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.
