Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/176

 silence. From without there came the hum of insects, the chirping of crickets in the fruit trees, and the deep, monotonous note of the bullfrogs in the rice-swamps.

When the men had finished their meal, the women carried the dishes to a corner near the fireplace, and there set to on such of the viands as their lords had not consumed. If you had looked carefully, however, you would have seen that the cooking-pots, over which the women presided, still held a secret store reserved for their own use, and that the quality of the food in this cache was by no means inferior to that of the portion which had been allotted to the men. In a land where women wait upon themselves, labour for others, and have none to attend to their wants or to forestall their wishes, they generally develop a sound working notion of how to look after themselves; and since they have never known a state of society. such as our own, in which women occupy a special and privileged position, it does not occur to them that they are the victims of male oppression.

Each of the men had meanwhile folded a lime-smeared leaf of the sîrih-vine into a neat, oblong packet, within which was enclosed parings of the betel nut and a fragment or two of prepared gambir, taking the ingredients of their quids from the little brass boxes in the clumsy wooden box that lay before them on the mat. Next they had rolled a pinch of Javanese tobacco—potent stuff which grips you by the throat as though you were a personal enemy—in a dried shoot of the nîpah-palm, had lighted these