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A Colonial Home.
It is the North which has introduced tight-fitting clothes and high houses, mused Taine, as, in the streets of Pompeii, he gazed at nobly planned peristyle and graceful arch, at the godlike figures shining from the 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 Northern mind when it looks upon a house in Batavia.
I am aware that Pompeii and Bata- | |
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via, pronounced in one breath, make a shrieking discord, and that, between a homely whitewashed 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 is 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
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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
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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 shadowy spot, as open to the breeze as the forest, whose flat spreading branch, supported on the stalwart sterns, seems to have been the model for its column-borne roof.
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 high 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
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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. And 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.
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 Netherlands Indian is the most hospitable of mortals, and is 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
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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 in 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 vicarious dining of of the Sovereign.
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
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settees in lieu of velvet-covered furniture, gauze hangings for draperies of silks and brocade. The inner hall of almost every house, true, is furnished in European style - exiles love to surround themselves with remembrances of their faraway home. But, though, very pretty, this room is generally empty of inhabitants, except, perhaps, for an hour now and then, during the rainy season.
In this climate, to sit in a velvet chair is to realize the sensations of Saint Lawrence, 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. Now, a bath in Java, is a very different thing from the dabbling among dishes in a bedroom, which Europeans
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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, here, bathing in the tropics is a pure delight, a luxury for body and soul - a dip into the Fontaine de Jouvence, almost the cheerful solemnity and semi-pagan act of worship, which the donkey-driving traveller through the Cevennes performs 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 sends the frigid stream pouring over him, he
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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
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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.
Curried fowl, fried fish, nutmeg sprinkled fricassée, hatched chicken delicately flavoured and cooked in a wrap of faintly fragrant leaves, fritters of shrimp paste, transparently pink, and so light that a breath of air might easily carry them away, then crisp cakes of Indian corn, dried and shredded deer flesh, fried slices of banana and pineapple, and the multitude of sweet, salt,
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bitter, sour, and pungent sambals, and, the basis of the whole elaborate system, the satisfying rice, all gone. Once more, I shall not try to explain. There pass more things 'twixt dapores and back galleries than are dreamt of in the dining rooms of Europe. And, once more, I asseverate, it is a fact, a not uncommon fact even, it would appear, for nobody is surprised at its recurrence. Your fellow guests do not so much as notice it, and your hostess only smiles a hospitable smile, and asks whether you have had enough of Cayenne pepper. For, without Cayenne pepper, it is not whole-some for any man to eat of the rice table, though the thousand and odd other condiments are almost equally necessary.
Records have survived of those Pantagruelic feasts with which the great ones of the mediaeval world delighted to celebrate the auspicious events of their lives, and the chronicler never fails to sum up the almost interminable list of
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the spices and essences with which the cook, on the advice of learned physicians, seasoned the viands, in order that, whilst the grosser meats satisfy 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 not might 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 Netherland 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. Tight fitting clothes are pronounced by Taine to be an invention of the North. A fortnight in Batavia will explain and, prove the theory
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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 loosefitting 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. On the Javanese, a small spare, slightly-made race, the garb sits not ungrace- | |
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fully; 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, it is not becoming to them either, at least in non-colonial eyes. The aesthetic 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 particoloured 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 tem- | |
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perature ranges between 85o and 95o 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, and under this colonial regime of dressing than in the British possessions, where they cling to the fashions of Europe.
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- | |
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books one may see babes similarly accoutred riding on the back of the parent-gladdening stork, and one comes to believe that ‘monkey-trousers’ are, after all, the paradisiacal garment of babes, and that by a Wordsworthian recollection of these things, they 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 would not like even the mother to take it away from her: feeds it, bathes it, dresses it prettily, take it out walking, 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
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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 ‘Terlaloe!’ ‘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 un- | |
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justly 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
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- 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 this difference, that it has more physical comfort, and less intellectual interest. The climate, it seems to me, is in a great part responsible for both these facts.
A continual temperature of about 90 degrees is not favourable to the growth of the finer faculties, in Northerners' brains at least. The little band of eminent men which has gone up from Java to shine in Dutch Universities must be regarded as the 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,
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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 with us in the East, ‘our house means 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 as- | |
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suredly 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 enthusiasts of sport 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
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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.
Since, people have reflected that a live Netherlands-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.
Outside is the black tropical night, heavy with the scent of invisible blos- | |
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soms, pricked here and there by the yellow spark of some trudging fruit-vendor's oilwick. The small fragment of Europe which 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.
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