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6

The morning sunlight slanted up the maidan and struck, yellow as
goldleaf, against the white face of the bungalow. Four black-
purple crows swooped down and perched on the veranda rail, waiting
their chance to dart in and steal the bread and butter that Ko S'la
had set down beside Flory's bed. Flory crawled through the
mosquito net, shouted to Ko S'la to bring him some gin, and then
went into the bathroom and sat for a while in a zinc tub of water
that was supposed to be cold. Feeling better after the gin, he
shaved himself. As a rule he put off shaving until the evening,
for his beard was black and grew quickly.

While Flory was sitting morosely in his bath, Mr Macgregor, in
shorts and singlet on the bamboo mat laid for the purpose in his
bedroom, was struggling with Numbers 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 of
Nordenflycht's 'Physical Jerks for the Sedentary'. Mr Macgregor
never, or hardly ever, missed his morning exercises. Number 8
(flat on the back, raise legs to the perpendicular without bending
knees) was downright painful for a man of forty-three; Number 9
(flat on the back, rise to a sitting posture and touch toes with
tips of fingers) was even worse. No matter, one must keep fit! As
Mr Macgregor lunged painfully in the direction of his toes, a
brick-red shade flowed upwards from his neck and congested his face
with a threat of apoplexy. The sweat gleamed on his large, tallowy
breasts. Stick it out, stick it out! At all costs one must keep
fit. Mohammed Ali, the bearer, with Mr Macgregor's clean clothes
across his arm, watched through the half-open door. His narrow,
yellow, Arabian face expressed neither comprehension nor curiosity.
He had watched these contortions--a sacrifice, he dimly imagined,
to some mysterious and exacting god--every morning for five years.

At the same time, too, Westfield, who had gone out early, was
leaning against the notched and ink-stained table of the police
station, while the fat Sub-inspector interrogated a suspect whom
two constables were guarding. The suspect was a man of forty, with
a grey, timorous face, dressed only in a ragged longyi kilted to
the knee, beneath which his lank, curved shins were speckled with
tick-bites.

'Who is this fellow?' said Westfield.

'Thief, sir. We catch him in possession of this ring with two
emeralds very-dear. No explanation. How could he--poor coolie--
own a emerald ring? He have stole it.'

He turned ferociously upon the suspect, advanced his face tomcat-
fashion till it was almost touching the other's, and roared in an
enormous voice:

'You stole the ring!'

'No.'

'You are an old offender!'

'No.'

'You have been in prison!'

'No.'

'Turn round!' bellowed the Sub-inspector on an inspiration. 'Bend
over!'

The suspect turned his grey face in agony towards Westfield, who
looked away. The two constables seized him, twisted him round and
bent him over; the Sub-inspector tore off his longyi, exposing his
buttocks.

'Look at this, sir!' He pointed to some scars. 'He have been
flogged with bamboos. He is an old offender. THEREFORE he stole
the ring!'

'All right, put him in the clink,' said Westfield moodily, as he
lounged away from the table with his hands in his pockets. At the
bottom of his heart he loathed running in these poor devils of
common thieves. Dacoits, rebels--yes; but not these poor cringing
rats! 'How many have you got in the clink now, Maung Ba?' he said.

'Three, sir.'

The lock-up was upstairs, a cage surrounded by six-inch wooden
bars, guarded by a constable armed with a carbine. It was very
dark, stifling hot, and quite unfurnished, except for an earth
latrine that stank to heaven. Two prisoners were squatting at the
bars, keeping their distance from a third, an Indian coolie, who
was covered from head to foot with ringworm like a coat of mail. A
stout Burmese woman, wife of a constable, was kneeling outside the
cage ladling rice and watery dahl into tin pannikins.

'Is the food good?' said Westfield.

'It is good, most holy one,' chorused the prisoners.

The Government provided for the prisoners' food at the rate of two
annas and a half per meal per man, out of which the constable's
wife looked to make a profit of one anna.

Flory went outside and loitered down the compound, poking weeds
into the ground with his stick. At that hour there were beautiful
faint colours in everything--tender green of leaves, pinkish brown
of earth and tree-trunks--like aquarelle washes that would vanish
in the later glare. Down on the maidan flights of small, low-
flying brown doves chased one another to and fro, and bee-eaters,
emerald-green, curvetted like slow swallows. A file of sweepers,
each with his load half hidden beneath his garment, were marching
to some dreadful dumping-hole that existed on the edge of the
jungle. Starveling wretches, with stick-like limbs and knees too
feeble to be straightened, draped in earth-coloured rags, they were
like a procession of shrouded skeletons walking.

The mali was breaking ground for a new flower-bed, down by the
pigeon-cote that stood near the gate. He was a lymphatic, half-
witted Hindu youth, who lived his life in almost complete silence,
because he spoke some Manipur dialect which nobody else understood,
not even his Zerbadi wife. His tongue was also a size too large
for his mouth. He salaamed low to Flory, covering his face with
his hand, then swung his mamootie aloft again and hacked at the dry
ground with heavy, clumsy strokes, his tender back-muscles quivering.

A sharp grating scream that sounded like 'Kwaaa!' came from the
servants quarters. Ko S'la's wives had begun their morning
quarrel. The tame fighting cock, called Nero, strutted zigzag down
the path, nervous of Flo, and Ba Pe came out with a bowl of paddy
and they fed Nero and the pigeons. There were more yells from the
servants' quarters, and the gruffer voices of men trying to stop
the quarrel. Ko S'la suffered a great deal from his wives. Ma Pu,
the first wife, was a gaunt hard-faced woman, stringy from much
child-bearing, and Ma Yi, the 'little wife', was a fat, lazy cat
some years younger. The two women fought incessantly when Flory
was in headquarters and they were together. Once when Ma Pu was
chasing Ko S'la with a bamboo, he had dodged behind Flory for
protection, and Flory had received a nasty blow on the leg.

Mr Macgregor was coming up the road, striding briskly and swinging
a thick walking-stick. He was dressed in khaki pagri-cloth shirt,
drill shorts and a pigsticker topi. Besides his exercises, he took
a brisk two-mile walk every morning when he could spare the time.

'Top o' the mornin' to ye!' he called to Flory in a hearty
matutinal voice, putting on an Irish accent. He cultivated a
brisk, invigorating, cold-bath demeanour at this hour of the
morning. Moreover, the libellous article in the Burmese Patriot,
which he had read overnight, had hurt him, and he was affecting a
special cheeriness to conceal this.

'Morning!' Flory called back as heartily as he could manage.

Nasty old bladder of lard! he thought, watching Mr Macgregor up the
road. How his bottom did stick out in those tight khaki shorts.
Like one of those beastly middle-aged scoutmasters, homosexuals
almost to a man, that you see photographs of in the illustrated
papers. Dressing himself up in those ridiculous clothes and
exposing his pudgy, dimpled knees, because it is the pukka sahib
thing to take exercise before breakfast--disgusting!

A Burman came up the hill, a splash of white and magenta. It was
Flory's clerk, coming from the tiny office, which was not far from
the church. Reaching the gate, he shikoed and presented a grimy
envelope, stamped Burmese-fashion on the point of the flap.

'Good morning, sir.'

'Good morning. What's this thing?'

'Local letter, your honour. Come this morning's post. Anonymous
letter, I think, sir.'

'Oh bother. All right, I'll be down to the office about eleven.'

Flory opened the letter. It was written on a sheet of foolscap,
and it ran:

MR JOHN FLORY,

SIR,--I the undersigned beg to suggest and WARN to your honour
certain useful pieces of information whereby your honour will be
much profited, sir.

Sir, it has been remarked in Kyauktada your honour's great
friendship and intimacy with Dr Veraswami, the Civil Surgeon,
frequenting with him, inviting him to your house, etc. Sir, we beg
to inform you that the said Dr Veraswami is NOT A GOOD MAN and in
no ways a worthy friend of European gentlemen. The doctor is
eminently dishonest, disloyal and corrupt public servant. Coloured
water is he providing to patients at the hospital and selling drugs
for own profit, besides many bribes, extortions, etc. Two
prisoners has he flogged with bamboos, afterwards rubbing chilis
into the place if relatives do not send money. Besides this he is
implicated with the Nationalist Party and lately provided material
for a very evil article which appeared in the Burmese Patriot
attacking Mr Macgregor, the honoured Deputy Commissioner.

He is also sleeping by force with female patients at the hospital.

Wherefore we are much hoping that your honour will ESCHEW same Dr
Veraswami and not consort with persons who can bring nothing but
evil upon your honour.

And shall ever pray for your honour's long health and prosperity.

(Signed) A FRIEND.

The letter was written in the shaky round hand of the bazaar
letter-writer, which resembled a copybook exercise written by a
drunkard. The letter-writer, however, would never have risen to
such a word as 'eschew'. The letter must have been dictated by a
clerk, and no doubt it came ultimately from U Po Kyin. From 'the
crocodile', Flory reflected.

He did not like the tone of the letter. Under its appearance of
servility it was obviously a covert threat. 'Drop the doctor or we
will make it hot for you', was what it said in effect. Not that
that mattered greatly; no Englishman ever feels himself in real
danger from an Oriental.

Flory hesitated with the letter in his hands. There are two things
one can do with an anonymous letter. One can say nothing about it,
or one can show it to the person whom it concerns. The obvious,
the decent course was to give the letter to Dr Veraswami and let
him take what action he chose.

And yet--it was safer to keep out of this business altogether. It
is so important (perhaps the most important of all the Ten Precepts
of the pukka sahib) not to entangle oneself in 'native' quarrels.
With Indians there must be no loyalty, no real friendship.
Affection, even love--yes. Englishmen do often love Indians--
native officers, forest rangers, hunters, clerks, servants. Sepoys
will weep like children when their colonel retires. Even intimacy
is allowable, at the right moments. But alliance, partisanship,
never! Even to know the rights and wrongs of a 'native' quarrel is
a loss of prestige.

If he published the letter there would be a row and an official
inquiry, and, in effect, he would have thrown in his lot with the
doctor against U Po Kyin. U Po Kyin did not matter, but there were
the Europeans; if he, Flory, were too conspicuously the doctor's
partisan, there might be hell to pay. Much better to pretend that
the letter had never reached him. The doctor was a good fellow,
but as to championing him against the full fury of pukka sahibdom--
ah, no, no! What shall it profit a man if he save his own soul and
lose the whole world? Flory began to tear the letter across. The
danger of making it public was very slight, very nebulous. But one
must beware of the nebulous dangers in India. Prestige, the breath
of life, is itself nebulous. He carefully tore the letter into
small pieces and threw them over the gate.

At this moment there was a terrified scream, quite different from
the voices of Ko S'la's wives. The mali lowered his mamootie and
gaped in the direction of the sound, and Ko S'la, who had also
heard it, came running bareheaded from the servants' quarters,
while Flo sprang to her feet and yapped sharply. The scream was
repeated. It came from the jungle behind the house, and it was an
English voice, a woman's, crying out in terror.

There was no way out of the compound by the back. Flory scrambled
over the gate and came down with his knee bleeding from a splinter.
He ran round the compound fence and into the jungle, Flo following.
Just behind the house, beyond the first fringe of bushes, there was
a small hollow, which, as there was a pool of stagnant water in it,
was frequented by buffaloes from Nyaunglebin. Flory pushed his way
through the bushes. In the hollow an English girl, chalk-faced,
was cowering against a bush, while a huge buffalo menaced her with
its crescent-shaped horns. A hairy calf, no doubt the cause of the
trouble, stood behind. Another buffalo, neck-deep in the slime of
the pool, looked on with mild prehistoric face, wondering what was
the matter.

The girl turned an agonized face to Flory as he appeared. 'Oh, do
be quick!' she cried, in the angry, urgent tone of people who are
frightened. 'Please! Help me! Help me!'

Flory was too astonished to ask any questions. He hastened towards
her, and, in default of a stick, smacked the buffalo sharply on the
nose. With a timid, loutish movement the great beast turned aside,
then lumbered off followed by the calf. The other buffalo also
extricated itself from the slime and lolloped away. The girl threw
herself against Flory, almost into his arms, quite overcome by her
fright.

'Oh, thank you, thank you! Oh, those dreadful things! What ARE
they? I thought they were going to kill me. What horrible
creatures! What ARE they?'

They're only water-buffaloes. They come from the village up
there.'

'Buffaloes?'

'Not wild buffaloes--bison, we call those. They're just a kind of
cattle the Burmans keep. I say, they've given you a nasty shock.
I'm sorry.'

She was still clinging closely to his arm, and he could feel her
shaking. He looked down, but he could not see her face, only the
top of her head, hatless, with yellow hair as short as a boy's.
And he could see one of the hands on his arm. It was long,
slender, youthful, with the mottled wrist of a schoolgirl. It was
several years since he had seen such a hand. He became conscious
of the soft, youthful body pressed against his own, and the warmth
breathing out of it; whereat something seemed to thaw and grow warm
within him.

'It's all right, they're gone,' he said. 'There's nothing to be
frightened of.'

The girl was recovering from her fright, and she stood a little
away from him, with one hand still on his arm. 'I'm all right,'
she said. 'It's nothing. I'm not hurt. They didn't touch me. It
was only their looking so awful.'

'They're quite harmless really. Their horns are set so far back
that they can't gore you. They're very stupid brutes. They only
pretend to show fight when they've got calves.'

They had stood apart now, and a slight embarrassment came over them
both immediately. Flory had already turned himself sidelong to
keep his birthmarked cheek away from her. He said:

'I say, this is a queer sort of introduction! I haven't asked yet
how you got here. Wherever did you come from--if it's not rude to
ask?'

'I just came out of my uncle's garden. It seemed such a nice
morning, I thought I'd go for a walk. And then those dreadful
things came after me. I'm quite new to this country, you see.'

'Your uncle? Oh, of course! You're Mr Lackersteen's niece. We
heard you were coming. I say, shall we get out on to the maidan?
There'll be a path somewhere. What a start for your first morning
in Kyauktada! This'll give you rather a bad impression of Burma,
I'm afraid.'

'Oh no; only it's all rather strange. How thick these bushes grow!
All kind of twisted together and foreign-looking. You could get
lost here in a moment. Is that what they call jungle?'

'Scrub jungle. Burma's mostly jungle--a green, unpleasant land, I
call it. I wouldn't walk through that grass if I were you. The
seeds get into your stockings and work their way into your skin.'

He let the girl walk ahead of him, feeling easier when she could
not see his face. She was tallish for a girl, slender, and wearing
a lilac-coloured cotton frock. From the way she moved her limbs he
did not think she could be much past twenty. He had not noticed
her face yet, except to see that she wore round tortoise-shell
spectacles, and that her hair was as short as his own. He had
never seen a woman with cropped hair before, except in the
illustrated papers.

As they emerged on to the maidan he stepped level with her, and she
turned to face him. Her face was oval, with delicate, regular
features; not beautiful, perhaps, but it seemed so there, in Burma,
where all Englishwomen are yellow and thin. He turned his head
sharply aside, though the birthmark was away from her. He could
not bear her to see his worn face too closely. He seemed to feel
the withered skin round his eyes as though it had been a wound.
But he remembered that he had shaved that morning, and it gave him
courage. He said:

'I say, you must be a bit shaken up after this business. Would you
like to come into my place and rest a few minutes before you go
home? It's rather late to be out of doors without a hat, too.'

'Oh, thank you, I would,' the girl said. She could not, he
thought, know anything about Indian notions of propriety. 'Is this
your house here?'

'Yes. We must go round the front way. I'll have the servants get
a sunshade for you. This sun's dangerous for you, with your short
hair.'

They walked up the garden path. Flo was frisking round them and
trying to draw attention to herself. She always barked at strange
Orientals, but she liked the smell of a European. The sun was
growing stronger. A wave of blackcurrant scent flowed from the
petunias beside the path, and one of the pigeons fluttered to the
earth, to spring immediately into the air again as Flo made a grab
at it. Flory and the girl stopped with one consent, to look at the
flowers. A pang of unreasonable happiness had gone through them
both.

'You really mustn't go out in this sun without a hat on,' he
repeated, and somehow there was an intimacy in saying it. He could
not help referring to her short hair somehow, it seemed to him so
beautiful. To speak of it was like touching it with his hand.

'Look, your knee's bleeding,' the girl said. 'Did you do that when
you were coming to help me?'

There was a slight trickle of blood, which was drying, purple, on
his khaki stocking. 'It's nothing,' he said, but neither of them
felt at that moment that it was nothing. They began chattering
with extraordinary eagerness about the flowers. The girl 'adored'
flowers, she said. And Flory led her up the path, talking
garrulously about one plant and another.

'Look how these phloxes grow. They go on blooming for six months
in this country. They can't get too much sun. I think those
yellow ones must be almost the colour of primroses. I haven't seen
a primrose for fifteen years, nor a wallflower, either. Those
zinnias are fine, aren't they?--like painted flowers, with those
wonderful dead colours. These are African marigolds. They're
coarse things, weeds almost, but you can't help liking them,
they're so vivid and strong. Indians have an extraordinary
affection for them; wherever Indians have been you find marigolds
growing, even years afterwards when the jungle has buried every
other trace of them. But I wish you'd come into the veranda and
see the orchids. I've some I must show that are just like bells of
gold--but literally like gold. And they smell of honey, almost
overpoweringly. That's about the only merit of this beastly
country, it's good for flowers. I hope you're fond of gardening?
It's our greatest consolation, in this country.'

'Oh, I simply adore gardening,' the girl said.

They went into the veranda. Ko S'la had hurriedly put on his ingyi
and his best pink silk gaungbaung, and he appeared from within the
house with a tray on which were a decanter of gin, glasses and a
box of cigarettes. He laid them on the table, and, eyeing the girl
half apprehensively, put his hands flat together and shikoed.

'I expect it's no use offering you a drink at this hour of the
morning?' Flory said. 'I can never get it into my servant's head
that SOME people can exist without gin before breakfast.'

He added himself to the number by waving away the drink Ko S'la
offered him. The girl had sat down in the wicker chair that Ko
S'la had set out for her at the end of the veranda. The dark-
leaved orchids hung behind her head, with gold trusses of blossom,
breathing out warm honey-scent. Flory was standing against the
veranda rail, half facing the girl, but keeping his birthmarked
cheek hidden.

'What a perfectly divine view you have from here,' she said as she
looked down the hillside.

'Yes, isn't it? Splendid, in this yellow light, before the sun
gets going. I love that sombre yellow colour the maidan has, and
those gold mohur trees, like blobs of crimson. And those hills at
the horizon, almost black. My camp is on the other side of those
hills,' he added.

The girl, who was long-sighted, took off her spectacles to look
into the distance. He noticed that her eyes were very clear pale
blue, paler than a harebell. And he noticed the smoothness of the
skin round her eyes, like a petal, almost. It reminded him of his
age and his haggard face again, so that he turned a little more
away from her. But he said on impulse:

'I say, what a bit of luck you coming to Kyauktada! You can't
imagine the difference it makes to us to see a new face in these
places. After months of our own miserable society, and an
occasional official on his rounds and American globe-trotters
skipping up the Irrawaddy with cameras. I suppose you've come
straight from England?'

'Well, not England exactly. I was living in Paris before I came
out here. My mother was an artist, you see.'

'Paris! Have you really lived in Paris? By Jove, just fancy
coming from Paris to Kyauktada! Do you know, it's positively
difficult, in a hole like this, to believe that there ARE such
places as Paris.'

'Do you like Paris?' she said.

'I've never even seen it. But, good Lord, how I've imagined it!
Paris--it's all a kind of jumble of pictures in my mind; cafes and
boulevards and artists' studios and Villon and Baudelaire and
Maupassant all mixed up together. You don't know how the names of
those European towns sound to us, out here. And did you really
live in Paris? Sitting in cafes with foreign art students,
drinking white wine and talking about Marcel Proust?'

'Oh, that kind of thing, I suppose,' said the girl, laughing.

'What differences you'll find here! It's not white wine and Marcel
Proust here. Whisky and Edgar Wallace more likely. But if you
ever want books, you might find something you liked among mine.
There's nothing but tripe in the Club library. But of course I'm
hopelessly behind the times with my books. I expect you'll have
read everything under the sun.'

'Oh no. But of course I simply adore reading,' the girl said.

'What it means to meet somebody who cares for books! I mean books
worth reading, not that garbage in the Club libraries. I do hope
you'll forgive me if I overwhelm you with talk. When I meet
somebody who's heard that books exist, I'm afraid I go off like a
bottle of warm beer. It's a fault you have to pardon in these
countries.'

'Oh, but I love talking about books. I think reading is so
wonderful. I mean, what would life be without it? It's such a--
such a--'

'Such a private Alsatia. Yes--'

They plunged into an enormous and eager conversation, first about
books, then about shooting, in which the girl seemed to have an
interest and about which she persuaded Flory to talk. She was
quite thrilled when he described the murder of an elephant which he
had perpetrated some years earlier. Flory scarcely noticed, and
perhaps the girl did not either, that it was he who did all the
talking. He could not stop himself, the joy of chattering was so
great. And the girl was in a mood to listen. After all, he had
saved her from the buffalo, and she did not yet believe that those
monstrous brutes could be harmless; for the moment he was almost a
hero in her eyes. When one does get any credit in this life, it is
usually for something that one has not done. It was one of those
times when the conversation flows so easily, so naturally, that one
could go on talking forever. But suddenly, their pleasure
evaporated, they started and fell silent. They had noticed that
they were no longer alone.

At the other end of the veranda, between the rails, a coal-black
moustachioed face was peeping with enormous curiosity. It belonged
to old Sammy, the 'Mug' cook. Behind him stood Ma Pu, Ma Yi, Ko
S'la's four eldest children, an unclaimed naked child, and two old
women who had come down from the village upon the news that an
'Ingaleikma' was on view. Like carved teak statues with footlong
cigars stuck in their wooden faces, the two old creatures gazed at
the 'Ingaleikma' as English yokels might gaze at a Zulu warrior in
full regalia.

'Those people . . .' the girl said uncomfortably, looking towards
them.

Sammy, seeing himself detected, looked very guilty and pretended to
be rearranging his pagri. The rest of the audience were a little
abashed, except for the two wooden-faced old women.

'Dash their cheek!' Flory said. A cold pang of disappointment went
through him. After all, it would not do for the girl to stay on
his veranda any longer. Simultaneously both he and she had
remembered that they were total strangers. Her face had turned a
little pink. She began putting on her spectacles.

'I'm afraid an English girl is rather a novelty to these people,'
he said. 'They don't mean any harm. Go away!' he added angrily,
waving his hand at the audience, whereupon they vanished.

'Do you know, if you don't mind, I think I ought to be going,' the
girl said. She had stood up. 'I've been out quite a long time.
They may be wondering where I've got to.'

'Must you really? It's quite early. I'll see that you don't have
to go home bareheaded in the sun.'

'I ought really--' she began again.

She stopped, looking at the doorway. Ma Hla May was emerging on to
the veranda.

Ma Hla May came forward with her hand on her hip. She had come
from within the house, with a calm air that asserted her right to
be there. The two girls stood face to face, less than six feet
apart.

No contrast could have been stranger; the one faintly coloured as
an apple-blossom, the other dark and garish, with a gleam almost
metallic on her cylinder of ebony hair and the salmon-pink silk of
her longyi. Flory thought he had never noticed before how dark Ma
Hla May's face was, and how outlandish her tiny, stiff body,
straight as a soldier's, with not a curve in it except the vase-
like curve of her hips. He stood against the veranda rail and
watched the two girls, quite disregarded. For the best part of a
minute neither of them could take her eyes from the other; but
which found the spectacle more grotesque, more incredible, there is
no saying.

Ma Hla May turned her face round to Flory, with her black brows,
thin as pencil lines, drawn together. 'Who is this woman?' she
demanded sullenly.

He answered casually, as though giving an order to a servant:

'Go away this instant. If you make any trouble I will afterwards
take a bamboo and beat you till not one of your ribs is whole.'

Ma Hla May hesitated, shrugged her small shoulders and disappeared.
And the other, gazing after her, said curiously:

'Was that a man or a woman?'

'A woman,' he said. 'One of the servants' wives, I believe. She
came to ask about the laundry, that was all.'

'Oh, is THAT what Burmese women are like? They ARE queer little
creatures! I saw a lot of them on my way up here in the train, but
do you know, I thought they were all boys. They're just like a
kind of Dutch doll, aren't they?'

She had begun to move towards the veranda steps, having lost
interest in Ma Hla May now that she had disappeared. He did not
stop her, for he thought Ma Hla May quite capable of coming back
and making a scene. Not that it mattered much, for neither girl
knew a word of the other's language. He called to Ko S'la, and Ko
S'la came running with a big oiled-silk umbrella with bamboo ribs.
He opened it respectfully at the foot of the steps and held it over
the girl's head as she came down. Flory went with them as far as
the gate. They stopped to shake hands, he turning a little
sideways in the strong sunlight, hiding his birthmark.

'My fellow here will see you home. It was ever so kind of you to
come in. I can't tell you how glad I am to have met you. You'll
make such a difference to us here in Kyauktada.'

'Good-bye, Mr--oh, how funny! I don't even know your name.'

'Flory, John Flory. And yours--Miss Lackersteen, is it?'

'Yes. Elizabeth. Good-bye, Mr Flory. And thank you EVER so much.
That awful buffalo. You quite saved my life.'

'It was nothing. I hope I shall see you at the Club this evening?
I expect your uncle and aunt will be coming down. Good-bye for the
time being, then.'

He stood at the gate, watching them as they went. Elizabeth--
lovely name, too rare nowadays. He hoped she spelt it with a Z.
Ko S'la trotted after her at a queer uncomfortable gait, reaching
the umbrella over her head and keeping his body as far away from
her as possible. A cool breath of wind blew up the hill. It was
one of those momentary winds that blow sometimes in the cold
weather in Burma, coming from nowhere, filling one with thirst and
with nostalgia for cold sea-pools, embraces of mermaids, waterfalls,
caves of ice. It rustled through the wide domes of the gold mohur
trees, and fluttered the fragments of the anonymous letter that
Flory had thrown over the gate half an hour earlier.

7

Elizabeth lay on the sofa in the Lackersteen's drawing-room, with
her feet up and a cushion behind her head, reading Michael Arlen's
These Charming People. In a general way Michael Arlen was her
favourite author, but she was inclined to prefer William J. Locke
when she wanted something serious.

The drawing-room was a cool, light-coloured room with lime-washed
walls a yard thick; it was large, but seemed smaller than it was,
because of a litter of occasional tables and Benares brassware
ornaments. It smelt of chintz and dying flowers. Mrs Lackersteen
was upstairs, sleeping. Outside, the servants lay silent in their
quarters, their heads tethered to their wooden pillows by the
death-like sleep of midday. Mr Lackersteen, in his small wooden
office down the road, was probably sleeping too. No one stirred
except Elizabeth, and the chokra who pulled the punkah outside Mrs
Lackersteen's bedroom, lying on his back with one heel in the loop
of the rope.

Elizabeth was just turned twenty-two, and was an orphan. Her
father had been less of a drunkard than his brother Tom, but he was
a man of similar stamp. He was a tea-broker, and his fortunes
fluctuated greatly, but he was by nature too optimistic to put
money aside in prosperous phases. Elizabeth's mother had been an
incapable, half-baked, vapouring, self-pitying woman who shirked
all the normal duties of life on the strength of sensibilities
which she did not possess. After messing about for years with such
things as Women's Suffrage and Higher Thought, and making many
abortive attempts at literature, she had finally taken up with
painting. Painting is the only art that can be practised without
either talent or hard work. Mrs Lackersteen's pose was that of an
artist exiled among 'the Philistines'--these, needless to say,
included her husband--and it was a pose that gave her almost
unlimited scope for making a nuisance of herself.

In the last year of the War Mr Lackersteen, who had managed to
avoid service, made a great deal of money, and just after the
Armistice they moved into a huge, new, rather bleak house in
Highgate, with quantities of greenhouses, shrubberies, stables and
tennis courts. Mr Lackersteen had engaged a horde of servants,
even, so great was his optimism, a butler. Elizabeth was sent for
two terms to a very expensive boarding-school. Oh, the joy, the
joy, the unforgettable joy of those two terms! Four of the girls
at the school were 'the Honourable'; nearly all of them had ponies
of their own, on which they were allowed to go riding on Saturday
afternoons. There is a short period in everyone's life when his
character is fixed forever; with Elizabeth, it was those two terms
during which she rubbed shoulders with the rich. Thereafter her
whole code of living was summed up in one belief, and that a simple
one. It was that the Good ('lovely' was her name for it) is
synonymous with the expensive, the elegant, the aristocratic; and
the Bad ('beastly') is the cheap, the low, the shabby, the
laborious. Perhaps it is in order to teach this creed that
expensive girls' schools exist. The feeling subtilized itself as
Elizabeth grew older, diffused itself through all her thoughts.
Everything from a pair of stockings to a human soul was
classifiable as 'lovely' or 'beastly'. And unfortunately--for Mr
Lackersteen's prosperity did not last--it was the 'beastly' that
had predominated in her life.

The inevitable crash came late in 1919. Elizabeth was taken away
from school, to continue her education at a succession of cheap,
beastly schools, with gaps of a term or two when her father could
not pay the fees. He died when she was twenty, of influenza. Mrs
Lackersteen was left with an income of L150 a year, which was to
die with her. The two women could not, under Mrs Lackersteen's
management, live on three pounds a week in England. They moved to
Paris, where life was cheaper and where Mrs Lackersteen intended to
dedicate herself wholly to Art.

Paris! Living in Paris! Flory had been a little wide of the mark
when he pictured those interminable conversations with bearded
artists under the green plane trees. Elizabeth's life in Paris had
not been quite like that.

Her mother had taken a studio in the Montparnasse quarter, and
relapsed at once into a state of squalid, muddling idleness. She
was so foolish with money that her income would not come near
covering expenses, and for several months Elizabeth did not even
have enough to eat. Then she found a job as visiting teacher of
English to the family of a French bank manager. They called her
'notre mees Anglaise'. The banker lived in the twelfth
arrondissement, a long way from Montparnasse, and Elizabeth had
taken a room in a pension near by. It was a narrow, yellow-faced
house in a side street, looking out on to a poulterer's shop,
generally decorated with reeking carcasses of wild boars, which old
gentlemen like decrepit satyrs would visit every morning and sniff
long and lovingly. Next door to the poulterer's was a fly-blown
cafe with the sign 'Cafe de l'Amitie. Bock Formidable'. How
Elizabeth had loathed that pension! The patroness was an old
black-clad sneak who spent her life in tiptoeing up and down stairs
in hopes of catching the boarders washing stockings in their hand-
basins. The boarders, sharp-tongued bilious widows, pursued the
only man in the establishment, a mild, bald creature who worked in
La Samaritaine, like sparrows worrying a bread-crust. At meals all
of them watched each others' plates to see who was given the
biggest helping. The bathroom was a dark den with leprous walls
and a rickety verdigrised geyser which would spit two inches of
tepid water into the bath and then mulishly stop working. The bank
manager whose children Elizabeth taught was a man of fifty, with a
fat, worn face and a bald, dark yellow crown resembling an
ostrich's egg. The second day after her arrival he came into the
room where the children were at their lessons, sat down beside
Elizabeth and immediately pinched her elbow. The third day he
pinched her on the calf, the fourth day behind the knee, the fifth
day above the knee. Thereafter, every evening, it was a silent
battle between the two of them, her hand under the table, struggling
and struggling to keep that ferret-like hand away from her.

It was a mean, beastly existence. In fact, it reached levels of
'beastliness' which Elizabeth had not previously known to exist.
But the thing that most depressed her, most filled her with the
sense of sinking into some horrible lower world, was her mother's
studio. Mrs Lackersteen was one of those people who go utterly to
pieces when they are deprived of servants. She lived in a restless
nightmare between painting and housekeeping, and never worked at
either. At irregular intervals she went to a 'school' where she
produced greyish still-lifes under the guidance of a master whose
technique was founded on dirty brushes; for the rest, she messed
about miserably at home with teapots and frying-pans. The state of
her studio was more than depressing to Elizabeth; it was evil,
Satanic. It was a cold, dusty pigsty, with piles of books and
papers littered all over the floor, generations of saucepans
slumbering in their grease on the rusty gas-stove, the bed never
made till afternoon, and everywhere--in every possible place where
they could be stepped on or knocked over--tins of paint-fouled
turpentine and pots half full of cold black tea. You would lift a
cushion from a chair and find a plate holding the remains of a
poached egg underneath it. As soon as Elizabeth entered the door
she would burst out:

'Oh, Mother, Mother dearest, how CAN you? Look at the state of
this room! It is so terrible to live like this!'

'The room, dearest? What's the matter? Is it untidy?'

'Untidy! Mother, NEED you leave that plate of porridge in the
middle of your bed? And those saucepans! It does look so
dreadful. Suppose anyone came in!'

The rapt, other-wordly look which Mrs Lackersteen assumed when
anything like work presented itself, would come into her eyes.

'None of MY friends would mind, dear. We are such Bohemians, we
artists. You don't understand how utterly wrapped up we all are in
our painting. You haven't the artistic temperament, you see,
dear.'

'I must try and clean some of those saucepans. I just can't bear
to think of you living like this. What have you done with the
scrubbing-brush?'

'The scrubbing-brush? Now, let me think, I know I saw it somewhere.
Ah yes! I used it yesterday to clean my palette. But it'll be
all right if you give it a good wash in turpentine.'

Mrs Lackersteen would sit down and continue smudging a sheet of
sketching paper with a Conte crayon while Elizabeth worked.

'How wonderful you are, dear. So practical! I can't think whom
you inherit it from. Now with me, Art is simply EVERYTHING. I
seem to feel it like a great sea surging up inside me. It swamps
everything mean and petty out of existence. Yesterday I ate my
lunch off Nash's Magazine to save wasting time washing plates.
Such a good idea! When you want a clean plate you just tear off a
sheet,' etc., etc., etc.

Elizabeth had no friends in Paris. Her mother's friends were women
of the same stamp as herself, or elderly ineffectual bachelors
living on small incomes and practising contemptible half-arts such
as wood-engraving or painting on porcelain. For the rest,
Elizabeth saw only foreigners, and she disliked all foreigners en
bloc; or at least all foreign men, with their cheap-looking clothes
and their revolting table manners. She had one great solace at
this time. It was to go to the American library in the rue de
l'Elysee and look at the illustrated papers. Sometimes on a Sunday
or her free afternoon she would sit there for hours at the big
shiny table, dreaming, over the Sketch, the Tatter, the Graphic,
the Sporting and Dramatic.

Ah, what joys were pictured there! 'Hounds meeting on the lawn of
Charlton Hall, the lovely Warwickshire seat of Lord Burrowdean.'
'The Hon. Mrs Tyke-Bowlby in the Park with her splendid Alsatian,
Kublai Khan, which took second prize at Cruft's this summer.'
'Sunbathing at Cannes. Left to right: Miss Barbara Pilbrick, Sir
Edward Tuke, Lady Pamela Westrope, Captain "Tuppy" Benacre.'

Lovely, lovely, golden world! On two occasions the face of an old
schoolfellow looked at Elizabeth from the page. It hurt her in her
breast to see it. There they all were, her old schoolfellows, with
their horses and their cars and their husbands in the cavalry; and
here she, tied to that dreadful job, that dreadful pension, her
dreadful mother! Was it possible that there was no escape? Could
she be doomed forever to this sordid meanness, with no hope of ever
getting back to the decent world again?

It was not unnatural, with the example of her mother before her
eyes, that Elizabeth should have a healthy loathing of Art. In
fact, any excess of intellect--'braininess' was her word for it--
tended to belong, in her eyes, to the 'beastly'. Real people, she
felt, decent people--people who shot grouse, went to Ascot, yachted
at Cowes--were not brainy. They didn't go in for this nonsense of
writing books and fooling with paintbrushes; and all these Highbrow
ideas--Socialism and all that. 'Highbrow' was a bitter word in her
vocabulary. And when it happened, as it did once or twice, that
she met a veritable artist who was willing to work penniless all
his life, rather than sell himself to a bank or an insurance
company, she despised him far more than she despised the dabblers
of her mother's circle. That a man should turn deliberately away
from all that was good and decent, sacrifice himself for a futility
that led nowhere, was shameful, degrading, evil. She dreaded
spinsterhood, but she would have endured it a thousand lifetimes
through rather than marry such a man.

When Elizabeth had been nearly two years in Paris her mother died
abruptly of ptomaine poisoning. The wonder was that she had not
died of it sooner. Elizabeth was left with rather less than a
hundred pounds in the world. Her uncle and aunt cabled at once
from Burma, asking her to come out and stay with them, and saying
that a letter would follow.

Mrs Lackersteen had reflected for some time over the letter, her
pen between her lips, looking down at the page with her delicate
triangular face like a meditative snake.

'I suppose we must have her out here, at any rate for a year. WHAT
a bore! However, they generally marry within a year if they've any
looks at all. What am I to say to the girl, Tom?'

'Say? Oh, just say she'll pick up a husband out here a damn sight
easier than at home. Something of that sort, y'know.'

'My DEAR Tom! What impossible things you say!'

Mrs Lackersteen wrote:

Of course, this is a very small station and we are in the jungle a
great deal of the time. I'm afraid you will find it dreadfully
dull after the DELIGHTS of Paris. But really in some ways these
small stations have their advantages for a young girl. She finds
herself quite a QUEEN in the local society. The unmarried men are
so lonely that they appreciate a girl's society in a quite
wonderful way, etc., etc.

Elizabeth spent thirty pounds on summer frocks and set sail
immediately. The ship, heralded by rolling porpoises, ploughed
across the Mediterranean and down the Canal into a sea of staring,
enamel-like blue, then out into the green wastes of the Indian
Ocean, where flocks of flying fish skimmed in terror from the
approaching hull. At night the waters were phosphorescent, and
the wash of the bow was like a moving arrowhead of green fire.
Elizabeth 'loved' the life on board ship. She loved the dancing on
deck at nights, the cocktails which every man on board seemed
anxious to buy for her, the deck games, of which, however, she grew
tired at about the same time as the other members of the younger
set. It was nothing to her that her mother's death was only two
months past. She had never cared greatly for her mother, and
besides, the people here knew nothing of her affairs. It was so
lovely after those two graceless years to breathe the air of wealth
again. Not that most of the people here were rich; but on board
ship everyone behaves as though he were rich. She was going to
love India, she knew. She had formed quite a picture of India,
from the other passengers' conversation; she had even learned some
of the more necessary Hindustani phrases, such as 'idher ao',
'jaldi', 'sahiblog', etc. In anticipation she tasted the agreeable
atmosphere of Clubs, with punkahs flapping and barefooted white-
turbaned boys reverently salaaming; and maidans where bronzed
Englishmen with little clipped moustaches galloped to and fro,
whacking polo balls. It was almost as nice as being really rich,
the way people lived in India.

They sailed into Colombo through green glassy waters, where turtles
and black snakes floated basking. A fleet of sampans came racing
out to meet the ship, propelled by coal-black men with lips stained
redder than blood by betel juice. They yelled and struggled round
the gangway while the passengers descended. As Elizabeth and her
friends came down, two sampan-wallahs, their prows nosing against
the gangway, besought them with yells.

'Don't you go with him, missie! Not with him! Bad wicked man he,
not fit taking missie!'

'Don't you listen him lies, missie! Nasty low fellow! Nasty low
tricks him playing. Nasty NATIVE tricks!'

'Ha, ha! He is not native himself! Oh no! Him European man,
white skin all same, missie! Ha ha!'

'Stop your bat, you two, or I'll fetch one of you a kick,' said the
husband of Elizabeth's friend--he was a planter. They stepped into
one of the sampans and were rowed towards the sun-bright quays.
And the successful sampan-wallah turned and discharged at his rival
a mouthful of spittle which he must have been saving up for a very
long time.

This was the Orient. Scents of coco-nut oil and sandalwood,
cinnamon and turmeric, floated across the water on the hot,
swimming air. Elizabeth's friends drove her out to Mount Lavinia,
where they bathed in a lukewarm sea that foamed like Coca-Cola.
She came back to the ship in the evening, and they reached Rangoon
a week later.

North of Mandalay the train, fuelled with wood, crawled at twelve
miles an hour across a vast, parched plain, bounded at its remote
edges by blue rings of hills. White egrets stood poised,
motionless, like herons, and piles of drying chilis gleamed crimson
in the sun. Sometimes a white pagoda rose from the plain like the
breast of a supine giantess. The early tropic night settled down,
and the train jolted on, slowly, stopping at little stations where
barbaric yells sounded from the darkness. Half-naked men with
their long hair knotted behind their heads moved to and fro in
torchlight, hideous as demons in Elizabeth's eyes. The train
plunged into forest, and unseen branches brushed against the
windows. It was about nine o'clock when they reached Kyauktada,
where Elizabeth's uncle and aunt were waiting with Mr Macgregor's
car, and with some servants carrying torches. Her aunt came
forward and took Elizabeth's shoulders in her delicate, saurian
hands.

'I suppose you are our niece Elizabeth? We are SO pleased to see
you,' she said, and kissed her.

Mr Lackersteen peered over his wife's shoulder in the torchlight.
He gave a half-whistle, exclaimed, 'Well, I'll be damned!' and then
seized Elizabeth and kissed her, more warmly than he need have
done, she thought. She had never seen either of them before.

After dinner, under the punkah in the drawing-room, Elizabeth and
her aunt had a talk together. Mr Lackersteen was strolling in the
garden, ostensibly to smell the frangipani, actually to have a
surreptitious drink that one of the servants smuggled to him from
the back of the house.

'My dear, how really lovely you are! Let me look at you again.'
She took her by the shoulders. 'I DO think that Eton crop suits
you. Did you have it done in Paris?'

'Yes. Everyone was getting Eton-cropped. It suits you if you've
got a fairly small head.'

'Lovely! And those tortoise-shell spectacles--such a becoming
fashion! I'm told that all the--er--demi-mondaines in South
America have taken to wearing them. I'd no idea I had such a
RAVISHING beauty for a niece. How old did you say you were, dear?'

'Twenty-two.'

'Twenty-two! How delighted all the men will be when we take you to
the Club tomorrow! They get so lonely, poor things, never seeing a
new face. And you were two whole years in Paris? I can't think
what the men there can have been about to let you leave unmarried.'

'I'm afraid I didn't meet many men, Aunt. Only foreigners. We had
to live so quietly. And I was working,' she added, thinking this
rather a disgraceful admission.

'Of course, of course,' sighed Mrs Lackersteen. 'One hears the
same thing on every side. Lovely girls having to work for their
living. It is such a shame! I think it's so terribly selfish,
don't you, the way these men remain unmarried while there are so
MANY poor girls looking for husbands?' Elizabeth not answering
this, Mrs Lackersteen added with another sigh, 'I'm sure if I were
a young girl I'd marry anybody, literally ANYBODY!'

The two women's eyes met. There was a great deal that Mrs
Lackersteen wanted to say, but she had no intention of doing more
than hint at it obliquely. A great deal of her conversation was
carried on by hints; she generally contrived, however, to make her
meaning reasonably clear. She said in a tenderly impersonal tone,
as though discussing a subject of general interest:

'Of course, I must say this. There ARE cases when, if girls fail
to get married it's THEIR OWN FAULT. It happens even out here
sometimes. Only a short time ago I remember a case--a girl came
out and stayed a whole year with her brother, and she had offers
from all kinds of men--policemen, forest officers, men in timber
firms with QUITE good prospects. And she refused them all; she
wanted to marry into the I.C.S., I heard. Well, what do you
expect? Of course her brother couldn't go on keeping her forever.
And now I hear she's at home, poor thing, working as a kind of lady
help, practically a SERVANT. And getting only fifteen shillings a
week! Isn't it dreadful to think of such things?'

'Dreadful!' Elizabeth echoed.

No more was said on this subject. In the morning, after she came
back from Flory's house, Elizabeth was describing her adventure to
her aunt and uncle. They were at breakfast, at the flower-laden
table, with the punkah flapping overhead and the tall stork-like
Mohammedan butler in his white suit and pagri standing behind Mrs
Lackersteen's chair, tray in hand.

'And oh, Aunt, such an interesting thing! A Burmese girl came on
to the veranda. I'd never seen one before, at least, not knowing
they were girls. Such a queer little thing--she was almost like a
doll with her round yellow face and her black hair screwed up on
top. She only looked about seventeen. Mr Flory said she was his
laundress.'

The Indian butler's long body stiffened. He squinted down at the
girl with his white eyeballs large in his black face. He spoke
English well. Mr Lackersteen paused with a forkful of fish half-
way from his plate and his crass mouth open.

'Laundress?' he said. 'Laundress! I say, dammit, some mistake
there! No such thing as a laundress in this country, y'know.
Laundering work's all done by men. If you ask me--'

And then he stopped very suddenly, almost as though someone had
trodden on his toe under the table.

8

That evening Flory told Ko S'la to send for the barber--he was the
only barber in the town, an Indian, and he made a living by shaving
the Indian coolies at the rate of eight annas a month for a dry
shave every other day. The Europeans patronized him for lack of
any other. The barber was waiting on the veranda when Flory came
back from tennis, and Flory sterilized the scissors with boiling
water and Condy's fluid and had his hair cut.

'Lay out my best Palm Beach suit,' he told Ko S'la, 'and a silk
shirt and my sambhur-skin shoes. Also that new tie that came from
Rangoon last week.'

'I have done so, thakin,' said Ko S'la, meaning that he would do
so. When Flory came into the bedroom he found Ko S'la waiting
beside the clothes he had laid out, with a faintly sulky air. It
was immediately apparent that Ko S'la knew why Flory was dressing
himself up (that is, in hopes of meeting Elizabeth) and that he
disapproved of it.

'What are you waiting for?' Flory said.

'To help you dress, thakin.'

'I shall dress myself this evening. You can go.'

He was going to shave--the second time that day--and he did not
want Ko S'la to see him take shaving things into the bathroom.
It was several years since he had shaved twice in one day. What
providential luck that he had sent for that new tie only last week,
he thought. He dressed himself very carefully, and spent nearly a
quarter of an hour in brushing his hair, which was stiff and would
never lie down after it had been cut.

Almost the next moment, as it seemed, he was walking with Elizabeth
down the bazaar road. He had found her alone in the Club 'library',
and with a sudden burst of courage asked her to come out with him;
and she had come with a readiness that surprised him; not even
stopping to say anything to her uncle and aunt. He had lived so
long in Burma, he had forgotten English ways. It was very dark
under the peepul trees of the bazaar road, the foliage hiding the
quarter moon, but the stars here and there in a gap blazed white and
low, like lamps hanging on invisible threads. Successive waves of
scent came rolling, first the cloying sweetness of frangipani, then
a cold putrid stench of dung or decay from the huts opposite Dr
Veraswami's bungalow. Drums were throbbing a little distance away.

As he heard the drums Flory remembered that a pwe was being acted a
little farther down the road, opposite U Po Kyin's house; in fact,
it was U Po Kyin who had made arrangements for the pwe, though
someone else had paid for it. A daring thought occurred to Flory.
He would take Elizabeth to the pwe! She would love it--she must;
no one with eyes in his head could resist a pwe-dance. Probably
there would be a scandal when they came back to the Club together
after a long absence; but damn it! what did it matter? She was
different from that herd of fools at the Club. And it would be
such fun to go to the pwe together! At this moment the music burst
out with a fearful pandemonium--a strident squeal of pipes, a
rattle like castanets and the hoarse thump of drums, above which a
man's voice was brassily squalling.

'Whatever is that noise?' said Elizabeth, stopping. 'It sounds
just like a jazz band!'

'Native music. They're having a pwe--that's a kind of Burmese
play; a cross between a historical drama and a revue, if you can
imagine that. It'll interest you, I think. Just round the bend of
the road here.'

'Oh,' she said rather doubtfully.

They came round the bend into a glare of light. The whole road for
thirty yards was blocked by the audience watching the pwe. At the
back there was a raised stage, under humming petrol lamps, with the
orchestra squalling and banging in front of it; on the stage two
men dressed in clothes that reminded Elizabeth of Chinese pagodas
were posturing with curved swords in their hands. All down the
roadway it was a sea of white muslin backs of women, pink scarves
flung round their shoulders and black hair-cylinders. A few
sprawled on their mats, fast asleep. An old Chinese with a tray of
peanuts was threading his way through the crowd, intoning
mournfully, 'Myaype! Myaype!'

'We'll stop and watch a few minutes if you like,' Flory said.

The blaze of lights and the appalling din of the orchestra had
almost dazed Elizabeth, but what startled her most of all was the
sight of this crowd of people sitting in the road as though it had
been the pit of a theatre.

'Do they always have their plays in the middle of the road?' she
said.

'As a rule. They put up a rough stage and take it down in the
morning. The show lasts all night.'

'But are they ALLOWED to--blocking up the whole roadway?'

'Oh yes. There are no traffic regulations here. No traffic to
regulate, you see.'

It struck her as very queer. By this time almost the entire
audience had turned round on their mats to stare at the 'Ingaleikma'.
There were half a dozen chairs in the middle of the crowd, where
some clerks and officials were sitting. U Po Kyin was among them,
and he was making efforts to twist his elephantine body round and
greet the Europeans. As the music stopped the pock-marked Ba Taik
came hastening through the crowd and shikoed low to Flory, with his
timorous air.

'Most holy one, my master U Po Kyin asks whether you and the young
white lady will not come and watch our pwe for a few minutes. He
has chairs ready for you.'

'They're asking us to come and sit down,' Flory said to Elizabeth.
'Would you like to? It's rather fun. Those two fellows will clear
off in a moment and there'll be some dancing. If it wouldn't bore
you for a few minutes?'

Elizabeth felt very doubtful. Somehow it did not seem right or
even safe to go in among that smelly native crowd. However, she
trusted Flory, who presumably knew what was proper, and allowed him
to lead her to the chairs. The Burmans made way on their mats,
gazing after her and chattering; her shins brushed against warm,
muslin-clad bodies, there was a feral reek of sweat. U Po Kyin
leaned over towards her, bowing as well as he could and saying
nasally:

'Kindly to sit down, madam! I am most honoured to make your
acquaintance. Good evening. Good morning, Mr Flory, sir! A most
unexpected pleasure. Had we known that you were to honour us with
your company, we would have provided whiskies and other European
refreshments. Ha ha!'

He laughed, and his betel-reddened teeth gleamed in the lamplight
like red tinfoil. He was so vast and so hideous that Elizabeth
could not help shrinking from him. A slender youth in a purple
longyi was bowing to her and holding out a tray with two glasses of
yellow sherbet, iced. U Po Kyin clapped his hands sharply, 'Hey
haung galay!' he called to a boy beside him. He gave some
instructions in Burmese, and the boy pushed his way to the edge of
the stage.

'He's telling them to bring on their best dancer in our honour,'
Flory said. 'Look, here she comes.'

A girl who had been squatting at the back of the stage, smoking,
stepped forward into the lamplight. She was very young, slim-
shouldered, breastless, dressed in a pale blue satin longyi that
hid her feet. The skirts of her ingyi curved outwards above her
hips in little panniers, according to the ancient Burmese fashion.
They were like the petals of a downward-pointing flower. She threw
her cigar languidly to one of the men in the orchestra, and then,
holding out one slender arm, writhed it as though to shake the
muscles loose.

The orchestra burst into a sudden loud squalling. There were pipes
like bagpipes, a strange instrument consisting of plaques of bamboo
which a man struck with a little hammer, and in the middle there
was a man surrounded by twelve tall drums of different sizes. He
reached rapidly from one to another, thumping them with the heel of
his hand. In a moment the girl began to dance. But at first it
was not a dance, it was a rhythmic nodding, posturing and twisting
of the elbows, like the movements of one of those jointed wooden
figures on an old-fashioned roundabout. The way her neck and
elbows rotated was precisely like a jointed doll, and yet
incredibly sinuous. Her hands, twisting like snakeheads with the
fingers close together, could lie back until they were almost along
her forearms. By degrees her movements quickened. She began to
leap from side to side, flinging herself down in a kind of curtsy
and springing up again with extraordinary agility, in spite of the
long longyi that imprisoned her feet. Then she danced in a
grotesque posture as though sitting down, knees bent, body leaned
forward, with her arms extended and writhing, her head also moving
to the beat of the drums. The music quickened to a climax. The
girl rose upright and whirled round as swiftly as a top, the
pannier of her ingyi flying out about her like the petals of a
snowdrop. Then the music stopped as abruptly as it had begun, and
the girl sank again into a curtsy, amid raucous shouting from the
audience.

Elizabeth watched the dance with a mixture of amazement, boredom
and something approaching horror. She had sipped her drink and
found that it tasted like hair oil. On a mat by her feet three
Burmese girls lay fast asleep with their heads on the same pillow,
their small oval faces side by side like the faces of kittens.
Under cover of the music Flory was speaking in a low voice into
Elizabeth's ear commenting on the dance.

'I knew this would interest you; that's why I brought you here.
You've read books and been in civilized places, you're not like the
rest of us miserable savages here. Don't you think this is worth
watching, in its queer way? Just look at that girl's movements--
look at that strange, bent-forward pose like a marionette, and the
way her arms twist from the elbow like a cobra rising to strike.
It's grotesque, it's even ugly, with a sort of wilful ugliness.
And there's something sinister in it too. There's a touch of the
diabolical in all Mongols. And yet when you look closely, what
art, what centuries of culture you can see behind it! Every
movement that girl makes has been studied and handed down through
innumerable generations. Whenever you look closely at the art of
these Eastern peoples you can see that--a civilization stretching
back and back, practically the same, into times when we were
dressed in woad. In some way that I can't define to you, the whole
life and spirit of Burma is summed up in the way that girl twists
her arms. When you see her you can see the rice fields, the
villages under the teak trees, the pagodas, the priests in their
yellow robes, the buffaloes swimming the rivers in the early
morning, Thibaw's palace--'

His voice stopped abruptly as the music stopped. There were
certain things, and a pwe-dance was one of them, that pricked him
to talk discursively and incautiously; but now he realized that he
had only been talking like a character in a novel, and not a very
good novel. He looked away. Elizabeth had listened to him with a
chill of discomfort. What WAS the man talking about? was her first
thought. Moreover, she had caught the hated word Art more than
once. For the first time she remembered that Flory was a total
stranger and that it had been unwise to come out with him alone.
She looked round her, at the sea of dark faces and the lurid glare
of the lamps; the strangeness of the scene almost frightened her.
What was she doing in this place? Surely it was not right to be
sitting among the black people like this, almost touching them, in
the scent of their garlic and their sweat? Why was she not back at
the Club with the other white people? Why had he brought her here,
among this horde of natives, to watch this hideous and savage
spectacle?

The music struck up, and the pwe girl began dancing again. Her
face was powdered so thickly that it gleamed in the lamplight like
a chalk mask with live eyes behind it. With that dead-white oval
face and those wooden gestures she was monstrous, like a demon.
The music changed its tempo, and the girl began to sing in a brassy
voice. It was a song with a swift trochaic rhythm, gay yet fierce.
The crowd took it up, a hundred voices chanting the harsh syllables
in unison. Still in that strange bent posture the girl turned
round and danced with her buttocks protruded towards the audience.
Her silk longyi gleamed like metal. With hands and elbows still
rotating she wagged her posterior from side to side. Then--
astonishing feat, quite visible through the longyi--she began to
wriggle her two buttocks independently in time with the music.

There was a shout of applause from the audience. The three girls
asleep on the mat woke up at the same moment and began clapping
their hands wildly. A clerk shouted nasally 'Bravo! Bravo!' in
English for the Europeans' benefit. But U Po Kyin frowned and
waved his hand. He knew all about European women. Elizabeth,
however, had already stood up.

'I'm going. It's time we were back,' she said abruptly. She was
looking away, but Flory could see that her face was pink.

He stood up beside her, dismayed. 'But, I say! Couldn't you stay
a few minutes longer? I know it's late, but--they brought this
girl on two hours before she was due, in our honour. Just a few
minutes?'

'I can't help it, I ought to have been back ages ago. I don't know
WHAT my uncle and aunt will be thinking.'

She began at once to pick her way through the crowd, and he
followed her, with not even time to thank the pwe people for their
trouble. The Burmans made way with a sulky air. How like these
English people, to upset everything by sending for the best dancer
and then go away almost before she had started! There was a
fearful row as soon as Flory and Elizabeth had gone, the pwe girl
refusing to go on with her dance and the audience demanding that
she should continue. However, peace was restored when two clowns
hurried on to the stage and began letting off crackers and making
obscene jokes.

Flory followed the girl abjectly up the road. She was walking
quickly, her head turned away, and for some moments she would not
speak. What a thing to happen, when they had been getting on so
well together! He kept trying to apologize.

'I'm so sorry! I'd no idea you'd mind--'

'It's nothing. What is there to be sorry about? I only said it
was time to go back, that's all.'

'I ought to have thought. One gets not to notice that kind of
thing in this country. These people's sense of decency isn't the
same as ours--it's stricter in some ways--but--'

'It's not that! It's not that!' she exclaimed quite angrily.

He saw that he was only making it worse. They walked on in
silence, he behind. He was miserable. What a bloody fool he had
been! And yet all the while he had no inkling of the real reason
why she was angry with him. It was not the pwe girl's behaviour,
in itself, that had offended her; it had only brought things to a
head. But the whole expedition--the very notion of WANTING to rub
shoulders with all those smelly natives--had impressed her badly.
She was perfectly certain that that was not how white men ought to
behave. And that extraordinary rambling speech that he had begun,
with all those long words--almost, she thought bitterly, as though
he were quoting poetry! It was how those beastly artists that you
met sometimes in Paris used to talk. She had thought him a manly
man till this evening. Then her mind went back to the morning's
adventure, and how he had faced the buffalo barehanded, and some of
her anger evaporated. By the time they reached the Club gate she
felt inclined to forgive him. Flory had by now plucked up courage
to speak again. He stopped, and she stopped too, in a patch where
the boughs let through some starlight and he could see her face
dimly.

'I say. I say, I do hope you're not really angry about this?'

'No, of course I'm not. I told you I wasn't.'

'I oughtn't to have taken you there. Please forgive me. Do you
know, I don't think I'd tell the others where you've been. Perhaps
it would be better to say you've just been out for a stroll, out in
the garden--something like that. They might think it queer, a
white girl going to a pwe. I don't think I'd tell them.'

'Oh, of course I won't!' she agreed with a warmness that surprised
him. After that he knew that he was forgiven. But what it was
that he was forgiven, he had not yet grasped.

They went into the Club separately, by tacit consent. The expedition
had been a failure, decidedly. There was a gala air about the Club
lounge tonight. The entire European community were waiting to greet
Elizabeth, and the butler and the six chokras, in their best
starched white suits, were drawn up on either side of the door,
smiling and salaaming. When the Europeans had finished their
greetings the butler came forward with a vast garland of flowers
that the servants had prepared for the 'missiesahib'. Mr Macgregor
made a very humorous speech of welcome, introducing everybody. He
introduced Maxwell as 'our local arboreal specialist', Westfield as
'the guardian of law and order and--ah--terror of the local
banditti', and so on and so forth. There was much laughter. The
sight of a pretty girl's face had put everyone in such a good humour
that they could even enjoy Mr Macgregor's speech--which, to tell the
truth, he had spent most of the evening in preparing.

At the first possible moment Ellis, with a sly air, took Flory and
Westfield by the arm and drew them away into the card-room. He was
in a much better mood than usual. He pinched Flory's arm with his
small, hard fingers, painfully but quite amiably.

'Well, my lad, everyone's been looking for you. Where have you
been all this time?'

'Oh, only for a stroll.'

'For a stroll! And who with?'

'With Miss Lackersteen.'

'I knew it! So YOU'RE the bloody fool who's fallen into the trap,
are you? YOU swallowed the bait before anyone else had time to
look at it. I thought you were too old a bird for that, by God I
did!'

'What do you mean?'

'Mean! Look at him pretending he doesn't know what I mean! Why, I
mean that Ma Lackersteen's marked you down for her beloved nephew-
in-law, of course. That is, if you aren't bloody careful. Eh,
Westfield?'

'Quite right, ol' boy. Eligible young bachelor. Marriage halter
and all that. They've got their eye on him.'

'I don't know where you're getting this idea from. The girl's
hardly been here twenty-four hours.'

'Long enough for you to take her up the garden path, anyway. You
watch your step. Tom Lackersteen may be a drunken sot, but he's
not such a bloody fool that he wants a niece hanging round his neck
for the rest of his life. And of course SHE knows which side her
bread's buttered. So you take care and don't go putting your head
into the noose.'

'Damn it, you've no right to talk about people like that. After
all, the girl's only a kid--'

'My dear old ass'--Ellis, almost affectionate now that he had a new
subject for scandal, took Flory by the coat lapel--'my dear, dear
old ass, don't you go filling yourself up with moonshine. You
think that girl's easy fruit: she's not. These girls out from home
are all the same. "Anything in trousers but nothing this side the
altar"--that's their motto, every one of them. Why do you think
the girl's come out here?'

'Why? I don't know. Because she wanted to, I suppose.'

'My good fool! She come out to lay her claws into a husband,
of course. As if it wasn't well known! When a girl's failed
everywhere else she tries India, where every man's pining for the
sight of a white woman. The Indian marriage-market, they call it.
Meat market it ought to be. Shiploads of 'em coming out every year
like carcasses of frozen mutton, to be pawed over by nasty old
bachelors like you. Cold storage. Juicy joints straight from the
ice.'

'You do say some repulsive things.'

'Best pasture-fed English meat,' said Ellis with a pleased air.
'Fresh consignments. Warranted prime condition.'

He went through a pantomime of examining a joint of meat, with
goatish sniffs. This joke was likely to last Ellis a long time;
his jokes usually did; and there was nothing that gave him quite so
keen a pleasure as dragging a woman's name through mud.

Flory did not see much more of Elizabeth that evening. Everyone
was in the lounge together, and there was the silly clattering
chatter about nothing that there is on these occasions. Flory
could never keep up that kind of conversation for long. But as for
Elizabeth, the civilized atmosphere of the Club, with the white
faces all round her and the friendly look of the illustrated papers
and the 'Bonzo' pictures, reassured her after that doubtful
interlude at the pwe.

When the Lackersteens left the Club at nine, it was not Flory but
Mr Macgregor who walked home with them, ambling beside Elizabeth
like some friendly saurian monster, among the faint crooked shadows
of the gold mohur stems. The Prome anecdote, and many another,
found a new home. Any newcomer to Kyauktada was apt to come in for
rather a large share of Mr Macgregor's conversation, for the others
looked on him as an unparalleled bore, and it was a tradition at
the Club to interrupt his stories. But Elizabeth was by nature a
good listener. Mr Macgregor thought he had seldom met so
intelligent a girl.

Flory stayed a little longer at the Club, drinking with the others.
There was much smutty talk about Elizabeth. The quarrel about Dr
Veraswami's election had been shelved for the time being. Also,
the notice that Ellis had put up on the previous evening had been
taken down. Mr Macgregor had seen it during his morning visit to
the Club, and in his fair-minded way he had at once insisted on its
removal. So the notice had been suppressed; not, however, before
it had achieved its object.

9

During the next fortnight a great deal happened.

The feud between U Po Kyin and Dr Veraswami was now in full swing.
The whole town was divided into two factions, with every native
soul from the magistrates down to the bazaar sweepers enrolled on
one side or the other, and all ready for perjury when the time
came. But of the two parties, the doctor's was much the smaller
and less efficiently libellous. The editor of the Burmese Patriot
had been put on trial for sedition and libel, bail being refused.
His arrest had provoked a small riot in Rangoon, which was
suppressed by the police with the death of only two rioters. In
prison the editor went on hunger strike, but broke down after six
hours.

In Kyauktada, too, things had been happening. A dacoit named Nga
Shwe O had escaped from the jail in mysterious circumstances. And
there had been a whole crop of rumours about a projected native
rising in the district. The rumours--they were very vague ones as
yet--centred round a village named Thongwa, not far from the camp
where Maxwell was girdling teak. A weiksa, or magician, was said
to have appeared from nowhere and to be prophesying the doom of the
English power and distributing magic bullet-proof jackets. Mr
Macgregor did not take the rumours very seriously, but he had asked
for an extra force of Military Police. It was said that a company
of Indian infantry with a British officer in command would be sent
to Kyauktada shortly. Westfield, of course, had hurried to Thongwa
at the first threat, or rather hope, of trouble.

'God, if they'd only break out and rebel properly for once!' he
said to Ellis before starting. 'But it'll be a bloody washout as
usual. Always the same story with these rebellions--peter out
almost before they've begun. Would you believe it, I've never
fired my gun at a fellow yet, not even a dacoit. Eleven years of
it, not counting the War, and never killed a man. Depressing.'

'Oh, well,' said Ellis, 'if they won't come up to the scratch you
can always get hold of the ringleaders and give them a good
bambooing on the Q.T. That's better than coddling them up in our
damned nursing homes of prisons.'

'H'm, probably. Can't do it though, nowadays. All these kid-glove
laws--got to keep them, I suppose, if we're fools enough to make
'em.'

'Oh, rot the laws. Bambooing's the only thing that makes any
impression on the Burman. Have you seen them after they've been
flogged? I have. Brought out of the jail on bullock carts,
yelling, with the women plastering mashed bananas on their
backsides. That's something they do understand. If I had my way
I'd give it 'em on the soles of the feet the same as the Turks do.'

'Ah well. Let's hope they'll have the guts to show a bit of fight
for once. Then we'll call out the Military Police, rifles and all.
Plug a few dozen of 'em--that'll clear the air.'

However, the hoped-for opportunity did not come. Westfield and the
dozen constables he had taken with him to Thongwa--jolly round-
faced Gurkha boys, pining to use their kukris on somebody--found
the district depressingly peaceful. There seemed not the ghost of
a rebellion anywhere; only the annual attempt, as regular as the
monsoon, of the villagers to avoid paying the capitation tax.

The weather was growing hotter and hotter. Elizabeth had had her
first attack of prickly heat. Tennis at the Club had practically
ceased; people would play one languid set and then fall into chairs
and swallow pints of tepid lime-juice--tepid, because the ice came
only twice weekly from Mandalay and melted within twenty-four hours
of arriving. The Flame of the Forest was in full bloom. The
Burmese women, to protect their children from the sun, streaked
their faces with yellow cosmetic until they looked like little
African witch-doctors. Flocks of green pigeons, and imperial
pigeons as large as ducks, came to eat the berries of the big
peepul trees along the bazaar road.

Meanwhile, Flory had turned Ma Hla May out of his house.

A nasty, dirty job! There was a sufficient pretext--she had stolen
his gold cigarette-case and pawned it at the house of Li Yeik, the
Chinese grocer and illicit pawnbroker in the bazaar--but still, it
was only a pretext. Flory knew perfectly well, and Ma Hla May
knew, and all the servants knew, that he was getting rid of her
because of Elizabeth. Because of 'the Ingaleikma with dyed hair',
as Ma Hla May called her.

Ma Hla May made no violent scene at first. She stood sullenly
listening while he wrote her a cheque for a hundred rupees--Li Yeik
or the Indian chetty in the bazaar would cash cheques--and told her
that she was dismissed. He was more ashamed than she; he could not
look her in the face, and his voice went flat and guilty. When the
bullock cart came for her belongings, he shut himself in the
bedroom skulking till the scene should be over.

Cartwheels grated on the drive, there was the sound of men
shouting; then suddenly there was a fearful uproar of screams.
Flory went outside. They were all struggling round the gate in the
sunlight. Ma Hla May was clinging to the gatepost and Ko S'la was
trying to bundle her out. She turned a face full of fury and
despair towards Flory, screaming over and over, 'Thakin! Thakin!
Thakin! Thakin! Thakin!' It hurt him to the heart that she
should still call him thakin after he had dismissed her.

'What is it?' he said.

It appeared that there was a switch of false hair that Ma Hla May
and Ma Yi both claimed. Flory gave the switch to Ma Yi and gave Ma
Hla May two rupees to compensate her. Then the cart jolted away,
with Ma Hla May sitting beside her two wicker baskets, straight-
backed and sullen, and nursing a kitten on her knees. It was only
two months since he had given her the kitten as a present.

Ko S'la, who had long wished for Ma Hla May's removal, was not
altogether pleased now that it had happened. He was even less
pleased when he saw his master going to church--or as he called it,
to the 'English pagoda'--for Flory was still in Kyauktada on the
Sunday of the padre's arrival, and he went to church with the
others. There was a congregation of twelve, including Mr Francis,
Mr Samuel and six native Christians, with Mrs Lackersteen playing
'Abide with Me' on the tiny harmonium with one game pedal. It was
the first time in ten years that Flory had been to church, except
to funerals. Ko S'la's notions of what went on in the 'English
pagoda' were vague in the extreme; but he did know that church-
going signified respectability--a quality which, like all
bachelors' servants, he hated in his bones.

'There is trouble coming,' he said despondently to the other
servants. 'I have been watching him (he meant Flory) these ten
days past. He has cut down his cigarettes to fifteen a day, he has
stopped drinking gin before breakfast, he shaves himself every
evening--though he thinks I do not know it, the fool. And he has
ordered half a dozen new silk shirts! I had to stand over the
dirzi calling him bahinchut to get them finished in time. Evil
omens! I give him three months longer, and then good-bye to the
peace in this house!'

'What, is he going to get married?' said Ba Pe.

'I am certain of it. When a white man begins going to the English
pagoda, it is, as you might say, the beginning of the end.'

'I have had many masters in my life,' old Sammy said. 'The worst
was Colonel Wimpole sahib, who used to make his orderly hold me
down over the table while he came running from behind and kicked me
with very thick boots for serving banana fritters too frequently.
At other times, when he was drunk, he would fire his revolver
through the roof of the servants' quarters, just above our heads.
But I would sooner serve ten years under Colonel Wimpole sahib than
a week under a memsahib with her kit-kit. If our master marries I
shall leave the same day.'

'I shall not leave, for I have been his servant fifteen years. But
I know what is in store for us when that woman comes. She will
shout at us because of spots of dust on the furniture, and wake us
up to bring cups of tea in the afternoon when we are asleep, and
come poking into the cookhouse at all hours and complain over dirty
saucepans and cockroaches in the flour bin. It is my belief that
these women lie awake at nights thinking of new ways to torment
their servants.'

'They keep a little red book,' said Sammy, 'in which they enter the
bazaar-money, two annas for this, four annas for that, so that a
man cannot earn a pice. They make more kit-kit over the price of
an onion than a sahib over five rupees.'

'Ah, do I not know it! She will be worse than Ma Hla May. Women!'
he added comprehensively, with a kind of sigh.

The sigh was echoed by the others, even by Ma Pu and Ma Yi.
Neither took Ko S'la's remarks as a stricture upon her own sex,
Englishwomen being considered a race apart, possibly not even
human, and so dreadful that an Englishman's marriage is usually the
signal for the flight of every servant in his house, even those who
have been with him for years.

10

But as a matter of fact, Ko S'la's alarm was premature. After
knowing Elizabeth for ten days, Flory was scarcely more intimate
with her than on the day when he had first met her.

As it happened, he had her almost to himself during these ten days,
most of the Europeans being in the jungle. Flory himself had no
right to be loitering in headquarters, for at this time of year the
work of timber-extraction was in full swing, and in his absence
everything went to pieces under the incompetent Eurasian overseer.
But he had stayed--pretext, a touch of fever--while despairing
letters came almost every day from the overseer, telling of
disasters. One of the elephants was ill, the engine of the light
railway that was used for carrying teak logs to the river had
broken down, fifteen of the coolies had deserted. But Flory still
lingered, unable to tear himself away from Kyauktada while
Elizabeth was there, and continually seeking--never, as yet, to
much purpose--to recapture that easy and delightful friendship of
their first meeting.

They met every day, morning and evening, it was true. Each evening
they played a single of tennis at the Club--Mrs Lackersteen was too
limp and Mr Lackersteen too liverish for tennis at this time of
year--and afterwards they would sit in the lounge, all four
together, playing bridge and talking. But though Flory spent hours
in Elizabeth's company, and often they were alone together, he was
never for an instant at his ease with her. They talked--so long as
they talked of trivialities--with the utmost freedom, yet they were
distant, like strangers. He felt stiff in her presence, he could
not forget his birthmark; his twice-scraped chin smarted, his body
tortured him for whisky and tobacco--for he tried to cut down his
drinking and smoking when he was with her. After ten days they
seemed no nearer the relationship he wanted.

For somehow, he had never been able to talk to her as he longed to
talk. To talk, simply to talk! It sounds so little, and how much
it is! When you have existed to the brink of middle age in bitter
loneliness, among people to whom your true opinion on every subject
on earth is blasphemy, the need to talk is the greatest of all
needs. Yet with Elizabeth serious talk seemed impossible. It was
as though there had been a spell upon them that made all their
conversation lapse into banality; gramophone records, dogs, tennis
racquets--all that desolating Club-chatter. She seemed not to WANT
to talk of anything but that. He had only to touch upon a subject
of any conceivable interest to hear the evasion, the 'I shan't
play', coming into her voice. Her taste in books appalled him when
he discovered it. Yet she was young, he reminded himself, and had
she not drunk white wine and talked of Marcel Proust under the
Paris plane trees? Later, no doubt, she would understand him and
give him the companionship he needed. Perhaps it was only that he
had not won her confidence yet.

He was anything but tactful with her. Like all men who have lived
much alone, he adjusted himself better to ideas than to people.
And so, though all their talk was superficial, he began to irritate
her sometimes; not by what he said but by what he implied. There
was an uneasiness between them, ill-defined and yet often verging
upon quarrels. When two people, one of whom has lived long in the
country while the other is a newcomer, are thrown together, it is
inevitable that the first should act as cicerone to the second.
Elizabeth, during these days, was making her first acquaintance
with Burma; it was Flory, naturally, who acted as her interpreter,
explaining this, commenting upon that. And the things he said, or
the way he said them, provoked in her a vague yet deep disagreement.
For she perceived that Flory, when he spoke of the 'natives', spoke
nearly always IN FAVOUR of them. He was forever praising Burmese
customs and the Burmese character; he even went so far as to
contrast them favourably with the English. It disquieted her.
After all, natives were natives--interesting, no doubt, but finally
only a 'subject' people, an inferior people with black faces. His
attitude was a little TOO tolerant. Nor had he grasped, yet, in
what way he was antagonizing her. He so wanted her to love Burma as
he loved it, not to look at it with the dull, incurious eyes of a
memsahib! He had forgotten that most people can be at ease in a
foreign country only when they are disparaging the inhabitants.

He was too eager in his attempts to interest her in things
Oriental. He tried to induce her, for instance, to learn Burmese,
but it came to nothing. (Her aunt had explained to her that only
missionary-women spoke Burmese; nice women found kitchen Urdu quite
as much as they needed.) There were countless small disagreements
like that. She was grasping, dimly, that his views were not the
views an Englishman should hold. Much more clearly she grasped
that he was asking her to be fond of the Burmese, even to admire
them; to admire people with black faces, almost savages, whose
appearance still made her shudder!

The subject cropped up in a hundred ways. A knot of Burmans would
pass them on the road. She, with her still fresh eyes, would gaze
after them, half curious and half repelled; and she would say to
Flory, as she would have said to anybody:

'How REVOLTINGLY ugly these people are, aren't they?'

'ARE they? I always think they're rather charming-looking, the
Burmese. They have such splendid bodies! Look at that fellow's
shoulders--like a bronze statue. Just think what sights you'd see
in England if people went about half naked as they do here!'

'But they have such hideous-shaped heads! Their skulls kind of
slope up behind like a tom-cat's. And then the way their foreheads
slant back--it makes them look so WICKED. I remember reading
something in a magazine about the shape of people's heads; it said
that a person with a sloping forehead is a CRIMINAL TYPE.'

'Oh, come, that's a bit sweeping! Round about half the people in
the world have that kind of forehead.'

'Oh, well, if you count COLOURED people, of course--!'

Or perhaps a string of women would pass, going to the well: heavy-
set peasant-girls, copper-brown, erect under their water-pots with
strong marelike buttocks protruded. The Burmese women repelled
Elizabeth more than the men; she felt her kinship with them, and
the hatefulness of being kin to creatures with black faces.

'Aren't they too simply dreadful? So COARSE-LOOKING; like some
kind of animal. Do you think ANYONE could think those women
attractive?'

'Their own men do, I believe.'

'I suppose they would. But that black skin--I don't know how
anyone could bear it!'

'But, you know, one gets used to the brown skin in time. In fact
they say--I believe it's true--that after a few years in these
countries a brown skin seems more natural than a white one. And
after all, it IS more natural. Take the world as a whole, it's an
eccentricity to be white.'

'You DO have some funny ideas!'

And so on and so on. She felt all the while an unsatisfactoriness,
an unsoundness in the things he said. It was particularly so on
the evening when Flory allowed Mr Francis and Mr Samuel, the two
derelict Eurasians, to entrap him in conversation at the Club gate.

Elizabeth, as it happened, had reached the Club a few minutes
before Flory, and when she heard his voice at the gate she came
round the tennis-screen to meet him. The two Eurasians had sidled
up to Flory and cornered him like a pair of dogs asking for a game.
Francis was doing most of the talking. He was a meagre, excitable
man, and as brown as a cigar-leaf, being the son of a South Indian
woman; Samuel, whose mother had been a Karen, was pale yellow with
dull red hair. Both were dressed in shabby drill suits, with vast
topis beneath which their slender bodies looked like the stalks of
toadstools.

Elizabeth came down the path in time to hear fragments of an
enormous and complicated autobiography. Talking to white men--
talking, for choice, about himself--was the great joy of Francis's
life. When, at intervals of months, he found a European to listen
to him, his life-history would pour out of him in unquenchable
torrents. He was talking in a nasal, sing-song voice of incredible
rapidity:

'Of my father, sir, I remember little, but he was very choleric man
and many whackings with big bamboo stick all knobs on both for
self, little half-brother and two mothers. Also how on occasion of
bishop's visit little half-brother and I dress in longyis and sent
among the Burmese children to preserve incognito. My father never
rose to be bishop, sir. Four converts only in twenty-eight years,
and also too great fondness for Chinese rice-spirit very fiery
noised abroad and spoil sales of my father's booklet entitled The
Scourge of Alcohol, published with the Rangoon Baptist Press, one
rupee eight annas. My little half-brother die one hot weather,
always coughing, coughing,' etc., etc.

The two Eurasians perceived the presence of Elizabeth. Both doffed
their topis with bows and brilliant displays of teeth. It was
probably several years since either of them had had a chance of
talking to an Englishwoman. Francis burst out more effusively than
ever. He was chattering in evident dread that he would be
interrupted and the conversation cut short.

'Good evening to you, madam, good evening, good evening! Most
honoured to make your acquaintance, madam! Very sweltering is the
weather these days, is not? But seasonable for April. Not too
much you are suffering from prickly heat, I trust? Pounded
tamarind applied to the afflicted spot is infallible. Myself I
suffer torments each night. Very prevalent disease among we
Europeans.'

He pronounced it Europian, like Mr Chollop in Martin Chuzzlewit.
Elizabeth did not answer. She was looking at the Eurasians
somewhat coldly. She had only a dim idea as to who or what they
were, and it struck her as impertinent that they should speak to
her.

'Thanks, I'll remember about the tamarind,' Flory said.

'Specific of renowned Chinese doctor, sir. Also, sir-madam, may I
advise to you, wearing only Terai hat is not judicious in April,
sir. For the natives all well, their skulls are adamant. But for
us sunstroke ever menaces. Very deadly is the sun upon European
skull. But is it that I detain you, madam?'

This was said in a disappointed tone. Elizabeth had, in fact,
decided to snub the Eurasians. She did not know why Flory was
allowing them to hold him in conversation. As she turned away to
stroll back to the tennis court, she made a practice stroke in the
air with her racquet, to remind Flory that the game was overdue.
He saw it and followed her, rather reluctantly, for he did not like
snubbing the wretched Francis, bore though he was.

'I must be off,' he said. 'Good evening, Francis. Good evening,
Samuel.'

'Good evening, sir! Good evening, madam! Good evening, good
evening!' They receded with more hat flourishes.

'Who ARE those two?' said Elizabeth as Flory came up with her.
'Such extraordinary creatures! They were in church on Sunday. One
of them looks almost white. Surely he isn't an Englishman?'

'No, they're Eurasians--sons of white fathers and native mothers.
Yellow-bellies is our friendly nickname for them.'

'But what are they doing here? Where do they live? Do they do any
work?'

'They exist somehow or other in the bazaar. I believe Francis acts
as clerk to an Indian money-lender, and Samuel to some of the
pleaders. But they'd probably starve now and then if it weren't
for the charity of the natives.'

'The natives! Do you mean to say--sort of CADGE from the natives?'

'I fancy so. It would be a very easy thing to do, if one cared to.
The Burmese won't let anyone starve.'

Elizabeth had never heard of anything of this kind before. The
notion of men who were at least partly white living in poverty
among 'natives' so shocked her that she stopped short on the path,
and the game of tennis was postponed for a few minutes.

'But how awful! I mean, it's such a bad example! It's almost as
bad as if one of US was like that. Couldn't something be done for
those two? Get up a subscription and send them away from here, or
something?'

'I'm afraid it wouldn't help much. Wherever they went they'd be in
the same position.'

'But couldn't they get some proper work to do?'

'I doubt it. You see, Eurasians of that type--men who've been
brought up in the bazaar and had no education--are done for from
the start. The Europeans won't touch them with a stick, and
they're cut off from entering the lower-grade Government services.
There's nothing they can do except cadge, unless they chuck all
pretension to being Europeans. And really you can't expect the
poor devils to do that. Their drop of white blood is the sole
asset they've got. Poor Francis, I never meet him but he begins
telling me about his prickly heat. Natives, you see, are supposed
not to suffer from prickly heat--bosh, of course, but people
believe it. It's the same with sunstroke. They wear those huge
topis to remind you that they've got European skulls. A kind of
coat of arms. The bend sinister, you might say.'

This did not satisfy Elizabeth. She perceived that Flory, as
usual, had a sneaking sympathy with the Eurasians. And the
appearance of the two men had excited a peculiar dislike in her.
She had placed their type now. They looked like dagoes. Like
those Mexicans and Italians and other dago people who play the
mauvais role in so many a film.

'They looked awfully degenerate types, didn't they? So thin and
weedy and cringing; and they haven't got at all HONEST faces. I
suppose these Eurasians ARE very degenerate? I've heard that half-
castes always inherit what's worst in both races. Is that true?'

'I don't know that it's true. Most Eurasians aren't very good
specimens, and it's hard to see how they could be, with their
upbringing. But our attitude towards them is rather beastly. We
always talk of them as though they'd sprung up from the ground like
mushrooms, with all their faults ready-made. But when all's said
and done, we're responsible for their existence.'

'Responsible for their existence?'

'Well, they've all got fathers, you see.'

'Oh . . . Of course there's that. . . . But after all, YOU aren't
responsible. I mean, only a very low kind of man would--er--have
anything to do with native women, wouldn't he?'

'Oh, quite. But the fathers of both those two were clergymen in
holy orders, I believe.'

He thought of Rosa McFee, the Eurasian girl he had seduced in
Mandalay in 1913. The way he used to sneak down to the house in a
gharry with the shutters down; Rosa's corkscrew curls; her withered
old Burmese mother, giving him tea in the dark living-room with the
fern pots and the wicker divan. And afterwards, when he had
chucked Rosa, those dreadful, imploring letters on scented note-
paper, which, in the end, he had ceased opening.

Elizabeth reverted to the subject of Francis and Samuel after
tennis.

'Those two Eurasians--does anyone here have anything to do with
them? Invite them to their houses or anything?'

'Good gracious, no. They're complete outcasts. It's not
considered quite the thing to talk to them, in fact. Most of us
say good morning to them--Ellis won't even do that.'

'But YOU talked to them.'

'Oh well, I break the rules occasionally. I meant that a pukka
sahib probably wouldn't be seen talking to them. But you see, I
try--just sometimes, when I have the pluck--NOT to be a pukka
sahib.'

It was an unwise remark. She knew very well by this time the
meaning of the phrase 'pukka sahib' and all it stood for. His
remark had made the difference in their viewpoint a little clearer.
The glance she gave him was almost hostile, and curiously hard; for
her face could look hard sometimes, in spite of its youth and its
flower-like skin. Those modish tortoise-shell spectacles gave her
a very self-possessed look. Spectacles are queerly expressive
things--almost more expressive, indeed, than eyes.

As yet he had neither understood her nor quite won her trust. Yet
on the surface, at least, things had not gone ill between them. He
had fretted her sometimes, but the good impression that he had made
that first morning was not yet effaced. It was a curious fact that
she scarcely noticed his birthmark at this time. And there were
some subjects on which she was glad to hear him talk. Shooting,
for example--she seemed to have an enthusiasm for shooting that was
remarkable in a girl. Horses, also; but he was less knowledgeable
about horses. He had arranged to take her out for a day's
shooting, later, when he could make preparations. Both of them
were looking forward to the expedition with some eagerness, though
not entirely for the same reason.

11

Flory and Elizabeth walked down the bazaar road. It was morning,
but the air was so hot that to walk in it was like wading through a
torrid sea. Strings of Burmans passed, coming from the bazaar, on
scraping sandals, and knots of girls who hurried by four and five
abreast, with short quick steps, chattering, their burnished hair
gleaming. By the roadside, just before you got to the jail, the
fragments of a stone pagoda were littered, cracked and overthrown
by the strong roots of a peepul tree. The angry carved faces of
demons looked up from the grass where they had fallen. Near by
another peepul tree had twined itself round a palm, uprooting it
and bending it backwards in a wrestle that had lasted a decade.

They walked on and came to the jail, a vast square block, two
hundred yards each way, with shiny concrete walls twenty feet high.
A peacock, pet of the jail, was mincing pigeon-toed along the
parapet. Six convicts came by, head down, dragging two heavy
handcarts piled with earth, under the guard of Indian warders.
They were long-sentence men, with heavy limbs, dressed in uniforms
of coarse white cloth with small dunces' caps perched on their
shaven crowns. Their faces were greyish, cowed and curiously
flattened. Their leg-irons jingled with a clear ring. A woman
came past carrying a basket of fish on her head. Two crows were
circling round it and making darts at it, and the woman was
flapping one hand negligently to keep them away.

There was a din of voices a little distance away. 'The bazaar's
just round the corner,' Flory said. 'I think this is a market
morning. It's rather fun to watch.'

He had asked her to come down to the bazaar with him, telling her
it would amuse her to see it. They rounded the bend. The bazaar
was an enclosure like a very large cattle pen, with low stalls,
mostly palm-thatched, round its edge. In the enclosure, a mob of
people seethed, shouting and jostling; the confusion of their
multi-coloured clothes was like a cascade of hundreds-and-thousands
poured out of a jar. Beyond the bazaar one could see the huge,
miry river. Tree branches and long streaks of scum raced down it
at seven miles an hour. By the bank a fleet of sampans, with sharp
beak-like bows on which eyes were painted, rocked at their mooring-
poles.

Flory and Elizabeth stood watching for a moment. Files of women
passed balancing vegetable baskets on their heads, and pop-eyed
children who stared at the Europeans. An old Chinese in dungarees
faded to sky-blue hurried by, nursing some unrecognizable, bloody
fragment of a pig's intestines.

'Let's go and poke around the stalls a bit, shall we?' Flory said.

'Is it all right going in among the crowd? Everything's so
horribly dirty.'

'Oh, it's all right, they'll make way for us. It'll interest you.'

Elizabeth followed him doubtfully and even unwillingly. Why was it
that he always brought her to these places? Why was he forever
dragging her in among the 'natives', trying to get her to take an
interest in them and watch their filthy, disgusting habits? It was
all wrong, somehow. However, she followed, not feeling able to
explain her reluctance. A wave of stifling air met them; there was
a reek of garlic, dried fish, sweat, dust, anise, cloves and
turmeric. The crowd surged round them, swarms of stocky peasants
with cigar-brown faces, withered elders with their grey hair tied
in a bun behind, young mothers carrying naked babies astride the
hip. Flo was trodden on and yelped. Low, strong shoulders bumped
against Elizabeth, as the peasants, too busy bargaining even to
stare at a white woman, struggled round the stalls.

'Look!' Flory was pointing with his stick to a stall, and saying
something, but it was drowned by the yells of two women who were
shaking their fists at each other over a basket of pineapples.
Elizabeth had recoiled from the stench and din, but he did not
notice it, and led her deeper into the crowd, pointing to this
stall and that. The merchandise was foreign-looking, queer and
poor. There were vast pomelos hanging on strings like green moons,
red bananas, baskets of heliotrope-coloured prawns the size of
lobsters, brittle dried fish tied in bundles, crimson chilis, ducks
split open and cured like hams, green coco-nuts, the larvae of the
rhinoceros beetle, sections of sugar-cane, dahs, lacquered sandals,
check silk longyis, aphrodisiacs in the form of large, soap-like
pills, glazed earthenware jars four feet high, Chinese sweetmeats
made of garlic and sugar, green and white cigars, purple prinjals,
persimmon-seed necklaces, chickens cheeping in wicker cages, brass
Buddhas, heart-shaped betel leaves, bottles of Kruschen salts,
switches of false hair, red clay cooking-pots, steel shoes for
bullocks, papier-mache marionettes, strips of alligator hide with
magical properties. Elizabeth's head was beginning to swim. At
the other end of the bazaar the sun gleamed through a priest's
umbrella, blood-red, as though through the ear of a giant. In
front of a stall four Dravidian women were pounding turmeric with
heavy stakes in a large wooden mortar. The hot-scented yellow
powder flew up and tickled Elizabeth's nostrils, making her sneeze.
She felt that she could not endure this place a moment longer. She
touched Flory's arm.

'This crowd--the heat is so dreadful. Do you think we could get
into the shade?'

He turned round. To tell the truth, he had been too busy talking--
mostly inaudibly, because of the din--to notice how the heat and
stench were affecting her.

'Oh, I say, I am sorry. Let's get out of it at once. I tell you
what, we'll go along to old Li Yeik's shop--he's the Chinese
grocer--and he'll get us a drink of something. It is rather
stifling here.'

'All these spices--they kind of take your breath away. And what is
that dreadful smell like fish?'

'Oh, only a kind of sauce they make out of prawns. They bury them
and then dig them up several weeks afterwards.'

'How absolutely horrible!'

'Quite wholesome, I believe. Come away from that!' he added to
Flo, who was nosing at a basket of small gudgeon-like fish with
spines on their gills.

Li Yeik's shop faced the farther end of the bazaar. What Elizabeth
had really wanted was to go straight back to the Club, but the
European look of Li Yeik's shop-front--it was piled with
Lancashire-made cotton shirts and almost incredibly cheap German
clocks--comforted her somewhat after the barbarity of the bazaar.
They were about to climb the steps when a slim youth of twenty,
damnably dressed in a longyi, blue cricket blazer and bright yellow
shoes, with his hair parted and greased 'Ingaleik fashion',
detached himself from the crowd and came after them. He greeted
Flory with a small awkward movement as though restraining himself
from shikoing.

'What is it?' Flory said.

'Letter, sir.' He produced a grubby envelope.

'Would you excuse me?' Flory said to Elizabeth, opening the letter.
It was from Ma Hla May--or rather, it had been written for her and
she had signed it with a cross--and it demanded fifty rupees, in a
vaguely menacing manner.

Flory pulled the youth aside. 'You speak English? Tell Ma Hla May
I'll see about this later. And tell her that if she tries
blackmailing me she won't get another pice. Do you understand?'

'Yes, sir.'

'And now go away. Don't follow me about, or there'll be trouble.'

'Yes, sir.'

'A clerk wanting a job,' Flory explained to Elizabeth as they went
up the steps. 'They come bothering one at all hours.' And he
reflected that the tone of the letter was curious, for he had not
expected Ma Hla May to begin blackmailing him so soon; however, he
had not time at the moment to wonder what it might mean.

They went into the shop, which seemed dark after the outer air. Li
Yeik, who was sitting smoking among his baskets of merchandise--
there was no counter--hobbled eagerly forward when he saw who had
come in. Flory was a friend of his. He was an old bent-kneed man
dressed in blue, wearing a pigtail, with a chinless yellow face,
all cheekbones, like a benevolent skull. He greeted Flory with
nasal honking noises which he intended for Burmese, and at once
hobbled to the back of the shop to call for refreshments. There
was a cool sweetish smell of opium. Long strips of red paper with
black lettering were pasted on the walls, and at one side there was
a little altar with a portrait of two large, serene-looking people
in embroidered robes, and two sticks of incense smouldering in
front of it. Two Chinese women, one old, and a girl were sitting
on a mat rolling cigarettes with maize straw and tobacco like
chopped horsehair. They wore black silk trousers, and their feet,
with bulging, swollen insteps, were crammed into red-heeled wooden
slippers no bigger than a doll's. A naked child was crawling
slowly about the floor like a large yellow frog.

'Do look at those women's feet!' Elizabeth whispered as soon as Li
Yeik's back was turned. 'Isn't it simply dreadful! How do they
get them like that? Surely it isn't natural?'

'No, they deform them artificially. It's going out in China, I
believe, but the people here are behind the times. Old Li Yeik's
pigtail is another anachronism. Those small feet are beautiful
according to Chinese ideas.'

'Beautiful! They're so horrible I can hardly look at them. These
people must be absolute savages!'

'Oh no! They're highly civilized; more civilized than we are, in
my opinion. Beauty's all a matter of taste. There are a people in
this country called the Palaungs who admire long necks in women.
The girls wear broad brass rings to stretch their necks, and they
put on more and more of them until in the end they have necks like
giraffes. It's no queerer than bustles or crinolines.'

At this moment Li Yeik came back with two fat, round-faced Burmese
girls, evidently sisters, giggling and carrying between them two
chairs and a blue Chinese teapot holding half a gallon. The two
girls were or had been Li Yeik's concubines. The old man had
produced a tin of chocolates and was prising off the lid and
smiling in a fatherly way, exposing three long, tobacco-blackened
teeth. Elizabeth sat down in a very uncomfortable frame of mind.
She was perfectly certain that it could not be right to accept
these people's hospitality. One of the Burmese girls had at once
gone behind the chairs and begun fanning Flory and Elizabeth, while
the other knelt at their feet and poured out cups of tea. Elizabeth
felt very foolish with the girl fanning the back of her neck and the
Chinaman grinning in front of her. Flory always seemed to get her
into these uncomfortable situations. She took a chocolate from the
tin Li Yeik offered her, but she could not bring herself to say
'thank you'.

'Is this ALL RIGHT?' she whispered to Flory.

'All right?'

'I mean, ought we to be sitting down in these people's house?
Isn't it sort of--sort of infra dig?'

'It's all right with a Chinaman. They're a favoured race in this
country. And they're very democratic in their ideas. It's best to
treat them more or less as equals.'

'This tea looks absolutely beastly. It's quite green. You'd think
they'd have the sense to put milk in it, wouldn't you?'

'It's not bad. It's a special kind of tea old Li Yeik gets from
China. It has orange blossoms in it, I believe.'

'Ugh! It tastes exactly like earth,' she said, having tasted it.

Li Yeik stood holding his pipe, which was two feet long with a
metal bowl the size of an acorn, and watching the Europeans to see
whether they enjoyed his tea. The girl behind the chair said
something in Burmese, at which both of them burst out giggling
again. The one kneeling on the floor looked up and gazed in a
naive admiring way at Elizabeth. Then she turned to Flory and
asked him whether the English lady wore stays. She pronounced it
s'tays.

'Ch!' said Li Yeik in a scandalized manner, stirring the girl with
his toe to silence her.

'I should hardly care to ask her,' Flory said.

'Oh, thakin, please do ask her! We are so anxious to know!'

There was an argument, and the girl behind the chair forgot fanning
and joined in. Both of them, it appeared, had been pining all
their lives to see a veritable pair of s'tays. They had heard so
many tales about them; they were made of steel on the principle of
a strait waistcoat, and they compressed a woman so tightly that she
had no breasts, absolutely no breasts at all! The girls pressed
their hands against their fat ribs in illustration. Would not
Flory be so kind as to ask the English lady? There was a room
behind the shop where she could come with them and undress. They
had been so hoping to see a pair of s'tays.

Then the conversation lapsed suddenly. Elizabeth was sitting
stiffly, holding her tiny cup of tea, which she could not bring
herself to taste again, and wearing a rather hard smile. A chill
fell upon the Orientals; they realized that the English girl, who
could not join in their conversation, was not at her ease. Her
elegance and her foreign beauty, which had charmed them a moment
earlier, began to awe them a little. Even Flory was conscious of
the same feeling. There came one of those dreadful moments that
one has with Orientals, when everyone avoids everyone else's eyes,
trying vainly to think of something to say. Then the naked child,
which had been exploring some baskets at the back of the shop,
crawled across to where the European sat. It examined their shoes
and stockings with great curiosity, and then, looking up, saw their
white faces and was seized with terror. It let out a desolate
wail, and began making water on the floor.

The old Chinese woman looked up, clicked her tongue and went on
rolling cigarettes. No one else took the smallest notice. A pool
began to form on the floor. Elizabeth was so horrified that she
set her cup down hastily, and spilled the tea. She plucked at
Flory's arm.

'That child! Do look what it's doing! Really, can't someone--it's
too awful!' For a moment everyone gazed in astonishment, and then
they all grasped what was the matter. There was a flurry and a
general clicking of tongues. No one had paid any attention to the
child--the incident was too normal to be noticed--and now they all
felt horribly ashamed. Everyone began putting the blame on the
child. There were exclamations of 'What a disgraceful child! What
a disgusting child!' The old Chinese woman carried the child,
still howling, to the door, and held it out over the step as though
wringing out a bath sponge. And in the same moment, as it seemed,
Flory and Elizabeth were outside the shop, and he was following her
back to the road with Li Yeik and the others looking after them in
dismay.

'If THAT'S what you call civilized people--!' she was exclaiming.

'I'm sorry,' he said feebly. 'I never expected--'

'What absolutely DISGUSTING people!'

She was bitterly angry. Her face had flushed a wonderful delicate
pink, like a poppy bud opened a day too soon. It was the deepest
colour of which it was capable. He followed her past the bazaar
and back to the main road, and they had gone fifty yards before he
ventured to speak again.

'I'm so sorry that this should have happened! Li Yeik is such a
decent old chap. He'd hate to think that he'd offended you.
Really it would have been better to stay a few minutes. Just to
thank him for the tea.'

'Thank him! After THAT!'

'But honestly, you oughtn't to mind that sort of thing. Not in
this country. These people's whole outlook is so different from
ours. One has to adjust oneself. Suppose, for instance, you were
back in the Middle Ages--'

'I think I'd rather not discuss it any longer.'

It was the first time they had definitely quarrelled. He was too
miserable even to ask himself how it was that he offended her.
He did not realize that this constant striving to interest her in
Oriental things struck her only as perverse, ungentlemanly, a
deliberate seeking after the squalid and the 'beastly'. He had not
grasped even now with what eyes she saw the 'natives'. He only
knew that at each attempt to make her share his life, his thoughts,
his sense of beauty, she shied away from him like a frightened
horse.

They walked up the road, he to the left of her and a little behind.
He watched her averted cheek and the tiny gold hairs on her nape
beneath the brim of her Terai hat. How he loved her, how he loved
her! It was as though he had never truly loved her till this
moment, when he walked behind her in disgrace, not even daring to
show his disfigured face. He made to speak several times, and
stopped himself. His voice was not quite ready, and he did not
know what he could say that did not risk offending her somehow. At
last he said, flatly, with a feeble pretence that nothing was the
matter:

'It's getting beastly hot, isn't it?'

With the temperature at 90 degrees in the shade it was not a
brilliant remark. To his surprise she seized on it with a kind of
eagerness. She turned to face him, and she was smiling again.

'Isn't it simply BAKING!'

With that they were at peace. The silly, banal remark, bringing
with it the reassuring atmosphere of Club-chatter, had soothed her
like a charm. Flo, who had lagged behind, came puffing up to them
dribbling saliva; in an instant they were talking, quite as usual,
about dogs. They talked about dogs for the rest of the way home,
almost without a pause. Dogs are an inexhaustible subject. Dogs,
dogs! thought Flory as they climbed the hot hillside, with the
mounting sun scorching their shoulders through their thin clothes,
like the breath of fire--were they never to talk of anything except
dogs? Or failing dogs, gramophone records and tennis racquets?
And yet, when they kept to trash like this, how easily, how
amicably they could talk!

They passed the glittering white wall of the cemetery and came to
the Lackersteens' gate. Old mohur trees grew round it, and a clump
of hollyhocks eight feet high, with round red flowers like blowsy
girls' faces. Flory took off his hat in the shade and fanned his
face.

'Well, we're back before the worst of the heat comes. I'm afraid
our trip to the bazaar wasn't altogether a success.'

'Oh, not at all! I enjoyed it, really I did.'

'No--I don't know, something unfortunate always seems to happen.--
Oh, by the way! You haven't forgotten that we're going out
shooting the day after tomorrow? I hope that day will be all right
for you?'

'Yes, and my uncle's going to lend me his gun. Such awful fun!
You'll have to teach me all about shooting. I AM so looking
forward to it.'

'So am I. It's a rotten time of year for shooting, but we'll do
our best. Goodbye for the present, then.'

'Good-bye, Mr Flory.'

She still called him Mr Flory though he called her Elizabeth. They
parted and went their ways, each thinking of the shooting trip,
which, both of them felt, would in some way put things right
between them.

12

In the sticky, sleepy heat of the living-room, almost dark because
of the beaded curtain, U Po Kyin was marching slowly up and down,
boasting. From time to time he would put a hand under his singlet
and scratch his sweating breasts, huge as a woman's with fat. Ma
Kin was sitting on her mat, smoking slender white cigars. Through
the open door of the bedroom one could see the corner of U Po
Kyin's huge square bed, with carved teak posts, like a catafalque,
on which he had committed many and many a rape.

Ma Kin was now hearing for the first time of the 'other affair'
which underlay U Po Kyin's attack on Dr Veraswami. Much as he
despised her intelligence, U Po Kyin usually let Ma Kin into his
secrets sooner or later. She was the only person in his immediate
circle who was not afraid of him, and there was therefore a
pleasure in impressing her.

'Well, Kin Kin,' he said, 'you see how it has all gone according to
plan! Eighteen anonymous letters already, and every one of them a
masterpiece. I would repeat some of them to you if I thought you
were capable of appreciating them.'

'But supposing the Europeans take no notice of your anonymous
letters? What then?'

'Take no notice? Aha, no fear of that! I think I know something
about the European mentality. Let me tell you, Kin Kin, that if
there is one thing I CAN do, it is to write an anonymous letter.'

This was true. U Po Kyin's letters had already taken effect, and
especially on their chief target, Mr Macgregor.

Only two days earlier than this, Mr Macgregor had spent a very
troubled evening in trying to make up his mind whether Dr Veraswami
was or was not guilty of disloyalty to the Government. Of course,
it was not a question of any overt act of disloyalty--that was
quite irrelevant. The point was, was the doctor the KIND of man
who would hold seditious opinions? In India you are not judged for
what you do, but for what you ARE. The merest breath of suspicion
against his loyalty can ruin an Oriental official. Mr Macgregor
had too just a nature to condemn even an Oriental out of hand. He
had puzzled as late as midnight over a whole pile of confidential
papers, including the five anonymous letters he had received,
besides two others that had been forwarded to him by Westfield,
pinned together with a cactus thorn.

It was not only the letters. Rumours about the doctor had been
pouring in from every side. U Po Kyin fully grasped that to call
the doctor a traitor was not enough in itself; it was necessary to
attack his reputation from every possible angle. The doctor was
charged not only with sedition, but also with extortion, rape,
torture, performing illegal operations, performing operations while
blind drunk, murder by poison, murder by sympathetic magic, eating
beef, selling death certificates to murderers, wearing his shoes in
the precincts of the pagoda and making homosexual attempts on the
Military Police drummer boy. To hear what was said of him, anyone
would have imagined the doctor a compound of Machiavelli, Sweeny
Todd and the Marquis de Sade. Mr Macgregor had not paid much
attention at first. He was too accustomed to this kind of thing.
But with the last of the anonymous letters U Po Kyin had brought
off a stroke that was brilliant even for him.

It concerned the escape of Nga Shwe O, the dacoit, from Kyauktada
jail. Nga Shwe O, who was in the middle of a well-earned seven
years, had been preparing his escape for several months past, and
as a start his friends outside had bribed one of the Indian
warders. The warder received his hundred rupees in advance,
applied for leave to visit the death-bed of a relative and spent
several busy days in the Mandalay brothels. Time passed, and the
day of the escape was postponed several times--the warder,
meanwhile, growing more and more homesick for the brothels.
Finally he decided to earn a further reward by betraying the plot
to U Po Kyin. But U Po Kyin, as usual, saw his chance. He told
the warder on dire penalties to hold his tongue, and then, on the
very night of the escape, when it was too late to do anything, sent
another anonymous letter to Mr Macgregor, warning him that an
escape was being attempted. The letter added, needless to say,
that Dr Veraswami, the superintendent of the jail, had been bribed
for his connivance.

In the morning there was a hullabaloo and a rushing to and fro of
warders and, policemen at the jail, for Nga Shwe O had escaped.
(He was a long way down the river, in a sampan provided by U Po
Kyin.) This time Mr Macgregor was taken aback. Whoever had
written the letter must have been privy to the plot, and was
probably telling the truth about the doctor's connivance. It was a
very serious matter. A jail superintendent who will take bribes to
let a prisoner escape is capable of anything. And therefore--
perhaps the logical sequence was not quite clear, but it was clear
enough to Mr Macgregor--therefore the charge of sedition, which was
the main charge against the doctor, became much more credible.

U Po Kyin had attacked the other Europeans at the same time.
Flory, who was the doctor's friend and his chief source of
prestige, had been scared easily enough into deserting him. With
Westfield it was a little harder. Westfield, as a policeman, knew
a great deal about U Po Kyin and might conceivably upset his plans.
Policemen and magistrates are natural enemies. But U Po Kyin had
known how to turn even this fact to advantage. He had accused the
doctor, anonymously of course, of being in league with the
notorious scoundrel and bribe-taker U Po Kyin. That settled
Westfield. As for Ellis, no anonymous letters were needed in his
case; nothing could possibly make him think worse of the doctor
than he did already.

U Po Kyin had even sent one of his anonymous letters to Mrs
Lackersteen, for he knew the power of European women. Dr
Veraswami, the letter said, was inciting the natives to abduct and
rape the European women--no details were given, nor were they
needed. U Po Kyin had touched Mrs Lackersteen's weak spot. To her
mind the words 'sedition', 'Nationalism,', 'rebellion', 'Home
Rule', conveyed one thing and one only, and that was a picture of
herself being raped by a procession of jet-black coolies with
rolling white eyeballs. It was a thought that kept her awake at
night sometimes. Whatever good regard the Europeans might once
have had for the doctor was crumbling rapidly.

'So you see,' said U Po Kyin with a pleased air, 'you see how I
have undermined him. He is like a tree sawn through at the base.
One tap and down he comes. In three weeks or less I shall deliver
that tap.'

'How?'

'I am just coming to that. I think it is time for you to hear
about it. You have no sense in these matters, but you know how to
hold your tongue. You have heard talk of this rebellion that is
brewing near Thongwa village?'

'Yes. They are very foolish, those villagers. What can they do
with their dahs and spears against the Indian soldiers? They will
be shot down like wild animals.'

'Of course. If there is any fighting it will be a massacre. But
they are only a pack of superstitious peasants. They have put
their faith in these absurd bullet-proof jackets that are being
distributed to them. I despise such ignorance.'

'Poor men! Why do you not stop them, Ko Po Kyin? There is no need
to arrest anybody. You have only to go to the village and tell
them that you know their plans, and they will never dare to go on.'

'Ah well, I could stop them if I chose, of course. But then I do
not choose. I have my reasons. You see, Kin Kin--you will please
keep silent about this--this is, so to speak, my own rebellion. I
arranged it myself.'

'What!'

Ma Kin dropped her cigar. Her eyes had opened so wide that the
pale blue white showed all round the pupil. She was horrified.
She burst out:

'Ko Po Kyin, what are you saying? You do not mean it! You,
raising a rebellion--it cannot be true!'

'Certainly it is true. And a very good job we are making of it.
That magician whom I brought from Rangoon is a clever fellow. He
has toured all over India as a circus conjurer. The bullet-proof
jackets were bought at Whiteaway & Laidlaw's stores, one rupee
eight annas each. They are costing me a pretty penny, I can tell
you.'

'But, Ko Po Kyin! A rebellion! The terrible fighting and shooting,
and all the poor men who will be killed! Surely you have not
gone mad? Are you not afraid of being shot yourself?'

U Po Kyin halted in his stride. He was astonished. 'Good gracious,
woman, what idea have you got hold of now? You do not suppose that
_I_ am rebelling against the Government? I--a Government servant
of thirty years' standing! Good heavens, no! I said that I had
STARTED the rebellion, not that I was taking part in it. It is
these fools of villagers who are going to risk their skins, not I.
No one dreams that I have anything to do with it, or ever will,
except Ba Sein and one or two others.'

'But you said it was you who were persuading them to rebel?'

'Of course. I have accused Veraswami of raising a rebellion
against the Government. Well, I must have a rebellion to show,
must I not?'

'Ah, I see. And when the rebellion breaks out, you are going to
say that Dr Veraswami is to blame for it. Is that it?'

'How slow you are! I should have thought even a fool would have
seen that I am raising the rebellion merely in order to crush it.
I am--what is that expression Mr Macgregor uses? Agent provocateur--
Latin, you would not understand. I am agent provocateur. First I
persuade these fools at Thongwa to rebel, and then I arrest them as
rebels. At the very moment when it is due to start, I shall pounce
on the ringleaders and clap every one of them in jail. After that,
I dare say there may possibly be some fighting. A few men may be
killed and a few more sent to the Andamans. But, meanwhile, I shall
be first in the field. U Po Kyin, the man who quelled a most
dangerous rising in the nick of time! I shall be the hero of the
district.'

U Po Kyin, justly proud of his plan, began to pace up and down the
room again with his hands behind his back, smiling. Ma Kin
considered the plan in silence for some time. Finally she said:

'I still do not see why you are doing this, Ko Po Kyin. Where is
it all leading? And what has it got to do with Dr Veraswami?'

'I shall never teach you wisdom, Kin Kin! Did I not tell you at
the beginning that Veraswami stands in my way? This rebellion is
the very thing to get rid of him. Of course we shall never prove
that he is responsible for it; but what does that matter? All the
Europeans will take it for granted that he is mixed up in it
somehow. That is how their minds work. He will be ruined for
life. And his fall is my rise. The blacker I can paint him, the
more glorious my own conduct will appear. Now do you understand?'

'Yes, I do understand. And I think it is a base, evil plan. I
wonder you are not ashamed to tell it me.'

'Now, Kin Kin! Surely you are not going to start that nonsense
over again?'

'Ko Po Kyin, why is it that you are only happy when you are being
wicked? Why is it that everything you do must bring evil to
others? Think of that poor doctor who will be dismissed from his
post, and those villagers who will be shot or flogged with bamboos
or imprisoned for life. Is it necessary to do such things? What
can you want with more money when you are rich already?'

'Money! Who is talking about money? Some day, woman, you will
realize that there are other things in the world besides money.
Fame, for example. Greatness. Do you realize that the Governor of
Burma will very probably pin an Order on my breast for my loyal
action in this affair? Would not even you be proud of such an
honour as that?'

Ma Kin shook her head, unimpressed. 'When will you remember, Ko Po
Kyin, that you are not going to live a thousand years? Consider
what happens to those who have lived wickedly. There is such a
thing, for instance, as being turned into a rat or a frog. There
is even hell. I remember what a priest said to me once about hell,
something that he had translated from the Pali scriptures, and it
was very terrible. He said, "Once in a thousand centuries two red-
hot spears will meet in your heart, and you will say to yourself,
'Another thousand centuries of my torment are ended, and there is
as much to come as there has been before.'" Is it not very
dreadful to think of such things, Ko Po Kyin?'

U Po Kyin laughed and gave a careless wave of his hand that meant
'pagodas'.

'Well, I hope you may still laugh when it comes to the end. But
for myself, I should not care to look back upon such a life.'

She relighted her cigar with her thin shoulder turned disapprovingly
on U Po Kyin while he took several more turns up and down the room.
When he spoke, it was more seriously than before, and even with a
touch of diffidence.

'You know, Kin Kin, there is another matter behind all this.
Something that I have not told to you or to anyone else. Even Ba
Sein does not know. But I believe I will tell it you now.'

'I do not want to hear it, if it is more wickedness.'

'No, no. You were asking just now what is my real object in this
affair. You think, I suppose, that I am ruining Veraswami merely
because I dislike him and his ideas about bribes as a nuisance.
It is not only that. There is something else that is far more
important, and it concerns you as well as me.'

'What is it?'

'Have you never felt in you, Kin Kin, a desire for higher things?
Has it never struck you that after all our successes--all my
successes, I should say--we are almost in the same position as when
we started? I am worth, I dare say, two lakhs of rupees, and yet
look at the style in which we live! Look at this room! Positively
it is no better than that of a peasant. I am tired of eating with
my fingers and associating only with Burmans--poor, inferior
people--and living, as you might say, like a miserable Township
Officer. Money is not enough; I should like to feel that I have
risen in the world as well. Do you not wish sometimes for a way of
life that is a little more--how shall I say--elevated?'

'I do not know how we could want more than what we have already.
When I was a girl in my village I never thought that I should live
in such a house as this. Look at those English chairs--I have
never sat in one of them in my life. But I am very proud to look
at them and think that I own them.'

'Ch! Why did you ever leave that village of yours, Kin Kin? You
are only fit to stand gossiping by the well with a stone water-pot
on your head. But I am more ambitious, God be praised. And now I
will tell you the real reason why I am intriguing against Veraswami.
It is in my mind to do something that is really magnificent.
Something noble, glorious! Something that is the very highest
honour an Oriental can attain to. You know what I mean, of course?'

'No. What do you mean?'

'Come, now! The greatest achievement of my life! Surely you can
guess?'

'Ah, I know! You are going to buy a motor-car. But oh, Ko Po
Kyin, please do not expect me to ride in it!'

U Po Kyin threw up his hands in disgust. 'A motor-car! You have
the mind of a bazaar peanut-seller! I could buy twenty motor-cars
if I wanted them. And what use would a motor-car be in this place?
No, it is something far grander than that.'

'What, then?'

'It is this. I happen to know that in a month's time the Europeans
are going to elect one native member to their Club. They do not
want to do it, but they will have orders from the Commissioner, and
they will obey. Naturally, they would elect Veraswami, who is the
highest native official in the district. But I have disgraced
Veraswami. And so--'

'What?'

U Po Kyin did not answer for a moment. He looked at Ma Kin, and
his vast yellow face, with its broad jaw and numberless teeth, was
so softened that it was almost child-like. There might even have
been tears in his tawny eyes. He said in a small, almost awed
voice, as though the greatness of what he was saying overcame him:

'Do you not see, woman? Do you not see that if Veraswami is
disgraced I shall be elected to the Club myself?'

The effect of it was crushing. There was not another word of
argument on Ma Kin's part. The magnificence of U Po Kyin's project
had struck her dumb.

And not without reason, for all the achievements of U Po Kyin's
life were as nothing beside this. It is a real triumph--it would
be doubly so in Kyauktada--for an official of the lower ranks to
worm his way into the European Club. The European Club, that
remote, mysterious temple, that holy of holies far harder of entry
than Nirvana! Po Kyin, the naked gutter-boy of Mandalay, the
thieving clerk and obscure official, would enter that sacred place,
call Europeans 'old chap', drink whisky and soda and knock white
balls to and fro on the green table! Ma Kin, the village woman,
who had first seen the light through the chinks of a bamboo hut
thatched with palm-leaves, would sit on a high chair with her feet
imprisoned in silk stockings and high-heeled shoes (yes, she would
actually wear shoes in that place!) talking to English ladies in
Hindustani about baby-linen! It was a prospect that would have
dazzled anybody.

For a long time Ma Kin remained silent, her lips parted, thinking
of the European Club and the splendours that it might contain.
For the first time in her life she surveyed U Po Kyin's intrigues
without disapproval. Perhaps it was a feat greater even than the
storming of the Club to have planted a grain of ambition in Ma
Kin's gentle heart.

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