Tramp Royale

by Robert A. Heinlein

  He himself was speaking a county dialect I could not identify but which I could hardly understand, but I pretended a politeness I did not feel and tried to explain that American was an independent variation of English, with its own spelling, pronunciation, and rules. This struck him as silly. So I asked him what English accent he wanted us to imitate?-Yorkshire, Oxonian, Cockney, Devon, or what? This ended the discussion without convincing either one of us.

  The United Kingdom shows a much wider variation in speech in one tight little island than we do in our continent-wide spread. To have our American speech patronized sets my teeth on edge.

  Ticky tangled to the point of brass rags with one Englishwoman in the ship. This female had insisted on inquiring into one aspect of our economy: "You don't really mean to tell me that you have to pay for medicines and hospital care? How dreadful! Why don't you have socialized medicine?"

  Ticky glared at her. "We can't afford it! We've had to pay for British socialized medicine!"

  I've tried to impress on Ticky the necessity of keeping her temper when needled, but I am afraid that she will never qualify for a job with the State Department.

  But I have a sneaking suspicion that her uncivil hyperbole contains a legitimate criticism of most of our foreign aid program. Have we really been getting our money's worth in most cases?

  We made only a dawn-to-dusk stop at Mauritius. Mauritius is a place I must have missed when I studied geography as a kid but it turns out to be a large and populous island. It exports sugar cane and imports everything else. The language is French, the flag is British, and the population is overwhelmingly East Indian. This is another one of those odd chunks of real estate that England took over during the Napoleonic Wars and never turned loose, like Tristan da Cunha, and, for that matter, South Africa itself. The dominant French population are largely royalists; they appear to believe sincerely that a restoration of the Bourbon crown would fix up all of the ills of France. I don't share the belief myself but I have no objection, as I doubt if it could make things worse. Port Louis is well equipped and beautiful but very busy; the Ruys had to anchor and we went in by launch. The shopkeepers, taxi drivers, money changers, and such are mostly Moslem Indians; the field laborers are Hindu; they look alike and have no use for each other.

  I changed South African pounds for Mauritian rupees and we hired a taxi. A rupee appeared to be about nineteen cents but the three-way conversion was so complicated that I could not have solved it without a sliderule-if I was cheated, I never knew it. Certainly we were not overcharged in the long run, as a day's drive for four of us, lunch, beer, baksheesh, and the launch came to less than eight dollars each.

  Port Louis is a picturesque and cleanly little town of narrow streets and cobblestones. We left it and headed around the island, which is basically one large, long-since-extinct volcano. It used to be covered with tropical rain forest; now all but about a fifth has been cleared and planted. As to climate one need only say that the inhabitants go to Durban, if possible, during the worst months to escape the heat-while the Durbanites are going to Transvaal or Cape Town for the same reason.

  We stopped to see the botanical gardens, which are beautiful, old, and very lush. Ticky trotted happily around, pointing to things and spouting Latin, and I identified a mango. There were giant tortoises in a pen there, which looked much like the famous Galápagos tortoises and seemed almost as big. About then mosquitoes started harrying us and I insisted that we move on; Mauritius has malaria.

  All day long we kept running into religious processions; it was the festival of "Cavadee" for the Tamil Hindu coolies. Who Cavadee was, or what; what he did, or it signified-these I never found out and my interest in trying to discern the sense behind it was considerably cooled by the fact that the central figure in each procession was a "holy man" with skewers stuck through his cheeks, in one side and out the other. To find nonsense posing in the name of religion it is not necessary to go outside my home town, but most of it seems harmless at worst. Mutilation seems to me another matter. I have no patience with any so-called religion that practices it, and would not bother to study its claims save through morbid curiosity.

  We crass Westerners are often urged to study the exquisite spiritual beauties of Hindu religion and philosophy and I will readily admit that some of their religious poetry reads pretty well. But I contend that the disgusting behavior of many of their alleged "holy men" relieves us of any intellectual obligation to take the stuff seriously. No amount of sanctimonious rationalization can make such behavior anything but pathological.

  These parades wound around through the streets and into the open country, where the Tamils gathered under trees and piled flowers in front of holy pictures. Their prayers, speeches, and hymns were strange to us but the air was more that of a Sunday School picnic than of Sunday School itself-little children scurried around underfoot, only slightly restrained by their solemn, sari-clad mothers. I noticed caste marks on foreheads and asked our driver what each meant. But he was Mohammedan and not only did not know but was contemptuous of such things.

  Our driver took us to a pleasant hotel high up in the hills where we got an excellent lunch . . . only to find out after lunch that the hotel had refused him even back room or back door service because he was not "European." It was infuriating but there was nothing we could do. We urged him to stop at once somewhere where he could eat, but he shrugged and said that he would wait.

  But his son, grandson, or nephew will probably someday own the hotel. The sahib's sun is setting in those parts.

  We drove around the rim of the extinct crater, an awesome sight of textbook perfection-then dropped back down into Port Louis. The ship sailed late that afternoon. It had been worth a day but Mauritius is not a place I want to see again.

  We crossed the equator without ceremony and turned into the Straits of Malacca, dropping back down toward Singapore. After days without raising a ship we were suddenly in heavy traffic and amidst numerous small islands, as well as having Sumatra on our starboard hand. I was surprised at the large numbers of lights visible on the Sumatran coast at night and had it impressed on me in a fashion that the World Almanac figures do not: these islands are very densely populated. We think of them as jungle and they are-but all of them are much more heavily populated than the States . . . New Jersey, not Wyoming, is the reasonable comparison. I think perhaps the strongest impression that we brought back from the Far East was the tremendous problem of population pressure. This is going to give us headaches, big ones, long after the communists are forgotten-and I have no idea what to do about it. It may be that there is no solution other than the ancient, tragic checks of famine, pestilence, and war.

  It is all very well to answer glibly with "birth control." Actually it is no answer but simply a piece of verbal magic, like, "The Lord will provide." But the Lord won't provide and birth control won't work on this wholesale scale, for obvious reasons of education and economics and for much deeper reasons of human psychology and body chemistry which we do not fully understand. I once saw a sucker ad for a method of exterminating cockroaches; the device was two blocks of wood: place the cockroach between them and squeeze.

  Birth control is about that effective-excellent on a retail scale; worthless at the wholesale level.

  But don't blame any religious opposition to birth control. In the long run, religious opposition to or humanistic support for birth control are both as irrelevant and as ineffectual as prayers for rain; the numbers on this planet keep increasing just the same-fifty-five thousand more people at today's breakfast table than there were yesterday morning, twenty million more this year than last year, in each decade an increase greater than the entire population of the United States.

  Occasionally one sees stories which "solve" this problem by emigration to other planets. I wish it would work but it won't. Oh, we will colonize the other planets someday; that is as certain as tomorrow's sunrise. But it will have no effect at all on the problem of population pressure on our o
wn beautiful and tragic globe. To stay even, not gain an inch, we would have to persuade or coerce nearly sixty thousand people to take to the sky every day of every year. Bypass the psychological problem, assume that it is solved-by force, if you like. The physical problem remains: we can build spaceships but we can't build that many. There isn't enough steel, aluminum, uranium, or anything else on this whole planet to permit us to build enough space ferries to move the daily increment and keep on doing it, day after day, year after year.

  The real problem of the Far East is not that so many of them are communists, but simply that there are so many of them.

  The above is somewhat out of its proper order, for we have not yet seen Singapore, where I first learned the meaning of the word "teeming"-nor Djakarta, especially Djakarta. We arrived in Singapore early in the morning, my own first impression of it being a shout from Ticky: "Hey! Look!"

  Passing by our porthole only a few feet away was the ribbed sail of a Chinese junk. It brought the Far East into my lap. While I knew that those funny sails and odd ships were as contemporary as atomic piles, subconsciously I had had them classed with pigtails and the old Dowager Empress as something out of an earlier era. So we hurried into clothes and topside to watch the junks.

  Arrival in port was accompanied by the usual hoorah, some of it necessary, some of it questionable. As usual, Captain's Dinner and arrival in port almost overlapped, with about three hours sleep only between. As usual the port doctor wanted to see us while we were at breakfast, the immigration officer required our presence while we were packing, and the steward's bill contained a major error which had to be corrected. There was the staff to tip, chief steward, head steward, table stewards, room steward (we were sad at leaving the incomparable Kwai Yau), lounge deck boys, night man, etc. Mail, messages, cables, addresses to be exchanged-it was past ten o'clock before we were checked in at the Raffles Hotel.

  There was a cubic foot of mail waiting for us there, much of it business mail, and I sat down to sort through it to determine what was important while Ticky settled us in. In about five minutes I looked up and said peevishly, "Have you unpacked?"

  "No."

  "Then don't. I'm going to see if they can move us to a quiet room." The room we were in, actually a bedroom, sitting room, and bath suite, was excellent, but it was on the ground floor and right at the corner of the building and ten feet outside was a traffic light. Every time the light changed the traffic would pour in one window and out the other. Traffic in Singapore is thick, enthusiastic, and noisy. Singapore is just above the equator and the climate is a steady hot and humid, like being soaked in warm oatmeal. Little men with sledges were playing Hammer Ring inside my head and I was beginning to realize that I should have gone to bed early after the Captain's Dinner even though I had wanted to say good-by and drink a cup of kindness yet with everyone in the ship. My morale is never improved by the irritations of quitting a ship, moving baggage, and getting through customs, and it had not been helped by an incident at the gate. When the customs officer had asked us if we had had anything to declare, Ticky had looked him in the eye and said, "Two pounds of heroin."

  His eyes bugged out, then he decided to treat it as a joke, laughed hollowly, said, "Yes yes, no doubt," and refrained from searching us. But I did not draw a breath until we were outside and in a taxi.

  Then I took a deep breath to load me for what I had to say. "Look, you red-headed juvenile delinquent, don't you know you can get us into trouble with pranks like that?"

  "Nonsense! I didn't have any heroin."

  "Sure, sure-and you got away with it. But suppose he had been one of that large number who despise Americans? He could have decided to teach you a lesson in respect for Her Majesty's officers, you know."

  Ticky said something rude and irrelevant about Her Majesty's officers. Having little respect for vested authority at home she seems to believe instinctively that the very notion of authority abroad is presumptuous and probably unconstitutional; the spirit of the Boston Tea Party is always just below the surface.

  But it was not a joke to me. I was seriously worried that she might grow restive at the wrong moment and get herself or both of us into trouble that the American consul would be hard put to straighten out. She was behaving like the fictional heroine who insists on doing something foolish and dangerous which then gives the hero a chance to be heroic. But I was no hero; I was just a middle-aged man in glasses who had no influence in foreign ports and no Lone Ranger tricks up his sleeve.

  "Look, baby," I answered wearily, "we've been all over this before. Don't you realize that he had the authority and the right to keep us there for three or four more hours while he subjected us and our baggage to a probe search? How would you like to be stripped to the skin?"

  "I'd like to see anybody try it!" She leaned forward and got herself unstuck from the cushions of the taxi. "Though this would certainly be the weather for it."

  All in all, my nerves twanged like a harp by the time we reached the hotel; the traffic noises and the damp heat of our room were simply the insupportable last straws. I sought out the manager, an imperturbable East Indian, and told him my troubles.

  He showed me several rooms, all of which were for one reason or another no better than the one we were in. Then he somewhat reluctantly showed me one which suited. I took it and hurried back.

  "Any luck?" Ticky asked.

  "Yes. Grab your purse; we're going out on the town. They'll move our baggage while we are gone."

  "But what about our new room? Can't I look at it?"

  "Never mind now. It's upstairs and clear across the hotel, a couple of blocks away. It's okay, you'll see it when you get back. Come on now, let's see the town."

  She came somewhat reluctantly but soon forgot about the change in room once we were in a taxi and on our way. Singapore, one of the "Seven Sinful Ports," is probably the most fascinating city we saw all the way around the world . . . even though we did not see much of the seamy underside which forms the basis for romantic fiction. No opium dens, no beautiful Eurasians held captive in international brothels, no sinister agents of Dr. Fu Manchu, or (much more probably) of Chou En Lai. All three of the above, plus a knife in the ribs in some dark alley, are (I feel sure) available in Singapore, but they do not come to the attention of middle-class couples traveling in each other's company and staying out of dark places.

  Even without them Singapore is a three-ring circus and a year-long Mardi Gras. It has a million people packed into a short stretch of waterfront suitable for fifty thousand at the most. It is a Chinese city, despite the Union Jack overhead and the fact that it is more than a thousand miles from China proper; there are only twelve thousand Europeans, mostly civil servants and traders; four out of five are Chinese and the fifth is an Asiatic of some other sort.

  Properly speaking, the whole city is a slum, so tightly stacked are they one on another. But it is so alive, so cheerful, so bursting with energy that the slumlike quality of it is not depressing. There are admitted slums near the waterfront, hovels built of trash and lived in by people who have neither pot nor window, and there are many, many narrow back alleys that are slums as the term is used in Chicago or New York. But even the "good" streets are so jampacked as to be slums to anyone used to mountain and prairie-or even in comparison with the endless apartment houses of our big cities. The first thing Ticky said, when we turned off the quay boulevards into the city itself, was, "Oh, look! They've got all their flags out. I wonder what they are celebrating?"

  A second look showed that they were not flags; the swarming mercantile street we were on was arched over by housewives' laundry, threaded on bamboo poles which stuck out and up from almost every window. Most of the clothes were brightly colored and the effect was very gay, but the effect was accidental and went on every day.

  Singapore is the place for shopping. You can buy anything; they will sell you your own hat if you lay it down on the counter. The city is loaded with bargains, most of them real, and wait
ing to be dickered over-treasures of the Far East, manufactured goods of the West, and careful copies of the latter from Japan and elsewhere. Some few spoilsport innovators have introduced fixed prices but they may be ignored; most buying and selling is still a joyous game, each trying without malice to outwit the other.

  It affected Ticky the way fresh catnip affects a cat. Dickering in South America she had never really gotten used to; their shops are too much like ours and South American politeness is so overwhelming that it seemed rude to suggest that the price was too high. But in the bawling, brawling atmosphere of Singapore bazaars and stalls she was able to swing into the spirit of it and enjoy it-so much so that I began to wonder what would happen when we got home. The butcher would say to her, "That will be three dollars and eighty-seven cents, please"-and Ticky would look at him scornfully and say, "Don't be silly! I'll give you a dollar and a quarter. Wrap it up."

  I made a mental note to be present when it happened; I wanted to see the butcher's expression.

  The prices, even the fixed prices, really were preposterously low. In general a Straits dollar would buy about as much as a U.S. dollar back home-but our dollar would buy three Straits dollars. Ticky bought a little handmade silver bracelet charm, a Chinese junk complete to rigging of silver thread, for five cents American-and this was at a fixed-price store. Later on, one of similar quality purchased at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu set us back eight dollars.

  The most colorful place to shop is Change Alley, a narrow passage ten feet wide and a block long but crowded with a hundred permanent shops, uncountable sidewalk merchants, and swarms of money changers. The money changers will swap any currency for any other currency, operating directly out of their pockets while people jostle their elbows on both sides, performing complicated arithmetic in their heads without any noticeable pause, and coming out with an answer that you had better check carefully, then count your money carefully.