Barbarism

Introduction

Henry Major Tomlinson was fascinated by travel. He grew up near the docks of East London, became a shipping clerk, and was able to visit various places around the globe, including Malaysia and a famous trip up the Amazon River. It is no surprise, then, that his works involve traveling across oceans and through jungles. He worked as a newspaper editor, travel journalist, and authored several novels and short stories.

“Barbarism” follows a man as he treks through the jungles of Malaysia and returns home. It is unclear whether this text is autobiographical, but it is known that Tomlinson traveled to Malaysia. No doubt Tomlinson included many details from his own experience.

Upon his return home, the narrator comes to realize his own civilization is more “barbaric” than the jungles of Malaysia and its people who are looked down upon as “savage.” It is, at its core, a story of realization and self-awareness. It also shows Tomlinson’s preference of nature over civilization. It is not that nature is idealized. In fact, it is rather frightening at times. But it shows how man thinks of himself as so advanced and civilized when, really, he is the exact opposite.

The short story was published in The Adelphi in December or 1923. The editor was John Middleton Murry. H.M. Tomlinson wrote for several publications that were decidedly anti-war, including The Adelphi. Though not as anti-war in tone as some of his other works, “Barbarism” does describe an adventurer returning home to find himself distanced from the world because of his journey.

Though he is not actively trying, like Mansfield or Woolf, to subvert readers’ expectations, Tomlinson can fit into the Modernist canon for his timeliness, his global perspective, and his anti-war opinions. Like most modernists, Tomlinson is concerned with the inner workings of the mind and his narrative reflects that. His descriptions are rich and detailed, and the narrative voice is inviting and self-aware.

 

Transcription

It looked to me a definite check. There was no bridge. The bed of the stream was of white sand, but the water seemed queer, coming dark and quick as it did out of the forest. It had no name that I knew. The three Malays^[1]An Austronesian ethnic group that predominately inhabit the Malay peninsula, eastern Sumatra and coastal Borneo. with the packs waded straight over up to the waist. Their eyes were fixed to the route; water or earth seemed all the same to them; they went lightly up the opposite bank and disappeared. I could not even hear them. The forest took them in.

My companion followed them, and it was my turn. But this was early in the first day of the journey, and it took me some seconds to understand that I too was expected to get wet. We are so used to the provision of bridges, with public houses^[2]A bar or tavern. on hither side, that at first it appears to be on oversight on the part of Nature, and an affront to our dignity, to have to wet the shirt, and to go on walking as though it were dry. Odd, that chill coming through dry clothes; and how heavy it makes the boots!

I went on as though nothing had happened; but I knew something had happened. I had done more than cross from one side of a stream to the other. All the support of civilization, which we accept without knowing it is there, and so imagine we are supporting ourselves, was abandoned. I was on my own resources now, and realized that they were inadequate. I was carrying, for example, a rifle because of tigers and other possibilities, but the rifle only gave moral support to our Malays. I knew I couldn’t be so infernally quick as a tiger, and that the rifle therefore was no more to me than burden which was already as heavy and unaccommodating as a load of sin.

Presently we came to another steam–but it was a river. It was turgid, swift, and quite wide enough, and was plainly very deep. A tree had fallen across it; its wet trunk, midway, was half submerged. Wading over was a joke to this. The barefooted Malays got across as easily as cats. My friend followed them; and when he was half-way over, and I had started, and was well down the first greasy descent of the trunk’s butt, wondering how many more seconds I should last; he fell. Somehow, he managed to keep desperate finger-tips on a snag of the trunk, while the current stretched his legs and body downstream.

The Malays had gone on. I stood balancing over the water, helpless. He was some distance from me. There was nothing I could do. I shouted at him that if he let me go–already I knew of him that he was a bit inclined to easy surrenders–if he let go he would have to die. He became energetic, and at last straddled the trunk and reached the shore. I have no idea how I got over with the gun.

So the day went on, while the jungle silently contemplated us. I was wet, hot, hungry, and tired, but fairly happy, and inclined to tell the tropical forest it could do its worst; for quite clearly, though it was a fascinating foe, yet it was an implacable one. It would grant nothing to us.

All right. Then one would have to be careful, and force concessions. There were still ten miles ahead of us of the roughest kind of travel before we should find a native kampong,^[3] A Malaysian enclosure or village. when I met one of the Malay carriers coming back to me–I had been watching some ants, and was a long way in the rear. He was without his pack. He looked most woebegone. He shook his head in severe disapproval, and I gathered from him that the other white man had collapsed, was lying in the forest, and would not continue; he added that the night was coming, and the place was bad.

While kneeling in the damp trash beside the other white man, in the act of persuasion and even of abuse, I noticed my clothes were bloodstained, and found hanging to my ribs some leeches, already bloated. The revulsion was physical. I was horrified, not hurt. Other leeches, as I then noticed and pointed out to my friend, were attached to him. Hadn’t he better get up? He glanced down at his body, and was up at once, in dismay. And he really did look as though he had met something much more formidable than he had expected. He was about done. But he pulled himself together, good man, and on we went.

We had a life of that sort for weeks. At times it was much worse than the first day. We ate when we could, and whatever we could get. We slept in places where fires had to be kept going at night to dissuade the wild beasts. The leeches nauseated me daily. We would wade across a river, then squash through a morass^[4]An area of boggy or muddy ground. made by a herd of elephants; and when, climbing up a slippery bank out of that, fatigued and famished, you sprawled on your face, the hand snatched at a handful of thorns. When you rose you had to pick off more leeches. Down came the rain. There was no home to go to.

I will admit that at last, though I was glad I was there, I got rather nervous about it. Awake at night lying on the ground, looking at the ghosts of the nearest trees fading as the fire declined, it made you feel a little queer inside to hear the half-moan, half-snarl, of a tiger. The forest seemed hanging over you, waiting in silence for something it knew was going to happen.

But we got out to the coast again at last; got out cheaply, too, for our foolish change of the wild against which society protects us. We suffered nothing but a little poisoning, through the insect bites and rough living. When, some weeks before, I first saw that native town on the shore of the China Sea,^[5]A sea that encompasses an area from the Karimata and Malacca Straits to the Strait of Taiwan. I thought it was barbarous enough, but then, coming upon it out of the wilderness, I realized that it was an outpost of London and Peking.^[6] A term that usually refers to Beijing, the capital of China. Even the primitive altar in a field, which struck me as pagan enough when I noticed it on the outward journey, now seemed not so distantly related to St. Peter’s. We were all right again, with known things about us.

Next morning I boarded a little coasting steamer for Singapore. She was shipshape and bright, my cabin was hung with chintz^[7]A printed multicolor cotton fabric, used especially for curtains and upholstery. having a pattern of rosebuds, and the saloon table was as well ordered as that of a hotel. The captain, nice man, listened to the tale of our fun upcountry, and then said: ‘You’d like some news from home. Here’s the papers by the last mail.’ Most certainly, feeling secure with chintz curtains about us, and poisoned feet already less inflamed, we wanted news from England. The smiling little sailor reentered with a week’s bound numbers of the Daily Mirror.^[8]The Daily Mirror is a British national daily tabloid newspaper founded in 1903. I opened the volume.

The first sight of leeches hanging horribly to my body had not given me a worse shock. News from England! Then what a country! The bloodsucking worms, the jungle bugs which raised wheals,^[9]A red, swollen mark left on flesh by a blow or pressure. the fevers, the dark forest and the cataracts, and the rhinoceroses – if all that was savagery, then what was this? The natives we had met were certainly not barbarians. I had learned to like the Malays very much. They are a quiet, well-mannered, humorous, and hospitable people. They certainly have a war cry, which is both hair-raising and exhilarating when they are watching two bulls fighting, or are shooting dangerous rapids. But they are, it is fair to add, gentlefolk. Was I to be forced to admit that, compared with the Malays, my own countrymen were barbarians?

Now in the forest, on some anxious nights when sleep would not come, I had been sustained by the comforting thoughts or Waterloo Bridge at midnight, and a nook in Surrey, and some corners in Devonshire;^[10]Waterloo Bridge, Surrey, and Devonshire are all locations in England. things like that in this world, it was strangely certain, did exist, and they were heartening. But I felt a sudden despair for England, even in the China Sea, when I opened that newspaper, and say England’s life reflected in such pictures.

What a life! It would shame the natives of the Aru Islands.^[11]A group of about ninety-five low-lying islands in the Maluku province of eastern Indonesia. To open those sheets seemed to let fly an inane and fatuous blare. There was no sense in it. It was only a silly noise. Were these the pictures of a people which was going to rebuild a civilization that had been wrecked by war? Then there was little hope. I got, in that five minutes, the first real scare I had had in nearly six months’ travel among Malay Islands. It was a very subdued adventurer who handed that volume back to the captain; for he realized that, if he were safely out of the jungle, there was that to go back to.

I had become used to the Malays. I had learned to understand, fairly well, their ways of living and of looking at things. After a while I had no doubt that they had rightly solved the problem of accommodating themselves to their circumstances. They are a happy folk. You hardly ever see an anxious face among them, and never a hungry child. They need no old-age pension. Their future is secure, if they will but give a brief time yearly to rice-fields, coconuts, and fishing nets. But I am not at all sure to-day whether I understand the English, and that black doubt can be credited to the illustrated paper, the pictures of which I saw at the right perspective in the China Sea. I have not recovered from the shock.

There was an occasion when, years ago, returning from my first long journey in a difficult land, I stayed up all night so that I might have the earliest glimpse of an English light. Yet when somebody announced at lunch in the Channel the other day, ‘Start Point^[12]A promontory in Devon, England. is sighted,’ I must confess that I examined my heart when I found that I was not thrilled. Who or what was wrong? It was a real trouble to me, to find that I was indifferent, for I knew that I was very glad indeed to be nearing home again. Yet was not England home? Well, say that one’s home happens to be in England. That may express the subtle difference in one’s mind, a difference which began about the end of the war and has been established by that more popular press in which the English seem to delight.

And the further truth is, when first adventuring in the streets of London recently, though I was as much at home in Ludgate Circus as I was a short while ago on the island of Ternate,^[13] An island in the Maluku Islands of eastern Indonesia. -- where you soon learn to find your way about, -- yet there was a mind about me in Fleet Street which I found harder to enter than, say, that of the natives of Kota Bharu.^[14]A city in Malaysia. Of evidence of Europe’s disastrous plight I had been seeing enough as far away as the Pacific; ships everywhere were running with light freights, at a loss to owners, though the means to fill them was often abundant. Plenty of ships, plenty of harvests, and a great want in Europe; and hardly any business. So what the deuce some things meant in Fleet Street I couldn’t make out.

It was but fair to suppose, as it is the business of journalist to give the public what it wants, that the newspaper placards indicated what then chiefly occupied the minds of most of my own people. But those placards were Chinese to me. One sheet grieved: ‘Bad News About Papyrus.’ An honest paper, because, as a journalist, I know that editors don’t like publishing gloomy stuff. But what did it mean? I could only conclude that Tut-ankh-amen’s^[15]An Egyptian pharaoh of the 18^th dynasty. prayer book had been most unfortunately torn.