THE VIGIL OF MAH MAY.
MAH MAY was a little Burmese girl who kept a small stall filled with cheroots in one of the crowded many-coloured streets of Rangoon. There she sat all through the sultry, languorous days smoking and waiting, with philosophical calm, for customers; now and then a great, big, well-fed looking Indian would stop and handle her goods, and, grumbling perhaps a little, would eventually buy; or a lean Chinaman, in baggy blue trousers, would pause and smile and talk awhile; or some little naked child would come and beg one for nothing; or the black coolies, their silver belts glittering in the sunlight, would cluster round and bargain and quarrel among themselves, perhaps, in the end, throwing her goods back to her with no very complimentary language; or a "Chetty,"[1] airily attired in scanty white muslin, his shaved head protected by a big cotton umbrella, would come and haggle over the annas as a poor Burman would never dream of doing; then, again, a well-to-do woman of her own race, dressed in silk, and with gold bracelets on her wrists, would purchase, but they were always, as Mah May used to say with a shake of her small head, the meanest of all.
She was a bright little girl, though very poor; often hungry, and always wretchedly clad.
For two years past she had squatted behind her tray, in the hot, hard, cruel glare, when the sun beat on the flat-roofed white houses mercilessly; when even the river, with its forests of ships, seemed to cease to flow; when all things were gasping and weary and the gharry wallahs slept soundly, and the poor lean ponies tried to flick the flies off their backs with their tails; when the Indian shopkeepers stretched themselves on wooden beds just in the shadow of their door-ways and snored away, dreaming of rupees and curry; while only the pariah dogs scratched and smelt in the road for something to eat. No one stirred; the drowsy influence of the heat seemed universal. Or on the dull wet days, when the sky was clouded and rain poured down, soaking everything through and through, and the thin coloured dresses clung pitifully round their owners' dark forms, and nobody had time to think of buying as they passed on in the warm, damp, oppressive atmosphere. Still Mah May sat, no matter what the season, rolling her cheroots, cutting betel chews, and crooning some little song to herself. At mid-day she ate some rice, and got a draught of water from a pump not far distant. Often some one was kind, and gave her some fruit or a cake; oftener they were unkind, but oftener still they were indifferent.
It was a hard life—very, and she was only seventeen. Yet was she content. Nature had been her nurse. The sun and the rain had made her what she was—a hardy, honest, upright little soul, envying and hating no one.
When the shadows grew long and the green shutters of the shops closed, Mah May rolled up her wares and wended her way homewards through the noisy, many-hued crowds to a miserable wooden hut, which stood in dirty yellow water, spanned by a rotten plank, and was situated in one of the poorest and most squalid quarters of the town—a quarter in which poverty, in its most hideous form, stalked. Half-clothed men, women and children of all ages, dwelt together there, and kept life in them as best they could.
In the huts there was scarce one piece of furniture, save perhaps a bed or a roll of matting or a ragged purdah.
The scorpions, the white ants, and the great toads held high revel. Amidst rows, hard words, evil things, cries of little children, and growls of half-starved dogs Mah May dwelt, and was happy.
She did not know of any better life than hers. The day passed in the fresh air under the changeless azure of the skies and the night curled up in a corner of the hut, with the purple stars looking down through some chink in the roof; and knowing of any other, it is doubtful if she would have cared to exchange.
Mah Khine, a black-browed woman whom Mah May had lived with as long as she could remember, was very good and kind to her in her own way; but she had many children tugging at her skirt, and her life was a very hard one. She was married to an Indian who had nearly all the faults of his by no means faultless race; his past had been bad, his present was even more so.