on, let’s go up and hold that dance they’ve been worrying us about every night.”
nine o'clock
“Say,” the niece said as she and Jenny mounted to the deck, “remember that thing we traded for the other night? the one you let me use for the one I let you use?”
“I guess so,” Jenny answered. “I remember trading.”
“Have you used it yet?”
“I never can think of it,” Jenny confessed. “I never can remember what it was you told me. . . . Besides, I’ve got another one, now.”
“You have? Who told it to you?”
“The popeyed man. That Englishman.”
“Major Ayers?”
“Uhuh. Last night we was talking and he kept on saying for us to go to Mandeville to-day. He kept on saying it. And so this morning he acted like he thought I meant we was going. He acted like he was mad.”
“What was it he said?” Jenny told her—a mixture of pidgin English and Hindustani that Major Ayers must have picked up along the Singapore water front, or mayhap at some devious and doubtful place in the Straits, but after Jenny had repeated it, it didn’t sound like anything at all.
“What?” the niece asked. Jenny said it again.
“It don’t sound like anything, to me,” the niece said. “Is that the way he said it?”
“That’s what it sounded like to me,” Jenny replied.
The niece said curiously: “Men sure do swear at you a lot. They’re always cursing you. What do you do to them, anyway?”
“I don’t do anything to them,” Jenny answered. “I’m just talking to them.”
