by Nevil Shute
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 along 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 Bharu, 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 ye 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 near-by 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 fertilise 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.
