The Further Side of Silence/At a Malayan Court
AT A MALAYAN COURT
WHERE and when these things happened does not signify at all. The east coast of the Malay Peninsula is a long one; several native states occupy its seaboard; and until quite recently the manners of the râjas who ruled over them had not suffered any material change for centuries. Thus, both in the matter of time and of spare, a wide range of choice is afforded to the imagination. The facts, anyway, are true, and they were related, in the watches of the night, to a white man (whose name does not matter) by two people with whose identity you also have no concern. One of the latter was a man, whom I will call Âwang Îtam, and the other was a woman whose name was Bêdah, or something like it. The place which they close for the telling of their story was an empty sailing-boat, which lay beached upon a sand bank in the centre of a Malayan river; and as soon as the white man had scrambled up the side, the dug-out which had brought him sheered off and left him.
He had come to this place by appointment, but he knew nothing beyond that single fact, for the assignation had been made in the furtive native fashion which is as unlike the invitation card of Europe as are most things in the East if compared with white men's methods. Twice that day his attention had been very pointedly called to this deserted sailing-boat, once by an old crone who was selling sweet stuff from door to door, and once by a young chief who had stopped to speak to him while passing up the street of the native town. By both a reference had been made to the moonrise and to a "precious thing," visible only to one who dared to go in search of it unattended; and though these hints had been dropped, as it were, by accideut, they sufficed to show the white man that something was to be learned, seen, or experienced by one who chose to visit the sailing-boat at the hour of the moon's rising.
The Malays who were with him feared a trap, and implored him not to go alone; but the white man felt certain that if any of his people accompanied him, his trouble would be in vain. Moreover, he had an appetite for adventure and could in no case afford to let his friends or his enemies think that he was afraid. The man who, dwelling alone among Malays in an unsettled country, shows the slightest trace of fear, is apt thereby to sign his own death warrant, while one who is believed by them to be "spoiling for a fight" is usually the last to be attacked; for no people are more susceptible to bluff, and given a truculent demeanour and a sufficiency of bravado, a coward may pass for a brave man in many a Malayan state.
The decks of the boat were wet with dew and drizzle, and she smelt abominably of the ancient fish cargoes which she had carried before she was beached. A light rain was falling, and the white man crept along the side until he reached the stern, which was covered by a roofing of rotten palm-leaf mats. Then he squatted down, rolled a cigarette, and awaited developments.
Presently the soft splash, whisp—splash, whisp of a single paddle came to his ear, and a moment later he heard the sound of a canoe bumping gently against the side of the sailing-boat. Next a girl's figure appeared, standing erect on the vessel's low bulwarks. She called softly, inquiring whether any one was on board, and the white man answered her with equal caution. She then turned and whispered to some unseen person in a boat moored alongside, and after some seconds she came toward the white man.
"There is one yonder who would speak with thee, Tûan," she said, "but he cannot climb over the ship's side. He is like one who is dead, unless others lift him, how can he move? Will the Tûan, therefore, aid him to ascend into the ship?"
The white man loosened his revolver in its holster, covertly, that the girl might not see, and stepped cautiously to the spot where the boat appeared to be moored, for now he, too, began to fear a trap. What he saw over the side reassured him. The dug-out was of the smallest, and it had only one occupant, a man who, even in the dim moonlight, showed the sharp angles of his bones. The white man let himself down into the canoe, and aided by the girl, he lifted her companion on board. He was in the last stages of emaciation, shrunken and drawn beyond belief, and the skin was stretched across his hollow checks like the goat hide on a drum face.
Painfully and very slowly he crept aft, going on all fours like some crippled animal, until he had reached the shelter in the stern. The girl and the white man followed, and they all three squatted down on the creaking bamboo decking. The man sat all of a heap, moaning at short intervals, as Malays moan when the fever holds them. The girl sat unconcernedly preparing a quid of betel nut, and the white man inhaled his cigarette and wailed for them to speak. He was trying to get the hang of the business, and to guess what had caused two people, whom he did not know, to seek an interview with him with so much secrecy and precaution in this weird place and at such an untimely hour.
The girl, the moonlight showed him, was pretty, She had a small, perfectly shaped head, a wide, smooth forehead, abundant hair, bright, laughing eyes, with eyebrows arched and well defined—"like the artificial spur of a game-cock," as the Malay simile has it—and the dainty hands and feet which are so common among well-born Malayan women. The man, on the contrary, was a revolting object. His shrunken and misshappen body, his features distorted by perpetual twitchings, his taut and pallid skin, and his air of abject degradation were violently repellent. Looking at him, the white man was moved by the feeling which is pity driven to desperation—the instinctive impulse to hustle the creature out of sight, or to put it out of its misery once for all—so abominable was the humiliation of its broken manhood.
Presently the girl glanced up at the white man.
"The Tûan knows Âwang Îtam?" she inquired.
Yes, the white man knew him well by sight, and had spoken with him on many occasions. He had not, however, seen him for many months.
"This is he," said the girl, indicating the crippled wretch who sat rocking and moaning by her side; and her words administered as sharp a shock to the white man as though she had smitten him across the face.
Âwang Îtam, when he had last seen him, had been one of the smartest and best favoured of the “King's Youths," a fine, clean-limbed, upstanding youngster, dressed wonderfully in an extravagantly peaked kerchief and brilliant garments of many-coloured silks, and armed to the teeth with Malayan weapons of beautiful workmanship. Among the crowd of lads who strutted like peacocks, and looked upon life as a splendid game in which love affairs were the cards and danger the counters, he had been preëminent for his swagger, his daring, and his successes. What had befallen him to work in him so appalling a transformation in the space of a few months? It was for the purpose of revealing this secret to the while man, in the hope that thereby a tardy retribution might overtake his oppressors, that he and Bêdah had sought this stolen interview.
In every independent Malay state the bûdak râja, or "King's Youths," are an established institution. They are a band of vainglorious young fighting men, recruited from the sons of nobles, chiefs, descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, and men belonging to the more well-to-do families. It is their business to watch over the person of the Sultan, to follow at his heels when he goes abroad, to paddle his boat, to join with him in the chase, to kill all who may chance to offend him, and incidentally to do a mort of evil in his name. Their principal aim in life is to win the fickle favour of their master, and having once gained it, freely to abuse the power thus secured. As the Malay proverb has it, "they carry their lord's work upon their heads, and their own under their arms"; and woe betide those, who are not themselves under the immediate protection of the king, with whom chance brings them in contact. At times they act as a sort of irregular police force, levying chantage from people detected in the commission of an offence; and when crime is scarce. it is their amiable practice to exact blackmail from wholly innocent individuals by threatening to accuse them of some ill deed unless their good will be purchased at their own price. There is, of course, no abomination which their master can require of them that they are not willing, nay, eager, to commit in his service; and no Malayau râja, in the old days, ever needed to ask twice in their hearing: "Will no man rid me of this turbulent priest?"
During the long, long hours which the Sultan spends among his women, the bûdak râja have to be in attendance in the courtyards of the palace or at the gate of the royal enclosure. This affords them the abundant leisure which Malays so dearly love, and hey while away the time by loafing and gossiping, by playing games of chance, by betting on the spinning of tops, on the number of seeds in a mangosteen, or on the power of resistance possessed by rival nuts of the kind called bûah kras; they sing a little, sleep a good deal, conceal their own, and speculate luridly upon their neighbours' private intimacies, and for the rest, are quite idle, dissolute, and happy. It is unnecessary to add that they are greatly feared by the peasants and immensely admired by the generality of the female population, for they are as reckless, as unscrupulous, as immoral, and withal as gayly dressed and as well born a gang of young truculents as ever preyed upon a defenceless people, or made open love to their wives and daughters.
More or less insecurely imprisoned within the palace precinets there abides also yet another set of bûdak râja—"a monstrous regiment of women"—some of whom are the concubines, permanent or occasional, of the king, while the remainder are the companions, attendants, and serving-girls of the more directly favoured ladies. All of them, however, without distinction, are vowed to the royal service, and are supposed to lead a celibate existence. Now, according to the vernacular proverb, the desires of Malay women are as disproportionate as those of the sandfly, the minute insect which is said to have a standing wager that he will swallow a man whole; and, as yet another Malayan proverb has it, "the cat and the roast, the tinder and the spark, and a boy and a girl are ill to keep asunder." Given, then, as the main components of a Malay court, a band of lusty young roisterers, separated from a hundred or more of equally idle young women by nothing more substantial than a few bamboo fences, and such like frail obstructions, and the resulting happenings can be more decorously left to the imagination than indicated in even the broadest outline. The question of marriage rarely arises, for it is only very infrequently that a râja can bring himself to dispose in this fashion of any of the female inmates of his numerous households. Therefore, all love affairs have to be conducted with the utmost stealth and secrecy; the atmosphere of the court is pungent with perennial immorality and intrigue; and the sordidness of it all is only redeemed by the fact that errant man and maid alike go from day to day in imminent danger of torture and death. These are the penalties of discovery.
Nevertheless, the majority of the intrigues carried on by the palace women with the men of the court become sooner or later more or less notorious. The inordinate vanity of the women largely contributes to this, for they pride themselves upon the number and upon the recklessness of their lovers. When torn by jealousy or spite, or by a desire to be avenged upon a faithless wooer, a girl is often enough moved to betray the secret she shares with him, regardless of the consequences to herself. Moreover, it is a point of honour with the palace women to exact love tokens from their admirers, and thereafter to display them to their envious companions; and even the men are frequently guilty of similar indiscretions. Usually the Sultan himself is the last person to learn what is going forward, for though there are many people at a Malayan court who are eager to curry favour with him by telling tales of their neighbours, the man who does so must himself be without sin or damaging secret of his own, and such innocents are passing rare.
Âwang Îtam had served the Sultan for several years as one of the bûdak râja, but, his immediate chief was Saiyid Usman, a youngster who was also one of the King's Youths, and was usually spoken of as Tûan Bângau. Âwang had been boru and bred in the household of which Tûan Bângau's father was the head; and, though in accordance with the immutable Malayan custom, he always addressed him as "Your Highness," and used the term "your servant" in lieu of the personal pronoun, when alluding lo himself, the relations subsisting between him and his chief more nearly resembled those of two brothers than any which we regard as customary between master and man. They had been born within a week or two of one another; had crawled about the floor of the women's apartments in company until they were old enough to run wild in the open air; they had learned to play pôrok and tûju lûbang, and all the games known to Malay childhood, still in company; they had splashed about in the river together, cooling their little brown bodies in the running water: they had often eaten from the same plate, and slept side by side upon the same mat spread in the veranda, Later, they had been circumcised upon the same day, and having thus entered upon man's estate, they had together begun to participate in the life of dissipation which every boy, bred in the neighbourhood of a Malayan court, regards as his birthright.
Both had been duly entered as members of the Sultan's bodyguard, and they had quickly proved themselves to be not the least reckless or truculent of that redoubtable crew. They were an uncommonly good-looking pair of boys, and many were the girls in the palace, and in the town that lay around it, who cast inviting glances in their direction Tûan Bângau availed himself to the full of his opportunities, but Âwang had no taste for casual love-affairs, for he had conceived an overwhelming passion for a girl who chanced to be a jâmah-jâmah-an, or occasional concubine, of the Sultan, and who, being somewhat puffed up by the majesty of her position, was leading for the moment a life of almost aggressive propriety. She was none the less fully aware of the state of Awang's feelings, and was not averse from affording him an occasional glimpse of the charms which had reduced him to so abject a condition. On his part, he was forever trying to have sight of her, and Tûan Bângau did his best to help him, but it was a tantalizing and unsatisfying business at the best. It was an evil day for both, however, when as they swaggered past the palace fence, intent upon stealing a peep at the girl, they were seen by Tŭngku Ûteh, the Sultan's only daughter by a royal mother, to whose household the jâmah-jâmah-an belonged. There was a saying current at the court, that Tungku Ûteh resembled a pôlong—a familiar spirit—not physically, for she was fairly well favoured, but in her capacity to devour and ruin. Her father guarded her jealously, for she had been recently married to the ruler of a neighbouring state, and his honour was involved; but public report said that her ingenuity was more than a match for his vigilence, and from time to time some prominent person in the community would precipitately fly the country, and presently the whisper would spread that he had been added to the tale of the prince victims. Such a disappearance had very recently taken place, wherefore, for the moment, her affections were disengaged, and so it chanced that she looked with the eyes of desire at the young and handsome Saiyid.
In the East, love affairs develop quickly; and that very day Âwang Îtam again saw Îang Mûnah—the girl whom he had loved so long and so hopelessly—and by the flash of an eyelid was apprized that she had that to tell him which it concerned him to hear. When two people are set upon securing a secret interview, many difficulties may be overcome; and that evening Âwang whispered to Tûan Bângau that "the moon was about to fall into his lap."
The Saiyid laughed.
"I dreamed not long since," he said, "that bitten by a very venomous snake," and Âwang laughed too, for he knew that his friend was ripe for any adventure, and upon that his own chances of happiness now depended.
To dream of a snake bite, among any of the people of the Far East, is held to signify that ere long the dreamer will receive lavish favours from some lady of exalted rank or surpassing beauty. The more venomous the snake, the brighter, it is believed, will be the qualities with which the dreamer's future mistress is endowed. Tûan Bângau had probably not failed to note the love glances bestowed upon him by the princess, and these, coupled with his dream, supplied him with a key to the situation.
His position in the matter was rather curious. He did not desire Tŭngku Ûteh for herself; she was his monarch's daughter, and the wife of a royal husband; and his duty and his interest alike forbade him to accept her advances. He knew that if his intrigue were to be discovered, he would be a ruined, if not a dead man; and he was, moreover, at this time very genuinely in love with another girl, whom he had recently married. In spite of all these considerations, however, the princess's overtures were, in his eyes, a challenge to his manhood which his code of honour made it impossible for him to refuse. The extreme danger of the business was, in a fashion, its supreme attraction. To evade it, upon no matter what pretext, was to play the poltroon, and on this point no self-respecting Malay, brought up in the poisonous moral atmosphere of an independent state, could admit of any other opinion.
And in this affair there were intrigues within intrigues. Îang Mûnah, who was acting as go-between for her mistress with the Saiyid, was to have her love passages with Awang Itam in comfort and security, without incurring any penalties therefor, and was moreover to have the princess's support in her candidature to become a permanent, and not a merely casual concubine of that young lady's father. Âwang Îtam would accompany his friend on his nocturnal visits to the palace, and while Tûan Bângau wooed the princess, her handmaiden would give herself to him, and thus the desire of his heart would at length be fulfilled. Eagerly he wooed his friend on Tŭngku Ûteh's behalf, and of the twain it was he who was the impassioned lover when together the two young men stole into the palace at the noon of the night.
They effected their entrance by a way known to few, the secret of which had been conveyed to them from the princess, through lang Münah; and they left by the same means before the breaking of the dawn, passing by a circuitous route to their quarters in the guardhouse, while all the town still slumbered.
For more than a month they paid their secret visits unobserved by any save those whom they sought, and by an old crone, who unbarred the door for them to enter; but one night, toward the end of that time, they narrowly escaped detection. The Sultan, like many Malay râjas, kept curious hours. The distinction between night and day had for him light or darkness, exactly when the fancy took him: and occasionally, when having gone to rest at noon, he awoke at midnight, he would go for a solitary prowl round the palace precincts, pouncing upon ill-doers like a roaming beast of prey. It thus chanced that he lighted upon Tûan Bângau and Âwang Îtam, just as they were quitting the princess's compound; but they fled so swiftly through the darkness that he failed to discover their identity, and was equally unable to determine that of the women whom they had risked their lives to visit. It was a hair-erecting experience for all concerned, however, and for a space the meetings ceased.
But Tûngku Ûteh was finding in the intrigue a delightful relief to the general dullness of palace life, and she was not prepared to let it have so tame an ending. Tûan Bângau, on the other hand, would very willingly have broken off the connection, but Âwang Îtam was in this matter the princess's most ardent advocate, and a series of taunting message: from her speedily reduced the Saiyid to acquiescence. Greater precautions were now necessary, however, and the meetings no longer took place in the palace. Instead, the lovers passed the night in a shed, within the fence of the royal enclosure, which was ordinarily used for storing firewood.
Things had gone on in this way for some time, when Tûngku Ûteh began to weary of the lack of excitement attending the intrigue. Her secret had been kept so well that there was not a breath of scandal to titillate her vanity. She regarded Tûan Bângau as a lover to be proud of, and she itched to show her entourage, the court world in general, and Tûan Bângau's wife in particular, that he had fallen a victim to her charms. To possess him in secret afforded her now only a pale satisfaction, and it never even occurred to her to consider his interests rather than her own whims. She knew, of course, that discovery would spell disaster, more or less complete, for him, and incidentally wouk deprive her of her lover; but for one of her adventuresome spirit, that was a loss which, in a Malay court, could be replaced without much difficulty, and since the intrigue must have an end, sooner or later, it was just as well, from her point of view, that it should conclude with a resounding explosion.
One morning, when the faint yellow of the dawn was beginning to show through the grayness low down in the east, and the thin smokelike clouds were hurrying across the sky from the direction of the sea, like great night birds winging their homeward way, Tûan Bângau awoke from sleep to find Tûngku Ûteh sitting beside him on their sleeping-mat, with his kris and girdle in her hands. She had taken them from his pillow while he slept, and no persuasions on his part could induce her to restore them to him, While he yet sought to coax her to return his property she leaped to her feet, and with a saucy laugh disappeared in the palace. Pursuit was, of course, impossible; and Tûan Bângau and Âwang Îtam made their way homeward with anxious hearts, knowing that now, indeed, their hour had come.
Once inside her own apartments. Tŭngku Ûtek placed the kris ostentatiously upon the tall erection of ornamental pillows that adorned the head of her sleeping-mat, and then composed herself calmly to enjoy the tranquil slumber which in the west is erroneously supposed to be the peculiar privilege of the just. The dagger was famous throughout the country, and the identity of its owner was not, of course, for a moment in doubt. Tŭngku Ûteh could not have proclaimed the intrigue more resoundingly if she had shouted its every detail from the bilâl's minaret of the central mosque.
The Sultan's anger knew no bounds when he learned what had occurred, and physical violence was, of course, the only means of its expression, and of covering the shame which had been put upon him, that presented itself to his primitive and unoriginal mind. He found himself, however, in a position of considerable difficulty. He was anxious to avoid prejudicing his daughter's future with her kingly husband, who had already evinced a marked disinclination to transport her from her father's to his own pałace. As regards her, therefore, his hands were fettered; and her acute enjoyment of the situation, and the shameless levity with which she received his reproofs, combined to make his impotence well-nigh unendurably humiliating. Tûan Bângau, moreover, was a member of a very powerful clan, He was also a Saiyid, and the Sultan feared that the religious fanaticism of his people would he aroused if he openly punished with death a descendant of the Prophet. Besides, it was not easy to proceed against him without involving Tŭngku Ûteh in the scandal. For the moment, therefore, he turned his thoughts to the other culprits. Âwang Îtam was overpowered that evening, on his way to the guardhouse, by a bevy of the King's Youths, was dragged into the palace, and thereafter all trace of him was lost for some months. The girl Îang Mûnah, all her bright dreams of permanent concubinehood scattered to the winds, was suspended by her thumbs from a roof beam, and was soused with water whenever she had the impudence to faint. The Sultan would not suffer any graver injury to be done to her, in spite of the gentle entreaties of his wife, Tŭngku Ûteh's mother, as that farseeing potentate judged it to be possible that his casual fancy for her might, at some later period, revive.
To Tûan Bângau, however, not a word was said; and never by sign or gesture was he allowed to guess that his crime against his master's honour was known to the Sultan.
Nearly a year later, when the whole incident had become a piece of ancient court history, the Sultan chanced to go ahunting, and took his way up a small stream, the banks of which happened to be totally uninhabited. Tûan Bângau was of the party, and the other bûdak râja who were on duty that day were all men who had been selected on account of their discretion and their unwavering loyalty to the Sultan. The hunt was accommodated in boats, of which there were two, the Sultan travelling in one, and his son. Tŭngku Saleh in the other. Besides the prince, there sat in the latter boat Tûan Bângau and about a dozen of the King's Youths. Arrived at a certain place, Tŭngku Saleh ordered his men to make the boat fast in midstream while he ate some sweet-meats which his women had prepared and packed for his use. The Sultan's boat meanwhile went un upriver, and presently disappeared round a jungle-covered point.
When the prince had eaten his fill, he bade Tûan Bângau and one or two other Saiyids who were among his followers, fall to on the remainder; and it was while Tûan Bângau was washing his mouth over the side of the boat after eating, that Tŭngku Saleh gave the signal which heralded his death. A man who was behind him, leaped suddenly to his feet and stabbed him with a spear, and a second thrust, de livered almost simultaneously by another of the party, knocked him into the river. Tûan Bângau dived and came presently to the surface in the shallow water near the bank of the stream. Here he rose to his feet, drew his kris, and called to the men in the boat to come and fight him, one at a time, it they dared. The only answer was a spear which struck him in the neck, and a bullet fired from the prince's express rifle by one of his men, which penetrated to his heart. He collapsed where he stood, and a moment later all that remained of Tûan Bângau was a huddled form lying motionless in the shallow water, with the eddies playing in and out of the brilliant silk garments, which had made him so brave a sight in life.
Those who had killed him buried him in the jungle near the place where he had fallen, the secret of the exact spot being shared by three individuals only. The report that he had strayed from the hunting party and had been lost was diligently spread, and to lend colour to it search was made for him for some days in a part of the forest situated at a discreet distance from his grave. The account of his disappearance was very generally disbelieved, but it was found to be impossible of disproof. But Bêdah, his wife, who had loved him. had not rested here. Deliberately she had set herself to work to worm the truth out of one of his murderers doing in the process every conceivable violence to her own feelings and inclinations; and she now told all to the white man, hoping that, through him, vengeance might perhaps overtake the Sultan who had planned, and his servants who had carried out the assassination. She was quite indifferent to the fact that she thereby risked the life which Tûan Bângau's death had temporarily rendered desolate.
All things considered, however, the relatives of the young Saiyid had not much of which to complain. He had got into mischief with the Sultan's daughter, and could not expect to escape the penalty of such ill doing. Though he was murdered in cold blood in cireumistances which made it impossible for him to offer any resistance, he met his end, at any rate, by a quick death and a clean one. Worse things may befall, as Âwang Îtam had experienced. After that youngster vanished behind the palace gates, he became the victim of nameless tortures. As he told the tale of the things that he had suffered on the night of his arrest—of the appalling mutilations which had been inflicted upon him, and of the diabolical ingenuity which had been used, amid laughter and brutal jests, to wreck his manhood, and to reduce him to the pitiful ruin he had since become—the white man sat writhing in sympathetic agony, and was assailed by a feeling of horror so violent that it turned him sick and faint.
"Ya Allah!" he cried. "It were better far to die than to endure such excruciating pains, and thereafter to live the life which is no life."
The cripple looked up at him with interest. He had evidently been more accustomed to mockery than to pity.
"That is true," he said. "It is true." Then, a light that was almost insane in its intensity awaking suddenly in his dulled eyes, he added, with something like triumph in his tone, “But for a space Îang Mûnah was mine, my woman to me, and willingly would I endure anew the worst that men can do if for a little I could be what of old I was, and the desire in my heart could once more be satisfied."
The spark of energy and spirit died out of him as quickly as it had been kindled. He seemed to collapse upon himself, and said in a hoarse whisper:
"But now she has again become a jâmah-jâmah-an—a casual concubine of the Sultan—and in that knowledge lurks the keenest of all my agonies."