She was graceful, accomplished, beautiful, poised and sweet.
One night as we walked alone under the moonlight the Englishman opened his heart to me and said, "You are going to visit the Head-Hunting Dyaks to-morrow. You will see their abject squalor and filth. You will be surprised when I tell you that my wife was a Dyak girl and that I took her out of a Kampong fifteen years ago and took her to England."
"That"s a lie!" I exclaimed.
"It is the truth!" he added.
Somehow his statement angered me. I don"t know why. Perhaps it was the unusual heat of the tropics. We were directly on the Equator. I would have fought him for that statement.
But it was true.
"And the h.e.l.l of it was that when I took her to England she was not happy and my people would not receive her. So we have had to come back to Borneo and live our lives in this fashion, far from civilization."
He was silent for a few minutes.
"That is the fate of mixing bloods in these tropical lands," he said with a shudder. "And the woman always suffers more than the man!"
I met another Malay-English girl on the ship going from Singapore to Batavia, Java.
She too was an educated, English-speaking girl of a strange beauty and fascination. She started to talk with me as I sat alone on the Dutch ship. We were the only English-speaking people on board and we felt a certain comradeship. We sat an entire evening talking about the problem of a girl of mixed blood in the Malay States.
"White men always a.s.sume that we are bad girls. They come into the offices where we work as stenographers and insult us. It is that taint of mixed blood. We have the longings and the ideals of the best blood that is in our veins; but the skin and the color and the pa.s.sions of the worst. We try to be good; some of us; but everything is against us. We can never marry white men; though we frequently fall in love with them for we work side by side with them in the offices. But when it comes to marrying us they fear the social ban. It is a terrible thing. There is no way out! It is a thing that has been imposed upon us from the generations that have gone. We pay!"
I shall never forget her brown eyes, her brown skin, her heaving breast, as the great Dutch ship cut the waves of the South China Sea bound for Java.
"Why are you leaving a good position and going to Java?" I asked her.
"They say things are better for us girls in Java; that the Dutch are not so particular. I shall no doubt be homesick for Singapore but I am going to try Java for a while. My sister is there!"
A Feminine-Flash light that has its humorous side was one that I experienced in Borneo.
We had gone out to a Dyak village to take pictures.
It was a miserably hot morning. That night I stayed in Pontianak which is bisected by the Equator. It was so cold in the middle of the night that I had to get up and put on a night shirt!
The next day we tramped ten miles through the Jungle to a Head-hunting Dyak village.
I had been taking pictures for an hour in this Kampong when six of the most beautiful Dyak girls came in, with great Bamboo water tubes flung over their gracefully strong shoulders. Their skin looked like that of a red banana from toe to chin. They were stark naked save for a girdle about their loins. They had been five miles away for water.
Their skin was flushed with exercise. There they stood, mystified at seeing white men in the village Kampong.
In fact they were terrified.
Their big brown eyes bulged out.
Their b.r.e.a.s.t.s heaved with fear.
I said to the missionary, "Dyak Madonnas! What a painting they would make?"
"Yes, there are no more beautiful women anywhere. They look like bronze statues. A Rodin, or a St. Gaudens would go wild over their limbs and bodies."
I asked the missionary to tell them that I wanted to take a picture of them just as they were, standing with their water vessels poised on their shoulders; in their naked splendor and beauty.
He told them.
They squealed for all the world like American girls and ran for dear life, disappearing in the flash of an eye.
He tried to coax them to come out to get a picture taken. The Missionary could speak their language but they would only peek through the doors with grinning faces.
Finally they agreed that we could take their pictures if I would let them put dresses on.
I didn"t want to do this; for I wanted them just as they were; but saw that they were adamant in their souls even if their brown bodies did look as soft as ripening mangos; and as beautiful and brown.
I pictured all sorts of ugly dresses; discarded by the white folks and given to them. But much to my surprise, when they appeared all dressed up for the picture, every last one of them had on a white woman"s discarded night gown.
I wanted to laugh. It destroyed their picturesqueness but those gowns could not destroy their symmetrical beauty of limb and body.
"That"s a quick way to dress up!" I said to my missionary friend.
We smiled but I got the picture.
And back of these Flash-lights Feminine; is the black page of the history of womankind in all the Far East; with footbinding still rampant over nine-tenths of China; baby-killing, baby-selling, and baby-slavery which I saw with my own eyes time and time again; with slavery of womankind, from j.a.pan down to Ceylon the regular thing. But there is still hope in the woman-heart of the Far East; and the hope is the American woman and her religion. That and that alone will break down prejudices, break off shackles, and tear to bits the traditions of the past.
"The women suffer! Yes, the women always suffer!" said a big fellow to me up in the northern part of Luzon in the Philippines one evening.
"What do you mean?" I asked him, scenting a story.
Then the man told me of a cholera epidemic that he had pa.s.sed through; of how he had tried to care for the sick, even though he was not a physician; told me of their poor superst.i.tious methods of driving away the "evil spirits."
He told of how he had gone into homes where he found seven inmates dead and four dying; of how he tried to care for them with nothing medicinal at hand.
Then he told me of how the poor people went down to a dirty inland river and had killed a hog, taken its heart; killed a dog, taken its heart; and then after putting them on a little raft, floated them off down the river to drive the cholera away. Then he told me of how the natives had, in their desperation, tied tight bands about their ankles to keep the evil spirits from coming up out of the earth into their bodies.
"But what do you yourself do about a doctor. You say that you are 400 miles from a doctor, even here. What about your children, when they take sick?" I asked him, and then was sorry that I had asked the question because of a terribly hurt and unutterably sorrowful look in his eyes.
"Mother and I don"t like to talk about that or to think about it!" he said simply, and I knew that I had torn open an old wound which was just over his heart.
His voice broke as he spoke, and he looked at the woman who was his brave helpmate and said again: "Mother and I don"t like to think about that!" The tears ran down over his cheeks and "Mother"s" too, and mine also.
"I am sorry! I am sorry if I have opened an old wound!" I said, quite helpless to remedy the damage I had done. I felt as one who had unwittingly trodden on a flower bed and crushed some violets. They bleed, even though you see no blood. I saw that their hearts were bleeding. But he spoke.
"We were 400 miles from a doctor. Baby took sick. If we could have had a doctor she would have been saved."
"Now Daddy, we do not know for certain about that," said the ever-conservative woman in her.