The People of Taman Sari

WEEKS of hard work followed for Pak and his muscles grew hard and the sweat ran off him in streams. The rice was ripening in his west fields, the ears hung heavy on the stalks, whose green became first silver and then gold. Even his old father often came out in the late afternoon and sat on the narrow dyke and rejoiced in the sight. Life is sweet when the rice ripens and the heart is content. Pak made many clappers which he fastened to long poles and set up in his fields; they scared the birds and at the same time made enough din to excite his neighbors to fury. There was a festival in the rice temples of the subak on the day before the harvest, with many offerings, and the old women wound black kains about their thighs, with golden ones beneath hanging down in a train; they wore yellow shawls over one shoulder and had many flowers in their gray hair. They danced before each shrine with the offering-vessels held high in the left hand and the children sat nearby in great delight. Pak’s aunt danced, too, with a rapt expression, for though her breasts might be withered, she had been a temple dancer when she was a child, as Lambon was. Puglug went with her mat and took her place in the row of vendors at the temple gate and made more than two hundred kepengs. Pak took them from her, for the three ceremonies after the birth of little Klepon had cost a lot in rice and money and on the third day of the festival there was to be a cockfight to which he looked forward with the greatest excitement.

Pak’s father was a great connoisseur of cocks, and on the crossbeam of his balé there were three old lontars, where it was written in which corner of the cock-pit and against what sort of cock on any given day a bird had to fight in order to win. On the day before each cock-fight many people came to Pak’s place to ask the old man’s advice. He pretended to be reading out of his old books, although his eyes were dim and he had long ago forgotten how to read. But he knew the lontars by heart, for he had learnt them from his father when he was still a boy. The visitors brought presents with them of ducks’ eggs and coconuts and papayas, and Pak was proud of having so knowing a father. Altogether his family was distinguishing itself, although they were only poor people of no caste. The eye of the raja had looked with favor on Lambon, and when she danced the legong with two other children on the evening of the harvest festival, Pak could see that she delighted everybody, though no one said so. Meru, his young brother, moreover, was summoned to the palace to carve two new doors for the eleven-storeyed tower of its temple and he went out and bought himself a kris on the strength of it.

Pak dug beneath the floor of his house when Puglug was at the market and took out three ringits for the cock-fight. He gave only a little food to his red cock, so that he should be light and nimble, and putting him in a wicker hamper went off to the cock-pit. He hesitated a long time before deciding which cock to challenge and rejected a large black-and-white one, although his red bird was frantic to fight him. He went over in his mind all the advice his father had given him—to take the west corner and to pit his cock against a white bird without a single black feather. In spite of this he lost his cock and two of his ringits besides. The winner took his beautiful red cock away dead and Pak’s heart was heavy, though he gave no sign of it; he laughed and slapped the other man on the knee and made a number of jokes which he thought very good indeed.

He tried to make good his losses by staking his last ringit on the lusty black-and-white cock he had passed over as an opponent, and won. His courage rose and he made bet after bet and lost and soon there was not a kepeng left in his kain. He felt a strong inclination to stake his loin-cloth, Puglug’s present, but at the thought of her his courage failed him.

Early next day they began harvesting, Pak and his friends who belonged to the same harvest guild and his brothers and uncle. The women and children joined in, too, and there was much singing, although the work was hard. The sun blazed and the ears were prickly. Pak wore his large hat and a sleeved jacket woven out of fibre as a protection against the haulm. He saw to it that he worked all day long near Sarna and he asked her when she would go to the river to fetch water. Yes, Sarna was helping in his field, for her father belonged to the same guild and the members had to help one another. Sarna sang well but was not much good at reaping. But Pak was in love and the blood pulsed in his veins, and little he cared whether Sarna was quick or slow with her rice sheaves.

Puglug came out to the sawah, bringing food for all the people, and they ate a great deal from politeness, and said what a good cook Puglug was and that Pak was a lucky man. Pak, too, was polite, and poured scorn on his wife and her cooking, and his face shone with sweat and happiness. But Puglug was cross and spoke less than her custom was. At night when the two fields were harvested the men went back to Pak’s house and ate once more. The old man squatted among them and told old tales and generally forgot how they ended. The rich Wajan sent his son home for palm wine in bamboo stems and Krkek praised the harvest and Pak for the way he had tilled his land. There was a great deal of laughter and drinking and it was one of the happiest nights of Pak’s life.

They had forty-eight sheaves from the one field and fifty-three from the other, and this was seven more than Pak had hoped for. When he had given half to the lord and three-tenths to the guild, there remained forty-five for himself, and this was more than his family required for the next half-year, by which time the next fields would have ripened on the soil in which Pak had buried his treasure.

“Father of Rantun,” Puglug said, addressing him by the name of his favorite child, as she did when she wanted something, “Father of Rantun, the work is becoming too hard for me. My back pains me since the birth of the last child, and the aunt, the old besom, is no help to me. I have to go to the river three times a day for water because I cannot any longer carry the large pitcher. What are you going to do to lighten my labors?”

Pak muttered that his household was full of women; there were Lambon and the two daughters and his uncle’s wives. This brought a torrent of words from Puglug. “Lambon,” she said, “thinks no doubt that her hands are too good for work now that she dances the legong. She is off to Kesiman to her teacher and does not come home for the rest of the day, like a strayed dog. She runs after Raka, who spends half his time at Kesiman too, practising new dances. She is no good in the house and only one more idle mouth to feed. Rantun has enough to do looking after her little sisters and gathering dried coconut shells for the fire. Besides, she has the heat sickness every three days and her arms are tired out with carrying Klepon around. I don’t believe you know what goes on in your own house.”

All Pak’s peace of mind was shattered and he let his head sink. “Wife, that is not a seemly way to speak and if I did what was right I should beat you,” he said to preserve his dignity; but in his heart he was ashamed of himself. Ever since the harvest he had been meeting Sarna secretly, at night under the wairingin tree, where it was pitch-dark, or near the old temple on the outskirts of the village where the grass grew high between the balés. Merely to think of Sarna was worse than hunger and thirst and yet he could not stop thinking of her.

“Rantun, come here,” he called, and Rantun came running across the yard from the kitchen to her father. He took her by the shoulders and held her in front of him and looked at her. It was true that her little arms were thin and her eyes too bright. She was carrying Klepon on her hip—a thriving happy little girl, who had no idea of being an unwanted child. The brass rings round her wrists and ankles were almost lost to sight in rolls of fat. She was clearly too heavy for Rantun to carry about. Madé, finger in mouth, clung to Rantun’s sarong. Rantun had a broad leaf in her hand with offerings on it and a glowing coconut shell. It would soon be evening and she had to place the offerings at the gate and a light, so that the evil spirits would see to find them and not need to come into the yard.

“Are you quite happy, Rantun?” Pak asked as he stroked the little girl’s hot neck.

“Very, father,” Rantun said, and this stirred Pak’s heart as though with the touch of a hand. “Give Klepon to me, I will carry her, your mother has no time,” he said, and he took the plump little girl on his own hip. If she had been a son he would have proudly stationed himself outside the gate to excite the admiration of his neighbors. But as she was a daughter he preferred to keep her within. “Go and put the offerings outside,” he said with a playful slap on her thin little flanks. Rantun smiled at him, almost as though he needed comforting, because she had the heat sickness, and went off with her lighted coconut shell. Puglug stood near meanwhile, her arms folded on her breast, for which little Klepon stretched out her arms.

“What have you been thinking I ought to do to make your life less hard?” he asked Puglug. She was a good wife and had not made such a very great fuss when he lost the three ringits. The worst of Puglug was that you could keep nothing secret from her. She came home on market-days stuffed to the brim with news and other people’s secrets, which tumbled out of her like potatoes from an overfilled basket. She had found out all about the cock-fighting to the last detail, even though women were not allowed to be present.

“I have been thinking that it was time you took a second wife,” Puglug said, confident of being on the right tack. “I have the right to ask that you should give me a younger sister in the house to share the work and help me when I am not well. Also she could look after the house and cook the meals when I am at the market making some money.”

When he heard this Pak felt as he had that time when a large coconut fell on his head. He blinked his eyes. “You are not half as stupid as I thought,” he said amiably. “You are right. I will look about in the village and bring home a second wife as soon as I have found the right girl.” His head went hot and dizzy. It overwhelmed him that Puglug herself should direct him how to appease his hunger for Sarna. He took her hand in his and patted it.

“There is someone in Sanur who is the very one for you and who would be glad to have you. Everyone in the village knows that you have not much eye for the girls. But there would be very little difficulty in persuading this Sanur girl I am speaking of. She would suit very well in the family, for her sister’s mother married a cousin of your father’s. You won’t remember that, for she went a long way away, to Krobokan.” And Puglug took up the child from his hip as it was showing signs of beginning to cry.

“In Sanur?” Pak said in amazement. “Who is there in Sanur who thinks of marrying me?”

Puglug squatted down beside him with the child at her breast. She always did this when she had news to impart and Pak knew that a lengthy talk was to come.

“I mean Dasni, if you want to know, and I could not ask for a better sister in the house. She can carry forty-five coconuts on her head, and if you think I am exaggerating ask anyone in Sanur. She can carry three sheaves of rice on a pole like a man and last harvest she threshed more rice than any other woman. As it happens I know that she has had her eye on you for a long time past, but of course you have never noticed that. But long ago she asked me to bring her two earthenware jars when I went to Badung market. When she came for them we had a long talk. And if you like to be spared the trouble I was going in any case to Sanur for Sweet Wednesday and I can talk it all over with her then.”

A second whacking great coconut seemed to have fallen on Pak’s head. “Dasni,” he said, almost speechless for disappointment. “And why should I want Dasni of all people as a second wife?”

“I am just beginning to tell you the reasons. Dasni can weave baskets and padang mats beautifully, and I could take them to market and sell them. And in her family there are always three sons born to every daughter, and the balian has read in his books and told her that she will soon have a husband, who is a better man than people think,” Puglug went on volubly. The child had fallen asleep on her breast, and she crouched in front of Pak and her ill-favored face looked up into his with entire devotion. Pak was confounded by her last words. A better man than people knew. He was certainly that. A man who had treasure buried in his rice-field, which he could dig up any day and turn to money. True enough, Pak was a better man than people knew. Nevertheless, the balian’s prophecy did not please him. “There are plenty of good men in the two villages,” he said. “And Dasni has pimples on her face.”

“That is a ridiculous objection,” Puglug said. “Rich Wajan has many sugem pigeons. You have only to go and ask him for some of the droppings, so that the balian can make the remedy, and in three days her skin will be clean.”

Pak started once more at the mention of Sarna’s father. He winced at anything that reminded him of Sarna and there was nothing that did not remind him of her apparently. He looked down on his wife in silence and thought it over. What am I to do with two ugly women in my house? he thought. I am not a pig—to be contented as long as I have all the food I want. My eyes want to be fed, too, and I want to be envied for a wife with beautiful breasts, and who is a delight to me. But he was sorry for Puglug and refrained from saying anything to wound her.

“I will speak to Krkek about it and ask his advice. He is a clever man,” he said evasively.

“Shall I mention it to Dasni in the meanwhile and take her the remedy for her skin? The balian would mix it properly for me in return for a basket of pisangs, and you need only give rich Wajan a present if the droppings of his pigeons do good.”

“If I ask rich Wajan for anything at all, it will be for something better than pigeon-droppings,” said Pak. He bit his lip as soon as it was out of his mouth. Puglug looked narrowly at him and said no more. He would have given much to know whether she had already heard at the market about his secret meetings with Sarna. But Puglug was silent and her face showed no sign.

“We have talked enough for one evening,” he said. “I am tired. Tomorrow we shall know better.”

Puglug followed him obediently into the house and laid Klepon down in her cot. Rantun and Madé were already rolled up on the other bench. Pak took the oil lamp down from its hook and looked at the little girls. Rantun even in her sleep had her arm protectingly round her younger sister. Pak smiled, pinched out the wick and lay down on his mat. Puglug had lain down already, but that was no concern of his. He lay awake until she had fallen asleep; then, feeling it hot and oppressive in the little room, he got up and went out into the yard. The moon was shining and the palm-tops were black against the brightness in the sky. He walked aimlessly to and fro, driven by the unrest in his blood. Then he squatted down and let the night air and the dew cool his body, but it was no good. It is a fever that destroys the flesh, he thought sadly. If it goes on, it will take me three days to plough one furrow and I will get behind with my work, and they will shut off the water from my sawahs and I shall be punished. He went out through the gate and crouched in the sluice that flowed along the wall and through the village. The water cooled but did not calm him. I must take Sarna into my home, he thought, so that I can see her and be with her whenever I wish. Sarna is a rich man’s daughter and spoilt. She will not be the second wife and do as Puglug bids her when she has to pound the rice. He tried to imagine Sarna doing the housework in a dirty kain and getting ugly as Puglug had. That cannot be, he thought. If she is spoilt, she can go on being spoilt. I am rich enough. Besides, it is well known that the second wife is for the husband’s pleasure as a rule. He went back into the moonlit yard and knotted up his kain again around his wet hips. Thoughts surged in his wretched head, which was not used to thinking. The dogs had woken up and looked at him with surprise. Then he heard light footsteps in the yard, and looking up he saw the old man there. “Why do you not sleep, my son?”

“I don’t know, father. I am overcome by a great restlessness and the narrow walls of my rooms suffocate me,” Pak replied. The moon shone brightly and every object and every building cast black shadows. The old man, who had shrunk together in the last years, so that Pak was now taller than he, looked sadly up at him.

“I thought the cow must have broken loose,” Pak muttered. “It is nothing else, father——”

“I have heard you creeping home just before cockcrow for three nights past. Are you going secretly to a woman?” the old man asked, and Pak realized with relief that there was nothing the old man in his wisdom did not know and understand.

“What is it that tortures a man like a sickness and puts him beyond his own help? It is a woman—and I must have her or else my whole life will be brought to nought.”

His father considered this for a while. “I will speak to my old friend, the pedanda,” he said. “In all probability this woman has used sorcery and the spell must be broken. You know that the mother of the husky man of Sanur is a witch and the women go to her for such things. Now go to sleep and tomorrow I will see how to heal you of this sickness.”

Pak hung his head at this. He had no desire to be healed. He wanted to have this fever for ever in his blood and Sarna with him in his house to appease it. He tried in vain to imagine that she took the dark way to the witch and mixed a witch’s brew with his food. But she was always at the back of his eyes, and he could see her at every moment, and her face was always sweet and faultless, full of laughter and roguishness; it was inconceivable that she should have anything to do with the black arts of magic. He followed his father’s bent and withered form across the moonlit yard to his balé “May I sleep with you, old man?” he asked familiarly as if he was still a child. The old man nodded. Pak lay down beside his father’s emaciated form which took little room on the couch and his father spread half of his own kain over his son. Lantjar, the youngest of the brothers, was asleep on the floor. Pak felt calmer to be lying close to his father as in his childhood. His eyes closed. It would be sensible to take Dasni, he thought. But I do not want to be sensible, but happy, he thought again as he fell asleep.

Raka and Lambon were coming over the rice-fields from Kesiman. They were on their way home after a three weeks’ stay in the house of the old teacher of dancing. They were a long time on the way, because in all the villages they passed through Raka was hailed and stopped and invited into the houses and pressed to take at least some fruit or sirih. Laughing and light-hearted he went on his way, taking as a matter of course the love people felt for him. As his dancing delighted them and it made them happy to offer him hospitality, it would have been impolite to decline what they were glad to give.

The basket on Lambon’s head was soon full of fruit and sirih and at last Raka was carrying on his bamboo pole a hamper containing a little black pig. Someone had given it to him for his wife, Teragia, in gratitude for her care of a sick child. Raka was in no hurry to be home. He sat down on the steps leading up to the doors of houses and talked to the old women, who were always eager for news of neighboring villages. He squatted at the road-sides with the men who were fondling their fighting-cocks and weighing one against another and even letting them fight one another for practice and the fun of the thing. It was the idle hour of the day when field labor was done and there was leisure for amusement.

In every village the young unmarried men, who were as yet of no importance whatever, assembled in their open balés, smoking, chewing and boasting of their latest conquests. Raka sat with them and chaffed them and slapped them on the back. But when they asked him about his own adventures he laughed and said he had nothing to tell them. He was said to be all the more a favorite with the girls because of his reticence. Whenever he passed a mother with her little children beside her, he called out his congratulations and admired the beauty and fatness of the babe at her breast. He jokingly helped the young girls to hoist the heavy pitchers on to their heads when they had drawn water. He talked to children, cows and ducks he met by the way and let no one pass without asking them whence and whither. And so it was that they had been a good two hours on the way before reaching the river that flowed at the back of Taman Sari.

Lambon kept always a pace or two behind Raka, for he was her elder and almost her teacher and married and of the highest caste. She was proud of going in his company through the villages and seeing how beloved he was; and she knew that girls older than her, who already had big breasts, were envious of her. She strode on with a nervous look and felt in every inch of her the joy of Raka’s presence and of being Lambon, the dancer, on whom the raja himself had smiled when he saw her dance.

When Raka loitered anywhere she knelt down by the roadside and wiped the little beads of sweat from her face. She had plenty to do, too, with her hair and her head-dress while waiting for him, for she had just reached puberty and now there was to be a neat coil of hair on her head and a fringe, as sign of her maidenhood. Apart from this, not much fuss had been made of it, a few offerings had been offered up, her brother Pak had given her a new sarong, and one or two of Puglug’s friends had brought some sweet rice cakes which they helped to dispose of over a good gossip without paying much attention to the little ceremony. Lambon was not eager to be home again. It was a life of poverty and her brother’s and uncle’s wives were always having words over the little there was to eat. She had been spoilt at Kesiman and she had become estranged day by day from the life in her own family.

Her teacher’s home at Kesiman could almost be called a puri— there were so many balés and so many people living on his rice and everything was so fine and open-handed. It was at Kesiman, too, that Lambon had her friends, not at Taman Sari. There were two, younger than she was, with whom she danced the legong, and three others, who helped her to dress for dancing and looked with admiring eyes at her beauty. They confided all their secrets and there was no end to the giggling and laughing when they were together. Lambon’s favorite was little Resi, her master’s granddaughter, who was like a sister. Sometimes they sat a whole morning together hand in hand without speaking. Lambon was glad to be silent, for then she could think about Raka undisturbed. Now and then there were differences of opinion between the old dancing master and Raka. The master was a noble of a wealthy family and devoted his life to handing down the old dances and steps, as he himself had learnt them from his own master fifty years before in Sukawati. But Raka was daring: he suddenly did something in a dance that had never been seen before, and when the master took him to task, he was not even aware that he had danced in any but the traditional way. Lambon, on the other hand, executed every movement zealously and scrupulously in the way she had been taught, without departing from it by a tremor of her neck or a quiver of the little fan in her hand. She had fingers that could be bent right over the backs of her hands and fine mobile wrists. She could roll her shoulders as if they were balls and give her eyes a dazed stare or dart them like lightning from corner to corner of their sockets, just as the dance required. Raka had taught her how to touch her heels with the back of her head when dancing the legong. The old teacher was horrified at the sight of this unseemly innovation, but Lambon loved to do it and she practised it in secret, with Resi to support the small of her back. Now that she was a girl Lambon often found herself doing and wishing things she could not quite understand. She did not want to annoy the old dancing master; and yet to bend her supple body backwards with closed eyes gave her pleasure even though her head felt dizzy afterwards; for it was Raka who had taught her how to do it. Sometimes, too, she could not stop laughing at silly jokes of her friends. But above all, her heart was big with suspense, for now that she was growing up she would have to consider which man she would not refuse to sleep with if he asked her.

She knew that she was beautiful; it was as obvious as that she had two legs. Her old teacher had impressed upon her that the gods were actually present, seated on their thrones, when she danced at the temple festivals. It was obvious that the gods could not be asked to look on at any but beautiful dancers. So when her old teacher, too, was pleased with her and her friends were full of admiration and Raka praised her, she was content to ignore the village youths who stood and looked after her as she went by. She wanted none of them. She wanted Raka. But Raka, as far as she could see, thought as little of her as she did of the little fan she used for dancing.

Everything she knew came from Raka. He showed her every movement which her teacher was too old and stiff to show her. He stood behind her, holding her hands firmly and making every movement with her until she got it right. He put his fingers on her neck and made her aware of all its vertebrae separately until she could move them one by one. He clasped her round the hips and glided to and fro with her until she gained the right speed and agility and could do it alone. Other girls all grew up with their mothers, far removed from men. But she had been used from childhood to having the hands of her master and Raka on her body. And for some time now it made a lot of difference whether it was the old guru’s or Raka’s.

When they reached the shadow of the palms which fringed the top of the river bank, Raka stopped. Lambon stopped too, politely in the rear. “Let us rest a little,” he called to her. “This son of a pig gets heavier the longer I carry it.” Lowering the bamboo pole from his shoulder, he put the hamper down on the grass. The little pig grunted its satisfaction. Lambon dropped to her knees and took the basket from her head. Raka looked idly at her. “My stomach feels empty again,” he called out to her. She brought him the basket and knelt in front of him. He lazily took a pisang and began to eat it. Lambon watched with veneration in her eyes. He had gleaming white, evenly filed teeth. When he had done he turned over on his back with his arm under his head and looked up into the tree-tops.

“The lord wants us to dance the baris again in Badung next week. He has visitors from Tabanan,” he said drowsily.

“That will be lovely,” Lambon said delightedly. She loved the glamour of the puri, and the baris was the only dance in which she could dance with Raka. The old teacher, certainly, thought it unseemly, but the Taman Sari dance guild had held out on this point, and the success which had attended the innovation of a girl’s appearing with the male dancers had justified them. The teacher had assembled his pupils and told them the story of the baris dance. Lambon never attended to what the narrator chanted during a performance, but she sat full of awe while her teacher told the stories of demons and gods, although she forgot it all again directly. All she retained was the impression that the dancing belonged to another world than that of the village and her brother’s household. A world of princes and princesses and demons, with gods coming down from heaven to fight with them, of women who were likened to flowers and wild birds and deep ponds, in which gold-fishes swam.

It was not the same, either, in the house of Raka’s father, the pedanda, as it was in her own home. Lambon sometimes went on errands there for her father or was sent for by Raka. She was always a little afraid of Teragia, although she was never anything but kind to her. She smoothed Lambon’s hair with her large hand and also brought her bright-colored fruit-juice in the half of a coconut shell and little rice cakes tasting of palm sugar. Yet Lambon always felt embarrassed in the priest’s house, everything there was so spotless; and flowers of every color, which Raka’s father, the pedanda Ida Bagus Rai, needed for the daily offerings, grew there. Raka’s mother went noiselessly about the courtyard—a tall, erect old lady dressed in a black kain and with the breasts of a young girl. As she was blind it was her custom to acquaint herself with persons and things by touch. It seemed funny to Lambon when the old lady’s cool hands explored her face as though she was a piece of carving or a figure in wood. But you could not laugh in the priest’s house as you could elsewhere. Even Raka was not the same in the presence of his parents and his wife.

Lambon’s thoughts went from one thing to another as she sat beside Raka on the grass, following the direction of his eyes. All he could possibly see up there was a little cloud slowly sailing to join her sisters near the Great Mountain. Raka pulled a stalk of grass and began chewing it. Suddenly he laughed aloud and turned over and stared in Lambon’s face. “What are you laughing at?” she asked, taken aback.

“Not at you,” he replied, still laughing. He waved his left hand in the air to disclaim the idea. Only nobles and artists might wear their nails so long. They were pointed like the spur of a fighting-cock and the color of mussels.

The little pig gave a loud squeak. Lambon aimed a blow at it. “Don’t——” Raka said, holding her hand tightly. She wrenched it free and said, “You hurt me.” It was a lie. It pleased her when Raka held her hand, even if it did hurt. Now her hand lay on the grass like a, pisang rind someone had thrown down and Raka once more gazed into the sky.

The faint outline of the new moon could be seen rising in the east, scarcely visible, for the sky was still bright. Lambon looked impatiently at the sky that detained Raka’s eyes.

“Is it true that there used to be seven moons?” she asked. Ever since she had put on her first kain and begun to dance she had been accustomed to ask Raka everything.

“You always forget everything you are told,” he said. “There used to be seven moons, until one of them fell down and now it hangs in the Temple of Pedjeng as a giant gong. Since then there have been only six, and that is why the year has only six months now. It used to have seven,” Raka said drowsily, without taking his eyes from the sky.

“Is the woman who lives in the moon very beautiful?” “Yes, she is very beautiful.”

“What does she look like?” Lambon asked importunately. Raka at last took his eyes from the cloud and sat up. “How am I to know?” he asked in a moment. “I have never paid her a visit yet.”

“Do you know any girl who is like what you imagine her to look like?” Lambon asked. She would have given her new sarong to hear Raka reply: “You, you, Lambon.” But he said, “No.”

Lambon decided to talk of something else. “Are there any other countries beside Bali?”

“Yes,” he said, “there is Java, where our ancestors came from.” It was wonderful how Raka knew everything. But his reply left her as unsatisfied as before. “And who made the stars?” she asked.

Raka sighed, for Lambon’s mania for asking questions was exhausting and replies were thrown away, for she forgot all she was told. But after a look at her parted and expectant lips he decided to answer this too.

“You must imagine heaven just like Bali. Just the same. There are the same villages and temples and puris. Only that in heaven everything stands on its head, as though reflected in a river. Yes,” he said, “Bali is a reflection of heaven. You can understand that. Up there there are sawahs just as here below and what you see sparkling as stars are the tips of the young plants hanging down towards us.”

Lambon looked about her at the young plants gleaming in the water of the sawah and then looked again up into the sky. Raka’s explanation made her feel a little dizzy.

“Some people say all the same that the stars are simply there to ornament the sky at night,” Raka added.

“I don’t believe that,” Lambon said with decision. She thought it over for a moment and then reached for her basket and arranged the fruit in it.

“Sambeh is going to have a baby soon,” she said meanwhile, without looking at Raka.

“Who?” he asked in surprise.

“Sambeh, the servant in your house,” Lambon said. She paused, and as Raka made no reply she went on, “She is going to have a baby, and then she will be unclean for forty-two days, and won’t be allowed to cook any food or be of any use at all about the house.”

“It seems the gods will it so,” Raka said piously. He did not know what Lambon was driving at.

“Teragia will want another servant,” Lambon said.

Raka had nothing to say to this. He took hold of his pole and tied the hamper with the little pig to it. The little pig squealed like a baby.

“I should love to be a servant in your house,” Lambon said. “I thought perhaps you would ask Teragia to take me as a servant when Sambeh has her child . . .”

She came to a stop and could not go on. Her heart pounded. She could feel the blood rush to her face and was angry with herself. Raka put two fingers under her chin and lifted back her head and looked at her face with curiosity. “No,” he said. “No, Lambon, I can make no use of you as a servant.”

“Not? Why not?” Lambon whispered in dismay.

“You are too forgetful for a cook, too clumsy to carry water,” Raka said severely. She looked at him miserably and he began to laugh. “Lambon,” he cried, “you are too beautiful by far for a servant, particularly in a pedanda’s household.”

Lambon sat motionless and her hands went limp. She looked down at herself and then up at Raka. His skin was much fairer than hers. Raka was fair-skinned and handsome and she had a brown skin and thin arms and her father was a poor man of low caste.

“You are not to laugh at me,” she said angrily.

Raka looked at her in astonishment. “What things you think of while you sit there with your eyes going dark,” he said teasingly.

“My eyes do not go dark, not when I think of you,” she said, almost bursting with rage. He laughed out loud. “You can’t see your own eyes. But I can and they are dark,” he shouted.

Lambon turned her head away in mortification, when he took her by the hands and drew her towards him and stared in her eyes. She pulled her head-dress down over her face and then, feeling that this was not concealment enough, she buried her head in her arms. Raka let go of her and shrugged his shoulders; then he got up, stretched, put the pole across his shoulder and walked on. Lambon raised her head, and when she saw that Raka had gone on she, too, took up her basket and followed him down the steep river bank. On the way she picked a little purple flower and put it in her hair above her forehead. The load on her head did not sway. Raka looked round at her and laughed.

“Let us have a bathe before we go home. We are hot and dusty,” he called to her. There was no one at the bathing pool yet, for the sun had not set, though the moon was visible. The water looked cool and the sand gleamed in the river bed. Raka did not wait for her answer. He had already undone his kain, and covering himself with one hand, as he had learnt to do as a child, waded into mid-stream. There was a small rock there, on which the women who had bathed that morning had laid offerings—now withered. Lambon put her basket down, girded up her sarong and followed his example; only she kept at a distance and went farther downstream, away from the rocks, to the spot where women always bathed. She heard him splashing and blowing higher up and saw him forging through the water, turning it to milky foam. When the water was up to her waist she took off her sarong and threw it on to the bank. Her legs were much lighter in color than her breast, which was always exposed to the sun. It was a never-ceasing tribulation to Lambon that the very parts of her that Raka saw were tanned and coarse. Kneeling on the sandy bottom she plunged her hair into the water to wash it. The water was cool and clear and the current was stronger there than elsewhere. Lambon’s spirits rose; she shouted for joy and smacked the water with her hands. Raka was just wading ashore; his body shone wet as he wound his kain about his waist, Lambon played about a little longer in the water, but Raka took up his pig and went on, as though he had forgotten all about her. As soon as he had turned away, she scrambled hurriedly out of the water, slipped on her sun-warmed sarong and began smoothing her hair. She looked about for some flower, and finding two more of the violet-colored ones, adorned herself with them. She felt cheerful and happy now and the wind blew refreshingly against her moist body. She looked down at herself and was rather better pleased with the sight. Then she picked up her basket and hurried after Raka. She caught him not far from a wairingin tree that shadowed a small rice temple. He stopped and waited as she came breathlessly up with him.

“Do you really mean you want to come into my house?” he asked, just as though they had never stopped talking together.

“Yes,” she said eagerly, supporting the basket on her head with her left hand. Raka looked her up and down, he looked at her hair, her face, her neck, her breast and her hips and the cheap new sarong of which she was so proud.

“But I want no second wife in my house,” he said jokingly, and yet with just a hint of earnest. Lambon stared at him in alarm. The next moment his arms were round her and his face pressed to hers. The wairingin tree rose high and dark above them. A bird sang and ceased again. Lambon’s knees failed her and the nipples of her breasts hurt. She pushed Raka away with all her strength. He picked up the pole and his pig, which he had let fall on to the grass.

“Be quiet,” he said to the little beast which had begun to squeal. “We are going straight home now.”

He had vanished from sight while Lambon was still collecting the fruit which had been scattered from her basket. It is his fruit, she thought, running after him. She caught him up only at the edge of the village. “Here is your basket,” she called out breathlessly. “Keep it,” he called back. But she ran on and caught hold of him by his kain. He turned round and stood close to her with a laughing tender look in his eyes.

“You will not be able to dance much longer, Lambon,” he said. I never noticed it until today, he thought. Lambon is too old now for the legong.

Lambon gazed at him without understanding at once what he was saying. It had never entered her head that her dancing was over when she arrived at puberty.

“Too old——?” she murmured. “But what shall I do when I cannot dance any longer?”

He felt sorry for her; not very, for she was charming and he knew that he could have her when he wished.

“It is time you looked out for a husband,” he said. “There are plenty of men in the village who would like to sleep with you.” He took her head in his hands for a moment, her warm hair in his warm hands. The three purple flowers were still in her hair, but crushed, when he turned and left her. Lambon stood looking after him until he reached the gate and disappeared.

His wife looked up from the loom as he came in, for he had been three weeks away from home; but he said nothing as he went past her to the sty with the little pig. “Has Raka come home?” his mother asked, for her eyes had grown dim. “Yes, he is here,” the pedanda, Ida Bagus Rai, called out to her, and went on chiselling a raksasa in stone which was to be set up as guardian at the cross-roads at the entrance to the village.

Teragia stood for a moment beside her weaving loom and then followed her husband to the pigsty.

Teragia was always the first to rise in the priest’s house-hold. She left Raka still fast asleep and went out softly. The morning was dewy and loud with the songs of birds. She returned to the house again to get a clean kain and she put another ready for Raka when he woke. She paused a moment to look at his sleeping face. Raka the beautiful. His hair fell over his cheeks and he breathed deeply and evenly. Raka, Teragia thought, my husband, my handsome brother. She never got over her amazement that the gods had given her Raka. Beside his beauty she felt herself ugly, and stiff and dead beside his life. She spread out her hands over his breast, but did not venture to touch him.

When she went out into the courtyard again to get water from the large earthenware vessel and wash her face and hands, she heard her father-in-law, the great pedanda, Ida Bagus Rai, coughing in the big house; and so she went quickly to the kitchen quarters and roused the two servants. Soon after the fire in the hearth was fanned to a flame and the smoke curled out through the thatched roof.

Teragia bowed low as the pedanda descended the steps. She knew that he meditated in the mornings and disliked speaking before he had prayed. Also he might not eat, drink or chew sirih until he had blessed the holy water for the day. She stood humbly to one side as he passed without seeing her. Ida Bagus Rai was a tall man whose hair was turning gray and the bridge of his nose was as thin as the blade of a knife. He walked on to the balé, where he prayed and sat down on his cushion with legs crossed and folded hands to meditate. The day before Teragia had woven small platters of palm-leaves of the kind prescribed for the daily offerings. She fetched cooked rice from the kitchen and sirih from the basket, and she went into the garden to pick flowers for the offerings and arranged them in the correct manner in the platters. Then she stepped over the bamboo grating which separated the precincts of the house temple from the rest of the courtyard, to keep the pigs out.

There were many beautiful shrines. The pedanda himself had chiselled the stone figures of gods and demons on which the altars rested. Teragia folded her hands over her forehead, knelt down and then laid the offerings on each shrine. The fowls came and pecked up any grains of rice that were left over. The sun was now up and a blue moist haze rose from the palms and mingled with the acrid smoke from the kitchen hearth. Teragia’s next task was to put the loom ready for Raka’s mother. The old lady could still weave quite well by the mere touch of her skilled hands without the use of her eyes. But Teragia had to put the strands of yarn ready for her with the colors in the right order. When this was done it was time to go to the spring to fetch water for the pedanda to consecrate.

Teragia would not leave this task to a servant; it was her own treasured and sacred duty. Also the women of the village believed that the water which Teragia herself fetched had a double virtue. Therefore she raised the heavy pitcher to her head, after placing over its mouth a basket with a few little offerings, and left the yard.

She soon joined the procession of women who were on their way to the spring to bathe. They were mostly pious elderly women who were not content to bathe in the river but took the longer steeper path up the river gorge where a very ancient and incredibly large wairingin tree gripped with its roots the mossy rocks whence the spring issued. Every day when Teragia, alone and unaccompanied by a servant, mingled with them as though she were one of themselves, it was a feast of joy to them. They touched her dress and her hands to show their pleasure and crooned old-fashioned blessings on her in long-drawn chants—happiness for the day, joy on her path, stillness of mind and a son, or many, in due time. Some of them who were grandmothers brought their grandchildren with them to let Teragia see the cuts they had got from bamboo splinters or from coral on the beach.

Teragia loved these early morning hours when everything glistened as though created afresh overnight. She took off her two kains and stood beneath the spring which spouted from the mouth of an old, mossy stone serpent. She looked like a boy among the other women, for she was taller than they and her breasts scarcely showed. After washing her hair and smoothing it down she wound her kains about her again. Then she joked with the old women and took the children between her knees and rubbed an ointment of yellow kunjit on their sore places. She did not fill her pitcher until peace fell again on the spring. But first she laid her offerings on the little wooden altars which stood in the gorge above it. Her knees shook as she hoisted the full pitcher on to her head, but she was strong and carried her load with back erect.

When she reached the river again she did not take the usual path by the ford but went about a hundred paces upstream, where a small basin had been hollowed out among some rocks. Lower down, the river was already approaching the sea and sluggish, but here it rushed turbulently in small rapids. As Teragia crossed it, she caught sight of the pedanda at the edge of the river a little higher up. He was cleaning his teeth, washing his long hair and bathing. He was accompanied only by two pupils. Teragia too called herself a pupil of her father-in-law’s, for though she was not initiated into the secrets of the sacred Mantras and Mudras, he taught her to read the old books and imparted the knowledge by which one could tell which days were auspicious and which of all the thousand different offerings to offer up.

When Teragia got home again Raka was still asleep, but his mother was already seated at her loom. “Greeting, daughter, peace on your coming,” she chanted. Teragia stroked the old lady’s hands and put a flower in her smooth hair. “Peace on your work,” she replied, smiling.

The two servant-girls were laughing happily as they swept the courtyard and fed the pigs. Teragia carefully poured out some of the spring water into a silver vessel, which she then replaced on the tripod in the prayer balé She fetched spills of sandalwood to burn and lit the sacred fire in a small brazier. She poured more water into a jar, ready for the priest’s washings. She brought flowers from many bushes and trees, red for Brahma, blue for Vishnu, white for Shiva. She tied a flower to the silver staff which was used for sprinkling the consecrated water and put the long-handled bell ready in its silken holder. She put on one side the basket containing the high crown which the pedanda wore at high festivals and arranged his cushion. When all was done she surveyed her work with satisfaction. While standing thus she felt what seemed to be a light touch on her neck. She turned quickly round with her hand on the place where she felt the touch. No one had touched her. But Raka was on the portico of the house and it must have been his look she felt as he looked at her from behind.

“Here is an empty stomach shouting for cooked rice,” he called to her. He patted the fine network of muscles over his diaphragm. Teragia laughed. “I was coming, hungry man,” she called back, and then, after quickly and rather hurriedly putting sirih beside the cushion, she ran to the kitchen.

She came back to Raka with a heaped-up leaf and found him sitting comfortably on his heels. The sweet clove scent of his cigarette pervaded the courtyard. Raka is at home again, Teragia thought happily. The rice was steaming hot and Teragia held the leaf while he ate. It pleased her to wait on him, though her palms hurt with the heat. She went for a second supply when she saw that he had still not had enough; also, as a surprise she brought him strong coffee in the only glass the household boasted of. Then she stood watching while her husband ate and drank and smoked again. “Come, eat too,” he said affectionately, and gave her what was left.

She sat turned away in a corner, for it was not the right thing to eat in a husband’s presence, and ate gladly.

Now the pedanda entered the courtyard and walked to the house with unseeing eyes and mind absorbed. Teragia left her husband, although she would gladly have stayed on enjoying these happy moments with him for ever. She went instead to give the priest his comb and the oil to comb out his hair. When it was smoothed to a close helmet round his refined and slender skull, he tied it in a tight knot at the back of his head, as a sign of his rank.

Teragia walked behind him as he went to his balé. He turned to the west, rinsed his mouth three times, poured water over his feet and again smoothed his hair. Then he took up the kain of white linen, which is the vestment of a pedanda, and put it on instead of his ordinary dress. Cleansed thus for his sacred duties he turned his face to the east, towards his domestic altar, in order to speak with the gods. The fowls assembled expectantly beneath the balé, waiting for the grains of rice which fell to the ground in the course of the ceremony. A particularly impudent, youthful and ill-bred fowl made a great clatter which almost drowned the priest’s murmured words.

When Teragia looked about for Raka she discovered him leaning against a tree watching his father with a mixture of awe and amusement. He was now wearing a cloth wound rakishly about his head and the sunlight flashed from his teeth. Raka, Teragia thought again, that is Raka, my husband, whose child I bear within me. He knows nothing of the darkness upon which floats the world. Raka grimaced as the little monkeys in the garden always did, and vanished with a wave of the hand behind the kitchen. Teragia collected herself and followed the prayers with an earnest face.

Holding a champak flower between the forefinger of his clasped hands, with his priest’s ring on his thumb, Ida Bagus Rai spoke to the gods. He called on each one singly and for each one he cast a petal into the holy water and threw flowers to each of the four points of the compass. He took up the bell and rang it to call the attention of the gods and he moved his fingers, with all the grace of a dancer, in the ancient manner prescribed in the Mudras. From time to time he ceased from his murmured prayers and sank into a mute and concentrated supplication, with clasped hands raised to his forehead. Then he sprinkled himself and the flowers with water and put a tiny fan of flowers in his hair, as ordained for the priest. The fowls stood by and looked on. Teragia waited below the balé to be of service to him, but Ida Bagus Rai saw no one. The prayers went on and on, for the gods were many and each had to be summoned and addressed by his name as Lord and King and Prince and Raja. Teragia kept a look-out for Raka out of the corner of her eyes. He was sitting now on the balé where the implements were stored and busily employed. The servants’ children stood leaning against him, and two sons of their neighbor as well, and he was making kites for all of them. I will give you a fine son, and his kites will fly the highest, Teragia thought happily. She left the prayer balé and joined the group. Raka did not even see her. He and the children were now pulling hideous and comical faces at each other and their laughter rang through the courtyard. Teragia went closer to them; she was aware of the weight in her womb and felt that her hands were empty. She put them on the shoulders of one of the children and the boy looked round at her and his laughter died away.

“There is a good wind for kite-flying today,” Raka said. “We will go on to the stubble fields later on and fly them.” Beasts of various shapes and colors lay scattered about his feet, great long-tailed fishes, birds and legendary creatures, for Raka was a welcome visitor in many villages and could construct kites of strange shapes, not only the square ones of Taman Sari.

“Yes, that will be grand,” Teragia said.

“Will you come with us?” Raka asked. She looked at him in surprise. “Perhaps——” she faltered. It scarcely seemed possible for her to go out kite-flying with a herd of children. It was all right for Raka. She stood there beside him a moment longer and then went back to the pedanda. No sooner had she turned her back than the laughter burst out again.

Ida Bagus Rai, as soon as his last prayer was ended, flung himself on the sirih he had resisted for so long. He smiled at Teragia, but it took a little time before the solemn expression left his eyes. The first supplicants for his counsel were already collecting in front of the house. Teragia saw Pak’s father and rich Wajan among them. “Where has Raka gone?” she asked his mother. “To the palms,” the old lady replied. Teragia followed her husband there, for she wanted to be with him as long as he was at home.

She could not find him at first. It was only when the cry of a betitja bird came from the top of a tree that she discovered him. He was up there, gripping the trunk with his feet as though he were part of the tree, imitating the bird’s note. A young and unpractised betitja, who had not yet learnt to sing properly, answered with a false note or two. “Come up, Teragia,” Raka called down jokingly. She clasped the trunk in her arms—it was always something—and waited. Raka took his knife from his girdle and cut the large palm-leaves which were used in the household. They fell down with a loud rustling noise. When he had got enough he came down. Teragia let go of the tree and bent to pick up the heavy leaves and put them over her shoulders. Raka watched her for a moment, then took her load from her—it was no load for him. “Pity,” he said suddenly. “What is a pity, my brother?” she asked. “That you aren’t a man,” Raka said, smiling. “It would be fun to have you for a friend if you were a man.” Teragia smiled too. “But then I could bear you no sons,” she said with bent head. He was silent for a moment and then began to whistle like a betitja and went off with the leaves. It is true, Teragia thought, letting her hands fall to her sides, I have let two children escape too soon from my impatient womb. But this time she felt safe, for her father, who was a great doctor, had uttered powerful blessings over her.

The morning was taken up with work in house and garden. Everything was bright and radiant, for Raka was at home. She felt his presence everywhere, even when she did not actually see him. In the kitchen the servant girls squealed with delight over everything he said and did. Later she saw him sitting with his father and eagerly telling him something. Next he ran across the courtyard, taking his mother a fresh skein of yarn. Then he was up on the roof of the balé in which the offerings were got ready, mending the thatch, accompanied by two children, and a moment later the rope of the well near the house altars rattled and ran. He played with the wild pigeons, which he had taught to curtsy to him. Then she saw him busied with leaves of lontar palm as though he were going to write a book, as his father did. It was not that, however. When she bent over him to see, he was cutting beautiful fishes out of the leaves; then the children came back from the beach bringing a particular variety of mussel which they heaped up at his feet. Raka looked up at Teragia and stopped in his work. “I am making a chime for the temple,” he said almost defiantly. “It will be used for the New Year’s Festival.” “That is right,” she said. There were still three months until the festival of the Galangan Nadi. She left him to his task of tying the tinkling mussel shells to the leaves. Why do I always seem to be interrupting him? she wondered. She went away, but stopped in the next courtyard and looked at him over the bamboo fence; her eyes could never have enough of him. He did not know she was watching him, but he shook his head as though an ant had been annoying him. Teragia walked quickly away. She felt uneasy and, asking the old mother’s leave, took a basket and went into the village. She paid her father, the doctor, a visit, went to the market to make purchases and looked in at several houses where there were old or sick people to attend to. The whole time she felt restless and knew that it was only strength of will that kept her away from Raka. His hand rested on my heart at night, she thought, but she did not believe it all the same.

On the way home she heard from a distance shouts and jubilations coming over the walls. There was a miscellaneous crowd at the gate looking through, and they, too, held their sides for laughing, and more and more people came up to see what was going on. Teragia pushed her way through and entered the yard. There she found a circle of people who might have been watching a play. In the centre was Raka walking to and fro, giving a performance. He had folded up his head-dress into a little cushion, as women do to carry loads on their heads, and on the top he was balancing a flat basket of the kind used for offerings, piled up with indiscriminate articles as offerings and covered with a red cover. His loin-cloth was bound round his chest, and he was obviously imitating a woman who was very proud of her beautiful offerings and walked with mincing steps to the temple. His face beamed with delight over his performance. From top to toe he was a woman: his hips rolled, his hands fluttered with refined affectation, his half-closed eyes expressed unashamed depths of feminine self-consciousness.

Teragia put her basket down and stopped in the gateway. She observed Raka’s father among the spectators, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes. His mother was there too; she could not see but was being told all that went on by a neighbor. “Now he is twisting his neck,” she announced, almost weeping with laughter; “now he’s afraid the offerings will fall down as he goes up the steps; now he’s wobbling his hips just like old Dadong, who thinks she’s so beautiful; now he’s stumbled, but he only puts on a sweeter expression.” Raka was utterly absorbed in his impersonation and the more people laughed the more new turns occurred to him. Just as he was about to take the basket from his head and give it to his father, who often took the offerings from the women at high festivals, and just as the pedanda was entering good-naturedly and heartily into the joke, Raka suddenly saw his wife.

Teragia stood on the top of the steps leading up from the road watching him. Her mouth was open with amazement. She thought she was smiling, but not a smile crossed her face. Raka went on for a moment and then stopped abruptly. He pulled the loin-cloth from his chest, gave the make-believe pile of offerings a kick that sent them flying, and became a man again. The laughter ceased. The pedanda, as though he had forgotten something, took up his chisel with an almost embarrassed air and turned again to the figure he was at work upon. The gathering dispersed and in a moment the courtyard was empty. Only from the kitchen at the back there were still sounds of tittering.

Raka stood in the middle of the yard putting on his headdress, and it seemed he was waiting for Teragia to speak to him. “How long have you been here?” he asked at last, just as though she was a visitor. And like a visitor she replied, “I have only just come.”

“Why did you not laugh?” he asked. Teragia said quietly, “I did laugh. I laughed a lot, it was very funny.” Raka looked at her with annoyance. Suddenly she caught sight of a flower under his turban above his forehead and she went quickly up to him. “Oh, Raka,” she said softly, “what have you got there?”

It was a large-flowered orchid, seven blooms on one spray, fluttering like butterflies over his forehead.

“Isn’t it a beauty?” he asked. “I found it in the garden. Would you like it? If you’ll only laugh I’ll give it you perhaps.”

“Oh, Raka,” Teragia repeated, “you ought not to have taken it——”

He pouted like a scolded child. “Aren’t you pleased when I adorn myself?” he asked, but then taking the spray from his head he held it out to her. Teragia did not take it.

“We went right to the forests of Besaki, three days’ journey, for them,” Teragia said slowly. “He wants these orchids for the first day of the Galangan. We waited until they would be in flower. They belong to Shiva. You ought not to have taken them. There are plenty of other flowers to decorate yourself with——”

Raka’s head hung down sorrowfully, but the next moment he looked up defiantly.

“You are a pedanda yourself——” he said. “Much too holy for me.”

He looked down in her face, hoping to see some response there to his joke But Teragia looked grave and upset and only repeated, “Oh, Raka——”

He still held the white orchid in his hand and at last he forced her to take it.

“How is it you cannot even laugh?” he asked abruptly.

Teragia stared at him. “Can I not laugh?” she said incredulously. He shook his head. “Forgive me,” she said slowly. When he looked at her he saw that her eyes were shining, but she was not crying.

“Has your father never told you what happened to me?” she asked.

“Did someone hurt you?” he asked impulsively.

“Oh no,” Teragia said. “Oh no, no one has hurt me, my brother——”

He drew her down beside him on the steps and held her hand in his. Warmth flowed in and over her. She let her eyes fall to the white orchid in her hand and began to speak hesitatingly.

“We lived far from here then, at Abeanbase in Gianjar,” she said. “And that is why you have never heard about it. I was a child, eight years old perhaps. My grandmother fell sick and then my mother, and in a short time they both died. Then I fell sick, and for all his prayers my father could not cure me. He could cure all the people in the village, but not me. My skin broke out into hideous sores which ate my flesh away to the bone——”

She felt Raka’s hand draw back involuntarily, and this hurt her, but she had to go on. “My father put himself into a trance, but no god appeared to him to give him advice and he remained hollow and vacant. The months went on and I only got worse, until there was not a healthy spot left on my body; my blood burned with the poison and my strength was wasted away; at last my heart grew weak and scarcely beat any more. Again my father put himself into a trance and this time Durga, the goddess of death, entered into him and told him he ought to take me to the Temple of the Dead and leave me there to die, alone and in her protection only.

“My father did so. Before sundown he carried me in his own arms to the Temple of the Dead, and he has often told me that I weighed no more than a fowl that he might have been taking as a sacrifice. He took offerings with him too, and the few women of my family who were still alive mad offerings. My father sat with me holding my hand—as you are holding it now, my brother—and waited till the sun had gone down. He called once more to the goddess to take me to herself, and he listened for my heart and it beat no longer. Then he said farewell to me and went away.

“They had laid me in the balé where the offerings were prepared and had spread a white kain over me. I was so weak that I saw my father only in a mist when he left me, and then I knew no more. In the middle of the night I woke up and the court of the temple was a blaze of light. I saw all the altars in a light brighter than sunlight, and the temple was full of forms. But no, I did not see them, but I felt their presence, and I knew that I was surrounded by many invisible beings. I had no fear, only joy, and then I lost consciousness again and fell asleep and knew no more.”

Teragia stopped for a moment and looked at the orchids in her lap. She noticed that Raka breathed uneasily.

“When I woke up,” she went on, “it was bright daylight. The birds sang and my heart was very light. A gray goat with two kids was scrambling about in the court of the temple, eating the flowers from the offering plates, and I looked at the kids and laughed, for they pleased me. Then I looked at my hands—and they were clean. All the sores had healed. They had healed so completely that I had forgotten the pain; and never since that day have I been able to remember what the pains and the sickness were like. When the sun rose above the trees my father came to bury me. And he found me healed and without a sore on my whole body, and I was playing with the two little kids.”

“And then?” Raka asked when Teragia was silent for a time. She looked at him in surprise.

“What more shall I tell you, brother?” she asked softly. “Since then it has been granted to me to heal sick children, and sometimes the gods speak through my mouth. You say that I cannot laugh. But I know I am very happy. There is not a happier woman than I am, and you must forgive me if I am sometimes burdensome to you. Perhaps I am fashioned of stone and not of bamboos that float on the water . . .”

When Raka bent over his wife to look into her face he found that she was smiling after all. And it was, as she said, the smile to be seen sometimes on the stone statues in the temples, an enigmatic smile and quite without mirth.

She took the white orchid from her lap and put it back under Raka’s head-dress. “There,” she said, “you were quite right to pick it. It looks beautiful on your forehead and you shall wear it. There will be more of them in flower when your father needs them. Forgive me for troubling you . . .”

 

 

Pak was ploughing for the third time on the eastern sawahs, and now the soil was soft and kindly and replied with a light rustle when he went over it with the lampit to break it down. The labor had been heavy, and if his legs were weary they ached no longer. The sawah lay ready to receive the seedlings.

Pak had set aside the best of his sheaves, part for the temple dues and part for seed. Now at last the time had come when he could gather up in bundles the little green seedlings, which he had grown from seed in a corner of the sawah, and his brother Meru helped him with the planting.

While he planted Pak thought of Sarna and talked to her in his head all the time. My little pigeon, he said, my white roe, my young mangis fruit. He never knew before that such words existed, but they came into his mouth of themselves. When he met Sarna in secret and held her in his arms he said things like that to her. My little pigeon, my white roe, my young mangis fruit. Sarna did not laugh at him, although she loved to laugh and teased him a great deal.

She did not seem to dislike his strong brown body, for she met him as often as she could; but though she gladly gave him her bloom and fragrance she would hear nothing of marriage. “What should I do in your home?” she asked mockingly. “You have not even room for a second wife. Should I have to cook for Puglug and do her work, while she was at the market enjoying herself?” Or else she said, “How can you think of marrying me? Why, you have not even had your teeth filed.” And Pak was ashamed. Or else she said, “Where would you get the money from to buy me plenty of new sarongs? I’m vain, you know, and I like always to be beautifully dressed. Someone has promised me five foreign gold pieces to make five gold rings with.”

“And I can buy you ten gold pieces,” Pak bragged. “But perhaps you expect the raja to send for you and make you his wife.”

“And why not?” Sarna asked coquettishly, and Pak felt he was seething in boiling oil like the sinful souls in hell. He was not a very prudent lover and the whole village knew his secret. Puglug, in spite of her volubility, held her tongue and this weighed on him. He would have preferred hearing her rail at him when he had spent the night away from home, or decked himself out with new head-dress or loin-cloth. He always now wore hibiscus flowers behind his ear and the little bush beside the house altar was stripped bare.

“Brother, who eats our hibiscus flowers overnight?” Meru asked him, for Meru, too, wanted a flower behind his ear when he went to Badung to carve the temple door for the prince. “We have no more flowers left for the offerings,” Puglug said curtly. “It has come to this—that I have to pay money for them at the market or barter sirih for them.”

“Yes, it is a scandal that we haven’t flowers enough of our own for the offerings,” their aunt agreed, being for once of the same opinion as Puglug. “Look at him strutting about like a cock that has won twenty fights.”

The heavy field labors were done and Pak had nothing to do but wait while the western fields lay fallow and the young plants grew tall in the eastern ones. He only went out now and again to weed and look to the edges of the fields and see that the water was deep enough. At this stage no woman might set foot in the sawah, not even Sarna, who sometimes came along as though by accident. The sawah was now imbued with good, rich strong male force, which begot increase, and no woman might intrude.

“I will build you a house such as not even the wives of the raja have,” Pak said to Sarna one night under the shadow of the wairingin tree.

She let her fingers stray lightly and caressingly over his face. “How many ringits have you got buried under your house to make you talk like that?” she asked, laughing. Her laughter came from her throat like the coo of wild pigeons. It made Pak’s blood pulse in his veins whenever he heard this laugh. He bit her throat as young horses did when they had done with play and wanted to come together.

“If I had many ringits buried, would you like me better?” he asked breathlessly. But it was impossible to get Sarna to answer a serious question.

“You can’t be dearer to me than you are,” she said, and clasped her hands behind his neck in a warm, untiable knot.

Pak went and dug up the plates from his field and took them home and buried them in secret under his house where his ringits were. Puglug was at market and had no suspicions. But it did not escape the old man, who knew everything. “Son,” he said, “I have asked my friend the pedanda and he has given me some holy water to mix with your food. I have been to the balian, too, and given him eleven kepengs and a large offering and he will break the spell. But you keep grubbing about in the earth like a dung-beetle burying his ball of dung, and you are driven round in circles day and night. You know that your mother must be burnt soon so that her soul may be freed. What are you looking for in the earth under the house? Are you digging up your savings and taking them to the woman who has bewitched you instead of thinking of your mother’s soul?”

At this Pak could keep his secret no longer, but dug the plates up again and showed them to his father by the light of the oil lamp. The old man held them up close to his dim eyes and stroked the smooth porcelain and looked at the roses and pondered over them for a long time. “Where did these come from?” he asked at last.

“They came from the earth in our eastern sawah when I was ploughing deeply,” Pak said. It was not actually a lie and his conscience was clear.

“Plates such as these came to us long ago from the countries beyond Java, from China and countries whose names are not known,” the old man said, and Pak marvelled, as so often before, at the extent of his father’s knowledge.

“Are they worth a lot of money?” he asked deferentially.

And his father said, “More than you can count. Someone must have buried them in the raja’s sawah long ago.”

One day Pak wrapped the plates in a freshly washed kain and tied them to a bamboo and set off for Sanur.

“Where are you going?” he was asked by everyone he met. “To Sanur,” he said without stopping.

“What are you going to do at Sanur?” they asked.

“I have something to sell the Chinese, Njo Tok Suey,” he replied with an important air as he walked on. The whole village was left buzzing with curiosity and that was just what he wanted.

When he arrived at the Chinaman’s house he had to pluck up his courage, but at last he went in; he did not crouch on his heels on the ground but stood upright, for Njo Tok Suey was a Chinaman without caste.

“If you have pigs to sell you had better go to Kula with them,” the Chinese said. “The boats that put in here want no more pigs. But if you have any copra, we could talk about that.”

“I don’t want to sell either pigs or copra but something far better, something you have never before set eyes on,” Pak said, puffed up with pride. “Show me,” the Chinese said. Pak undid the clean kain with ceremony, wiped each plate before taking it out and then displayed the three plates.

Njo Tok Suey at first said nothing at all. Then he went into the house for his spectacles. Pak quailed slightly, but not too much, when the Chinaman emerged wearing the spectacles. A man who had less hair on his head than a pig on its back could not make much impression on him.

“Where did these plates come from?” the Chinese asked.

Pak was ready with his story of having turned them up in his field when he was ploughing deeply. He told him also what his father had said. “They came from China long ago and must have been buried as a great treasure in the raja’s fields. Perhaps they were an offering against bad harvests and mice,” he added on his own account, for this had just occurred to him and struck him as being a remarkably acute observation. Njo Tok Suey shook his head as he turned the plates over in his hands. “They are not old and they do not come from China either,” he said. Suddenly something appeared to have come into his head, and he went quickly into the house and came back with a voluminous document. Pak looked over his shoulder, but he could make nothing of it.

“It occurred to me that somebody had stolen from the ship and buried them in your sawah,” Njo Tok Suey said finally. “But they are not on the list.” This sounded Chinese to Pak’s ears, but nevertheless he gave a slight start. He had contrived to forget how the plates came into his hands, and now he shuddered when he remembered the night he had kept watch and encountered the husky man. “Why do you come to me with these plates?” Njo Tok Suey asked.

“I want to sell them and you are the only man with enough money; also you know better than other people the worth of such treasure,” Pak said confidentially. Njo Tok Suey again looked the plates over. “You have not any copper to sell?” he asked abruptly.

“What is copper?” Pak asked with an innocent expression.

“I can easily tell you that,” the Chinese replied. “Copper is what you people stole from the ship which was wrecked here. Kepengs are made of it.”

“I stole nothing,” Pak replied in an injured tone. “I was one of the watch.” Whereupon Njo Tok Suey looked at him for some time in silence.

Pak had heard talk in the village of this and that having been taken from the wreck, but nobody bothered about it any longer. He had even been to the beach himself with his younger brother, Lantjar, who deserved a little fun now and again, and was of use besides helping to carry home nails and wood and whatever else they might find.

“I want to take a second wife and I must build her a house, for she comes of wealthy parents and is beautiful enough to ask that and more,” Pak said, deciding to put all his cards on the table. “That is why I want to part with my treasure and sell the plates which the Goddess herself sent me. It costs money to marry a second wife, as you know, sir.”

Njo Tok Suey removed his spectacles as though the plates were not worth further inspection. “I have no use for the plates,” he said. “You would do better to bring me copra. But to oblige you I will give you ten kepengs for each of them.”

Pak laughed bitterly. He knew that dealing with a Chinese was worse than having leeches behind your knees. But this was going too far. “Ten ringits each,” he shouted. “And even then it is making you a present of them.”

They bargained on and on, but the Chinese was hard-headed and it came to nothing. Twelve kepengs each was the utmost he would bid, and this was no more than Pak sometimes spent in one day on sirih alone. He wrapped up his plates again and returned to Taman Sari. He was not downhearted, far from it. He burled the plates again, this time near the wall, so that Puglug might not find them, and carefully trod down the soil.

Next day the whole village knew that Pak had turned up some plates in his sawah, and a number of inquisitive people turned up on one pretext or another and stood about in his yard, keeping their eyes open for a sight of the plates. This was just what Pak wanted. It might be all to the good if the wealthy Wajan heard that Pak, who was poor, had something that no one else in the village had so much as set eyes on.

From now onwards Puglug talked of nothing else, and she turned up every yard of earth in the courtyard in the hope of finding the plates, and seeing them with her own eyes and touching them with her own fingers. His aunt and uncle brought him tid-bits to wheedle his secret out of him. And Pak was aware from all sides how greatly he had grown in importance. Sarna alone asked no questions. She merely gave him a sidelong look now and then, while her tongue roamed over her upper lip—a sign that she was thinking something over. Pak himself had to introduce the topic.

“There are some people in the village who seem to think I have turned up treasure in my sawah,” he said. He was having rather a restless time of it, for as soon as Puglug left the house, he dug up the plates and buried them again somewhere else so that she should not find them. Also, now that the Chinaman had refused to deal, he did not know what to do but bury them in one place after another and content himself with the riches of secrecy and the importance it gave him.

“The people in the village seem to think you offered yourself for the low job of scaring squirrels and gathering coconuts, like any other poor man,” Sarna said, and her words were like a douche of cold water.

“There are some things women do not understand,” he replied with dignity. Sarna pinched his ears and laughed, but before he left her she asked when they would meet again, and the lover’s fever in his blood burnt more fiercely than ever.

It was true that he was working hard at gathering coconuts; he wanted more than his own twelve trees yielded. By rights he ought now to be taking it easy after the heavy labors of ploughing and planting. Instead of that he had to climb up and down the palm trees, skinning his calves on the trunks, and then load himself up with coconuts. When he got home he set his brother Lantjar and his sister Lambon to work to cut up the nuts and dry them in the yard, so that he should have copra to sell the Chinaman.

“It’s a shame,” Puglug broke out. “Soon we shall not have a drop of coconut milk to feed Klepon on when she teethes and we shall have to buy coconuts for the temple dues and we shall forget what grated coconut tastes like.”

“Which only shows that there is more sense in many a coconut than in the heads of some people I know of,” her aunt said, bristling for battle. Pak said nothing at all. He took his four cocks to the place where most of the men forgathered at that time of day. He wanted to hear no more for a good while about women, coconuts and buried crockery. Even his little sister, Lambon, was not the same ever since she had grown too old to dance the legong. She sat sullenly in front of a pile of coconuts, which were destined to become copra, and forgot even to lift her knife for half an hour together.

And so it came to that Friday when all Pak’s perplexities were submerged for an hour or two in the excitement of an event which went beyond anything he had ever experienced.

It started with the beating of the kulkul to summon all the men of the village to the house of the punggawa of Sanur. They lost no time; from Taman Sari and from the neighboring four villages along the coast they hastened over the rice-fields strung out in single file. It was the same as on the day when the Chinese ship struck. “What can it mean?” Pak asked the wise Krkek. “I had the news yesterday,” he replied carelessly. “A great punggawa of the white men has come in a ship from Buleleng to ask questions of us.”

“Ask questions of us? What does he want to ask?” Pak cried out, and his knees gave way beneath him with fright.

“We shall know soon,” was all Krkek said.

The punggawa’s courtyard was like the entrance to a hollow tree inhabited by, bees. It was one surging jostling crowd and women vendors had already spread their mats on its fringes, for there was the promise of doing a brisk trade. Pak squeezed his way into the yard behind Krkek, and as most of the crowd was now squatting down he made room for himself between two half-grown lads. And now he saw the white man.

The sight was not nearly so bad as he had imagined it would be. In the first place, the white man was no taller than Pak himself, and he sweated like any ordinary man. All the same, there was something frightening about his face, for it was not white, as you might have expected, but pink, as light-colored buffaloes were beneath their bristles. The white man was enclosed in unbecoming and solidly constructed clothing, though this certainly was white, and he sat on a kind of seat Pak had never seen before.

“What is that he is sitting on?” he whispered in Krkek’s ear.

“A chair. All white men have them,” Krkek said. Pak clicked his tongue in amazement.

“Is he lame?” he asked next, when he had considered this strange apparatus from new points of view. “Or why do his legs hang down like that?”

“Be quiet,” Krkek said testily. “White men cannot sit in any other way. It is the sign of their caste.” This satisfied Pak for the time. He could tell that the white man was of high caste by the fact that his chair was higher than the punggawa’s mat. Also the punggawa’s servant held the indispensable umbrella over the white man and not over the ruler of the coast villages.

“Silence,” the men in the courtyard called out, and stirred expectantly to and fro. “He is going to speak to us.”

All opened their mouths in order to hear better and a murmur of wonder ran through the crowd when the Controller addressed them in their own tongue. “He speaks like anyone else,” Pak said, quite taken aback. Rib, the wag, was sitting near him. “Did you expect him to grunt like a pig?” he asked audibly, and there was laughter from behind. The punggawa stood and looked over the heads of the crowd. “Silence,” he said severely. “Listen to what the tuan Controller has to say to you and answer when you are asked.”

“People of Sanur, Taman Sari, Intaran, Renon and Dlodpekan,” the Controller said, “you all remember that on the second day of the third week of the second month a ship, the Sri Kumala, was wrecked on your coast?”

“That is so,” the people murmured readily.

‘’Now I want those of you whom the punggawa appointed as a watch to step forward.”

For a time the courtyard looked like a rice sieve when women shake it and the grains roll this way and that. But at last twelve men pushed their way to the front row with their hands clasped. Pak was one of them and Sarda, the fisherman, and his waggish friend, Rib, and several other of Pak’s neighbors. “It is true then that a watch was set,” the Controller said to the punggawa. Krkek made himself the spokesman for the rest.

“It is,” he said in a voice that trembled slightly. “There was a watch set for several days, two and two, good honest men.”

The Controller pondered this, wrinkling his forehead meanwhile. “Punggawa,” he said.

“Tuan Controller,” said the punggawa, and clasped his hands as though he were a man of no caste in comparison with the white man.

“The punggawa told me yesterday that he set no watch because he did not wish to accept any responsibility, and that the watchmen of the Chinese were overpowered and the ship plundered. This morning, when questioned by the raja himself, the punggawa took all this back. I am now convinced that a watch was set. But what am I to make of these two different stories, and what am I to say to the tuan Resident?”

“There was a watch set, tuan Controller,” the punggawa said, and his voice sounded small and hollow. “But as our watchmen were tired and sleepy men who did not keep good watch over the boat, I thought it better to say that I had not provided a watch.”

“Which of you kept watch the first night?” the Controller next asked. “I want to speak to them.”

Krkek gave Pak a push in the back which landed him straight in front of the Controller. Clutching about him in alarm he encountered Sarda the fisherman’s arm and gripped tight hold of it. The Controller seemed to smile and Pak felt relieved. He ventured shyly to return the smile.

“Now, my friends,” the Controller said—and by this time Pak had grown used to the sight of him—“you kept watch the first night. Tell me what you saw. I know all about it, so it is no use lying.”

“It was cold and later it rained,” Krkek said on behalf of both of them, as neither of them opened his mouth. “It was hard to keep a fire going.”

“I have been told that a number of men came in the middle of the night and plundered the boat. Perhaps there were so many of them that you were afraid and ran away. There is no need to be ashamed of that, for you are simple folk and no warriors.”

“That is so,” they all murmured complacently, for this seemed to them a good way of putting it. Sarda then opened his mouth. “I did not see any men,” he said, and shut it again.

“And you?” the Controller asked, looking at Pak. This was unpleasant, for his light eyes were like a blind man’s, and yet they looked keenly in Pak’s face. He felt hot under his head-dress and his hair stood on end. He wrinkled his forehead and thought hard, for he had a poor memory.

“I don’t know whether I saw any men or not,” he said at last. “How do you mean, you don’t know? Are your eyes bad?” the Controller asked patiently.

“Very bad. They would not keep open, sir, although I strictly commanded them to. But for as long as they were open I saw no men,” Pak said.

Now an event happened—the white man began to laugh. He opened his mouth and laughed aloud. At first they all stared at him, and then the laughter caught on over the whole courtyard. They all pointed and cried out, “Look, just look at him—he is laughing!”

Above all the noise Rib’s voice could be heard saying, “Pak had a quiet night for once. He had not got to sleep with his wife!”

The punggawa extended his hand and the laughter slowly ceased. The white man got to his feet and his face was now very serious.

“You people, men of the coast of Badung,” he said, “when this boat was wrecked it was driven by the storm, but it was a good ship, laden with money and goods. Is that so?”

There was a murmur of assent.

“When you go down to the shore now, what do you see? A few boards—not even good enough for mussels to take possession of. I want to know what has become of the ship. What has become of the goods and the ringits it carried? Who destroyed it and took away its masts and planks?”

The men stirred uneasily on their bare heels at this direct interrogation. Many of them chewed feverishly and not one made any reply. Someone from behind near the wall growled out that the sea and Baruna, the sea-god, had taken what it pleased them to take, but the murmur soon died away.

“You men are responsible for this ship,” the Controller said in a loud voice. “I stand here in the name of my master, the lord Resident of Bali and Lombok, who is a just man and loves you as his own children. If you restore what you have stolen, you shall be pardoned. If not, ships will come with cannon and rifles and you will rue the day you plundered that boat.”

The Controller sat down again and wiped the sweat from his face with a white cloth. Profound silence ensued and the men’s faces went mute and blind. They clenched their teeth and said not a word. They had been insulted and there was nothing they could say. The silence went on and on and lay like a weight on the courtyard. Suddenly, when it had become almost intolerable, a man stepped forward. Every eye was fixed on him. It was Bengek, the husky man, the son of the witch.

“May I speak?” he asked the punggawa, and the punggawa nodded.

“I am a fisherman, sir,” Bengek said in his whispered tones that all the same could be heard in the farthest corner of the yard. “I have to go to sea when it is dark and the men in the village are asleep. I went out earlier than the other fishermen on the night of the shipwreck—and I saw some men. Other nights, too, I saw them, when there was no moon. They waded out and boarded the wreck. They were men from Gianjar.”

“How do you know that?” the Controller asked quickly.

“I know their boats. They are built rather differently from ours in Badung,” he replied huskily. After pausing a moment longer he retreated again into the crowd. The men showed their relief by whispering together. What Bengek had said was good and to the point. The only pity was that they had not had a better spokesman.

The Controller spoke in a low voice to the punggawa—this time in Malay. Krkek pricked his ears.

“You can go to your homes, I need you no more,” the Controller said to the people.

They drifted slowly out of the courtyard; they went unwillingly, for at that moment the Chinese, Njo Tok Suey, made his appearance and with him the other one, the one to whom the ship belonged, and whom Raka had carried from the wreck on his own shoulders. There was a third Chinese with them, and the white man looked at the three with an unfriendly eye.

The men hung about the road in knots discussing the situation. “Are we to be called thieves, and threatened?” many of them asked, shaking their fists. Krkek, always level-headed, went from group to group, calming them down. “The white man was displeased with the punggawa,” he told them. “I heard what they said in Malay. He said it was true that copper from the ship had been found in Gianjar. He called the punggawa dishonest and double-tongued.

And he does not love the Chinamen.”

Some of them collected round the husky man, who as a rule was avoided, and asked him about the men he had seen. Pak had his own reasons for preferring to keep out of his way; also he was as limp and weary as after hard labor in the fields, and wanted to get home as soon as he could to tell the news. He carefully avoided the road, for he saw Dasni there with her wares beckoning to him, and set off for home across the fields as fast as he could go.

But when he got back, bursting with excitement and the news he had to tell, he found they knew it already. Puglug, in her unpleasant way, had heard all about it at the market and as usual knew more than he did.

“... and the gamelan played as he entered the puri, for he is a great friend of the lord of Badung and he must have the truth,” she was saying, and Pak found that all his juicy bits about the white man were forestalled. “He only had to give the Chinaman, Tan Suey Hin, a look and he confessed at once that he had been paid two and a half ringits for accusing in a letter the people of Badung of taking copper from the ship. He was promised two hundred ringits for giving false witness, but the white man can see through your bones to the bottom of your heart, where the truth lies—”

“The truth is in the liver, not in the heart,” Pak said in ill-humor, for the sake of getting a word in.

“Then I advise you to keep your liver out of sight,” Puglug said with ready wit, and everyone laughed. Women, Pak thought sadly, have quick tongues like serpents. And he put on another head-dress and went to the river to bathe. On the way he bought fragrant oil from a woman vendor and smeared it behind his ears and over his shoulders and then waited for Sarna.

The western fields had lain fallow long enough and, next morning, Pak went out and dug in as manure the ashes of the burnt straw and offered up the first offering and let in the water, thus starting afresh on the cycle of ploughing, planting and harvesting. It did him good to be hard at work again and to feel the sun beat on him and the sweat run down his body. Nevertheless, a new care was added to those he had already. He stayed out in the sawah long after the kulkul had called the men home to eat and rest; and he had a particular reason for this.

The field next to his belonged to Bengek, the fisherman, and his ill-famed mother, and ever since hearing the white man’s threat Pak had been haunted by the thought of speaking to the husky man about the plates. But Bengek was a lazy cultivator, and though it was high time he got to work on his sawah nothing was to be seen of him.

Pak went to the river and washed his cow and then drove her in the direction of Sanur, for he was resolved to run Bengek to earth in his home. His cow was refractory, for she knew it was time to go home. “Come, my mother, we must go to Sanur,” Pak explained to her as he urged her on in the way she had to go. “I am tired too, my sister, and we will not stay there long.”

He tied the beast to a tree outside Bengek’s yard and went cautiously in. It was the house nearest the sea and a little way outside the village, not far from the Temple of the Dead, where an enchanted and sacred frangipani tree stood in a bright light of its own. The walls were not built of baked mud but of rough gray coral, in which here and there a piece of red coral was embedded and looked like a sore place. The yard was large and clean and had an almost opulent air. Bengek was there mending his nets and his mother, the witch, was busy in the kitchen.

“Peace on your work,” Pak said with exaggerated amiability. “Peace on your evening, old lady.” For he was afraid of her. She came close up to him, greeting him in a sing-song voice, and when he looked at her eyes he saw that they watered, which is a certain sign of a witch. “Sirih, my son?” she asked in a friendly way, offering him her own basket, but Pak prudently declined in case she cast a spell on him.

“I looked for you on the sawah, but you didn’t come,” he said to open the conversation, and Bengek glanced inquiringly at him.

“I am a poor peasant but a good fisherman,” he said casually. “Has anything gone wrong with the water that I am to blame for?” “No, nothing at all,” Pak said hurriedly. “It’s something else. I was quite astonished at what you told the white man about the men from Gianjar . . .”

As the husky man neither answered nor looked up Pak had no choice but to proceed.

“I don’t know if you remember our encounter that night—” “I don’t,” Bengek said.

Pak’s next words stuck in his throat. “It is about the plates you gave me that night—” he stammered. Bengek threw down his net and looked him in the face. “What about them?” he asked.

“They are very beautiful—but if they came from the Chinaman’s boat I shall have to hand them up to the punggawa,” Pak said uncomfortably.

“They did not come from the boat and you must not hand them up. Nobody has asked about any plates. There was talk only of copper and iron and ringits.”

“Where did you get the plates from?” Pak asked straight out. “Out of the sea. They got into my net instead of fish which I would much rather have caught,” the fisherman said. Pak breathed hard. “Why didn’t you keep them?” he asked.

“What should I want with plates? I have no wife and want no toys for children.”

“But they are valuable—” Pak said shyly.

“No, they are not. Do you think I should be such a fool as to give them to you if they were?” Bengek asked. “They are worth just as much as the little kindnesses you do me as my neighbor on the land, and no more,” he added. Pak’s heart was at once lighter and heavier. “I buried them in my field and offered them up to the goddess. But they came new and beautiful out of the ground again in token that the goddess had taken her joy in them and that I might now make use of them—” he said, breathing more freely.

“Well then, that is all right,” the husky man replied with indifference.

“I mean—I wanted to ask you—if I now do what I like with the plates, will you tell people that you gave me them?” Pak asked, forcing himself to come to the point.

“Who? I? No,” Bengek said tersely. Sometimes his hoarse voice ran on volubly, as he had shown in the presence of the white man, and sometimes his mouth seemed too lazy to open or shut. He laughed abruptly and it sounded like a cough. “Let’s leave it at that— the goddess gave you them,” he added .

Pak stood irresolute. “I’ll gladly give you a hand any time on your sawah when you’re behind.”

“That’s very kind of you,” the fisherman replied.

Pak went politely across to the witch and took leave of her. He was afraid of her. “Peace on your way, my son,” she said with a titter. Pak took his cow by the rope and went off at a good pace so as to reach the village before dusk. “Sister,” he said confidentially, “we can be glad that’s over.”

But it seemed that peace had departed from Pak’s life ever since the plates entered it; for a week later, it was the fifth day of the fourth month, the following incident occurred:

On that day Pak was busy laying straw on his yard wall and there was silence in the yard. Puglug had gone to Badung to the big market, and the aunt to the next village to attend a funeral. The old man was asleep in his balé, wearied with the heat of the day. Pak was happy; he hummed softly to himself as he spread the straw and smoothed it down to give the wall protection and a good thatch. Then at the farthest side of his premises, where the garden ran on into a coconut palm plantation, he heard a peculiar noise. It sounded like someone crying, and after a moment or two he went to see whether his little daughter Rantun had perhaps hurt herself in some way. But there were no children to be seen, and then he remembered that they had all gone with Lantjar when he took the ducks out into the fields. Pak looked round about and felt a little uneasy, for it is not very pleasant to hear inexplicable noises and to see nothing. But suddenly he caught sight of something yellow thrown down or crouching on the ground among the palm trees; his heart stopped and then raced and he bounded to the spot, for he had recognized Sarna’s yellow kain with the blue butterflies.

She lay crouching close to the ground with her hands pressed to her left ear, sobbing as though in great pain, while blood welled out between her fingers and trickled down. Pak went cold with distress as she sat up. “What have they done to you?” he asked in horror. But Sarna only pressed her head against his breast and the blood ran warm and sticky down his body, and when he tried to tear her hands from her face she held them there as tight as steel.

“No one has done anything to me,” she sobbed. “Oh, Pak, can I hide in your house?”

He looked round about him; he knew that Puglug was not at home and he would not have cared if she had been. So he helped Sarna to her feet, and supporting her firmly with both his arms, led her past the house altar to his house. “What has happened to you? Who has hurt you?” he asked again and again, while at the same time, not wishing to forget the rudiments of good manners, he muttered that his cabin was wretched and dirty and no place to receive so great a beauty as Sarna. As he spoke he could feel how his heart turned over for pity and fear on her account.

It was not until he had pulled her on to the sleeping bench, and was nursing her in his arms as he did little Klepon, that she consented to remove her hands from her face. They were covered in blood and more blood streamed from her ear and down her neck.

Now Pak saw what had happened. The round hole which Sarna’s vanity delighted in adorning with pretty earrings was torn right through the lobe, which was in two bleeding fragments and could never serve for adornment again.

“What does it mean?” he whispered in horror, for his throat was parched. Pak could not bear even to kill a fowl and to see Sarna bleed was an agony to him.

“It means that I refuse to lie in the bed of an ugly old man,” she said, sitting bolt upright; and her eyes flashed through their tears. “No, never will I do it,” she said. “The mere thought sickens me and I will be disfigured for the rest of my days rather than submit to it.” “Come,” Pak whispered, “let me stop the bleeding—shall I run to Teragia?—she has medicine. What did you do, my Sarna—did you do it yourself? Who is the old man you won’t give yourself to? I don’t understand. Tell me all about it.”

Sarna took her head-dress and held it to her torn ear, and although she still sobbed she began to smile and the blood ceased to flow by degrees.

“Do not run about like a chicken after its head is cut off, Pak,” she said. “Just hold me tight and I will tell you everything. I am glad I did it and you ought to be glad too.”

In the nick of time Pak remembered that there was holy water on the premises, and he ran off to his uncle’s balé to get the pitcher. He brought it back and sprinkled the wound with it; he took Sarna in his arms, and then he could feel that she stopped trembling, but still he did not understand.

“Don’t you know that the raja’s people go round the villages looking for girls for his bed?” Sarna said with more composure. “But I have done enough to make it impossible for them to drag me to the puri and hand me over to the raja.”

“The raja—” Pak stammered, staring at her. He had heard tales now and then of girls mutilating themselves in this way when they did not want to be taken into the puri, for it was impossible for a raja to have a woman near him who was disfigured in any way. But they were always girls who had done it out of desperation, because they were in love with a man of the village and could not bear to be parted from him. His heart swelled within him until he felt it in his throat.

“Why did you do it? Tell me,” he asked her breathlessly. And it seemed to him incredible that a girl of Sarna’s radiance and charm had wounded herself with a knife for his sake and rejected a raja. “Did you do it for my sake?” he whispered, feeling that he was uncouth and dirty from labor and reeking like a swine. Sarna looked at him and laughed softly.

“For your sake?” she said. “Yes, for your sake—”

At this moment the old man came from his balé, for his sleep was light and he had heard Sarna’s sobbing. Pak said nothing. He only took his arms away from the girl quickly and squatted down at a distance from her, as propriety demanded. And the old man said nothing either, and, although he saw it all, he did not look but just picked up a basket and disappeared again behind the house.

“The raja is as old as the hills and has been sick for years, as you know. Now they are going to put girls in his bed to warm the marrow in his bones, for his inside is going cold and his entrails are slothful within him and his breath stinks with his sickness,” Sarna said. “But they will not have me as medicine for a corpse even if it’s the lord of Pametjutan a thousand times over. I am young and I will not be buried alive.”

Pak began now to understand. If it was not a question of the young lord Alit, but of the old tjokorda of Pametjutan, and if it was as Sarna said, then her crazed action seemed comprehensible. Sarna took the cloth from the wound now that it had stopped bleeding, and Pak shuddered slightly when he saw the limp, torn lobe. Sarna looked closely in his face. “Now I can never wear earrings again,” she said, smiling, while her eyes filled again with tears.

“That is nothing, my little bird—” Pak said, clumsily comforting her. “You are beautiful without any adornment.”

“There were little rubies set in them, they cost seven ringits,” Sarna lamented. But Pak took her in his arms and said, “And when you marry you will in any case have to give up your earrings, sister.”

Sarna nestled up to him and said no more, and after a while the cooing in her throat that always made his pulses beat was to be heard again. “My father will beat me when I get home,” she said. Pak, too, feared the wealthy Wajan.

“My father thinks it an honor to be chosen out for the raja of Pametjutan, to be a woman of the palace with lovely kains and no more work to do.”

“And all that you have thrown away?” Pak said in a transport. He was prouder of what Sarna had done for him than of anything that had ever happened to him in his whole life. He felt dazed as he thought that he had never known her, never known anything about her until that day. Sarna, the pretty Sarna, had destroyed her own beauty with a knife.

“I will not be shut up as a raja’s wife,” she said, thinking aloud. “They are hidden away and are no better than prisoners. And the raja is old—he will die soon and then his wives will have to be burned—and I don’t want that. But my father will beat me—”

“And so you came to me?” Pak said.

“To whom else could I go?” Sarna asked. Never had he heard words like these. To whom else? To whom, indeed? He stretched to his full height and two fingers’ breadth more, and his muscles grew tense. “Your father will not beat you—he has me to reckon with,” he said proudly. A happy thought came to him and he jumped up. “Wait, I will show you something no one has seen yet,” he said, and ran for his spade.

He had buried the plates near the house altar two days before, and now he took Sarna with him and quickly dug them up with a strength in his arms he had never known before. The pig came up and routed in the earth with his snout. Pak kicked him aside. Sarna squatted on the ground and from time to time she was shaken with a sob, but she was inquisitive and did not cry any more. At last the plates were unearthed and the roses were as fresh as on the first day; the soil could not obscure or hurt them. Pak wiped the plates on his kain and they shone at once. “There—they will be yours when you are my wife,” he said, rather out of breath, and laid them at Sarna’s feet. She gazed at the treasure open-mouthed and then at Pak and then back at the plates. She said nothing. She stroked the flowers tentatively with her finger-tips and then started back as though afraid. Then she looked again at Pak. He laughed aloud, for it was clear that the plates made a great impression; he began to brag and handled the plates carelessly, clapping one over the other, as though a man like him was quite used to such things. “Take them, they are a present,” he said, but Sarna shook her head. “I am afraid of my father,” she said again. Pak buried the plates and the pig went disappointedly away. Pak, too, began to be afraid, not only of Sarna’s father, but also of Puglug and the noise she would make or, what was worse, her silence, when she came home and found Sarna in her own house. A happy thought struck him. “I will take you to Teragia,” he said. “She will see to your wound and make it heal quickly and leave no scar. And Teragia will take you home to your father and speak to him. She is good and has power over people and he will do nothing to you.” Sarna looked at him once more, searchingly this time, as though she detected the lurking fear in his heart, and at last she nodded. “Do not come with me,” she said finally. “I will go to Teragia alone. Everyone in the village knows by now what I have done, and there must not be any gossip about us.”

Pak was thankful she was so sensible and relieved she was going before his domestic troubles broke upon him.

“My father,” he said later to the old man, “where would be the best place to build a house for a second wife? And how soon could I start on it?”

The old man laughed to himself and replied, “I will ask my friend, the pedanda, what day would be favorable for building the foundations. And don’t worry any more. Even though it is a mistake to marry a woman for her looks, you will soon have had your fill of her and she will soon bear you a son and you will have peace.”

 

 

Although the weeks that followed were the most eventful in Pak’s life, there was a strange stillness in the household. Puglug had been mixing magic potions with his food in order to turn him from Sarna, but when she saw how useless it all was she gave in and did not even say anything, although she knew all. Puglug could be silent with the best when it was her policy; and Pak, who was eagerly absorbed in his preparations, actually believed that she was not aware of his plans. On his side he ignored the little troubles that began mysteriously to arise in his daily life. Sometimes there was not enough to eat when he came in from the sawah, or else he had the same remains put before him day after day long after the ants had infested them. When he looked for a clean kain there was none to be found and Puglug informed him that she had forgotten to do the washing. Or else she had an inflamed place on her arm and could not pound the rice for the household. Then she let the large pitcher fall from her head over the dried copra on the very day when he was taking it to Sanur to sell to the Chinaman. But nothing of all this broke in on Pak’s dream, for now he would have a second wife and his life would be as ripe and full of flavor as a durian fruit.

It turned out as his father had promised. The third Friday of the fourth month was the appointed day for beginning the building and Pak had brought along the earth and stones. He himself built the foundation walls, ramming the ground hard to receive them. He would have liked to have used red stones, like those of which Wajan’s chief house was built, but he could not find any and it would have been too costly to buy them; and so he used coral as everyone else did. Puglug went round the four sides and spat red betel-juice in her consternation, for it did not escape her that Pak had laid out a building rather larger even than his own house. Meru, on his return from the town, whistled in astonishment. “I’ve heard already that you carried off his chosen beauty from under the raja’s nose, brother,” he said good-humoredly. Pak was not sure whether this was said in jest or admiration, for Meru had a great reputation for his knowledge of women and his taste in them. “I shall want a garuda bird with Vishnu on its back for the main beam,” he said in lordly style.

“What will you give me to carve you one?” Meru asked. “Nothing, as you are my brother,” Pak said in a wounded tone.

Meru whistled again. He could carve garuda birds and Vishnus in his sleep by now—he had done so many for the puri at Badung. “A garuda bird and Vishnu an arm’s length in height and painted in red and gold, the same as in Bernis’s house,” Meru said. “Would that be good enough for her Highness, my brother’s second wife?”

“Who is Bernis?” Pak asked. But Meru did not answer. Instead he took his knife from his girdle and began playing with a piece of bamboo. “I’ll give you my white cock,” Pak said at last, and this was not a bad bargain for Meru.

“The men in the family have all lost their wits,” Puglug remarked to her aunt, taking care that Pak should overhear. “They say at Badung market that Meru is poaching in the puri preserves. One brother has lost his head in the village street, and the other will lose his head to the raja if he does not keep his hands off the palace women.”

Pak felt a touch of anxiety, for if it was true that Meru was making love on the sly to one of the raja’s wives he was in very real danger. He had a brief talk as man to man with his young brother. “You must not run after the women of the puri,” he said. “No good ever came of that kind of thing.”

Meru slapped himself on the thigh and laughed. “I run after the women?” he shouted. “I like that. It’s they who run after me, the little hens. The puri is full of slave-girls and they are all crazy as cats after the rainy season. Look after your own women and I’ll look after mine.”

“And I’ll want four carved cross-beams as well. I want the house to look imposing!” said Pak to end the discussion.

He went about looking for the straightest and best-grown trunks in the plantations, for if he could not buy nanka wood timbers, he wanted at least to have the best durian trees he could find. The best durian trees grew in Wajan’s plantation on the edge of the village and this suited Pak particularly well. He could bring off a fine stroke of diplomacy as well as a good bargain.

One Thursday morning he presented himself in Wajan’s courtyard wearing his silk saput about his loins and a new head-dress. Wajan received him amiably. As politeness enjoined Pak first talked at length about anything rather than his errand.

“My father tells me the great rain will come soon,” he said, and, “I hear that you have a srawah among your cocks that ought to be invincible,” and, “I have been asked whether I will have my mother burned at the burning on the fifth day of next week. But I have refused because I want her to have a pyre to herself and not have her burned with thirty more—which could not be any pleasure to her soul.”

This was sheer bragging, for Pak had not even got the twenty thousand kepengs for the communal burning. A private one, such as only rich people could afford, cost ten times as much, and this was a sum beyond Pak’s conception. Wajan, however, was as amiable as before and made lavish offers of sirih. And then Pak came to the object of his visit.

“I am employed in building a house for a second wife and her house has to be a finer one than my main house,” he said in one breath, for he had thought out this piece of eloquence beforehand. He could not possibly have hit on a better way of informing Wajan of his designs on Sarna and respecting the proprieties at the same time. “I heard something about it,” the old man remarked. “I wish you joy and peace in your house.”

“I have been looking round for trees for the timbers of my new house. Nobody has such fine ones as you and I wanted to ask whether you would sell me six durian trees and four palm trees from your northern plantation.”

“Why not?” Wajan said. He would reckon the price and perhaps he would let him have them, although he had really intended them for fruit. Pak in his reply again laid stress on his desire to build a fine house, and repeated that Wajan’s trees would suit him better than any in the village. But when Wajan asked six hundred kepengs a tree, Pak’s heart sank and he gasped for air. He could not pay this price, and yet he did not wish to appear a poor man in the eyes of his future father-in-law. He offered to pay half down and to work for the rest in Wajan’s sawahs. When at last the deal was concluded, Wajan sent his youngest son up a palm tree and offered Pak the milk of a young coconut as an honored guest and Pak walked home on air, swollen with pride and satisfaction.

Next day he went with his axe, accompanied by several of his friends, to fell first the four palms. He did as his father had taught him. He embraced the trunk of each palm. “Palm tree, my mother,” he said, “I must fell you not because I wish to kill you, but because I need posts for my house. Forgive me, dear palm, and allow me to cleave your trunk with my axe.” And when they felled the trees and their crowns sank to earth with a loud rustling, Pak felt the strength of ten men in him, for he caught sight of Sarna hiding in the plantation watching him at work; and nothing makes a man so happy as when the right woman admires him as he works.

While the trunks were left to dry, he went out to cut bamboo stems for the roof, and he was fortunate in having a bamboo thicket on the edge of his sawahs; so he did not have to buy them. The bamboos grew cool and tall, shading the stream that ran beneath them, and Pak had good weather for cutting them and shortening them to the right length. He also mowed alang-alang grass for the thatch; it grew tall in his uncle’s pasture, almost up to his chest. It hissed and whispered as it fell to his sickle and lay in swathes and was dry in two days and ready to be tied in bundles. He spoke to Krkek, who sent him men to help him build the roof, and he paid them with rice from his well-filled barns.

While this went on Puglug had an attack of her former volubility, and shouted a number of unpleasant remarks as she went about the yard, without addressing them to anyone in particular. The women of the household made themselves even more disagreeable when the posts were erected and the time came for an offering to be deposited in the north-east corner of the house; this only a woman could do. Puglug was not to be found on this festal day, and her spiteful disappearance wounded Pak to the heart. And then his aunt, who behaved as a rule as though she was the only woman in the village who understood the right way of making an offering, grumbled and made difficulties about preparing and depositing this one. It was beneath her, she said, to prepare the way for half-grown pullets and she did not care a grain whether the new house was blessed or not. All this was extremely painful to Pak, for Teragia’s father, the balian, had come to say the proper prayers and for half an hour all was confusion and dismay. But at last Teragia herself appeared and, putting her hand on Lambon’s shoulder, showed her how to prepare the offering. And Pak’s little sister, rather awkwardly and yet with the grace of a former dancer, advanced with the offering; and then the balian was able to pray for a blessing on the house and that sickness might pass it by. Also his aunt finally felt able to display her knowledge, and so the eight prescribed offerings were laid at the right spots in order to conciliate the house god, Begawan Suwa-Karma. It was a great day for Pak and also for the poultry and the dogs, who later devoured the rice and the roasted entrails in the offering vessels.

Puglug, however, felt otherwise, and what seared her soul and made her particularly short-tempered with her husband was the splendor emanating from the red-and-gold Garuda bird of Meru’s handiwork which hung on the centre post of the house.

Pak’s days were fully occupied at this time and he saw very little of Sarna. For now he had the walls to finish and the door to fix, besides working in Wajan’s sawahs to pay for the trees. He also spent a lot of time cock-fighting, for he felt happy and successful and could bet with a good courage. His white cock did, in fact, win three times, and in this way Pak procured seven hundred of the three thousand kepengs he owed Wajan. And he went to the beach collecting coral, which contained a lot of chalk, and carried it in baskets to the lime-kiln in Sanur and gave the lime-burner six ripe coconuts for burning him beautiful white lime to wash the walls of his house with. Also he took his copra to the Chinese, Njo Tok Suey, and got two thousand two hundred kepengs for it. It was a poor price, but it helped towards the expenses that still lay before him.

When the walls were finished and the door fixed, Pak took his spade and dug up the plates before Puglug’s eyes, and put them in the wall—one over the door and the other two on each side. By this time the house was as good as finished, and it had such an air of wealth and splendor, that the whole village collected to look at it and there was scarcely an hour of the day when there were not a few people in Pak’s yard gaping at it and uttering cries of admiration. It took Pak all his time to preserve his modesty and to call his new house a wretched dirty hut, but he did so for the sake of good manners.

In the midst of all this stir it happened that Pak was summoned to the punggawa on a Wednesday on which the omens were unusually favorable. He found the punggawa’s servant at his gate when he came home from cutting fodder for the cow, and the message was so urgent that he went straight back with him, only stopping on the way to wash himself in a stream. Pak felt somewhat disconcerted and out of his depth, for neither was his father with him, nor could he ask Krkek what the meaning of this summons might be. He had an uneasy suspicion that his plates, which were now so openly exposed on the walls of his new house, might have something to do with it. Also the topic of the wreck had never quite died away and people from the court of Badung were often in the village, asking questions and searching for wreckage.

And when he entered the punggawa’s courtyard the first person who met his eye was a man of great influence in the palace. This was the anak Agung Bima, a relation of the lord of Badung, as Pak well knew. He sat beside the punggawa on a finely woven mat chewing sirih. Pak squatted low with clasped hands and waited.

“My friend,” the anak Agung said, “I seem to remember that your family has belonged to the puri for two generations. Did your father hold sawahs under the old lord?”

“That is so, your Highness,” Pak said with awe.

“Your brother, too, works in the puri and I have only lately honored him by the order for a kris holder,” the anak continued.

Pak inclined himself once more. Puglug’s ominous allusion to Meru’s love affairs passed through his mind, but he breathed again when it occurred to him that the whole interview seemed to be intended as an honor and distinction.

“Our lord, the Prince Alit, is my brother,” Bima went on, though this was a lie. “I am his eye, his mouth and his hand.”

Pak accepted this with deference. Are they going to give me another sawah or are they going to take one away from me? he thought in dismay.

“You have a sister; she is called Lambon, is she not? And she is beautiful and a good dancer?” the anak Agung said unexpectedly.

“I have a sister—Lambon,” Pak said. “Unfortunately she is much too old to dance and she is ugly and a burden in the house.”

He inwardly thanked his father for having taught him his manners so well, that even when addressing high dignitaries of the court he knew the right thing to say. Bima waved his politeness aside and came to the point.

“I have come here to tell you that your sister has been chosen to enter the puri. If she is, as I hope, of a ripe enough age, she can be received on the prince’s next birthday as one of his wives,” he said without further beating about the bush.

Pak’s brain did not work fast enough to take all this in at once. An idiotic expression came into his face, his mouth opened, his eyebrows went up to his head-dress, and he stared at the punggawa.

“My sister Lambon—?”

Naturally a number of people had attached themselves to him as he went to the punggawa’s house, and now there were whispers of astonishment and wonder behind him. A crowd of village children renewed their attempts to peer over the wall and Pak expected any moment to hear a scoffing remark from his friend Rib.

“Thank the anak Agung,” the punggawa now told him, “and bring your sister to the puri early tomorrow morning. I am glad that your family has received this distinction, for I know that you and your father are good men and loyal subjects of your lord and master.”

“I am to bring her tomorrow?” Pak asked. She has not even a new kain, he thought. “She has not even a new kain,” he said aloud. He heard laughing behind him.

“She will be provided in the puri with all she requires in the way of dress and adornment,” the anak Agung said. “You have only to bring her and to ask for me.”

But a happy thought had found its way into Pak’s brain, befogged as it was by this great honor. “Do I not receive a little present if I give my sister to the raja—so that I can fit her out and dress her?” he asked.

The punggawa wrinkled his brow and the anak began to laugh. “You ought rather to offer me a present for proposing your sister’s admission to the puri—not ask one from me,” he cried out, and Pak remembered that his brother Meru in his impudent way had called the anak a corrupt and avaricious rhinoceros. But something told him that there was money to be made out of it, and as he needed money, a lot of it, for his marriage he plucked up his courage.

“I will speak to my sister,” he said. “She is still a child and she may be afraid of entering the puri.” As he said this it occurred to him that it might be the truth. He knew little of what Lambon thought and she seldom talked in his presence.

This aspect of the matter was discussed at some length and when Pak took his leave the anak Agung had parted with five ringits— twice as much as Pak had expected and half what Bima had been prepared at the outset to pay. Pak returned home escorted by an excited throng. Puglug, of course, had heard it all already, and he found the women of his establishment collected in a circle with Lambon crouching in the middle like a little inert chrysalis. It annoyed Pak that he could never be first with the news, but he had his ringits in his pocket and a great honor had come to his house.

“Are you not glad to be one of the raja’s wives?” he asked Lambon. She looked at him with big eyes and nodded without a word. “You don’t quite understand yet what it means,” he said impatiently.

“I am stupid, my brother,” Lambon whispered. “Shall I be at liberty in the puri?” she asked a little later. “Or shall I be kept a prisoner?”

Puglug and her aunt broke out into dissertations on the honor and felicity awaiting her. She kept her hands folded in her lap and smiled absently.

“You must be very happy, Lambon my sister,” Pak warned her. And Lambon said gently—Yes, she was very happy.

The women had enough to occupy them all that evening, for Puglug ran out to buy fragrant oils and a new kain, while her aunt searched Lambon’s head for lice and gave her hair a thorough combing. Also her old kain was washed and her eyebrows shaved, as though she was to dance the legong again. Next morning the excitement flared up afresh. Lambon was sent off early to the river to bathe and Puglug packed her belongings in a square basket. They also got her pisangs and papayas and put them in a red fancy basket, and said that they were intended for an offering. This was not out of a fear that there would not be enough to eat in the puri, but because it would make a better impression not to arrive empty-handed. Pak was already arrayed in his best to take his sister to Badung, and now he loitered waiting at the gate, for it was a long time before she came back from the river.

After bathing she went past the pedanda’s house and she longed to say good-bye to Raka before she became a wife of the raja’s. But when she came to the gate she did not venture to go in, but crouched down outside in the grass and laid her head on her arms and waited for she knew not what. She was still there when Teragia came home with water from the spring. Teragia bent over the little crouching figure and asked, “Are you sick, Lambon, my little sister?”

“No,” Lambon said. “I am very happy. I am going into the puri today to be one of the lord’s wives.”

Whereupon Teragia looked searchingly in her face for a moment and then led her affectionately into the courtyard and called for Raka. He came up with an armful of young papayas from the plantation. “Lambon!” he said. “How tall you have grown! I haven’t seen you for a long time.”

Lambon stood with drooping head, unable to speak. Teragia put her hand under her chin and said, “She wants to say good-bye to you, Raka, before going into the puri to be one of the lord’s wives.” When Raka heard this he laughed out loud. “Has not Alit more wives than he wants already?” he cried out. “And the anak Agung Bima keeps on combing the villages for more.”

Lambon threw back her head and said with energy, “It is a great honor and I am very happy. I have seen the lord Alit and he is handsome and has a fair skin, and he is going to make me his wife.”

Raka said nothing. He looked at Lambon at first with surprise and then reflectively. “Alit is good and a true friend to those whom he likes,” he said earnestly. Lambon stood a moment longer with her arms hanging at her sides and an expectant look in her face. Then she said, “I only wanted to say good-bye. Peace remain with you,” and she turned to go. Teragia quickly put a few large blue flowers, such as grew only in the pedanda’s garden, in her hair and stood beside Raka in the gateway—waving to her as she went down the village street until she had turned the corner.

At the last moment when all Lambon’s preparations were made, and she had said good-bye to everyone, and was setting out with her basket on her head escorted by Pak, his little daughters came running out of the house weeping loudly. They ran the whole length of the village beside Lambon, Rantun with little Klepon on her hip and Madé with nothing on. But Lambon did not weep as she left the village but had still the same dazed, gentle smile and lowered eyes.

It took them an hour to reach Badung and Pak was perspiring when he handed his sister up to the gate-keeper. He laid his hands on her shoulders and at last pushed her from him. But he did not know what to say to her in farewell and he was sorry that his mother and hers was not alive.

“Can I come and see her?” he asked the gate-keeper.

“It is not usual,” the man said, and a glimpse of Lambon’s green kain as she vanished was the last Pak saw of her.

 

 

Pak quickly forgot his sister, for now all his thoughts were taken up by his second wife. When the house was finished, the pedanda himself came to put life into it. Nine offerings were made, as well for the gods as for the demons below. The pedanda addressed each one of them, so that no misfortune should befall the house, no fire break out and no sickness enter. The timbers of the house were smeared with lime, charcoal, the blood of a fowl, coconut oil and powdered sandalwood. The plates shone over the door and new mats were spread on the two sleeping benches. Puglug and his aunt behaved this time with propriety, and it was only Pak who ran about in a fluster of agitation as though he would burst with excitement. For there was nothing left to do now but carry Sarna off.

The whole village knew about it and the pedanda had ascertained the auspicious day and told Pak’s father. But of course no one in the village spoke of it and all went about their work as usual. But Pak had spoken to his friends, Rib, the jester, and Sarda, the fisherman, and they were ready to help in the rape, as the custom was.

That afternoon Sarna did not go to the river for water but to the spring, and she told Pak the exact time when she would be there. So he and his two friends hid themselves among the roots of the old wairingin tree, and when Sarna had put her jar down they rushed out and carried her off. She defended herself with a branch but they only laughed; and afterwards, rather breathless with the fun, they sat down and rubbed her arms and legs with cold water. Then they set off over the sawahs, Sarna in front and Pak some distance behind her and then his two friends. Rib’s sawahs were some way out and they were bound for a deserted watch-house which stood in his fields. The sun had nearly set when they reached it; all the birds were singing and the chirping of grasshoppers and the jarring throb of cicadas was to be heard all over the rice-fields. Then darkness came quickly down and a thousand frogs began to croak. The night wind stirred the clappers in the ripening fields and great fireflies flickered through the air and settled on Sarna’s hair. Pak’s heart throbbed with all these night sounds after the excitement of the day.

Rib, in spite of his jocularity, was the very pattern of tact and good behaviour and made not a single ribald remark when he and Sarda left the two by themselves in the little cabin. They had brought food and two oil lamps with them. The trickle of water running into the fields could be heard nearby and the moist rich earth smelt of fruitfulness. From the other side the green scent of the ripening sawahs was borne on the wind. All this was so familiar and homely to Pak that his heart came to rest after all his agitation. He stood in the doorway of the hut with his arm round Sarna’s shoulders looking after his friends as they vanished in the dusk across the fields. He could still hear them laughing and then far away the kulkul beating in Taman Sari to summon the men. For now the rape had been detected and they had been given time to hide themselves and the next thing was to make a great uproar about it.

“Sarna,” Pak said softly, “I am content.” He looked once more over the sawahs and then he pulled her inside the hut and shut the door and slept with her and made her his wife.

Meanwhile the village was bright with torches and loud with the beating of the kulkul and the shouts of the men. They ran hither and thither searching everywhere for the raped girl except where the runaway couple were hidden. Wajan tore his hair and lamented loudly, and after a time Rib and Sarda arrived and endeavoured politely to soothe and console him.

Then it became known that Wajan, in spite of all Pak’s diplomatic moves, was seriously annoyed by the carrying off of his daughter. Even when Krkek himself put it to him that, with her disfigured ear, she could not expect a better husband than the honest and hardworking Pak, even then he stuck to his grievance and raged and demanded damages for his pained feelings and the deep insult he had suffered.

After three days Pak returned to the village with his new wife and begged forgiveness of his father-in-law. It was then settled that he had to pay eight ringits for the abduction, and the whole village considered this hard and unjust. But Pak was too happy to care. He dug up the eight ringits and now he had only twenty-four left of his savings beneath the floor of his house, and there was no more talk of the burning of his mother’s bones.

“How does your house please you?” Pak asked his second wife. “Quite pretty,” Sarna said, and it did not sound very enthusiastic considering the plates and the splendid garuda bird. “If I had married the raja I should have had a roof of Chinese tiles.” Since her ear had healed she had talked of nothing but her rejection of a raja, and of the great sacrifice she had made in order to marry a common man like Pak. But Pak only laughed for, in the first place, it flattered him and, besides, he knew Sarna in the intimacy of the night and she was his wife, and he knew the sweetness of her and her continual hunger for his embraces.

The wedding was celebrated at the same time as the consecration of the new house, and Pak spoiled all the festal ceremonies by his excitement and forgetfulness. His uncle and aunt, his father and brother all pushed him this way and that and helped him to get through it properly. Sarna, however, never lost her head for a moment; she sold him rice in the courtyard and she let him beat her, and broke the string and walked through the fire at the ceremony of union. And she bathed in the river and came back and laid herself down on the floor of the house with a lighted torch beside her at the ceremony of cleansing. And finally she sat down opposite the pedanda with her face to the east. He spoke to the souls of their forefathers and offered up the prescribed offerings, sprinkled the pair of them with holy water, and did a lot more things which Pak could never afterwards remember. But it all signified the dedication of the marriage and after that they were man and wife.

For Pak, the whole day was enveloped in a droning mist, and he marvelled at Sarna’s gracious way of attending to the guests as though she had long been used to living in his house. Now and then he took a sly look at Puglug and saw that she was dressed in her best with flowers in her hair, just as though the marriage was of her own making. Also she had cooked a splendid and sumptuous meal and called Sarna young sister and friend in a loud voice. And Sarna, like a kitten, thanked her loudly and often. She wore a large hibiscus flower over her ear and this concealed the mutilated lobe. The gamelan arrived too, for Pak was a member of it, and it took up a position near the gateway and Pak’s father beat the gong instead of him, since he was being honored that day and had to listen. When night came on the whole courtyard smelt of spilt palm wine and the guests were still drinking when Pak, wearied out with a surfeit of honor and happiness, had fallen asleep with his head against a post of his new house.

By the time all the dissipation and excitement of these weeks were over it was time to reap the eastern fields. The sawah absorbed Pak once more and it was there he lived the life he loved best. He was happier at home than before, but things were not so simple as they had been. Puglug put a great deal of work on the new wife; and Sarna, with an amiable smile, put it back on Puglug again. “If I had married the raja—” she was very often heard to say.

After a time Pak ceased to laugh good-naturedly over this. Sarna was his wife, and though in the ardour of his love he had built her a house on which three plates were displayed, she would have to be put in her place all the same. It was still as sweet as ever to fondle her and sleep with her, and he still called her sometimes by the names of fruits and birds. But he got used to her and it happened as his father had said: the hunger and the fever and the restlessness passed out of his blood like a sickness that was over.

Not that Sarna was of no use in the household. She could catch dragonflies and roast them to a turn, and she had a cunning hand at cutting out palm-leaf decorations for the offerings. Things did not go equally well in the months when it was her task to see to his meals. But he forgave her that, for in the very first month after the marriage her kain remained clean and Pak had hopes of a son.

“She must not pound rice or carry water, for she promises to bear a son to our house,” he said confidentially to Puglug. His first wife pulled a face. “You would think she was a raw egg,” she said. “How shall the son be strong if the mother does not work?”

In spite of this Pak observed that Puglug spared his second wife the heavier labors when her womb began to grow big, and he was grateful to her. He never let a week go by without spending a night with Puglug in the chief house, and he praised her cooking and her children. Moreover, at about this time he was allotted another sawah by the lord of Badung, probably because Lambon had been taken into the puri. More rice for the household and more work for Pak. He was glad to do it. He gave the eastern fields a rest and pressed on with the western ones and began ploughing again and breaking down the soil, three times, with aching back and thighs. He talked to the earth and took offerings to the rice goddess and explained to his cow what they had to do. The tjrorot sang and it sounded like a tiny kulkul, and his father came and surveyed the growing crops. And all the time Pak waited for the birth of his son, dreaming great things of him. I will teach him to plough and sow and plant, he thought. I will take him between my knees and show him how to beat the gong, he thought on other days. At other times he thought how he would impart all he knew and had experienced, as his father had done with him.

Soon after the New Year had been celebrated came the day when the child was born. Pak was out on the sawah mowing weeds when Rantun came running to him. “Your wife is taken with great pains,” she called out from far off. “The little brother is going to be born.” At this Pak was seized with fear and joy at once, as though a hand was at his throat. He did not pause to wash off the mud in the stream, but ran home, perspiring all over his body, and reached the yard breathless. From the gate he could hear Sarna crying out, and this seemed to him strange, for Puglug had given birth to three children in complete silence and with tight lips. The yard was full of women. It seemed to Pak that all the women of the village had collected; some ran inanely to and fro like fowls and some sat motionless, some gave advice and some prepared the offerings.

Rantun clung to his hand when he went into Sarna’s house, and crouched beside him as he sat down behind Sarna and supported her body. “Take good heed, Rantun,” he said, “for you, too, will have to bear children.”

He felt very sorry for Sarna; her body streamed with sweat and her kain was soaked and her eyes were shut and she threw herself about and cried aloud. But if she had not cried out he would have been even sorrier for her. “Puglug never cried out,” he said out loud. But Puglug signed to him to be quiet and Sarna cried out more loudly than ever. After a while Pak was soaked with sweat, too, and the cries rang in his ears. He would have liked to ask his father whether his mother had cried out in this way, but his father kept out of the way on this occasion. So Pak stayed sitting behind Sarna on the floor and the time passed endlessly and yet never moved. “Why is it taking so long?” he asked the women.

“The child will be born at the appointed time,” the old midwife said. She massaged Sarna’s body and put a rope in her hands which was fastened to the door and was meant to help her in her labor. Pak looked at Puglug’s face; it was composed and in its ugliness he now detected great goodness and strength. He would gladly have laid his head in her capacious lap and rested, for he was wearied out with Sarna’s labor. But she only nodded to him to put his hands on Sarna’s body and said, “You must help her so, for you are the husband.”

The sun already slanted down the sky and Sarna’s cries went on and on.

“I have had enough,” Pak said, getting up and going out into the yard. Is she made of other stuff than other women? he thought, feeling impatient with Sarna. She cannot pound rice and she will not help Puglug with the work, and when she ought to bring forth a child she breaks down. But as he thought this he gave a start, for he had forgotten that there might be danger. He went back into the house; the women had hung two oil lamps beside the plates. Pak looked round for his first wife. “Puglug,” he said, and was surprised to find his throat and lips as dry as dust. “It cannot last much longer,” Puglug said consolingly as she went up to him. “Sarna is young and slender and the child has first to make a way for itself.”

“Is there danger?” Pak asked, feeling grateful to Puglug. She laughed at him and took his hands between hers and rubbed them. “No, there is no danger,” she said as if he were a child.

Pak went back and sat down again behind Sarna. He wondered at her. The bare earth was beneath her so that its strength could pass into her and the child, but Sarna had no strength. Her head hung limp like the flower on a broken stem and she whimpered on and on. Even in her womb there was no movement now. The sun set. Pak looked from one to the other of the many women who filled the room. Is it dangerous? Is she dying? Will she bear me a dead child? he wanted to ask. But the women appeared to be indifferent. They chewed sirih and some of them had leaves in their hands, from which they ate the cooked rice Puglug brought them. Then he saw his aunt come up the steps with a sharp bamboo knife in her hand to cut the umbilical cord. Sarna began to cry out more loudly and Puglug wiped the sweat from her forehead. He had taken her as his wife in the watch-house among the sawahs and she had been sweet, but now she looked ugly—broken. She was no good at bearing children or at anything else. She turned her eyes to him and whispered, “Oh Pak, help me. Oh Pak, help me.” Then she cried out aloud, “Oh Pak, help me!” Pak began supporting her back again and pressing down on her womb as Puglug had shown him. The earth round Sarna was wet with sweat in large dark patches and he thought: This child will never be born.

Suddenly Sarna gave a long and piercing cry. Puglug and his aunt bent over to help her. And then Pak saw that his child lay on the earth; it had tiny sprawling limbs, and it was a son.

Sarna fell back in his arms and smiled the very moment her pains were over. “Is it a son, Pak?” she asked. “Yes it is a son,” he answered, breathless for joy. He stroked her forehead and her wet hair and her shoulders and held her on his knees, until Puglug had parted the child from the umbilical cord. All the women now talked at once and pushed him out of the house and showered congratulations on him. Pak suddenly found himself alone, while an immense stir began in the house. He ran to his father and shouted: “It’s a son and he’s fine and big.” The old man came down from his balé. “Offerings must be brought,” he said, “and you must build him an altar, on the right of the house, where they bury the afterbirth, the little brother of your son.”

The yard was full of torches and women and shouting, and women crossed from the kitchen carrying large vessels of water to wash the mother and the child.

Puglug had always cleansed the house herself after the birth of her children, but it appeared that Sarna was too weak and the other women did it for her. Even the next day when she went to the river to bathe Puglug had to help her; and she supported her younger sister down the steep bank without complaining. She did not say: “I bore my children without crying out and I needed no help.” All the same Sarna held her head high and said: “I have borne a son to a house where before there were only daughters.”

As for Pak, he sat at home holding in his arms the little bundle wrapped in white linen, that was his son, and he forgot everything else in the fulfilment of his dearest wish.

And he named him Siang, the light and the day.