A Town like Alice

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 click-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 thank-offering to this place, and that this thank-offering 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." One 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 thank-offering. 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