When the meal was over the women carried what was left to a corner near the
fireplace, and there fell to on such of the viands as their lords had not consumed.
If you had looked carefully, however, you would have seen that the cooking-
pots, over which the women ruled, still held a secret store for their own
consumption, and that the quality of the food in this cache was by no means
inferior to that which had been allotted to the men. In a land where women wait
upon themselves, and have none to attend to their wants, or forestall their
wishes, they very soon acquire an extremely good notion of how to look after
themselves; and, since they have never known a state of society in which women
are treated as they are amongst ourselves, they do not repine, and seem, for the
most part, to be sufficiently bright, light-hearted, and happy.
The men, meanwhile, had each rolled up a quid of betel-nut, taking the four
ingredients carefully from the little brass boxes in the wooden tray before them,
and having prepared cigarettes of Javenese tobacco, with the dried shoots of the
nîpah palm for wrappers, had at length broken the absorbed silence, which had
held them fast while the matter of the meal was occupying their undivided
attention.
The talk flitted lightly over many subjects; for a hearty meal, and the peace of
soul which repletion brings with it, are not conducive to concentration of
attention, nor yet to activity of mind. The Malay, too, is always superficial, and
talk among natives generally plays round facts, rather than round ideas. Che’
Sĕman, the owner of the house, and his two sons, Âwang and Ngah, discussed
the prospects of the crop then growing in the fields behind the compound. Their
cousin Äbdollah, who chanced to be passing the night in the house, told of a fall
which his wife's aunt's brother had come by, when climbing a cocoa-nut tree.
Mat, his bîras (for they had married two sisters, which established a definite
form of relationship between them, according to Malay ideas), added a few more
or less ugly details to Äbdollah's description of the corpse after the accident. And
as this attracted the attention of the two remaining men, Pôtek and Kassim, who
had been discussing the price of rice, and the varying chances of gĕtah hunting,
the talk at this point became general. Pôtek and Kassim had recently returned
from Dûngun, where, as has been said, the present Sultân of Pahang was, at that
time, collecting the force with which he afterwards successfully invaded and
conquered the State. They told of all they had seen and heard, multiplying their
figures with the daring recklessness that is born of unfettered imaginations, and
the lack of a rudimentary knowledge of arithmetic. But even this absorbing topic
could not hold the attention of their hearers for long. Before Pôtek and Kassim