And repetitious as the leaves of the rubber trees endless along the roads of Malaya, the days shed, carrying me with my doctoring, Ah Mei with her cleaning and washing, and Cookie with his cooking.

My daughter grew and grew, my husband worked and studied, and every evening the male S.E.P.s walked up the garden gravel in the pink clearness precursor of swift night. They sat in the wide space at the back of the house with the jacaranda trees sifting luminous blue petals upon them, and a quivering tall albizzia occupying what was still undark of the sky. In the kitchen yard, helping Cookie hose the drains with water, or feed his hens and ducks, they laughed, gay and childish. Later at night they did downstairs what we did upstairs, lay back in canvas chairs or on the ground and looked at the stars, hugely bright. Hour by hour the stars increased in dazzle until in the fixed trance of gazing even the S.E.P.s, who took so much for
granted, would wonder and exclaim whether it was real gold in the sky, and how to reach the uncounted millions poised glowing above them.

And when the moon, out in her brusque full way, peremptory rode the sky and all the world went silver, and from the Malay kampongs behind their banana clumps rose moon-agitated soft drumming, and the wailing for love, throaty songs supplicated unbearably in the swooning soft night; when the whole town huddled spellbound with desirous softness and the insistent drumming, and the Chinese and Indian shopkeepers in their close-shuttered rooms above the shops turned fiercely upon their wives in sudden urge; the S.E.P.s would wander up and down the gravel path, restless silver statues come to life treading a silver world. Then Cookie would turn on the radio full blast, and to drown the soft insistent stream of song and the drum beating steady as a living pulse, they all sang together ‘Rose, Rose, I love you’.

And laughed and jeered at each other, little boys who want to be tough.

At eleven the radio was turned off, a concession to our rest. The guests would depart, lingering, throwing black velvet shadows from silver trunks and arms and heads, and the great glittering pale night belong once again to the Malay drums and their zigzag melody rising and falling in tune with the blood in urgent bodies.

*  *  *

Besides the S.E.P.s’ visits, it became a friendly habit for other people to drop upon us inoffensive protégès.

Our bills for electricity, water, and Cookie’s bills for food and especially butter, began to soar. I seemed to be eating more beef, pork, and cabbage, than a small hotel, and the three of us, con-genitally abstemious of fat, consumed two pounds of butter a week. I protested, but Cookie insisted that we ate more than we thought. Meanwhile his large wife swelled and rounded again, and it became evident that an eighth boisterous youngster would soon be acclaimed with red eggs.