雙語(yǔ)·像愛(ài)麗絲的小鎮(zhèn) Chapter 4

Chapter 4

“My dear,”I said.“I am so very sorry.”

She raised her head.“You don't have to be sorry,”she replied.“It was one of those things that seem to happen in a war. It's a long time ago, now—nearly six years. And Captain Sugamo was hung—not for that, but for what he did upon the railway. It's all over and done with now, and nearly forgotten.”

There was, of course, no women's camp in Kuantan, and Captain Sugamo was not the man to be bothered with a lot of women and children. The execution took place at midday at a tree that stood beside the recreation ground overlooking the tennis courts: as soon as the maimed, bleeding body hanging by its hands had ceased to twitch Captain Sugamo stood them in parade before him.

“You very bad people,”he said.“No place here for you. I send you to Kota Bahru. You walk now.”

They stumbled off without a word, in desperate hurry to get clear of that place of horror. The same sergeant that had escorted them from Gemas was sent with them, for he also was disgraced as having shared the chickens. It was as a punishment that he was ordered to continue with them, because all prisoners are disgraceful and dishonourable creatures in the eyes of the Japanese, and to guard them and escort them is an insulting and a menial job fit only for the lowest type of man. An honourable Japanese would kill himself rather than be taken prisoner. Perhaps to emphasize this point the private soldier was taken away, so that from Kuantan onwards the sergeant was their only guard.

So they took up their journey again, living from day to day. They left Kuantan about the middle of July. It is about two hundred miles from Kuantan to Kota Bahru: allowing for halts of several days for illness Jean anticipated it would take them two months at least to get there.

They got to Besarah on the first day: this is a fishing village on the sea, with white coral sand and palm trees at the head of the beach. It is a very lovely place but they slept little, for most of the children were awake and crying in the night with memories of the horror they had seen. They could not bear to stay so close to Kuantan and travelled on next day another short stage to Balok, another fishing village on another beach with more palm trees. Here they rested for a day.

Gradually they came to realize that they had entered a new land. The north-east coast of Malaya is a very lovely country, and comparatively healthy. It is beautiful, with rocky headlands and long, sweeping, sandy beaches fringed with palm trees, and usually there is a freshwind from the sea. Moreover there is an abundance of fresh fish in all the villages. For the first time since they left Panong the women had sufficient protein with their rice, and their health began to show an improvement at once. Most of them bathed in the warm sea at least once every day, and certain of the skin diseases that they suffered from began to heal with this salt water treatment, though not all. For the first time in months the children had sufficient energy to play.

They all improved, in fact, except the sergeant. The sergeant was suspicious of them now; he seldom carried a child or helped them in any way. He seemed to feel the reproofs that he had been given very much, and he had now no companion of his own race to talk to. He moped a great deal, sitting sullenly aloof from them in the evenings; once or twice Jean caught herself consciously trying to cheer him up, a queer reversal of the role of prisoner and guard. Upon this route they met very few Japanese. Occasionally they would find a detachment stationed in a river village or at an airstrip; when they came to such a unit the sergeant would smarten himself up and go and report to the officer in charge, who would usually come and inspect them. But there is very little industry between Kuantan and Kota Bahru and no town larger than a fishing village, nor was there any prospect of an enemy attack upon the eastern side of the Malay Peninsula. On several occasions a week passed without the women seeing any Japanese at all except the sergeant.

As they travelled slowly up the coast the condition of the women and the children altered greatly for the better. They were now a very different party from the helpless people who had started off from Panong nearly six months before. Death had ruthlessly eliminated the weakest members and reduced them to about half the original numbers, which made all problems of billeting and feeding in the villages far easier. They were infinitely more experienced by that time, too. They had learned to use the native remedies for malaria and dysentery, to clothe themselves and wash and sleep in the native manner; in consequence they now had far more leisure than when they had been fighting to maintain a western style of life in primitive conditions. The march of ten miles every other day was now no longer a great burden; in the intervening day they had more time for the children. Presently Mrs Warner, who at one time had been an elementary schoolmistress, started a class for the children, and school became a regular institution on their day of rest.

Jean began to teach her baby, Robin Holland, how to walk. He was quite fit and healthy again, and getting quite a weight for her to carry, for he was now sixteen months old. She never burdened him with any clothes in that warm climate, and he crawled about naked in the shade of palm or casuarina trees, or in the sun upon the sand, like any Malay baby. He got nearly as brown as one, too.

In the weeks that followed they moved slowly northwards up the coast, through all the many fishing villages, Ular and Chendar and Kalong and Penunjok and Kemasik and many others. They had a little sickness and spent a few days here and there while various members of the party sweated out a fever, but they had no more deaths. The final horror at Kuantan was a matter that they never spoke about at all, each fearing to recall it to the memory of the others, but each was secretly of the opinion that it had changed their luck.

With Mrs Frith this impression struck much deeper. She was a devout little woman who said her prayers morning and evening with the greatest regularity. It was Mrs Frith who always knew when Sunday was: on that day she would read the Prayer Book and the Bible for an hour aloud to anyone who came to listen to her. If it was their rest day she would hold this service at eleven o'clock as near as she could guess it, because that was the correct time for Matins.

Mrs Frith sought for the hand of God in everything that happened to them. Brooding over their experiences with this in mind, she was struck by certain similarities. She had read repeatedly about one Crucifixion; now there had been another. The Australian, in her mind, had had the power of healing, because the medicines he brought had cured her dysentery and Johnnie Horsefall's ringworm. It was beyond all doubt that they had been blessed in every way since his death for them. God had sent down His Son to earth in Palestine. What if He had done it again in Malaya?

Men and women who are in great and prolonged distress and forced into an entirely novel way of life, divorced entirely from their previous association, frequently develop curious mental traits. Mrs Frith did not thrust her views upon them, yet inevitably the matter that she was beginning to believe herself became known to the other women. It was received with incredulity at first, but as a matter that required the most deep and serious thought. Most of the women had been churchgoers when they got the chance, mostly of Low Church sects; deep in their hearts they had been longing for the help of God. As their physical health improved throughout these weeks, their capacity for religious thought increased, and, as the weeks went on, accurate memory of the Australian began to fade, and was replaced by an awed and roseate memory of the man he had not been. If this incredible event that Mrs Frith believed could possibly be true, it meant indeed that they were in the hand of God; nothing could touch them then; they would win through and live through all their troubles and one day they would regain their homes, their husbands, and their western way of life. They marched on with renewed strength.

Jean did nothing to dispel these fancies, which were evidently helpful to the women, but she was not herself impressed. She was the youngest of all of them, and the only one unmarried; she had formed a very different idea of Joe Harman. She knew him for a very human, very normal man; she had grown prettier, she knew, when he had come to talk to her, and more attractive. It had been a subconscious measure of defence that had led her to allow him to continue to refer to her as Mrs Boong; if the baby on her hip had misled him into classing her with all the other married women, that was just as well. In those villages, in the hot tropic nights when they wore little clothing, in that place of extraordinary standards or no standards at all, she knew that anything might have happened between them if he had known that she was an unmarried girl, and it might well have happened very quickly. Her grief for him was more real and far deeper than that of the other women, and it was not in the least because she thought that he had been divine. She was entirely certain in her own mind that he wasn't.

Toward the end of August they were in a village called Kuala Telang about half way between Kuantan and Kota Bahru. The Telang is a short, muddy river that wanders through a flat country of rice fields to the sea; the village stands on the south bank of the river just inside the sand bar at the mouth. It is a pretty place of palm and casuarina trees and long white beaches on which the rollers of the South China Sea break in surf. The village lives upon the fishing and on the rice fields. About fifteen fishing-boats operate from the river, big open sailing-boats with strange, high, flat figureheads at bow and stern. There is a sort of village square with wood and palm-leaf native shops grouped round about it; behind this stands a godown for the rice beside the river bank. This godown was empty at the time, and it was here that the party was accommodated.

The Japanese sergeant fell ill with fever here, probably malaria. He had not been himself since Kuantan; he had been sullen and depressed, and he seemed to feel the lack of companionship very much. As the women had grown stronger so he had grown weaker, and this was strange to them at first, because he had never been ill before. At first they had been pleased and relieved that this queer, ugly, uncouth little man was in eclipse, but as he grew more unhappy they suffered a strange reversal of feeling. He had been with them for a long time and he had done what was possible within the limits of his duty to alleviate their lot; he had carried their children willingly and he had wept when children died. When it was obvious that he had fever they took turns at carrying his rifle and his tunic and his boots and his pack for him, so that they arrived in the village as a queer procession, Mrs Warner leading the little yellow man clad only in his trousers, stumbling about in a daze. He walked more comfortably barefoot. Behind them came the other women carrying all his equipment as well as their own burdens.

Jean found the headman, a man of about fifty called Mat Amin bin Taib, and explained the situation to him.“We are prisoners,”she said,“marching from Kuantan to Kota Bahru, and this Japanese is our guard. He is ill with fever, and we must find a shady house for him to lie in. He has authority to sign chits in the name of the Imperial Japanese Army for our food and accommodation, and he will do this for you when he recovers; he will give you a paper. We must have a place to sleep ourselves, and food.”

Mat Amin said,“I have no place where white Mems would like to sleep.”

Jean said,“We are not white mems any longer; we are prisoners and we are accustomed to living as your women live. All we need is a shelter and a floor to sleep on, and the use of cooking pots, and rice, and a little fish or meat and vegetables.”

“You can have what we have ourselves,”he said,“but it is strange to see mems living so.”

He took the sergeant into his own house and produced a mattress stuffed with coconut fibre and a pillow of the same material; he had a mosquito net which was evidently his own and he offered this, but the women refused it because they knew the sergeant needed all the cooling breezes he could get. They made him take his trousers off and get into a sarong and lie down on the bed. They had no quinine left, but the headman produced a draught of his own concoction and they gave the sergeant some of this, and left him in the care of the headman's wife, and went to find their own quarters and food.

The fever was high all that night; in the morning when they came to see how he was getting on they did not like the look of him at all. He was still in a high fever and he was very much weaker than he had been; it seemed to them that he was giving up, and that was a bad sign. They took turns all that day to sit with him and bathe his face, and wash him; from time to time they talked to him to try and stimulate his interest, but without a great deal of success. In the evening Jean was sitting with him; he lay inert upon his back, sweating profusely; he did not answer anything she said.

Looking for something to attract his interest, she pulled his tunic to her and felt in the pocket for his paybook. She found a photograph in it, a photograph of a Japanese woman and four children standing by the entrance to a house. She said,“Your children, gunso?”and gave it to him. He took it without speaking and looked at it; then he gave it back to her and motioned to her to put it away again.

When she had laid the jacket down she looked at him and saw that tears were oozing from his eyes and falling down to mingle with the sweat beads on his cheeks. Very gently she wiped them away.

He grew weaker and weaker, and two days later he died in the night. There seemed no particular reason why he should have died, but the disgrace of Kuantan was heavy on him and he seemed to have lost interest and the will to live. They buried him that day in the Moslem cemetery outside the village, and most of them wept a little for him as an old and valued friend.

The death of the sergeant left them in a most unusual position, for they were now prisoners without a guard. They discussed it at some length that evening after the funeral.“I don't see why we shouldn't stay here, where we are,”said Mrs Frith.“It's a nice place, this is, as nice as any that we've come to. That's what He said, we ought to find a place where we'd be out of the way, and just live there.”

Jean said,“I know. There's two things we'd have to settle though. First, the Japs are bound to find out sometime that we're living here, and then the headman will get into trouble for having allowed us to stay here without telling them. They'd probably kill him. You know what they are.”

“Maybe they wouldn't find us, after all,”said Mrs Price.

“I don't believe Mat Amin is the man to take that risk,”Jean said.“There isn't any reason why he should. If we stay he'll go straight to the Japanese and tell them that we're here.”She paused.“The other thing is that we can't expect this village to go on feeding seventeen of us for ever just because we're white mems. They'll go and tell the Japs about us just to get rid of us.”

Mrs Frith said shrewdly,“We could grow our own food, perhaps. Half the paddy fields we walked by coming in haven't been planted this year.”

Jean stared at her.“That's quite right—they haven't. I wonder why that is?”

“All the men must have gone to the war,”said Mrs Warner.“Working as coolies taking up that railway line, or something of that.”

Jean said slowly,“What would you think of this? Suppose I go and tell Mat Amin that we'll work in the rice fields if he'll let us stay here? What would you think of that?”

Mrs Price laughed.“Me, with my figure? Walking about in mud and water up to the knee planting them little seedlings in the mud, like you see the Malay girls doing?”

Jean said apologetically,“It was just a thought.”

“And a very good one, too,”said Mrs Warner.“I wouldn't mind working in the paddy fields if we could stay here and live comfortable and settled.”

Mrs Frith said,“If we were growing rice like that, maybe they'd let us stay here—the Japs I mean. After all, in that way we'd be doing something useful, instead of walking all over the country like a lot of whipped dogs with no home.”

Next morning Jean went to the headman. She put her hands together in the praying gesture of greeting, and smiled at him and said in Malay,“Mat Amin, why do we see the paddy fields not sown this year? We saw so many of them as we came to this place, not sown at all.”

He said,“Most of the men, except the fishermen, are working for the army.”He meant the Japanese Army.

“On the railway?”

“No. They are at Gong Kedak. They are making a long piece of land flat, and making roads, and covering the land they have made flat with tar and stones, so that aeroplanes can come down there.”

“Are they coming back soon to plant paddy?”

“It is in the hand of God, but I do not think they will come back for many months. I have heard that after they have done this thing at Gong Kedak, there is another such place to be made at Machang, and another at Tan Yongmat. Once a man falls into the power of the Japanese it is not easy for him to escape and come back to his home.”

“Who, then, will plant the paddy, and reap it?”

“The women will do what they can. Rice will be short next year, not here, because we shall not sell the paddy that we need to eat ourselves. We shall not have enough to sell to the Japanese. I do not know what they are going to eat, but it will not be rice.”

Jean said,“Mat Amin, I have serious matters to discuss with you. If there were a man amongst us I would send him to talk for us, but there is no man. You will not be offended if I ask you to talk business with a woman, on behalf of women?”She now knew something of the right approach to a Mohammedan.

He bowed to her, and led her to his house. There was a small rickety veranda; they went up to this and sat down upon the floor facing each other. He was a level-eyed old man with close-cropped hair and a small, clipped moustache, naked to the waist and wearing a sarong; his face was firm, but not unkind. He called sharply to his wife within the house to bring out coffee.

Jean waited till the coffee appeared, making small talk for politeness; she knew the form after six months in the villages. It came in two thick glasses, without milk and sweet with sugar. She bowed to him, and lifted her glass and sipped, and set it down again.“We are in a difficulty,”she said frankly.“Our guard is dead, and what now will become of us is in our own hands—and in yours. You know our story. We were taken prisoner at Panong, and since then we have walked many hundreds of miles to this place. No Japanese commander will receive us and put us in a camp and feed us and attend to us in illness, because each commander thinks that these things are the duty of the other; so they march us under guard from town to town. This has been going on now for more than six months, and in that time half of our party have died upon the road.”

He inclined his head.

“Now that our gunso is dead,”she said,“what shall we do? If we go on until we find a Japanese officer and report to him, he will not want us; nobody in all this country wants us They will not kill us quickly, as they might if we were men. They will get us out of the way by marching us on to some other place, perhaps into a country of swamps such as we have come through. So we shall grow ill again, and one by one we shall all die. That is what lies ahead of us, if we report now to the Japanese.”

He replied,“It is written that the angels said, ‘Every soul shall taste of death, and we will prove you with evil and with good for a trial of you, and unto us shall ye return.’”

She thought quickly; the words of the headman at Dilit came into her mind. She said,“It is also written, ‘If you be kind towards women and fear to wrong them, God is well acquainted with what ye do.’”

He eyed her steadily.“Where is that written?”

She said,“In the Fourth Surah.”

“Are you of the Faith?”he asked incredulously.

She shook her head.“I do not want to deceive you. I am a Christian; we are all Christians. The headman of a village on our road was kind to us, and when I thanked him he said that to me. I do not know the Koran.”

“You are a very clever woman,”he said.“Tell me what you want.”

“I want our party to stay here, in this village,”she said,“and go to work in the paddy fields, as your women do.”He stared at her, astonished.“This will be dangerous for you,”she said. We know that very well. If Japanese officers find us in this place before you have reported to them that we are here, they will be very angry. And so, I want you to do this. I want you to let us go to work at once with one or two of your women to show us what to do. We will work all day for our food alone and a place to sleep. When we have worked so for two weeks, I will go myself and find an officer and report to him, and tell him what we are doing. And you shall come with me, as headman of this village, and you shall tell the officer that more rice will be grown for the Japanese if we are allowed to continue working in the rice fields. These are the things I want.”

“I have never heard of white mems working in the paddy fields,”he said.

She asked,“Have you ever heard of white mems marching and dying as we have marched and died?”

He was silent.

“We are in your hands,”she said.“If you say, go upon your way and walk on to some other place, then we must go, and going we must die. That will then be a matter between you and God. If you allow us to stay and cultivate your fields and live with you in peace and safety, you will get great honour when the English Tuans return to this country after their victory. Because they will win this war in the end; these Short Ones are in power now, but they cannot win against the Americans and all the free peoples of the world. One day the English Tuans will come back.”

He said,“I shall be glad to see that day.”

They sat in silence for a time, sipping the glasses of coffee. Presently the headman said,“This is a matter not to be decided lightly, for it concerns the whole village. I will think about it and I will talk it over with my brothers.”

Jean went away, and that evening after the hour of evening prayer she saw a gathering of men squatting with the headman in front of his house; they were all old men, because there were very few young ones in Kuala Telang at that time, and young ones probably would not have been admitted to the conference in any case. Later that evening Mat Amin came to the godown and asked for Mem Paget; Jean came out to him, carrying the baby. She stood talking to him in the light of a small oil lamp.

“We have discussed this matter that we talked about,”he said.“It is a strange thing, that white mems should work in our rice fields, and some of my brothers are afraid that the white Tuans will not understand when they come back, and that they will be angry, saying we have made you work for us against your will.”

Jean said,“We will give you a letter now, that you can show them if they should say that.”

He shook his head.“It is not necessary. It is sufficient if you tell the Tuans when they come back that this thing was done because you wished it so.”

She said,“That we will do.”

They went to work next day. There were six married women in the party at that time, and Jean, and ten children including Jean's baby. The headman took them out to the fields with two Malay girls, Fatimah binti Darus and Raihana binti Hassan. He gave them seven small fields covered in weeds to start upon, an area that was easily within their power to manage. There was a roofed platform nearby in the fields for resting in the shade; they left the youngest children here and went to work.

The seven women were all fairly robust; the journey had eliminated the ones who would have been unable to stand agricultural work. Those who were left were women of determination and grit, with high morale and a good sense of humour. As soon as they became accustomed to the novelty of working ankle-deep in mud and water they did not find the work exacting, and presently as they became accustomed to it they were seized with an ambition to show the village that white mems could do as much work as Malay women, or more.

Paddy is grown in little fields surrounded by a low wall of earth, so that water from a stream can be led into the field at will to turn it into a shallow pool. When the water is let out again the earth bottom is soft mud, and weeds can be pulled out by hand and the ground hoed and prepared for the seedlings. The seedlings are raised by scattering the rice in a similar nursery field, and they are then transplanted in rows into the muddy field. The field is then flooded again for a few days while the seedlings stand with their heads above the water in the hot sun, and the water is let out again for a few days to let the sun get to the roots. With alternating flood and dry in that hot climate the plants grow very quickly to about the height of wheat, with feathery ears of rice on top of the stalks. The rice is harvested by cutting off the ears with a little knife, leaving the straw standing, and is taken in sacks to the village to be winnowed. Water buffaloes are then turned in to eat the straw and fertilize the ground and tramp it all about, and the ground is ready for sowing again to repeat the cycle. Two crops a year are normally got from the rice fields, and there is no rotation of crop.

Working in these fields is not unpleasant when you get accustomed to it. There are worse things to do in a very hot country than to put on a large conical sun-hat of plaited palm leaves and take off most of your clothes, and play about with mud and water, damming and diverting little trickling streams. By the end of the fortnight the women had settled down to it and quite liked the work, and all the children loved it from the first. No Japanese came near the village in that time.

On the sixteenth day Jean started out with the headman, Mat Amin, to go and look for the Japanese; they carried the sergeant's rifle and equipment, and his uniform, and his paybook. There was a place called Kuala Rakit twenty-seven miles away where a Japanese detachment was stationed, and they went there.

They took two days to walk this distance, staying overnight at a place called Bukit Perah. They stayed with the headman there, Jean sleeping in the back quarters with the women. They went on next day and came to Kuala Rakit in the evening; it was a very large village, or small town. Here Mat Amin took her to see an official of the Malay administration at his house, Tungku Bentara Raja. Tungku Bentara was a little thin Malay who spoke excellent English; he was genuinely concerned at the story that he heard from Mat Amin and from Jean.

“I am very, very sorry,”he said at last.“I cannot do much to help you directly, because the Japanese control everything we do. It is terrible that you should have to work in the rice fields.”

“That's not terrible at all,”Jean said.“As a matter of fact, we rather like it. We want to stay there, with Mat Amin here. If the Japanese have got a camp for women in this district I suppose they'll put us into that, but if they haven't, we don't want to go on marching all over Malaya. Half of us have died already doing that.”

“You must stay with us tonight,”he said.“Tomorrow I will have a talk with the Japanese Civil Administrator. There is no camp here for women, anyway.”

That night Jean slept in a bed for the first time in nearly seven months. She did not care for it much; having grown used to sleeping on the floor she found it cooler to sleep so than to sleep on a mattress. She did not actually get out of bed and sleep upon the floor, but she came very near to it. The bath and shower after the bath taken by holding a gourd full of water over her head, however, were a joy, and she spent a long time washing.

In the morning she went with Tungku Bentara and Mat Amin to the Japanese Civil Administrator, and told her tale again. The Civil Administrator had been to the State University of California and spoke first-class American English; he was sympathetic, but declared that prisoners were nothing to do with him, being the concern of the Army. He came with them, however, to see the military commanding officer, a Colonel Matisaka, and Jean told her tale once more.

It was quite clear that Colonel Matisaka considered women prisoners to be a nuisance, and he had no intention whatsoever of diverting any portion of his force to guarding them. Left to himself he would probably have sent them marching on, but with Tungku Bentara and the Civil Administrator in his office and acquainted with the facts he could hardly do that. In the end he washed his hands of the whole thing and told the Civil Administrator to make what arrangements he thought best. The Civil Administrator told Bentara that the women could stay where they were for the time being, and Jean started back for Kuala Telang with Mat Amin.

They lived there for three years.

“It was three years wasted, just chopped out of one's life,”she said. She raised her head and looked at me, hesitantly.“At least—I suppose it was. I know a lot about Malays, but that's not worth much here in England.”

“You won't know if it was wasted until you come to the end of your life,”I said.“Perhaps not then.”

She nodded.“I suppose that's right.”She took up the poker and began scraping the ash from the bars of the grate.“They were so very kind to us,”she said.“They couldn't have been nicer, within the limits of what they are and what they've got. Fatimah, the girl who showed us what to do in the rice fields in those first weeks—she was a perfect dear. I got to know her very well indeed.”

“Is that where you want to go back to?”I asked.

She nodded.“I would like to do something for them, now that I've got this money. We lived with them for three years, and they did everything for us. We'd have all died before the war was ended if they hadn't taken us in and let us stay with them. And now I've got so much, and they so very, very little...”

“Don't forget you haven't got as much as all that,”I said.“Travelling to Malaya is a very expensive journey.”

She smiled.“I know. What I want to do for them won't cost so very much—not more than fifty pounds, if that. We had to carry water in that village—that's the women's work—and it's a fearful job. You see, the river's tidal at the village so the water's brackish; you can use it for washing in or rinsing out your clothes, but drinking water has to be fetched from the spring, nearly a mile away. We used to go for it with gourds, two in each hand with a stick between them, morning and evening—a mile there and a mile back—four miles a day. Fatimah and the other girls didn't think about it; it's what the village has done always, generation after generation.”

“That's why you want to dig a well?”

She nodded.“It's something I could do for them, for the women—something that would make life easier for them, as they made life easier for us. A well right in the middle of the village, within a couple of hundred yards of every house. It's what they ought to have. I'm sure it wouldn't have to be more than about ten feet deep, because there's water all about. The water level can't be more than about ten feet down, or fifteen feet at the most. I thought if I went back there and offered to engage a gang of well-diggers to do this for them, it'ld sort of wind things up. And after that I could enjoy this money with a clear conscience.”She looked up at me again.“You don't think that's silly, do you?”

“No,”I said.“I don't think that. The only thing is, I wish it wasn't quite so far away. Travelling there and back will make a very big hole in a year's income.”

“I know that,”she said.“If I run out of money, I'll take a job in Singapore or somewhere for a few months and save up a bit.”

“As a matter of interest,”I said,“why didn't you stay out there and get a job? You know the country so well.”

She said,“I had a scunner of it, then—in 1945. We were all dying to get home. They sent three trucks for us from Kota Bahru, and we were taken to the airfield there and flown down to Singapore in a Dakota with an Australian crew. And there I met Bill Holland, and I had to tell him about Eileen, and Freddie and Jane.”Her voice dropped.“All the family, except Robin; he was four years old by that time, and quite a sturdy little chap. They let me travel home with Bill and Robin, to look after Robin. He looked on me as his mother, of course.”

She smiled a little.“Bill wanted to make it permanent,”she said.“I couldn't do that. I couldn't have been the sort of wife he wanted.”

I said nothing.

“When we landed, England was so green and beautiful,”she said.“I wanted to forget about the war, and forget about the East, and grow to be an ordinary person again. I got this job with Pack and Levy and I've been there two years now—ladies' handbags and attaché cases for the luxury trade, nothing to do with wars or sickness or death. I've had a happy time there, on the whole.”

She was very much alone when she got home. She had cabled to her mother directly she reached Singapore; there was a long delay, and then she got a cable in reply from her Aunt Agatha in Colwyn Bay, breaking to her the news that her mother was dead. Before she left Singapore she heard that her brother Donald had died upon the Burma-Siam railway. She must have felt very much alone in the world when she regained her freedom; it seemed to me that she had shown great strength of character in refusing an offer of marriage at that time. She landed at Liverpool, and went to stay for a few weeks with her Aunt Agatha at Colwyn Bay; then she went down to London to look for a job.

I asked her why she had not got in touch with her uncle, the old man at Ayr.“Quite honestly,”she said,“I forgot all about him, or if I thought of him at all I thought he was dead, too. I only saw him once, that time when I was eleven years old, and he looked about dead then. It never entered my head that he would still be alive. Mother's estate was all wound up, and there were very few of her personal papers left, because they were all in the Pagets' house in Southampton when that got blitzed. If I had thought about Uncle Douglas I wouldn't have known where he lived...”

It was still pouring with rain. We decided to give up the idea of going out that afternoon, and to have tea in my flat. She went out into my little kitchen and began getting it, and I busied myself with laying the tea table and cutting bread and butter. When she came in with the tray, I asked,“When do you think of going to Malaya, then?”

She said,“I thought I'd book my passage for the end of May, and go on working at Pack and Levy up till then,”she said.“That's about another six weeks. By then I'll have enough saved up to pay my passage out and home, and I'll still have about sixty pounds I saved out of my wages in this last two years.”She had been into the cost of her journey, and had found a line of intermediate class cargo ships that took about a dozen passengers for a relatively modest fare to Singapore.“I think I'll have to fly to Kota Bahru from Singapore,”she said.“Malayan Airways go to Kuantan and then to Kota Bahru. I don't know how I'll get from Kota Bahru to Kuala Telang, but I expect there'll be something.”

She was quite capable of walking it, I thought; a journey through the heart of Malaya could mean little to her now. I had had the atlas out while she had been telling me her story to see where the places were, and I looked at it again now.“You could get off the aeroplane at Kuantan,”I said.“It's shorter from there.”

“I know,”she said,“I know it's a bit shorter. But I couldn't bear to go back there again.”There was distress in her voice.

To ease the situation I said idly,“It would take me years to learn how to remember these Malay names.”

“It's all right when you know what they mean,”she said.“They're just like English names. Bahru means New, and Kota means a fort. It's only Newcastle, in Malay.”

She went on with her work at Perivale, and I went on with mine in Chancery Lane, but I was unable to get her story out of my mind. There is a man called Wright, a member of my club, who was in the Malayan Police and was a prisoner of the Japanese during their occupation of Malaya, I think in Changi gaol. I sat next to him at dinner one night, and I could not resist sounding him about it.“One of my clients told me an extraordinary story about Malaya the other day,”I said.“She was one of a party of women that the Japanese refused to put into a camp.”

He laid his knife down.“Not the party who were taken at Panong and marched across Malaya?”

“That was it,”I said.“You know about them, do you?”

“Oh yes,”he said.“It was a most extraordinary thing, as you say. The Japanese commanders marched them from place to place, till finally they were allowed to settle in a village on the east coast somewhere, and they lived there for the rest of the war. There was a very fine girl who was their leader; she spoke Malay fluently. She wasn't anybody notable; she'd been a shorthand typist in an office in Kuala Lumpur. A very fine type.”

I nodded.“She's my client.”

“Is she! I always wondered what had happened to her. What's she doing now?”

I said dryly,“She's a shorthand typist again, working in a handbag factory at Perivale.”

“Really!”He ate a mouthful or two, and then he said,“I always thought that girl ought to have got a decoration of some sort. Unfortunately, there's nothing you can give to people like that. But if she hadn't been with them, all those women and children would have died. There was no one else in the party of that calibre at all.”

“I understand that half of them did die,”I said.

He nodded.“I believe that's true. She got them settled down and working in the rice fields in the end, and after that they were all right.”

I saw Jean Paget from time to time in the six weeks before she left this country. She booked her passage to sail from London docks on June 2nd, and she gave notice to her firm to leave at the end of May. She told me that they were rather upset about it, and they offered her a ten shilling rise at once; in view of that she had told Mr Pack about her legacy, and he had accepted the inevitable.

I made arrangements for her income for the months of July and August and September to be available to her in Singapore, and I opened an account for her with the Chartered Bank for that purpose. As the time for her departure drew closer I became worried for her, not because I was afraid that she would overspend her income, but because I was afraid she would get into some difficulty due to her expenses being higher than she thought they would be. Nine hundred a year does not go very far in these days for a person travelling about the east.

I mentioned that to her about a week before she left.“Don't forget that you're a fairly wealthy woman now,”I said.“You're quite right to live within your income and, indeed, I have to see you do. But don't forget that I have fairly wide discretionary powers under your uncle's will. If you get into any difficulty, or if you really need money, let me have a cable at once. As, for example, if you should get ill.”

She smiled.“That's very sweet of you,”she said.“But honestly, I think I'll be all right. I'm counting upon taking a job if I find I'm running short. After all, I haven't got to get back here to England by a given date, or anything like that.”

I said,“Don't stay too long away.”

She smiled.“I shan't Mr Strachan,”she said.“There's nothing to keep me in Malaya once I've done this thing.”

She was giving up her room in Ealing, of course, and she asked if she might leave a trunk and a suitcase in the box-room of my flat till she came back to England. She brought them round the day before she sailed, and with them a pair of skating boots with skates attached, which wouldn't go into the trunk. She told me then that she was only taking one suitcase as her luggage.

“But what about your tropical kit?”I asked.“Have you had that sent on?”

She smiled.“I've got it with me in the suitcase,”she said.“Fifty Paludrine tablets and a hundred Sulphatriads, some repellent, and my old sarong. I'm not going out to be a lady in Malaya.”

She had nobody but me to go down to the docks with her to see her off; she was very much alone in the world, and friends she had who might have liked to come were all working in jobs, and couldn't get the time off. I drove her down in a taxi. She took her journey very much as a matter of course; she seemed to have made no more preparation for a voyage half way round the world than a girl of my generation would have made for a weekend at Chislehurst. The ship was a new one and everything was bright and clean. When the steward opened the door of her cabin she stood back amazed, because he had arranged the flowers all round the little room, and there were plenty of them.“Oh Noel, look!”she said.“Just look at all the flowers!”She turned to the steward.“Wherever did they come from? Not from the Company?”

“They come in three big boxes yesterday evening,”he replied.“Make a nice show, don't they, Miss?”

She swung round on me.“I believe you sent them.”And then she said,“Oh, how perfectly sweet of you!”

“English flowers,”I said.“Just to remind you to come back to England soon.”I must have had a premonition, even then, that she was never going to come back.

Before I could realize what she was doing, she had slipped an arm round my shoulders and kissed me on the lips.“That's for the flowers, Noel,”she said softly.“For the flowers, and for everything you've done for me.”And I was so dumbfounded and confused that all I could find to say to her was,“I'll have another of those when you come back.”

I didn't wait to see her ship go off, because partings are stupid things and best got over quickly. I went back in the taxi to my flat alone, and I remember that I stood for a long time at the window of my room watching the ornamented wall of the stables opposite and thinking of her fine new steamer going down the river past Gravesend and Tilbury, past Shoebury and the North Foreland, taking her away. And then I woke myself up and went and shifted her trunk and her suitcase to a corner of the box-room by themselves, and I stood for some time with her boots and skates in my hand, personal things of hers, wondering where they had better go. Finally I took them to my bedroom and put them in the bottom of my wardrobe, because I should never have forgiven myself if they had been stolen. She was just such a girl as one would have liked to have for a daughter, but we never had a daughter at all.

She travelled across half the world in her tramp steamer and she wrote to me from most of the ports she called at, from Marseilles and Naples, from Alexandria and Aden, from Colombo, from Rangoon, and from Penang. Wright was always very interested in her because he had known about her in Malaya, and I got into the habit of carrying her latest letter about with me and telling him about her voyage and how she was getting on. He knew the British Adviser to the Raja at Kota Bahru quite well, a Mr Wilson-Hays, and I got him to write out to Wilson-Hays by air mail telling him about Jean Paget and asking him to do what he could for her. He told me that that was rather necessary, because there was nowhere a lady could stay in Kota Bahru except with one of the British people who were living there. We got a very friendly letter back from Wilson-Hays saying that he was expecting her, and I was able to get a letter out to her by air mail to meet her at the Chartered Bank telling her what we had done.

She only stayed one night in Singapore, and took the morning plane to Kota Bahru; the Dakota wandered about all over Malaya calling at various places, and put her down upon the air-strip at Kota Bahru early in the afternoon. She got out of the Dakota wearing the same light grey coat and skirt in which she had left London, and Wilson-Hays was there himself to meet the aeroplane, with his wife.

I met Wilson-Hays at the United University Club a year later, when he was on leave. He was a tall, dark, quiet man with rather a long face. He said that she had been a little embarrassed to find that he had come to the airstrip to meet her personally; she did not seem to realize that she was quite a well-known person in that part of Malaya. Wilson-Hays knew all about her long before we wrote to him although, of course, he had heard nothing of her since the end of the war. He had sent word to Mat Amin when he got our letter to tell him that she was coming back to see them, and he had arranged to lend her his jeep with a driver to take her the hundred miles or so to Kuala Telang. I thought that very decent of him, and I told him so. He said that the prestige of the British was higher in the Kuala Telang district after the war was over than it was before, due solely to the presence of this girl and her party; he thought she'd earned the use of a jeep for a few days.

She stayed in the Residency two nights, and bought a few simple articles in the native shops. When she left in the jeep next morning she was wearing native clothes; she left her suitcase and most of her things with Mrs Wilson-Hays. She took with her only what a native woman of good class would take; she wore a faded old blue and white chequered sarong with a white coatee. She wore sandals as a concession to the softness of her feet, and she carried a plain tan Chinese type umbrella as a sunshade. She had done her hair up on top of her head in the native style with a large comb in the middle of it. She carried a small palm-leaf basket, but Mrs Wilson-Hays told her husband there was very little in it; she took a toothbrush but no toothpaste; she took a towel and a cake of antiseptic soap and a few drugs. She took one change of clothes, a new sarong and a flowered cotton top to match; she took three small Woolworth brooches and two rings as little presents for her friends, but she took no cosmetics. That was about all she had.

“I thought her very wise to go like that,”said Wilson-Hays.“If she had gone dressed as an Englishwoman she'd have made them embarrassed. Some of the English residents were quite upset when they heard she'd gone off in native dress—old school tie, and letting down the side, and all that sort of thing. I must say, when I saw her go I thought it was rather a good thing to do.”He paused.“After all, it's how she was dressed all through the war, and nobody talks about her letting down the side then.”

It is a long day in a jeep from Kota Bahru to Kuala Telang; the roads are very poor, and there are four main rivers to be crossed which necessitate ferrying the jeep over in a boat, apart from a large number of fords. It took her fourteen hours to cover the hundred miles, and it was dark when they drove into Kuala Telang. There was a buzz of excitement as the jeep drove through the shadowy village, and people came out of their houses doing up their sarongs; there was a full moon that night, so that there was light enough to see to drive. They stopped in front of the headman's house, and she got out of the jeep a little wearily, and went to him, and put her hands up in the praying gesture, and said in Malay,“I have come back, Mat Amin, lest you should think the white mems have forgotten all about you when their need is past.”

He said,“We have thought and talked about you ever since you went.”And then there were people thronging about them, and she saw Fatimah approaching with a baby in her arms and a toddler hanging on to her sarong, and she pushed through the crowd and took her by the hand, and said,“It is too long since we met.”And there was Raihana, and Safirah binti Yacob, and Safirah binti Taib, and little Ibrahim who squinted, now grown into a young man, and his brother Samat, and old Zubeidah, and Meriam, and many others, some of whom she did not know, because the men had come back from the labour gangs soon after she left Malaya, and there were a number of new faces.

Fatimah was married to a young man called Derahman bin Ismail, and she brought him forward and presented him to the white mem; Jean bowed before him and wished that she had brought a shawl to pull over her face, as would have been polite when being introduced to a strange man. She put her hand up to her face, and said,“Excuse me that I have no veil.”He bowed to her and said,“It is no matter,”and Fatimah broke in and said,“He knows and everybody knows that the white mems never veiled their faces when they lived with us, because different people have different ways. Oh Djeen, we are so happy that you have come back.”

She made arrangements with Mat Amin for the accommodation of the driver, and then went with Fatimah to her husband's house. They asked if she had eaten, and she said no, and they made her a supper of rice and blachan, the highly-spiced paste of ripe prawns and fish that the Malays preserve in an upended concrete drain pipe. And presently, tired out, she made a pillow of her palm-leaf bag and lay down on a mat as she had done a thousand times before, and loosened the sarong around her waist, and slept. It would not be entirely accurate to say that she slept well upon the floor after sleeping in a bed for three years. She woke many times throughout the night, and listened to the noises of the night, and watched the moonlight creep around the house, and she was happy.

She had a talk with Fatimah and Meriam and old Zubeidah next morning, squatting round the cooking-pots behind the house out of the way of the men.“Every day that I have been away I have thought of this place,”she said; it was not precisely true, but near enough.“I have thought of you all living and working as I lived and worked. I was working in England, in an office at books in the way that women have to work in my country, because, as you know, I am a poor woman and I have had to work all my life to earn my living till I find a husband who suits me, and I am very particular.”The women laughed, and old Zubeidah said,“It is very strange that a woman should earn her living in that way.”

Meriam said,“There is a woman of our people working in the bank at Kuala Rakit. I saw her through the window. She was doing something with her fingers on a machine, and it went clock-click-click.”

Jean nodded.“That is how I earn my living in my country, working a machine like that to make a printed letter for the Tuan. But recently my uncle died; he lived far away from me and I have only met him once, but he had no other relatives and I inherited his money, so that now I need not work unless I want to.”A murmur of appreciation went around the women. Two or three more had drifted up to enlarge the circle.“And now having money of my own for the first time in my life, I thought more of you here in Kuala Telang than ever before, and of your kindness to us when we lived with you as prisoners. And it came to me that I should give a thankoffering to this place, and that this thankoffering should be a present from a woman to the women of Kuala Telang, nothing to do with the men.”

There was a pleased and excited little buzz amongst the women who surrounded her. Old Zubeidah said,“It is true, the men get everything.”O(jiān)ne or two of the women looked shocked at this heresy.

“I have thought many times,”Jean said,“that there should be a well in this place, so that you should not have to fetch fresh water from the spring morning and evening, but you could walk out of your houses only fifty paces at the most and there would be a well of fresh water with a bucket that you could go to and draw water at any time of the day whenever you had the need of cool, fresh water.”There was a little buzz of appreciation again.“There would be smooth stones around the well where you could sit and talk while the young men work the bucket for you. And close beside the well, I would have an atap house for washing clothes with long slabs of smooth stone or concrete arranged so that you could face each other while you wash, and talk, but all surrounded by an atap wall so that the men will not be able to see.”The buzz rose to an excited clamour.“This is what I want to do, as a thankoffering. I will engage a gang of well-diggers, and they shall dig the well, and I will pay masons for the stonework round the top, and I will pay carpenters to build the washing-house. But for the arrangement inside the house I shall want two or three women of experience to advise me how it should be devised, for the height of the slabs, for concrete pools or channels for the water, and so on. This is the gift of a woman for women, and in this thing the men shall do what women say.”

There was a long clamour of discussion. Some of the women were doubtful if the men would ever allow such a thing, and some were doubtful whether it was not impious to wish to alter the arrangements that had satisfied their mothers and their grandmothers before them. But most were avid for the innovation if it could be achieved; once they were used to the idea they savoured it and turned it over, examining it in every detail and discussing where the well should be and where the washhouse, and where the concrete pools should be, and where the drain. At the end of a couple of hours they had accepted the idea whole-heartedly, and Jean was satisfied that it would fill a real need, and that there was nothing that they would have preferred her to give.

That evening she sat opposite Mat Amin on the small veranda before his house, as she had sat so many times before when matters that concerned the women had to be discussed. She sipped her coffee.“I have come to talk with you,”she said,“because I want to give a thankoffering to this place, that people may remember when the white women came here, and you were kind to them.”

He said,“The wife has been talking of nothing else all day, with other women. They say you want to make a well.”

Jean said,“That is true. This is a thankoffering from all the English mems to Kuala Telang, but because we are women it is fitting that it should be a present for the women of this place. When we lived here it was a great labour, morning and evening, to fetch water from the spring and I was sorry for your women when I thought of them, in England, fetching water all that way. That is why I want my thankoffering to be a well in the middle of the village.”

He said,“The spring was good enough for their mothers and their grandmothers before them. They will get ideas above their station in life if they have a well.”

She said patiently,“They will have more energy to serve you faithfully and kindly if they have this well, Mat Amin. Do you remember Raihana binti Ismail who lost her baby when she was three months' pregnant, carrying this water?”He was shocked that she should speak of such a thing, but English mems would speak of anything.“She was ill for a year after that, and I don't think she was any good to her husband ever again. If the women had had this well I want to give you as a thankoffering, that accident would not have happened.”

He said,“God disposes of the lives of women as well as those of men.”

She smiled gently,“Do I have to remind you, Mat Amin, that it is written, ‘Men's souls are naturally inclined to covetousness; but if ye be kind towards women and fear to wrong them, God is well acquainted with what ye do.’”

He laughed and slapped his thigh.“You said that to me many times when you lived here, whenever you wanted anything, but I have not heard it since.”

“It would be kind to let the women have their well,”she said.

He replied, still laughing,“I say this to you, Si-Jean; that when women want a thing as badly as they want this well that you have promised them, they usually get it. But this is a matter which concerns the village as a whole, and I must consult my brothers.”

The men sat in conference next morning, squatting on their heels in the shade of the atap market house. Presently they sent for Jean and she squatted down with them a little to one side as is fitting for a woman, and they asked her where the well was to be put, and where the atap washhouse. She said that everything was in their hands, but it would be convenient for the women if it was on the patch of ground in front of Chai San's shop, with the atap washhouse west of it and pointing towards Ahmed's house. They all got up then and went to see the ground and discuss it from all angles, and all the women of the village stood around and watched their lords making this important decision, and Djeen talking with them almost as if she was an equal.

She did not hurry them; she had lived three years in this village and she knew the slowness of their mental processes, the caution with which all innovations were approached. It took them two days to make up their minds that the well would be a good thing to have, and that the Wrath of God would not descend upon them if they put the work in hand.

Well-digging is a skilled craft, and there was one family only on the coast who could be entrusted with the work; they lived about five miles from Kuantan. Mat Amin dictated a letter for the Imam to write in the Jawi script, and then they took it into Kuala Rakit and posted it. Jean sent for five sacks of cement from Kota Bahru, and settled down to wait for several weeks while the situation developed.

She spent much of the time with the fishermen on their boats, or sitting on the beach and playing with the children. She taught them to build sand castles and to play Noughts and Crosses on a chequer drawn with the finger in the sand; she bathed and swam a good deal, and worked for a week in the rice fields at the time of harvest. She had lived so long with these people that she was patient about the passage of time; moreover, she had a use for time to consider what she was going to do with her life now that she had no further need to work. She waited there for three weeks in idleness, and she did not find it tedious.

The well-diggers and the cement arrived about the same time, and work commenced. The diggers were a family of an old grey-bearded father, Suleiman, and his two sons, Yacob and Hussein. They spent a day surveying the land and all the arguments for the site chosen for the well had to be gone over once again to satisfy these experts; when work finally began it was done quickly and well. The diggers worked from dawn till dusk, with one at the bottom of the shaft and the other two disposing of the soil on top; they bricked it downwards from the top as they worked, supporting the brickwork upon stakes driven into the earth sides.

Old Suleiman, the father, was a mine of information to the village, for he travelled up and down the east coast of Malaya building and repairing wells, and so visited most villages from time to time. The men and women of Kuala Telang used to sit around watching the progress of the new well and gossiping with the old man, getting news of their acquaintances and relatives up and down the coast. Jean was sitting there one afternoon, and said to him,“You are from Kuantan?”

“From Batu Sawah,”said the old man.“That is two hours' walk from Kuantan. Our home is there, but we are great travellers.”

She was silent for a moment; then she said,“Do you remember the Japanese officer in charge at Kuantan in the first year of the war, Captain Sugamo?”

“Assuredly,”the old man replied.“He is a very bad man, and we were glad when he went away. Captain Ichino who came after him was better.”

Jean was surprised that he did not seem to know that Sugamo was dead; she had supposed that the War Crimes Commission would have taken evidence in Kuantan. She told him,“Captain Sugamo is dead now. He was sent to the Burma-Siam railway, and there he caused many atrocities, and many murders. But the Allies caught him when the war was over, and he was tried for murder, and executed in Penang.”

“I am glad to hear it,”the old man replied.“I will tell my sons.”He called down the well with the news; it was discussed a little, and then the men went on with their work.

Jean asked,“Did he do many evil things in Kuantan?”There was one still hideously fresh in her mind, but she could not bring herself to speak of it directly.

Suleiman said,“Many people were tortured.”

She nodded.“I saw one myself.”It had to come out, and it did not matter what she said to this old man.“When we were starving and ill, a soldier who was a prisoner helped us. The Japanese caught him, and they crucified him with nails through his hands, and they beat him to death.”

“I remember that,”the old man said.“He was in hospital at Kuantan.”

Jean stared at him.“Old man, when was he in hospital? He died.”

“Perhaps there were two.”He called down the well to Yacob.“The English soldier who was crucified and beaten at Kuantan in the first year of the war. The English mem knew him. Tell us, did that man die?”

Hussein broke in.“The one who was beaten was an Australian, not English. He was beaten because he stole chickens.”

“Assuredly,”the old man said.“It was for stealing the black chickens. But did he live or die?”

Yacob called up from the bottom of the well.“Captain Sugamo had him taken down that night; they pulled the nails out of his hands. He lived.”