The Further Side of Silence/A Daughter of the Muhammadans
A DAUGHTER OF THE MUHAMMADANS
THE sunset hour had come as I passed up the narrow track that skirted the river bank, with a mob of villagers at my heels. Old men were there who had seen many strange things in the wild days before the coming of the white men; lull peasants, who seemed too stolid and stupid to have ever seen anything at all; and swaggering youngsters, grown learned in the mysteries of reading and writing, fresh from our schools and prepared at a moment's notice to teach the wisest of the village elders the only proper manner in which an egg may be sucked. The rabble which every Malay village spews up nowadays, when one chances to visit it, is usually composed of these elements—the old men whose wisdom is their own and of its kind deep and wide; the middle-aged tillers of the soil, whose lives are set in so straitened a rut that they cannot peep over the edges, and whose wisdom is that of the field and the forest; and the men of the younger generation, most of whose knowledge is borrowed, extraordinarily imperfect of its kind, and fortified by the self-confidence of ignorance. The men of the first two classes are gradually dying out, those of the last are replacing them; and the result sometimes tempts one to ask the heretical question whether European systems of education are really as practically educa tive as the unsystematic transmission of accumulated knowledge and tradition which they have superseded.
The path along which I was walking was to all intents and purposes the main street of the village. On my right, a dozen feet away, the ground fell suddenly and perpendicularly to the brown waters of the Jělai, which at this point had cut for themselves a deep channel through the clay soil. Here and there the bank had been worn into a chenderong—a deep cleft formed by the buffaloes trampling their way down to water; and at regular intervals bathing rafts were moored, and rude steps had been cut to render them more easily accessible. On my left the thatched roofs of the Malayan houses showed in an irregular line running parallel to the river, amid groves of fruit trees and coco and areca mut palms. On the other side of the Jelai the jungle rose in a magnificent bank of vegetation eighty feet in height, sheer from the river's brink.
The glaring Malayan sun, sinking to its rest, blazed full in my eyes, dazzling me, and thus I saw but dimly the figure that crossed my path, heading for the running water on my right. Silhouetted blackly against the furnace mouth in the west it. appeared to be the form of a woman bowed nearly double beneath the weight of a burden slung in a cloth across her back-a burden far too heavy for her strength. This, however, is a sight that is only too common in Asiatic lands; for here, if man must idle and loaf, woman must work as well as weep, until at last the time comes for the long, long rest under the lovegrass and the spear-blades of the lalang in some shady corner of the peaceful village burial- ground. Accordingly, I took no special notice of the laden woman moving so painfully athwart the sun- glare ahead of the, until my arm was grasped vio- lently by the headman, who was walking just behind me.
"Have a care, Tuan!" he cried in some agitation. "Have a care. It is Minah and her man. It is the sickness that is not good-the evil sickness. Go not near to her, Tan, lest some ill thing befall."
The perverse instinct of the white man invariably prompts him to set at instant defiance any warning that a native may be moved to give him. This propensity has added considerably to the figures which represent the European death-rate throughout Asia, and, incidentally, it has led to many of the acts of reckless daring which have won for Englishmen their Eastern Empire. It has also set the native the hard task of deciding whether the greater sub- ject for wonder is the courage or the stupidity of the men who rule him. I had lived long enough among natives to know that there is generally a sound reason to justify any warning they may give; but nature, as usual, was stronger than acquired experience or com- mon sense, so I released my arm from the headman's grip, and walked up to the figure in front of me.
It was, as I had seen, that of a woman bowed beneath the weight of a heavy burden, a woman still young, not ill-looking, light coloured for a Malay, and possessed of a pair of dark eyes the expres- sion of which was peculiarly soft and tender. I only noticed this later, and perhaps a knowledge of her story helped then to quicken my perceptions; but at the moment my attention was completely absorbed by the strange bundle which she bore.
It was a shapeless thing, wrapped in an old cloth, soiled and tattered and horribly stained, which was slung over the woman's left shoulder, across her breast, and under her right armpit. Out of the bundle, just above the base of the woman's own neck, there protruded a head that lolled backward as she moved a head, gray-white in colour, hairless, sight- less, featureless, formless-an object of horror and repulsion. Near her shoulders two stumps, armed with ugly bosses at their tips, emerged from the bundle, motiveless limbs that swayed and gestieu- lated loosely. Near her own hips two members, similarly deformed, hung down almost to the ground, dangling limply as the woman walked-limbs that showed a sickly grayish colour in the evening light, and ended in five white patches where the toes should have been. It was a leper far gone in the discase whom the woman was carrying riverward.
She did not pause when I spoke to her. rather she seemed to quicken her pace; and presently she and her burden, the shapeless head and limbs of the latter bobbing impotently as the jolts shook them, disappeared down the river bank in the direction of the running water.
I stood still where she had left me, shocked by what I had seen; for lepers, or indeed deformed people of any kind, are remarkably rare among the healthy Malayan villagers, and the sight had been as un- expected as disgusting. Of the men behind me, some laughed, one or two uttered a few words of cheap jeer and taunt, and every one of them turned aside to spit soleinnly in token that some unclean thing had been at hand. The headman, newly ap- pointed and oppressed by a sense of his responsibili- ties, whispered an apology in my car.
"Pardon us, Tian," he said. "It is an ill-omened sight, and verily I crave forgiveness. It is not fitting that this woman should thus pass and repass athwart the track upon which you are pleased to walk, and that she should bear so unworthy a burden. She is one who hath been inadequately instructed by her parents, one who knoweth nought of language or religion. I pray you pardon her and the village. She is a bad woman to bring this shame upon our folk."
"Who is she?" I inquired.
She is Minah, a woman of this village, one devoid of shame. And behold this day she has smudged soot upon the faces of all of us by thus wan- tonly passing across your path, bearing her man, the leper; and I presently will upbraid her, yea, very certainly, I will reprove her with many pungent words."
"Is she also unclean?" I asked.
"No, Tun, the evil sickness hath not fallen upon her yet. But her man is sore stricken, and though we, who are of her blood, plead with her mevasingly, bidding her quit this man, as by the Law of Mu- hammad she hath the right to do, she will by no means hearken to our words, for she, Tuan, is a woman of a hard and evil heart, very obstinate and headstrong."
He spoke quite simply the thought that was in his mind. From his point of view there was nothing of heroism, nothing of the glory of womanly tenderness and devotion in the sight of this girl's self-sacrifice. To him and to his fellows Minal's conduct was merely a piece of inexplicable female folly, the unspeakable perversity of a woman deaf to the persuasions and advice of those who wished her well. As for white men, they were even more incomprehensible than women; so he turned upon me eyes that held more of pity than surprise when I presently spoke of her in praise.
"Of a truth," I said, "this woman is nobler than any of her sex of whom I have heard tell in all this land of Pahang. Your village, O Peng-hulu, hath much right to be proud of this leper's wife. I charge you say no word of reproach to her concerning her crossing of my path; and give her this, it is but a trifling sum, and tell her that it is given in token of the honour in which I hold her."
This wholly unexpected way of looking upon a matter which had long been a topic of discussion in the village was clearly bewildering to the Malays about me; but money is a useful and honourable commodity, and the possession of anything calculated to bring in cash does not fail to inspire some measure of respect. My gift, therefore, had the effect of stemming forthwith the undercurrent of jeers and laughter at Minah and her husband which had been audible among the Peng-hulu's followers ever since the strange pair had come into view. The incident, moreover, would tend to improve her position in the village and to cause more consideration to be shown to her by her neighbours.
"Tell her also," I said, as I stepped on board my boat to begin the journey downstream. "Tell her also that if there be aught in which she needs my aid, now or hereafter, she hath but to come to me or to send me word, and I will help her in her affliction according to the measure of my ability."
Tan!" cried the villagers in a chorus of assent, as my boat pushed out from the bank, and my men seized their paddles for the homeward row; and thus ended my first encounter with Minah, the daughter of the Muhammadans, whom the threats of the village elders, the advice of her friends, the tears and en- treaties of her relatives, the contempt of most of her neighbours, and the invitations of those who would have wed with her, were alike powerless to lure from the side of the shapeless wreck who was her husband.
Later I made it my business to inquire from those who knew concerning this woman and her circum- stances, and all that I learned served only to quicken my sympathy and admiration.
Like all Malay women, Minah had been married, when she was still quite a child, to a man whom she had hardly ever seen, and with whom, prior to her wedding, she would not for her life have been guilty of the indecency of speaking a syllable. On the day appointed for the ceremony she had been decked out in all the finery and gold ornaments that her people had been able to borrow from their neighbours for many miles around, and had been led forth to take her seat upon a dais, side by side with the stranger into whose keeping she was about to be given. For hours she had squatted there in an agony of cramped limbs that she dared not relieve by the slightest movement, and in a torture of embarrassment, while the village folk- who composed the whole of her world ate their fill of the rich food provided for them, and thereafter chanted endless verses from the Kúran in sadly mispronounced Arabic. This ap- palling publicity had almost deprived the dazed little girl of her faculties, for hitherto she had been kept in complete scclusion, and latterly had spent most of her time on the para, or shelf-like upper apartment of her father's house. She had been too abjectly terrified even to cry, far less to raise her eyes from her fingertips which, scarlet with henna, rested immovably upon her knees.
Then, the wedding ceremonies having at last con- cluded, she had been utterly miserable for many days. She was not yet in her "teens," and to her a man was much what the ogre of the fairy-tales is to the imagination of other little girls of about the same age in our nurseries at home-a creature of immense strength and cruelty, filled with strange devouring appetities, against whom her puny efforts to resist could avail nothing. All women who are wives by contract, rather than by inclination, experience some- thing of this paralysis of fear when first they find Themselves at the mercy of a man; but for the girls of a Muhammadan population this instinctive terror of the husband has a tenfold force. During all the days of her life a daughter of the Muhammadaus has seen the power and authority of man undisputed and unchecked by the female members of his house- hold. She has seen, perhaps, her own mother put. away, after many years of faithfulness and love, be- cause her charms have faded and her husband has grown weary of her; she has seen the married women about her cowed by a word, or even a look, from the man who holds in his hands an absolute right to lispose of his wife's destiny; she has watched the men eating their meals apart-alone if no other member of the masculine sex chanced to be present-because women are not deemed worthy to partake of food in the company of their superiors; and as a result of all These things, the daughter of the Muhammadans has learned to believe from her heart that man is indeed. Tashioned in a mould more honourable than that in which the folk of her own sex are cast. She sub- scribes generally to the Malay theory that "it is not filting that women should question the doings of men, and she has no share in the quasi maternal, very tolerant, yet half-contemptuous attitude which wo- men in Europe are apt to assume toward the wen whom they love but are accustomed to regard in the light of more or less helpless and irresponsible chil- dren. Instead, the Muhammadan woman looks up to a man as to a being who is nobler than herself, endowed with mental and physical powers superior to her own, who is often capricious, harsh, and violent, who may be cajoled and placated, but who fills her simple, trustful soul with fear and awe.
Little Minah, therefore, had been frightened out of her wits at the bare notion of being handed over to a husband for his service and pleasure, and her gratitude to her man had been extravagant and passionate in its intensity when she found that he was consistently kind and tender to her. For Ma- mat, the man to whom this child had been so early mated, was a typical villager of the interior, good- natured and easygoing through sheer indolence, courteous of manner, soft of speech, and caressing by instinct, as are so many folk of the kindly Malayan stock. He, too, perhaps, had felt something akin to pity for the wild-eyed little girl who addressed him in quavering monosyllables, and he found a new pleasure in soothing and petting her. So, little by little, his almost paternal feeling for her turned in due season to a man's strong love, and awoke in her a woman's passionate devotion. Thus, for a space. Mamat and Minah were happy, though no children were born to them, and Minah fretted secretly, when the house was still at night-time, for she knew that the village women spoke truly when they whis- pered together that no wife could hope to hold the fickle heart of a man unless there were baby fin- gers to aid and strengthen her own desperate grasp.
Two or three seasons came and went. Annually the rich yellow crop was reaped laboriously, ear by car, and the good grain was garnered. Later the ploughs were sel going anew across the dry meadows, and in the rice swamps the buffaloes were made to trample and knead the soft earth into a quagmire. Then sowing had been taken in hand, and while the progress of the crop was closely marked and end- lessly discussed, the villagers had kept all free from weeds, working in rotation upon one another's land in chattering groups until the time for reaping once more came round. Mamat and Minah had taken their share of the toil, and had watched nature giving oirth to her myriad offspring with unfailing regu- larity, but still no small feet pattered over the lath flooring of their hut, and no child's voice made music in their compound. Mamat seemed to have become less lighthearted than of old, and he frequently re- turned from the fields complaining of fever, and lay down to rest tired and depressed. Mînah tended him carefully, but she watched him with misery in her heart, for she told herself that the day was drawing near that would see a co-wife, who should bear sons to her husband, come to rob her of his love. There- fore, at times, when Mamat was absent, she would weep furtively as she sat alone among the cooking- pots in the empty hut, and many were the vows of rich offerings to be devoted to the shrines of the local . saints that she made if only they would insure to her the joy of motherhood.
Just before dusk one afternoon Mamat came back to the hut, and as was his wont-for he was very considerate to Minah, and ever anxious to aid her in her work he fell to boiling the rice at the little mud fireplace at the back of the central living-room where Minah was preparing the evening meal. While he was so engaged he contrived by a clumsy movement to over-set the pot, and the boiling water streamed over the fingers of his right hand. Minal gave a shrill cry in sympathy for the pain which she knew he must be enduring; but Mamat looked up at her with wondering eyes.
"What ails you, little one?" he asked, without a trace of suffering in his voice.
"The water is boiling," cried Minah. "Ya Allah! How evil is my destiny that so great a hurt should befall you because you, unlike other men, stoop to aid me in my work! O Weh, Weh, my liver is sad because of your pain. Let me bind your fingers. See, here is oil and much rag."
"What is the matter?" Mamat asked again, star- ing at her uncomprehendingly. "Indeed I have suffered no hurt. The water was cold. Look at my fing
His voice faltered and his words ceased as he sat gazing stupidly, in mingled astonishment and fear. at his scalded hand. The little hut was reeking with the odour emitted by that peeling skin and flesh.
"What is the meaning of this, Minah," he asked presently, in an awed whisper. "The water was certainly boiling for my fingers are all a-frizzle, yet I felt no pain, and even now . . . What is it, Mînah?"
His wife inspected the ugly hand which he ex- tended toward her, and was as bewildered as Mamat.
"Perchance you have acquired some magic art that drives pain far from you," she suggested.
Among the villagers of the Malay Peninsula magic is accounted so much a commonplace of everyday experience that neither Mamat nor Minah saw anything extravagant in her explanation. Mamat, indeed, felt rallier flattered by the idea, but he none the less denied having had any dealings with the spirits, and for some weeks he thought little more about the discovery of his strange insensibility to pain. The sores on his hands, however, did not heal, and at length matters began to look serious, since he could no longer do his usual share of work in the fields. By Minah's advice the aid of a local medicine- man of some repute was had recourse to, and for days the little house was noisy with the sound of old- world incantations, and redolent of the heavy odours given off by the spices that burned in the wizard's brazier. Mamal, too, went abroad with his hand stained all manner of unnatural hues, and was hedged about by numerous taboos, which deprived his life of a good deal of its comfort and his meals of most things that made his rice palatable.
For some weeks, as is the manner of his kind in Asia and out of it, the medicine-man struggled with the disease he half recognized but lacked the courage to name; and when at length disguise was no longer possible, it was to Minah that he told the truth, told it with the crude and brutal bluntness which natives keep for the breaking of ill tidings. He lay in wait for her by the little bathing raft on the river's brink, where Minah was wont to fill the gourds with water for her house, and he began his tale at once without preface or preparation.
"Sister, it is the evil sickness," he said. "Without doubt it is the sickness that is not good. For me, I can do nought to aid this man of thine, for the devil of this sickness is a very strong devil. Therefore, give me the money that is due to me, and suffer me to depart, for I also greatly fear to contract the evil. And, Sister, it were well for you speedily to seek a divorce from Mamat, as in such cases is permitted by law, lest you, too, become afflicted, for this disease is one that can by no means be medicined, even if Petera Guru himself were to take a hand in the charming away of the evil humours."
No one in Malaya ever names leprosy. It is spoken of as rarely as possible, and then by all manner of euphonisms, lest hearing its name pronounced it should seek out the speaker and abide with him for- ever. But when the words "the evil sickness" sounded in her cars, Minah understood their full meaning. The shock was violent, the grief and horror intense; yet her first conscious feeling was a throb of relief, almost of joy. Her man was a leper! No other woman would ever now be found to wed with him; no co-wife would come into her life to separate her from him; barren woman though she was, the man she loved would be hers for all his days, and no one would arise to dispute with her her right- her sole right-to tend and comfort and cherish him.
The medicine-man turned away and walked slowly up the path along the river bank, counting the coppers in his hand, and Minah stood where he had left her, gazing after him, a prey to tumultuous and conflicting emotions. Then a realization of the tragedy of it overwhelmed her, a yearning, pas- sionate pity for the man she loved, and in an agony of self-reproach she threw herself face downward on the ground. Lying there among the warm damp grasses, clutching thein in her hands, and burying her face in them to suppress her sobs, she prayed passionately and inarticulately, prayed to the leprosy itself, as though it were a sentient being. entreating it, if indeed it must have a victim, to take her and spare her husband. Her rudimentary con- ceptions of religion did not bid her turn to God in the hour of her despair; and though, moved by the instinct which impels all human beings in the hour of their sorest need to turn for aid to invisible Powers, she poured out plaint and supplication, her thoughts were never for a moment directed Heavenward. She was a daughter of the Muhanumadans, unskilled in letters, ignorant utterly of the teachings of her faith, and, like all her people, she was a Malay first and a follower of the Prophet accidentally, and, as it were, by an afterthought. Therefore her cry was raised to the demon of the leprosy, to the spirits of wind and air and pestilence, and to all manner of unclean beings who should find no place in the mythology of a true believer. The old-world superstitions of the Malays-the natural religion of the people, tempered a little by the bastard Hin- duism disseminated in its day by the great Brahman empire of Kambodia, ere ever the Muhammadan missionaries came to lamper with their simple paganism always comes uppermost in the native mind in seasons of trouble or stress. In precisely The same way, it is the natural man, the savage. that ordinarily rises to the surface, through no matter what superimposed strata of conventionalism. in moments of strong emotion. But these things had no power to help or comfort Minah, and any strength that came to her during that hour that she passed, lying prone and in agony, learing at the lush grass and stifling her lamentations, was drawn from her own brave and generous heart, that fountain of willing self-immolation and umutlerable tenderness, the heart of a woman who loves.
The evening sun was sinking amid the riot of splendour which attends sunset in Malaya when at last Minah gathered herself together, rearranged her disordered hair and crumpled garinents with deft feminine fingers, and turned her face homeward. Later still, when the evening meal had been dis- patched and the lights extinguished, Minah, lenderly caressing the head of her husband, which lay pil- lowed upon her breast, whispered in his ears the words which revealed to him the full measure of his calamity. No more appalling message can come to any man than that which makes known to him that he has been stricken by leprosy, that foulest, most repulsive, and least merciful of incurable dis- eases; and Mamat, as he listened to his wife's falter- ing speech, cowered and trembled in the semi- darkness, and now and again, as he rocked his body to and fro for instinctively he had withdrawn him- self from Minah's embrace-gave vent to low sobs, very pitiful to hear.
Leprosy has an awful power to blight a man utterly, to rob him alike of the health and the cleanliness of his body, and of the love and kindness which have made life sweet to him; for when the terror falls upon any one, even those who held him in closest affection in the days when he was whole, too often turn from him in loathing and fear.
As slowly and with pain Mamat began to under- stand clearly, and understanding, to realize the full meaning of the words that fell from his wife's lips, he drew farther and farther away from her, in spite of her restraining hands, and sat huddled up in a corner of the hut, shaken by the hard, deep-drawn tears that come to a grown man in the hour of misery, bringing no relief, but merely adding one additional pang to the intensity of his suffering. Vaguely he told himself that, since Minah must be filled with horror at his lightest touch, since she would now surely leave him, as she had a right to do, he owed it to himself, and to what tattered remnant of selfrespect was left to him, that the first signal for separa- tion should be made by him. It would ease the situation for both of them, he felt, if from the begin- ning he showed her plainly that he expected nothing but desertion, that she was free to go, to leave him, that he was fully prepared for the words that should tell him of her intention, though for the moment they remained unspoken. Therefore, though Minah held out her arms toward him, he repulsed her gently, and retreating farther into the shadows, cried warningly: "Have a care! Have a care lest you also become infected by the evil.”
Again Minah crept toward him, with arms outstretched for an embrace, and again he evaded her A little moonbeam struggling through the in- terstices of the wattled walls fell full upon her face, and revealed to him her eyes wide with sympathy, dewy with tears, and yearning after him with a great love. The sight was so unexpected that it smote him with the violence of a blow, sending a strange thrill through all his ruined body, and gripping his heart so that he fought for breath like one distressed by running.
"Have a care!" he cried again; but Minah dis- regarded his warning.
"What care I?" she replied. "What care I? Do you think that my love is so slight a thing that it will abide with you only in the days of your prosperity? Am I like unto a woman of the town, a wanton who loves only when all is well and when the silver dollars are many and bright? Am I so fashioned that I have no care for anyone save for myself? O Mamat, my man to me, fruit of my heart! After these years that we have lived together in love, do you in truth know me so little? Is it fitting that I, your wife, should quit you now because the evil spirits have caused this trouble to fall upon you? Weh, I love you, I love you, I love you, and life would be of no use to me without you. Come to me, Weh, come to me!" And again she extended her arms toward him.
For long Mamat resisted, fighting against the temptation to accept her sacrifice sturdily; but at length the longing for human sympathy, and for comfort in his great affliction-a desire which, in time of trouble, a grown man feels as instinctively as does the little child that, having come by some hurt, runs to its mother to be petted into forgetful- ness of his pain-proved too strong for him; and he sank down, sobbing unrestrainedly, with his head in Minah's lap, and with her kind hands fondling and caressing him.
And thus it came about that Minah made the great sacrifice, which, in a manner, was to her no sacrifice, and her husband brought himself to ac- cept it as the one precious thing that capricious fate had accorded to him.
Two or three years slid by after this, and as Minali watched her husband, she marked the subtle changes of the evil to which he was a prey working their cruel will upon him. He had been far gone in the disease even before the medicine-man had mustered courage to name it, but for many months after the discovery little change was noticeable. Then, as is its wont, the leprosy took a forward stride; then halted for a space, only to advance once more, but now with more lagging feet. Thus, though the physical alterations wrought by the ravages of the discase were increas- ingly terrible to Minah, who marked each change take place gradually, step by step and from day to day, beneath her eyes, underlying the deformed and featureless face, the blind eye-sockets, the aimless, swaying limbs with their maimed and discoloured extrenuities, she saw as clearly as ever the face, the glance, the gestures that had been distinctive of hier husband. And she loved this formless, mutilated thing with all the old passionate devotion, and with a new tenderness that awoke all her maternal instincts: for to this childless woman Mamat was now both husband and the baby that had never been born to her.
He was utterly dependent upon her now. Twice daily she carried him upon her back down to the river's edge, and bathed him with infinite care. To her there seemed nothing remarkable in the act. She had done it for the first time one day long before, when his feet were peculiarly sore and uncomfortable, had done it laughingly, half in jest, and he had laughed, too, joining in her inerriment. But now he had become so helpless that there was no other way of conveying him riverward, and she daily bore him on her back unthinkingly, as a matter of course. The weight of her burden diminished as time went on.
In the same way she had gradually fallen into the habit of dressing and feeding him, having performed these services for him now and again before there was any absolute necessity therefor; but latterly his limbs had become so useless that lacking her aid he would have gone naked and have died of starvation. She never lamented now that Allah or the Spirits― Minah was always in doubt as to which of the two had the larger share in the ordering of her world— had not seen fit to send her a child in answer to her prayer. Mamat occupied every cranny of her heart, and in his helplessness made to her an appeal stronger far than that which he had made to her in the years of his unspoiled manhood. Most Asiatic women of the better sort find the role of mother more naturally congenial than that of wife, and all that was best in Minah's nature rose up to fortify her in her trial. She was quite blind to the nobility of her own devo- tion, for thoughts of self played but a small part in the consciousness of this daughter of the Muhammadans, and though her simple vocabulary contained no word to express the idea of "duty," she found in the per- formance of the task which she had set herself a deep content that transformed the squalor of her life into a thing of wonder and beauty. And she had to work for both her husband and herself, that there might be rice in the cooking-pot and clothing for their bodies, so her labours in house or in the fields was never ended. The kindly village folk, who pitied her, though they could not repress an occasional jeer at lier eccentric devotion to a leper, lightened her tasks for her in half a hundred ways, and Minah found her rice plot tilled and the crop weeded, and the precious grain stored safely, without clearly knowing how the work had been done at such comparatively slight cost to herself. And thus Minah and her man spent many years of the joint life that even the Demon of the Lep- rosy had been powerless to rob of all its sweetness.
It was some time after the white men had placed Pahang under their protection, with the amiable object of quieting that troubled and lawless land, that a new terror came to Minah. Men whispered together in the villages that the strange pale-faced folk who now ruled the country had many ordinances known to the old Rajas. The eccentricities and excesses of the latter were hair-erecting things, but to them the people were inured by the accumulated experience of generations, whereas the ways of the white men were inconsequent and inscrutable. The laws which they promulgated were unhallowed by Custom the greatest of all Malayan fetishes--and were not endeared to the native population by age or tradition; and one of them, it was said, provided for the segregation of lepers. In other words, it was the habit of white folk to sentence lepers to imprisonment for life, precisely as though it were a crime for a man to fall a victim to a disease! Minah listened to this talk, and was stricken dumb with misery and bewilderment, as the village elders, mumbling their discontent concerning a dozen lying rumours, spoke also of this measure as one likely to be put in force in Palang.
The wanton cruelty of the notion was what chiefly struck her. The old native rulers had been oppres- sive, with hearts like flint and hands of crushing weight, but they had always been actualed by a personal motive, a motive which their people could recognize and understand, the sort of motive whereby the peasants felt that they themselves would have been impelled if their relative positions had been reversed. But why should the white folk covet her man? Why should they scheme to rob her of him, seeing that he was all she had, and they could have no need of him? Why, too, should they punish him with imprisonment for a calamity for which he was in no wise to blame? What abnormal and crim- inal instinct did the strangers hope to gratify by such an aimless piece of barbarity? In imagination she heard his fretful call, his mumbled speech, which none save she could interpret or understand; and the thought of the pitifulness of his condition, of his utter helplessness, if deprived of her love and com- panionship, aroused in her all the blind combativeness that lurks in all maternal creatures. In his de fence she would cast aside all fear and fight for him, as a tigress fights for her cubs.
Minah managed with difficulty to bribe au ok crone to tend Mamat for a day or two. Then she set off for Kuala Lipis, the lown at which, she had heard men say, the white men had their headquarters. Until she started upon this journey downcountry she had never quitted her own village, and to her the twenty miles of river, that separated her home from the town, was a road of wonder through an undis- covered country. Kuala Lipis itself-the ordered streets; the brick buildings, in which the Chinese traders had their shops; the lamp-posts; the native policemen standing at the corners of the roads, shameless folk who wore trousers, but no protecting sarong; the huge block of Government offices, for to her this far from imposing pile appealed as a stupendous piece of architecture; the made roads, smooth and metalled; the wonder and the strange- ness of it all dazed and frightened her. What could the white men, who already possessed so many marvellous things, want with her man, the leper, that they should desire to take him from her? And what had she of power or of stratagem to oppose to their night? Her heart sank within her.
She asked for me, since I had bade her come to me if she were in trouble, and presently she made her way along the unfamiliar roads to the big Residency on the river's bank, round which the forest clustered so closely in the beauty which no hand was suffered to deface. She was brought into my study, and seated herself upon the mat-covered floor, awed by the strangeness of her surroundings, and gazing up at me plaintively out of those great eyes of hers. which were wet with tears. Hers was the simple faith of one who has lived all her days in the same place, whither few strangers penetrate, and where every man knows his neighbour and all his neigh- bours' affairs. It never occurred to her that her words might need explanation or preface of any kind, in order that they might be rendered intelligible, and so, fixing her gaze upon my face, she sobbed out her prayer again and again,
"O suffer me to keep my man and my children. O suffer me to keep my man and my children. O suffer them not to be taken away from me. Allah, Tuan, suffer me to keep my man and my children."
I knew, of course, that she spoke of her "man and her children" nierely from a sense of decorum, since it is coarse and indecent, in the opinion of an up- country woman, to speak of "her husband" without euphonism, even though she be childless; but, for the moment, I supposed that she was the wife of some man accused of a crime, who had come to me seeking the aid that I had not the power to give.
"What has your man done?" I inquired
"Done, Tuan?" she cried. "What could he do, seeing that he is as one already dead? Unless men lifted him he could not move. But suffer him not to be taken from me. He is all that I have, and in truth I cannot live without him. Hang me on high, Tuan, sell me in a far land, burn me till I am con- sumed, duck me till I be drowned, but suffer not my man and my children to be taken from me. I shall die. Tuan, if you allow this thing to befall us.”
Then suddenly the mist obscuring my memory rolled away, and I saw the face of this woman, as I had seen it once before, straining under a terrible burden on the banks of the Jělai River, with the sun- set glow and the dark masses of foliage making a background against which it stood revealed. Then at last I understood, and her passionate distress moved me intensely.
As a matter of fact, the question of the necessity for segregating lepers in the Malay States under British protection had shortly before been under discussion, but so far as Pahang was concerned, I had succeeded in persuading the Federal Government that the country was not yet ripe for any such action. Administration, all the world over, is from first to last a matter of compromise, compromise between what is right and what is expedient, what is for the material welfare of the population and what is ad- visable and politic in existing circumstances; and in dealing with a new, raw country, whose people prior to our coming had been living, to all intents and purposes, in the twelfth century, great caution had to be exercised by those of us who were engaged in the delicate task of transferring them bodily into a nineteenth-century atmosphere. Leper asylums in the tropics are, at best, deplorable institutions. One may admit their necessity, but the perennial dis- content and unhappiness of their inmates are prover- bial, and even the devoted service rendered to the unfortunates by so many European women belonging to religious orders, fails greatly to ameliorate their lot. When lepers are consigned to the charge of ordinary paid attendants, the results are even more depressing. It was with a feeling of keen relief, therefore, that I was now able to reassure Minah.
"Have no fear, sister," I said, making use of the kindly Malayan vocative which makes all the workl akin. "Your man shall not be taken from you. Who is it that seeks to separate you from him?"
"Men say it is an order," she replied.
To the Oriental an "order" is a kind of impersonal monster, invincible and impartial, a creature that respects no man, and is cruel to all alike.
"Have no fear," I said. "It is true that I have bidden the headmen of the villages report to me concerning the number of those afflicted with the evil sickness, but this is only done that we may be able to aid those who suffer from it. Moreover, in this land of Pahang, the number is small, and the infection does not spread. Therefore, sister, have no fear, and believe me, come what may, the Govern- ment will not separate you from your man. Return now in peace to your home, and put all trouble from you. Moreover, if aught comes to sorrow you, remember that I, or another, am here to listen to your plaint.'
As I finished speaking, the woman before nie was transformed. Her eyes filled with tears, her brown skin faded suddenly to a grayish tint with the inten- sity of her relief; and before I could stay her, she had thrown herself upon the matting at my feel, encircling them with her warm clasp. I leaped up, humbled exceedingly that such a woman should so abase her- self before me, and angered by an Englishman's instinctive hatred of a scene; and as I stooped to dis- engage her hands, I heard her murnur, almost in a whisper.
"Your servant hath little skill in speech, bul in truth, Tuan, you have made me happy-happy, as though the moon had fallen into my lap-happy as is the barren wife to whom it is given to bear a son!"
And, as I looked into her face, it seemed to me to shine with the beauty of her soul.