are truly splendid; the most modest ones still have an air of comfort.
According to the ideas of the inhabitants, there are none absolutely
squalid. All these houses are, at the same time, shops. They are, in a
way, wonderful people, these sons of the Celestial Empire, merchants,
in one way or other, all of them. There is, of course, a difference.
There is the foot-sore "klontong" trudging trough the weary streets
all day, and shaking his rattle as he goes, to advertise the reels of
cotton and the cakes of soap in his wallet; and, again, there is the
portly millionaire, who entertains army officers and civil servants
in his own profusely-decorated mansion; but the difference is one in
degree only, not in kind. Amid the pomp and circumstance of the one
condition, and the squalor of the other, the individualities are the
same, the attitude of mind and the habits of thought identical, the sum
and substance of a Chinaman's life in Java being expressed in "the
making of bargains." He could as soon leave off breathing as leave off
buying and selling; trading seems to be his natural function. And this,
one fancies, is the great difference between his race and ours; and
the true secret of their superiority as money-makers. A Caucasian, if
he is a merchant, is so with a certain part of his being only--during
certain hours of the day, in his own office. A Chinaman is a merchant
with his whole heart, his whole soul, and his whole understanding, a
merchant always and everywhere, from his cradle to his grave, at table,
at play, over his opium-pipe, in his temple. Trade is the element in
which he lives, moves, and has his being. His thoughts might be noted
in figures. The world is to him one vast opportunity for making money,
and all things in it are articles of trade; which, in Chinese, means
gain to him, and loss to everybody else. He has few wants, infinite
resources, and the faith (in himself) that removeth trading towns.
Small wonder if he succeeds.
I fancy it would be quite a practical education in the principles of
business, to watch the career of one of these Chinamen, from the hour
of his arrival at Tanjong Priok onward. At first, you see him trudging
along with a wallet, containing soap, sewing cotton, combs, and
matches. After a few months, you find him in your compound surrounded
by the whole of your domestic staff, to whom he is selling sarong
cloth and thin silks. When a year has gone by, a coolie trudges at his
heels panting under a load of wares, the samples of which he subjects
to your approval with the most correct of bows. Have but patience, and
you will find him in a diminutive shop, where somehow he finds place
for a settee in the corner, a mirror on the wall, and all around such a
collection of articles as might fitly be termed an epitome of material
civilization. Nor does he stop in that tiny shop. A few years later,
he will be taking his ease behind the counter of a spick-and-span
establishment in the camp; and, if, by chance, you get a glimpse of his
wife, you will be astonished at the size of the diamonds in her shiny
coil of hair. Our friend is on the high road to prosperity now, which
leads to a big house separate from the shop. Before he is fairly fifty,
he has built it, high and spacious, with an altar to the gods and to
the spirits of his ancestors set in the midst of it, and a profusion
of fine carving and gilding, of embroidered hangings and lacquered
woodwork all around. He will invite you for the New Year's festivities
now, and, if your wife accompanies you, introduce you to his spouse,
resplendent as the rainbow in many-tinted brocades, and more thickly
covered with diamonds than the untrodden meadow with the dews of a
midsummer night. He talks about the funeral of his honoured father,
which cost him upward of three thousand pounds sterling; and he will
ask your advice, over the pine-apples and the champagne, about sending
his son to Europe in one of his own ships, that the youth may see
something of the world, and, if he so list, be entered as a student at
the famous university of Leijden.
A COLONIAL HOME
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
"It is the North which has introduced tight-fitting clothes and high
houses." Thus Taine, as, in the streets of Pompeii, he gazed at
nobly-planned peristyle and graceful arch, at godlike figures shining
from frescoed walls, and, with the vision of that fair, free, large
life of antiquity, contrasted the Paris apartment from which he was but
newly escaped, and the dress-coat which he had worn at the last social
function. And a similar reflection crosses the Northerner's mind when
he looks upon a house in Batavia.
I am aware that Pompeii and Batavia, pronounced in one breath, make a
shrieking discord, and that, between a homely white-washed bungalow,
and those radiant mansions which the ancients built of white marble
and blue sky, the comparison must seem preposterous. And, yet, no one
can see the two, and fail to make it. The resemblance is too striking.
The flat roof, the pillared entrance, the gleam of the marble-paved
hall, whose central arch opens on the reposeful shadow of the inner
chambers, all these features of a classic dwelling are recognized in
a Batavia house. Evidently, too, this resemblance is not the result of
mere mechanical imitation. There are a consistency and thoroughness
in the architecture of these houses, a harmony with the surrounding
landscape, which stamp it as an indigenous growth, the necessary
result of the climate, and the mode of life in Java, just as classic
architecture was the necessary result of the climate and the mode of
life in Greece and Italy. If the two styles are similar, it is because
the ideas which inspired them are not so vastly different. After all,
in a sunny country, whether it be Europe or Asia, the great affair of
physical life is to keep cool, and the main idea of the architect,
in consequence, will be to provide that coolness. It is this which
constitutes a resemblance between countries in all other respects so
utterly unlike as Greece and Java, and the difference between these
and Northern Europe. In the North, the human habitation is a fortress
against the cold; in the South and the East, it is a shelter from the
heat.
There is no need here of thick walls, solid doors, casements of
impermeable material, all the barricades which the Northerner throws
up against the besieging elements. In Italy, as in Greece, Nature is
not inimical. The powers of sun, wind, and rain are gracious to living
things, and under their benign rule man lives as simply and confidingly
as his lesser brethren, the beasts of the fields and forests and
the birds of the air. He has no more need than they to hedge in his
individual existence from the vast life that encompasses it. His
clothes, when he wears them, are an ornament rather than a protection,
and his house a place, not of refuge, but of enjoyment, a cool and
shadow spot, as open to the breeze as the forest, whose flat spreading
branches, supported on stalwart stems, seem to have been the model
for its column-borne roof.
[Illustration: "Compound" of a Batavia house.]
The Batavia house, then, is built on the classic plan. Its entrance
is formed by a spacious loggia, raised a few steps above the level
ground, and supported on columns. Thence, a door, which stands open
all day long, leads into a smaller inner hall, on either side of which
are bedrooms, and behind this is another loggia--even more spacious
than the one forming the entrance of the house--where meals are taken
and the hot hours of the day are spent. Generally, a verandah runs
around the whole building, to beat off both the fierce sunshine of the
hot, and the cataracts of rain of the wet, season. Behind the house
is a garden, enclosed on three sides by the buildings containing the
servants' quarters, the kitchen and store rooms, the bath-rooms, and
stables. And, at some distance from the main building and connected
with it by a portico, stands a pavilion, for the accommodation of
guests;--for the average Netherland-Indian is the most hospitable of
mortals, and seldom without visitors, whether relatives, friends, or
even utter strangers, who have come with an introduction from a common
acquaintance in Holland.
It takes some time, I find, to get quite accustomed to this arrangement
of a house. In the beginning of my stay here, I had an impression
of always being out of doors and of dining in the public street,
especially at night, when in the midst of a blaze of light one felt
oneself an object of attention and criticism to every chance passer-by
in the darkness without. It was as bad as at the ceremonious meals of
the Kings of France, who had their table laid out in public, that their
faithful subjects might behold them at the banquet, and, one supposes,
satisfy their own hunger by the Sovereign's vicarious dining.
In time, however, as the strangeness of the situation wears off, one
realises the advantage of these spacious galleries to walled-in rooms,
and very gladly sacrifices the sentiment of privacy to the sensation of
coolness.
For to be cool, or not to be cool, that is the great question, and all
things are arranged with a view to solving it in the most satisfactory
manner possible. For the sake of coolness, one has marble floors or
Javanese matting instead of carpets, cane-bottomed chairs and settees
in lieu of velvet-covered furniture, gauze hangings for draperies of
silks and brocade. The inner hall of almost every house, it is true, is
furnished in European style--exiles love to surround themselves with
remembrances of their far-away home. But, though very pretty, this room
is generally empty of inhabitants, except, perhaps, for an hour now
and then, during the rainy season. For, in this climate, to sit in a
velvet chair is to realize the sensations of Saint Laurence, without
the sustaining consciousness of martyrdom.--For the sake of coolness
again, one gets up at half-past five, or six, at the very latest,
keeps indoors till sunset, sleeps away the hot hours of the afternoon
on a bed which it requires experience and a delicate sense of touch
to distinguish from a deal board, and spends the better part of one's
waking existence in the bath room.
[Illustration: The servants' kitchen.]
Now, a bath in Java is a very different thing from the dabbling among
dishes in a bedroom, which Europeans call by that name, even if their
dishes attain the dimensions of a tub. Ablutions such as these are
performed as a matter of duty; a man gets into his tub as he gets into
his clothes, because to omit doing so would be indecent. But bathing
in the tropics is a pure delight, a luxury for body and soul--a dip
into the _Fountaine de Jouvence_, almost the "cheerful solemnity and
semi-pagan act of worship," which the donkey-driving Traveller through
the Cevennes performed in the clear Tarn. A special place is set apart
for it, a spacious, cool, airy room in the outbuildings, a "chamber
deaf to noise, and all but blind to light." Through the gratings over
the door, a glimpse of sky and waving branches is caught. The marble
floor and whitewashed walls breathe freshness, the water in the stone
reservoir is limpid and cold as that of a pool that gleams in rocky
hollows. And, as the bather dips in his bucket, and send the frigid
stream pouring over him, he washes away, not heat and dust alone, but
weariness and vexatious thought in a purification of both body and
soul, and he understands why all Eastern creeds have exalted the bath
into a religious observance.
Like the often-repeated bath, the rice table is a Javanese institution,
and its apologists claim equal honours for it as an antidote to
climatic influences. I confess I do not hold so high an opinion of
its virtues, but I have fallen a victim to its charms. I love it but
too well. And there lies the danger, everybody likes it far too much,
and, especially, likes far too much of it. It is, humanly speaking,
impossible to partake of the rice table, and not to grossly overeat
oneself. There is something insidious about its composition, a cunning
arrangement of its countless details into a whole so perfectly
harmonious that it seems impossible to leave out a single one. If you
have partaken of one dish, you must partake of the rest, unless you
would spoil all. Fowl calls to fowl, and fish answers fish, and all the
green things that are on the table, aye, and the red and the yellow
likewise, have their appointed places upon your plate. You may try to
escape consequences by taking infinitesimal pinches of each, but many
a mickle makes a muckle, and your added teaspoonfuls soon swell to a
heaped-up plate, such as well might stagger the stoutest appetite. Yet,
even before you have recovered from your surprise, you find you have
finished it all. I do not pretend to explain, I merely state the fact.
Records have survived of those Pantagruelic feasts with which the great
ones of the mediæval world delighted to celebrate the auspicious events
of their lives, and the chronicler never fails to sum up the almost
interminable list of the spices and essences with which the cook, on
the advice of learned physicians, seasoned the viands, in order that,
whilst the grosser meats satisfied the animal cravings of the stomach,
those ethereal aromatics might stimulate the finer fluids, whose ebb
and flow controls the soul, and the well-flavoured dishes might not
only be hot on men's tongues but eke "prick them in their courages."
They pricked to some purpose, it seems. And, if the spice-sated
Netherlands-Indian is a comparatively law-abiding man, it must be
because battening rice counteracts maddening curry. But for this
providential arrangement, I fully believe he would think no more of
battle, murder, and sudden death than of an indigestion, and consider a
good dinner as an ample explanation of both.
Now, as to what they clothe themselves withal. Taine's opinion
concerning tight fitting clothes has been mentioned--viz: that they
are an invention of the North. A fortnight in Batavia will explain and
prove the theory better than many books by many philosophers; and,
moreover, cause the most sartorially-minded individual to consign the
"invention" to a place hotter than even Java. Like the habitations, the
habits of European civilization are irksome in the tropics; and, for
indoor-wear at least, they have suffered a sun-change into something
cool and strange--into native costume modified in fact. Now, the
outward apparel of the Javanese consists of a long straight narrow
skirt "the sarong" with a loose fitting kind of jacket over it,--short
for the men, who call it "badjoo," and longer for the women who wear
it as "kabaya": which garments have been adopted by the Hollanders,
with the one modification of the sarong into a "divided skirt" for
the men, and the substitution of white batiste and embroidery for the
coloured stuffs of which native women make their kabayas, in the case
of the ladies. On the Javanese, a small, spare, slightly-made race,
the garb sits not ungracefully; narrow and straight as it is, it goes
well with contours so attenuated. But on the sturdier Hollander the
effect is something appalling. An adequate description of the men's
appearance in it would read like a caricature; and though, with the
help of harmonious colours and jewellery, the women look better when
thus attired, the dress is not becoming to them either, at least in
non-colonial eyes. The æsthetic sense shies and kicks out at the sight
of those straight, hard, unnatural lines. Modern male costume has been
held up to ridicule as a "system of cylinders". The sarong and kabaya
combine to form one single cylinder, which obliterates all the natural
lines and curves of the feminine form divine, and changes a woman into
a parti-coloured pillar, for an analogy to which one's thoughts revert
to Lot's wife. But, though utterly condemned from an artistic point of
view, from a practical one it must be acquitted, and even commended. In
a country where the temperature ranges between 85° and 95° Fahrenheit
in the shade, cool clothes which can be changed several times a day,
are a condition not merely of comfort, but of absolute cleanliness and
decency, not to mention hygiene. For it is a noteworthy fact that the
women, who wear colonial dress up to six in the evening, stand the
climate better than the men, who, in the course of things, wear it
during an hour or an hour and a half at most, in the day. And it must
be admitted that both men and women enjoy better health in Java,
under this colonial regime of dressing than in the British possessions,
where they cling to the fashions of Europe.
[Illustration: Native Servants.]
As for the children, they are clad even more lightly than their elders,
in what the Malay calls "monkey-trousers", chelana monjet, a single
garment, which, only just covering the body, leaves the neck, arms, and
legs bare. It is hideous, and they love it. In German picture-books one
sees babes similarly accoutred riding on the stork, that brings them to
their expectant parents. Perhaps, after all, monkey-trousers are the
paradisiacal garment of babes; and it is a Wordsworthian recollection
of this fact, that makes them cling to the costume so tenaciously.
One cannot speak of an "Indian" child, and forget the "babu," the
native nurse, who is its ministering spirit, its dusky guardian angel,
almost its Providence. All day long, she carries her little charge
in her long "slendang," the wide scarf, which deftly slung about her
shoulders, makes a sort of a hammock for the baby. She does not like
even the mother to take it away from her; feeds it, bathes it, dresses
it prettily, takes it out for a walk, ready, at the least sign, to lift
it up again into its safe nest close to her heart. She plays with it,
not as a matter of duty, but as a matter of pleasure, throwing herself
into the game with enjoyment and zest, like the child she is at heart;
so that the two may be seen quarrelling sometimes, the baby stamping
its feet and the babu protesting with the native cluck of indignant
remonstrance, and an angry "Terlalu!" "it is too bad!" And, at night,
when she has crooned the little one to sleep, with one of those
plaintive monotonous melodies in a minor key, which seem to go on for
ever, like a rustling of reeds and forest leaves whilst the crickets
are trilling their evensong, she spreads her piece of matting on the
floor, and lies down in front of the little bed, like a faithful dog
guarding its master's slumbers.
As for the other servants, their name is Legion. A colonial household
requires a very numerous domestic staff. Even families with modest
incomes employ six or seven servants, and ten is by no means an
exceptional number. The reason for this apparent extravagance is, that,
though the Javanese is not lazy--as he often and unjustly is accused
of being--yet he is so slow, that the result practically is the same,
and one needs two or even three native servants, for work which one
Caucasian would despatch in the same time.
All these have their own quarters in the "compound" and their own
families in those quarters; they go "into the house" as a man would go
to his office; coming home for meals, and entertaining their friends
in the evening, on their own square of matting, and with their own
saffron-tinted rice, and syrup-sweetened coffee.
Such then, is the setting of every-day existence in Java.
As for the central fact, it is less interesting than its circumstances,
in so far as it is more familiar. The three or four great conceptions
which determine the home-life of a people--its ideas social, ethical,
and religious concerning the relations between parent and child,
and between men and women--are too deeply ingrained into its mental
substance to be affected by any merely outward circumstances.
Therefore, home-life among the Hollanders in Java, is essentially
the same as among Hollanders in their own country. Still there is
difference, that it has more physical comfort, and less intellectual
interest. The climate, it seems to me, is in a high degree responsible
for both these facts.
[Illustration: Native gardener.]
A continual temperature of about 90 degrees is not favourable to the
growth of the finer faculties, in Northerner's brains at least. The
little band of eminent men who have gone up from Java to shine in Dutch
Universities must be regarded as a signal exception to a very general
rule. Besides, the heat is so grave an addition to the already heavy
burden of the day, that one requires all one's energies, both of body
and soul, to conscientiously discharge one's ordinary duties; and
there is no surplus left to devote to literary, artistic, or scientific
pursuits. There are no theatres, no operas, no concerts, no lectures,
no really good newspapers, even, in Java. There could not be, where
there is so little active public life. So that a man's one relaxation
after a hard day's work--unless he looks at dances and dinners in that
light--must be found in his own house.
One continually hears the phrase in the East, "our house is our life."
Naturally, therefore, the house is made as pleasant as possible, and
as comfortable, not to say luxurious. Incomes are proportionately very
much higher in Java than in Holland--without financial advantage as
an incentive nobody would accept life under tropical conditions--and
the better part of the money is spent on good living in the majority
of cases. Even families of comparatively moderate means have a roomy
house, a sufficient domestic staff, and keep a carriage and a good
table.
And as to the heat, which assuredly is a discomfort, and no trifling
one, the accepted mode of life does much to palliate it, not only by
the regime of housing, feeding, and dressing, but almost as much by the
way the day is divided. Work is begun early, so as to get as much as
possible done in the cool hours; between nine and five everybody keeps
indoors; and those who can snatch an hour of leisure after the one
o'clock rice-table, spend it in a siesta. Only in the early morning,
and in the evening does one see Europeans about. Not even the greatest
enthusiast for cricket and tennis dare begin games earlier than
half-past four.
Formerly this was different.
On old engravings, one may see the tall sombre houses which the first
colonists built on those "grachts" now long since demolished. One
may mark them walking home from a three hours' sermon in broadcloth
mantles, and velvet robes, giving solemn entertainments in their trim
gardens along the canal, with the sun in noon-day glory over-head,
and generally ignoring the trifling differences between Amsterdam and
Batavia. They fought very valiantly for their ancestral customs; but
very few returned to tell of the fight.
[Illustration: Native footboy.]
Since, people have reflected that a live Netherland-Indian is better
then a dead Hollander. And, giving up a fight, in which defeat was
all but certain, and success worse than useless, they have effected a
compromise with the climate. In Java they do as Java does, from sunrise
to sunset. But, with the congenial cool of the evening, they resume
their national existence, the garb, the manners and the customs of
Holland. At seven there is a general "va et vient" of open carriages
bearing women in light dresses, and men in correct black-and-white to a
"reception" in some brilliantly-lighted house; and for a few hours, the
life of Home is lived again.
Outside is the black tropical night, heavy with the scent of invisible
blossoms, pricked here and there by the yellow spark of some trudging
fruitvendor's oilwick. The small fragment of Europe with that
tall-colonnaded marble-paved loggia, with its gliding figures of men
and women, is, stands an Island of Light among the waveless seas of
darkness.
[Illustration: Sacred gun near the Amsterdam gate, Batavia.]
SOCIAL LIFE
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
The social life of Batavia has a physiognomy of its own; curious
enough in some of its features. But it is not this which strikes
the new-comer most forcibly. In certain Byzantine mosaics, the
figure represented is entirely eclipsed by the magnificence of the
background: the eye must grow accustomed to the splendour of the gold
and precious stones surrounding it, before it can take in the lines
of the face. In a similar manner, no surmise can be formed as to the
character of Batavia social life before the charm has, at least in
part, passed off, which its setting casts over the critical faculties.
It moves in romance; it is surrounded by beauty; its conditions and
circumstances are in themselves a source of delight. It would seem
almost enough for a feast, in the cool of the evening, to sit under
the verandah, marking on the gleaming marble floor half-reflections
as in tranquil waters under a tranquil sky seen from afar; and the
rich strange green, relieved against blackness, of the plants on
the steps outside, their every leaf and shoot shone upon by the
lamplight, standing out sparkling against the ebon wall of night. From
without, there comes the chirping of crickets, and the deepbreathed
fragrance of flowers--tuberose, gardenia and datura, nocturnal
blossoms. Framed between pillars and architrave, great rectangles of
sky are seen, interstellar azure, and the countless scintillation of
stars. Environings such as these shed a grace and dignity even over
the actions of daily life. When the scene is in itself fair, it is
transfigured into what seems the vision of a poet.