A Town like Alice

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 thank-offering 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 thank-offering 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 thank-offering 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 thank-offering, 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