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.
He counted the cost of anything, done or undone, as small if it only brought in pice; pice sufficient to procure "toddy,"[2] the hot, horrible, poisonous stuff kept in the little shop by a Chinaman in one of the narrow, tortuous bye-lanes of the native quarter. To him it mattered nothing that his children had oftentimes not enough to eat, and that the lines about his wife's patient mouth deepened.
[2] "Toddy" is composed of the juice of palms, and sold in those shops when fermented.
The passion for drink possessed him, to the exclusion of all other feelings.