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Malayan memories.
3 1924 021 572 106
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GAYLORD
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MALAYAN MEMORIES.
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MALAYAN
MEMORIES
BY
R. O. WINSTEDT
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
BY DOROTHEA A. H. ALDWORTH
SINGAPORE
KELLY AND WALSH, LIMITED
(INCORPORATED IN HONGKONG)
PRINTERS AND PUBLISHERS
— AND AT
SHANGHAI-HONGKONG-YOKOHAMA
1916
g
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Wl8'-h
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CONTENTS.
PAGE.
A Raja of Dreams ... ... ... ... i
Timah's Passion ... ... ... ... lo
Puteh's Passing ... ... ... ... i8
A Rubber King ... ... ... ... 26
His Last Device ... ... ... 35
A Soother of Cares ... ... ... 40
A Raja Lady ... ... ... ... 45
A Dealer in Daggers ... ... ... 30
The Leper's Parting ... ... ... 58
The King's Highway ... ... ... 65
A Malay Seance ... ... ... ... 70
Hamlet ... ... ... ... ... 77
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"IWASNOWESCAfroOOTOFTHE
SHADOW OFTHC ROHAN EflPIRE
UNDER WHOSE TOPPLING nONUnENTS
VE ARE AIL Cf(ADLED,WH05E LAWS
AND LETTERSAREON EVERY HilNl)
of(]s,constraiwingandpitp
^venting.iwasnowtosee
vhat men might be whose
fathers had never studied
vii?gil,had never been con-
>pred by c/esar and never
seen ruled bythewisdon of
gaiusorpapinian:
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A RAJA
OFDREflNS
HERE is a deal of import in a man's
name to a Malay, so much indeed that
he will often let his own fall into
desuetude and call himself father of
so-and so, his child ; moreover, he will
seldom risk ill luck by divulging it to
a stranger, preferring to hear awkward inquiry made from
a third party. But setting aside its animistic and dealing only
with its material significance, a Malay name will tell a man's
place among his brothers and sisters; whether his father is
peasant or policeman, native of the Peninsula or foreigner
from Sumatra or of the mixed blood of the market-place;
whether his parents are simple country-folk or sophisticated
and religious; plain commoners or of exalted station. A
peasant will call his son Hitam " the Dark One," or Puteh " the
Fair," or simply Long "the First Born," or Busu "the
Youngest " ; or, if he has the despised Batak blood in his veins,
his daughter will inherit some telltale pretty Indonesian name
like Bunga " the Flower." The Malay of the market-place is
addicted to Muhammadan names that have come by way of
southern India. The pious will name their sons Abdullah
"Slave of Allah," or Rashid "the orthodox," and their
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daughters Khatijah or Fatimah after womenfolk of the prophet.
A raja will have an old, conventional Malay name for daily
use and a grandiloquent cognomen culled from Arabic or
Persian romance for public occasion. Raja Ngah, having in
the face of a competitive democratic generation to uphold the
dignity of a line traced back to Adam and having nothing
wherewith to support his pretensions except a small incult
kampong, four acres of rice-field and a block of mining land
long since worked out, very fittingly bore the impressively aristo-
cratic appellation of Kamar u'l Zaman, " Moon of the Age."
When I knew him, he had suffered extensive eclipse. His
fathers had enjoyed a monopoly of the sale of palm-leaf
thatching, tribute on all tin exported down the river that edged
their demesne, the right of free labour from their ryots, the
power to command contribution of rice flesh and fowl at times
of festival. Of all these privileges the white man had
deprived him, giving in exchange a paltry pension barely
enough to support the few old "slaves," who, sharing their
lord's inadaptability to change elected still to encumber him
with their trivial service. He had held salaried office as a
headman, but while yet a crescent boy had lost it for harsh-
ness to Sakai, jungle-folk his ancestors had harried unhindered
from time immemorial. His sphere of power was restricted
now to a tumble-down parched wooden hut, a garden which
boasted little but a patch of maize, a row of betel and coconut
palms and seven durian trees, and beyond that to a circle of
ancestral dependents, whose respect, unlike that of a former
day, was at liberty to vary with their tempers and their fortune.
Still, he enjoyed privilege. His neighbours might struggle and
barter and grow rich ; but he could squat all his life under the
feathery bamboos and watch the river tumbling down from
blue forest-clad hills; assured of clothing and food, and
possessed of social standing to which the commoner however
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wealthy could never aspire. A freedom of gait and readiness
of address marked him as one born to power and authority.
They were his sole distinctions, for in intellect he was not
above the ordinary ; and glib, unkind upstarts dubbed him (out
of hearing) an old fool. He moved in a different world to theirs,
a world of ghosts and bye-gone honours, a world of absorbing
ceremony and minute observances. " Moon of the Age "
struck the right note. He was a dreamer, a grown-up child
playing with romantic toys and mistaking his pastime for the
game of life.
Only twice did I know him display a lively interest in
what passes with most of us for real business. The first time
was when the younger of his two sons was, like the elder,
appointed pSnghulu. He had been proud of the elder holding
office, but that both of them should be headmen and he with
nothing but the memory of his dismissal ! A special visit was
paid, a special letter presented with line upon line of compli-
ment and the gist in the last sentence. Was he too old to
hope for office again? The second concern he would have
scorned, had he not been desperately pressed for money to
lavish on a grandchild's christening, one of those episodes
which were the stuff of his life. He was the last man to
publish the weaknesses of any of his own family or " put his
salt out in the rain," as he would have phrased it. However,
under the stimulus of urgent need, he had no choice but to
invest my office, a tragic figure gnawed with want and shame
and anger, if haply he might waylay his eldest son for the
recovery of an old debt; and his son being as far above
mundane matters as himself, he got it only by presenting his
solemn curse writ fair for recital in the mosque ! As a rule,
he came upon suaver errands.
I can see him still, stalking beside the walls of my office, im-
pressive and stiff as a hidalgo of Spain ; a waist-cloth wrapped
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ostentatiously in loose folds about his loins, faded the colour
of sand but of thin silk and to the initiated a sufficient visible
sign and prerogative of rank. Often he carried a Chinese
paper umbrella, but his personaHty or perhaps the sombre
poorness of his habiliments domineered over bathos, and the
thing might have been the gold-mounted dagger he had worn
in his youth, so far was it from striking one as incongruous.
At first his dilatory edging away to the walls behind pillars
and desks struck me as a sorry waste of time, and distracted
or even irritated me at my work. It brought home to me my
insignificance ; I was a slave of the desk and of the hours, and
he a gentleman of leisure, free from the tyranny of the clock,
at beck neither of man nor occupation. It irritated me more
when I learnt the esoteric import of his demeanour, and often
I had reason to regret that a sense of humour invariably pre-
vented me from displaying my soreness if only as a weapon of
self-protection; but for the life of me, I had to smile. He
let drop the explanation casually.
" I am going to present myself before His Highness the
Sultan," he remarked ; " I have a weighty request to make,
and it will take several days to do it with propriety and
delicacy. I shall wander first in the court-yard with a pre-
occupied air till I am observed : then I shall pace alone and
melancholy in the outer hall replying to all inquiries, 'No
matter! No matter!': finally, after a day or so, when I go
into the presence, I shall hesitate before I proceed to do
obeisance, and relate my errand only after considerable cir-
cumlocution. All that will make it abundantly clear to His
Highness that the occasion is not ordinary. Praise be to Allah,
my parents taught me manners."
After that, I got to calculate fairly accurately the amount
he wanted to borrow from the precision and ceremony of his
entrance.
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When he had skirted along as far as to the side of my
desk, his sparse gray beard would begin to wag under a
plethora of betel and of sentences that might have done credit
to Polonius ; ponderous stilted nothings, allusions to Iskatidar
Dz'ul Karnain, Alexander the Great, the reputed progenitor of
most princely Malay lines, and to the fallen fortunes of his
house.
"Ours is the fate of the nyiur gading," he would say;
"the golden coconut that may be planted only in princes'
gardens; its fruits ripen, and heaven knows the fate of the
dry shells, destined to become some drinking vessels, some
cups for rain-water, and some to fall downwards so that
neither rain can assuage their thirst nor earth their empti-
ness."
And then he would produce some mildewed, worm-eaten
parchment, a kttasa given to him by a hand whose power of
delegating had long surceased, and urge that it gave him a
claim on the Government for ten acres of mining land free of
dues.
Or another time it was a crystal he brought and waved
in the sunlight before the eyes of myself and my astonished
clerks. Five hundred dollars was the price he dreamed of,
and I remember how I thought that his natural simplicity had
turned into madness. But his plan of operations was sane
enough.
" This," he observed, waving it at arm's length, " this is
a priceless talisman got from the head of a sacred elephant in
the days of Marhum Kota ; not in ten generations shall such a
talisman be found again; therefore I beg of the tuan a free
ticket for myself and this exhibit to the agricultural show;
haply at Singapore I shall meet some rich prince of Siam,
who reveres the elephjuit and will give a fitting price for such
a treasure."
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Ticket obtained, he leant across the desk, clutched my
arm and took his leave with fulsomeness of emotion that might
have been copied from the stock manners of Malay romance.
It were difficult for the man who recognises nothing but
material success to adjust his mind to the plane of thought of
this threadbare unprepossessing courtier, this simple gentle-
man. A dais of gilt and scarlet paper with bouquets of cut
paper flowers stood to his infantile pride for the pomp of
palaces ; a paltry lych-gate of round timber posts and a zinc
roof for all the glories of the Alhambra. His days, I am
positive, were spent in Elysium : he spurned poverty and trod
on air; his umbrella was a Malay Excalibur; his faded waist-
cloth a mystic fabric; his one tatterdemalion follower a
prince's retinue; the splendour and dignity of his presence
patent to all observers. Perhaps it was natural. His pedi-
gree covered a dozen full sheets of foolscap and went back to
Adam by way of Muhammad and Alexander the Great. But
considering his attitude to the world, I could believe almost
in the efficacy of that famous charm for pre-eminence. Si
Awang Lebeh, his precious possession which one day he
allowed me to copy : —
" Sheltered I 'neath Allah's foot-stool,
Allah's Prophet my protector ;
On my right the angel Gabriel,
On my left the angel Michael,
All the angels ranged behind me.
Me vice-regent of the Highest.
By the providence of Allah,
By th' evidence of the Faith,
By the words of the Koran,
Hearts of all adversaries
Be locked at the sight of me ;
Hearts of believers
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Be opened unto me.
God's blessing upon me,
I stand by his Prophet.
Can God be imperilled,
Then fall I in peril.
His Prophet imperilled,
Then fall I in peril.
A serpent my loin-cloth.
My throne a wild elephant^
Swift lightnings before me,
Fierce tigers to shadow me.
Yea, by this charm of mine
Allah exalteth me ;
In seated assembly
Pre-eminent I :
Erect or in walking or talking
Pre-eminent I :
I, a master of mortals,
Precious stone of the Prophet,
Pearl of the Highest.
Yea, none can withstand me,
My charm and confession of faith."
Once his faculty for romance was brought to bear on a
predicament of real life with pathetic felicity. His youngest
daughter was about to be married, and I felt abashed almost
at the terms in which he invited a mere commoner like myself
to such an august festivity.
"The tuan will come to the wedding of his younger
sister?" he inquired, "The tuan knows the poverty of my
house, but by Allah's blessing there will be a buffalo slaughter-
ed for the feast."
It was the problem of how to get that buffalo which
brought him ignominiously out of the clouds down to earth.
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Did I think he could borrow a hundred dollars from. Govern-
ment on the security of his wife's pension ? It was mean-
spirited and plebeian perhaps, but I cast about to save him
from himself. As a pupil of his in the art of Malay diplomacy,
the art of wrapping up denial in compliment and sugaring
present disappointment with unbounded future promise, I had
to devise excuse suitable to the dignity of the occasion, and I
hope I proved myself worthy of his unconscious tutelage. I
hinted mysteriously that, as his wife drew her pension from
another State, such a request might result in inter-state
complications. The suggestion appealed to his vanity. He
departed anxious but flattered.
At last the day for the wedding, it appeared, was fixed.
The buffalo had been bought and a henchman sent over the
hills to fetch it. I, who was fairly intimate with his resources,
marvelled. A week hence and the sitting-in-state was to take
place. I promised to attend. Alas! it was only two days
before the festivities that he came again, stalking more digni-
fied than ever, resignation in his mien, and on his lips courtly
excuses. Was there ever such a fate as his? Had I not
heard of the disaster that had overtaken him ? It was strange
that the tuan mata-mata had not spoken of it. He had
reported to the police sergeant. His man had been driving
that buffalo over the pass, when the beast had turned upon
him and broken away into the forest. Chase had been vain.
He had asked the sergeant to shoot it as a dangerous animal
in the event of oapture. Of course it was too late to procure
another for the wedding. And the tmn knew how long that
ceremony had been postponed already. Further delay was
impossible. He regretted deeply the accident and hoped that
I would yet condescend to come to a feast at which kid must
take the place of buffalo.
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As I say, I had studied under him the art of diplomacy,
and I hope it will not be accounted to me for sin that I
listened gravely and made appropriate inquiry, asked if the
man was much hurt, on what range the buffalo had broken
loose, and if the sergeant entertained hopes of shooting it. I
think he knew I knew that buffalo was mythical as the buffalo
on whose horns the Malay world rests; but it, too, had a
weight to bear that justified its existence in idea, for it was
the sole stay of its creator's pride of rank and hospitality.
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TIMAH'S
PASSION
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AMAUAYVCRSC. '
was a little earth-oiled plank hut,
thatched (its owner evidently a Suma-
tran) with dry dun lalang grass instead
of the broad leaves of nipah palm affect-
ed by Malays of the peninsula. N othing
divided it from the road except two yards of sandy soil,
where fowl scratched in channels dug by drip of tropical rain
from the pent roof, and pecked the seeds that fell from chillies
and yellow marigolds planted in a gaptoothed row of kerosine
tins. Close beside the house were stable and shed for pony
and gharri. At the back a shady close-planted garden of
durians mangosteens and betel palms stretched down to a
rapid river, edged for miles with tall dark foliage of jungle
and kampong and throughout the wet season turbid and
melancholy with scour and spilth of earth.
I had remarked the hut first for its lalang thatch. Once,
I had hired the owner's gharri and been invited up his house-
ladder out of a torrent of rain into a room vacant and dull as
himself, empty of furniture except for greasy, coverless pillows,
a grimy mosquito-curtain and a few kitchen utensils.
Sumatrans are often a dour folk, occupied in earning hard-won
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dollars and in religion, disinclined for the junketings dear to
the lighter hearts of other Malays. This man Baginda seemed
typical of his people. He was, I imagined, a bachelor. His
compound was always deserted. I came to notice, because I
was visiting a house directly opposite, the abode of 'Mak Busu,
who was chanting for me the indefinitely protracted Malay
version of Jack and the Bean-stalk, which, as the Beanstalk
in the story was a gigantic coconut palm, I preferred to hear
under the thick overhanging fronds in her orchard rather than
in my smug bungalow. The tale, as I say, was protracted.
And the old lady would stop often to cough, chew betel, and
rest herself with gossip. One evening, I asked about her
neighbour.
"Who is that I see alone at the window every day? A
young girl. Perhaps his daughter? His house is mostly
closed and empty."
'Mak Busu laughed.
"He has married a wife; a girl very fair to look upon.
But it is a bad custom of ours, that fifty may mate with fifteen.
If there is too much lemon-grass in the curry, it is sure to be
nasty; age and youth can never agree. Surely, the white man
has no such stupid custom ?"
" In every country," I quoted the Malay proverb in reply,
" prudence is overruled by desire — desire, a raja in the eyes, a
sultan in the heart."
" She sits from dawn when the first flies stir till dusk when
her husband returns with his pony ; there behind the barred
windows," continued 'Mak Busu. " She has nothing to occupy
or amuse her except the boiling of rice for their two meals a
day and the plaiting of mats for sale ; Baginda is always away
with his gharri. She has eye-brows like a cock's spurs, ears
flushed with the pink of half-faded lotus petals, and the toes of
her feet are yellow gold. She is the very counterpart of the
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princess for whom the hero climbed the tree in our tale.
Passers stare at her like tigers, but as yet she is asleep and
cannot see. By and bye, she will wake and then there will be
trouble. It is not fitting to leave a young girl alone like a
night-jar in a deserted house."
" But, the neighbours," I said ; " there is no loneliness, no
privacy even in a Malay kampong."
" Timah is a stranger. They hate her for her good looks
and her marriage with a well-to-do syce. Also, it is galling
that she a child should have gold bracelets, when those of elder
women are silver-gilt."
This tattle of rustic jealousies jarred me, and I looked out
into the night. The moon shed splendour on a world that
seemed to await and invite romance; the romance that has
lived, since the first moon rose, in green and silver shadows, in
warm enfolding night and in the burning heart of youth.
Across the white ribbon of road, I could see the girl of whom
we had been talking hold a guttering lamp that lighted hay
and ordure, while her husband harnessed the pony for a
journey. In a few minutes, the gharri rattled away into the
distance. The girl sat silhouetted against the light on the top
rung of the house-ladder.
'Mak Busu started her chant again and I turned and
squatted down to listen. She stopped after a while. A far
louder chant sounded from the road, the chant of a Malay
youngster bellowing a love song in tones that swell novf fierce
and insistent and anon
" Stagger in a warbling doubt.
Of dallying sweetness ; "
to foreign ears an almost animal roar, to Malay youth full of
the ache of infinite desire.
" Where shall the ant die, if not in sugar ?" mumbled the
old woman. " Youth will risk more than life for a winsome
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' Silhouetted against the light on the top rung oj the house ladder.
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face. The old eat their rice and are satisfied, but for youth
how often rice tastes like thorns, when the liver is hot and the
heart consumed with the fire of longing ? Did I not say there
would be doings soon ? A boy bellows his love-song like an
owl hooting at the moon ; and who of us staid elders wakes to
catch the words and their drift ? But the girl for whom he
sings knows — ay, though they have never exchanged speech or
eye-play even as Timah knows to-night.
All night from the roof of the chieftain
The owlets cry tuwhit tuwhoo —
— that was what he sang. The tuan knows the answer. No ?
To a Malay girl it seldom needs recital —
Or ever God created Adam
We were plighted, I and you.
Pain ensues later, but ah! the rapture of it all. The
white man does not marry till he is old, and his wife even is
over twenty, of middle-age. How can he know the madness
of young hearts ? Also, he is tied to one wife ; and to love a
wife, one must leave her sometimes."
" So, too, to love a husband ?" — I laughed.
"The tuan must joke. Well, old folk like the tuan and
me have nothing better to amuse us, have we ?"
I was not flattered at her estimate of my age.
" Selamat tinggal " said I, climbing down to the ground.
" It is too late to finish our tale ; I'll come another time."
I walked to the white road. The bellow of song sounded
again, and a youth passed persisting, heedless of my presence,
in his chant. How should a fool of a white man under-
stand ?
" Where does the argus pheasant nest ?
Above the fall, in crannied cleft ?
Where does the lover long to rest ? "
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This was cat-like luring of the bird off the bough. But it
was no business of mine and old 'Mak Busu's suspicions might
be idle.
A week later, I saw the girl watering the marigolds out of
a coconut shell. 'Mak Busu had not exaggerated her beauty.
She had a complexion the colour of old honey, slow brown
eyes, dimpled cheeks, white even teeth and lips that might
have been reddened by bruised grapes or burning kisses. Her
husband was rubbing down the pony under a tree. As it
chanced, just at that moment, a youth passed on a cycle. He
looked at the inattentive husband, glanced at the girl quickly
and drew his hand across his eyes, eyes that (as was thus
signified) were aching for the sake of the beloved, dazzled by
the sun of her loveliness and full of the tears of fruitless yearn-
ing. They were soft big eyes, set in a handsome face. From
the carriage of head and shoulders and set of the cap rakishly
atilt, I was sure it was the singer of that night. The girl
clambered into the house, fluttered, it would seem, by sudden
access of emotion or fear.
It was a fortnight after that, before I could find leisure
for old 'Mak Busu and the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk.
" 'Tis a long while, since the tuan has come here," she
said. " And much has happened yonder across the road. It
befell even as I foretold, for Timah, Only the heart of youth
is very hot and its devices quick so that things came to pass
with exceeding suddenness. Why, the very morning after the
tuan had left, I saw a betel-quid flung from her window at his
feet. Whose feet ? Oh, it is Che Wan, a son of the pXnghulu.
They carried themselves with great daring, those two. It was
not so we conducted love affairs in the days before the white
man, when a keris would let out hot blood like water. One
morning, as I was picking sticks in my garden, I saw Baginda
catch his rival under the durian trees, but the youth proffered
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small coin and declared he had come to buy the fruit. Then I
observed Timah wearing a new necklace. How did she
account for it ? Said it was borrowed from a friend, perhaps.
But when things have come to such a pass, discovery is only
a matter of days. "Who can hide the sun with a sieve ? It is
strange, tuan, how love will turn the timid heart of a girl to
boldness. But so it is. A Malay girl with one passion devour-
ing her like flame sooner or later scorns concealment. To
hold vagrant man's heart fluttering in a tiny palm ; is it not
matter for pride rather than shame? I was not surprised
when I remarked Timah wearing her lover's sarong, that
sarong of red and white chess-board pattern. The tuan has
not noticed? It is silk and known from one end of the
kampong to the other. I was not surprised, but I was
frightened and bade my son stay at home in case of trouble.
We saw Baginda return with his gharri. He unharnessed the
pony and sat in the stable, sullen, smouldering like burnt
chaff. We were eating our meal. Then a girl screamed once,
and there was silence. My son seized a parang. We ran to
Baginda's house. He was holding a knife against Timah's
bosom ; her eyes were wide with terror, but she did not waver.
As we came up, the man released her with disgust, and she
started to clamour volubly. She was mad, mad with fear and
love. Who was Baginda, that he should make her his slave
at bed and board ; keeping her there friendless in the jungle ?
He, a Rawa man, of no birth, a syce, a cleaner-up of dung.
She rolled on the floor of the stable, her bangled wrists crash-
ing on the boards and the whites of her eyes big and frenzied.
Baginda walked away. I was afraid. But my son was here,
a quick man of his hands. I took her to my house. The
next morning, we heard, Baginda had divorced her."
" It is easy for Malay lovers," I interrupted, " easy to get
divorce, easy to marry again. Where is she now ? "
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" She is dead," said the old woman ; " died four days ago
here in this house."
Life with the rush and passion of a tropical storm, fierce,
ecstatic, a lovers' life, pent in the abundant present ; forgetful
of the morrow, of self, of honour, of fear, of regret ; unashamed
as nature ; compact of fire and sunlight and kisses — and then
the eclipse of death, death the divider.
"A man may not keris an erring wife nowadays,"
continued the old woman. " There is the white man's law,
with the dangling gallows. Yet there are other ways of
which the white man recks nothing ; mayhap they'd have no
effect on white folk, hard-faced, hard-hearted. But our people
are quick to love, quick to fear. Che Wan was gone for a
week on business (that was why she had made him give her a
keepsake) or he might have drowned her fears in that sea of
love which quenches terror. Baginda went away, but he had
been careful to spread abroad the object of his errand.
Timah had left the sarong, that sarong which had brought
about the trouble, hanging on the line. Baginda had taken it
and gone in quest of a Brunai pawang, who fears not Allah
and is in league with the devil. Most kampongs have a pawang
but not such as are expert in the black art. I have met this
Brunai man, a smoker of opium, his face black with the fires
of the pit, before his time; a rogue to practise spells and
fumigation over that sarong, which, by the blessing of Allah,
should rack its whilom wearer, heart liver and spleen. Timah
fell sick of a fever. She was weak, spiritless and afraid. Her
limbs, she complained, ached as on a rack; her head was
giddy as with the fumes of enchantment ; the shadows of the
room seemed to her full of devils, of nameless dangers. We
burnt yellow turmeric that frightens spirits. But she died in
two days. The Tamil dresser said it was fever. Bah ! fever,
perhaps, but what medicine can cure the effects of black
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magic ? A very potent pawang, that Brunai man, wicked and
doomed to feed the fires of hell hereafter, but in this life
helped by the devil.
And now, where did we leave off our tale? The tuan
does not want me to chant it to-night? No? The tuan is
upset. And he had not even spoken to the girl? Perhaps,
being old and a mid-wife, I am hardened. Love and birth
and death, they are common enough bed-fellows, often under
one roof together. She left me her gold bracelets, but I
daresay Baginda will claim them — a miserly file and, as I
always said, no mate for a young girl,"
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UTEH'S PASSING
HE Wan got up from his desk in the
District Office and walked home to his
tiny Government quarters; arrived at
the top step, he stooped and kicked
off a pair of shining pumps, passed
through the verandah, and removing a nickel Roskopf watch
and its chain of pure soft Chinese gold from the pocket, hung
up his starched white uniform coat with its gilded buttons — he
could never understand why the tuan majistret preferred to wear
them as plain brass. Then he sat down in zephyr and Malay
cotton shirt and proceeded to roll a rokok of Javanese tobacco
and palm leaf. He reflected half unconsciously (such a part
of his mental existence had it become) how superior he was to
the people of that jungle district, he a Malay from the Straits
Settlements; for himself, he could speak English and his
women folk had never in their hves stood in the baking sun
knee-deep in the slush of ricefields, but on the other hand
were such (Jooks as Perak people had hardly dreamed of and
able to crotchet white antimacassars. He looked around his
best room; the hampong Malay had no place like it; only
those who were accustomed to the ways of the white man
had adopted bentwood Austrian chairs, oil-cloth-covered
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table, oleographs of Queen Victoria and the Sultan of Turkey,
and clean white-washed walls. Ugh ! what houses his neigh-
bours had; flooring of creaking split bamboo; plaited mats
instead of chairs and tables ; rough walls of interwoven palm,
brown, unpainted; roofs which looked like a cobweb of
rafters nets nooses old mats and miscellaneous rubbish.
Alas! despite its European character, there were many evil
spirits about his bungalow ; it was strange ; they haunted the
quarters even of the Tuans, whose very Mems with their
hard, strong faces feared not ghostly enemies; probably it
was because in his confidence the white man paid no heed
to matters on which the native Pawang could so easily advise
him, the month for commencing to build, the colour of the
soil, the aspect, propitiatory ceremonies to Earth on violating
her virgin spaces with rude house-pillars. Anyhow, there
were evil spirits all about these quarters, palpable almost
in the cold, noxious air; and he and his family were per-
petually falling victims to fever, perhaps because they had
been brought up too delicately for the jungle. The tuan doktor
ascribed the trouble to mosquitoes and advised the cleaning of
drains and burning of empty coconut shells; but the tuan
doktor also got fever; certainly he was joking or perhaps he
had been drunk ; he must be drunk often to have the heart to
cut up corpses and perform other works, ghastly and revolting
to the true believer.
A woman, with a dark olive face, handsome but lined
before its time, as time is counted in the cold north, came
into the room; she wore nothing but a sarong or unpleated
sack-like skirt, tucked above her bosom and falling to the
ankles in a way that revealed the outline of her figure clearly
but quite decently.
" What news, Ngah ? " asked Che Wan.
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"The news is good, Che," answered his wife, conven-
tionally but gloomily; adding "Si Puteh is worse to-day, her
head aches and her skin is very hot. And Fatimah is sicken-
ing."
Che Wan rose and followed her into the inner room. A
group of matrons, shabby ugly kind cotton bundles squatted
on the floor; Ma Bidan, the wise woman president at every
birth and death in the place; old Raja Hitam, talkative,
officious ; Che Munah, the headman's wife, with Zin, her tiny
boy; Chik, help-mate to a small contractor, who depended on
the clerk for surreptitious help in getting free timber passes ;
Ma Bidan's follower, Si Long ; Halimah, once a wanton, now
married to Che Wan's son. They greeted him condescend-
ingly, a mere male trespassing where he was just as useful as
"an axe on an embroidery frame"; and hushed their chatter
to watch quizzingly what he would do. He returned their
greeting, stooped low before Raja Hitam and then looked
where his daughter lay, but did not outrage the matrons' ideas
of decency by offering to touch her fevered hands or forehead.
" How do you feel now, Puteh ? " he asked.
The girl moaned. Her sister sat silent beside her, with
large eyes in which the fever had begun to shine.
" What medicine are you administering ? " he asked his
wife.
" Herb potions," she answered ; " we tried a decoction of
leaves of bunga China ; we are trying now akar pinang, root of
the betel palm, but nothing will make her sweat."
Ma Bidan smeared a yellow cosmetic on the sufferer's
face and bosom. "There've been weird yellow sunsets of
late," she observed, " and every one knows they bring disease,
or the water spirit may have crossed her when she was
bathing. Who can tell?" The headman's wife addressed
the company at large.
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" Perhaps the medicine the tuan doktor gave us might do
good ? " ventured the father.
" Don't bother the poor girl," retorted Che Ngah. "You
say it is so bitter you can't drink it yourself and now you want
to plague her."
" But it was the ' beans,' the pills, I meant."
"I've heard tell, how the white powder, those 'beans'
are packed in is hog's bones ground fine," remarked Ma
Bidan's gaptoothed follower. "You trust Ma Bidan, Che
Krani (Mr. Clerk) and by Allah's blessing all will be well.
Siamese women are clever at mixing herbs and she is half
Siamese."
"Bring me charcoal, Long," Ma Bidan ordered in her
professional voice.
The old woman reached for an ash-stained bronze censer
from the shelf.
" Allah save us : my virtue gone, gone, gone ; virtue, save
us, virtue gone," she screamed, dancing about as a black
beetle crawled out of the censer over her fingers.
They all laughed, despite the occasion. Halimah jerked
her sleeve mischievously. How could one help it? The old
hag was so very funny. She started again. "Allah, Allah,
save us, our virtue, our virtue, our virtue " — with stress on the
last syllable like the hoot of an owl.
" Don't tease and make her latah ; you know her nervous
ailment, as well as I ; " sdd Ma Bidan " let her bring the
charcoal."
"There, let me fetch it," muttered Che Ngah, pushing
aside her daughter-in-law. " It's not so long since you were
a hu2zy and you're as lazy and callous as one still."
"I couldn't help it," whimpered Halimah. "I didn't
mean any harm."
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" Now, when I was a girl " — Raja Hitam launched on a
homily and then stopped with the inconsequence of age and
sudden memories.
Che Ngah returned with a censer full of charcoal. Ma
Bidan sprinkled benzoin upon it and the air grew thick and
sickly with fumes, which the powers of evil fear. The un-
canny atmosphere brought uneasiness to Che Wan.
" I'll go and fetch the Brunai bomo," he whispered to his
wife.
It is notorious that, the further off a man hails, the more
familiar he is with the unseen world ; that the white man, for
instance, is descended from jin puteh, white spirits. Ma Bidan
had been long in the country; perhaps she had lost her
cunning.
" Ah," observed Raja Hitam to the penghulu's wife, " it's
always comforting when one is really ill to have a man about ;
one never trusts a woman so much."
" To be sure," answered Che Munah, mentally calculating
the number of illnesses in which Raja Hitam must have been
comforted, if scandal spoke true. "Why there's Che Ngah
bringing coffee and sweet-meats. It is a treat to visit her; she
makes the best cakes of any one I know ; they'll be lucky folk
who bespeak her daughters for their sons."
Presently Che Wan returned with the Brunai medicine-
man. He was a youngish man, modest but with the quiet
reliant air adopted by his profession all the world over.
" Where is the pain ? " he enquired, hardly venturing to
look at the patient.
"She has complained of severe headache," said the
mother.
The bomo wrote hieroglyphics, some Arabic, some sheer
nonsense, on a slip of paper, passed it over the smoke of the
censer and drew near the bed.
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" Tie it round her forehead," he said to Ma Bidan.
" Will she get better soon ? " Che Ngah pleaded.
" If Allah wills," answered the bomo.
They sat whispering and drinking coffee.
The patient began to wander. " See them, conning up
the hill, can't you see them," — the gilt bangles jangled on her
thin wrists as she pointed to the foot of the mosquito curtain.
Old Raja Hitam got up and knelt over her. " Mlnguchap,
my child, pray," she reiterated, " pray."
The sick sister lay back, her face to the wall, and sobbed
softly, quite frightened.
"Eat some of these sweet-meats, Fatimah," Ma Bidan
tried to encourage her, "and drink a cup of coffee," handing
a cup of black sugared coffee without milk ; " you must eat or
you'll get worse too."
"I've a mind to fetch the tuan doktor," said the father;
" the white man is very clever at curing fever."
" Don't be shameless," his wife faltered, " you know he is
young and a bachelor and it is not fitting ; besides, think how
angry he is with us because our goats are always eating the
flowers in his compound ; he'd certainly poison the girl."
"Lah! he'd frighten the child," cried Che Munah; "with
his lanky body stooping shoulders and lopping arms, he looks
like a marabout stork."
" By your leave," the bomo bowed to the parents and put his
fingers firmly but gently on the patient's forehead. He began
to mutter an incantation, rhythmical very long monotonous
and soothing, addressed to Batara Guru and other deitia and
clinched with an appeal to the Prophet and Allah the One God.
The women kept silent ; the sick girl grew less restless.
"She's better now," whispered old Raja Hitam, her
pagan heart more relieved by this heathen performance than
she would have cared to confess. " She's going to sleep."
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" By Allah's will and by virtue of the good luck a raja's
presence brings," said Che Wan politely.
He got up and went into the verandah where a few elders
had gathered; among them, the imam. Outside, it was a
warm night with burning stars and a sky like velvet. It was
getting late and several of the women rose to depart. Che
Ngah came out and bade her husband escort them on their
way. He was preparing to go, but they excused him and he
put back his coat on its peg. Then Ma Bidan's attendant
glided on to the verandah, awesome and mysterious.
"'To Bidan says she's very weak; she seems to be sinking
You'd better call the imam."
They all crowded back into the sleeping room.
The girl lay still now, pale and cold. The imam went up
to her side ; his haji's robe was earth-stained but its flowing
lines lent him a priestly look among that homely crowd.
"She's dying, I think," whispered Ma Bidan, drawing aside
the mosquito-curtain to leave passage for the parting spirit.
" Has she seen the lam alifV murmured the imam.
"She's been unconscious, so far."
The girl's lips moved but no sound came from them.
" Try to repeat the creed after me, my child," said the
priest," La Ilaha ila'llah Muhammad rasulu'llah."
Zin, the tiny boy, grabbed for sweetmeats from a tray on
the floor : he was dragged away and started to scream. Seven
times, as religion ordains, the imam repeated the confession
of Islam in the dying ears.
Ma Bidan stooped over critically as he finished.
" She's gone home to the mercy of Allah," said the imam.
Ma Bidan wiped her eyes with the corner of her jacket.
The others cried and sobbed. Presently they turned to com-
fort the mother. It was fate, ordained from the beginning.
Nothing more could have been done.
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'"Tis Friday night, too," said Raja Hitam, "the night
propitious for birth bridal and death ; she was always a lucky
girl. Ya Allah, what a winsome bride she would have made."
Che Ngah wept silently. Her brain was in a whirl. No,
she would never have any grand-children now. Probably
Fatimah would die too. She got up to go to her; then sank
down again. There was nothing she could do, nothing at all :
no help anywhere. It was nasib, fate. Grand-children . . •
she remembered her own children climbing about her knees
. . . the dead girl, what a dear child with such pretty ways
. . . now she had gone, beyond reach, on an unknown path
no path at all.
A crash of masculine voices chanting the Koran broke
frorh the outer room. , The women did not understand one
syllable of the Arabic words but the chant, harsh, a key above
any Malay air, above Malay life, was tonic to their nerves.
Che Ngah got up and closed her daughter's eyes. Long
attended on Fatimah. Ma Bidan rummaged in a cupboard for
silk cloths. Che Ngah rummaged too. And there was the
funeral feast to get ready and no Puteh to help her. She wept
again. Raja Hitam picked up the betel-nut scissors and
placed them on the dead girl's bosom — iron, to keep away all
evil influences.
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ARUBBERKINO
j^SBBSBSSBU
was, he conceived, the great day of his life,
more momentous than the day of his
marriage or the time when his first-born
had been put into his hands; those
days saw but natural expected events,
this something no more within the ken of himself or his
simple forefathers than cats with horns, as the Malay saying
goes. Yet, for a while, Indut had forgotten almost the unique
greatness of the occasion. Hustled by cacophonous Chinese
coolies at the ticket office, pushed with a crowd of others like
cattle into a third class carriage, he sat now in a train which
seemed to him to travel with incredible speed, though it was
not even the kreta sombong, the "proud" mail which will not
condescend to stop at humble villages like his. He was
mazed not only by this onset into a fleeting landscape, but by
the cosmopolitan crowd in the carriage — cotton-clad Chinese
tradesmen, a Jaffna Tamil swelling with rice and office, a
Punjabi cattle-dealer in dirty pink turban and large gold
necklace, a sleek smooth-skinned Haji of his own race, a
Malay raja in khaki suit and neat black boots, a Chinese nonia
faded like her cheap flowery kebaya but to him a mirror of
fashion of beauty. The importance of these fellow passengers
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seemed obvious and abashed him. He was a frog just popped
from under a coconut shell and here were these people moving
in a world of complex and hurried event, as to the turmoil
born.
The train jolted and stopped. Passengers thrust their
heads out of the windows. The Malay raja spoke to the guard.
"Tuan Barrett said we should get through to-night."
" Oh ! mister-r Barr-r-ett, ma-an, he no care, we all
killed," retorted the guard with importance.
It was marvellous, this Tamil and the Malay raja talking
the language of the white man, kis km, very sibilant and ugly
but apparently quite intelligible. Even that Haji yonder had
bandied words like tikkut and stashun with ease and distinction.
He was speaking now ; to the raja in Malay.
" One never can tell when there is going to be a break-
down, " he remarked ; " di-dalam kilau nampak kilat, the
unlooked for happens, summer brightness often hides forked
lighting."
Well, they were very clever, all these people. But talking
of kilat di-dalam kilau, was not he, too, big with the unexpect-
ed; for who would guess from his gnarled knuckles and
shabby sarong that he was the possessor of more than three
thousand dollars ? He reflected how even his narrow experience
had taught him the deceit of appearances. He would not be
surprised if that mellifluous Haji with silver-topped cane and
yellow leather slippers was impecunious as a mosque mouse.
Presently the train moved again. Past katnpong and betel
palm, waste rice-fields and lotus swamp, mean scrub and
barren gravel of mining lands, it struggled to its destination.
The third railway journey of Indut's life came to an end.
He alighted on a platform amid terrific crowds. There
was a sharp rattle of precipitant rikishas, and the clamour of
frenzied Chinese pullers, gesticulating and wiping gargoyle
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faces with dirty cloths. Indut had a knife hidden in his waist-
band, and his hand gripped instinctively the cotton bundle
wherein he had wrapped two slips of paper which by mys-
terious alchemy, he was assured, would be changed into nine
hundred dollars and two thousand five hundred dollars
respectively. The glare of the unaccustomed white road half
blinded him; he faltered nervously before its great breadth
and tearing vehicles ; but rikishas with fine rugs and white
cushions were not meant for such as he ; and he started to
walk with slouching jungle gait along the streets.
Yes, he had got the name of the place pat before he start-
ed. It was the Benk he wanted. True the afternoon was
almost over; there would be no return that day, and his
treasure hard to house for the night. But he distrusted those
two slips of paper from the bottom of his mind and was eager
to see them changed into current coin. Allah knew, it had
been trouble enough to earn the money. All his life, he had
had barely more than one coat to his back. His fields had
yielded him just the measure of rice sufficient for sustenance,
never the extra peck for sale and profit. It was very lucky
that tuan had advised him to plant rubber ten years ago, at the
opportune time : " if the ship does not float when the water is
in flood, there follows generally a long drought," and he had
taken fortune with the tide. It was lucky that not more than
half of his rubber had been destroyed by deer and lalang;
lucky that the white man of many wiles had found a way to
use the stuff. He chuckled, as he recalled how he had tried to
coagulate his first takings by boiling in a pot 1 But the
chuckle died in his throat, killed by wotry and excitement.
He wandered nervously up and down hot streets, like a worm
in the sun (as the proverb goes), turning now hither now
thither, uncertain of his way. He came to the Benk at last.
It seemed to be locked fast and a Sikh sentry was pacing up
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and down. No doubt, that was the way a place with so much
money should be kept. Yes, there was a small side door. He
made for it and found himself in a court yard confronted by a
Hylam cook.
" Apa lu mau ? Lu churi ! " yelled the Chinaman.
Indut could not know that the cook had just lost a
month's wages at Hkam po and was in a rabid temper. He
was enraged that a pig-eater should curse him for a thief.
But his anger changed to fear, when the thought struck home
that he might be arrested there with those two slips of paper
in his bundle. Certainly, he would stand convicted of theft.
He stumbled back into the street, and peered along the barred
shutters. The sentry questioned him and told him to come in
the morning; explained that the Benk was closed. What
extraordinary hours ! Why it was only just four o'clock in
the afternoon.
He wandered away into the bazaar. Really, it had hardly
entered his head that there could be so many Chinamen in the
universe. They were thick as ants. And the durians in piles
under the senna trees ! He came to a street, where the victims
of civilization drag out garish jaded days behind green shutters.
To him, the houses seemed palatial, the women prosperous,
gay, enviable; it was very strange, certainly; perhaps they
came from keyangan, fairy-land, whose folk according to
romance led unaccountable lives. The public gardens must
assuredly have been copied from pleasaunces in fairy-land.
They were pretty, but there were no fruit-trees, no vegetables.
What an expense to keep such grounds in trim merely for
ornament. Well, he would build a fine house, when he got
that money. But the garden should be planted thick with
durians, mangoes, coconuts, rambutans.
He began to feel hungry, and looked about for an eating-
shop. It must be a place where he could lodge for the nighti
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Town life was very expensive. He must try to obtain a lodg-
ing for thirty cents, or he would not have enough cash to get
home again. Ah; those thousands of dollars. It seemed
incredible. Two slips of paper ! Well, every one assured him
they were good as notes. He must go to bed soon and wake
very early to reach the Benk in good time. More than three
thousand dollars! Why, if other folk arrived before him,
there might not be enough money left in the Benk. It
would be difficult to find the place again. Even in dense
jungle, trees were of different kinds ; there were water cour-
ses to follow ; foot-prints ; broken branches ; notched stems.
Here all the houses were alike; all streets confusingly an-
gular, smoothly metalled, intricate and baffling as a puzzle.
He found himself in a spot less pretentious than the high
walled streets he had traversed ; with a homely litter of veget-
able stuffs in the five-foot way, cramping the passage into
keeping with the goings of poor folk, who have to crawl rather
than fly. He supposed he would be able to fly soon ; at any
rate he could afford a new large dug-out when he returned
home. There were shops where rows and rows of red earthen
cooking-pots were marshalled for sale; shops where sarong
and cheap European cottons were folded in piles behind glass
doors ; shops where boxes of all kinds of dried condiment might
deceive the new-come European into a belief that they were
the goods of a seedsman ; and at the corner, a shop redolent
of garlic and cinnamon and cooked rice, with tables covered
with black oil-cloth and spread with common Chinese bowls
and squat earthenware spoons.
He entered the eating shop and put down his bundle.
For the first time that day, he was treated with civility, as a
human being and not as a mere cypher in a crowd. It is true,
that the proprietor, a Jawi pSkan from Penang, had little res-
pect for a jungle fellow, whose mouth was full of betel, whose
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voice was high-pitched as of a man accustomed to live and
converse in the open, whose head-covering was a kerchief limp
and twisted like string used for tethering fowl. But there
were a few cents to be earned from him. What curry would
he like ? Prawn ? vegetable ? fowl ? or meat ? Why this was
a spread such as Indut had never seen save at a chief's kenduri.
Penghulu Majid had offered nothing so good even at the
wedding of his daughter Halijah. He wished his son Mat had
been there; the fellow had a tooth for such dishes. For
himself, a heaped plate of new rice, a few bananas stewed with
hot chillies, a scrap of dried fish and he was satisfied. He
■gaped at the number of condiments. The shop-keeper knew
his man ; took half a dozen of the less popular dishes and put
them before this casual customer. Indut imagined he was
being treated with especial courtesy and mumbled his thanks
in rustic phrases and high-pitched vocables barely intelligible
to the townsman. Would he have coffee ? This was going to
be an extravagant meal, but he was ashamed not to live up
to his surroundings and after all it was rare for him to indulge
in an outing. He took the coffee. The proprietor grew
affable. He was talking to a crony wearing a fez, whom he
addressed as Sheikh, and he condescended to include the new
customer in their conversation. Had Indut heard that the
Emperor of Japan was a Muhammadan and was going to send
an army to deliver the Achinese from the Dutch ? Indut had
no more concern for the Emperor of Japan or the Dutch than
he had for Farun (Pharaoh). But the topic was undoubtedly
distinguished, and he was gratified at being addressed. He
wondered if he could lead these superior beings to talk of
rubber and the Benk. Presently, he was surprised and shocked
to hear the Sheikh call for a bottle of stout and drink it with
gusto. On further acquaintance, the Sheikh proved to be
greatly interested in rubber. Had Indut any rubber lands for
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sale? The price of rubber had fallen and there were few
buyers now, but the Sheikh would be glad to assist him to
sell — on komisUn. Perhaps Indut's neighbours had land for
sale ? Let them by all means consult him, the Sheikh, at this
eating-house. Indut was lucky to have acquired so much
wealth ; he would be able to give more alms to the poor : for
it behoved him to think of eternity and not of this transitory
world, like a courtezan gay and fine to see but inwardly vile
and wicked. Many of the Sheikh's similes and much of his
lore seemed to Indut nasty, but then perhaps his own mind
could not rise to the subtleties of an orang alim. Anyhow,
the Sheikh promised to show him the Benk to-morrow and to
assist him to transmute those two sli^s of paper into money.
He was much relieved at this kindness and, cheques in belt,
slept soundly under a table on a mat which the shop-keeper
spread for him. The last thing he remarked as his head
touched the hard pillow were blue tapes and metal clips at the
top of the Sheikh's socks. Socks were a luxury, but he had
seen them before; sock-suspenders were an enigma. He
dreamt of bank-notes tied with blue tape.
" Snores like a water buffalo," murmured the Sheikh to
the shop-keeper with sarcastic regard.
*****
The next morning Indut awoke early as is the wont of
country-men; also, his project stirred in his heart — or his
liver, as Malays insist, perhaps appropriately. For bath, he
had to sling water in a bucket out of a well, and all his life he
had been used to bathe in a flowing river. He was anxious to
start for the Benk at once, and the Sheikh's long prayers
worried him. At last, they set out together and reached the
bank an hour before it was open to the public. He peeped
through the half shut door. It seemed a dreary place to keep
so much money. A Tamil boy was sweeping dust from the
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floor in clouds. The counters and walls were large, bare,
empty. After some time the shroff beckoned them forward,
and counted up two columns in his day-book, while the
countryman was fumbling with his bundle. He looked at the
cheques — "pay bearer."
" Mau sign," he said.
The Sheikh showed Indut how to make his mark, and
witnessed it. The shroff flung the cheques away on a desk.
Indut trembled for his money : it could not be that any one
would fling so much wealth about in that careless way. The
shroff pushed forward a tray of dollars and notes. Indut
stuffed all eagerly into his bundle, and was making off.
" Count it," said the shroff.
"Why! you've got only nine hundred dollars as yet,"
said the Sheikh. " What are you doing ? "
Indut was ashamed and anxious. "You help, tuan,"
said he.
His friend began to count. The shroff turned away.
They had their money all right. Indut stooped to put the
counted notes into his kerchief. The Sheikh slipped one of
the bundles into his own pocket. It would be hours before
Indut could finish counting and who should tell how the
shortage arose ?
"Banyak terima kaseh, tuan," said Indut, tying up his
bundle of money. "The tuan must allow me to give him
komishin for his trouble."
He was not used to riches yet and tendered a dollar! It
seemed to him a large sum, enough to buy food for three days
at least.
The Sheikh smiled contemptuously. "Never mind,"
he said.
Indut, sensitive as all his race to shades of manner,
noticed the look and felt foolish.
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"'Twas my mistake, tuan," said he, "I mistook it for a
five dollar note,"
The Sheikh took the five dollars, and excused himself
from further attendance ; he had an appointment elsewhere.
Indut thanked him again and turned' his foot-steps towards
the station. People had been very kind. Alhamdu'lillah.
He would go home now and bury his treasure. In due season
he would go to Mecca on the pilgrimage ; travel gave a man
such polish, made one a gentleman.
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H[S
LAST
DEVICE
ORING over ungrammatical illspelt me-
moirs and crabbed pedigrees, which
had passed from his illiterate hands into
the possession of a raja enthusiast, I had
learnt the history of his house, its past
fortunes and greatness and the host of its scions, many almost
as the sands on the shore of that miniature Malay kingdom.
The family tree jumbled strange fellows. There was Adam,
the father of the human race, set down with evangelical
assurance in Indian ink at the head of the line. There were
Muhammed the prophet, Siti Fatimah, and many a saidina
and saint. Of local Malayan fame, the first immigrant had
won office of state by carving the beams of the Raja's wattled
palace with cosmopolitan skill ; his son had achieved honour
as a law-giver by settling what, for Malays, were the entirely
novel and therefore absorbing problems of how much damage
should be paid by the owner of a refractory lion or the hirer
of a debilitated camel ; his grandson at a national crisis had
enhanced still further the family's name by the weighty
counsel that, in order to impress a meddling Dutch commis-
sary with sense of the state's temporal power, the Raja and
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his court had best discard comfort for an afternoon and don
coats !
The multitude of descendants from those ancient worthies
was legion, a very few prosperous, most poor, some peasants,
some pushing ploughs, stupid, bucolic, courteous, passionate,
wise; dotted along every bank in that river kingdom.
None of them had attained the distinction of their early
progenitors, except perhaps this grey fragile old man, who
had been selected their chief for his prowess as Cock-Fighter
and fencer by a bye-gone Raja half a century ago. His gold-
sheathed keris of office was slipping now from feeble fingers ;
many passions, many tropical years had wasted him to a mere
shadow of manhood. Etiquette, that let him sound the royal
trumpet as far down the artery of the State as the bar where
the surf broke and the grey mullet leapt in sparkling waves —
that same etiquette decreed with callous incongruity, that he
should attire his wasted frame in rose-pink, the colour of
wanton youth steering full sail down paths of pleasure. But,
though the royal trumpet might blare at the poop of his barge,
the only kingdom worth having, the kingdom of youth, had
departed from him and he had nothing now in the jubilee
of office to remind of those days except that absurd costume
of rose-pink, which suited the sunlight and the palms so well
and his meagre figure so ill. He had drunk a wild deep
draught of the power and lust of a chief of his race and
generation; strange to reflect, had ravished and killed with
those thin nerveless hands and wooed and dared and cowed
with those lack-lustre eyes; first once in the chase, in war, in
love. There wqfe dead women with distracting languor and
jet flower-starred tresses ; one, especially, fairer than honour,
the wife of his playmate and friend — but he was too tired
now for remorse, too jaded to remember. A long, untamed
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unhindered life had lavished upon him with Oriental prodigality
all emotions and all passions, burning desires, fierce jealousy,
hot hate and, last of all, this slow sad measure of satiety and
fatigue.
He commanded respect not from wisdom or cleverness
but from long tenure of office and his great age. Men came
before him, backs bent and hands spread in deference or lifted
in attitude of supplication ; told him of their ambitions and
loves and despairs, enthusiasms of the spring and heyday of
life, and he listened with apathy as to stories of a world he
could no longer realize, and gave counsel and orders weighty
with experience and dispassionate as the oracle of a god.
Years ago, it had been gall and wormwood to him, when, with
the white man's coming, authority had gone out from his gold-
sheathed dagger and left it a mere toy ; now he was glad to be
quit of responsibility. Years ago, he had felt jealous of
younger, keenerwitted chiefs, in that decade when reputation
for wisdom had accrued to him beyond his desert from the one
notable saying of his life, that a seat on the white man's
council was sugar for a caged bird; but now, well, he was
ready enough to let younger shoulders bear the burdens of
place. Only habit of loyalty and constraint of office led him
to court in those latter days.
He was a Hamba Tua and must serve his Raja to the
brink of the grave. Looking at him in his dotage, one would
have sworn the salt of life had lost all savour, that there was
no tie, nor passion nor humour to keep the flickering spirit
under that pink costume alive. Then, at death's door, he did
a thing which put him in the galaxy of those worthies, his
ancestors, who had won fame respectively from the carver's
chisel and the wisdom of the petit maitre.
He was delicate and very weak. His royal master
insisted that he should allow the tuan doktor to prescribe.
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He suffered his pulse to be felt, his chest to be tapped and
pronouncement to be made.
"You want nourishment, tenghu. We must feed you up.
I'll send some Frame Food, uhat badan tnakan" — the Malay
idiom was not impeccable.
The only ubat badan makan that the old chief could think
of was a sharp spear or keris, but he concealed his feelings and
the doctor expanded the phrase and explained that this was a
cereal powder to mix with food. A powder to mix with the
rice Allah had provided for the sustenance of his servants !
And how very youthful this white medicine-man looked !
Still, with the fine courtesy of his race, he hid his distrust and
gave profuse thanks for a diagnosis so profound and for the
packet of Frame Food. After that, he certainly brightened.
He even called at the Hospital to express his appreciation of
the treatment, and ask for more Frame Food. The medical
department braved the green pencil of the auditor to provide
the luxury for so distinguished and influential a patient.
Hopes were entertained that some of the inhabitants of that
river reach where the tenghu bore sway would now apply for
European treatment — at any rate for fever and simple mala-
dies. Then the medical officer suffered a rude awakening.
He had occasion to visit the Chinese store in the village.
There, in the place of honour, were those packets of Frame
Food ! The shop-keeper declared that the tengku himself had
brought them in exchange for tobacco, explaining that they
were an excellent medicine for debility, better than soin for the
Chinese constitution. Alas ! the old man had never thought
the Utan would demean himself by resorting to a Chinese
store. He had taken a senile grasping pleasure in his little
ruse and, above all, had prided himself on his diplomacy
The Raja had been pleased and surprised at such adaptability
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" There, in the place of honour, were (hose packets of
Frame Food."
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MALAYAN MEMORIES.
to European treatment in his old-world follower ; the doctor
had been delighted at his reiterations of confidence in the
prescription ; and he — well, he had enjoyed tobacco gratis for
a month and upheld the tradition of his family for finesse.
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A SOOTHER OF
E sat cross-legged on the holystoned
deck of my launch, crushing betel to a
scarlet pulp in a mortar and ever and
anon drawing the straight steel pestle
across his lips with an appreciative
relish ; he was a tall, big-limbed old man for a Malay,
straight-backed, clean shaven, with a strong face.
"This breeze makes me feel young again," he remarked.
"It is long since I knew the sea: I mind me when I first
thridded the shoals and mud-banks of these waters ; it was a
keris I had to carry in my belt then, and not this betel-mortar.
' What is the rule at sea ? Sail with the breeze : anchor
in calm,' runs a sailor's saying ; but it was risky work to anchor
hereabouts then, if a man had goods aboard. Pirates
swarmed. The country was in arms ; the Chinese ungovern-
able ; there were two steersmen at the helm, two Sultans, that
is, on the throne ; the white man came. Yes ! I was young in
those days and a soldier of fortune, as all could see, ay ! even
from the tie of my headkerchief with its ends projecting in the
style of the 'fighting elephants' as we dubbed it. Men were
men then, not pliant scribes or mannerless babblers, thanks to
the keris each wore at belt and the will to wipe black shame
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from their faces. Yet, if my tales be true, even those of my
generation were lesser men than their fathers before them.
See landward the sheer white sides of yonder mountain ?
They say how in the old times a famous hermit lived atop
there and a man might climb to his cave and learn of him the
secrets which could turn the dagger-blade to water and the
bullet from its course. Perhaps the old gods are dead, Batara
Guru, Batara Kala. It is clear they lived once, but I think
they may be gone now. Allah alone knows. Ha! the tuaii's
foot still hurts? They deal a sore thrust, those ray-fish.
Would the titan like me to exorcize the poison?"
And leaning forward he drew his hand upwards and down-
wards across the smart, blew on it and commenced to mumble
a shibboleth of Indonesian and Hindu magic, clinched with a
threat of the virtue of the Moslem creed.
" It is time for prayer," he said at last, after a look at the
setting sun, " if the ttmn wiW allow| me to retire awhile; and
afterwards I will go on with that tale of Awang Sulong Merah
Muda, the Red Prince, as I learnt it in my youth, or I can
relate how I helped the white man in the Perak war and
rescued the body of the Resident from the river down by
Bandar."
I watched him step back where the crew squatted, a man
of larger stature and experience than those lean boys, intent on
cards and questionable tales. I could picture him in his own
youth ready to pay for clean loves with life-blood, not wanton
with dirty dollars, ready to acknowledge deeds and misdeeds
and abide the consequence without resort to peddling lawyer
and quibbling court. Many a tale from his lips had let me
take a fair measure of his manhood. He had been a soldier
of fortune but no fire-eater; he was resolute always but
cautious always ; he did not like war where peace was possible
and often shook his head over the memory of stockades rushed
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and kampongs burnt, as over so much waste of life and
property. I could not well imagine him, however, conducting
an ambush ; he was so straight a man in thought, and speech
and deed. The casual observer would hardly have believed it,
perhaps ; for now in old age, strength and need to wield
weapons gone, he was a pawang by profession ; he blessed
crops in the name of Batara Guru; he exorcized sickness to
the navel of the sea and the sunken reef where the mythical
coco tree grows ; and he kept each hour of prayer, devout as
the most devout of Mussulmans. Yet there was no double-
faced hypocrisy in this attitude, but rather a practical soldier
bluntness; he did not seek to win money from the credulous
by muttering charms in which he had no faith ; those charms
had come down from immemorial antiquity, hallowed by use
at annual harvest and the sick-bed of countless generations ; it
could not be but that they were efficacious, and it was not for
him but for bookish theologians to reconcile them with the
religion of the mosque. His simple faith, like that of more
sophisticated superstitions, had its reward ; for I had seen the
quiet strength of his very presence bring rest and his calm
convincing recital of antique rigmarole send sleep to many a
fevered patient.
He returned from his prayers.
" Ha," he said, "so the kcan has got pen and paper ready.
It was writing that ruined me. After the war, the Company
made me a headman and because I was illiterate gave me a
clerk ; the fellow was a rogue and cheated me and the Com-
pany ; no one attached blame to me, but I was ashamed and
fearful of what others that followed him might do, and I re-
signed; it is hard fighting when one cannot see the enemy."
"And how do you live now?" I asked him.
"Like a fowl," he laughed; what I scratch up in the
morning, I eat in the morning ; what I scratch up in the
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evening, I eat in the evening; there are no leavings. The
sale of my garden-stuff keeps me going from day today; a
little I earn as pawang, very little, as mostly my services are
rendered to my own people; the profits of the rice-harvest wipe
off debts or yield enough for the expense of one's children's
weddings. Yes, times are hard. Everything is very dear
nowadays, and the Chinaman has the money. Has the tuan
ever seen a starved old woman in rags fishing in the drain near
my kampong} I remember the time when a man might not
see so much as her heel, were he ready to give a thousand
dollars."
And he quoted the stock tag of Malay romance on
woman's beauty —
" Browed like newly risen crescent ;
Like to spurs her curving eye-brows ;
Her cheek like slice of golden manggo ;
Her nose as fair as jasmine blossom ;
Dainty her ears as th' curling lotus ;
Tapering her neck as vase from Raman ;
Round as curve of bow her fore-arm ;
Like spears of lemon-grass her fingers ;
Waist the span of a tiny finger ;
Legs as plump as swelling rice-grain ;
Heels as eggs so fair and shapely ;
Fine her toes as yellow gold."
"But shall I get on with my tale?" he asked. "Of
course, it should not be recited at sea, they say, but the white
men are no respecters of spirits, and I do not think the storm
demons will venture near a Government steam launch. It is
lucky we finished the passage about the tempest last night
on shore ; I can continue now about the fair weather voyage
of the Red Prince and his princess, the Pride of Java, along
this very coast."
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He started to chant, his voice at first cracked with age
and disuse but strengthening as he warmed to his tale. The
hour grew late : the launch clock had struck the hour of mid-
night : I dozed on the top of my cabin but still his voice rose
strong and interested across the moon-lit bay. For me his
tale with its mixture of many superstitions, layer upon layer,
possessed indeed a dilettante interest ; to him it was what
Robinson Crusoe or Treasure Island are to a school-boy, what
The Odyssey must have been to a Greek fisherman. Adventure
had gone out of his life; his home was poor; his clothes
cotton, and his wife old and ugly. But as he recited, he
lived in a different world ; princes in the splendour of old-
world raiment fought battles with magic arts and weapons,
rescued lovely maidens in distress, travelled from land to land
in search of adventure, debonair, irresistible, possessed of the
secret of perpetual youth and passion. Visions of sunlight
and sea peeped out of the rude verse; sails filled with the
freshening breeze, and youth sat at the prow gay with silks
and colour and love, whispering honeyed nothings to prin-
cesses such as never were even on the green islands and sum-
mer seas of the Malay Archipelago.
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HEN first I made her acquaintance,
she looked a wi2ened old woman, dis-
hevelled, dirty, filmy-eyed; and yet,
I was to learn later, she could have
known hardly more than fifty fierce,
year-long tropical summers. She was one of that class of
lesser Malay rajas, who more than all others have reason and
excuse for hugging the memory of a former age, the memory
of licence and power and respect, the memory of a time when
the horn-bill, however battered his plumage, was always a
horn-bill and the sparrow, however pert, could never be aught
but a sparrow, so rigid were distinctions of class. A wilful
girl, half dove, half hawk, ravishing the hearts of her mild
eyed brooding mankind, she had been wont to collect tribute
in those days on her river, the river over which her ancestors
for two centuries had lorded as a right ; and scandal, whispered
by old folk, her peers, with sage noddings over betel, averred
how with dagger in nervous supple grasp she had been as eager
in quest of lovers as in quest of tribute, how she had warmed
both dainty hands before the fire of life with zest enough for a
dozen conventional women even of her race and clime. The
fire was sunk now. For her (one felt with the superfluous
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sentiment of one's civilization) life henceforth must be a
blank vestibule wherein she had to await the slow release of
death : —
" Ainsi le bon temps regretons
Entre nous, pauvres vieilles sottes,
Assises bas, k croppetons,
Tout en ung tas comme pelottes ;
A petit feu de chenevottes,
Tost allum6es, tost estainctes,
Et jadis fusumes si mignottes !
Ainsi en prend k maintz et maintes."
Wasted pity, because though she had been devoured by
many passions, she never, I am sure, entertained the morbid
passion of remorse; because despite failure and disappointment
and age, she still nursed hopes and interests, still had courage
and looked to the future.
She had outgrown a feudal civilization and almost all that
made life for her worth living, but she had not out-grown use
and place, at any rate in her own eyes. Was there a birth, she
would be present to utter Arab invocations, that except as
potent spells were " miching mallecho " to her pagan mind ; or
she would swing a cradle, crooning in a cracked treble lullabies
that had charmed the infant royalty of Malaya into slumber
time out of mind. Was there a marriage, who but she should
know the traditional duties of duenna? Who else start the
bridal song or teach the steps of the henna dance ? If there
was a death, where could sorrow sit more fitly than on her grey
sunken face ? or who better able than she to recall the career
of the departed with its follies and foibles, its sins and its virtues
dating from the almost forgotten past.
The short reign of the Oriental woman is a common-place ;
in reality, her reign actually begins when it is supposed usually
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to have ended. As a girl and a young bride, she is cabined
and confined, not allowed for instance to eat the toothsome
burnt rice for fear it darken her complexion, not allowed to
take a part in affairs for fear of her morals. As a mother, she
has more scope. As a matron, she dictates to men-folk and
wields sway such as a suffragette might toil for centuries to
acquire. So, this old raja lady was a force in her petty sphere.
The years that had robbed her of beauty and reputation, had
left her a full measure of memories and abundant confidence ;
she would babble of princes and high officials and the great
ones of her world ; she would beg and sell mining-lots ; specu-
late in rubber land ; negotiate marriages— all affairs of small
moment but to her absorbing, important, warp and weft of the
stuff of her life. She was not confined to one village or one
district, but would travel from the house of one chief to that of
another, from one country to another, at times even overseas-
No company found her at a loss; no misfortune dismayed her.
She was essentially a woman of the world and she lived by her
wits, not indeed a life of pleasure, for carking poverty hung
ever over her, but a life full of interests.
She had her hopes, built to the music of soothing old-
world saws, "and therefore never built at all and therefore
built for ever." Surely royal luck, proverbial among people of
her race, which had led remote ancestors to the shores of their
principalities, given them regalia from the depths of the sea,
protected them from enemies, guided them in omens and
dreams; surely, it could never desert even its humblest in-
heritor? And then would not her own merits avail to win
fortune in the end ? There was a litter of ant-eaten mildewed
documents kept in a grimy bundle under an old brass betel-
service ; some day those papers bearing the seal manual of dead
Sultans and the signatures of British officers of a past genera-
tion would bring a larger pension, a rich tinfield, a liberal
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suitor for some grandchild's hand. Then, too, there were
talisnjans, which should realize their inherent luck. Perhaps,
it was useless now to keep them stored away, but falling into
the right hands — . I remember how chagrined she was once,
because the offer of a knot of Malacca cane with a natural mark
that those living in or sympathetic with her plane of thought
might have taken for a face, had failed to accomplish some
impossible plea in high quarters.
It was easy to learn her thoughts and ambitions, because
she had that directness of conversation, embarrassing as nudity
to modern society, wherein lies half the charm of the Malay and
others at his stage of culture ; the directness without the coarse-
ness of " the Wife of Bath." She was old and she never
pretended for one moment that she was young. She was
desperately poor and admitted it with a shrug or a shake of her
grey coifed head. She had been and still was wicked with
aristocratic scorn of opinion and confessed it rather wistfully —
adding the half truth that beggars cannot choose their own
lives ; doubtless she had chosen to develop other sides of her
character than would be chosen by a professor of moral
philosophy, but from childhood she too had been a humble,
unconscious disciple in the school of "self-realization," had
followed unbridled her impulses and desires ; short-lived they
may have been but none the less real and leading far enough
from the religious ideal which bans half of experience to the
devil.
" Assises bas, a croppetons
Tout en ung tas comme pelottes."
The stern moralist would reflect, how she had made her
bed and must lie on it. In me she prompted other thoughts.
Dust and ashes, where once there had been fire ; but that fire
had not been extinguished pettily by trivialities and con-
ventions, had never been thwarted by this or that theory of
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conduct, but had burnt out as a natural event under stress of
passion, the bearing of children, war, the crumbling of her
world about her feet; had burnt leapingly as flame a-work
among the sere rank growth of that tropical forest, which fate
had given her for cradle home and grave.
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A DEALER IN
DAGGERS
THt RIUA ClinBrO THC RIVTRBANH,
CUMatD^WCNI-TO THE CRArTSMANS OOOR:
HC ORCVI HIS PlAlO ABOUT HIS HfAD
roRArEvrn hacked him sorc
"CRArTsnAN'SAIOHE"lVl lU ATCASC
MV60DY SIC.K,AnRC MY BRAIN;
nAKcsoniNCWHArT roRcRtcst i rm
WHICH StEINO I'll fOrtCET MTf RAIN"
HiSBOWfD HEAD WRAPT IN roLOrDFlAlb
THE RAJA KNELT WlT« BENDED THICH
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A MODEL TMERE FOR THE CRAnSrW&nf
THfllWrrSMAtlSTRMtHT TOOK CWSll THE
AND YELLOW GOLDEN rAOLC-WOOD;
AND FASHIONED TOR NEW DACCER-HAn
THE FEvraro chieftain in his mood.
(vfBStFlECg
was an old Malay, very old according to
the Oriental estimate with its respect-
ful exaggeration, and in sober truth of
some seventy summers. His hair was
white, whiter than his daily wear, a Mecca pilgrim's crotchet
skull cap and flowing cotton gown; the iris of his eye had
paled to the colour of cold steel ; and age had chiselled his fine
head and slightly aquiline nose to severe profile. But the
mouth showed firm under the sparse white beard ; his figure
was well knit, erect and soldier-like ; his gait still alert and sure ;
and his skin, paled somewhat by old age, looked fresh and
healthy as a russet pippin under his yellow Arab turban. In
his right hand he carried a dingy white umbrella ; dusty white
(as of a pilgrim who had travelled far and long) being the
dominant note of colour in his picturesque old-world figure.
In his left, he held a three-jointed Malacca cane, six foot long,
and a bundle containing bananas ; a box for the betel-nuts,
lime and sireh-leaf, which all elderly folk and some young
chew till their mouths are stained scarlet ; and lastly, certain
knives which stringent police rules made it politic to conceal.
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In the left side of his belt was thrust the brass-bound wooden
tube and crusher, with which toothless old people pound their
betel-nuts ; on the right side, hidden away in folds of cloth,
nestled a short straight damascened dagger or badik, which he
always wore for luck and refused to part with, shabby cracked
little blade though it was, for any bribe or cajolery; — its
cracks, he said, were called " the steps of gold."
Putting umbrella cane and bundle down in my verandah,
he lifted folded hands to brow and stooping low just touched
my hands between his palms in Muhammadan salutation.
" Is the news good ?" he asked.
" The news is pretty good," I answered, " and how is it
with thee ? "
"But middling," he replied, touching on his usual topic
with his usual polite nonchalance, " ever since I lost those six
boats in the war, six boats almost new and of lucky measure-
ment, fate has left me but a poor man, tuan."
"Ah!" I laughed, " how was it the lucky measurements
did not save those boats from capture ? "
"The tuan is making fun of me," he said, smiling; "but
verily, talking of lucky measurements, I have a creese in this
bundle very old and very lucky. Would the tuan like to
examine it? The tuan, also, is skilled in these matters."
And he pulled out a dagger with ebony haft, silver mounting,
a polished sheath the colour of an old Cremona, and a black
sinister blade some eight inches long, twisted and watered
with damascene till it looked like a snake.
" A Patani blade, a pandai Sara blade. There be three
famous Patani makers, pandai Sara, pandai Muhammad, and
bandai Thaib, and pandai Sara is the oldest and best. Not
even a fowl is bold enough to cross the man that wears this
dagger, but will turn aside off his path."
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I laughed. " There is a fowl in the garden, would'st thou
test thy blade. But what damasking is this ? " and I pointed
to the watering on the steel.
"The 'mountain' mark, ttmn the 'mountain' mark, good
to wear, when bartering, buying and selling."
" And why should the m juntain' mark be so lucky ?"
" I cannot tell. The tuan asks deep questions. Our
fathers have told us, and what more do we know. Perhaps it
is because a mountain is beautiful and entices and conquers
the hearts of men. As for the measurement of the blade, has
the tuan a strip of palm-leaf that I may show him ? "
I sent my orderly into the garden to fetch a coconut leaf.
The old man shredded it and showed me how to measure from
stem to point and then across and round the blade at three
places, repeating " Sickness, captain, lady," as English
children repeat " Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief,"
over seeds of grass.
" See," he said, " at point ' lady,' at stem and centre
' captain.' A lucky blade. The hearts of women follow the
wearer. Will not the Umh buy ? Thirty dollars only."
" Father," I said, " thou art old: the hearts of women may
follow thee and no harm done. But the hearts of women may
follow a young man and luck not ensue."
" Thou speakest well, tuan. And if there were ' lady '
at base or centre as well as at point, then evil might chance.
But when at centre and base 'captain' supports 'lady'
at point, the heart of the wearer shall not wax effeminate in
his love passages nor strength and cunning fail him in love's
quarrels. See, tuan, the ' mountain ' damask-mark runs more
than half-way up the blade, bringing thee thy heart's uttermost
desire. Seldom is a dagger like this for sale: it is kept in
a chest and gives luck to a house; the owner wears it in
the rice-field and his crop is plentiful ; it is handed down as an
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heirloom in families. Trouble enough I had to get it, knowing
the tuan desired such weapons. Two days' journey into the
jungle, much parley and betel-chewing, the summoning of
children and grand-children, before the heirloom could be
sold. Never should I have obtained it in the old days; but
now this is the white man's land and a man may not wear
dagger in belt, when he goes abroad. The price is low.
Any man would give five silver dollars for such a ' section
of lime-fruit ' to his sheath." And he handled the beautiful
wooden cross-piece, so called from its shape, like a lover.
" Yes," he continued, going over to where my collection
hung : " here are some pretty blades — this sapokal Bugis steel,
very venomous, and the ' broken tooth ' (a chip in the steel
under the guard), not the work of the craftsman, that mark,
but the doing of Allah : I myself would give a hundred dollars
or a buffalo for it, had I the means. A blade to leap out of
the sheath when danger is nigh ; an eagle-wood crosspiece to
the sheath with parallel veins that can avert every blow aimed
at its wearer. This sheath too," (taking up another dagger)
" it looks shabby enough but cunning was the workman that
chose it with the ' fish-navel ' vein on either side, the vein that
brings good fortune and the heart's desire. May I draw?"
he asked. " We Malays fear to let another draw our dagger;
perchance he wills us evil and possessing a more potent weapon,
by virtue of it may touch our blade in malice and extract all
temper from the steel."
Drawing the dagger gingerly from the sheath, he held the
point up to his ear.
"Poor metal," he said, "gives no noise: steel of fine
temper makes a noise like the noise in a sea-shell : an old
blade makes a man's ear feel hot. There be men afraid
to draw an old dagger, for fear its potency afflict them with
sickness or death."
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" What is the history of the keris pichit, the creese shaped
and fashioned by the craftsman's mere naked finger ? " I
asked. " Two such daggers I have seen : one belonging to
a river chieftain and one to the son of a banished Sultan ; and
the Raja's blade at least looked as if it might indeed have been
so shaped and bent, though haft and sheath and steel were old
and shabby."
" What matters haft and sheath, tuaii. It is true, these
Perak fellows love ivory and horn and gold-mounting,
but men of my race say ivory haft and ivory ferrule but draw
the temper from the blade. Better the lucky blade be kept
hiltless and sheathless, that it may bring all the gifts of
heaven to its owner's house. Let Allah, whose name be
praised, see fine sheath and hilt and He will say, ' The owner
possesses goods in sufficiency and needs no help of mine
But as for these thumb-fashioned daggers, there are only
seven in the world, and a Sultan might exchange his kingdom
for any one of them. The man that made them had eaten
neither rice nor fish nor curry from childhood up but cold tea
only. And the owner of such a blade must keep it point in air
towards the sky where no mortals are ; for if it be laid down
to point east or west, north or south, all men that live in its
direction straightway suffer calamity, death, sickness, ill-
fortune. The ttian has heard how our Malay rhapsodists,
soothers of village care, sing of these magic weapons? No? I
think I can repeat it : —
Blade and cross-piece one unjointed ;
Down the damask silver veining.
Forged of parent primal steel.
Sifted first and hammered after,
Fragment broke from Adam's stave ;
Chip of steel from Khorassan.
Would you clean the blade \s ith acid
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Take it to an inner chamber.
Would you clean the blade in water,
Choose the river's upper reaches.
If a month ago a stranger
Went a-carrying his bundle,
Stab the spot his feet have trodden
He shall die before its magic ;
If a month ago the swimmer
Hied from out some Bugis river,
Stab where'er his ripples eddied
He shall die before its magic.
If its point has drawn a blood gout
Let one drop but trickle earthward
For a year the rice-crops wither ;
Let one drop but trickle seaward
For a year no fishes sport."
"Allah!" he continued, " youth is good; when limbs are
supple and the heart young. The tuan is young yet and
knows not the sweetness of it and the evils of old age. Ah,"
clutching a straight dagger called 'the wanton ' in his right
hand and a short curved knife ' the cock's tail-feather ' in his
left and putting himself in attitude of fence, "Ah, but the
young men nowadays cannot fence as they could of old."
And he made two or three sweeping paces across my verandah
thrusting and guarding, with the light of memories on his
face.
" So," he said, picking up bundle and cane, " so, I may
leave this dagger with the tuan. And the tuan has got me
that pink arsenic which keeps a blade bright : I want it for
my creese with the damask marks which the knowing call
' the grass-hopper's legs.' Luck be to thy journeying. The
tuan is going away, and before he comes back, who knows ?
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I may have returned to the mercy of Allah: and indeed I
shall not be loth ; friends are always dying or going away ; few
of my comrades are left and the thoughts of the young folk
are not as mine. Luck be to thy journeying, tuan. It is time
I started home, before the sun is high and the shadows round
my feet."
The old man had gone. I turned to my orderly, a
Javanese, who had been standing by ; and asked him, " Well,
Thaib, what do you think? Is the old Achinese skilled in
creese lore? in the mystery of damascenes and measure-
ments ? "
" Skilled,' tuan. Where be men of his race that are not
skilled? Perhaps he has lived over-long among these high-
land folk, seeing he has come to praise Patani blades. But he
was right about poor steel and good steel, and the keris pichit.
Myself I am no adept in these matters. But my father had
eighteen blades, five of them good. One of them would turn
to water if the house caught fire, and dout the flames, setting
about its business with a noise like the noise of a breeze.
Another would ever leave the house and its sheath on the
evening of a lucky day, of Friday for instance, take its way
winding and hissing along the wall, no longer steel but bright
flame, glide into the garden and lie across the fork of a tree :
it would leave between seven and eight o'clock and return at
one in the morning ; a third, when stuck in your belt, would
keep away rain, so that it might pour on right hand and
on left but the wearer's path remain dry."
I sent my orderly about his work and sat and reflected on
the charm of the unknown ; and I half resolved that, though
the Malay Peninsula had almost realized the expectation of my
fancy, Java should never be visited by me but remain a vision,
tempting and wonderful as dreams that come through the
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ivory gates, the vision of a land encircled by treacherous
summer seas, seas to which no one in a green coat may draw
nigh, seas on whose waves Javanese rajas walk twice a year
without sinking by virtue of their royal blood ; the vision of a
land where knives walk in the orchards like flame and where
Dutchmen smoke cigars two feet long.
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THE LEPER'S
PARTING.
From Ricc-riELDSToo Ruocron cmb/vnkments,
PROn STRrAMSTOOSHALLOV/ FORnSH:
A PLACt WHCRE THE APE HOWLS TO THE NICHT,
WHERE THrCrBBON SVINOS DOWN TO DKINK;
Where eolk nusT eat fcrn-shoots."
ALAY folk-tales often take for hero
and heroine a foolish couple, too shy
to mix with their fellows a few reaches
down river, preferring rather to eke
out a scanty subsistence on the rice and pumpkins and yams
of a remote up-land clearing. They are fond from habit and
lack of imagination ; Ma Andeh knows to a nicety the number
of chiUies Pa Pandir likes to his curry ; Pa Pandir has seen
hardly a dozen other women in his life, and they black with
the kisses the tropic sun gives agriculturists, black but not
comely. There is no more high passion or romance in their
lives than there is presumably in the vegetable loves of their
garden. Ma Andeh's days and thoughts are occupied with
pounding the rice, tending the pot and nursing the baby ; Pa
Pandir spends hours watching his bananas ripen or setting a
quaint conical trap made of thorns to catch one fish ! So little
greed is there in rural ambition. Their only excitement is
a birth or a death. For with the best intentions in their
witless primitive world they let a fair proportion of their
children die and devote their day-long leisure to spoiling the
survivors.
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Just such a couple were Hitam and Long his wife, of Ulu
Chegar. White men and railways and motor cars have been
common enough for years in Malaya ; these folk may have
met a rare specimen of the first, but the "fire carriage" and
the "ghost carriage" had never come near their retreat nor
had they gone a-field to see them. Their interests began and
ended in a poor garden, a stretch of river, a little space of
forest. In these, to be sure, they discovered far more than
would strike a stranger — -a fresh banana sucker visible above
ground only two days since, a big temoli to be trapped in the
pool below the freshet, the track of mouse-deer up to the hole
in the unkempt fence towards the forest, and everywhere, but
especially in the boskage of the tall merbau tree, a host of
unseen spirits, some kind, some vindictive.
Alas ! there was one canker in the garden of their content.
Hitam had suffered the finger of a malignant spirit and was a
leper. Yet he and his wife, no more susceptible to acute
anxiety than to great pleasure, were hardly moved by their
misfortune. The disease had made little head-way and if
cotton streamers were tied long enough on the branches of the
merbau, in time the evil spirit might remove that finger of
wrath.
Fate decreed that time was not to be given him. It came
about through a letter couched in the hybrid diction of official
Malay writers and signed in the margin by an implacable
white man. Even so, the letter might have been harmless.
If it had fallen into the hands of old 'To Pandak, for instance!
He had been an assiduous picker-up of unconsidered but valu-
able durian orchards, the lawful property of Sakais, if property
were a word to be considered in relation with such jungle
swine. And he had had a keen nose for tin. But for lepers,
in the «/«! and his family's anak buah time out of mind?
" The knee was nearer than the foot " and popularity with his
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dependents more important than the whims of the white man.
Unfortunately, he had retired full of years and durian or-
chards, and Che Brahim who ruled in his stead was a headman
of the new school. The drill and routine of an education
conducted more or less on European lines had robbed him of
half the urbanity and tolerance of his race ; and the drab
khaki uniform which he thought good form was a fair symbol
at least of his official mind. His idol, the god that had made
him out of a man of straw into a penghulu, was the British
Government, not local popularity which as a stranger he could
never win nor plums which his predecessors had picked to the
kernel. If his own father had been a leper and the order had
come to surrender him, Che Brahim would hardly have
hesitated. And here he was instructed to make search in a
place where he had no friends or relations. He sat down
complacently and copied the order in a neat Roman hand into
his note-book: — "This is to inform our friend that careful
inquiry and search is to be made throughout his mukim in
case any persons afflicted with leprosy may be found. Hany
are discovered, tliey should be put on a raft and despatched
down river, that the Government may care and prescribe for
them, and their friends be free from the danger of infection."
For his own part, Che Brahim had a vague suspicion that
Government cast away the unhappy wretches on a desert
island in mid-ocean ; but he kept that idea to himself as
incompatible with official khaki, and circulated the discreet
and loyal opinion that they were merely to be taken to head-
quarters and there rubbed with medicine of quick and
sovereign property. Even with that inducement, few lepers
were forth-coming ; all those in accessible places having been
snapped up by the summary methods of the police. At last,
by the aid of some time-server, he had got wind of Hitam at
Ulu Chegar and set off up-river to hunt him down.-
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Hitam, squatting under a clump of bamboos and staring
into the pool was taken by surprise, when the strange boat
rounded the head-land; not of course that it would have
struck him to escape in any circumstances. Its khaki-clad
occupant was unknown to him. The boat drew up to his
garden and the standing of the penghulu was conveyed to him
almost at the same moment that a big fish entered his jut, the
ingenious trap from which only the flow of current prevents
escape.
"You bring luck to a poor man, data," he said politely,
extracting his catch and offering it as a gift to the new-
comers.
The penghulu refused, partly because he felt uncomfortable,
partly because, being town-bred, he had no more stomach for
river fish than Hitam would have had for fish from the sea.
Half unconsciously, he realized that here was an occasion
when the old-time diplomacy "he had learnt as a child would
serve better than the abrupt methods of European discipline.
He climbed up the bank, sat down under the bamboos and
asked for a sugar-cane to quench his thirst, talking the while of
weather and crops. At last when occasion seemed ripe, he
broached the subject of his visit.
"That's a sick leg you've got, Hitam," said he; "'twere
well it were medicined."
"Ah! dato," said the man uneasily, " 'tis no matter."
"Well! when a woman's ailing, there's no place for her
but the mid-wife, as the saying goes."
" To be sure, if the mid-wife knows her business."
" The white man's doctors are very clever," ventured the
head-man.
" No wonder, seeing that the white man is descended from
jinputeh," the sick man retorted.
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"Well, there'd be no harm in giving them a trial, would
there?"
" I've tried even the Sakai medicine-man," said Hitam.
And as for the tuan doktor, how should a poor man like me
get down river to consult him or haye money to fee him ? "
" That's simple enough," and the penghulu pulled out the
magistrate's letter and read such portions as suited his
purpose. " The Company cares for its ryots as a hen for her
chicken and you can have free passage and free medicine."
" But what about the hen and her chicken ? " lifting his
chin uneasily in the direction of his wife and their five-year
old child.
" They may come, too, for a holiday," said Che Brahim.
Malay diplomacy is apt to be as tedious as Malay packing
is expeditious, but by the afternoon that family with its bundle
of cotton clothes and its palm-leaf bag of betel utensils was
accommodated with a raft and drifting idly down-stream.
They reached head-quarters the next day and the leper was
conducted at seeming liberty to the rumah sakit. There, after
being kept waiting in a white-washed room, whose unac-
customed glare dazzled his eyes more than the sun dancing on
a rice-field, he was taken at last before the tuan doktor. The
tuan doktor diagnosed his case, but being new to the country
had to rely on a Jaffna Tamil dresser to interpret and explain
the situation.
"Tell the man, he will have a house provided, and a
garden ; and he can fish and do as he likes so long as he does
not leave the island, and he will not be hurt at all. He can,
also, write to his friends."
Alas! the Malay from the ulu gaped at a rush of loud
whirring vocables and rude breaches of idiom and wondered.
His wonder grew when he was handed over to the custody of a
mata-mata.
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Meanwhile the penghulu sought the presence of the District
Magistrate to report progress. He regretted that only one
case had been found but he would keep a look-out for the
future. And would the tuan see the wife and child of the leper
and explain what was going to be done with her husband.
She was a woman from up-country and very stupid. The
magistrate bade him fetch her. He feared an unpleasant
scene.
" You know your husband is a leper " — he plunged with
European bluntness.
" Perhaps, tuan." Her eyes wandered vaguely but appar-
ently without interest round the office.
" Well, it is a rule of the Company that lepers must be
sent to live alone for fear they infect others. It would never
do for your little boy to catch it, you know."
The woman listened ; so far as she could gather, here was
a white man claiming to be able to worst the world of evil
spirits.
" Your man will have house and garden, and fishing net
given him, plenty of friends and food and clothes and good
treatment. You need be in no care."
The toil-worn, sun-burnt face before him stared stolid as
mahogany.
" Of course, you can see him before he goes," continued
the Magistrate.
Lack of imagination was a veil between her and the blow
that had fallen. She lived in the past and in the present but
not in the future. It was high time she got home to drive the
rats from the rice-bin and the sparrows from the corn. Also,
the varnished almeirahs, the red screen, the formal orderliness
of that office seemed strange, cruel, intense to eyes accustomed
to dust and dun dry wood. The long years to be lived without
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Hitam had not yet struck home. But for her heart's ease she
must hurry away from these abnormal surroundings.
"Never mind," she answered with apathy, "what's the
use. If the tuan has no further hukum, I and the child will get
back to the kampong at once."
" A very stupid person," said the penghulu, when she had
passed out, "almost mad,"
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THE KING'S HIGH'
^tfeftJjffl'W)
i WAY.
HE MAT was serang and Lebai Hassan
engineer of a tiny steam-launch that
fretted and throbbed up and down
mangrove-fringed back-waters in the
Malacca Straits. Che Mat was a quite
elderly Malay with a figure that suffered in symmetry because
though he could square his shoulders he could no longer
straighten his back, lumbago having stiffened it at an ungainly
angle. When he tottered ashore, a cigarette pendulous in his
gaptoothed jaw and an extra fine greasy satin -slashed cap set
at a rakish angle on his poll, he looked like a particularly
cunning, humorous parrot with a spice of recklessness in his
composition. He had nothing exciting to look forward to,
unless perhaps it were a writ for debt, a summons for never
attending mosque, a divorce-case with one of his wives or an
aggravated land twinge of lumbago, but he titubated with
ricketty knees over the ashes of life and pleasure with the
comfortable feeling that he was a dashing ensample for young
seamen.
If Che Mat represented the world, Lebai Hassan repre-
sented religion. It had brought him respect and prosperity.
By birth, he was what Straits folk dub vaguely a Bengali ; he
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was reputed to have come from the borders of Assam; and
had seen China, Australia, Europe even, if rumour were true,
before fate landed him in those shallow, lifeless lagoons.
The fires of many stoke-holds had deepened his skin to ebony.
In nautical blue serge and a peaked cap he looked like an
oriental avatar of a Salvation Army General.
"You're a reverend old fellow now," Che Mat would
criticize, head on one side, " with your long white beard. You
sit there sewing, sewing the whole day and looking as if ghee
would not melt in your mouth. But don't tell me ! when you
were young and ashore in strange countries. Why! I can
picture you marching into heathen temples in the land of
Cheena, sweet-heart on arm, and helping her to burn joss
sticks before dragon idols. But I don't know that it was a
worse offence than lapping that tinned milk as you do from
morn till night — milk that we all know is milk of dogs or pigs."
This trite sally never failed to set the long beard and
pit-like ebony cheeks moving in expostulation.
" The tuan knows," he would appeal to me, " and can be
witness that the milk is pure. What else can I drink at sea ?
For how can one of my race fare without milk ? As for Che
Mat, he is a son of perdition and his words slip off me like
water from a duck's back, but the penghulu (who is also kathi)
reproached me some while back and we quarrelled so that no
speech passed between us for six months. ' You account this
to me for sin,' said I, 'you who know not the world or Europa
but have lived like a frog under a coconut shell all your life.
Is it not a greater sin for you to see men of your faith sold up
for rent, when a few cents given in alms would relieve
them ? • "
" I am not surprised he was ruffled," I remarked.
"Nor am I," said Che Mat, "but folk of the Lebai's race
have ever a heavy hand and a heavy wit. Please play the
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frog under the coconut shell yourself, Lebai, while I take
my medicine," nodding towards a bottle of ' Revolver '
Stout.
The Bengali lived in the present, calculating profits to be
derived from the cattle that thronged his trampled kampong,
from fowl, from defoliated palm-leaf shanties he let at an
exorbitant rental to naked Kling coolies. The old Sevang,
having no such comfortable stuff for reflection, pondered over
the past, the follies, joys and experience of his youth.
One day we had run firmly aground on a mud bank, to
rest high and dry with a falling tide.
" Reminds me of the Temenggong's road, this mud," he
observed at last, having resigned himself to fate, till the tide
should rise ; " did the tuan ever hear the tale ? It was nigh
on forty years ago in the mukim where I was born. The Raja
of course could levy forced labour in those days but I still
remember how in the case of that accursed road the conditions
made even us driven sheep feel sore and grumble. Never a
measure of rice, never a tool provided for us; the road
through swamp and slush, till we labourers became caked like
buffaloes in a wallow and the sun baked the mud splashes hard
and grey, the only dry patches on our bare sweating backs.
However 'twas hand to forehead in those days, when a chief
gave orders. And it was by the Raja's own wish, we were
told, the road was started ; he wanted to show the white man,
the orang ptiteh, that his ministers knew a thing or two about
public works. Ya Allah, I laugh now when I think how his
tuan Enjineer diddled us all, elephant as well as ants, Raja as
well as poor sweating slaves. He did not drive in a buggy or
a motor-car, our engineer; he didn't handle any dirty tapes or
chains, or high-fangled instruments ; and he didn't draw up
any estimates — except for his own purposes and account
perhaps. He lolled upriver with a dozen polers pushing his
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palm-thatched house-boat and called for the village headman
to go down to them.
"'To Penghulu,' says he, 'you'll see that these jungle
pig nose a road through the forest hereabouts. It need not
be rigidly straight,' he adds, ' a good curve here or there will
improve its appearance but it must be a mile long by the end
of the month, for then His Highness will pay a visit.'
" ' Your pleasure on my head, Temenggong,' answers the
headman.
'"And your own comfortably nursed under your arm,
dato,' quoth the Temenggong, ' your own under your arm so
far as I am concerned, so long as mine be observed ! '
" That was our engineer's only visit till the Raja came a
month or so later.
" ' A new road ? ' says His Highness, standing on the
river-bank, his tasselled spears behind him, 'a very creditable
piece of work and how did you get the money for it, Temeng-
gong ? '
" ' Pardon, your Highness,' says the Temenggong, 'your
slave took the liberty of drawing advances against the Chinese
farmer's rent.'
" ' How much ? ' asks the Raja, stepping down into his
barge, ' and how far does the road go ? '
" ' Six thousand dollars,' answers the Temenggong, pat
and bowing, 'and the distance a matter of six miles, your
Highness, though you cannot judge its length rightly for a
curve here and there ! '
" ' We'll soon be able to rival pulau Pinang,' observes the
Raja smiling.
" ' Or London, your Highness,' smiles the Temenggong
back.
" It was a matter of six chains long, that road, and had
cost nothing but the sweat of our brows. Why didn't we
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shout out the Temenggong's doings to our Raja and so get
revenge for our hardships? Well, it is hardly discreet for
mouse-deer to put themselves between fighting elephants, is
it ? "
*' Did your work wear well," I enquired, " so far as it
went ? "
" I have not seen it these twenty years," he chuckled,
' but the last time I was there, crabs had thrown up the earth
in spiral mounds and the tide had broken down its banks and
softened the soil ; it was for all the world like this slimy mud-
bank and now," lifting his chin towards the mangroves, " now
I daresay it is trackless as yonder forest."
^VQ3^^--^^'
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HE Laksamana took incense, burnt it,
and fumigated sacrificial rice. He
sprinkled the rice on his mat of
honour ; set up a candle one cubit in
length, large, round as a man's fore
arm, with wick as thick as a man's thumb; spriakled the
candle with parched rice and turmeric and lighted it. Then
having drawn a white cloth eight cubits long about his head,
he sat in silence hugging himself from evening until dawn. At
last, he removed the cloth, and Raja Sri Rama said to him,
" How, brother ? Does the divination our fathers have taught
thee foretell that I shall get a son ? "
The sand-flies stung me like so many fiery pin-pricks into
sleeplessness. I writhed and longed for that long white cloth
wherein to wrap myself like the medicine-man in the divina-
tion ritual of which I had been reading. It was hours since
the hollow drum of the mosque had called the devout to
prayer, and hardly a sound broke the stillness save the lapping
of water against my house-boat as she lay moored on the river,
committed to the care of the god of mid-currents in the vain
hope of protection. from insect plague. The moon was at the
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full, round and clear, making the water shine like a sword and
lighting fitfully the coconut palm orchards on the bank. One
cradled in Greek sentiment would think of Diana and shining
deity roaming where " the dark foliage overhead splinter'd the
silver arrows of the moon." The Malay mind inherits no such
beatific vision, but is troubled about ghosts and shadows and
malignant spectres.
Suddenly the crazy thud of devil drums broke the silence.
" One of those medicine-men at his business," ejaculated
my Malay companion, rousing himself.
" Can we go and see ? " I asked.
"We can ask permission, tuan," he replied. "We may
not get it, because it is a custom that there shall be only the
same folk present on each night of the performance."
I despatched a messenger.
" Have you ever consulted one of these pawang to expel
an ill of the flesh ?" I asked my companion.
" Yes," he replied. " My wife was sick and no medicine
would allay the fever. I did not believe in the business one
whit, but her friends persuaded me to call a pawang. The tuan
knows our saying, 'Sulk with one that loves you,' and I gave
way."
" Well," I asked, " and then ? "
"The fellow was a knave. We Malays cannot bear that
any one should filch part of our body, the clippings of hair or
nails, for fear the possessor use them to our hurt and cast a
spell upon us. So, the pawang took my money and ate my
sireh, and produced a hollow bamboo stoppered at either end.
Therein, he declared, was hair and a finger-nail of my wife's
which some enemy had stolen and which was now recovered
by his magic. On no account, he ordered, was the bamboo to
be opened. But I, tuan, was unbelieving, risked the harm
which old folk prophesied, and broke the seals. Now my wife's
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hair was fine as unwoven silk, and this was as coarse as the
hair of a horse's tail ; my wife's finger-nail was curved like the
young moon and delicate as pearl, and this nail was thick as
the nail on a man's thumb. It is a pity the white man has
not made a law to clap such rogues in gaol ; but they shall be
shut in Allah's gaol hereafter, which is much worse. Never
since have I had truck with medicine-men."
He laughed. "Not that their charms are always vain.
Down-stream here at the Three Islands was once a famous
pawang, and also a husband, who noticed at last, how his wife
was sick only when he was away ; a dagger-thrust sent that
pawang home to the mercy of Allah."
And my friend quoted a trite Malay verse : —
" What's the use of raiment dainty
If the raiment be not clean :
If my mistress be not honest
What's there in her looks, I ween ? "
" Not half these pawang," he added, " believe in their own
power. They seek profit only."
We talked. And presently my envoy returned with a
welcome. We climbed the steep bank and set off on a wind-
ing track beneath the palms, clambering bamboo fences, cross-
ing ditches on perilous slippery logs and arriving at last at a
house with a bright light. I stumbled up the round rungs ®f
the house-ladder into a verandah spread with palm-matting
and crowded with about twenty persons, the women peering
furtively from behind grimy patch-work curtains. For light
and shade the scene might compare with one of Rem-
brandt's etchings. Onlookers sat dark in the background, the
figure of the pawang stood out a silhouette before the light of a
candle near which he squatted ; and the candle-light fell full
on a man who crouched beside it and on a fellow who beat a
drum with his hands and chanted in a rapid jerky voice,
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nodding and bobbing spasmodically the while. Near the candle
were set a bowl of water, some small saucers of rice and the
usual betel-boxes. When we arrived, the pawang was said to
have just revived, and the patient only was supposed to be in
a trance. For it was the patient who sat brooding over the
magic candle huddled and looking like a grotesque ruffled
bird. His head was wrapped in a yellow cloth, because the
demon possessing him was royal and entitled to the honour of
that colour. Now and again, the pawang rose from his squat-
ting position and hovered over his subject, a bunch of coarse
grass cut square in hand, and when the patient showed signs
of reviving consciousness, flicked magic water on him with the
grass brush and then squatting down behind proceeded to beat
himself on arms and knees back and sides sharply and deci-
sively with the grass. Presently the patient got stiffly up,
looking very gloomy, and with faltering foot-steps made his
way to the corner, where he lay on a mat.
The pawang now sat down before the candle, scattered
rice and dipping his grass into the bowl of water brushed him-
self. The bidnan or musician chanted lustily. The pawang,
holding the grass bunch with stiff extended arm straight in
front of him and before the candle, stared fixedly and began to
grow rigid. Two sturdy fellows stretched out arms to support
him, while the spirit entered his body. He made believe to
swoon ; revived and talked with the musician or rather the spirit
talked, asking what was wanted of him. The bidmn chanted
how sick the man was, how near to death, how great his
agony : —
" Skin and bone and joint and vein
Flesh, blood, heart, spleen, racked with pain."
The spirit answered. His fault also was great, and he, 'to
Megat, born of royal mother but humble father, could not
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minister to the disease: for the patient had cut down a
forest tree sacred to a powerful hantu. The Raja Jin must be
invoked to aid. He ceased to speak. The pawang's head sank
on his breast ; the biduan chanted frantically : —
" Home, we pray thee, spirit, to thy palace
If of mountain, home to mountain.
If of hill, home to hill.
If of forest, home to forest.
If of mere, home to mere.
If of shore, home to shore.
Home to the navel of the sea and the tree Janggi ;
Send no hurt, no harm, no fever
On head of wizard and folk present."
Suddenly with a convulsive shudder the pawang threw up
head and hands, scattering rice from his brush all over the
room ; 'to Megat was taking his departure with a most uncanny
rustle of grass and rice.
Then began the invocation to the Raja Jin. The pawang
went through the same performance, the stiffness, the rigidity
again hands were stretched out to support him while the spirit
entered and possessed his body. At last the Raja Jin spoke
through his medium, but reluctantly and chidingly. Why was
not due preparation made against his coming ? Why, when he
came last night had no hospitality been shown him ? Surely
there was sireh in the house? Let them give him some at
once. Forthwith some one got up and prepared a leaf with
lime betel-nut and tobacco and presented it to the pawang
Again (through the toothless old pawang) the Jin grumbled.
" What manner of men are these that they do not consider
old age and its wants ? I am a Jin stricken in years and tooth-
less and yet ye give me betel uncrushed. It is time that I
hied ye home."
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Hastily someone crushed the sireh and offered it again.
The biduan chanted wildly beseeching him to help them in
their need. The pawang chewed the betel.
At last, the Jin spoke. " The sin of the sick man is in-
deed heinous and no drug can cure his illness. There is but
one remedy. Ye must appease the spirit whom he has angered.
To-morrow, ye must set afloat upon the river a lanchang."
His verdict given, the Jin was exhorted to leave the
pmwang's body just as 'to Megat had been exhorted and took
his departure in the same convulsive rustling fashion.
The ceremony was over. The sick man looked more
hopeful and ate a little sireh. Neighbours began to return
homewards. Unfortunately I could not stay on the morrow to
see that miniature boat decked with coconut streamers and
laden with fruit food and a few pence ; set then to float down-
stream with appropriate invocations to bear away as soon as
possible its malicious spirit captain.
" Peace be to thee, ocean captain !
Not of common sort thy craft is,
Ivory-painted, yellow-gilded :
Mast of her a prince's watch-tower.
Shrouds of her of sheeted silver,
Oars like centipedes in number,
Rail at stern like civet's bristles.
Rudder hanging large like bees' nest,
Balc'nies curv'd like writhing serpents.
Pennons flap against her cabin,
Wave her streamers in the breezes.
Master come ! The hour's auspicious.
Heave her anchor ! Spread her canvas.
Turn her helm. Pull off, ye oarsmen.
Whither bound ? To ocean's navel,
Where the tree pauh janggi stands.
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Sport, O craft, with waves and breakers :
Be not slothful, be not laggard.
Hasten, swagger ocean captain :
Linger not by reach or bight ;
Dally not with bride or. mistress ;
Come, thy bark thy home is ready."
As we went back in the moonlight to the river and our
boat, I turned to one of my boatmen and said : —
" Kaniu juga perchaya ; do you also believe that a man
may offend a spirit, by felling a tree of the forest ? "
" Of a truth," he answered, " the men of all Perak kam-
pongs think so. Does the tuan know the tualang tree, the tree
where the wild bee builds his nest ? It is said that once a man
climbed such a tree, bag in hand, to collect honey and lo, the
tree-spirit cut him so at knee and thigh and elbow, that men
swore he was in pieces, and that they saw the pieces in the
man's bag ; the spirit had placed them there, and thrown the
bag to the foot of the tree. Howbeit a pawang restored the
man and made him whole. If such be the punishment for but
gathering honey, what shall be that for felling the trunk ? "
And I could see that my boatmen felt it indiscreet to talk
of such matters at midnight, under the shadows.
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HAMLET
HE theatre is a palm-thatched barn;
the pit serried rows of forms, the
stalls a sanded space divided off by
bunting and furnished with bentwood
Austrian chairs ; the ladies' gallery a
scaffolded loft. On the left of the stalls is a refreshment bar
or trestle, whereon are displayed Burma cheroots, " Cycle "
cigarettes and drinks of terribly bright colour. The drop-
curtain displays the soul-satisfying spectacle of a street of
shops in impossible perspective, and the wings are adorned
with cold-clay winged figures petrified apparently against a
background of Reckitt's blue ; a scroll above the curtain bears
the legend " King Edward's heart-soothing play company."
It must be premised that all bangsawan pieces are operatic.
Ali Baba, Cinderella, the ghost of Hamlet's father must tiptoe
trip and stalk to the music of a couple of fiddles, a drum and
a small harmonium ; it may be, to a Malay air low and
languishing or to the livelier strains of a piece out of " The
Country Girl," or "The Geisha," or to the tune of "Daisy
Belle." All Malays have music at their finger-tips and the
orchestra plays by ear and plays tolerably well. Consequent
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on the operatic nature of the play comes a disregard for letter-
press. No attempt is made at exact translation of the pieces.
Scenes that strike the Malay imagination are picked out for
what we may call execution in detail, while minor scenes and
minor characters are omitted and the breaks slurred over by a
kind of chorus song before the curtain. Superfluous people
like Bernardo and Francesco, scenes that offend Malay taste
or superstition like the grave-digger scene, or the scene where
Hamlet upbraids his mother, all 'these are banished from the
boards of a bangsawan.
The curtain rises on a room in the palace, represented by
a canvas back-ground painted with yellow bricks, blue square-
paned windows and red hangings. A high dais serves for the
throne and Windsor chiirs are placed for Queen and Council-
lors. The King of Denmark, arrayed in a costume which but
for black spectacles, might be that of a circus performer, pulls
terrific moustaches, sings of his estate and degree and the
incident of his recent marriage; then sinks into prose and
addresses the Queen, a half-caste Dutch girl, and Polonius, a
bearded vizier in turban spangled velvet coat and carpet-
slippers. He expresses fears for Hamlet's sanity and
Polonius with an obsequious shuffle of carpet-slippers and due
pulling of beard hurries off to inquire into the business. The
curtain falls. A clown dressed as a pantaloon comes forward
and sings a nonsense song, just to introduce himself.
The next scene is a garden (darkened by withdrawal
of lamps up to the very roof) with a large coffin or box on
trestles in the centre. The clown enters and goes to sleep at
the foot of the trestles. The orchestra plays slow music.
The ghost of Hamlet's father, a fearful figure in white, with
ghastly chalked face, comes from behind the coffin and
executes a slow dance between a minuet and a cake-walk.
The clown wakes and rolls himself head over heels across the
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stage in terror. The ghost pays no heed. When the ghost's
slow cake-walk and the clown's paroxysms are beginning
to tire, suddenly the ghost vanishes behind the coffin, the
clown jumps up opens the side of the box and peeps. Ham-
let's father lies inside, a decorous corpse. The clown shuts the
box, opens it again. The corpse has gone. Exit clown in a
panic-stricken skelter. The curtain falls. The clown comes
before it and sings a song to the effect that this is no place for
him and that he will fetch Hamlet.
The curtain rises on the same scene, but now the stage is
crowded. There is Hamlet, a Malay girl in green plush
breeches pumps and a Cavalier hat; there are the clown,
Polonius, and presumably Horatio, a gentleman dressed in a
sergeant's khaki uniform and football boots and brandishing a
scimitar. The word "Company" is, of course, commonly used
by Malays to mean the Government ; Horatio turns to Hamlet
and with a flourish of scimitar and urban materialism
exclaims, " Sa-lama sahaya makan gaji Company, belum pepiah
sahaya lihat hantu" ("all the years I've been in the police
force, I've never seen a ghost "). But the ghost of Hamlet's
father is in no mood for braggadocio, minuets out from
behind the coffin and so terrifies Horatio that he drops his
scimitar and grovels. The clown suffers a return of his
previous paroxysms. Hamlet, with feminine curiosity and a
fine affectation of unconcern plucks at the ghost's sleeve and
makes him unfold his story, which he does in sepulchral tones.
The ghost vanishes. Hamlet sinks on her knees and sings a
song of lament with the Muhammadan refrain, la Illahi lah-i.
The curtain falls. Hamlet comes before it and sings how
a play shall be devised to prick the king's conscience.
Then we have the "dumb-show" of Shakespeare's play
and the poisoning of the sleeper in the ear. Hamlet roams
about and takes the audience into her confidence with lifted
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finger and eager smile, as who shall say " I am a very clever
girl," The clown watches the faces of King Claudius and
Queen Gertrude, and opens his mouth in idiotic glee as he
detects their exaggerated agitation. Exeunt omnes. The
clown sings a song.
Once more we are in the palace. The King Queen and
Polonius are in consultation. The King says Hamlet is
moody and must marry. Polonius fetches Ophelia, an extra-
ordinarily plain Ophelia. Hamlet strolls on to the stage and
hotly refuses to marry the lady, singing of his dislike and
finally spitting at and spurning her. This scene is very
spirited and effective, as the ladies playing the parts of Hamlet
and Ophelia are rival prima donnas and jealous. But now
poor Ophelia is debarred from retort other than a plaintive
lament ; leaves the stage and apparently lacks heart even to fall
into a pond; for no more is heard of her. Then the King
enters and explains how, when he prayed to a spirit of omnipo-
tence and righteousness — Dewa yang maha sakti dan maha
sttchi — he felt repentance :
" Try what repentance can : what can it not ?
Yet what can it, when one cannot repent."
He addresses a Dewa, one of the Hindu cosmogony,
because it would be profane to talk of stage prayer to Allah.
Hamlet, with an attitude and a tin scimitar, makes passes at
his back, and then, hand on heart, turns to the audience
and sings in a loud voice (inaudible to the King) the usual
tag of Malay opera,
Baik-lah kami per-rag-i (^pergi) ;
Apa-hah guna di-sini lagi ?
The remaining scenes are slurred and mostly omitted till
we come to a last scene of indiscriminate slaughter; for "that
fell sergeant, death, is strict in his arrest " on the Malay stage.
Hamlet and Laertes fence, whirling round weaponless face to
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face and back to back alternately, till Laertes falls by the
deadliness of Hamlet's magic. The Quj&en drinks poison.
The King is stabbed by Hamlet and dW! Hamlet comes to
the front of the stage, turns and looks at the strewn corpses
and then, with a seraphic feminine smile and great delicacy of
touch draws the scimitar across her throat and falls dead too.
Polonius, who has been spared his proper fate, stands pulling
and wagging a grey beard over the dead.
It is an odd performance, bizarre scenery, strangely
translated plot : but interesting, perhaps, as a perverted example
of Shakespeare's world-wide popularity. I have seen women
weep at the pity of the tragedy, though that, to be sure, was
not at the pathetic cadence of a line or any turn of the
plot, but when the ghost of Hamlet's father was stalking
across the boards, and again, when the "dumb-show" poison
was poured into the old King's ear !
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