Rather than that you should be scandalized when you visit Bali, let me make it quite clear that in matters of morality the Balinese women are as easy as an old shoe. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they are unmoral rather than immoral. This is one of the conditions of life in the Insulinde which must be accepted by the traveler, just as he accepts as a matter of course the heat and the insects and the dirt. Though polygamy is practised, it is confined, because of the expense involved in maintaining a matrimonial stable, to the wealthier chiefs and other men of means. A Turkish pasha who maintained a large harem once told me that polygamy is as trying to the disposition as it is to the pocketbook, because of the incessant jealousies and bickerings among the wives. And I suppose the same conditions obtain in the seraglios of Bali. The former rajah of Kloeng Kloeng, now known as the Regent, a stout and jovial old gentleman arrayed in a cerise kain, a sky-blue head-cloth, and a white jacket with American twenty-dollar gold pieces for buttons, told me with a touch of pride that he had twenty-five wives in his harem. But his pride subsided like a pricked toy balloon when the Controleur, who had overheard the boast, mentioned that another regent, the ruler of a district at the western end of the island, possessed upward of three hundred wives—of the exact number he was not certain as it was constantly fluctuating. To my great regret I could not spare the time to pay a visit to this Balinese Brigham Young. There were a number of questions relative to domestic economy and household administration which I should have liked to have asked him.
Until very recent years, the young Balinese girl who married an old husband incurred the risk of meeting an untimely and extremely unpleasant end, for the island was the last stronghold of that strange and dreadful Hindu custom, suttee—the burning of widows. The last public suttee in Bali was held as recently as 1907, but, in spite of the stern prohibition of the practise by the Dutch, it is said that some women faithful to the old customs and to their dead husbands continue to join the latter on the funeral pyre. In fact, the Controleur at Kloeng Kloeng told me that, only a few weeks before my arrival, two women had begged him on their knees for permission to be burned with the body of the dear departed, whom they wished to share in death as in life.
The Balinese, being devout Hindus, burn their dead, but the cremations are held only twice yearly, being observed as holidays, like Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July. If a man dies shortly before the cremation season is due, his remains are kept in the house until they can be incinerated with befitting ceremony—though I imagine that, in view of the torrid climate, the members of his family perforce move elsewhere for the time being—but if he is so inconsiderate as to postpone his dying until after one of these semi-annual burnings, it becomes necessary to bury him. In a land where the thermometer frequently registers 100 and above, you couldn't keep a corpse around the house for several months, could you? When cremation day comes round again, however, he is dug up, taken to a temple and burned. There is no escaping the funeral-pyre in Bali. As we were leaving one of the cremation places I overheard the Doctor irreverently humming a paraphrase of a song which was very popular in the army during the war:
"Ashes to ashes and dust to dust,
If the grave don't get you the wood-pile must."
Unlike the South Sea islanders, who are rapidly dying out as the result of diseases introduced by Europeans, the population of Bali—which is one of the most densely peopled regions in the world, with 325 inhabitants to the square mile—is rapidly increasing, having more than doubled in the last fifteen years. This is due in some measure, no doubt, to the climate, which, though hot, is healthy save in certain low-lying coastal districts, but much more, I imagine, to the fact that there are scarcely a hundred Europeans on the island, and that, as there are no harbors worthy the name, European vessels rarely touch there. It is well for the Balinese that their enchanted island has no harbors, for harbors mean ships, and ships mean white men, and white men, particularly sailors, all too often leave undesirable mementoes of their visits behind them.
The men of Bali are a fine, strong, dignified, rather haughty race, fit mates in physique for their women. They are considerably taller than any other Malays whom I saw and possess less Mongoloid and Negroid characteristics, these being subdued by some strong primeval alien strain which is undoubtedly Caucasian. Though now peaceable enough, every Balinese man carries in his sash a kris—the long, curly-bladed knife which is the national weapon of Malaysia. Most of the krises that I examined were more ornamental than serviceable, some of them having scabbards of solid gold and hilts set with precious stones. Moreover, they are worn against the middle of the back, where they must be difficult to reach in an emergency. I imagine that the kris, universal though it is, serves as a symbol of former militancy rather than as a fighting weapon, just as the buttons at the back of our tailcoats serve to remind us that their original purpose was to support a sword-belt. But, though the Balinese have made no serious trouble for their Dutch rulers for upward of a decade, they long resisted European domination, as evidenced by the four bloody uprisings in the last three-quarters of a century—the last was in 1908—which were suppressed only with difficulty and considerable loss of life. When the shells from the gunboats began to burst over their towns, the rajahs, recognizing that their cause was lost, nerved themselves with opium and committed the traditional puputan, or, with their wives, threw themselves on the Dutch bayonets. But, though the Balinese have bowed perforce to the authority of the stout young woman who dwells in The Hague, they have none of the cringing servility, that look of pathetic appeal such as you see in the eyes of dogs which have been mistreated, so characteristic of the Javanese.
Though the three-quarters of a million natives in Bali have behind them the traditions of countless wars, the Dutch, who seem to possess an extraordinary talent for governing brown-skinned peoples, maintain their authority with a few companies of native soldiery officered by a handful of Europeans. The success of the Dutch in ruling Malays, who are notoriously turbulent and warlike, is largely due to the fact that, so long as the customs of the natives are not inimical to good government or to their own well-being, they studiously refrain from interfering with them. Nor is there the same social chasm separating Europeans and natives in the Insulinde which is found in Britain's Eastern possessions. Were a British official in India to marry a native woman he would be promptly recalled in disgrace; if a Dutch official marries a native woman she is accorded the same social recognition as her husband. Though in the old days probably ninety per cent of the Dutch officials and planters in the Insulinde lived with native women, these unions are constantly decreasing, today probably not more than ten per cent of the Europeans thus solving their domestic problems. It struck me, moreover, that the Dutch are more in sympathy with their native subjects, that they understand them better, than the British. It is a remarkable thing, when you stop to think of it, that a little nation like Holland, with a colonial army of less than thirty-five thousand men and no fleet worthy of the name, should be able to maintain its authority over fifty millions of natives, ten thousand miles away, with so little friction.
We passed the night in the small rest-house at Den Pasar which the government maintains for the use of its officials. I have said that we passed the night, mark you; I refuse to toy with the truth to the extent of saying that we slept. Why they call it a rest-house I cannot imagine. Never that I can recall, save only in a zoo, have I found myself on such intimate terms with so many forms of animal life as in that passangrahan. Cockroaches nearly as large as mice (before you raise your eyebrows at this statement talk with anyone who has traveled in Malaysia), spiders, centipedes, ants and beetles made my bedroom an entomologist's paradise. Some large winged animal, presumably a fruit-bat or a flying-fox, entered by the window and circled the room like an airplane; and, judging from the sounds which proceeded from beneath the bed, I gathered that the room also harbored a snake or a large rat, though which I was not certain as I saw no reason for investigating. A family of lizards disported themselves on the ceiling and when I menaced them with a stick they departed so hastily that one of them abandoned his tail, which dropped on the wash-stand. A squadron of mosquitoes—a sort of escadrille de chasse, as it were—kept me awake until daybreak, when they were relieved by a skirmishing party of cimex lectulariae, which are well known in America under a shorter and less polite name. Fishes only were absent, but I am convinced that their neglect of me was due to ignorance of my presence. Had they known of it I feel certain that the climbing fish, which is one of the curiosities of these waters, would have flopped on to my pillow.