I
WE KNEW him in those unprotected days when we
were content to hold in our hands our lives and our
property. None of us, I believe, has any property
now, and I hear that many, negligently, have lost their
lives; but I am sure that the few who survive are not yet
so dim-eyed as to miss in the befogged respectability
of their newspapers the intelligence of various native
risings in the Eastern Archipelago. Sunshine gleams
between the lines of those short paragraphs — sunshine
and the glitter of the sea. A strange name wakes up
memories; the printed words scent the smoky atmosphere
of to-day faintly, with the subtle and penetrating
perfume as of land breezes breathing through the
starlight of bygone nights; a signal fire gleams like a
jewel on the high brow of a sombre cliff; great trees,
the advanced sentries of immense forests, stand watchful
and still over sleeping stretches of open water; a
line of white surf thunders on an empty beach, the
shallow water foams on the reefs; and green islets scattered
through the calm of noonday lie upon the level of
a polished sea, like a handful of emeralds on a buckler
of steel.
There are faces too — faces dark, truculent, and smiling;
the frank audacious faces of men barefooted, well
armed and noiseless. They thronged the narrow length
of our schooner's decks with their ornamented and barbarous
crowd, with the variegated colours of checkered
sarongs, red turbans, white jackets, embroideries; with
the gleam of scabbards, gold rings, charms, armlets,
lance blades, and jewelled handles of their weapons.
They had an independent bearing, resolute eyes, a restrained
manner; and we seem yet to hear their soft
voices speaking of battles, travels, and escapes; boasting
with composure, joking quietly; sometimes in well-bred
murmurs extolling their own valour, our generosity;
or celebrating with loyal enthusiasm the virtues
of their ruler. We remember the faces, the eyes, the
voices, we see again the gleam of silk and metal; the
murmuring stir of that crowd, brilliant, festive, and
martial; and we seem to feel the touch of friendly
brown hands that, after one short grasp, return to rest
on a chased hilt. They were Karain's people — a
devoted following. Their movements hung on his
lips; they read their thoughts in his eyes; he murmured
to them nonchalantly of life and death, and they accepted
his words humbly, like gifts of fate. They were
all free men, and when speaking to him said, "Your
slave." On his passage voices died out as though he
had walked guarded by silence; awed whispers followed
him. They called him their war-chief. He was the
ruler of three villages on a narrow plain; the master
of an insignificant foothold on the earth — of a conquered
foothold that, shaped like a young moon, lay ignored
between the hills and the sea.
From the deck of our schooner, anchored in the
middle of the bay, he indicated by a theatrical sweep
of his arm along the jagged outline of the hills the
whole of his domain; and the ample movement seemed
to drive back its limits, augmenting it suddenly into
something so immense and vague that for a moment it
appeared to be bounded only by the sky. And really,
looking at that place, landlocked from the sea and shut
off from the land by the precipitous slopes of mountains,
it was difficult to believe in the existence of any
neighbourhood. It was still, complete, unknown, and
full of a life that went on stealthily with a troubling
effect of solitude; of a life that seemed unaccountably
empty of anything that would stir the thought, touch
the heart, give a hint of the ominous sequence of days.
It appeared to us a land without memories, regrets,
and hopes; a land where nothing could survive the
coming of the night, and where each sunrise, like a
dazzling act of special creation, was disconnected from
the eve and the morrow.
Karain swept his hand over it. "All mine!" He
struck the deck with his long staff; the gold head flashed
like a falling star; very close behind him a silent old
fellow in a richly embroidered black jacket alone of
all the Malays around did not follow the masterful gesture
with a look. He did not even lift his eyelids.
He bowed his head behind his master, and without
stirring held hilt up over his right shoulder a long
blade in a silver scabbard. He was there on duty, but
without curiosity, and seemed weary, not with age,
but with the possession of a burdensome secret of existence.
Karain, heavy and proud, had a lofty pose and
breathed calmly. It was our first visit, and we looked
about curiously.
The bay was like a bottomless pit of intense light.
The circular sheet of water reflected a luminous sky,
and the shores enclosing it made an opaque ring of
earth floating in an emptiness of transparent blue.
The hills, purple and arid, stood out heavily on the sky:
their summits seemed to fade into a coloured tremble
as of ascending vapour; their steep sides were streaked
with the green of narrow ravines; at their foot lay rice-fields,
plantain-patches, yellow sands. A torrent wound
about like a dropped thread. Clumps of fruit-trees
marked the villages; slim palms put their nodding heads
together above the low houses; dried palm-leaf roofs
shone afar, like roofs of gold, behind the dark colonnades
of tree-trunks; figures passed vivid and vanishing;
the smoke of fires stood upright above the masses
of flowering bushes; bamboo fences glittered, running
away in broken lines between the fields. A sudden
cry on the shore sounded plaintive in the distance,
and ceased abruptly, as if stifled in the downpour of
sunshine. A puff of breeze made a flash of darkness
on the smooth water, touched our faces, and became
forgotten. Nothing moved. The sun blazed down
into a shadowless hollow of colours and stillness.
It was the stage where, dressed splendidly for his
part, he strutted, incomparably dignified, made important
by the power he had to awaken an absurd
expectation of something heroic going to take place —
a burst of action or song — upon the vibrating tone of a
wonderful sunshine. He was ornate and disturbing,
for one could not imagine what depth of horrible void
such an elaborate front could be worthy to hide. He
was not masked — there was too much life in him, and
a mask is only a lifeless thing; but he presented himself
essentially as an actor, as a human being aggressively
disguised. His smallest acts were prepared and
unexpected, his speeches grave, his sentences ominous
like hints and complicated like arabesques. He was
treated with a solemn respect accorded in the irreverent
West only to the monarchs of the stage, and he accepted
the profound homage with a sustained dignity seen
nowhere else but behind the footlights and in the condensed
falseness of some grossly tragic situation. It
was almost impossible to remember who he was —
only a petty chief of a conveniently isolated corner of
Mindanao, where we could in comparative safety break
the law against the traffic in firearms and ammunition
with the natives. What would happen should one of
the moribund Spanish gun-boats be suddenly galvanized
into a flicker of active life did not trouble us, once
we were inside the bay — so completely did it appear
out of the reach of a meddling world; and besides, in
those days we were imaginative enough to look with a
kind of joyous equanimity on any chance there was
of being quietly hanged somewhere out of the way of
diplomatic remonstrance. As to Karain, nothing could
happen to him unless what happens to all — failure and
death; but his quality was to appear clothed in the
illusion of unavoidable success. He seemed too effective,
too necessary there, too much of an essential condition
for the existence of his land and his people,
to be destroyed by anything short of an earthquake.
He summed up his race, his country, the elemental
force of ardent life, of tropical nature. He had its
luxuriant strength, its fascination; and, like it, he carried
the seed of peril within.
In many successive visits we came to know his
stage well — the purple semicircle of hills, the slim trees
leaning over houses, the yellow sands, the streaming
green of ravines. All that had the crude and blended
colouring, the appropriateness almost excessive, the
suspicious immobility of a painted scene; and it enclosed
so perfectly the accomplished acting of his amazing
pretences that the rest of the world seemed shut
out forever from the gorgeous spectacle. There could
be nothing outside. It was as if the earth had gone on
spinning, and had left that crumb of its surface alone
in space. He appeared utterly cut off from everything
but the sunshine, and that even seemed to be made
for him alone. Once when asked what was on the other
side of the hills, he said, with a meaning smile, "Friends
and enemies — many enemies; else why should I buy
your rifles and powder?" He was always like this —
word-perfect in his part, playing up faithfully to the
mysteries and certitudes of his surroundings. "Friends
and enemies" — nothing else. It was impalpable and
vast. The earth had indeed rolled away from under
his land, and he, with his handful of people, stood
surrounded by a silent tumult as of contending shades.
Certainly no sound came from outside. "Friends
and enemies!" He might have added, "and memories,"
at least as far as he himself was concerned;
but he neglected to make that point then. It made
itself later on, though; but it was after the daily performance — in
the wings, so to speak, and with the lights
out. Meantime he filled the stage with barbarous
dignity. Some ten years ago he had led his people
— a scratch lot of wandering Bugis — to the conquest
of the bay, and now in his august care they had forgotten
all the past, and had lost all concern for the
future. He gave them wisdom, advice, reward, punishment,
life or death, with the same serenity of attitude
and voice. He understood irrigation and the art
of war — the qualities of weapons and the craft of boat-building.
He could conceal his heart; had more endurance;
he could swim longer, and steer a canoe better
than any of his people; he could shoot straighter, and
negotiate more tortuously than any man of his race I
knew. He was an adventurer of the sea, an outcast,
a ruler — and my very good friend. I wish him a quick
death in a stand-up fight, a death in sunshine; for he had
known remorse and power, and no man can demand
more from life. Day after day he appeared before us,
incomparably faithful to the illusions of the stage,
and at sunset the night descended upon him quickly,
like a falling curtain. The seamed hills became black
shadows towering high upon a clear sky; above them
the glittering confusion of stars resembled a mad
turmoil stilled by a gesture; sounds ceased, men slept,
forms vanished — and the reality of the universe alone
remained — a marvellous thing of darkness and glimmers.