could travel in all directions, as well as an occasional, fully loaded, rackety prehistoric bus. The natives, however, love their Japanese bicycles, and even women may be seen on them in their bright-colored kains with little packages precariously balanced on their heads.
“What has my friend got in his bag?” I asked Tamor at last, when I thought that full honor had been done to preludes and politenesses.
“It is nothing,” he said modestly. “Only a bad carving.” “May I see it?” I asked.
He slowly opened the fibre bag, unwrapped a carving from a piece of rag and put it down on the step near Putuh’s naked brown feet. It was a simple and vigorous piece of work—a doe and a stag in the moment of coming together. An arrow had pierced the male in the flank and both their necks were arched back in a way that expressed anguish and the pangs of death. I looked at the two beasts with emotion. Suddenly I was aware that I had once seen something like it many, many years before. Then I remembered. It was Tamor’s uncle who had tried to carve them—in defiance of the style of his day. The memory came back with a rush as I felt the smooth finely worked satinwood in my hands.
“Has my friend ever seen a carving like this before?” I asked. Tamor smiled in surprise. “No, Tuan,” he replied.—”I must therefore beg forgiveness.”
I had fallen in love with the piece on the spot and knew that I should have to have it. But first there were many ceremonies to be gone through. I praised the carving, while Tamor maintained that it was bad and worthless, unworthy to stand in my house and that he was a wretched beginner and bungler. Joy and pride in his work shone meanwhile in his honest eyes, in which there was the innocence of an animal. I asked him the price and he assured me that he would take whatever I chose to give and that he would be happy to be allowed to offer me the piece as a present. I knew that Tamor was a good salesman and that, like all Balinese, he loved nothing better than earning money to gamble away at cock fights. He was merely counting on the fact that I would offer more than he would venture to ask—and so it proved.
The deal concluded, Tamor knotted the money in the folds of his silk girdle; but still Putuh had said not a word about the motive of his visit and it would have been impolite to ask him straight out. Perhaps he had been unable to pay his taxes and wanted to ask me for a loan, but in that case he would have come by himself and secretly, not with Tamor. The conversation dribbled on. The rainy season would soon be here. The heat had been bad for some days on end, particularly when you had the sawahs (the rice-fields) to plough. There had been a corpse-burning at Sanur, the next village to Taman Sari, nothing to speak of, only simple folk who shared the cost among them, about thirty bodies in all. There were a lot of squirrels among the coco palms and they had had to get together and frighten them off for a night or two with torches and clappers. The Lord of Badung had taken a girl of Taman Sari as wife, a Gusti from the lower nobility of the Wesjas. At next full moon there was to be a three-days’ temple feast at Kesiman. The rice-fields did not yield as much as they did in the old days. The rainy season would soon be here and then there would be an end of the heat.
After we had canvassed all these little village topics, the conversation completely dried up. The Balinese think nothing of squatting through an hour or two in silence, and the gods only know what goes on meanwhile behind their placid foreheads. But I was still smelling of the iodoform and carbolic of the hospital and was eager for my bath. I begged to be excused. That was really only a joke, for properly speaking it was for my visitors to beg leave to go. They clasped their hands and raised them to their left shoulders and I withdrew to my little bath-house.
I had my bath and drank my home-made arrack. My servants brought me my meal to another balé—cooked rice and roast sucking-pig bought in the market, vegetables colored yellow with kunjit and flavored with various strong spices—papayas and pisang. After that I lit my pipe and lay in a bamboo chair to read the latest magazines. As Bali has a direct air-line with Holland, we are only ten days behind the rest of the world with our news. Sometimes it almost puts my brain in a spin when I think of our little island, so ancient, so unique, so like paradise in spite of every innovation, so unspoilt, being linked up so closely with the rest of the world by aeroplanes and large steamers and tourist agencies.
I read myself into a doze and did not wake up until my little monkey, Joggi, jumped on to my shoulder and began gently searching through my hair. The sun meantime had moved across the sky and the palms and bread-fruit trees in my garden threw long shadows. My cook’s mother was crossing the courtyard with a palm-leaf basket containing offerings. I watched her—a lean figure with shrunken breasts—as she busied herself at my house altar and did those reverences to the gods which I, as a white man, did not know how to do. Now my house was assured of divine protection. The air had grown cool and the doves cooed in the cages suspended from the eaves.
An hour or two had gone by when I returned to the other house. It still smelt of champak flowers and Putuh still sat on the step chewing sirih. Tamor appeared to have gone. I went to the gate and looked for the bicycle. It had gone. I was sure now that Putuh wanted to borrow money of me. If you did not pay your taxes within two years, your fields were taken from you and put up for auction. I put my hand on his shoulder to reassure him. “Had my friend something to tell me?” I asked. He took his sirih out of his mouth and put it down on the step.
“I ought not to burden the Tuan with my trivial affairs,” he said politely. “But I know that the tuan has a good medicine for sickness and I hoped that the tuan would give me medicine for my sick child.”
“Which of your children is sick?” I asked, forgetting to address him with the formality beseeming his caste. Perhaps he took it for the familiarity permitted among equals, for his face brightened.
“It is Raka, Tuan,” he said. “He has the heat sickness.”
“Why didn’t you bring him with you?” I asked severely. “You know that anyone who is sick can come to me in the sick-house.”
Putuh looked at me with brimming eyes. His smile took a deeper meaning. It was the saddest smile imaginable.
“The child is very weak, Tuan,” he said. “He would have died on the way. His soul is no longer with him.”
Putuh had three wives, one of whom had left him. Of these three wives five children had been born. Raka was his eldest son. I knew Raka well. He was a slender little fellow, six years old, and a wonderful dancer. The Guild of Dancing of his village paid a celebrated teacher in Badung to give Raka lessons in dancing. They were proud of this child in Taman Sari and they hoped he would become a great dancer and be an honor to his Guild. And now Raka had malaria and was delirious; his soul had left him, and his father had been seven hours at least in coming to me and telling me about it.
“You are Raka’s father,” I said sternly. “Why did you not come to me before? Will you people never learn that you must go for the doctor while there is still time?”
Putuh let his head fall with an expressiveness peculiar to the Balinese. “Raka’s mother is a stupid woman,” he said. “She has no more sense than a buffalo cow. She sent for the balian and he gave the child medicine. It is good medicine, but the child wishes to go to his fathers.”
The hopeless fatalism of this put me in a rage. I rushed for my bag, and seizing Putuh by the arm I dragged him to my car, heaping reproaches on him all the while. I could scarcely refrain from calling the village doctor, the witch-doctor, the balian, a stupid old buffalo. The native doctors can cure many ailments with their exorcisms and herb lore, but in the case of many others they are powerless. For malaria they decoct a brew from a bark which contains quinine, but not enough quinine to be efficacious. Many balians came to me in secret for quinine pills, which they then reduced to powder and mixed with their brew. But the doctor of course was not so clever a conjurer as that. As we rattled along in
