That was my first glimpse of the life of tragedy through which a half-breed woman of the Orient has to go.
I met them in the Philippines, with Spanish and American blood running in their veins; I met Malay girls whose fathers had been German or English; I met Dyak girls whose fathers had been Dutch; and Javanese girls whose fathers had been either American, English or Dutch.
I stayed with such a woman in a home in Borneo. She had been a Dyak girl. Yet she did not look it. She had a beautiful home with beautiful English speaking children. I met her in the interior of Borneo a hundred miles from a single white woman. And yet in this far interior; living with her English husband who was the head of a mining project; she was keeping intact the English education of her children. There was a piano and the children played beautifully while the mother, in a rich contralto voice sang.
She was graceful, accomplished, beautiful, poised and sweet.
One night as we walked alone under the moonlight the Englishman opened his heart to me and said, "You are going to visit the Head-Hunting Dyaks to-morrow. You will see their abject squalor and filth. You will be surprised when I tell you that my wife was a Dyak girl and that I took her out of a Kampong fifteen years ago and took her to England."
"That's a lie!" I exclaimed.
"It is the truth!" he added.
Somehow his statement angered me. I don't know why. Perhaps it was the unusual heat of the tropics. We were directly on the Equator. I would have fought him for that statement.
But it was true.
"And the hell of it was that when I took her to England she was not happy and my people would not receive her. So we have had to come back to Borneo and live our lives in this fashion, far from civilization."