LITMIR.BIZ

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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 my battered Ford it occurred to me that Raka might very well have died meanwhile and that the soul of this child who was to have been a great dancer might by now be astray in the darkness of the unknown. I could hear myself upbraiding Putuh on and on without restraint and at the top of my voice as we went noisily over the bridge which spans the abrupt gorge at the end of my village. Putuh listened to me quietly and when I had done he began to smile once more.

      “What the gods will must come to pass,” was all he said.

      Raka was not to me just an ordinary patient. I had seen the child dance the kebjar at a temple festival a short time before. What intentness in his small face, what ancient wisdom in his eyes! On that occasion the thought came to me for the first time that he must, as the Balinese believe, have already lived many lives. I suddenly felt that I could realize what ancestor was born again in the little Raka, and who it was who had once more been made manifest in order to return to the island once more and to live again—to live a new life with the same sweetness and bitterness as the old, but with fewer mistakes and aberrations and one step nearer perfection, and that Balinese heaven whence there is no longer the necessity to be born again. For moments together during that dance it seemed to me that the little figure in the golden robe was not the child Raka, but the older Raka, his forefather, the radiant, glamorous Raka of other days—the man whom everyone loved, who had erred and been punished and who had been purified by his own efforts, so that he came back to earth not as a worm or a scorpion, but as a child and a grandson and a dancer as he himself had been. I loved little Raka as I had loved the other in earlier days; and the old car went far too slowly to suit my impatience.

      My thoughts might be high-flown and beautiful, but my words to Ida Bagus Putuh the while were full of vulgarity and good Dutch curses. I saw nothing of the road and the landscape, although as a rule, even after thirty-five years in Bali, I never tired of gazing at the terraced rice-fields, the gorges and the distant vistas of palm trees. Putuh had put a fresh quid into his mouth and was silent for very shame at the white man’s lack of control.

      We passed through the town of Badung, which is also called Denpasar from its street of shops where Chinese, Indians, Japanese and Arabs have their funny little booths. We went by the hotel. One of the five radios of the island could be heard through the entrance which was on a level with the road. It sounded like Sunday in a Dutch provincial town and I shut my eyes in disgust. Putuh laughed and tried to imitate the sound of it, which seemed comical to him. “The white people’s gamelans are not good,” he criticized. As we passed the two great wairingin trees at the entrance to the main street, my thoughts were caught back into the past. The trees were still there, standing where they had stood years ago before the wall of the Puri, the palace of the lords of Badung. This was the spot where Bali had changed the most. There, where the palace courtyards had sprawled abroad their clutter of buildings and people, white-skirted girls were playing tennis and, farther away, Mohammedan salesmen from Denpasar were practising football. An automobile full of tourists was coming round the corner.

      I don’t

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