We will now leave him for a while to this distress and to his difficult labour, in order to tell the reader the story of the Javanese Saïdyah in the dessah[1] of Badoor. I choose the name of this Javanese and of the village from Havelaar’s notes. In this story there will be question of extortion and robbery, and if, as regards the main tendency, anyone wishes to deny to a fiction the force of evidence, I give the assurance that I can supply the names of thirty-two persons in the district of Parang Koodyang alone, from whom in one month thirty-six buffaloes were forcibly taken on behalf of the Regent. Or, to be even more exact, that I can name thirty-two persons from that district who in one month had the courage to complain, and whose complaints Havelaar inquired into and found justified.
There are five such districts in the division of Lebak.
Now if anyone chooses to accept that the number of stolen buffaloes was less high in the places that had not the honour of being ruled by a son-in-law of the Adhipatti, I shall not insist on disputing the point, although the question is whether the insolence of other Chiefs may not have been based on grounds as solid as exalted kinship. For instance, the District-Chief of Tjelang-kahan, on the south coast, could, in the absence of a feared father-in-law, depend on the difficulty of lodging complaints which confronted poor people who had to travel from forty to sixty miles before at eve they could hide in the ravine next to Havelaar’s house. And if then also one remembers the many who started on the way and never reached that house . . . and the many who never even left their village, frightened by their own past experience or by the contemplation of the fate that befell other complainants, then I believe that one would be wrong in imagining that to multiply the number of stolen buffaloes in one district by five would yield too high a statistical measure of the total number of buffaloes stolen every month in the combined five districts in order to provide for the needs of the Court and dependants of the Regent of Lebak.
And it was not only buffaloes that were stolen, nor even was
- ↑ Village.
