Then Mamat took his seat on the dais beside the bride, and the punghulo passed about the betel-box. First, Busuk took out a syrah leaf smeared with lime and placed in it some broken fragments of the betel-nut, and chewed it until a bright red liquid oozed from the corners of her mouth. The others did the same.
Then the women brought garlands of flowers--red allamandas, yellow convolvulus, and pink hibiscus--and hung them about Busuk and Mamat, while the musicians outside beat their crocodile-hide drums in frantic haste.
The great feast began out in the sandy plaza before the houses. There was cock-fighting and kicking the ragga ball, wrestling and boxing, and some gambling among the elders.
Toward night Busuk was put in a rattan chair and carried by the young men, while Mamat and the girls walked by her side, a mile away, where her husband's big cadjang-covered prau lay moored. It was to take them to his bungalow at Bander Bahru. The band went, too, and the boys shot off guns and fire-crackers all the way, until Busuk's head swam, and she was so happy that the tears came into her eyes and trickled down through the rouge on her cheeks.
So ended Busuk's childhood. She was not quite fifteen when she became mistress of her own little palm-thatched home. But it was not play housekeeping with her; for she must weave the sarongs for Mamat and herself for clothes and for spreads at night, and the weaving of each cost her twenty days' hard labor. If she could weave an extra one from time to time, Mamat would take it up to Singapore and trade it at the bazaar for a pin for the hair or a sunshade with a white fringe about it.
Then there were the shell-fish and prawns on the sea-shore to be found, greens to be sought out in the jungle, and the padi, or rice, to be weeded. She must keep a plentiful supply of betel-nut and lemon leaves for Mamat and herself, and one day there was a little boy to look after and make tiny sarongs for.
So, long before the time that our American girls are out of school, and about the time they are putting on long dresses, Busuk was a woman. Her shoulders were bent, her face wrinkled, her teeth decayed and falling out from the use of the syrah leaf. She had settled the engagement of her oldest boy to a little girl of two years in a neighboring kampong, and was dusting out the things in the camphor-wood chest, preparatory to the great occasion.
