difficulties between white man and brown—not specially between this white
man and any with a darker skin: the quarrel was between white authority
and Malay resentment of interference. Grant was not even remotely
connected with the matter, but he was white, and under such circumstances
a want of discrimination is not uncommon. There followed what is known
as “a state of reprisals.” Uncivilised people, who do not understand
fine distinctions in such matters, called it war. The disturbance was,
however, comparatively local, Grant’s immediate neighbourhood did not
seem affected, and he was probably unconcerned. Therefore he went about
his work and took no special precaution, fearing no attack.
But his hut was isolated, there was only one other white man anywhere
near him, no police within miles, and Maämih, who understood Malays
better than her protector, was on the watch for trouble.
To expect is, sometimes, to go half way to meet, and the trouble came
quickly.
One morning two Malays appeared at Grant’s house, and, having given some
trivial excuse for their presence and looked about the premises, took
their departure. There was nothing unusual in that, and only a very
nervous person would have seen in so simple an event any cause for alarm.
But even ere this, prudence would have told most white men under similar
circumstances that it would be well to see to their arms and keep them
handy. Grant, however, took no precautions, as he had probably convinced
himself that none were necessary; as for arms, he does not appear to have
had any.
That morning, or it may have been the evening before, three large boats
and two small ones arrived in the river close by, but kept out of sight
of Grant’s hut, and he probably did not know they were there. They
belonged to a minor chief who had no connection with the Malays then in
arms.
The day wore on, Grant had been out all morning looking after his work,
he had returned to breakfast, been out again, and now he was back and
had thrown himself down to rest, glad to get under shelter from the
oppressive heat. He was a busy man and his work took him out of doors,
but though he had been about all day he had seen and heard nothing to
arouse his suspicions.
Seen nothing, certainly. That was not strange, it was a jungly place,
and to be ten yards off in the jungle is as good, for those who seek
concealment and know the jungle, as to be in another district. As
for hearing anything, that too was most unlikely: the only people he
could hear from were Malays, the only means of communication the Malay
language, of which Grant knew very little, and the only condition on
which information is to be obtained from Malays about Malays would be an
intimacy with and respect for the threatened man to which Grant could
hardly aspire. There must be some very powerful influence at work to
induce a Muhammadan, who is not personally in danger, to tell a Christian
that there is a Muhammadan plot against his life. Grant, at any rate, if
he thought about it at all, could hardly expect that he, a new-comer,
possessed friends who would do so much for him.
He was still resting when, about 4 P.M., a party of nearly twenty armed
men suddenly appeared in front of the house and stood some fifty yards
away, while two of them, carrying only the ordinary jungle knives, came
up to the house and asked Grant if he wanted to buy fowls. He told the
inquirers to take them to his servant, and got up as the Malays left him.
The men had no fowls, and instead of going to the servant’s quarters they
rejoined their companions, and the whole body advanced towards the house.
At this moment Maämih appeared, and instantly divining that the
strangers meant no good, she screamed out, “They are going to murder us.”
But Grant said that he and she had done no harm and the Malays could mean
none, and, taking the woman with him, he went out of the house and a few
steps forward to meet his assailants.
These last stopped some twenty yards from Grant and the woman, and she
said, “What harm have we done?” The answer was “_Titah_”—it is by order
of the Raja—and they told the woman to leave the infidel and go away. But
she replied, “I shall stay with him.”
Then several men said, “If you do not go, we will kill you as well as the
white man.”
Grant may not have understood this sentence of death on himself, he may
not have realised how strangely the times were out of joint, that he who
was the enemy of no man, who had done no wrong, who represented no cause,
should suddenly, in the broad light of day, hear his own death sentence,
and in the same breath learn that he was facing his executioners and his
account with the world was closed. There was no time to think: instinct
said, “There is Death,” and doubtless instinct also said, “Death is
disagreeable: shun it.”
It is commonly reputed that there are people who do not know what fear
is; to them in such a situation instinct no doubt suggests that death
is a new and pleasant experience. With this man it was different; as he
saw here and there a gun raised and pointed at him from a distance of a
few paces, he probably felt the fear of sudden and violent death, and
if he was in any way responsible for what he did in that supreme moment
his thought must have suggested that these men would not harm a woman of
their own nationality and religion, for he took her in his arms.
A shot was fired, and the bullet shattered Maämih’s left arm. Then,
seeing what had happened, Grant put her behind him and two more shots
were fired, one of which struck Grant in the breast, and saying, “They
have killed me,” he fell on his face to the ground.
A Malay rushed up with a heavy chopping knife, but the woman threw
herself on the body and put her unwounded arm over Grant’s neck to save
him. The Malay’s first blow inflicted a deep wound on Maämih’s arm and
made her loose her hold; the man then struck Grant a heavy blow on the
back of the neck, but he was already dead.
The murderers took no further notice of the woman, except to try and rob
her of the jewellery she wore, but they plundered the house, and having
decapitated the dead man and otherwise mutilated his body, they threw the
remains into the river and departed.
The woman was cared for by a countryman of her own until she could be
removed to a hospital, where, after weeks of suffering, she recovered
from her injuries.
The motive of this outrage was simply the desire of an individual and
his small following to wipe out the white man, and as Grant’s isolated
position made him a specially easy prey, he fell a victim. His only
European neighbour was also murdered by the same band. I know of no
similar attack being made by Malays on a white man within modern times,
and I question whether there is such another instance of a Malay woman’s
devotion—not that they are not capable of such self-sacrifice, I think
they are, but the circumstances necessary to call it forth very seldom
arise.
This woman realised what was going to happen before she left the shelter
of the house, she had time after that to think, her life was not sought,
she was told to go away and warned that if she did not separate herself
from the white man she would share his fate. Moreover, she knew that no
sacrifice of hers could save him, and more than all, as affecting her
woman’s nerves, she saw face to face the men with murder in their faces
and the means to accomplish it in their hands.
The motive which kept Maämih by Grant’s side and which led her, after
receiving the first shot, to interpose herself between his body and the
weapons of his foes, must have been as high as it was powerful. Just as
there was nothing to fear by standing aside (for none would have blamed
her), so there was nothing to hope from the forbearance of Grant’s
murderers, and that she did not also lose her life by her devotion to
him was the accident of an ill-directed shot and a well-aimed blow which
sought to sever the woman’s arm and reach the neck it protected—the neck
of a dead man.
United to the devotion which deemed no sacrifice too great for one she
loved, was that other sort of courage which comes of knowledge and
deliberate intention. No one can fail to admire the pluck which takes no
thought of danger, the instinct which impels a wild beast to charge an
enemy and probably achieve thereby its own destruction. Even then it can
hardly be said that the sensation of fear has never been and cannot be
experienced by the most formidable and gallant denizens of the forest
and the desert. All sportsmen know the contrary, and a child has put a
tiger to flight by suddenly throwing a basket in the face of the beast.
Had the child run away, its death was probable, whereas it saved the life
of an old man already in the tiger’s clutches, and yet the child’s action
was not the result of courage but of fear.
This Malay woman, in whom the love of life was strong, and on whose
nerves the horror and certainty of what awaited her must have had a
terrifying effect, deliberately renounced safety, with that higher
resolve which, vanquishing fear, faces the unknown in the spirit
described by the Persian who, writing eight centuries ago, has found so
worthy an interpreter in the author of the lines—
“So when the Angel of the darker Drink
At last shall find you by the river brink
And, offering his Cup, invite your Soul,
Forth to your Lips to quaff—
You shall not shrink.”
XI
IN THE NOON OF NIGHT
Her soul upheld
By some deep-working charm
KIRKE WHITE
On the western coast of the Peninsula, more especially that part of
it which forms one side of the Straits of Malacca, the shore-line is
generally one long stretch of mud, covered with mangrove trees to the
verge of high-water mark and rather further, for when the tide is up
there are thousands of acres of mangrove whose roots and several inches
of the stems are submerged. Beyond this forest the receding tide leaves
great wastes of evil-smelling mire, soft and clinging, in which the
searcher for shell-fish sinks almost to his waist.
Many rivers, small and great, find their way to the sea through this wide
flat. At high water they look imposing enough, but when the tide is out
a narrow and shallow channel is left winding about between low slimy
banks, and right and left the eye wanders over a desolation of glistening
mud with an almost imperceptible slope to the edge of the distant sea.
Pools of shallow water and tiny channels, through which the receding
tide finds easier road to river or sea, alone break the monotony of the
unsightly waste.
That is as far as physical features go. The mud-flats have their
denizens, but they are not over-attractive.
First, there is the Malay fisherman, hunting for mussels and other
shell-fish. If he is there at all he will be hard to see, for he pushes
his little dug-out fifty or a hundred yards up a mud creek, leaves it and
fossicks about, sunk above his knees in the mire.
Then there are myriads of birds, attracted by the great possibilities of
gain to the industrious searcher after garbage, stranded fish, and all
sorts of particularly loathsome-looking and foul-smelling dead things
to be found in such a place. These birds are often strange-looking
creatures, vast of size, long and lank of leg, snaky of neck and spiky
of bill. But they are wary to a degree, they always seems to be standing
just in the tiny ripple of the smallest wavelets where you instinctively
know the mud and sea meet, and there they watch the gradually receding
tide with melancholy abstraction, as though they took no real interest in
the daily toil of sustaining life.
Last, there is something else here, and, if you are not quite a stranger,
you will look first, look longest, and look always for this other thing.
Perhaps it is the extraordinary fitness of her surroundings (I say _her_
advisedly), perhaps the art with which nature has designed the body of
the saurian to make you think her a log, or a stranded palm-branch, a
half-buried spar of a wrecked boat, or even a lighter or darker ridge
of the surrounding mud—certain it is that as the crocodile lies there,
basking in the sun which makes air and water and blistering slime shimmer
and dance before your eyes, you will not notice the creature, nay, even
when pointed out to you, it is ten to one that you will not even then
realise that she is there.
But get nearer, speak no word and let your rowers pull a long and
noiseless stroke till some one with a quick eye and a steady hand can
put a bullet in the reptile’s neck. As that great mouth suddenly opens,
disclosing the rows of shining teeth, as it shuts again with the noise
of a steel trap, as the horrible scaly claws dig deep into the mud in
their agony and the great spiked tail lashes round in fury, as the
loathsome yellow belly slides over the ooze and you catch sight of the
stony cruelty of the crocodile’s eye, then you will realise what manner
of thing she is, and you will probably conceive for her and all her kind
a deadly horror and loathing, and a consuming desire to slay the whole
brood will seize you then and remain with you for all time.
If it should happen to you to have to fight a wounded crocodile at close
quarters, if accident brings you in contact with a man who has just lost
arm or leg, or with a corpse out of which a crocodile has torn the life,
your feelings towards these river-murderers will not be softened.
There are Malay rivers so infested by these reptiles that at low water
for a mile or two from the river’s mouth they will be seen, in twos and
threes or larger groups, lying on either bank basking or sleeping in the
sun. It repeatedly happens that they knock people out of their boats
and then kill and devour them, and in places where the creatures are
specially numerous, if a crocodile is shot dead on the bank, in less than
half an hour the carcase will be dragged into the river and a crowd of
the reptiles will be tearing it in pieces and fighting for the remains.
Villages on the Malay coast are nearly always situated on the bank of
a river; the sea is full of fish and the men of a coast village are
mostly fishermen. If the village is of any size and the industry of any
importance, the catching of fish is supplemented by curing—that is,
salting and drying them.
The whereabouts of a village of this kind may be recognised by the
traveller on sea or land when he is yet a great way off. Probably for
that reason, and because the cleaning of thousands of fish loads the
water with food of a kind that is specially attractive to the saurian,
the immediate neighbourhood of a fishing village is the favourite resort
of the crocodile.
At the mouth of a wide river on the Perak coast there is just such a
village. It is thriving, and as there are a number of Chinese as well as
Malay fishermen, it boasts a police-station. The houses are built for
the most part on piles; at high water the sea washes under them, and the
means of inter-communication are wooden stagings from house to house. At
low water there is mud, great stretches of mud, running from the edge of
the mangrove swamp which backs the village far out to the west and the
waters of the Straits of Malacca.
It was in the month of Ramthân, when begin those forty days of fast
observed by all good Muhammadans—though so few of them know why they
fast, or the details of the touching story which tells the sufferings
of the Martyrs of Kerbela—that one night, past the middle of the month,
but when the moon still lit up the water and made things plain as day, a
strange thing happened at this small coast village.
In it there lived a Malay revenue officer with his wife and child, and on
the night in question these three, being at home, went to sleep about 10
P.M. as was their wont.
A slight breeze was blowing off the sea, blowing against the falling
tide, and the moonlight glorified the hideous expanse of slime
till it looked like a limitless mirror, blending far away with the
haze-enshrouded waters of the sea, but bordered landwards by that dark
fringe of mangroves, the thick forest forming a striking contrast to the
moonlit beauty of the glistening shore.
The wind sighed up the river, played through the great brown nets hanging
up to dry, and, scarcely stirring the tops of the mangroves, swept gently
towards the distant hills.
All the village slept, except the one Guardian of the Peace, who showed
his devotion to duty by punctually striking the hours on a huge metal
gong.
The night was far advanced, when suddenly he heard a child crying in the
house of the Malay revenue clerk. Then there was the noise of footsteps
and the voice of the man calling to his wife, but no answer. After a few
minutes there was the sound of approaching feet, a shout from the Malay,
followed by the man himself.
The constable called out, “What is the matter, Che Mat?”
Che Mat replied, “I was asleep, but awoke hearing the child crying for
its mother. I could not see her anywhere, and she did not answer when I
spoke. Then I got up and saw at once the door of the house was open, but
she is nowhere to be seen. Have you heard anything of her?”
The constable had heard nothing, but there was evidently something
uncanny about this disappearance, for, in a village such as this, where
the houses are more in the water than on land, where the pathless
mangrove is the background, and the waters of the river the foreground,
there are few places left in which to look for any one or anything with
any chance of finding them.
The man on guard roused his comrades, and, as Malays do not sit down
and discuss plans of action, some one at once made a move; the others
followed, and they all walked out to the last house on the platform, and
then listened.
“Hark! did you not hear something?” Yes, through the silence of the
night, wafted on the incoming breeze, there was a distinct but faint cry
from the direction of the sea.
It did not take the men long to get down to the ground, and first
hurrying along the edge of the trees, they went some distance, hearing
the cries at intervals and ever more plainly, till it became necessary to
strike right out across the mud. By this time there was no doubt about
the source of the cries, for the voice of the object of their search
was recognised, and that the woman was in sore distress did not admit
of doubt. Making all the speed they could, sinking above their knees at
every step, stumbling, falling, but ever pressing on, they saw at last to
their horror, in the brilliant moonlight, the woman on the ground being
literally worried by three crocodiles, each six or eight feet in length.
As crocodiles go, six or eight feet is no great length, but to go to
sleep in your own house and wake up at midnight within a hundred feet
of the sea, but with half a mile of mud between you and anything like
dry land, and at the same time assailed by _three_ crocodiles quite big
enough to kill you, is calculated to shock the strongest nerves.
After a short but exciting fight, the police beat off the scaly beasts
with difficulty, and found the woman had been badly torn in legs, and
arms, and neck.
Whilst the men were arranging to carry her back, no easy matter over half
a mile of soft but sticky wet mud and ooze, she told her tale:
“I was sleeping,” she said, “and had a vision. Two radiant Beings
appeared to me and bid me rise and follow them, and they would show me
a sight more glorious than is vouchsafed to mortals. Transported with
joy, I rose and followed them, and whilst filled with ecstatic rapture by
the companionship of these Celestial Beings, I seemed to be borne along
without effort of my own through enchanted fields of more than earthly
beauty. Suddenly I was awakened by feeling the teeth of a crocodile in my
leg, and, to my horror, I found I was out here on this mud-flat half a
mile from home, but close to the sea, with three crocodiles attacking me,
no means of defending myself, and little hope of help. I fell, and the
beasts tore and worried me, biting my arms, and legs, and neck, while I
screamed for help until you came and rescued me.”
Well, after all, there is nothing very strange in that. A woman of
peculiar nervous organisation, a somnambulist, dreams a dream and walks
out into the balmy atmosphere of a moonlit Eastern night. She walks
rather far, and has a rude awakening. That is nothing; other sleepers
have walked further, and their awakening has been to the life beyond the
grave.
Only this was curious: that while the men sank deep into the mud at every
step, the woman had never sunk in at all. When found, there was only mud
on the _soles_ of her feet, and, though she had walked half a mile across
the flat, and her tracks were plainly visible in the moonlight, they were
all on the surface, and she had crossed the soft, unstable mire as easily
as though it had been a metalled road.
So the men bore her home, not wondering overmuch, for in this thing
they saw the hand of the Celestial Beings who guided her feet with
such consideration, to abandon her to the ferocious attentions of the
crocodiles.
The woman herself, her husband, and the police were satisfied as to the
means, but found the end too hard for their understanding.
The ideal woman, the product of higher education and deep research in
divers subjects, supplies the real clue to the phenomenon, for, when
asked “where the true Spirit of God is,” she modestly replies, “I can
tell you: it is in us _women_. We have preserved it and handed it down
from one generation to another of our own sex unsullied.”[2]
Doubtless—from the time when the Spirit moved upon the face of the
waters, and, later, on the Sea of Galilee; but it is more difficult
to understand how woman, unaided, has handed anything down from one
generation to another.
The same idea is, however, more happily conveyed in the injunction of the
President of the Scraggsville Woman’s Suffrage League to her husband,
when ordering him to go and purchase a divided skirt. “If you are afraid,
pray to God for courage; _She_ will help you.”
The mere male has his uses, one of which is to assist the unsullied sex
to perpetuate the Spirit of God, and another to be within hail when there
are crocodiles about.
XII
VAN HAGEN AND CAVALIERO
How loved, how honoured once, avails thee not,
To whom related, or by whom begot,
A heap of dust alone remains of thee
POPE
Not many months after my first arrival in the East I met, in a club in
Singapore, an Italian called Cavaliero. He was quite young, tall, dark,
and good-looking, of a pronounced Italian type. What his occupation was
I have no idea; I suppose he had some sort of business, but it could not
have been very attractive or profitable, for one day I was told that he
and a Hollander named Van Hagen had collected about a hundred natives of
all sorts and conditions and had accepted service with the Viceroy of the
Sultan of Selangor.
Selangor was then an absolutely independent Malay State, so independent
in fact that the principal and almost only employment of its inhabitants
was fighting.
The Sultan was and is an old gentleman for whom I have the highest
regard, and I desire to speak of him with the greatest respect. He had
had his own fighting day and was tired of it, he wished to be left alone,
that was all; but he recognised that boys will be boys, and if the young
Selangor Rajas took their pleasure in this way, he was inclined to regard
their escapades with an indulgent eye, provided they did not interfere
with his _opium cum dignitate_ and his immediate surroundings.
The Sultan’s own sons were very much interested in the guerilla warfare
that was then being carried on throughout Selangor, and the feature of
the disturbances was that every chief said he had the Sultan’s approval
of his proceedings. Some time later I was myself in Selangor, and, as
this statement was constantly being dinned into my ears, I took the
liberty of asking his Highness what it meant.
He promptly pointed out that each of these Rajas in turn came to him,
stated his case, and asked the Sultan if that was not correct. His
Highness always replied, “Quite correct,” but, as he explained to me,
“_bĕnar ka-pâda dia, bûkan bĕnar ka-pâda kami_,” which being interpreted
means, “correct in their view, not in mine.” He was evidently tickled by
this happy inspiration and laughed heartily at his own ingenuity.
The gossips declared that his Highness was always requested to give a
tangible proof of his approval in the shape of gunpowder and lead, and
that he gave them to every applicant with strict impartiality. On this
point the Sultan told me nothing, and I was not indiscreet enough to
inquire, but as Selangor is no more free from gossip than its neighbours,
I put the statement down to irresponsible chatter.
All this is, however, by the way. Certain Rajas held certain important
strategical points from which other Rajas kept trying to oust them, and
the fight waxed hottest about Klang, the principal port of the State, and
Kuala Lumpor, the principal mining centre.