Part 10

From Batavia, the way thither leads through some of the loveliest scenery in Java--past Buitenzorg and Bandong, straight across the Preanger. Rantja-ekkek, a village in the vast plain which begins an hour or so east of Bandong, is the last railroad station on the route. There, the noise, the hurry, and the bustle of western civilization cease, as if arrested by some invisible barrier; and the traveller enters the real Java, the Java of the Javanese, the tranquil land of plenty, the inhabitants of which lead their leisurely lives without much more thought of the morrow than the tall gandasoli lilies of their fields. When we two--the friend whom I accompanied to her home among the hills, and myself--reached this stage of our journey, the day was still young. The summits of the hills, which bound the plain on the west, had already assumed their sober day colours--greyish brown and dark green. But the distant eastern range stood out in violet gleams against a sky of crimson and orange; and the intervening plain was a lake of whitish, waving mist. The air had a peculiar, sweetish taste--like an insipid fruit--which reminded me of early autumn mornings at home. It was cold, too. Our native servants went with head and shoulders wrapped up: and the breath of the ponies waiting for us at the station made little clouds about their heads. We were grateful for the plaids which we found in the carriage.

The road lay straight before us--a long white streak through the soft misty green of the plain. As we drove along, the pink sheen, which rested on the hazy hillside to our left, like a handful of scattered roses, began to spread and glide down into the valley, kindling as it flowed, until the whole vast vapoury plain was suffused with purple. The mist began to dissolve, and float upwards in little crimson drifts. Suddenly, the great golden sun leaped up from behind the eastern summits, and day streamed in upon us. The country-folk had already begun the labours of the day. Children met us on the road, driving powerful grey buffaloes before them; in a hamlet which we passed, the women were pounding rice, breaking the silence of the morning with the rhythmic click-clack of the wooden pestles. And, here and there, groups of labourers moved through the rice fields, weeding. Overhead, larks were soaring and singing; it was the first time I had heard their sweet shrill note in Java. After a while, a partridge flew up with a whirr of hurrying wings, almost from between the hoofs of the horses. They are plentiful in this neighbourhood. At certain seasons of the year, large parties of sportsmen assemble here to shoot them.

On starting from the railway station, I had thought that, in half an hour or so, we should have reached the hill-range, which bounded the plain in the north. But the clear atmosphere has a perspective of its own, confusing to eyes unaccustomed to it. After about two hours of rapid driving we were still in the valley--on either side of us, immense tracts of soft bluish green, full of the thousand lights and shades that form the peculiar beauty of these terraced rice-fields; and, all around, the circling summits which seemed no sensibly nearer than at first.

At every turn of the road, I expected to reach the base of the hills. And again and again, they appeared to recede as we advanced, until the fancy was stirred to the idea of some magic wall environing the captive, withersoever he might turn; and the wish to find an exit out of this hill-bounded plain grew almost to a fever. At length, we reached it--a narrow defile between two steep green heights; and the road began to climb. Here, in the deep glens and valleys, the air was notably cooler than on the sunlit plain. Where the road broadened, it was shaded by tall njamploeng trees, which strewed the ground with their white transparent blossoms; and their faint fresh odour, which reminded one of the scent of March violets, perfumed the breeze.

Meanwhile, we had changed horses at a "gladak"--a nondescript wooden shed--stable, barn, and hostelry for native wayfarers in one--with a spacious thoroughfare leading right through it. And our shaggy ponies trotted along with a right good will, until they came to a sudden stand at the bottom of a hill. "Gladakkers," as these ugly little animals are called, are notorious for freakishness and perversity, and often, without any apparent reason, will stand stockstill in the middle of the road, and refuse to move another step. But this time, as I soon found, they were moved by no such perverse whim; they knew their duty, and that the dragging of carriages up this particular hill was in no way a part of it. When the syce had unharnessed them, they turned aside, and began to crop the dewy grass by the way-side, as if work were over for that day. And, presently, their substitutes, a pair of powerful grey buffaloes, appeared goaded on by their owner. Slowly, the majestic brutes descended the hill, bending a broad splendidly-horned head and an enormous neck under a triangular bamboo yoke, and sending forth the breath in clouds from their large nostrils. They drew the carriage up hill without any apparent effort, still moving onward with that same slow, strong, steady gait, which neither the impatient shouts of our syce, nor the goad which their owner plied, could make them accelerate one whit. At the summit they halted of their own accord; and, as soon as they felt their necks free of the harness, turned and departed. As they passed me, the curved horn of the one just grazing my shoulder, they seemed to me the personification of resistless strength, unconscious of its own power, and patiently subservient. Their large beautiful eyes had a look of meekness most pathetic in so tremendous a creature.

After this steep hill, the ascent became easy and gradual, and the ponies trotted on at a good round pace. The road still kept zig-zagging between steep hill-sides, densely overgrown with nipah-palm, banana, and dark-leaved brushwood, which shut out the view of the landscape. And I remember no noteworthy incident, except the passing of a native market, a "passar," in a spot where the road broadened a little, and where an impetuous brook, that came bounding down the hillside, spouted from a sort of primitive aqueduct made of bamboo. Half a score of naked children were bathing themselves under the icy "douche," whilst their parents stood bargaining and chaffering at the narrow booths that adhered to the steep hillside like swallows' nests to a house-wall. As we approached, the whole company, men, women, and children, squatted down with one accord, as if they had been so many puppets pulled by a string. One very fat baby, his fists and his mouth full of sweetmeats, stood staring at us in round-eyed surprise; but his mother managed to catch him and draw him to his little haunches, just in the nick of time; and the whole company remained in this crouching posture until our carriage rounded the bend of the road.

At Batavia, where the manners of the natives have suffered a change--a change for the worse, as some maintain--by contact with Europeans, I had never witnessed this peculiar mode of salutation. And I confess I was painfully impressed by it, the more so as my friend warned me that native etiquette forbade my acknowledging the humble greeting by so much as a nod. I do not know whether it was the abjectness of their semi-prostration, or the seemingly gratuitous insolence of our thus ignoring it, that I felt as the more acute humiliation to human dignity. But, after all, the only way to rightly judge the manners and customs of a country is to look at them from the point of view of the natives; and, to a Javanese, there is nothing undignified in a salutation which impresses us as slavish. He squats down, just as a European rises, in the presence of a superior. It is a token of respect; nothing more. And the superior's apparent unconsciousness of this greeting no more implies rudeness on his part than the familiar nod with which in Europe a gentleman might answer a labourer's or artisan's raising of his cap. "The way of the land, the honour of the land," as the Dutch proverb puts it.

On the point of etiquette, the Javanese, moreover, are infinitely more punctilious than any western people of our period. I believe they might even be said to surpass the Spaniards of the time of Philip II, in the elaborateness of their code of manners and in their strict adherence to its requirements. Every possible circumstance and occurrence in life have been foreseen, and the appropriate conduct noted down in the unwritten law of the "adat"; the attitude, the gesture, and the set phrase, are all prescribed, down to the smallest detail. Nor is it a question of phraseology only; the very language is subject to the regulations of the adat, which distinguishes three separate and altogether different kinds of Javanese, according as a man speaks to his superior, his equal, or his inferior. For speech to one higher in rank, there is the "Kromo"; commands to a subordinate are given in "Ngoko"; friends familiarly converse in a third idiom into which elements of the other two enter. The theory of these three kinds of Javanese is a science by itself, and one not easily acquired by a westerner. At the same time, it is imperatively necessary to him, if he would gain the esteem of the natives; for the use of a Ngoko word when a Kromo term should have been employed, would mark the offender with an indelible brand of vulgarity and ill-breeding. When the Bible was being translated into Javanese, this peculiarity of etiquette proved a considerable difficulty; and the missionaries had to consult countless authorities and compare a thousand precedents, before they could settle the question whether Christ should address Pilate in Kromo or in Ngoko, or in the third idiom. A solecism would have fatally injured the "prestige" of the new religion: and its ministers could not have escaped the accusation of being "koerang atjar" which being translated into English means "ill-bred." It was in order to avoid this qualification, that my friend and I seeing the country folk at the "passar" squat down in the dusty road, passed on, without so much as looking at them.

Towards eleven o'clock, we reached the highest point of our journey--a ledge upon the mountain-side called Njadas Pangeran. Here, the hills on our right suddenly fell away, and the broad green plains of Cheribon lay disclosed, dazzling with sunlight and living water. At our feet, away far below, lay a brown hamlet in the midst of sawahs, like a lark's nest in a field of clover; and the hills through which we had threaded our way, since dawn, hung in the western distance like massy clouds, tinted with brown and violet, and an exquisite pale, half-transparent blue. We paused here for some minutes, to rest the horses, whilst we gathered armsful of a splendid orchid which grew in profusion on the hillside--great shiny snow-flakes of blossoms, with a touch of carmine on the curling petals; and then resumed the journey along a road which steadily sloped to the bottom of the valley. A muddy river runs through it, which we crossed on a primitive kind of ferry--the carriage, horses, and all standing on a raft, which a score of natives dragged and pushed across the shallow water. On the other bank, the road began to ascend again; we had reached the base of Tjerimai, and a drive of some two or three hours more, along a smooth road that passed by prosperous sugarcane plantations waving in the breeze with thousands of glossy green streamers, brought us at length to our destination--the little bamboo cottage upon the hillside, whither my friends repaired for a spell of coolness and a breath of mountain air, when the heat rendered the sojourn on their estate in the plains unendurable. It was about four in the afternoon when we entered the garden gates, and the air was as fresh as in the early morning. The breeze rustled through the tall flower-laden njamploeng-trees on the roadside; there was a smell of water and moist stones in the air; I heard the murmur of a brook over its rocky bed. This was the country of which hot, dust-stifled Batavia was the capital. The thing seemed scarcely credible.

IN THE DESSA

Our bungalow on the Tjerimai hillside was situated in the near neighbourhood of a native dessa. But we had been there for some time, before I became aware of the fact. And my first glimpse of the village was a surprise as fascinating as it was sudden.

It chanced in the course of a cool clear morning, as we rode along on our way to the sacred grove of Sangean and the legend-haunted lake in its shadow.

We had been skirting for some time what seemed to be an unusually dense bamboo-wood, when suddenly, in the wall of crowded stems, there appeared a breach and framed in it, lo! a prospect of brown huts, with flowering fruit-trees set between, and a well-kept road in the middle, on which a score of children were playing about. A plough-man came along, driving a pair of grey buffaloes before him, women were coming and going, carrying waterpitchers and piled up baskets of fruit on their erect heads; it was a busy hamlet in the heart of the wood.

We entered, passing from the sunny hillside into the green twilight among the trees, and out again upon the village road, flecked with changeful lights and shadows. It was trim and clean as a gardenpath. The huts on either side of it had a prosperous look, each standing in its own patch of ground, surrounded by fruit-trees--mangoes, bananas and djamboos that turned the soil purple with their fallen blossoms. The rice-barns shaped like a child's cradle, narrow at the base, and broadening out towards the top, were full of sweet new rice and in the sheds sleek dun-coloured cattle stood patiently chewing the cud.

I saw no men about, they were probably at work on the outlying ricefields. But here and there, under the pent-roofs of the houses, women sat at their looms busily weaving sarong-cloth. And on the doorsteps plump brown babies were rolling about.

One hut we passed, where a very old man sat playing with a tiny baby, so exceedingly pretty, that we could not help stopping to admire it. With a proud smile he told us it was his great-grand-child. Its father and mother were living with him, and so indeed were all the other members of his numerous family, sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters who, each in turn, had wedded and brought a wife or a husband to the parental home.

"There are over a score of them" said the patriarch proudly. To him had, in truth, been granted the prayer, which, on their wedding-day Javanese couples put up to the gods "Give us a progeny like to the spreading crown of the waringin tree." And the venerable sire, trusting in his helpless old age to the love and piety of his children, reminded one of the parent trunk, which, when decaying, is upheld by the stalwart young trees that have sprung up around it.

We asked after his family. The children, the old man answered, were all out in the fields; no hands could be spared from the work just now. Only his youngest grand-daughter, the baby's mother, had stayed in the house, to look after the little one, and cook the familydinner. Yonder she was, at her bâtik-frame, painting the sarong-cloth with flowers and butterflies. The girl looked up as he spoke, turning a pretty face on us; and smiled.

"Ah! happy those that live among the woods and fields, if they but knew their happiness...." It seemed to me that these dessa-folk knew theirs.

And I filled my eyes and my heart with the scene before me--the low, brown roofs amidst the fruittrees, the merry-eyed children at play, the leisurely comings and goings of the women upon their daily occupation, with the rustling coolness and the soft green light of the bamboo leafage over it all; gathering all the gladsome beauty of it, that it might keep fresh and fragrant my thoughts, when I should have returned to the world outside, to the weariness, the fever and the fret to which we of the conquering race have condemned ourselves.

As we rode on, and the wood-enshrined hamlet disappeared among the folds of the hillrange, like the beautiful day-dream it all but seemed to me, I learnt that it was but a fair type of the prosperous dessa, such as it is found throughout the length and breadth of Java.

The plan and general appearance of these native villages are always the same--a cluster of huts, each standing in its own patch of ground, surrounded by a quick-set hedge; a main road from which numerous bye-paths diverge, leading through; in the centre an open square, shaded by waringin trees, fronting the mosque; then, surrounding the whole, a dense plantation of bamboo trees, which completely hides the village from sight. Around stretch meadows, ricefields, and plantations of nipahpalm, which, in many cases, are the property of the community.

Where this particular form of proprietorship obtains, the village authorities assign portions of the communal fields in usufruct to such inhabitants of the dessa as will pledge themselves in return to pay certain taxes, and to perform certain duties entailed by the possession of landed property; the principal of which are, keeping the roads and irrigation works in repair, and guarding the gates or patrolling the streets at night. Moreover in all matters touching the cultivation of these fields, they are obliged to observe the prescriptions of the "adat," and such regulations as the village authorities may deem proper to make.

Very strict supervision is excercised in this matter, so as to prevent the occupant from exhausting, either through ignorance or neglect, the field, which, at the expiration of his lease, will be allotted to another member of the community. Disobedience to the commands of the village authorities is punishable by forfeiture of the right of occupation.

In most districts, this communal right alternates with private proprietorship.

According to the ancient custom, which has been ratified by the Colonial Regulations, whosoever, of his own free will, reclaims a piece of waste ground, by that act acquires the possession of the same, and the right to transmit it to his heirs, the "hereditary individual right," as the legal term is. Any native, desirous to obtain land on these terms, can apply for permission to the Government, which, having taken the place of the ancient Sultans is considered as the "Sovereign of the Soil." This permission is never refused. So that, under the communal regime as under the system of hereditary individual ownership, anyone who has the will to work is sure of being able to earn a sufficiency for himself and his family. There need be no unemployed: there are no paupers in our sense of the word. It should be added, that the right of usufruct under the system of communal possession, can be converted into that of "hereditary individual ownership." But the inherited communistic sentiment is so strongly developed in the people of the dessa, that they but rarely, if ever, avail themselves of the facilities, which the law offers them in this respect; they prefer that the community should own the soil.

As might be expected the principle of solidarity which pervades these laws and customs, manifests itself even more strongly in the domestic life of the dessa-folk.

The ties of kinship--though not those of marriage--are much respected by them. Parents are so absolutely sure of the love and filial piety of their children, that they often, as they grow older, abandon all their property to them, content to live for the remainder of their days as their sons' and daughter's pensioners. And even the most distant relation, who, like the nearest, is termed brother or sister, may count, in case of need, upon assistance and hospitality. Parents are free to bequeath their property as they like; and they sometimes give everything to the first-born son or daughter, without any of the other children protesting. But, just as frequently, the heritage is left to all the descendants in common, when the paternal house is enlarged, so as to afford room for all the married sons and daughters and their families; and the produce of the fields is equally divided amongst them, as they equally divide the labour and the toil. Thus, through all chances and changes, the communistic principle is still maintained in the small community of the family, as in the greater one of the dessa. And indeed it may be said that the dessa is but the enlarged paternal house of the Javanese. All the inhabitants of it are his kinsfolk and nearest of blood, whose interests are his own, whose prosperity or misery is bound up with his, and who are his natural allies in defending the common inheritance against the stranger. The bamboo enclosure which defines and defends the dessa and the environing fields--the common possession of all--are the symbols and the outward visible signs of this.

Such then are the conditions which determine the existence of the Javanese husbandman--a happy life on the whole, exempt from hardship, excessive toil and care, and not without dignity or idyllic grace.

The dessa-man has to work, certainly, but he need not slave; a very moderate exertion is sufficient to procure him what food and raiment he wants. His neighbours are his next of kin, and spite occasional bickerings, his helpful friends. He has himself chosen the village-chief to whose authority he defers, and is free to follow that ancestral law of the adat, which, to him, is the embodiment of supreme wisdom and justice. And as he goes about his daily business, his labour in wood and field, still keeping time to the recurrent rhythm of the seasons, is graced by many a ceremony and religious rite, which while honouring the gods, rejoices the hearts of the worshippers.

At these religious festivals called "Sedeka," sacrifices of flowers and fruits are offered to the deity and the ancient, naïve idea, that which is pleasant to human beings must also be acceptable to the gods, causes the Javanese to lay on his altar offering of the eatables he is fondest of himself. Such as spice-flavoured rice and all manner of sweetmeats.