Part 15

The city of Djokja, fifth in size of the cities of the island, and reputed as more Javanese than Solo, less influenced by Chinese and European example, is in the center of the residency, and but twelve miles from the shores of the Indian Ocean. It is approached by railway from either side over a plain planted chiefly with indigo and tapioca, whose low, uninteresting plants in myriad rows, and the frequent roofs and tall chimneys of fabriks, speak of abundant prosperity for all classes. The broad streets of the provincial capital are beautifully shaded, and the residency, a great, low, white building with a classical portico, is set in a luxuriant garden, where Madagascar palms and splendid trees make halos and shadow for the grim stone images, the pensive Buddhas and fine bas-reliefs, brought from neighboring ruins. The government offices adjoin, and on any court day one may see the crowds of litigants and witnesses sitting around on their heels beneath a shadowing waringen-tree that would be fit bench for Druids’ justice. The majority of the cases tried before the assistant resident, who there balances the scales, are of petty thieving; for notwithstanding the severity of the penalties for such offenses, the inherent bias of the Malay mind is toward acquiring something for nothing—transmuting _tuum_ into _meum_. The death sentence is pronounced upon the burglar caught with a weapon on his person, and twenty years in chains is prescribed for the unarmed burglar; for in this eternal summer, where people must live and sleep with open doors and windows, or at most with flimsy lattices, some protection must be assured to those who own portable properties and valuables. But with the great advances made in the security of property, the innate propensities of the race are not to be eradicated by even three centuries of stern Dutch justice; and there is the same mass-meeting of witnesses and lookers-on squatting under the big waringen-tree at Djokja, when the scales are to be balanced by the blind lady, as before every petty court-room on the island. An ingenious little firefly lamp, taken from a Djokja burglar, was given me as a souvenir of one such a court day. It was a veritable fairy’s dark lantern—a half of a nutshell, with a flat cover sliding on a pivot and concealing at will the light of two fireflies struggling in a dab of pitch. The burglar carried a reserve supply of fireflies in a bit of hollow bamboo stoppered at the ends, and added a fresh illuminator whenever the dark lantern’s living glow diminished.

The Djokja passer is a large and important daily gathering, but corrugated-iron and tiled sheds in formal rows have pretty nearly robbed it of all a passer’s picturesqueness. Model municipal government, Dutch system and order, are too pronounced to please one whose eye has seen what a few palm-thatched booths and umbrellas, and a few tons of scattered fruits and peppers, can produce in that picnic encampment by Boro Boedor’s groves or in the open common at Tissak Malaya.

We had been promised great finds in the way of old silver and krises in a street of Chinese pawnshops opening from one corner of the passer; but the promises were not realized. The betel-boxes, buckles, and clasps in charge of these wily “uncles” of Djokja were plain and commonplace, and not a jeweled nor a fancy kris of any kind was to be seen, after all the repute of Djokja’s riches in these lines of native metal-work. Hundreds of sarongs, each with a dangling ribbon of a ticket, were stowed away on the shelves of these pawnshops, proofs of the improvidence and small necessities of these easy-going, chance-inviting people; and while we were haggling over a veined kris-blade with the most obdurate Chinese that ever kept a pawn-shop, a timid little woman stole in and offered her sarong to the arrogant, blustering old rascal. He scowled and scolded and stormed at the frightened little creature, shook out and snapped the finely patterned battek as if it were a dust-cloth, and still muttering as if making threats of blood and vengeance, made out a ticket, and threw it at her with a few silver cents. We wanted nothing more from that shop, save the head of the “uncle” on a trencher or impaled on a kris’s point.

With a shameless eye to revenue only, the government has long continued to sell pawnbrokers’ licenses at auction to the highest bidder, after a brief relapse from the year 1869 to 1880, when the experiment was tried of selling licenses to any one at a moderate rate. The great income from such licenses fell away so amazingly that the auctions were resumed, and the improvident natives handed over again to the merciless Chinese pawnbrokers, who charge interest even up to ninety per cent., and usually retain everything that crosses their counters. M. Emile Metzger, in a communication to the “Scottish Geographic Magazine” (vol. iv., 1888), gives fifty thousand florins a year as the annual revenue during the eleven years when the other system prevailed, which soon increased to as much as one million, sixty-five thousand florins a year when licenses were again auctioned to the highest bidder.

The Sultan of Djokja has a kraton, or palace inclosure, a mile square in the very heart of the city, the great entrance-gates fronting on a vast _plein_ or _platz_, where waringen-trees have been clipped and trained to the shape of colossal state umbrellas, great green pajongs planted in permanence in the outer court or approach to the throne, as a badge of royalty. The huge Burmese elephants, that play an important part in state processions, trumpet in one corner; and strangely costumed retainers are coming and going, some of them as gaily uniformed as parrakeets, and others reminding one of the picadors and matadors in the chorus of “Carmen.” Surrounded by this indoor army of gorgeous musicians, singers, dancers, bearers of fan and pajong, pipe and betel-boxes, the sultan’s court is as splendidly staged as in the last century; and when this “regent of the world” and “vicegerent of the Almighty,” as his titles translate, goes abroad in state procession, the spectacle is worth going far to see, the Djokjans assure one. Twenty different kinds of pajongs belong to this court—those flat umbrellas that are the oldest insignia of royalty in all the East, and are sculptured on Boro Boedor’s walls through all the centuries pictured there. From the sultan’s own golden pajong with orange border, the gold-bordered pajong of the crown prince, the white pajongs of sultanas and their children and of concubines’ children, down to the green, red, pink, blue, and black pajongs of the lesser officials and nobles, all pajongs are exactly ordered by court heraldry—the pajong the definite symbol of rank, a visiting-card that announces its owner’s consequence from afar. Strange accompaniments these, however, for a sultan who plays billiards at the club and a sultana who takes a hand at whist.

The old Taman Sarie, or Water Kastel, in the suburbs, built by a Portuguese architect in the middle of the last century for the great sultan Manko Boeni, is an Oriental Trianon, a paradise garden of the tropics, where former greatness spent its hours of ease in cool, half-underground chambers and galleries such as Hindu princes have made for themselves in every part of India. The Taman Sarie is sadly deserted now. The most important buildings were shaken to formless mounds by earthquakes—the last great Djokja earthquake of 1867, when so many lives were lost, making the complete ruins that are covered with vines and weeds. The ornamental waters are choked with weeds and rubbish; the carved stonework is black with mold and lichens; the caves, grottoes, tunnels, staircases, and galleries around the wells are dripping and slippery with green mosses; and the rose-gardens and shrubberies are fast going to jungle. A few pavilions remain, whose roof gables are as deeply recurved as those of Burmese temples, but for the most part all the once splendid carved and gilded constructions are but wrecks and refuges for bats and lizards. The Water Kastel in its better days stood in the midst of a lake, reached only by boat or a secret tunnel; and here the old sultan Hamanku Bewono IV and his harem whiled away their leisure hours, even when an army thundered at the gates.

On one unfortunate day he kept Marshal Daendels waiting in the outer court for an hour beyond the time appointed for an interview, while the sultan and his women made merry, and the gamelan sounded gaily from the Water Kastel’s galleries. Daendels, growing weary, suddenly pushed through the retainers to the mouth of the tunnel, and appeared to the dallying sultan in the Water Kastel without announcement or further ceremony, and with still less ceremony seized the sultan by the arm and led him back to Dutch headquarters, where the interview took place. Another version of this Water Kastel tradition describes the mad marshal as making a dash down terraces and staircases to a water-pavilion sunk deep in foliage at the edge of a tank, where, in a shady cellar of a sleeping-room, shielded and cooled by a water curtain falling in front of it, he dragged the sultan from his bed, and carried him off to headquarters. The _opas_ and the chattering old guardian, who led us about the Kastel’s labyrinths, plunged into the green gloom of a long, mossy staircase that led to the platform on which the sultan’s sleeping-room opened, to show us the “unlucky bed” and prove by it their particular or favored version of the irruption of Marshal Daendels. The bedstead or couch is an elaborately carved affair, and must once have been the chief ornament of this cool cave-like retreat; but in the reek and gloom of the late afternoon this water boudoir seemed too suggestive of rheumatism, malaria, and snakes by wholesale to invite one to linger, or to suggest repose on the “unlucky bed,” which insures an early death to the one who touches it.

Another water-chamber was provided in the Sumoor Gamelan (“Musical Spring”), a deep circular well or tank near the ruined banquet-hall, with vaulted chambers opening around it—just such echoing places of green twilight, where it must be cool on the hottest noonday, as one may see in the old palaces at Lucknow, Futtehpore Sikri, and Ahmedabad, in the fatherland whence the ruling princes of Java came. There is, too, a great oval tank with beautiful walls, parapets, and pavilions, well worthy of a Hindu palace; and in this secluded place there lived for many decades a sacred white or dingy yellow turtle with red eyes, an albino to whom the people made offerings and paid homage. The Taman Sarie has great fascination for one, and at sunset something of romance seems to linger in the old gardens and grottoes, the picturesque courtyards and galleries; and one could imagine scores of legends and harem’s mysteries belonging there—that anything and everything had happened there by that lake that burns a rose-red when the palms are silhouetted against the high sunset sky. A group of children played hide-and-seek about the once august court, supple, nimble little bronze fauns, with the carefully folded kerchiefs on their heads their only garments—kerchiefs that they arrange with the greatest care and deliberation many times a day, holding the ends of the cloth with agile toes while they pat and crease and coax the fine folds into the prescribed order of good form. These children dashed through the shrubberies, leaped balusters and walls as lightly and easily as wild creatures, and ran up tall trees like squirrels, to gather tasseled orchids and some strange blue flowers that we pointed to with suggestive coppers, and they hailed us as old friends when we came again.

There were delightful drives to be taken in and around Djokja in the cool of the afternoon, the tamarind- and waringen-shaded streets leading to bowery suburbs, that gave wider views out over the fertile plain with the winding Oepak River, or toward the beautiful blue mountain cones that slumbered to northward. There were always the most decorative palm-trees in the right place to outline themselves against the rosy sunset sky, and the drives back to the hotel through the quick twilight and sudden darkness gave many views into lamp-lighted huts and houses—genre pictures of native life, Dutch-Indies interiors, where candle-light or firelight illuminated family groups and women at their homely occupations, that should inspire a new, a tropical school of Dutch painters. The graves of the old Hindu princes of Mataram crown a beautiful wooded hill south of the city near the sea-shore, and are still worshiped and garlanded by their people.

Through our now near friend, august patron, and protector, the kindly assistant resident, we received word at sunrise that the independent Prince Pakoe Alam V (“Axis of the Universe”) and his family would graciously receive us the next morning at nine o’clock; and that meanwhile our patronage was invited for a topeng, or lyric dance, to be given by Prince Pakoe Alam’s palace troupe on that evening for the benefit of the widows and orphans of the soldiers killed in the Lombok war. This Lombok war had been brought to a close that week by the capture of the treacherous Balinese sultan who had so tyrannized over the Sassaks, and was then on his way to be paraded with the victorious soldiers before the governor-general in a grand triumph or review at Batavia.

I had a long, quiet afternoon at the Hotel Toegoe to give again to the enormous folios of Wilsen’s drawings of Boro Boedor, while my companions napped, the palm-branches hung motionless in the garden, and only a few barefooted servants moved without sound—that deathly silence of tropic afternoon life that is sometimes a boon, and sometimes an exasperation and irritation to one accustomed to doing his sleeping by dark and not turning day into night. Finally the pale skeleton of an invalid, who was my next neighbor on the long porch, lifted his pitiful voice, and was helped out to his chair, and then our imperturbable Amat stirred from his leisured sleep on the flags beyond, meditated for a while, twisted his kerchief turban anew, disappeared, and returned with the tea-tray, silent, impassive, and automatic, as if under some spell. A graceful little woman peddler came to the porch’s edge—a pretty, gentle creature with dark, starry Hindu eyes, clear-cut features, even little white teeth, and crinkly hair. It was delight enough to watch this pretty creature’s flash of eyes and teeth, and her manners were most beguiling as she proffered her sarongs—intricately figured batteks from Cheribon and Solo, silk plaided ones from Singapore, and those of Borneo shot through with glittering threads. Nothing could have been more graceful and charming than the naïve appeals of the little peddler woman, and nothing could have presented more extreme and unfortunate contrast than to have the sockless and waistless young Dutch matron of the opposite portico step down and run to the garden gate at sound of a military band. Few women since Atalanta’s time have been able to run gracefully; and this thick-ankled young matron, with her flapping mule slippers, scant sarong, and shapeless jacket, outdid all descriptions and caricatures of “the woman who runs.” A friendly cavalier in gaudy battek pajamas, who had been talking to the lady, and blowing clouds of pipe-smoke into her face the while, gaily danced an elephantine fandango as the band went sounding down the street to give its sunset concert in the park.

When tea was taken to the lady’s porch after this divertisement, she took a banana to the edge, and called, “Peter! Peter!” There was a rustle and crash of boughs overhead, and a great ape, nearly the size of a man, swung from one tree-branch to another, snatched the banana, and bounded back into the tree, where it peered cunningly at us while he ate. After that every rustle in the shrubbery made us jump; we kept umbrellas at hand for defense, and made solemn compact that no one of us should be left asleep unguarded while doors and windows were open to this dreadful reminder of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”

XXI

PAKOE ALAM: THE “AXIS OF THE UNIVERSE”

As the lines of the topeng-players are always delivered in the ancient Kawi, or classic language of Java, one has need to brush up beforehand, and to wish for a libretto, a book of the opera, to keep in hand as the lyric drama progresses. Sir Stamford Raffles’s “History of Java” furnishes one a general glimpse of the ancient literature of the island, and by many translations acquaints one with the great epics. This old literature is Hindu in form and origin; and Kawi, the classic or literary language of the past, in which all the history, early records, epic and legendary poems, and the books of religion and the law are written, is closely related to Sanskrit and Pali. The famous myths and legends of India are included in this literature, and the Ramayan and Mahabharata appear, incomplete but unaltered, in the Javanese epics known as the Kandas and the Parvas. Besides these two great works, there is the “Arjuna Vivaya,” giving an account of the exploits of the Indian Arjuna, the real hero of the Mahabharata; and there is still another romantic legendary poem, the “Bharata Yuddha,” in which many of the incidents and the heroes of the Mahabharata are presented in Javanese settings with Javanese names. All these Kawi books are known to the people by translations in modern Javanese, and by their frequent presentation in the common dramatic entertainments, the wayang-wayang, or shadow-plays, of even the smallest villages.

Many “Books of Wisdom” and of exhortation to pious and righteous living survive in Kawi literature; but with all that Hindu civilization brought, it bequeathed nothing that could be called Buddhist literature, and the bulk of ancient Javanese literature is decidedly secular and profane—sentimental and romantic poems, love-tales in verse, that continue to extreme lengths. The Arab conquest has left almost no impress upon the language. Although schools were established, and a considerable body of Arabic literature came with the Mohammedan conquerors, but little save _bababs_, romantic chronicles of the loves of imaginary princes and heroes, have been added to Javanese literature in the four centuries since Islam’s conquest. The spoken language of the Javanese shows few traces of Arabic, and the written language is also unchanged—a neater, more beautiful and graceful system of ornamental characters than either Arabic or Persian.

The old Kawi epics are popularized by the theater, the topeng, and the common wayang-wayang, or shadow-dance of puppets, where a manager delivers the well-known lines. Of these three dramatic forms the topeng is the highest, the most classic and refined presentation, a lyric drama very like the No dance of Japan, and doubtless, like the No dance, had a religious origin. A topeng troupe has its _dalang_, or manager, who prompts, sometimes explains, and often delivers all the lines for the masked actors; and there is a gamelan, or orchestra, of four or more musicians, and a chorus which chants accompanying and explanatory verses as the action proceeds. Great princes maintain their own private topeng troupes, and in their palace presentations, and always in the presence of native royalties, the actors go without masks. The topeng’s gamelan consists of two sets of the circles of tiny gongs (_gong_ or _agong_, a pure Javanese word and instrument), that are struck with wooden sticks, and two wood and two metal gambang kayu (wood and metal bars of different length and thickness mounted on a boat-shaped frame), or native xylophones, to which single instrument the name “gamelan” is so often given in the West.

The common wayang-wayang of the people is a modification of the same masked or puppet drama that was in vogue long before the Mohammedan conquest. As the religion of Islam forbade the representation of the human figure, the susunhan ordered the puppets to be so distorted that the priests could not call them images of human beings, and that even then only their shadows, thrown on a curtain, should be seen. Hence the exaggerated heads, the beaks and noses, of the cardboard jumping-jacks which, pulled by unseen strings, serve to maintain an interest in the national history and legends, and by preludes and lines, chanted in classic Kawi, preserve acquaintance with the literary language among the common people. There is a form of wayang-wayang half-way between this puppet-show and the real drama, in which the actors themselves are visible, wearing distorted masks; but the plays are of modern times, in the common dialect, and the manager often improvises his lines and scenes as the play progresses. With these popular dramas there rank the performances of the graceful _bedaya_, or dancing-girl, whose tightly folded sarong, floating scarf-ends, measured steps, outward sweep of the hand, and charming play of arm and wrist recall the Japanese _maiko_. Although the winsome bedaya is sculptured on Boro Boedor’s recording walls, there is nothing there to indicate the puppet-play, nor anything from which it might have evolved, although from other records ethnologists claim that the Javanese possessed this dramatic art when the Hindus came. A love of the drama in the form of the topeng and the wayang-wayang was so ingrained in the tastes and fixed in the customs of the people that the Mohammedan conquerors could not suppress those popular amusements, and were finally content to modify them in trifling points. The Dutch were also wise enough never to interfere with these harmless pleasures of the people, the greatest distraction and delight of these sensitive, emotional, innately esthetic and refined Javanese, who will sit through shadow-plays for half the night, and are moved to frenzy and tears by the martial and romantic exploits of their national heroes.