Tales of the Malayan Coast Part 15

"Sudah chukup!" (Stop talking) I commanded angrily. The syce shrugged his bare shoulders and gave a hitch to his cotton sarong.

"Tuan, to-morrow New Year Day. Tuan, mem (lady) drive to Esplanade. Governor, general, all white tuans and mems there. Tuan Consul's carriage not nice. Shall syce buy ribbons?"

"Yes," I answered, tossing him the rest of the coppers, "and get a new one for your arm."

I had forgotten for the moment that it was the 31st of December. The syce touched his hand to his forehead and salaamed.

Through the s.p.a.ces of the protecting chicks I caught glimpses of my Malay kebun, or gardener, squatting on his bare feet, with his bare knees drawn up under his armpits, hacking with a heavy knife at the short gra.s.s. The mottled crotons, the yellow allamanda and pink hibiscus bushes, the clump of Eucharist lilies, the great trailing ma.s.ses of orchids that hung among the red flowers of the stately flamboyant tree by the green hedge, joined to make me forget the midwinter date on the calendar. The time seemed in my half-dream July in New York or August in Was.h.i.+ngton.

Ah Minga, the "boy" in flowing pantalets and stiffly starched blouse, came silently along the wide veranda, with a cup of tea and a plate of opened mangosteens. I roused myself, and the dreams of sleighbells and ice on window-panes, that had been fleeting through my mind at the first mention of New Year's Day by the syce, vanished.

Ah Minga, too, mentioned, as he placed the cool, pellucid globes before me, "To-mollow New Year Dlay, Tuan!"

On Christmas Day, Ah Minga had presented the mistress with the gilded counterfeit presentment of a Joss. The servants, one and all, from Zim, the cookee, to the wretched Kling dhobie (wash-man), had brought some little remembrance of their Christian master's great holiday.

In respecting our customs, they had taken occasion to establish one of their own. They had adopted New Year's as the day when their masters should return their presents and good will in solid cash.

At midnight we were awakened by a regular Fourth of July pandemonium. Whistles from the factories, salvos from Fort Canning, bells from the churches, Chinese tom-toms, Malay horns, rent the air from that hour until dawn with all the discords of the Orient and a few from Europe. By daylight the thousands of natives from all quarters of the peninsula and neighboring islands had gathered along the broad Ocean Esplanade of Singapore in front of the Cricket Club House, to take part in or watch the native sports by land and sea.

The inevitable Chinaman was there, the Kling, the Madrasman, the Sikh, the Arab, the Jew, the Chitty, or Indian money-lender,--they were all there, many times multiplied, unconsciously furnis.h.i.+ng a background of extraordinary variety and picturesqueness.

At ten o'clock the favored representatives of the Anglo-Saxon race took their place on the great veranda of the Cricket Club, and gave the signal that we would condescend to be amused for ten hours. Then the show commenced. There were not over two hundred white people to represent law and civilization amid the teeming native population.

In the centre of the beautiful esplanade or playground rose the heroic statue of Sir Stamford Raffles, the English governor who made Singapore possible. To my right, on the veranda, stood a modest, gray-haired little man who cleared the seas of piracy and insured Singapore's commercial ascendency, Sir Charles Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak. A little farther on, surrounded by a brilliant suite of Malay princes, was the Sultan of Joh.o.r.e, whose father sold the island of Singapore to the British.

The first of the sports was a series of foot-races between Malay and Kling boys, almost invariably won by the Malays, who are the North American Indians of Malaysia--the old-time kings of the soil. They are never, like the Chinese, mere beasts of burden, or great merchants, nor do they descend to petty trade, like the Indians or Bengalese. If they must work they become hors.e.m.e.n.

Next came a jockey race, in which a dozen long-limbed Malays took each a five-year-old child astride his shoulders, and raced for seventy-five yards. There were sack-races and greased-pole climbing and pig-catching.

Now came a singular contest--an eating match. Two dozen little Malay, Kling, Tamil, and Chinese boys were seated at regular intervals about an open circle by one of the governor's aids. Not one could touch the others in any way. Each had a dry, hard s.h.i.+p-biscuit before him. A pistol shot and two dozen pairs of little brown fists went pit-a-pat on the two dozen hard biscuits, and in an instant the crackers were broken to powder.

Then commenced the difficult task of forcing the powdered pulp down the little throats. Both hands were called into full play during the operation, one for crowding in, the other for grinding the residue and patting the stomach and throat. Each little compet.i.tor would shyly rub into the warm earth, or hide away in the folds of his many-colored sarong, as much as possible, or when a rival was looking the other way, would snap a good-sized piece across to him.

The little brown fellow who won the fifty-cent piece by finis.h.i.+ng his biscuit first simply put into his mouth a certain quant.i.ty of the crushed biscuit, and with little or no mastication pushed the whole ma.s.s down his throat by sheer force.

The minute the contest was decided, all the partic.i.p.ants, and many other boys, rushed to a great tub of mola.s.ses to duck for half-dollars. One after another their heads would disappear into the sticky, blinding ma.s.s, as they fished with their teeth for the s.h.i.+ning prizes at the bottom.

Successful or otherwise, after their powers were exhausted they would suddenly pull out their heads, reeking with the mola.s.ses, and make for the ocean, unmindful of the crowds of natives in holiday attire who blocked their way.

Then came a jinrikisha race, with Chinese coolies pulling Malay pa.s.sengers around a half-mile course. Letting go the handles of their wagons as they crossed the line, the coolies threw their unfortunate pa.s.sengers over backward.

Tugs of war, wrestling matches, and boxing bouts on the turf finished the land sports, and we all adjourned to the yachts to witness those of the sea. There were races between men-of-war cutters, European yachts, rowing sh.e.l.ls, Chinese sampans, and Malay colehs with great, dart-like sails, so wide-spreading that ropes were attached to the top of the masts, and a dozen naked natives hung far out over the side of the slender boat to keep it from blowing over. In making the circle of the harbor they would spring from side to side of the boat, sometimes lost to our view in the spray, often missing their footholds, and dragging through the tepid water.

Between times, while watching the races, we amused ourselves throwing coppers to a fleet of native boys in small dugouts beneath our bows. Every time a penny dropped into the water, a dozen little bronze forms would flash in the sunlight, and nine times out of ten the coin never reached the bottom.

Last of all came the trooping of the English colors on the magnificent esplanade, within the shadow of the cathedral; the march past of the st.u.r.dy British artillery and engineers, with their native allies, the Sikhs and Sepoys; then the feu-de-joie, and New Year's was officially recognized by the guns of the fort.

That night we danced at Government House,--we exiles of the Temperate Zone,--keeping up to the last the fiction that New Year's Day under a tropic sky and within sound of the tiger's wail was really January first. But every remembrance and a.s.sociation was, in our homesick thoughts, grouped about an open arch fire, with the sharp, crisp creak of sleigh-runners outside, in a frozen land fourteen thousand miles away.

IN THE BURST OF THE SOUTHWEST MONSOON

A Tale of Changhi Bungalow

We had been out all day from Singapore on a wild-pig hunt. There were eight of us, including three young officers of the Royal Artillery, besides somewhere between seventy and a hundred native beaters. The day had been unusually hot, even for a country whose regular record on the thermometer reads 150 degrees in the sun.

We had tramped and shot through jungle and lallang gra.s.s, until, when night came on, I was too tired to make the fourteen miles back across the island, and so decided to push on a mile farther to a government "rest bungalow." I said good-by to my companions and the game, and accompanied only by a Hindu guide, struck out across some ploughed lands for the jungle road that led to and ended at Changhi.

Changhi was one of three rest bungalows, or summer resorts, if one can be permitted to mention summer in this land of perpetual summer. They were owned and kept open by the Singapore Government for the convenience of travellers, and as places to which its own officials can flee from the cares of office and the demands of society. I had stopped at Changhi Bungalow once for some weeks when my wife and a party of friends and all our servants were with me. It was lonely even then, with the black impenetrable jungle crowding down on three sides, and a strip of the blinding, dazzling waters of the uncanny old Straits of Malacca in front.

There were tigers and snakes in the jungle, and crocodiles and sharks in the Straits, and lizards and other things in the bungalow. I thought of all this in a disjointed kind of a way, and half wished that I had stayed with my party. Then I noticed uneasily that some thick oily-looking clouds were blotting out the yellow haze left by the sun over on the Joh.o.r.e side. A few big hot drops of rain splashed down into my face, as I climbed wearily up the dozen cement steps of the house.

The bamboo chicks were all down, and the shutter-doors securely locked from the inside, but there was a long rattan chair within reach, and I dropped into it with a sigh of satisfaction, while my guide went out toward the servant-quarters to arouse the Malay mandor, or head gardener, whom H. B. M.'s Government trusted with this portion of her East Indian possessions.

As might have been expected, that high functionary was not to be found, and I was forced to content myself, while my guide went on to a neighboring native police station to make inquiries. I unb.u.t.toned my stiff kaki shooting-jacket, lit a manila, which my mouth was too dry to smoke, and gazed up at the ceiling in silence.

It was stiflingly hot. Even the cicadas in the great jungle tree, that towered a hundred and fifty feet above the house, were quiet. Every breath I took seemed to scorch me, and the b.a.l.l.s of my eyes ached. The sky had changed to a dull cartridge color.

A breeze came across the hot, glaring surface of the Straits, and stirred the tops of a little clump of palms, and died away. It brought with it the smell of rain.

For a moment there was a dead stillness,--not even a lizard clucked on the wall back of me; then all at once the thermometer dropped down two or three degrees, and a tearing wind struck the bamboo curtains and stretched them out straight; the tops of the ma.s.sive jungle trees bent and creaked; there was a blinding flash and a roar of thunder, and all distance was lost in darkness and rain. It was one of the quick, fierce bursts of the southwest monsoon.

I did not move, although wet to the skin.

Presently I could make out three blurred figures fighting their way slowly against the storm across the compound. One was the guide; the second was the mandor, naked save for a cotton sarong around his waist; the third was a stranger.

The trio came up on the veranda--the stranger hanging behind, with an apologetic droop of his head. He was a white man, in a suit of dirty, ragged linen. It took but one look to place him. I had seen hundreds of them "on the beach" in Singapore,--there could be no mistake. "Loafer"

was written all over him--from his ragged, matted hair to the fringe on the bottom of his trousers. He held a broken cork helmet, that had not seen pipe-clay for many a month, in his grimy hands, and sc.r.a.ped one foot and ducked his dripping head, as I turned toward him with a gruff,--

"Well?"

"Beg pardon, sir," he said, in a harsh, rasping voice, "but I heard that the American Consul was here. I am an American."

He looked up with a watery leer in his eyes.

"Go on," I said, without offering to take the hand of my fellow-countryman.

He let his arm fall to his side.

"I ain't got any pa.s.sport; that went with the rest, and I never had the heart to ask for another."

He gave a bad imitation of a sob.

"Never mind the side play," I commented, as he began to rumble in the bottomless pocket of his coat. "I will supply all that as you go along. What is it you want?"