Hoofdstuk 16

Havelaar received a letter from the Regent of Tjanjor, in which the latter informed him that he wished to pay a visit to his uncle, the Adhipatti of Lebak.

This news was very unwelcome to him.

He knew how accustomed the Chiefs in the Preanger Regencies were to displaying great pomp, and how the Tjanjor Tommongong would not undertake such a journey without a retinue of many hundreds, all of whom, with their horses, would have to be lodged and fed.

Gladly, therefore, would he have prevented this visit, yet he pondered in vain over the means that might forestall it without giving offence to the Regent of Rangkas-Betoeng, since the latter was very proud and would have felt himself deeply insulted had his relative poverty been cited as the reason for not visiting him.

And if this visit could not be avoided, it would inevitably give rise to a worsening of the burden under which the population already bent. It is to be doubted whether Havelaar's address had left any lasting impression on the Chiefs.

With many this was surely not the case, on which he himself had not in fact counted. But it is just as certain that a report had gone round in the villages that the toewan who held authority at Rangkas-Betoeng meant to do justice; and so, even though his words had lacked the power to hold them back from wrongdoing, they had nonetheless given its victims the courage to complain, however hesitantly and in secret they did so.

Of an evening they crept through the ravine, and when Tine sat in her room she was many a time startled by an unexpected rustling, and through the open window she saw dark figures slipping past with timid tread.

Before long she ceased to be frightened, for she knew what it meant when those shapes haunted the house so ghost-like and sought protection from her Max!

Then she would beckon to him, and he would rise to call the complainers to himself.

Most of them came from the district of Parang-Koedjang, where the Regent's son-in-law was Chief; and although that Chief assuredly did not neglect to take his own share of what was extorted, it was no secret to anyone that he plundered chiefly in the name and for the benefit of the Regent.

It was touching how those poor folk trusted in Havelaar's chivalry and were convinced that he would not summon them to repeat in public, the following day, what they had said in his room by night or the previous evening.

For this would truly have been a torment for all of them, and for many of them, death!

Havelaar noted down what they said, and afterwards bade the complainers return to their village.

He promised that justice would be done, provided they did not resist and did not flee the country, as most of them had intended.

Usually he was, soon after, at the very place where the injustice had occurred; indeed, often he had already been there and had—commonly by night—investigated the matter before the complainant himself had even returned to his dwelling.

Thus he visited, in that far-flung division, villages that lay twenty hours distant from Rangkas-Betoeng, without either the Regent or even the controller Verbrugge knowing that he was absent from the chief town.

His purpose in this was to avert from the complainers the danger of revenge, and at the same time to spare the Regent the shame of an open inquiry which, under him, would assuredly not, as before, have ended with a withdrawal of the complaint.

So he still hoped, always, that the Chiefs would turn back from the dangerous road they had already trodden so long; and in that case he would have contented himself with demanding restitution for the despoiled ... in so far as it was possible to make good the damage they had suffered.

But every time, after he had once more spoken with the Regent, he was brought to the conviction that the promises of improvement were idle, and he was bitterly grieved at the failure of his efforts.

We shall now leave him for a while to that sorrow and his arduous labour, in order to tell the reader the story of the Javanese Saïdjah in the village of Badoer.

I take the names of that village and of that Javanese from Havelaar's notes.

It will be a matter of extortion and theft; and should anyone—as far as the main thrust of it goes—wish to deny the evidential force of a piece of fiction, I give the assurance that I am able to supply the names of thirty-two persons in the district of Parang-Koedjang alone from whom, in the space of a single month, thirty-six buffaloes were taken for the benefit of the Regent. Or, more exactly still, that I can name the thirty-two persons from that district who in one month dared to complain, and whose complaint Havelaar investigated and found to be well-founded.

There are five such districts in the division of Lebak ...

If one now chooses to assume that the number of buffaloes stolen was lower in the regions that had not the honour of being governed by a son-in-law of the Adhipatti, I am quite willing to grant it—though it remains a question whether the brazenness of other Chiefs did not rest on grounds just as firm as exalted kinship?

The district chief of Tjilang-kahan on the South Coast, for instance, could, lacking a dreaded father-in-law, count upon the difficulty of lodging a complaint, for poor folk who had forty to sixty miles to travel before they could, of an evening, hide themselves in the ravine beside Havelaar's house.

And if one bears in mind, besides, the many who set out on the road never to reach that house ... the many who did not even leave their village, deterred as they were by their own experience or by witnessing the fate that befell other complainers, then I believe one would do an injustice in supposing that multiplying by five the number of buffaloes stolen from a single district yielded too high a figure for anyone who asks after the statistics of the number of cattle stolen each month in five districts to provide for the needs of the household of the Regent of Lebak.

And it was not buffaloes alone that were stolen, nor was buffalo-theft even the chief thing.

There is needed—in the Indies above all, where forced labour still lawfully exists—a lesser measure of effrontery to call up the population unlawfully for unpaid work than is required for the taking of property.

It is easier to make the population believe that the Government has need of their labour without meaning to pay for it than that it would demand their buffaloes for nothing. And even if the timorous Javanese dared to inquire whether the so-called forced labour exacted of him agreed with the regulations on the matter, this would still be impossible for him, since the one knows nothing of the other, and he therefore cannot reckon whether the appointed number of persons has been exceeded tenfold—nay, fiftyfold?

Where, then, the more dangerous deed, the one more easily detected, is carried out with such boldness, what is one to think of the abuses that are easier to commit and run less risk of discovery?

I said I would pass on to the story of the Javanese Saïdjah. First, however, I am compelled to one of those digressions that can so hardly be avoided in describing conditions wholly strange to the reader.

I shall at the same time take occasion from it to point to one of the obstacles that make the right judging of Indian affairs so peculiarly difficult for non-Indian persons.

Repeatedly I have spoken of Javanese, and however natural this may seem to the European reader, the term will nonetheless have rung as a mistake in the ears of anyone acquainted with Java.

The western residencies of Bantam, Batavia, Preanger, Krawang, and a part of Cheribon—taken together, called the Soenda Lands—are held not to belong to Java proper; and, leaving aside now the foreigners who have come over the sea into those regions, the original population is indeed an altogether different one from that of central Java and of the so-called Oosthoek.