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 thunderclap of Kreuzmillionen Himmels Donnerwetter had gradually died away in an indistinct grumbling, he would summon his attendant for a light to rekindle his pipe with a "come now, thou black pigdog" that sounded quite friendly. A kind-hearted old blusterer at bottom, he treated his dependents well and never sent away a beggar pennyless. "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 subscription-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 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.
Entrance to a rich Chinaman's House.
Rijswijk, Noordwijk, and Molenvliet, the commercial quarters of Batavia, are more European in aspect than the Koningsplein; the houses—shops for the most part—are built in straight rows; a pavement borders the streets, and a noisy little steam-car pants and rattles past from morning till night. But, with these European traits, Javanese characteristics 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 shops are approached through gardens, the pavement is strewn with flowers of the flame-of-the-forest: and, at the street-corners, instead of cabs, one finds the nondescript sadoo, its driver, gay in a flowered muslin vest and a gaudy headkerchief, squatting cross-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 canal; native women pass up and down the flight of stone steps that climbs from the water's edge to the street, a flower stuck into their gleaming hair, still wet from the bath; the tribe of fruitvendors and sellers of sweet drinks and 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 water.
From the little station at the corner of Noordwijk and Molenvliet, a steam-car 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 too. They have abandoned their sirih-chewing and day-dreaming upon the square of matting in the cool corner 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 hunkers."
