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The Town.
It is but for want of a better word that one uses this term of ‘town’ to designate that picturesque ensemble of villa-studded parks and avenues, Batavia. There is, it is true, an older Batavia, grey, grim, and stony as any war-scarred city of Europe - the strong-hold which the steel-clad colonists of 1620 built on the ruins of burnt-down Jacatra. But, long since abandoned by soldiers and peaceful eitizens alike, and its once stately mansions degraded to offices and warehouses, it has sunk into a mere suburb - the business quarter of Batavia - alive during a few hours of
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the day only, and sinking back into a death-like stillness, as soon as the rumble of the last down-train has died away among its echoing streets. And the real Batavia - in contradistinction to which this ancient quarter is called ‘the town’ - is as unlike it as if it had been built by a different order of beings.
It is best described as a system of parks and avenues, linked by many a pleasant byway and shadowy path, with here and there a glimpse of the Kali Batavia gliding along between the bamboo groves on its banks, and everywhere the whiteness of low, pillared houses, standing well baek from the road, each in its own leafy garden. Instead of walls, a row of low stone pillars, not much higher than milestones, separates private from public grounds, so that from a distance one cannot see where the park ends and the street begins. The shadow of the tall trees of the avenue keeps the garden cool; and the white dust of the road is
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sprinkled with the flowers that lie scattered over the smooth grassplots and shell-strewn paths of the villa.
Among the squares of Batavia, the largest and most remarkable by far is the famous Koningsplein. It is not so much a square as simply a field, vast enough to build a eity on, dotted from place to place by pasturing cattle, and bordered on the four sides of its irregular quadrangle by a triple row of branching tamrinds. From the south, two aerial mountain-tops overlook it. The brown bare expanse of meadowy ground, lying thus broadly open to the sky, with nothing but clouds and cloud-like hill-tops rising above its distant rampart of trees, seems like a tract of untamed wilderness, strangely set in the midst of a city, and all the more savage and lonely for these smooth surroundings. Between the stems of the delicate-leaved tamarinds, glimpses are caught of gateways and pillared houses: the eastern side of the quad- | |
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rangle is disfigured by a glaring railway-station. And, notwithstanding, it remains a rugged solitary spot, a waste, irreclaimably barren, and which, by the sheer strength of its unconquered wildness, subdues its environment to its own mood. The houses, glinting between the trees, seem mere accidents of the landscape, simply heaps of stones; the glaring railway-station itself sinks into an indistinct whiteness, disassociated from any idea of human thought and enterprise.
Now and then a native traverses the field, slowly moving along an invisible track. He does not disturb the loneliness. He is indigenous to the place, its natural product, almost as much as the cicadas trilling among the grass blades, the snakes darting in and out among the crevices of the sun-baked soil, and the lean cattle, upon whose backs the crows perch. There is but one abiding power and presence here - the broad
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brown field - under the broad blue sky, shifting shades and splendours over it, and that horizon of sombre trees all around.
This vast sweep of sky gives the Plein a tone and atmosphere of its own. The changes in the hour and the season that are but guessed at from some occasional glimpse in the street, here are fully revealed. The sunshine may have been glaring enough among the whitewashed houses of Ryswyk and Molenvliet - it is on the Plein only that tropical sunshine manifests itself in the plenitude of its power. The great sun stands flaming in the dizzy heights; from the scorched field to the incandescent zenith the air is one blaze, motionless and white-hot, in which the tall tamarinds stand sere and grey, the grass shrivels up to a tawny hay, and the bare soil stiffens and cracks. The intolerable day is past. People, returning home from the town, see a roseate sheen playing over roofs
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and walls, a long crimson cloud sailing high overhead. Those walking on the Plein behold an apocalyptic heaven and a transfigured earth - a firmamental conflagration - eruptions of scarlet flame through incarnadined cloud, runnels of fire darting athwart the melting gold and translucent green of the horizon; hill-tops changed into craters and tall trees into fountains of zodiacal light.
And many are the nights, when, becoming aware of a dimness in the moonlit air, I have hastened to the Koningsplein, and found it whitely waving with mist, a very lake of vapour, fitfully heaving and sinking in the uncertain moonlight; and rolling airy waves against a shore of darkness. The seasons, too - how they triumph in this bit of open country! When, after the devouring heat of the East Monsoon, the good gift of the rains is poured down from the heavens, and the town knows of nothing but impracticable streets, flooded houses,
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and crumbling walls, then it is a time of resurrection and vernal glory for the Plein. The tamarinds, gaunt grey skeletons a few days ago, burst into full-leaved greenness: the hard, white, cracked soil is suddenly covered with tender grass, fresh as the herbage of an April meadow, in that land of freshness - Holland. In the early morning, the broad young blades are white with dew. There is a thin silvery haze in the air, which dissolves into a pink and golden radiance, as the first slanting sunbeams pierce it. And the tree tops, far off and indistinct, seem to rise airily over hollows of blue shade. Not far from the Koningsplein there is another square, its very opposite in aspect and character - the idyllic Duke's Park - very shadowy, fragrant, and green. One walks in it as in a poet's dream. All around there is the multitudinous budding and blossoming of faint-coloured flowers, a play of transparent bamboo-shadows that flit and shift
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over smooth grassplot and shell-streewn path, a ceaseless alternation of glooms and glories. Set amidst tall dark trees, whose topmost branches break out into flame-coloured blossom, there stands a marble mansion, temple-like in its severe grace of Doric columns and crowning frontispiece. A bend of the river enfolds the pleasance, murmuring. The Park of the Duke........ One wonders - was he at all like Olivia's princely suitor? and were these glades ever haunted by some Viola-like maiden, wooing him all-unsuspectedly from his forlorn allegiance? Surely, yonder starry orange-grove were a meet scene for the final recognition: -
‘Boy, thou hast said to me a thousand times,
Thou never wouldst love woman like to me....’
The irony of facts has willed it otherwise.
A duke it was, sure enough, that
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stood sponsor to the spot. But as (according to French authorities) there are fagots and fagots, even so there are Dukes and Dukes - and vastly more points of difference than of resemblance between Viola's gentle prince, and that thunderous old Lord of Saxen-Weimar, to whose rumbling Kreuzdonnerwetters and Himmels - Sakraments this abode of romance re-echoed some fifty years ago. A distant relative to the King of the Netherlands, he was indebted to his Royal kinsman's sense of family duty for these snug quarters, a very considerable income (from the National Treasury) and the post of an Army Commander, which upheld the dignitary in the pensioner. His tastes were few and simple, and saving the one delight of his soul, a penurious youth, and the hardships of the Napoleonic supremacy having so thoroughly taught him the habit, that it had become a second nature to him; and would not be ousted now by the mere
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fact of his having become rich. He was proud of his parsimony, too - prouder even than of his swearing, remarkable as it was and, amidst the pomp and cireumstance he had so late in life attained to, neglected not the humble talents which had solaced his less affluent days. So that, looking upon the many goodly acres around his palace, lying barren of all save grass, flowers, blossoming trees, and such like useless stuff, he at once saw what an unique opportunity it would afford him for the exercise of his favourite virtue. And, setting about the matter in his own thorough-going way, cut down the trees, ploughed up the grassplots, and had the grounds neatly laid out in oinon-beds, and plantations of the sirih, which the Javanese loves. Here one might meet the Duke of a morning - a portly, bald-pated, red-faced old warrior with a prodigious ‘meerschaum’ protruding from his bristling white beard, stars, crosses, and gold- | |
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lace all over his general's uniform, and a pair of list slippers on his rheumatic old toes. An orderly waiked behind him, holding a gold-edged sunshade over his shining pate. And, every now and then, the Duke would stop to look earnestly at his crops, and, stooping with a groaning of his flesh, and a creaking of his tightunic, straighten some trailing plant, or flick off an insect from the sirih leaves.
‘The Duke was in his kitchen-garden, A counting of his money,’
as one might vary the nursery rhyme.
For money it was he counted, when he gazed so long and earnestly at his vegetables - the alchemy of his thrifty imagination turning every young stalk and sprouting leaflet into a bit of metal, adorned with his Royal kinsman's effigy. And when the green pennies-to-be were plentiful, well content was the gardener; and if not - ‘Mountains and vales and floods, heard Ye those oaths?’ Tradition has kept an echo of
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them. They were something quite out of the common order, and with a style and sound so emphatically their own as to baffle imitation, and render description a hopeless task.
Nor did this originality wear off as, in the course of time, the worthy Duke began to forget the language of the Fatherland. For, losing his German, he found not his Dutch, and the expressions he composed out of such odds and ends of the two languages, as he could lay tongue to, would have astonished the builders of Babel Tower. Fortunately, however, his anger was as short-lived as it was violent, and, when the last thundersclap of Kreuzmillionen Himmels Donnerwetter had gradually died away in an indistinet grumbling, he would summon his attendant for a light to rekindle his pipe with a ‘come now, thou black pig-dog’ that sounded quite friendly. A good old blusterer at bottom, he treated his dependents kindly, and never sent away a beggar penny- | |
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less. ‘Doitless’ I should have written, for his donations never exceeded that amount.
There is a tale of an A.D.C., his appointed almoner for the time, having one day come to him with a subseription list, on which the customary doit figured as His Serene Highness the Duke of Saxen Weimar's contribution: and hinting at what he considered the disproportion between the exiguity of the gift, and the wealth and worldly station of the giver. He must have been a very rash A.D.C. The Duke turned upon him like a savage bull. And, after a volley of oaths: Too little! he roared: Too little! and again, Too little! I would have you know, younker; that a doit is a great deal when one has nothing at all!
It was a cry de profundis - laughable and half contemptible as it sounded, the echo from unforgotten depths of misery.
He had known what it meant ‘to
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have nothing at all.’ Wherefore, and for those winged words in which he uttered the knowledge, let his onion-beds be forgiven him. Of the outrage he committed, only the memory is left - the effects have long since been obliterated: bountiful tropical nature having again showered her treasures of leaf and flower over the beggared garden, and re-erected, in their places, the green towers of her trees.
Rijswijk, Noordwijk, and Molenvliet, the commereial quarters of Batavia, are more European in aspect than the Koningsplein: the house - shops for the most part - are built in straight rows; sidewaiks border the streets, and a noisy little steam-car pants and rattles past from morning till night. But, with these European, traits Javanese characteristies mingle, and the resulting effect is a most curious one, somewhat bewildering withal to the new-comer in its mixture of the unknown with the familiar. Absolutely commonplace
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shops are approached through gardens, the sidewalks are strewn with flowers of the flame-of-the-forest: and, at the street-corners, instead of cabs, one finds the nondescript saddo, its driver, gay in a flowered muslin vest and a gaudy headkerchief, squatting eross-legged on the back seat. Noordwijk is unique, an Amsterdam ‘gracht’ in a tropical setting. Imagine a long straight canal, a gleam of green-brown water between walls of reddish masonry - spanned from place to place by a bridge, and shaded by the softly-tinted leafage of tamarinds: on either side a wide, dusty road, arid gardens sweltering in the sun, and glaring white bungalows: the fiery blue of the tropical sky over it all. Gaudily-painted ‘praos’ glide down the dark water: native women pass up and down the flight of stone steps that climbs from the water's edge to the street, a flower stuck to their gleaming, wet hair; the tribe of fruit-vendors and sellers of sweet drinks and
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cakes have established themselves along the parapet, in the shade of the tamarinds; and the native crowd, coming and going all day long, makes a kaleidoscopic play of colours along the still dark canal.
From the little station at the corner of Noordwijk and Molenvliet, a steamcar runs along the canal down to the suburbs: every quarter of an hour it comes past, puffing and rattling: and every time the third-class compartment is choking full of natives. The fever and the fret of European life have seized upon these leisurely Orientals tool. They have abandoned their sirih-chewing and day-dreaming upon the square of matting in the cool eorner of the house, the dusty path along which they used to trudge in Indian file, when there was an urgent necessity for going to market; and behold them all perched upon this ‘devil's engine,’ where they cannot even sit down in the way they were taught to ‘hurkling on their hun- | |
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kers.’
The skippers and cargoes are more conservative in their ways - owing, perhaps, to their constant communion with the deliberate stream, sauntering along on its way from the hills to the sea, at its own pace. They take life easy; paddling along over the shifting shallows and mud-banks of the Kali (river) in the same leisurely way their forhears did; bringing red-tiles, brieks, and earthenware in flat-bottomed boats: or pushing alkong rafts of bamboo-stems, which they have felled in the woods up-stream. As they eome floating down the canal, these rafts of green bamboo, with the thin tips curving upwards like tails and stings of venomous insects, have a fantastical appearance of living, writhing thins, which the native raftsman seems to be for ever fighting with his long pole. After dark, when the torch at the prow blazes out like the single baleful eye of the monstrous
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thing, the day-dream deepens into a nightmare. And, shuddering, one remembers ghastly legends of river-dragons and serpents that haunt the sea, swimming up-stream to ravish some wretched mortal. The native boats appeal to merrier thoughts. With the staring white-and-black goggle eyes painted upon the prow, and the rows of red, blue, yellow, and green lozenges arranged like scales along the sides, they remind one irresistibly of grotesque fishes for those big children, the Javanese, to play with their little boats - at house-keeping. They eat, drink, sleep, and live in the prao. A roof of plaited bamboo leaves helps to make the stern into a semblance of a hut: and here, whilst the owner pushes along the floating home by means of a long pole and a deal of apparent exertion, his wife sits cooking the rice for the family meal over a brazier full of live coals: and the children tumble about in happy nakedness
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Javanese babies, by the way, always seem happy. What do they amuse themselves with, one wonders? They do not seem to know any games, and playthings they have none, except the tanjong-flowers they make necklaces of, and perchance some luckless cockroach, round whose hind leg they tie a thread to make him walk the way he should. Their parents' Mohammedan orthodoxy debars them from the society of their natural companions - the dogs: and, as for cats, that last resource of un-amused childhood in Europe, they hold them sacred, and would not dare to lay a playful hand upon one of them. Yet, there they are - plaything-less, naked, and supremely happy.
Their parents, for the matter of that, are exactly the same: they seem perfectly happy without any visible and adequate cause for such content. As long as they are not dying - and one sometimes doubts if Javanese did at all -
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all is well with them. The race has a special genius for happiness, the free gift of those same inscrutable powers who have inflicted industry, moral sense, and the overpowering desire for clothes upon the unfortunate nations of the North.
Following the left-ward bend of the canal - past the sluice, and the Post-office, the most hideous structure by the bye that ever disfigured a decent street - one eomes to the bridge of Kampong Bahru: and, crossing it, suddenly finds oneself in what seems another quarter of the globe. Tall narrow houses, quaintly decorated and crowned with tilted roofs, flaming out red against the contrasting azure of the sky, stand in close built rows: the wide street is full of jostling carts and vans, fairly humming with traffic: and the people move with an energy and briskness never seen among Javanese. This is the Chinese quarter. There are three or four such
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in the town, inhabited by Chinese exclusively. This habit of herding together - though now a matter of choice with the Celestials - is the survival of a time when Batavia had its ‘camp’ as mediaeval Italian cities had their ghetto: a period no further back than the beginning of last century.
At that time, when Chinese immigration threatened to become a danger to the colony, the then Governor-General, Valckenier, took some measures against the admittance of destitute Chinese, which, however well-designed, were so clumsily executed as to spread the rumour that the Government intended to deport even the Chinese residents of Batavia. A panic broke out among them, and then a revolt, in which they were soon joined by their countrymen from all over the island. After a desperate struggle, atroeities innumerable both sustained and inflicted, a siege sustained, and an attack of fifty and odd thousand beaten back
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by their two thousand men, the Hollanders succeeded in putting down the rebellion, and the enemy fled to the woods and swamps of the lowlands around Batavia. A few months later, however, a general amnesty having been granted, such of them as had escaped from famine and jungle-fever returned. and a special quarter was assigned to them, where it would be easy both to protect and to control them. There, they have since continued to live.
The houses of some rich Chinamen in the Kampong Bahru neighbourhood 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 through the weary streets
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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 summed up 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 fancy 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
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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 com- | |
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pound, 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 a epitome of material civilization. Nor does he stop in that tiny house. 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
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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 screens 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 pineapples and the champagne, about sending his sons 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 London.
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