The further side of silence

Front matter

THE FURTHER

SI! OF

SILENCE

Preface

NOBODY, I am assured, ever reads a preface. I consider, therefore, that I may safely regard this foreword as a confidential document, written for the sole purpose of salving my own sensitive conscience. From this point of view I regard it as necessary, for it seems to me that the imposture involved in issuing as a work of fiction a volume which is in the main a record of fact, should be frankly confessed from the outset. A knowledge of the truth that these initial pages will remain to some extent a secret between me, the proofreader, and the printer, will enable me, however, to write of personal things with a larger measure of freedom than I should otherwise be bold enough to use.

The, stories composing this book, with a single exception — "The Ghoul," which reached me at second hand- — are all relations of incidents in which I have had a part, or in which the principal actors have been familiarly known to me. They faithfully reproduce conditions of life as they existed in the Malayan Peninsula before the white men took a hand in the government of the native states, or immediately after our coming — things as I knew them between 1883 and 1903 — the twenty years that I passed in that most beautiful and at one time little frequented viii PREFACE

corner of Asia. They are written with a full appreciation of the native point of view, and of a people for whom I entertain much affection and sympathy. Incidentally, however, they will perhaps help to explain why British civil servants in the East occasionally lay themselves open to the charge of being animated by "a hungry acquisitiveness" and a passion for annexing the territory of their native neighbours.

Fate and a rather courageous Colonial Governor ordained that I should be sent on a special mission to the Sultan of Pahang — a large Malayan state on the eastern seaboard of the Peninsula — before I was quite one and twenty years of age. This course was not, at the time, as reckless and desperate as it sounds. I had already more than three years' service and had acquired what was reckoned an unusual acquaintance with the vernacular. The mission would entail a long overland journey and an absence of more than three months' duration. Senior men who possessed the necessary qualifications could not be spared for so protracted a period, and thus the choice fell upon me, to my very great content.

My object was to obtain from the Sultan the promise of a treaty surrendering the management of his foreign relations to the British Government, and accepting the appointment of a Political Agent at his court. This I obtained and bore in triumph to Singapore, whence I immediately returned to negotiate the details of the treaty, and subsequently

PREFACE ix

to reside at the Sultan's court as the Agent in question.

This meant that I was privileged to live for nearly two years in complete isolation among the Malays in a native state which was annually cut off from the outside world from October to March by the fury of the northeast monsoon; that this befell me at perhaps the most impressionable period of my life; that having already acquired considerable familiarity with the people, their ideas and their language, I was afforded an unusual opportunity of completing and perfecting my knowledge; and that circumstances compelled me to live in a native hut, on native food, and in native fashion, in the company of a couple of dozen Malays — friends of mine, from the western side of the Peninsula, who had elected to follow my fortunes. Rarely seeing a white face or speaking a word of my own tongue, it thus fell to my lot to be admitted to Us coulisses of life in a native state, as it was before the influence of Europeans had tampered with its eccentricities.

Pahang, when I entered it in 1887, presented an almost exact counterpart to the feudal kingdoms of mediaeval Europe. I saw it pass under the "protection" of Great Britain, which in this case was barely distinguishable from "annexation." I subsequently spent a year or so fighting in dense forests to make that protection a permanency, for some of the chiefs resented our encroachment upon their prerogatives; and when I quitted the land a decade and a half later, it was as safe and alx PREFACE

most as peaceful and orderly as an English countryside.

Thus at a preposterously early age I was the principal instrument in adding 15,000 square miles of territory to the British dependencies in the East; arid this fact forces me to the conclusion that my share in the business stands in need of some explanation and defence, if readers who are not themselves Britishers are to be persuaded that I am not merely a thief upon a rather large scale. The stories and sketches contained in this book supply ine with both. I, who write, have with my own eyes seen the Malayan prison; have lived at a Malayan court; have shared the life of the people of all ranks and classes in their towns and villages, in their rice-fields, on their rivers, and in the magnificent forests which cover the face of their country. I have travelled with them on foot, by boats, and raft. I have fought with and against them. I have camped with the downtrodden aboriginal tribes of jungle-dwelling Sakai and Semang, and have heard from their own lips the tales of their miseries. I have watched at close quarters, and in intolerable impotericy to aid or save, the lives which all these people lived before the white men came to defend their weakness against the oppression and the wrong wrought to them by tyrants of their own race; and I have seen them gradually emerge from the dark shadow in which their days were passed, into the daylight of a personal freedom such as white men prize above most mundane things.

PREFACE xi

The late Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, a' recent British Prime Minister, once gave vent to the aphorism that "good government can never be a satisfactory substitute for self-government." That may or may not be true; but the Malays, be it remembered, never possessed "self-government." The rule of their rajas and chiefs was one of the most absolute and cynical autocracies that the mind of man has conceived; and the people living under it were mercilessly exploited, and possessed no rights either of person or of property. To their case, therefore, the phrase quoted above has only the most remote and academical application; but no words or sentiments, no matter how generous or beautiful, would avail to staunch the blood which I saw flow, or to dry the tears which I saw shed in Pahang when I lived in that native state under its own administration.

If, then, my stories move you at all, and if they inspire in you any measure of pity or of desire to see the weak protected and their wrongs avenged, you may judge how passionate was the determination to make the recurrence of such things impossible whereby I and my fellow workers in Malaya were inspired. For we, alas, lived in the midst of the happenings of which you only read.

Hugh Clifford,

Government House, The Gold Coast, British West Africa,

Contents

PAGE

Preface . vii

I. The Further Side of Silence . . 3

II

Kria's brief wooing was purely a commercial transaction, in which Pi-Noi herself was the last person any one dreamed of consulting. The naked jungle-folk who were her papa and mamma developed unsuspected business aptitude at this juncture of their affairs, the number of knife-blades, cooking-pots, rolls of red twill, flints and steels, and the like, which they demanded, maintaining a nice proportion to Kria's growing passion for the girl. As this became hotter day by day, there was little haggling on his part, and presently an amazing sum (from first to last it cannot have fallen far short of fifteen shillings sterling) was paid to Pi-NoiV parents, to their great honour, glory, and satisfaction, and during an unforgettable forenoon the Sakai of all ages and both sexes gorged themselves to repletion at Kria's expense. Then Pi-Noi was placed upon an ant heap, and a shaggy pack of hiccoughing male relatives girt the place about in attitudes of defence. It was now Kria's task to touch the girl's hand in spite of the resistance of her defenders. This is all that survives among the hill-people of the old-time custom of marriage by capture; and when the bridegroom is one of their own folk it still happens sometimes that he carries a sore and bleeding head and a badly bruised body to his marriage bed. The bride, at such times, darts hither and thither within the ring of her kinsmen, with real or simulated desire to evade her conqueror, till the latter has the luck to touch her hand or to bring her to the ground by a well-aimed blow from his club.

Kria, however, had an unusually easy time of it, for the Sakai hold all Malays in awe, and Pi-Noi was hampered by the unaccustomed silk garments with which her husband's generosity had clothed her. Very soon, therefore, Kria, his eyes blazing, gave a great cry as he won a grip upon her wrist, and at once Pi-Noi, in obedience to established custom, submitted herself to his control. Hand in hand, the man and wife sped across the clearing in the direction of the river, with a string of hooting, gesticulating, shock-headed, naked savages trailing out behind them. Below the high bank Kria's canoe was moored, and leaping into her, they pushed out into midstream. Then the current caught them; the dugout became suddenly a thing instinct with life; a bend hid the Sakai camp from view; and, amid the immense, hushed stillness of the forest afternoon, these two set out upon the oldest and newest of all pilgrimages.

With the strong current aiding them, they had only a journey of a few hours to make, a time short enough for any lovers' transit, though Kria was busy steering the boat, and Pi-Noi sat in the bows helping to direct its course by an occasional timely punt. He had won his heart's desire, and the home to which he was bearing his love lay close at hand; yet even during this honeymoon journeying down the clear, rapid-beset river and through the heart of that magnificent wilderness of woodland, Kria had leisure in which to experience the assaults of a mysterious and perplexing jealousy. He was as utterly alone with the girl as if they two were the first or the last of their kind to wander across the face of the earth; yet he had an uneasy consciousness that Pi-Noi had companions, invisible and inaudible to him, in whose presence he knew himself to be de trop* In spite of her silence and immobility, he knew instinctively that always she was holding intimate commune with animate nature in a language which had its beginning upon the further side of silence. It was not only a tongue which he could not hear. It seemed to cleave an abyss between them; to wrench her from his grasp ere ever he had securely won her; to lift her out of his life; to leave, him yearning after her with piteous, imploring face upturned and impotent, outstretched arms.

Suddenly the thought of this girl's elusiveness shook him with a panic that checked his heartbeats.

She. was journeying with him now of her own free will, but what if her will should veer? What if the lures of the jungle should prove too strong for such spells as his poor love and longing could lend him wit to work? What if that cruel wilderness whence she had come should yawn and once more engulf her? As Kria steered the boat with mechanical skill, and, watching the girl with hungry eyes, knew himself to be by her totally forgotten, he experienced with new force and reason the dread which alloys the delight of many a lover even in the supreme moment of possession — the haunting terror of loss. Kria went in fear, not only of Time and Death, those two grim highwaymen who lie in wait for love; there was also the Forest. Every last, least twig of it, every creature that moved unseen beneath its shade, was his enemy, and it was through long files of such foemen that he bore the bride- they threatened to ravish from him. And thus — the girl abstracted and aloof, the man a prey to besetting, though as yet vaguely formulated, fears — Kria and Pi-Noi wended their way downstream, through the wonder of the tropical afternoon, to begin in their new home the difficult experiment of married life.

Ill

Pi-Noi was very much a child, and, childlike, she found delight in new toys. The palatial house which now was hers; the wealth of cooking-pots; the beautiful Malay silks which Kria had given to her; the abundance of good food, and Kria's extravagant kindness, were all new and very pleasant things. She was playing at being a Malay housewife with all the elaborate make-believe which is a special faculty of the child mind. She would load her small body with gay clothes, clamp ornaments of gold about her wrists, stick long silver pins in her glossy hair, and strut about, laughing rapturously at this new, fantastic game. But throughout she was only mimicking Malayan ways for her own distraction and amusement; she was not seriously attempting to adapt herself to her husband's conception of femininity. She would often cross-question Kria as to the practices of his womenfolk, and would immediately imitate their shining example with a humorous completeness. This pleased him, for he interpreted all this irresponsible child's play as the pathetic efforts of a woman to fulfil the expectations of the man she loves.

The illusion was short lived. Very soon Pi-Noi, the novelty of her new grandeur wearing thin, began to be irked by the tyranny of Malayan garments. All her life she had gone nude, with limbs fetterless as the wings of a bird. For a space the love of personal adornment, which is implanted in the heart of even the most primitive of feminine creatures, did battle with bodily discomfort; but the hour came when ease defeated vanity. Kria, returning home from a short trip upstream, found his wife, who did not expect him, clothed only in her waterweed girdle, lying prone in the sun-baked dust before their dwelling, crooning a strange ditty to herself, and kicking two rebellious bare legs joyously Jin the air.

He was horribly shocked and outraged; for though a naked Sakai girl was one of the commonest sights in the valley, this girl was his wife, and he had been hugging to his heart the belief that she was rapidly developing into a decorous Malayan lady. Also his eye, which had become accustomed to see her clad with the elaborate modesty of his own womenkind, saw in her pristine nudity an amazing impropriety. Feeling wrathful and disgraced, he rushed at her and tried to seize her, but she leaped to her feet in the twinkling of an eye and eluded him with forestbred ease. He brought up short, panting hard, after an inglorious chase; and much petting, coaxing, and pleading were needed before he could lure her back into the house and persuade her to don even one short Malayan waist skirt. He had to fight his every instinct, for he longed to take a stick to her, being imbued with the Malay man's unshakable belief in the ability of the rod to inspire in a wife a proper sense of subordination; but he did not dare. Malayan women accept such happenings with the meekness which experience reserves for the inevitable; but in the forest Pi-Noi had a protector — a protector who never left her.

The compromise of the short waist skirt duly effected, things again went on smoothly for a space. Kria suspected that Pi-Noi broke the inadequate compact unblushingly whenever he was absent; but he loved the girl more madly every day, and was not looking for trouble, if it might by any means be shirked.

Some ten days later another incident occurred to break upon his peace. Pi-Noi, in common with all the people of her race and other nocturnal animals, was a restless bedfellow, waking at frequent intervals through the night, and being given at such times to prowling about the house in search of scraps of food to eat and tobacco to smoke. Kria detested this peculiarity, since it emphasized the difference of race and of degrees of civilization which yawned between him and his wife, but he ignored it until one evening, when he had waked to find her gone, and had wide-eyed awaited her return for something over an hour. Then he went in search of her.

He hunted through the hut in vain; passed to the door, and finding it open, climbed down the stair-ladder into the moonlight night. A big fire had been lighted that evening, to the windward of the house, in order that the smoke might drive away the sand-flies, and in the warm, raked-out wood ashes Kria found his wife. She was sleeping "as the devils sleep," with her little, perfectly formed body, draped only by the offending girdle, stretched at ease upon its breast, and with her face nestling cozily upon her folded arms. All about her the soft gray ashes were heaped, and her skin was seen, even in the moonlight, to be plastered thickly with great smears of the stuff. To Kria, a Malay of the Malays, whose only conception of comfort, propriety, and civilization was that prevailing among his people, this discarding of his roof tree, this turning of the back upon decency and cleanliness and convention, was an incomprehensible madness, but also an act of unspeakable perversity and naughtiness. White with anger, he looked at the sleeping girl, and even as he looked, warned by the marvellous jungleinstinct, she awoke with a leap that bore her a dozen feet away from him. One glance she cast at his set face, then plunged headlong into covert.

Wrath died down within him on the. instant, and was replaced by a great fear. Frantically he ran to the spot where she had vanished, calling upon her by name. In vain search he wandered to the edge of the clearing, and so out into the forest, pleading with her to return, vowing that he would not harm a hair of her head, cajoling, entreating, beseeching, and now and again breaking forth into uncontrollable rage and threat. All night he sought for her. The cold gray dawn, creeping up through banks of mist, to look chillingly upon a dew-drenched world, found him, with blank despair in his heart, with soaked clothes and sodden flesh tattered by the jungle thorns, making his way back to his empty house with the plodding pain of a man in a nightmare. A last hope was kindled as he drew near — the hope that Pi-Noi might have crept homeward while he wandered through the night looking for her — but it flickered up for an instant only to die, as the fire had died above the gray ashes which still bore the imprint of her little body.

Kria, sitting lonely in his hut, looked forth upon a barren world, and saw how desolate is life when love has fled.

IV

As soon as Kria had pulled himself together sufficiently to enable him to think out a course of action, he set off for the Sakai camp, whence he had taken his wife; but her people had, or professed to have, no news of her. She had always been liar, they averred — more liar even than the rest of her people. (Liar means "wild," as animals which defy capture are wild.)

"The portals of the jungle are open to her," said her father indifferently. He was squatting on the ground, holding between his crooked knees a big, conical, basketwork fish-trap which he was fashion • ing. He spoke thickly through half a dozen lengths of rattan which he held in his mouth, the ends hanging down on either side like a monstrous and disreputable moustache, and he did not so much as raise his eyes to look at his son-in-law. "She will come to no harm," he grunted. "Perhaps presently she will return."

But Kria did not want his wife "presently" or "perhaps"; he wanted her now, at once, without a moment's delay. He explained this to the assembled Sakai with considerable vehemence.

"That which is in the jungle is in the jungle," they said oracularly. Folk who are liar, they explained, are very difficult to catch, resent capture, and if brought back before their wanderlust is an expended passion, are very apt to run away again. Then the laborious business of tracking and catching them has to be undertaken anew, to the immense fatigue and annoyance of every one concerned. It is better, they urged, to let such people grow weary of the jungle. at their leisure; then, in the fullness of time, they will return of their own free will.

The limitations of their intellects and vocabularies made it impossible for the Sakai to express themselves quite as clearly as this, but the above represents the gist of their dispassionate opinions. They took several torturing hours and innumerable monosyllables to explain them to Kria, who gnashed and raved in his impatience.

"Pi-Noi is so excessively liar," said that young woman's mamma, speaking with a sort of dreamy indifference while, with noisy nails, she tore at her scaly hide. "She is so incurably liar that it would be better, Inche', to abandon her to the jungle and to take one of her sisters to wife in her stead. Jag-ok N here," she added, indicating with outthrust chin a splay-faced little girl, who, in awful fashion, was cleaning fish with her fingers, " Jag-ok N is hardly to be called liar at all. Besides, she hates being beaten, and if you use a rod to her, she would make, I am convinced, a very obedient and amenable wife. We will let you have Jag-ok N very cheap— say half the price you paid for Pi-Noi, her sister."

But Kria did not want Jag-ok N , who was ill favoured and covered from tip to toe with skin diseases, at any price at all. He wanted her sister, who was still to him the only woman in the world. The slack indifference of the Sakai maddened him, and in the end he threatened to trounce his father-in-law soundly if that worthy elder did not forthwith aid him in tracking the recalcitrant Pi-Noi.

In an instant A-Gap, the Rhinoceros, as Pi-Noi's papa was named, was standing before Kria, shaking as a leaf is shaken, for the Sakai's inherited fear of the Malay is an emotion which has for its justification a sound historical basis. Immediately the whole camp was in a turmoil; the danger call was sounding, and those of the Sakai to whom escape was open were melting into the forest as swiftly and noiselessly as flitting shadows. A-Gap and two younger men, however, squealing dismally, were clutched by their frowsy elf-locks, hustled on board Kria's canoe, and soon were paddling rapidly downstream in the direction of his house. The hour of their arrival was too late for anything further to be done that day, so Kria spent a miserable night, and awoke next morning to find that the three Sakai had disappeared. They had cut a hole in the bamboo floor, and had dropped noiselessly through it on to the earth beneath, what time Kria had been tossing upon the mat which he had placed athwart the doorway. They had arrived at two conclusions: firstly, that Kria was mad, which made him a highly undesirable companion; and, secondly, that if he caught Pi-Noi he would very certainly kill her. They were convinced of his insanity because he was making such an absurd fuss about the recovery of a particular girl, when all the time, as everybody knew, there were hundreds and hundreds of others, just as good, to be had for the asking. Their reasonable fears for Pi-Noi's safety were based upon the argument that a person who would beat a man would certainly kill a woman. On the whole, they concluded, it would be at once more wholesome and more pleasant to go away now, and to avoid Kria for the future.

Kria, unaided, tried some very amateurish tracking on his own account, his great love setting at naught the Malay's instinctive horror of entering the jungle unaccompanied. He succeeded only in getting hopelessly bushed, and at last won his way back to his house, almost by a miracle. He was worn out with anxiety and fatigue, foot-sore, heartsore, weary soul and body, and nearly starved to death. The Sakai seemed to have vanished from the forest for twenty miles around; his trading was at a standstill; he was humiliated to the dust; and his utter impotence was like a load of galling fetters clamped about his soul. Yet all the while his love of Pi-Noi and his hungry longing for her were only intensified by her absence and her heartlessness. He missed her— was haunted by the sound of her voice — was tortured by elusive wraiths of her which emerged suddenly to mock him from the forest's pitiless.depths.

V

The moon had been near the full on the night when the wanderlust, as the Sakai called it, had come to Pi-Noi. A little crescent was hanging just above the forest in the wake of the sunset before Kria received any hint of her continued existence. Returning one evening to his house from a visit to his fish-weir, he found on the threshold a small heap of jungle-offerings — wild duri-an and other fruit, the edible shoot of the ibul palm, and a collection of similar miscellaneous trash. At this sight the blood flew to Kria's face, then stormed back into a heart that pumped and leaped. These things shouted their meaning in his ears.

Trembling with joyful agitation, Kria passed to the inner room of the house, and examined Pi-Noi's store of clothes. Not only a silk waistcloth, but a long blouse, such as Malayan women wear as an upper garment, were missing. Evidently Pi-Noi was bent upon doing the thing handsomely now that she had decided upon submission, and to that end was pandering with a generous completeness to his absurd prejudices on the subject of wearing apparel. Also she must be close at hand, for it was unlikely that she would stray far into the jungle clad in those delicate silks.

Pi-Noi's surrender was an instant victory for her. No sooner had Kria made his discovery than, with a wildly beating heart, he was standing in the doorway, calling softly, in a voice that shook and failed him,, using a pet name known only to Pi- Noi and to himself. All his rage, all his humiliations, all his sufferings were forgotten. He only knew that Pi-Noi had come back to him, and

THE FURTHER SIDE OP SILENCE 23

that all at once he was thankful and tearful and glad.

"Chep!" (Little Bird!) he cried. "Chep! Are you there, Fruit of my Heart? Come to me, Little One! Come, O come!"

From somewhere in the brushwood near at hand came the sound of musical laughter — the laughter of a woman who knows her po'ver, and finds in its tyrannous exercise a triumph and delight.

"Is there space in the house for me?" she inquired demurely, tilting her head and gazing at him in mockery, while again a ripple of light laughter broke from her lips. "Or shall I go to my other house . . . the forest?"

Kria, his withers wrung by the conviction of her elusiveness and his own impotence, tortured, too, by a fear lest even now some capricious perversity might induce her again to desert him, could only stammer out wild protestations of love and welcome. The girl was thoroughly aware that she was complete mistress of the situation, and even Kria was tempted to believe that he, not she, was the wrongdoer. In moments of rage, during her absence, he. had often promised himself that, if he ever laid hands upon her again, he would give her the very soundest whipping that the forest had ever seen administered to an erring wife; but now these vows were forgotten. All he desired was to have her back, on any terms, at any price, at no matter what sacrifice, of pride, of honour, of self-respect. Even in that instant of passion and emotion he saw, though dimly, that this woman was killing his soul.

Reassured at last as to the amiability of Kria's intentions, Pi-Noi drew near him after the manner of other wild forest creatures, her every muscle braced for flight; and then she was in his arms, and he had borne her up the stair-ladder with infinite tenderness, crooning and weeping over her with broken words of love.

VI

Thus began the years of Kria's slavery — only three little years of life, as men count time, but an eternity; no less, if judged by the number and violence of the emotions packed within them. While they lasted, periods of almost delirious delight alternated with seasons of acute mental suffering and moral struggle. Sometimes for six weeks or more at a time Pi-Noi would live contentedly under his roof, and he would strive to trick himself into the belief that the wanderlust was dead in her. Then, upon a certain day, his watchful eyes would note a subtle change. She would be lost to him, sitting in the doorway of the hut with parted lips, while into her eyes there crept a dreamy, faraway mystery. The depths of her absorption would be so profound that she would take no heed of words addressed to her; and Kria would know, in his miserable heart, that she was listening to the voices which begin upon the further side of silence, and was holding inaudible commune with the forest world. He would guard her then stealthily, sleeplessly, so that his business was neglected, and his body was parched with the fever bred of anxiety and want of rest; but sooner or later nature would overcome him, and he would awake with a shock from the sleep of exhaustion to see Pi-Noi's scattered garments heaped about the floor, and to find that the girl herself had once more eluded his vigilance.