would fly into a passion, and run sobbing up the ladder of her home. Noa
became moody in turn. His father saw it and his mates chaffed him, but no one
guessed the cause. That it should be for the sake of a woman would have been
beyond belief; for did not the Koran say, “If thy wife displease thee, beat her
until she see the sin of her ways”? One day, as he thought, it occurred to him,
“She does not want to marry me!” and he asked her, as though it made any
difference. There were tears in her eyes, but she only threw back her head and
laughed, and replied as she should:—
“That is no concern of ours. Is your father, the captain, displeased with my
father’s, the punghulo’s, dowry?”
And yet Noa felt that Anak knew what he would have said.
He went away angry, but with a gnawing at his heart that frightened him,—a
strange, new sickness, that seemed to drive him from despair to a longing for
revenge, with the coming and going of each quick breath. He had been trying to
make love in a blind, stumbling way; he did not know it,—why should he?
Marriage was but a bargain in Malaya. But Anak with her finer instincts felt it,
and instead of fanning this tiny, unknown spark, she was driving it into other and
baser channels.
In spite of her better nature she was slowly making a demon out of a lover,—a
lover to whom but a few months before she would have given freely all her love
for a smile or the lightest of compliments.
From that day until the day of the marriage she never spoke to her lover save in
the presence of her elders,—for such was the law of her race.
She submitted to the tire-women who were to prepare her for the ceremony,
uttering no protest as they filed off her beautiful white teeth and blackened them
with lime, nor when they painted the palms of her hands and the nails of her
fingers and toes red with henna. She showed no interest in the arranging of her
glossy black hair with jewelled pins and chumpaka flowers, or in the draping of
her sarong and kabaya. Only her lacerated gums ached until one tear after
another forced its way from between her blackened lids down her rouged cheeks.
There had been feasting all day outside under the palms, and the youths, her