Woman is the lesser man, and all her passions matched with mine,
Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine.

Locksley Hall.

This is a true story. Also, unlike most of the tales which I have to tell concerning my Malay friends, it is garnished with a moral; and one, moreover, which the Women’s Rights Committees would do well to note. I should dearly like to print it as a tract, for distribution to these excellent and loud-talking institutions, but, failing that, I publish it here, among its unworthy companions.

To those who live in and around a Malay Court, two things only take rank as the serious matters of life. These are the love intrigues, in which all are more or less engaged at peril of their lives, and the deeds of daring and violence, long past or newly done, of discussing which men and women alike never weary. People talk, think, and dream of little else, not only in the places where men congregate, but also in the dimly lit inner apartments, where the women are gathered together. In the conduct of their love intrigues, men and women alike take a very active part, for the ladies of the Peninsula are as often as not the wooers of the men, and a Malay girl does not hesitate to make the necessary advances if the swain is slow to take the initiative, or fails to perceive the desire which she has conceived for him. In the matter of fighting, however, the women who are as often as not the cause act usually as mere spectators, taking no active part themselves, though they join in a shrill chorus of applause when a shrewd blow is given, and delight greatly in the brave doings of their men. Nevertheless, the warlike atmosphere, with which she is surrounded all the days of her life, sometimes infects a young Malay Princess, and urges her to do some daring deed which shall emulate the exploits of her brothers, and shall show her admirers how dashing a spirit, and how great a courage are hers.

It was during the hot, aching months, which, in Merry England, go to make up the Spring of the year; and the King and his favourite concubines had betaken themselves up-river to snare turtle-doves, and to drowse away the hours in the cool flowering fruit groves, and under the shade of the lilac-coloured bungor trees. Therefore the youths and maidens in the palace were having a good time, and were gaily engaged in sowing the whirlwind, with a sublime disregard for the storm, which it would be theirs to reap, when the King returned to punish. As the vernacular proverb has it, the cat and the roast, the tinder and the spark, and a boy and a girl are ill to keep asunder; and consequently my friends about the palace were often in trouble, by reason of their love affairs, even when the King was at hand; and on his return, after he had been absent for a day or two, there was generally the very devil to pay. Perhaps, on this occasion, the extreme heat had something to do with it, and made hot blood surge through young veins with unwonted fury, for things went even worse than usual, and, after a week of flagrant and extraordinary ill-doing, Tungku Indut, one of the King’s sons, put the finishing touch to it all, by eloping with no less than four of his father’s choicest dancing girls!

Now, these girls were as the apple of her eye to Tungku Indut’s half-sister, Tungku Aminah. They belonged to her mother’s household, and had been trained to dance from earliest infancy, with infinite care and pains. Nor had they attained their present degree of efficiency, without the twisting back of tortured fingers, and sundry other gentle punishments, dear to Malay ladies, being frequently resorted to, in order to quicken their intelligence. That her brother should now carry off these girls, after all the trouble which had been expended upon their education, was a sore offence to Tungku Aminah; and that the girls themselves were very willing captives, and had found a princely lover, while she remained unwedded, did not tend to soothe her gentle woman’s breast. Her mother was also very wroth, and sent threatening messages to Tungku Indut, presaging blood and thunder, and other grievous trouble when the King returned. Tungku Indut, however, resolutely declined to give the girls up. He knew that he had gone so far that no tardy amends could now cover his ill-deeds, and, as he had a fancy for the girls, he decided to enjoy the goods the gods had sent him until his father came back, and the day of reckoning arrived. His stepmother, therefore, resigned herself to await the King’s return; but Tungku Aminah could not brook delay, and she resolved to attack Tungku Indut in his house, and to wrest the girls from him by force of arms.

Circumstances favoured her, as her mother, who was the only person capable of thwarting her project, was ill with fever, and had retired early to her bed and her opium pipe. Tungku Aminah was thus left at liberty to do whatsoever she wished; and accordingly, at about eleven o’clock that night, she sallied forth, from within the stone wall which surrounded her mother’s palace, at the head of her army.

It was at this moment that word was brought to me that strange things were toward, and I, and the Malays who were with me, ran out to our compound fence, and witnessed all that ensued with our eyes glued to the chinks in the plaited bamboos.

Presently the army came pouring down the street in the pale moonlight, and halted in front of my compound, which chanced to face the house at that time occupied by Tungku Indut, the door of which abutted on the main thoroughfare. Tungku Aminah led the van, strutting along with an arrogant and truculent swagger most laughable to see. She was dressed for the occasion after the fashion of the Malay warrior. Her body was encased in a short-sleeved, tight-fitting fighting jacket, which only served to emphasise the femininity of her bust. She wore striped silk breeches reaching to the middle of her shins; a silk sarong was folded short about her waist; and her thick hair was tucked away beneath a head handkerchief twisted into a peak in the manner called tanjak. At her belt she carried a kris, and also, a smaller dagger, called a ‘pepper-crusher’ in the vernacular, and in her hand she held a drawn sword, which she brandished as she walked. At her back came some three hundred women, moving down the street with that queer half-tripping, half-running gait, which Malay women always affect when they go abroad in a crowd at the heel of their Princess. The way in which they run into and press against one another, on such occasions, together with the little quick short steps they take, always reminds me of young chickens trying to seek shelter under their mother’s wing. The army was wonderfully and fearfully armed. Some of the more fortunate had spears and daggers; one or two carried old swords; but the majority were armed with weapons borrowed from the cook-house. The axes and choppers, used for breaking up firewood, were the best of these arms, but the number of these was limited, most of Tungku Aminah’s gallant three hundred being provided with no better weapons than the kandar sticks, on which water pails are carried; spits made of wood hardened in the fire; cocoa-nut scrapers lashed to sticks; and a few old pocket-knives and fish-spears. What they lacked in equipment, however, they made up in noise, one and all combining to raise an indescribable and deafening babel.

As they halted before Tungku Indut’s house, the shrill screams of defiance from three hundred dainty throats pierced my ear-drums like a steam siren, and they were all so marvellously noisy, brave, and defiant, that, in spite of an occasional girlish giggle from one or another of them, I began to fear there would be bad trouble before the dawn. So wild was their excitement, and so maddening was the din they made, that, though Tungku Aminah shrieked louder than any one of them, she could not make herself heard above the tumult; and it was not until she had scratched the faces of those nearest to her, and smitten others with the flat of her sword, that she succeeded in reducing her followers to even a partial silence. Then she beat upon the barred door of Tungku Indut’s house with her naked weapon, and cried shrilly to her brother:

’Come forth, Indut! Come forth, if thou art in truth the son of the same father as myself! Come forth!’

‘Come forth!’ echoed the army, and the deafening din of defiance broke out once more, and was again with difficulty repressed by Tungku Aminah.

‘Come forth!’ she shrilled once more, ’come forth that I may rip thy belly, and cause thy entrails to gush out upon the ground!’

‘Come forth, thou accursed and ill-omened one!’ echoed the army, with the unanimity of Pickwick’s thirty boarders.

Indut, however, did not show any signs of coming forth; but when the women had screamed themselves hoarse and out of breath, his gruff voice sounded from within the house, like the growl of a wild beast, after all that shrill feminine yelping.

‘Go hence, Iang!’ he shouted, ’get thee to thy bed, thou foolish one; disturb not one who desires to slumber, and waken not the fowls with thy unmaidenly shouting.’

Now, when Tungku Aminah heard these words she dropped her sword, and beat upon the door with her little bare hands, weeping and screaming in a perfect ecstasy of rage, and showering curses and imprecations on her brother. The army joined in the torrent of abuse, and a very pretty set of phrases were sent spinning through the clean night air. At length, Tungku Aminah, finding that she only bruised her hands, again took up her sword, and, as soon as she could make herself heard, renewed her challenge to her brother to come forth.

When this scene had continued for about twenty minutes, and I was beginning to fear that the Devil would prompt Tungku Aminah to fire her brother’s house, and that I should get burned out also, suffering, as the Malays says, like the woodpecker in the falling tree, a sudden and unexpected turn was given to affairs, which speedily brought things to an abrupt conclusion.

During one of the pauses for breath, indulged in by the clamouring women, Tungku Indut was heard to arise from his couch with great noise and deliberation. A hushed silence immediately fell upon the assembled women, and, in the stillness, Tungku Indut’s words were distinctly heard by all of us.

‘Awang!’ he said, naming one of his followers, ’Awang! Bring me my sword!’

That was all, but it was enough and to spare. A shrill shriek was raised by the listening women, a shriek, this time, of fear and not of defiance, and in a moment the army of three hundred ladies was in full flight. Never was there such a rout. They tumbled over, and trampled upon one another in their frantic desire to escape, and maimed one another, as they fought their way up the narrow roadway, in their panic. All respect for persons, rank, or position, was completely lost sight of, commoners pushing past rajas in their deadly fear of being the hindermost, who is the proverbial prey of the pursuing devil. Too breathless to scream, and sweating with fear and exertion, they scuffled up the street, to the sound of rending garments and pattering feet, nor did they rest until the palace was regained, and the doors securely barred.

On the King’s return, the dancing girls were, of course, surrendered; and I do not like to think what was the measure of bodily pain and suffering, that these dainty creatures were called upon to pay as the price of their escapade. It was a sore subject with Tungku Indut, too, and he and his father were not on speaking terms, on this account, for near a twelvemonth after.

As for Tungku Aminah, she is as truculent as ever, and bears a great reputation for courage among her fellow country-women. It is not every girl, they say, who would so boldly have attacked; and of the retreat, which only a few of us witnessed, no mention is ever made.

One has heard of the Women’s Rights Meeting in Boston, which was broken up in confusion by the untimely appearance of three little mice; and of that other meeting, in which the aid of the Chairwoman’s husband and brothers had to be sought, in order to eject a solitary derisive man, who successfully defied the assembled emancipated females to move him from his position; but neither of these stories seems to me to illustrate the inherent feebleness of women, when unaided by the ruder sex, quite as forcibly as does the pleasant story of Tungku Aminah and her brother, Tungku Indut.