For the gods very subtly fashion
Madness with sadness
upon earth:
Not knowing in any wise compassion,
Nor holding pity
of any worth.
Atalanta in
Calydon.
In writing of the amok, which
Dato’ Kaya Biji Derja ran in the streets of
Kuala Trengganu, I have spoken of suicide as being
of very rare occurrence among Malays of either sex,
and, indeed, I know of no authenticated case in which
a man of these people has taken his life with his
own hand. A Chinaman, who has had a difference
of opinion with a friend, or who conceives that he
has been ill-treated by the Powers that be, betakes
himself to his dwelling, and there deliberately hangs
himself with his pig-tail, dying happy in the pleasing
belief that his spirit will haunt those who have done
him a wrong, and render the remainder of their lives
upon earth ‘one demned horrid grind.’
Not so the Malay. He, being gifted with the merest
rudiments of an imagination, prefers to take practical
vengeance on his kind by means of a knife, to trusting
to such supernatural retaliation as may be effected
after death by his ghost.
This story deals with a suicide which
occurred in Pahang in July 1893, and I have selected
it to tell, because the circumstances were remarkable,
and are quite unprecedented in my experience.
If you go up the Pahang River for
a hundred and eighty miles, you come to a spot where
the stream divides into two main branches, and where
the name Pahang dies an ignominious death in a small
ditch, which debouches at their point of junction.
The right stream, using the term in its
topographical sense, is the Jelai, and the
left is the Tembeling. If you go up the latter,
you come to rapids innumerable, a few gambir
plantations, and a great many of the best ruffians
in the Peninsula, who are also my very good friends.
If you follow the Jelai up past Kuala Lipis,
where the river of the latter name falls into it on
its right bank, and on, and on, and on, you come to
the Sakai country, where the Malay language is still
unknown, and where the horizon of the people is formed
by the impenetrable jungle that shuts down on the other
side of a slender stream, and is further narrowed
by the limitations of an intellect which cannot conceive
an arithmetical idea higher than the numeral three.
Before you run your nose into these uncleanly places,
however, you pass through a district dotted with scattered
Malay habitations; and, if you turn off up the Telang
River, you find a little open country, and some prosperous-looking
villages.
One day in July 1893, a feast in honour
of a wedding was being held in one of these places,
and the scene was a lively one. The head and skin
of a buffalo, and the pools of blood, which showed
where its carcase had been dismembered, were a prominent
feature in the foreground, lying displayed in a very
unappetising manner on a little piece of open ground.
In one part of the village two men were posturing in
one of the inane sword-dances which are so dear to
all Malays, each performance being a subject of keen
criticism or hearty admiration to the spectators.
The drums and gongs meanwhile beat a rhythmical time,
which makes the heaviest heels long to move more quickly,
and the onlookers whooped and yelled again and again
in shrill far-sounding chorus. The shout is the
same as that which is raised by Malays when in battle;
and, partly from its tone, and partly from association,
one never hears it without a thrill, and some sympathetic
excitement. It has a similar effect upon the
Malays, who love to raise a sorak, as
these choric shouts are termed, and the
enthusiasm which it arouses is felt to be infectious,
and speedily becomes maddening and intense.
All the men present were dressed in
many-coloured silks and tartans, and were armed
with daggers as befits warriors, but, if you had an
eye for such things, you would have noticed that all
the garments and weapons were worn in a manner which
would have excited the ridicule of a down-country
Malay. It is not in Europe only, that the country
cousin furnishes food for laughter to his relatives
in the towns.
In a Balai, specially erected
for the purposes of the feast, a number of priests,
and pilgrims, and lebai, that class
of fictitious religious mendicants, whose members
are usually some of the richest men in the villages
they inhabit, were seated gravely intoning
the Kuran, but stopping to chew betel-nut,
and to gossip scandalously, at frequent intervals.
The wag, too, was present among them, for he is an
inevitable feature in all Malay gatherings, and he
is generally one of the local holy men. ’It
ain’t precisely what ’e says, it’s
the funny way ’e says it;’ for,
like the professionally comic man all the world over,
these individuals are popularly supposed to be invariably
amusing, and a loud guffaw goes up whenever they open
their mouths, no matter what the words that issue
from them. Most of his hearers had heard his
threadbare old jokes any time these twenty years, but
the ready laughter greeted each of them in turn, as
though they were newly born into the world. A
Malay does not understand that a joke may pall from
repetition, and is otherwise liable to be driven into
the ground. He will ask for the same story, or
the same jest time after time; prefers that it should
be told in the same manner, and in the same words;
and will laugh in the same place, with equal zest,
at each repetition, just as do little children among
ourselves. A similar failure to appreciate the
eternal fitness of things, causes a Malay Raja,
when civilised, to hang seven copies of the same unlovely
photograph around the walls of his sitting-room.
Meanwhile, the women-folk had come
from far and near, to help to prepare the feast, and
the men, having previously done the heavy work of
carrying the water, hewing the firewood, jointing the
meat, and crushing the curry stuff, they were all
busily engaged in the back premises of the house,
cooking as only Malay women can cook, and keeping up
a constant babble of shrill trebles, varied by an
occasional excited scream of direction from one of
the more senior women among them. The younger
and prettier girls had carried their work to the door
of the house, and thence were engaging at long range
in the game of ’eye play,’ as
the Malays call it, with the youths of the
village, little heeding the havoc they were making
in susceptible male breasts, whose wounds, however,
they would be ready enough to heal, as occasion offered,
with a limitless generosity.
The bride, of course, having being
dressed in her best, and loaded with gold ornaments,
borrowed from many miles around, which had served to
deck every bride in the district ever since any one
could remember, was left seated on the geta,
or raised sleeping platform, in the dimly lighted
inner apartments, there to await the ordeal known to
Malay cruelty as sanding. The ceremony
that bears this name, is the one at which the bride
and bridegroom are brought together for the first time.
They are officially supposed never to have seen one
another before, though no Malay who respects himself
ever allows his fiancee to be finally selected,
until he has crept under her house, in the night time,
and watched her through the bamboo flooring, or through
the chinks in the wattled walls. They are led
forth by their respective relations, and placed side
by side upon a dais, prepared for the purpose, where
they remain seated for hours, while the guests eat
a feast in their presence, and thereafter chant verses
from the Kuran. During this ordeal they
must sit motionless, no matter how their cramped legs
may ache and throb, and their eyes must remain downcast,
and fixed upon their hands, which, scarlet with henna,
lie motionless one on each knee. Malays, who
have experienced this, tell me that it is very trying,
and I can well believe it, the more so, since it is
a point of honour for the man to try to catch an occasional
glimpse of his fiancee out of the corner of
his eyes, without turning his head a hair’s breadth,
and without appearing to move an eyelash. The
bridegroom is conducted to the house of his bride,
there to sit in state, by a band of his relations and
friends, some of whom sing shrill verses from the Kuran,
while others rush madly ahead, charging, retreating,
capering, dancing, yelling, and hooting, brandishing
naked weapons, and engaging in a most realistic sham
fight, with the bride’s relations and friends,
who rush out of her compound to meet them, and do
not suffer themselves to be routed until they have
made a fine show of resistance. This custom, doubtless,
has its origin in the fact that, in primitive states
of society, a man must seek a wife at his risk and
peril, for among the Sakai in some of the wilder
parts of the country, the girl is still placed upon
an anthill, and ringed about by her relations, who
do not suffer her fiance to win her until his
head has been broken in several places. The same
feeling exists in Europe, as is witnessed by
the antagonism displayed by the school-boy, and even
the older and more sensible males of a family, to
their would-be brother-in-law. It is the natural
instinct of the man, to protect his women-folk from
all comers, breaking out, as natural instincts are
wont to do, in a hopelessly wrong place.
As I have said, the bride had been
left in the inner apartments, there to await her call
to the dais; and the preparations for the feast were
in full swing, and the men were enjoying themselves
in their own way while the women cooked, when, suddenly,
a dull thud, as of some falling body, was heard within
the house. The women rushed in, and found the
little bride lying on the floor, with all the pretty
garments, with which she had been bedecked, drenched
in her own blood. A small clasp knife lay by
her side, and there was a ghastly gash in her throat.
The women lifted her up, and strove to staunch the
bleeding, and as they fought to stay the life that
was ebbing from her, the drone of the priests, and
the beat of the drums, came to their ears from the
men who were making merry without. Then suddenly
the news of what had occurred spread among the guests,
and the music died away, and was replaced by a babble
of excited voices, all speaking at once.
The father of the girl rushed in,
and, as she lay on the sleeping platform, still conscious,
he asked her who had done this thing.
‘It is my own handiwork,’ she said.
‘But wherefore, child of mine,’
cried her mother, ’but wherefore dost thou desire
to slay thyself?’
‘I gazed upon my likeness in
the mirror,’ said the girl, speaking slowly
and with difficulty, ’and I beheld that I was
very hideous to look upon, so that it was not fitting
that I should live. Therefore I did it.’
And until she died, about an hour
later, this, and this only, was the explanation which
she would give. The matter was related to me by
the great up-country Chief, the Dato’ Mahraja
Perba, who said that he had never heard of any parallel
case. I jestingly told him that he should be
careful not to allow this deed to become a precedent,
for there are many ugly women in his district, and
if they all followed this girl’s example, the
population would soon have dwindled sadly. Later,
when I learned the real reasons which led to this
suicide, I was sorry that I had ever jested about
it, for the girl’s was a sad little story.
Some months before, a Pekan born Malay
had come to the Jelai on a trading expedition, and
had cast his eyes upon the girl. To her, he was
all that the people of the surrounding villages were
not. He walked with a swagger, wore his weapons
and his clothes with an air that none but a Court-bred
Malay knows how to assume, and was full of brave tales,
which the elders of the village could only listen
to with wonder and respect. As the brilliant
form of Lancelot burst upon the startled sight of the
Lady of Shalott, so did this man an equally
splendid vision in the eyes of this poor little up-country
maid come into her life, bringing with
him hopes and desires, that she had never before dreamed
of. Before so brave a wooer what could her little
arts avail? As many better and worse women than
she have done before her, she gave herself to him,
thinking, thereby, to hold him in silken bonds, through
which he might not break; but what was all her life
to her, was merely a passing incident to him, and
one day she learned that he had returned down stream.
The idea of following him probably never even occurred
to her, but, like others before her, she thought that
the sun had fallen from heaven, because her night
light had gone out. Her parents, who knew nothing
of this intrigue, calmly set about making the arrangements
for her marriage, a matter in which, of course, she
would be the last person to be consulted. She
must have watched these preparations with speechless
agony, knowing that the day fixed for the marriage
must be that on which her life would end, for she
must long have resolved to die faithful to her false
lover, though it was not until the very last moment
that she summoned up sufficient courage to take her
own life. That she ever did so is very marvellous.
That act is one which is not only contrary to all
natural instincts, but is, moreover, utterly opposed
to the ideas which prevail among people of her race;
and her sufferings must, indeed, have been intense,
before this means of escape can have presented itself
to her, even as a possibility. She must have
been at once a girl of extraordinary strength and
weakness: strength to have made the resolve,
and, having made it, to fearlessly carry it into execution,
dying with a lie on her lips, which should conceal
her real reasons, and the fact of her rapidly approaching
maternity; and weakness in that the burden laid upon
her was greater than she could bear. Poor child,
ignorant, yet filled with a terrible knowledge, false,
yet faithful even unto death, strong in her weakness,
with a marvellous strength, yet weak in her first
fall.
She has lived her life, and
that which she has done,
May God within Himself make
whole.