No man is perfect. Her master has confessed that he once or twice was so provoked at such a performance as to give her a tap on the nose, whereupon she went and “sulked in a corner,” as he expressed it; but how could he tell what she was thinking?
Some said she whimpered for her mother on such occasions. The Burmans say, “When the child trips, it cries for its mother”; but it is not certain that she remembered her early days, for she was but a young thing when she was caught and taken to a man’s house. Her master may well have been an indifferent substitute for an indulgent parent; but he was all she had, and his jam was very good.
He was not allowed to monopolise her young affections. She had not been long in Kyauktan before she had explored the town and even found her way to the bazaar or market, where the stall-holders, male and female, welcomed her with open arms.
[291] ]To tell Europeans of a bear running about loose and being welcomed with open arms in the markets may seem a fairy tale; and though in a narrative of fact it is permissible to tell what is stranger than fiction, still it may be as well to explain a few things that Europeans cannot easily know. The Kyauktan bazaar was a retail market, where people were never in a hurry, quite different from Covent Garden; and the bears of Burma have different habits from those of Europe. They are smaller too; but that is the least of the difference.
In Europe, if we mean to be rude and impute rudeness, we call a man a bear. To torture bears was a familiar sport, not long ago—bear-baiting. We still use the word; and big bears ignominiously led captive may still be seen, bemocked to make a foolish holiday. All this implies a hostile attitude which is never seen in Burma.
Perhaps a grim passage in Gibbon’s History may be quoted to show the contrast. It is in chapter xxv, and concerns the great Emperor Valentinian (A.D. 364–375). He had put his brother Valens on the throne at Constantinople, and taken charge of the rowdier end of the world himself.
“In the government of his household, or of his [292] ]empire, slight, or even imaginary offences, a hasty word, a casual omission, an involuntary delay, were chastised by a sentence of immediate death. The expressions which issued the most readily from the mouth of the emperor of the West were, ‘Strike off his head’; ‘Burn him alive’; ‘Let him be beaten with clubs till he expires’; and his most favoured ministers soon understood that, by a rash attempt to dispute or suspend the execution of his sanguinary commands, they might involve themselves in the guilt and punishment of disobedience. The repeated gratification of this savage justice hardened the mind of Valentinian against pity and remorse; and the sallies of passion were confirmed by the habits of cruelty. He could behold with calm satisfaction the convulsive agonies of torture and death: he reserved his friendship for those faithful servants whose temper was the most congenial to his own. The merit of Maximin, who had slaughtered the noblest families of Rome, was rewarded with the royal approbation and the prefecture of Gaul. Two fierce and enormous bears, distinguished by the appellations of Innocence and Mica Aurea, could alone deserve to share the favour of Maximin. The cages of those trusty guards were always placed near the bedchamber of Valentinian, who [293] ]frequently amused his eyes with the grateful spectacle of seeing them tear and devour the bleeding limbs of the malefactors who were abandoned to their rage. Their diet and exercises were carefully inspected by the Roman emperor; and, when Innocence had earned her discharge by a long course of meritorious service, the faithful animal was again restored to the freedom of her native woods.”
Unlike those occidental savages, the heroine of our history, if asked to eat the flesh of men or even butchers’ meat, would have felt as much insulted as Bernard Shaw himself. I do not mean that either she or “the Shaw” would rather starve than nibble a chicken; but that their tastes were delicate, and they preferred cereals and vegetables and fruits and sweets to any kind of carcasses.
The Burmans call the bear “wetwun,” the governor or minister of the pigs, the “gentleman pig”; and sometimes say, between jest and earnest, that pigs and bears are good Buddhists. That is because they are not murderous, though strong. It is only in self-defence that they ever do hurt. They live in general without taking life; and a nice she-bear that was sleek and tame was a treat to see, especially as she was not proud, the [294] ]unpardonable sin in Mongolian eyes. She was ever willing to accept little tit-bits of fruit and to stand and be caressed by anybody.
The woods were near. No doubt she often lifted up her eyes in that direction; but the sweet things of the table and the excitements of the bazaar—all the comforts of Charing Cross, so to speak—kept her from trying to escape.