“Count the moons; I shall stay away three times twelve moons, … this moon not included.… See, Adinda, at every new moon, cut a notch in your rice-block. When you have cut three times twelve lines, I will be under the Ketapan the next day, … do you promise to be there?”
“Yes, Saïdjah, I will be there under the ketapan, near the djati-wood, when you come back.”
Hereupon Saïdjah tore a piece off his blue turban, which was very much worn, and gave the piece of linen to Adinda to keep it as a pledge; and then he left her and Badoer. He walked many days. He passed Rankas-Betong, which was not then the capital of Lebak, and Warong-Goonoong, where was the house of the Assistant Resident, and the following day saw Pamarangang, which lies as in a garden. The next day he arrived at Serang, and was astonished at the magnificence and size of the place, and the number of stone houses covered with red tiles. Saïdjah had never before seen such a thing. He remained there a day, because he was tired; but, during the night, in the coolness, he went further, and the following day, before the shadow had descended to his lips, though he wore the large toodoong[22] which his father had left him, he arrived at Tangerang.
At Tangerang he bathed in the river near the passage, and rested in the house of an acquaintance of his father’s, [[330]]who showed him how to make straw-hats like those that come from Manilla. He stayed there a day to learn that, because he thought to be able to get something by that afterwards, if he should perhaps not succeed at Batavia. The following day towards the evening when it was cool he thanked his host very much, and went on. As soon as it was quite dark, when nobody could see it, he brought forth the leaf in which he kept the ‘melatti’ which Adinda had given him under the ‘Ketapan’ tree, for he was sad because he should not see her for so long a time. The first day, and the second day likewise, he had not felt so much how lonely he was, because his soul was quite captivated by the grand idea of gaining money enough to buy two buffaloes, and his father had never possessed more than one; and his thoughts were too much concentrated in the hope of seeing Adinda again, to make room for much grief at his leave-taking. He took that leave in anxious hope, and mingled the memory of it in his thoughts, with the prospect of again seeing Adinda at last under the ketapan. For this prospect so occupied his heart that he, on leaving Badoer, and passing that tree, felt something like joy, as if the thirty-six moons were already past that separated him from that moment. It had appeared to him as if he had only to turn round, as if on his return from the journey, to see Adinda waiting for him under the tree. But the further he went away from Badoer, the more attention he paid to the duration of one [[331]]day, the longer he thought the period of the thirty-six moons before him. There was something in his soul which made him walk less quickly—he felt affliction in his knees, and though it was not dejection that overcame him, yet it was mournfulness, which is not far from it. He thought of returning;—but what would Adinda think of so little heart?
Therefore he walked on, though less rapidly than the first day. He had the ‘melatti’ in his hand, and often pressed it to his breast. He had become much older during the last three days, and he no longer understood how he had lived so calmly before, when Adinda was so near him, and he could see her as often as he liked. But now he could not be calm, when he expected that he should see her again by and by. Nor did he understand why he after having taken leave had not returned once more to look at her again. And he even remembered how a short time ago he had quarrelled with her about the cord which she had made for the lalayang[23] of her brother, and which had broken because there was a defect in her work by which a wager had been lost against the children of Tjipoeroet. “How was it possible,” he thought, “to have been angry about that with Adinda? For if there was a defect in the cord, and if the wager of Badoer against [[332]]Tjipoeroet had been lost in consequence, and not by the piece of glass which little Djamien had thrown while hiding himself behind the pagger,[24] ought I then to have been so rough to her, and called her by unseemly names? What if I die at Batavia without having asked her pardon for such harshness? Will it not make me appear as if I were a bad man, who scolds a girl? And when it is heard that I have died in a foreign country, will not every one at Badoer say, ‘It is good that Saïdjah died; for he had an insolent mouth against Adinda?’ ”
Thus his thoughts took a course which differed much from their former buoyancy, and involuntarily were uttered, first in half words and softly, soon in a monologue, and at last in the melancholy song, of which a translation follows. My first intention was to have recourse to measure and rhyme in this translation; but, like Havelaar, I thought it better to leave it without the corset.
“I do not know where I shall die.
I saw the great sea on the south-coast,
when I was there with my father making salt;[25]
If I die at sea, and my body is thrown into the