The Soul of a People Part 11

CHAPTER XIV

WOMEN--I

'Her cheek is more beautiful than the dawn, her eyes are deeper than the river pools; when she loosens her hair upon her shoulders, it is as night coming over the hills.'--_Burmese Love-Song._

If you were to ask a Burman 'What is the position of women in Burma?' he would reply that he did not know what you meant. Women have no position, no fixed relation towards men beyond that fixed by the fact that women are women and men are men. They differ a great deal in many ways, so a Burman would say; men are better in some things, women are better in others; if they have a position, their relative superiority in certain things determines it. How else should it be determined?

If you say by religion, he laughs, and asks what religion has to do with such things? Religion is a culture of the soul; it is not concerned with the relationship of men and women. If you say by law, he says that law has no more to do with it than religion. In the eye of the law both are alike. 'You wouldn't have one law for a man and another for a woman?' he asks.

In the life of the Buddha nothing is said upon the subject. The great teacher never committed himself to an opinion as to whether men or women were the highest. He had men disciples, he had women disciples; he honoured both. Nowhere in any of his sayings can anything be found to show that he made any difference between them. That monks should be careful and avoid intercourse with women is merely the counterpart of the order that nuns should be careful in their intercourse with men.

That man's greatest attraction is woman does not infer wickedness in woman; that woman's greatest attraction is man does not show that man is a devil. Wickedness is a thing of your own heart. If he could be sure that his desire towards women was dead, a monk might see them as much as he liked. The desire is the enemy, not the woman; therefore a woman is not d.a.m.ned because by her man is often tempted to evil; therefore a woman is not praised because by her a man may be led to better thoughts.

She is but the outer and unconscious influence.

If, for instance, you cannot see a precipice without wishing to throw yourself down, you blame not the precipice, but your giddiness; and if you are wise you avoid precipices in future. You do not rail against steep places because you have a bad circulation. So it is with women: you should not contemn women because they rouse a devil in man.

And it is the same with man. Men and women are alike subject to the eternal laws. And they are alike subject to the laws of man; in no material points, hardly even in minor points, does the law discriminate against women.

The law as regards marriage and inheritance and divorce will come each in its own place. It is curiously the same both for the man and the woman.

The criminal law was the same for both; I have tried to find any difference, and this is all I have found: A woman's life was less valuable than a man's. The price of the body, as it is called, of a woman was less than that of a man. If a woman were accidentally killed, less compensation had to be paid than for a man. I asked a Burman about this once.

'Why is this difference?' I said. 'Why does the law discriminate?'

'It isn't the law,' he said, 'it is a fact. A woman is worth less than a man in that way. A maidservant can be hired for less than a manservant, a daughter can claim less than a son. They cannot do so much work; they are not so strong. If they had been worth more, the law would have been the other way; of course they are worth less.'

And so this sole discrimination is a fact, not dogma. It is a fact, no doubt, everywhere. No one would deny it. The pecuniary value of a woman is less than that of a man. As to the soul's value, that is not a question of law, which confines itself to material affairs. But I suppose all laws have been framed out of the necessities of mankind. It was the incessant fighting during the times when our laws grew slowly into shape, the necessity of not allowing the possession of land, and the armed wealth that land gave, to fall into the weaker hands of women, that led to our laws of inheritance.

Laws then were governed by the necessity of war, of subjecting everything else to the ability to fight. Consequently, as women were not such good fighters as men, they went to the wall. But feudalism never obtained at all in Burma. What fighting they did was far less severe than that of our ancestors, was not the dominant factor in the position, and consequently woman did not suffer.

She has thus been given the inestimable boon of freedom. Freedom from sacerdotal dogma, from secular law, she has always had.

And so, in order to preserve the life of the people, it has never been necessary to pa.s.s laws treating woman unfairly as regards inheritance; and as religion has left her free to find her own position, so has the law of the land.

And yet the Burman man has a confirmed opinion that he is better than a woman, that men are on the whole superior as a s.e.x to women. 'We may be inferior in some ways,' he will tell you. 'A woman may steal a march on us here and there, but in the long-run the man will always win. Women have no patience.'

I have heard this said over and over again, even by women, that they have less patience than a man. We have often supposed differently. Some Burmans have even supposed that a woman must be reincarnated as a man to gain a step in holiness. I do not mean that they think men are always better than women, but that the best men are far better than the best women, and there are many more of them. However all this may be, it is only an opinion. Neither in their law, nor in their religion, nor--what is far more important--in their daily life, do they acknowledge any inferiority in women beyond those patent weaknesses of body that are, perhaps, more differences than inferiorities.

And so she has always had fair-play, from religion, from law, and from her fellow man and woman.

She has been bound by no ties, she has had perfect freedom to make for herself just such a life as she thinks best fitted for her. She has had no frozen ideals of a long dead past held up to her as eternal copies.

She has been allowed to change as her world changed, and she has lived in a very real world--a world of stern facts, not fancies. You see, she has had to fight her own way; for the same laws that made woman lower than man in Europe compensated her to a certain extent by protection and guidance. In Burma she has been neither confined nor guided. In Europe and India for very long the idea was to make woman a hot-house plant, to see that no rough winds struck her, that no injuries overtook her. In Burma she has had to look out for herself: she has had freedom to come to grief as well as to come to strength. You see, all such laws cut both ways. Freedom to do ill must accompany freedom to do well. You cannot have one without the other. The Burmese woman has had both.

Ideals act for good as well as for evil; if they cramp all progress, they nevertheless tend to the sustentation of a certain level of thought. She has had none. Whatever she is, she has made herself, finding under the varying circ.u.mstances of life what is the best for her; and as her surroundings change, so will she. What she was a thousand years ago I do not care, what she may be a thousand years hence I do not know; it is of what she is to-day that I have tried to know and write.

Children in Burma have, I think, a very good time when they are young.

Parentage in Burma has never degenerated into a sort of slavery. It has never been supposed that gaiety and goodness are opposed. And so they grow up little merry naked things, sprawling in the dust of the gardens, sleeping in the sun with their arms round the village dogs, very sedate, very humorous, very rarely crying. Boys and girls when they are babies grow up together, but with the schooldays comes a division. All the boys go to school at the monastery without the walls, and there learn in noisy fashion their arithmetic, letters, and other useful knowledge. But little girls have nowhere to go. They cannot go to the monasteries, these are for boys alone, and the nunneries are very scarce. For twenty monasteries there is not one nunnery. Women do not seem to care to learn to become nuns as men do to become monks. Why this is so I cannot tell, but there is no doubt of the fact. And so there are no schools for girls as there are for boys, and consequently the girls are not well educated as a rule. In great towns there are, of course, regular schools for girls, generally for girls and boys together; but in the villages these very seldom exist. The girls may learn from their mothers how to read and write, but most of them cannot do so. It is an exception in country places to find a girl who can read, as it is to find a boy who cannot.

If there were more nunneries, there would be more education among the women; here is cause and effect. But there are not, so the little girls work instead. While their brothers are in the monasteries, the girls are learning to weave and herd cattle, drawing water, and collecting firewood. They begin very young at this work, but it is very light; they are never overworked, and so it does them no harm usually, but good.

The daughters of better-cla.s.s people, such as merchants, and clerks, and advocates, do not, of course, work at field labour. They usually learn to read and write at home, and they weave, and many will draw water. For to draw water is to go to the well, and the well is the great meeting-place of the village. As they fill their jars they lean over the curb and talk, and it is here that is told the latest news, the latest flirtation, the little scandal of the place. Very few men or boys come for water; carrying is not their duty, and there is a proper place for flirtation. So the girls have the well almost to themselves.

Almost every girl can weave. In many houses there are looms where the girls weave their dresses and those of their parents; and many girls have stalls in the bazaar. Of this I will speak later. Other duties are the husking of rice and the making of cheroots. Of course, in richer households there will be servants to do all this; but even in them the daughter will frequently weave either for herself or her parents. Almost every girl will do something, if only to pa.s.s the time.

You see, they have no accomplishments. They do not sing, nor play, nor paint. It must never be forgotten that their civilization is relatively a thousand years behind ours. Accomplishments are part of the polish that a civilization gives, and this they have not yet reached.

Accomplishments are also the means to fill up time otherwise unoccupied; but very few Burmese girls have any time on their hands. There is no leisured cla.s.s, and there are very few girls who have not to help, in one way or another, at the upkeep of the household.

Mr. Rudyard Kipling tells of an astonishing young lady who played the banjo. He has been more fortunate than myself, for I have never had such good luck. They have no accomplishments at all. Housekeeping they have not very much of. You see, houses are small, and households also are small; there is very little furniture; and as the cooking is all the same, there is not much to learn in that way. I fear, too, that their houses could not compete as models of neatness with any other nation.

Tidiness is one of the last gifts of civilization. We now pride ourselves on our order; we forget how very recent an accomplishment it is. To them it will come with the other gifts of age, for it must never be forgotten that they are a very young people--only children, big children--learning very slowly the lessons of experience and knowledge.

When they are between eight and fourteen years of age the boys become monks for a time, as every boy must, and they have a great festival at their entrance into the monastery. Girls do not enter nunneries, but they, too, have a great feast in their honour. They have their ears bored. It is a festival for a girl of great importance, this ear-boring, and, according to the wealth of the parents, it is accompanied by pwes and other rejoicings.

A little girl, the daughter of a shopkeeper here in this town, had her ears bored the other day, and there were great rejoicings. There was a pwe open to all for three nights, and there were great quant.i.ties of food, and sweets, and many presents given away, and on the last night the river was illuminated. There was a boat anch.o.r.ed in mid-stream, and from this were launched myriads of tiny rafts, each with a little lamp on board. The lamps gleamed bright with golden light as they drifted on the bosom of the great water, a moving line of living fire. There were little boats, too, with the outlines marked with lamps, and there were paG.o.das and miniature houses all floating, floating down the river, till, in far distance by the promontory, the lamps flickered out one by one, and the river fell asleep again.

'There is only one great festival in a girl's life,' a woman told me.

'We try to make it as good as we can. Boys have many festivals, girls have but one. It is only just that it should be good.'

And so they grow up very quiet, very sedate, looking on the world about them with very clear eyes. It is strange, talking to Burmese girls, to see how much they know and understand of the world about them. It is to them no great mystery, full of unimaginable good and evil, but a world that they are learning to understand, and where good and evil are never unmixed. Men are to them neither angels nor devils, but just men, and so the world does not hold for them the disappointments, the disillusionings, that await those who do not know. They have their dreams--who shall doubt it?--dreams of him who shall love them, whom they shall love, who shall make life one great glory to them; but their dreams are dreams that can come true. They do not frame to themselves ideals out of their own ignorance and imagine these to be good, but they keep their eyes wide open to the far more beautiful realities that are around them every day. They know that a living lover is greater, and truer, and better than any ideal of a girl's dream. They live in a real world, and they know that it is good.

In time the lover comes. There is a delightful custom all through Burma, an inst.i.tution, in fact, called 'courting-time.' It is from nine till ten o'clock, more especially on moonlight nights, those wonderful tropic nights, when the whole world lies in a silver dream, when the little wandering airs that touch your cheek like a caress are heavy with the scent of flowers, and your heart comes into your throat for the very beauty of life.

There is in front of every house a veranda, raised perhaps three feet from the ground, and there the girl will sit in the shadow of the eaves, sometimes with a friend, but usually alone; and her suitors will come and stand by the veranda, and talk softly in little broken sentences, as lovers do. There maybe be many young men come, one by one, if they mean business, with a friend if it be merely a visit of courtesy. And the girl will receive them all, and will talk to them all; will laugh with a little humorous knowledge of each man's peculiarities; and she may give them cheroots, of her own making; and, for one perhaps, for one, she will light the cheroot herself first, and thus kiss him by proxy.

And is the girl alone? Well, yes. To all intents and purposes she is alone; but there is always someone near, someone within call, for the veranda is free to all. She cannot tell who may come, and some men, as we know, are but wolves in sheep's clothing. Usually marriages are arranged by the parents. Girls are not very different here to elsewhere; they are very biddable, and ready to do what their mothers tell them, ready to believe that it is the best. And so if a lad comes wooing, and can gain the mother's ear, he can usually win the girl's affection, too; but I think there are more exceptions here than elsewhere. Girls are freer; they fall in love of their own accord oftener than elsewhere; they are very impulsive, full of pa.s.sion. Love is a very serious matter, and they are not trained in self-restraint.

There are very many romances played out every day in the dusk beside the well, in the deep shadows of the palm-groves, in the luminous nights by the river sh.o.r.e--romances that end sometimes well, sometimes in terrible tragedies. For they are a very pa.s.sionate people; the language is full of little love-songs, songs of a man to a girl, of a girl to a man. 'No girl,' a woman once told me, 'no good, quiet girl would tell a man she loved him first.' It may be so; if this be true, I fear there are many girls here who are not good and quiet. How many romances have I not seen in which the wooing began with the girl, with a little note perhaps, with a flower, with a message sent by someone whom she could trust! Of course many of these turned out well. Parents are good to their children, and if they can, they will give their daughter the husband of her choice. They remember what youth is--nay, they themselves never grow old, I think; they never forget what once was to them now is to their children. So if it be possible all may yet go well. Social differences are not so great as with us, and the barrier is easily overcome. I have often known servants in a house marry the daughters, and be taken into the family; but, of course, sometimes things do not go so smoothly. And then? Well, then there is usually an elopement, and a ten days' scandal; and sometimes, too, there is an elopement for no reason at all save that hot youth cannot abide the necessary delay.

For life is short, and though to-day be to us, who can tell for the morrow? During the full moon there is no night, only a change to silver light from golden; and the forest is full of delight. There are wood-cutters' huts in the ravines where the water falls, soft beds of torn bracken and fragrant gra.s.ses where great trees make a shelter from the heat; and for food, that is easily arranged. A basket of rice with a little salt-fish and spices is easily hidden in a favourable place.

You only want a jar to cook it, and there is enough for two for a week; or it is brought day by day by some trusted friend to a place previously agreed upon.

All up and down the forest there are flowers for her hair, scarlet dak blossoms and orchid sprays and jasmine stars; and for occupation through the hours each has a new world to explore full of wonderful undreamt-of discoveries, lit with new light and mysterious with roseate shadows, a world of 'beautiful things made new' for those forest children. So that when the confidante, an aunt maybe or a sister, meets them by the sacred fig-tree on the hill, and tells them that all difficulties are removed, and their friends called together for the marriage, can you wonder that it is not without regret that they fare forth from that enchanted land to ordinary life again?

It is, as I have said, not always the man who is the proposer of the flight. Nay, I think indeed that it is usually the girl. 'Men have more patience.'

I had a Burmese servant, a boy, who may have been twenty, and he had been with me a year, and was beginning to be really useful. He had at last grasped the idea that electro-plate should not be cleaned with monkey-brand soap, and he could be trusted not to put up rifle cartridges for use with a double-barrelled gun; and he chose this time to fall in love with the daughter of the headman of a certain village where I was in camp.

He had good excuse, for she was a delicious little maiden with great coils of hair, and the voice of a wood-pigeon cooing in the forest, and she was very fond of him, without a doubt.

So one evening he came to me and said that he must leave me--that he wanted to get married, and could not possibly delay. Then I spoke to him with all that depth of wisdom we are so ready to display for the benefit of others. I pointed out to him that he was much too young, that she was much too young also--she was not eighteen--and that there was absolutely nothing for them to marry on. I further pointed out how ungrateful it would be of him to leave me; that he had been paid regularly for a year, and that it was not right that now, when he was at last able to do something besides destroy my property, he should go away.

The boy listened to all I had to say, and agreed with it all, and made the most fervent and sincere promise to be wise; and he went away after dinner to see the girl and tell her, and when I awoke in the morning my other servants told me the boy had not returned.

Shortly afterwards the headman came to say that his daughter had also disappeared. They had fled, those two, into the forest, and for a week we heard nothing. At last one evening, as I sat under the great fig-tree by my tent, there came to me the mother of the girl, and she sat down before me, and said she had something of great importance to impart: and this was that all had been arranged between the families, who had found work for the boy whereby he might maintain himself and his wife, and the marriage was arranged. But the boy would not return as long as I was in camp there, for he was bitterly ashamed of his broken vows and afraid to meet my anger. And so the mother begged me to go away as soon as I could, that the young couple might return. I explained that I was not angry at all, that the boy could return without any fear; on the contrary, that I should be pleased to see him and his wife. And, at the old lady's request, I wrote a Burmese letter to that effect, and she went away delighted.

They must have been in hiding close by, for it was early next morning that the boy came into my tent alone and very much abashed, and it was some little time before he could recover himself and talk freely as he would before, for he was greatly ashamed of himself.

But, after all, could he help it?

If you can imagine the tropic night, and the boy, full of high resolve, pa.s.sing up the village street, now half asleep, and the girl, with shining eyes, coming to him out of the hibiscus shadows, and whispering in his ear words--words that I need not say--if you imagine all that, you will understand how it was that I lost my servant.

They both came to see me later on in the day after the marriage, and there was no bashfulness about either of them then. They came hand-in-hand, with the girl's father and mother and some friends, and she told me it was all her fault: she could not wait.