Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/87

 DROIT DU SEIGNEUR

NE morning, not so very many years ago, old Mat Drus, bare to the waist, sat cross-legged in the doorway of his house, in the little sleepy village of Kĕdôndong on the banks of the Pahang River. A single wide blade of lâlang grass was bound filet-wise about his forehead to save appearances, for all men know that it is unmannerly to wear no headdress, and Mat Drus had mislaid his kerchief. His grizzled hair stood up stiffly above the bright green of the grass-blade; his checks were furrowed with wrinkles; and his eyes were old and dull and patient—the eyes of the driven peasant, the cattle of mankind. His lips, red with the stain of areca nut, bulged over a damp quid of Java tobacco, shredded fine and rolled into a ball the size of a large marble. His jaws worked mechanically, chewing the betel nut, as a cow chews the cud, and his hands were busy with a little brass tube in which he was crushing up a fresh quid, for his teeth were old and ragged and had long been powerless to masticate the nut without artificial aid. The fowls clucked and scratched about the litter of trash with which the space before the house was strewn; and a monkey of the kind the Malays call brôk, and train to pluck cocoanuts, sat