Mah Me is smoking a big Burmese cigar. The Burmese cigars look very formidable, but in reality they are the mildest of weeds. But the Burmans are devoted to them, and only cease to smoke when they sleep. To-night is her first night “at home to suitors.” A dozen or more will probably come. She will give them pickled tea, and they will chat and sing and play upon their tinkling native instruments. Every Burman is a musician, skilful and inveterate, if somewhat primitive. The Burmese, unlike the other Oriental peoples, do not drink tea, they eat it. I dislike tea as a beverage, but I liked it as a viand. The Burmese pickle it with oil and garlic. As rice is the staff of Burmese life, so is pickled tea the dish of Burmese ceremony; so Mah Me gives her suitors pickled tea. Night after night they come, until she smiles on one more than on his fellows, then their ranks thin; the favoured remains, the others go; the betrothal is accomplished; the mothers of the young couple confer; the bridegroom presents his bride with a dowry; the marriage is celebrated by a feast; the bride and bridegroom sit side by side and eat from one dish. No marriage ceremony could be simpler, none could be more significant. On the marriage night, the friends who have partaken of the marriage feast pelt the house with stones. This musicless serenade is kept up for an incredible time, but the silence and the dark come at last, and the young husband and wife drift quietly into the happiness of peaceful Burmese married life.
I have sometimes thought, when looking at the Burmese women, that perhaps one secret of the constant affection of the Burmese husbands was the constant neatness of the Burmese wives. No one, I believe, has ever seen a Burmese woman untidy; their persons and their garments are always fresh, bright, and spotless.
Some one asked me recently, “what about divorce in Burmah?” I never heard of divorce in Burmah. I am not, of course, prepared to say that there is no such thing; but certainly it is very rare. When it is necessary, I daresay they deal with it as simply and as sensibly as they do with marriage. But the only divorce of which they are very generally cognisant is the great divorce, the divorce decreed by death.
BHÂMO WOMEN. Page 99.
We have conquered the Burmese; true, but they have conquered the marriage question, they have solved it,—they have conquered it and solved it without knowing of its existence. They are heathens; true, but they are happy in their home lives. May they never learn the weird Western secret of marital misery. There is much for us to learn in the Orient, but none of it is more important than the beautiful lesson of married happiness that is taught by Burmah. There is much in Burmah that is most imperfect, but in the relative positions of the sexes it is ideal.
CHAPTER XII
A JAUNT IN A HOUSE-BOAT—THROUGH THE HOME OF THE WILD WHITE ROSE
I have been lying in a steamer chair, in which I have crossed half the large bodies of water in the world, and trying to recall the absolute stillness of the night I drove from the theatre in Shanghai to the canal up which we were going into China,—Chinese China, I mean; not semi-European China! Nothing moved. The crunching of our carriage wheels was the only sound we heard. The pungent Chinese flowers scented the air, and the clear moonlight brocaded the white ground with sharp black shadows of the blue wistarias.