Baboe Dalima; or, The Opium Fiend

by M. T. H. Perelaer

One reason of this was, that the terrible effects of the poison did not at once manifest themselves. No—the enemy made his approaches in the dark, he advanced slowly but surely.

At first the quantity used was but very small, a couple of matas or so a day, not even as much as that, were for those primitive people who were wholly unaccustomed to the drug quite sufficient to procure blissful rest and delightful sleep, and to call up visions of the houris with which Mohammed has peopled his paradise. Double that quantity would produce exuberant gaiety and excite to the most inordinate passions. And that peace, that excitement, that bliss could be purchased at the opium-store for fourteen cents (about 2½d.) a mata. It was indeed dirt-cheap!

But—though in the beginning of his downward course, the opium smoker could rest satisfied with so moderate an allowance—albeit even this did not fail to make a breach in his modest budget seeing that the expenditure was pretty constant—presently his constitution began to get seasoned to it, and it took a much greater quantity of the poison to have the desired effect. At first a man would only occasionally indulge and take up the bedoedan (opium pipe) say, once a week; but gradually his nervous system began to grow accustomed to the stimulant, and then a craving for the poison began to be felt, so that already several men could be pointed out who, as soon as the influence of the narcotic had passed off, were dull, downcast, nervous and restless; and who, in consequence, felt utterly miserable. There was but one means to raise them out of their state of depression; and so they would take up the bedoedan again and swallow another dose of the poison. And thus by degrees it came to pass that at length there was with them scarcely an interval between one fit of intoxication and the next. That thus the prosperity of the dessa was inevitably destined to disappear did not admit of the slightest doubt.

Not only was the actual expense of this habitual indulgence greater than the means of many would allow; but the fatal habit engendered other cravings which also had to be gratified, and which helped to sweep away the little that opium had left. Moreover the love of work—never under any circumstances too strong in a tropical land—was first seriously impaired, then wholly extinguished, and, when not under the influence of the opiate the smoker was a slovenly, drowsy, lazy and objectless being, wholly unfit for the least exertion, whom nothing could rouse into activity but fresh indulgence in the baneful remedy. Indeed the sanitary condition of the people of Kaligaweh had degenerated with such alarming rapidity, that the most casual observer could not fail to be struck by the change. If, in days gone by, a European visited the dessa—which it is true but very seldom happened—he could not fail to admire the healthy and sturdy look of its inhabitants; but now he constantly came upon men and women whose ghastly appearance could not but excite in him the deepest pity. There could be no mistake about it, at a single glance it was evident that he had before him the victims of the terrible opium-fiend.

Those grey livid faces from which every trace of the Oriental bronze tint had faded; that wrinkled skin which looked like parchment overheated without being scorched; those wasted angular features which gave to the head the appearance of an unsightly skull; those deep sunken eyes with their jaded look and the dark blue rings around them; those stooping forms and receding chests; that extraordinary emaciation of the upper body, of which every rib could be counted, and which conveyed an idea of transparency, for the specimens which one met had hardly a rag about them; barely a bit of dirty clothing wrapped round their loins to hide their nakedness; that deep distressing cough which came, with hollow sound, from the labouring breast and spoke of lungs wasted with disease whilst it seemed to shake to pieces the entire frame; those spindle legs, so poor, so meagre, that they seemed hardly able to totter along under the weight of the body they had to support; all these formed the stereotyped picture of defaced humanity and bore incontestable witness to the protracted sufferings and unfathomable misery which had reduced these poor blighted creatures to mere walking skeletons.

When later on Singomengolo revisited the dessa where he first saw the light, and where, as a thanksoffering, he had planted the most terrible curse, his lip must have curled with a Satanic smile. Yes, all he could now see there; those cocoa-nut trees overgrown with moss and parasites; those orchards neglected and decayed; those unwatered rice-fields and half-tilled fields; those two or three oxen whose lean and sickly appearance spoke plainly of neglect and starvation; yes, all these things were his work. It was his fault that now the harvest was scanty and worthless; it was his fault that even that wretched harvest had been pawned long before the ani anis had so much as begun their work; it was his fault that clothes, furniture, tools, everything, had been sold or pawned for next to nothing, and that all had been swallowed up in the bottomless pit of that national curse.

But Babah Lim Yang Bing the opium farmer and his friends Ong Sing Beh and Kouw Thang the keepers of the pawnshop and of the gambling-booth were thriving wonderfully, and by their glorious aid the Dutch Treasury also was doing well in comparison, at least, with former days when those three noble sources of income contributed little or nothing to that unsatiable Moloch, the Revenue. Gaily therefore might the Dutch flag wave in the breeze, and proudly might the Dutch arms display their manly motto “Je Maintiendrai” above the opium-den, the gambling-booth and the pawn-shop—that much worshipped Trinity which forms the most elaborate system of extortion under which ever a poor conquered race has groaned.

Among the first of the infatuated wretches which fell into the pit so carefully dug for them, was Pak Ardjan, the father of the mate of the schooner brig Kiem Ping Hin. But a short time ago he was looked upon as a thriving and well-to-do Javanese peasant, the possessor of a yoke of powerful oxen, now he had gambled, rioted and smoked away house and goods and had plunged his helpless family into the most hideous misery.

Where was now the pleasant little cottage with its neat hedge of golden-yellow bamboo and its clean dark-brown roof of thatch made of leaves? Where was that comfortable little house in which Pak Ardjan was wont to sit with wife and children, passing his days in peace and cheerfully looking forward to the future?

Alas! the miserable hovel which now barely sheltered the once happy family was small, low, close, in fact a ruin. The single room of which it consisted was pervaded by that offensive musty smell which decaying bamboo generally emits. One look at the walls, the lower parts of which had already rotted away while the upper were rapidly crumbling under the attacks of the white ant, and one glance at the roof which was in one place bulging inwards and in another fast going to dust, was quite sufficient to account for the closeness of the air. On the bits of matting, which covered the still more filthy floor, the children were rolling about, many of them naked as they were born, while the mother and father, if he happened to be at home, clad in rags which were never washed and were leaving their bodies in tatters sat crouching on the floor stupidly gazing at the scene of desolation before them. Gazing! aye, if the stony mechanical stare could be called by that name. For the father had lost all consciousness of the hopeless misery of his family. The frightful selfishness produced by the abuse of opium: the constantly growing indifference to all things round about him, even to his own wife and children; the rapidly increasing love of idleness, and incapacity for work, for care, for exertion in fact of any kind which at length made him utterly unable to think of anything by day or night except of how he might gratify his passion and the other cravings it engendered, and for which he was driven to sacrifice everything. All this had clouded his sight, and as a man stone-blind he was tottering on the very brink of a precipice.