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A Native of Java
AS manifold as the loveliness with which it caresses his senses and his soul, so manifold is the love with which the native of Java, the brown man of the earth, living poorly and humbly close to the glebe, loves his land, most lovely Java.
He loves the soil of Java, which is a fire in the east monsoon season, and a flood in the months of the rains; which, under the tread and turning wheels of the long files of bullock-carts, slowly creaking along the harvested sugar-cane fields, floats up in clouds of whitish dust, and lies dark and cool on the hands of the women at work in the rice-field, transplanting the month-old seedlings from the seed-plot to the sawah, as they carefully press the soaked earth around the limp, pale green stalk that the plant may strike firm root and thrive; the earth that softly yields to the potter's fashioning fingers as he shapes the lump on his revolving disk into capacious rice-bowl or slender cooling-jar; the earth that stands steadfast and strong in the dikes of the flooded terraced fields, bearing up against the hillside a flight of lakelets, crystalline pools, where the purple skies of sunrise and sunset and all the sailing clouds of azure noon float reflected amidst the green of the sprouting rice.
He loves the scents of Java, the thousand scents that float on the passing breeze; the smell of wet earth and boulders in the shallow river, of young leafage springing from shoots all swollen and gleaming with sap, of the pasture where the naked herdsman lies piping in the shade as his broad buffaloes plunge into the pool, snorting; the bitter smell of the tall alang-alang grass afire on the hillside, where some reckless nomad sits waiting to sow his rice in the ashes, that he may gather a harvest from soil unbroken and untilled; the exquisite fragrance of the penang palm in bloom, breathing from the wall of trees that hides from view a hamlet; the pungent smell of the market-place and the crowded highway, and the home where children are always being fed; the odour of the incense that hallows the eve before the Day of Prayer; the scent of the white jessamine wreaths that crown the bride and the bridegroom sitting in state at the wedding feast.
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He loves the sounds of Java, the innumerable sounds, to which his heart makes gladsome answer; the delectable sound of the rain on the living leaves of the wood and the withered leaves of woven roofs, on the boulders in the ravine, where the silent brooklet begins to purl and cluck, and suddenly lifts up clear voices calling aloud; the wind-stirred rustle and murmur of the bamboo grove that surrounds the village, a swaying cloud-like wall of foliage, where at sunset swarms of rice-birds twitter unseen; the busy sound of rice-pounding, a dancing rhythmical beat from the hollowed-out tree-trunk lying between the starrily flowering citron bushes of the fruit garden, the scented space of shade and freshness for the labouring housewife, over whose shoulders the babe, cradled in the deftly slung slendang cloth, laughs at the dance of the golden rice grains bouncing away from the pestle; the festive sound of the gamelan orchestra played by an able musician whose touch on the bronze sends the deep tones and the shrill soaring through the silences of the night, and they hover for a while firefly-like, gladdening hearts far away.
He loves the colours of Java, the clear and effulgent ones, the darkly glowing ones saturated with mellow sunshine, the delicate ones, tender and cool as moonlight upon dew; the tints of diaphanous hilltops in the distance and of the mist-flushed plain; the sparkling green of the sawah; the purple in the heavily hanging blossom cone of the banana-tree at the back of his house; the thousand-tinted sparkle with which the long files of gaily attired women strew tamarind-shaded roads that lead to the market; the scarlet and blue and green and black and gold of the garb in which gods, nymphs, and heroes are represented in the solemn wayang drama.
And he loves the daily labour of Java, the labour he does not do for wages in the service of the alien, but for his own ends, at his own will, in his own way, the ancient way of his people, as his father taught it to him.
To go to the sawah at daybreak - the field that out of the broad expanse of common land the headman and elders of his village have allotted him as his own for a year's space - to go, his feet in the dew-frosted grass where scents still are asleep, his face lifted to the colourless sheen that precedes dawn, to move lightly through air fresh and abundant as welling water, feeling on his shoulder the light burden of the wooden
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plough, and looking at the yoke of broad-backed buffaloes that slowly tread the wonted way - the ploughman's good friends they, who lend their strength to his knowledge; to drive the long furrow through soil growing warmer as morning glows into noon, the rich soil where the rice grains of the recently gathered harvest already are sprouting under the ashes of the stubble fires (the ploughman thinks of the frolicking boys of the village, how they leapt among the leaping flames, and remembers himself leaping and frolicking thus not so many harvests ago); to return in the heat of noon to find the coolness of the house, and the meal of rice and dried fish neatly served on a strip of freshly gathered banana leaf; to see, in the slowly cooling hours of the afternoon, the lengthening shadows gliding along a narrowing strip of unbroken ground, slender man's shadow side by side with broad shadows of plough beasts; and to draw the plough out of the last furrow as he sees the buffaloes and his own arms and knees reddened by the glow of sunset. Thus to live through the working day is sweet to him.
And sweet is the restful evening afterward, when, perchance, he does not go home after bathing under the small gurgling and frothing cascade of the hillside, where the women of the village fill their pitchers, but he squats down in the group of young men, who sit smoking their cheroots and quizzing the girls in impromptu rhymes, laughing when some quick-witted maiden returns an apt answer. Arms under head he lies at length and feels the evening breeze lifting up the wet hair at his temples, and gazes at the Ploughman whom Westerners call Orion, as he rises in the darkening heavens and drives his starry plough along the arching furrow that stretches from eastern horizon to western. The crickets in the leaves, the tiny ones that shrilly trill, and the large ones that buzz and thrum, hum him asleep. When the sky begins to gleam around the fading morning star, the sheen that lights up to purple the darkness of his eyelids wakes him. Benumbed with sleep, he half rises, keeping his sarong drawn over his head, and sits still, arms around knees, head drooping, like some bush bending under its burden of dew. Even as the bush opens its blossoms, so he slowly opens out toward the rising sun.
He loves the feasts of Java, at which gods and genii are his unseen guests. For many weeks beforehand he rejoices in the coming harvest feast. A merry sight it is to him when the housewife prepares and dyes
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with yellow boreh powder the sacrificial rice and chooses the finest fruit of the garden for an offering to Dewi Sri, the Rice-Goddess. When the angkloong players begin the feast, shaking their sets of graduated bamboo tubes from which the liquid notes pour forth clucking, he binds a handful of rice-ears into his kerchief, and another handful into the kerchief his friend holds out toward him, and, with the gaudy bundles dangling from either end of his bamboo yoke, he performs the graceful dance that follows the rise and fall of that undulating music.
He loves the graves of Java, the miracle-working tombs of the saints of Islam and of mighty sultans, whither he goes to pray for a blessing on his undertakings; the graves of his father and mother, whither on set days the household brings flowers and food, that the souls of the dead may feed, and rejoice, beholding their children's love still faithful to them and mindful of their needs in the cold Land of Shadows.
All things of Java he loves; all of his lovely country is sweet to his senses and sweet to his soul - so abundant in sweetness that even the utterly poor may often have his fill of happiness there. He loves with the love that cleaves to the last thing left, the dearest, the heart's innermost treasure, with the timorous needy love of the immemorially subservient, the conquered of many conquerors, for the one thing indefeasibly his own which his proud masters have left him.
This is why the eyes are so full of fear and anger that gaze through iron bars at the tall ships in the roadstead - the ships of the masters, their formidable beasts of burden with iron heart and fiery breath, the strong swift swimmers, that carry to Java from far lands, that carry away from Java to far lands, what the masters ordain; that carry precious goods and carry men dispossessed of all goods. Men of Java who have done the thing forbidden by the law of the masters they carry away from Java to alien and distant lands. Dark faces turn grey when the ship in the roadstead lifts her piercing voice as the signal for departure.
The jailer enters. He puts an iron collar on the necks of the prisoners condemned to deportation, iron manacles on their wrists. He drives the gang of chained convicts in their mud-brown garb forward on the road to the shore.
The men walk slowly. They east about dull furtive looks, they lay
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hold with their eyes on the humble houses in the native quarter, on the men and women in the road, on the naked children loitering about the stalls of the sellers of sweetmeats. They set their feet on the earth heavily, as if they would strike root there and grow fixed for ever, like trees. And in that last instant when the indifferent policeman pushes them into the prao, some one of the exiles will perhaps suddenly stoop and take up from the shore and hide against his heart a handful of earth - a handful of Java.
Why, indeed, should this not have happened more than once before or after that time when Westerners saw it? - passengers of a steamer bound for the Moluccas who, idly leaning over the railing, watched a man in a gang of convicts thus stoop; thus with his fettered hands, which moved but awkwardly, take up from the wave-washed shore and thus hide against his naked breast a handful of sand. Wondering they gazed at the brown man and his passion.
He was a young man - boy rather than man - lightly treading as a deer, with wild, frightened eyes. He carried himself as hill folk do, who in attitude and motion show their fellowship with the wind, the rapid runner on the hillside. When the policeman roughly pushed him into the prao, with his whole body he gave a sharp sideward jerk, like a captured animal bounding to escape.
The policeman drove the mud-brown troop through the jostling crowd on deck to the hatches, shut down upon the precious freight in the hold; they lay there like a heap of sorry stuff, not worth the stowing, left where the weary bearers had flung it down.
The policeman took off their fetters - of what use fetters in that one prison from which there is no escape, the ship on the high seas? But they sat as if still suffering that iron constraint on neck and arms - inert, stolid. He of the flashing eyes was among them as among dull ashes a live spark. He held his face immovably turned toward the sinking coast of Java; those flashing eyes burned into it. More than one of the passengers seated in the pleasant shade of the awning averted his gaze from the sight.
They were Hollanders, he was a Javanese. The fairness of their faces and hands, white, the proud hue of the conquering race in this land of the brown conquered, made brotherhood amongst themselves, made separation between them and those men who had a brown skin,
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the indelible mark of defeat and servitude. Though they had not known about one another the day before, and would have forgotten one another the day after, yet they were comrades to-day, aboard this ship - this strong and wonderful thing wrought by brains and hands of their own race, which carried their common lot in soaring security between wave and wind. And they spoke and thought of the things which were their own, of overlordship and riches. Yet more than one of them felt and, feeling, was fain to avoid, that burning gaze at the coast of Java, at the fatherland sinking away in the sea.
A young, straight, fiery-eyed creature, such as that Javanese was, a creature like a flame - in many ways surely such a one might have erred against the law of the masters, the law that is of the intellect, that knows naught of sorrow or joy, but makes for power only, for the might of the mightiest and for whatever serves that might.
He surely would have danced gracefully, a reveller at the golden harvest feast of the rice, shone upon by the light from smiling maidens' eyes. Had he found a rival hidden in the garden of the fairest at nightfall?
At cock-fights when the bird, strong and eager for the fray after many months' training, flies at his enemy, neck feathers ruffled, when hacking bills and the shrewd stroke of claws armed with trenchant steel spurs make the blood spout from head and breast - he surely would have been a mad gambler. Had the winner laughed all too insolently as he carried away his dead cock?
Those eyes of his - like black flames they were - he had surely not cast them down humbly under a blow from a white hand. Had he wreaked his fury running amuck, blind with blood, killing he knew not whom?
Labour in exile is the punishment which the law of the Western masters metes out for gravest offenses. The masters of yore, the sultans who were adored and feared, as they had been gods, punished not according to law but as whim moved them - incalculable, incomprehensible whim - with punishments that were acts of vengeance, tortures, mutilations, rendings asunder of bone and sinew. Of this, too, they thought, who nevertheless were constrained to avert their gaze from those burning eyes. Among the other convicts, the native of Java sat solitary, shut up within his sorrow as within a windowless prison.
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Around him there was a cautious muttering, behind the back of the sleepy policeman, about things of which the happy know not - rash deed, and flight, and capture, all in vain - of aching days of labour and nights afire with thoughts of revenge; about escape from exile. There were many voices that questioned and one voice that answered, a voice that derided the masters, the ignorant mighty, and extolled the cunning of the conquered, the innumerable tricks which the condemned of the masters' law teach one another, so that the simple man, whom his hot blood and the law of the alien drove, all blindly, into the secret brotherhood of the convicts, will grow subtle as the wily one of the woods, the dwarf deer, and dangerous as the deadly snake. Henceforth no wronged one will accuse him any more, no thief-taker will catch him, no judge will find a way to condemn him! The poisonous whispering found its way into the solitude of the native of Java as the intoxicating datura seed, which the burglar blows through a crevice, penetrates into the house where a man lies alone; as the eyes of the defenceless victim, so his eyes grew dim and dull.
And the ship hastened on, hastened through the long morning, the afternoon, the short red evening, the night; through the black night, moonless and starless, she found her way. She never swerved to left or right, she never hesitated, she never lagged; her screw spurned the Java Sea, her bow swallowed the distances ahead of her, she drew toward her the alien, the terrible land. At sunrise she would have reached the roadstead.
It was dark on the deck, still within the ship. Deep down in the stoke-hole the scorched stokers were at their work, blinking their red, lashless eyes at the blaze they incessantly fed with ancient heat, turned into black stone; in the stifling engine-room the engineer, breathing heavily, moved forward and backward amidst gliding, shoving, leaping steel; on the bridge the watch was on the lookout, the ship's sleepless eye, peering out into the night for any danger that might threaten her course. But all else slept. Within their fan-cooled cabins, into which ventilators drew the freshness of the spaces of sea and night without, the masters of the ship slept; scattered on the floor of the saloon, half in and half out of the white and red clothes which with the colours of the ship's flag marked them as the ship's property, the servants slept; in the second class, their heads pillowed on their ledgers with the packs
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of cards and the bundles of banknotes they had been gambling with all day long, the Chinese slept; on deck, sarong drawn over head or arms folded over face to ward off the glare of the electric light, huddled family groups of natives slept. Even the convicts slept, side by side with the sleeping guard.
But suddenly sleepers everywhere awoke, a shriek ringing in their ears which made the heart stand still. And again, and yet once again it rang out, fainter and more piteous each time, farther off in the surging darkness of the sea. As if that wretched cry of a creature in agony had clutched at her in her headlong course, the ship slowed down and lay still. And passengers hurrying on deck saw the lifeboat making toward a blue flame on the water, far away in the ship's wake. The natives around the hatches whispered, eyeing askance the empty place among the convicts where had lain the man who had taken a handful of earth from the shore.
As the rescuers led him staggering up the gangway the policeman pounced upon him; he held the convict clutched with both fists as he brought him before the captain. Trembling with abject fear, livid, the native of Java stood in the intolerable light. The sea-water dripped from his torn convict's garb, darkening the deck around his feet. Like a damp, agony reeked from him. The captain questioned him. It was long before the all but inaudible answer came:
‘I do not know. I was asleep. I awoke in the sea. Then I screamed for help.’
In vain the captain pointed out how useless the awkward lie was, since evidently in quiet weather, and from the place where the convicts lay amidships, it was not possible for a man to fall overboard sleeping. The convict muttered again:
‘I do not know. I was asleep. I awoke in the sea. Then I screamed for help.’
Speaking more severely, the captain then said that the truth was manifest, and the convict had better confess so as not to aggravate his offense and of necessity his punishment; he had attempted to escape, and had leapt into the sea, hoping to swim to some islet where a roving opium-smuggler or fisherman would have picked him up and shipped him back to Java. But if, as his heart forsook him and he screamed out in the sea, the officer on watch had not heard and flung him the lifebuoy,
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causing the ship to stop, and if the men of the lifeboat had not rowed out to him and seized him as he was sinking, he must have drowned, and even now the sharks would be tearing up his body. For no swimmer, not the boldest and strongest, could have reached any shore from the spot where he was sinking. Leagues and leagues around, there was nothing but open sea.
With a slow sweep of his white-sleeved arm the captain pointed over distances beyond distances of darkness toward the circling horizon invisible in the night. The onrush and the gurgling fall of the waves against the ship's sides broke through the unwonted stillness with a threatening sound. Overawing, the thought loomed up of the infinite loneliness of the seas.
The policeman pushed the rescued man back to his place among the other convicts. He passively suffered himself to be flung down upon the heap.
The slow night wore away. As he walked up and down the bridge, the officer on watch found his glance returning again and again to the mud-brown heap of convicts in the fierce glare of the electric light, to the one figure sitting erect amongst the prostrate sleepers. He had drawn over his head the sarong given him instead of his drenched convict's garb. His hands folded around his knees, he sat motionless. Once, at a chance glimpse, the officer thought he saw a small huddled-up shape glide away from him. But then again he thought it must have been the shadow of the sail that had slightly stirred in the breeze.
The dark watcher sat still as a stone: as one waiting. In the dew-cold hour before dawn, harvesters guarding the gathered sheaves sit thus in the village rice-fields of Java. They are waiting for the sun, for the recommencement of life. What was he waiting for?
Night was almost over. Around the faded morning star the sky was growing transparently white. The Javanese raised his face toward the coming dawn; then for a long while he gazed toward the west; the sky was dark as yet, over there. At last, very gently, with a movement of child-like compliance, he lay down. He drew the border of his sarong over his eyes as if to sleep deeply in darkness, and lay still, utterly at rest.
As one who at the end of a vigil beholds afar his heart's desire appearing - now he may well close his eyelids over the blessed sight, he
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may well stretch his weary limbs along the path of that assured approach - even so he lay.
Day broke.
There where the red light shone, land hove in sight. It stood, a dull, faint-coloured wedge in the core of the purple blaze that was setting sea and sky immensely aflame. The ship made straight for it. Faces irradiated by the dawn were turned toward the Moluccan island as it rose on the view, lifting scintillating hilltops in a still deepening splendour of diaphanous blue.
In the transfiguring glory of the dawn, with the sheen all around of gladdened faces and eyes alight with a new beginning, a new hope, that heap of castaway humanity, the mud-brown gang of convicts, showed all the sorrier. In dull apathy the exiles gazed at the thing feared with the fear of death: the alien land.
The yawning policeman reached out for the manacles. The hands that had done against the law of the masters were to be barred from all self-willed doing, henceforth. When, after others had passively surrendered neck and wrists to the clasp of the iron, that one man never moved nor heeded his call, the policeman sullenly seized the arm lying limp and long beside the body. But he hastily withdrew his hand, startled.
Two of the convicts, who had squatted down at head and foot of that still shape, their manacled hands hanging between their knees, looked from him to the man who held the fetters. And the one of them uttered a word, a short word of deep and terrible sound. He had not said it aloud. And yet, all heard.
The word passed over the ship, over the motley crowd of natives on the fore-deck, over the groups of Chinese at the entrance of the second-class cabin, over the company of Hollanders shining in their white clothes under the awning. As if out of a sunlit lake a dark monster had suddenly lifted its head, and now gloom spread in widening ripples until all the glory had gone down before it, so at that one word an awed gravity overcast faces in an ever spreading circle, until there was not one but wore a still look.
Some one came and bent over the dead man, lifting the sarong from his face. It lay revealed, very young, almost smilingly gentle. It shone with a radiancy purer than the pure sunshine that lit up the brow and
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[pagina t.o. 38]
[p. t.o. 38] | |
The Sea
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the pale mouth. There was a space around it wider than all the spaces of the infinite sea. So perfect was that serene quietude, no man still groping through the clamorous darknesses of life would have dared disturb it with a shadow of those darknesses, would have dared utter the word of suffering and despair which was the name of that streak of whitish powder still clinging to the half-open lips.
A wizened little old woman, who furtively hid something still deeper down under jealously guarded market-ware, stooped and hid behind those next to her, as the medical officer, raising his head, looked about him.
He questioned the dead man's two friends:
‘Why did he do this thing, he who called for help against death?’
The one of the two spoke slowly:
‘When he would have drowned himself in the sea, his body feared, so that he needs must call for help. But his soul desired death and remained constant. For bitterer than death it was to him to live far from Java.’
They left him the sarong of the Javanese peasant when they buried him on the alien shore.
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