaintive in the distance, and
ceased abruptly, as if stifled in the downpour of sunshine. A puff of
breeze made a flash of darkness on the smooth water, touched our faces,
and became forgotten. Nothing moved. The sun blazed down into a
shadowless hollow of colours and stillness.

It was the stage where, dressed splendidly for his part, he strutted,
incomparably dignified, made important by the power he had to
awaken an absurd expectation of something heroic going to take
place--a burst of action or song--upon the vibrating tone of a wonderful
sunshine. He was ornate and disturbing, for one could not imagine what
depth of horrible void such an elaborate front could be worthy to hide.
He was not masked--there was too much life in him, and a mask is only
a lifeless thing; but he presented himself essentially as an actor, as a
human being aggressively disguised. His smallest acts were prepared
and unexpected, his speeches grave, his sentences ominous like hints
and complicated like arabesques. He was treated with a solemn respect
accorded in the irreverent West only to the monarchs of the stage, and
he accepted the profound homage with a sustained dignity seen
nowhere else but behind the footlights and in the condensed falseness
of some grossly tragic situation. It was almost impossible to remember
who he was--only a petty chief of a conveniently isolated corner of
Mindanao, where we could in comparative safety break the law against
the traffic in firearms and ammunition with the natives. What would
happen should one of the moribund Spanish gun-boats be suddenly
galvanized into a flicker of active life did not trouble us, once we were
inside the bay--so completely did it appear out of the reach of a
meddling world; and besides, in those days we were imaginative
enough to look with a kind of joyous equanimity on any chance there
was of being quietly hanged somewhere out of the way of diplomatic
remonstrance. As to Karain, nothing could happen to him unless what
happens to all--failure and death; but his quality was to appear clothed
in the illusion of unavoidable success. He seemed too effective, too
necessary there, too much of an essential condition for the existence of
his land and his people, to be destroyed by anything short of an
earthquake. He summed up his race, his country, the elemental force of
ardent life, of tropical nature. He had its luxuriant strength, its
fascination; and, like it, he carried the seed of peril within.
In many successive visits we came to know his stage well--the purple
semicircle of hills, the slim trees leaning over houses, the yellow sands,
the streaming green of ravines. All that had the crude and blended
colouring, the appropriateness almost excessive, the suspicious

immobility of a painted scene; and it enclosed so perfectly the
accomplished acting of his amazing pretences that the rest of the world
seemed shut out forever from the gorgeous spectacle. There could be
nothing outside. It was as if the earth had gone on spinning, and had
left that crumb of its surface alone in space. He appeared utterly cut off
from everything but the sunshine, and that even seemed to be made for
him alone. Once when asked what was on the other side of the hills, he
said, with a meaning smile, "Friends and enemies--many enemies; else
why should I buy your rifles and powder?" He was always like
this--word-perfect in his part, playing up faithfully to the mysteries and
certitudes of his surroundings. "Friends and enemies"--nothing else. It
was impalpable and vast. The earth had indeed rolled away from under
his land, and he, with his handful of people, stood surrounded by a
silent tumult as of contending shades. Certainly no sound came from
outside. "Friends and enemies!" He might have added, "and memories,"
at least as far as he himself was concerned; but he neglected to make
that point then. It made itself later on, though; but it was after the daily
performance-- in the wings, so to speak, and with the lights out.
Meantime he filled the stage with barbarous dignity. Some ten years
ago he had led his people--a scratch lot of wandering Bugis--to the
conquest of the bay, and now in his august care they had forgotten all
the past, and had lost all concern for the future. He gave them wisdom,
advice, reward, punishment, life