The Sundanese who live in their ornamental little fancy baskets of houses beneath Sinagar’s tall tamarinds and kanari-trees are much to be envied by their people. The great estate is a world of its own, an agricultural Arcadia, where life goes on so happily that it is most appropriate that they should have presented model Javanese village life at the Chicago Exposition in 1893. These little Sinagar villagers have their frequent passers on one side or the other of the demesne by turn, with theater and wayang-wayang, or puppet-shows, lasting far into the night. Professional raconteurs thrill them with classic tales of their glorious past, while musicians make sweet, sad melodies to rise from gamelan, or gambang kayu, from fiddle, drum, bowls, bells, and the sonorous alang-alang—a rude instrument of most ancient origin, made of five or eight graduated bamboo tubes, cut like organ-pipes, and hung loosely in a frame, which, shaken by a master hand, or swinging in the breeze from some tree-branch, produces the strangest, most weird and fascinating melodies in all the East.
The play of village life about Sinagar is so prettily picturesque, so well presented and carried out, that it seems only a theatrical representation—a Petit Trianon sort of affair at the least. The smiling little women, who rub and toss tea-leaves over the wilting-trays at the fabrik, seem only to be playing with the loose leaves like a larger sort of intelligent, careful children. In the same way the plucking in the tea-gardens and the march to the fabrik in long, single file, with bundles balanced on their heads, are mere kindergarten exercises to develop the muscles of the back and secure an erect and graceful carriage—the secret, perhaps, of their splendid bearing, although all Javanese walk as kings and queens are supposed to walk, as the result of not being hampered by useless garments, and thus having control of every member and muscle of the body from earliest years. The same supple ease and grace distinguish their manners too, and one young planter said: “After living a few years among these gentle, graceful, winning natives, you cannot know how Europe jarred upon me. All the hard, sad, scowling faces and the harsh, angry voices oppressed me and made me so homesick for Java that I was really glad to turn away from it. I never before was so aware of the poverty, misery, distress, and vice of Europe.”
Visitors to the Paris Exposition of 1889 and the Chicago Exposition of 1893 had a typical model Javanese village set before them, and all were unstinted in their praises of the mise en scène and the human features of the exhibit. The Chicago village was peopled by families from the Sinagar and Parakan Salak estates, and, as a purely ethnological exhibit, was the one success of that kind among the many trifling side-shows that detracted from the character of the Midway Plaisance. The trip to America was the prize and reward allotted to the most industrious and deserving villagers, who with their properties and industrial accessories filled two sailing-ships from Batavia to Hong Kong, whence they took steamer to San Francisco and railway across the continent to Chicago. There was a large outlay required at the start, and the best workmen were away from the estates for a year; and between a dishonest shipping-agent at Batavia and the heavy commissions upon all receipts levied by the exposition’s managers at Chicago, and the free admissions which those same generous American managers bestowed so widely, the village did not nearly pay its current expenses, and the venture stands as an entire loss, or a gift to the American people from the two public-spirited Preanger planters who paid for it.
The good little Javanese who went to Chicago returned from their great outing as simple and unspoiled as before, settled down contentedly under their kanari-trees, and resumed their routine life in field and fabrik. And what tales they had to tell to open-mouthed villagers and neighbors, who sat around the traveled ones, to the neglect of wayang-wayang and provincial professional story-tellers, listening to their accounts of the very remarkable things on that other side of the world! For the first time ever in their lives these Javanese saw white men at work in the fields, drudging in city streets, and doing every kind of menial, coolie labor. They saw a few black men, blacker than Moormen, but they were great personages, wearing fine uniforms and having command of the railway-trains, and riding in the most magnificently gilded cars—individuals treated always with great respect, who came to the Midway Plaisance in rich clothing, with gold watch-chains, jeweled scarf-pins, and much loose money in their pockets—a superior and a moneyed, if not the ruling class, in that topsy-turvy country, America.
A striped cat of the common roof-and-fence variety was given to one of the village managers, and made the journey back to Java with the party. Everything else in Chicago had been paid for so dearly that this tabby could be fairly said to represent the entire profit and result of the Chicago village venture. The cat was named “Chicago,” and soon became the pet of the whole plantation, roaming freely everywhere, and feasting on small rice-mice and tropical birds. “Chicago” came to us on our arrival, rubbed in friendly fashion against one and another American knee, and purred loudly, as if recognizing us for compatriots. The morning we left Sinagar there was hubbub and running to and fro in the great quadrangle of the residence. “Chicago,” while walking the well-curb with gesticulating tail, had lost her balance, and with frightful cries and a splash ended her existence—by unpleasant coincidence, just as we were making our farewells to our kindly host. “In despair at being unable to return to America with you,” said one mourner, “she has thrown herself in the well. It is plainly suicide.” And this domestic tragedy saddened our leave-taking from those charming people, the fine flavor of whose hospitality, courtesy and kindliness took the edge from many of our disagreeable experiences in Java, and gave us pleasant memories with which to offset those of the other kind.
XII
ACROSS THE PREANGER REGENCIES
One may ride all day by train from Buitenzorg before reaching the limits of the Preanger regencies, where native princes still hold pretended sway; and it is a continuous landscape feast from the sunrise start to the sunset halt of the through-train. The railway line, after curving around the shoulder of Salak, runs through the vaunted hill-country, the region of the great tea, coffee, and kina estates; and from Soekaboemi to Bandong, the two great headquarters for planters, one perceives that the planter is paramount, the cultivator is king. The new cultures have not dispossessed the old, however, and the sawas, or flooded rice-fields, break the level of plain and valley floor with their myriad waving lines of division, and climb by terraces to the very hilltops—a system of cultivation and irrigation as old as the human race, and followed in these same valleys by these same Sundanese since the beginning of their recorded time. To them rice is a holy grain, the offspring of a god, and the gods’ best gift to man; a grain both cultivated and worshiped. It argues for the industry of a tropical race that they should grow this troublesome grain at all, the grain that demands more back-breaking toil and constant attention from planting to harvest-time than any other grain which grows. It would seem discouraging to rice-cultivation, too, when in old times the natives were taxed according to the area of their rice-lands only, and mulcted of a fifth of their rice when it was harvested—all in this happy land, where they might sit under the breadfruit- and banana-trees and doze at their ease, while those kindly fruits dropped in their laps. These picturesque rice-fields have won for Java the name of “the granary of the East,” and enabled it to export that grain in quantities, besides supporting its own great population, one of the densest in the world, and averaging four hundred and fifty inhabitants to each square mile. No fertilizer of any kind is applied to these irrigated rice-fields, save to burn over and plow under the rich stubble, after the padi, or ripe ears of grain, have been cut singly with a knife and borne away in miniature sheaves strung on carrying-poles across the peasants’ shoulders.
Beyond the region of the great plantations, where every hillside is cleared and planted up to the kina limit, and only the summits and steepest slopes are left to primeval jungle, there succeed great stretches of wild country, where remarkable engineering feats were required of the railway-builders. With two heavy engines the train climbs to Tjandjoer station, sixteen hundred feet above the sea; and there, if one has telegraphed the order ahead, he may lunch at ease in his compartment as the train goes on. He may draw from the three-storied lunch-basket handed in either a substantial riz tavel, consisting of a little of everything heaped upon a day’s ration of boiled rice, or a “tiffin,” whose pièce de résistance is a huge bifstek mit ard appelen, that would satisfy the cravings of any three dragoons. Either feast is followed by bread or bananas, with a generous section of a cheese, with mangosteens or other fruits, and one feels that he has surely reached the land of plenty and solid, solid comforts, where fate cannot harm him—when all this may be handed in to fleeting tourists at a florin and a half apiece.