FICTION.
TILE VILLAGE IN THE JIINGLE.I.
THE author-of this remarkable study of native life in a jungle village in Ceylon was, we gather, in the Ceylon Civil Service. If all Civil servants thought as sympathetically and as curiously—in the strict sense—about native habits as Mr. Woolf thinks, nothing would be more transparently absurd than the charge that Civil servants do not care to "understand the native." Mr. Woolf extenuates the faults of the natives— or rather, we should say, states them without impatience or reproof, which to English minds almost connotes extenuation —while giving a frankly grim and rather ugly picture of Sinhalese customs. In this story the jungle is the village as —• The Folk-lore of aerejordshire. By Ella Mary Leather. London: Sidgwick and Jaekeon. [21a. net. t in the angle. By L. S. Woolf. London : Edward Arnold. kau. net.] truly as the Nile is Egypt. . The jungle with its forbidding gloom, its alternating rank luxuriance and. aridity, dominates the habits and thoughts of the villagers. The jungle is an element to be fought as consciously and persistently as Victor Hugo makes his fishermen struggle_ against their majestic antagonist the sea. Give the jungle the least encourajtment by your lethargy and in a short time its furious growth engulfs your house and throws rapacious arms across your compound, deriding and obliterating the poor artificial marks of man's ownership. In this setting the standards of village life have a primeval character; the passions and habits of the men and women are very near those of the animals. Mr. ,Woolf states all this plainly. If the picture is not always pleasant or beautiful it may be answered that not otherwise could it have been drawn.
Of the 'chief character' of the story, Silindu, one would be puzzled to say whether or not he declines enough from the normal to he called mad. He is certainly queer. The jungle has cast a spell upon him ; he knows it more closely than any of his fellows in the village of Bedda,,,ama; be throws greetings. to the animals as they slink past him in the under- growth, and he exhorts an animal which he has wounded with= his gun to be sensible and die easily. Perhaps he is about as mad as the eccentric priest in John Bull's Other Island, for while he would not be incapable of carrying on an animated conversation with a cricket, he has more perception and lore than all his neighbours. But although he is intimate with the jungle he is terrified of it ; he dreads its sinister influences and the devils sequestered in its shades, and fear is never absent from his eyes. It is the terror of fascination. When his wife bears him twin daughters be kills his wife. He wanted a son to help him in his old age to clear patches in the jungle that he might gather the scanty harvest of grain. To have daughters was only to add to the burdens of his househOld and make more real for him the spectre of starvation which, scarcely less than the jungle itself, is a haunting terror to the village. When the twin girls grow up, how- ever, they learn from their father the fascination of the jungle and become as expert as he in its peculiar craft. Even a Sinhalese jungle village has its conventionalities, and the twine are disapproved of by the other women who loiter about the compounds gossiping when they are not cooking their husbands' rice. But it is just the unconventionality of the lithe and resourceful jungle-loving. Punchi Menika (one of the twins) which engages the roving fancy of a relation of the headman. For the headman's relation to wish to marry a member of such an inferior family as that of Silindu is in itself a social revolution. The headman expresses his displeasure against Silindu in a variety of ways that display a character strangely compounded of , smoothness and strength. But, after all, such a character is not peculiar to Ceylon or even to a jungle village. Swaviter in modo is an ancient rule for getting exactly what you will. And so the smiling but relentless headman brings it about that Silindu sinks deeper and deeper into debt. The universal solution of pledging the harvest in advance is no longer open to him.
His other daughter indirectly brings new trouble on him. The comparatively affluent man who wishes to marry her understands magic, and when Silindu withholds his consent he throws a charm on the unhappy father. Silindu comes near to death because he believes that he is unable to resist his fate; evidently a mental obsession is strong enough to play havoc among those people of extremely low vitality. The pilgrimage undertaken by Silindu and his household to a distant Tamil temple to supplicate the god for a cure is remarkably described. Silindu recovers, but fresh troubles await him. A town-bred gombeen man—so to call him— who settles in the village and rapidly brings a large part of the residents into his debt, wishes to take Punchi Menika for his wife ; and when Silindu aids and abets his daughter in her determination to stay with her present husband a trumped-up charge of burglary is brought against Punebi Menika's husband. The irony of the author's account of the trial makes us think that he has no very high opinion of the power of the judiciary ;in Ceylon to appreciate the motives of the native mind. We shall not diselbse the character of Silindu's revenge or the fate of his daughters. The jungle closes in on the sordid and futile struggles of the hunger-driven, debt- ridden inhabitants. Mr, Woolf describes its end when only one person is left.
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" The village was forgotten, it disappeared into the jungle from which it had sprang, and with it she was cut off, forgotten. It was as if she was the last person left in the world, a world of unending trees above which the wind roared always and the sun blazed. She became one of the beasts of the jungle, struggling perpetually for life against hunger and thirst; the ruined hut, through which the sun beat and the rains washed, was only the ilair to which she returned at night for shelter. Her memories of the evils which had happened to her, even of Babun and her life with him, became dim and faded. And as they faded, her child- hood and Silindu and his tales returned to her. She had returned to the jungle ; it had taken her back ; she lived as he had done, understanding it, loving it, fearing it. As he had said, one has to live many years before one understands what the beasts say in the jungle. She understood them now, she was one of them. And they understood her, and were not afraid of her. They became accustomed to the little tattered hut, and to the woman who lived in it. The herd of wild pigs would go grunting and rooting up to the very door, and the old sows would look up unafraid and untroubled at the woman sitting within."
The fault of the story is that its interest is too much dispersed, but the author can beyond doubt create an atmosphere of tragedy, and has drawn characters that we shall not easily forget.
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