Burmese Days

Flory did not say any of this, and he was at some pains not to show it in his face. He was standing by his chair, a little sidelong to the others, with the half-smile of a man who is never sure of his popularity.

‘I’m afraid I shall have to be off,’ he said. ‘I’ve got some things to see to before breakfast, unfortunately.’

‘Stay and have another spot, old man,’ said Westfield. ‘Morning’s young. Have a gin. Give you an appetite.’

‘No, thanks, I must be going. Come on, Flo. Good-bye, Mrs Lackersteen. Good-bye, everybody.’

‘Exit Booker Washington, the niggers’ pal,’ said Ellis as Flory disappeared. Ellis could always be counted on to say something disagreeable about anyone who had just left the room. ‘Gone to see Very-slimy, I suppose. Or else sloped off to avoid paying a round of drinks.’

‘Oh, he’s not a bad chap,’ Westfield said. ‘Says some Bolshie things sometimes. Don’t suppose he means half of them.’

‘Oh, a very good fellow, of course,’ said Mr Macgregor. Every European in India is ex officio, or radier ex colore, a good fellow, until he has done something quite outrageous. It is an honorary rank.

‘He’s a bit too Bolshie for my taste. I can’t bear a fellow who pals up with the natives. I shouldn’t wonder if he’s got a lick of the tarbrush himself. It might explain that black mark on his face. Piebald. And he looks like a yellow-belly, with that black hair, and skin the colour of a lemon.’

There was some desultory scandal about Flory, but not much, because Mr Macgregor did not like scandal. The Europeans stayed in the Club long enough for one more round of drinks. Mr Macgregor told his anecdote about Prome, which could be produced in almost any context. And then the conversation veered back to the old, never-palling subject–the insolence of the natives, the supineness of the Government, the dear dead days when the British Raj was the British Raj and please give the bearer fifteen lashes. This topic was never let alone for long, partly because of Ellis’s obsession. Besides, you could forgive the Europeans a great deal of their bitterness. Living and working among Orientals would try the temper of a saint. And all of them, the officials particularly, knew what it was to be baited and insulted. Almost every day, when Westfield or Mr Macgregor or even Maxwell went down the street, the High School boys, with their young, yellow faces–faces smooth as gold coins, full of that maddening contempt that sits so naturally on the Mongolian face–sneered at them as they went past, sometimes hooted after them with hyena-like laughter. The life of the Anglo-Indian officials is not all jam. In comfortless camps, in sweltering offices, in gloomy dak bungalows smelling of dust and earth-oil, they earn, perhaps, the right to be a little disagreeable.

It was getting on for ten now, and hot beyond bearing. Flat, clear drops of sweat gathered on everyone’s face, and on the men’s bare forearms. A damp patch was growing larger and larger in the back of Mr Macgregor’s silk coat. The glare outside seemed to soak somehow through the green-chicked windows, making one’s eyes ache and filling one’s head with stuffiness. Everyone thought with malaise of his stodgy breakfast, and of the long, deadly hours that were coming. Mr Macgregor stood up with a sigh and adjusted his spectacles, which had slipped down his sweating nose.

‘Alas that such a festive gathering should end,’ he said. I must get home to breakfast. The cares of Empire. Is anybody coming my way? My man is waiting with the car.’

‘Oh, thank you,’ said Mrs Lackersteen; ‘if you’d take Tom and me. What a relief not to have to walk in this heat!’

The others stood up. Westfield stretched his arms and yawned through his nose. ‘Better get a move on, I suppose. Go to sleep if I sit here any longer. Think of stewing in that office all day! Baskets of papers. Oh Lord!’

‘Don’t forget tennis this evening, everyone,’ said Ellis. ‘Maxwell, you lazy devil, don’t you skulk out of it again. Down here with your racquet at four-thirty sharp.’

‘Après vous, madame,’ said Mr Macgregor gallantly, at the door.

‘Lead on, Macduff,’ said Westfield.

They went out into the glaring white sunlight. The heat rolled from the earth like the breath of an oven. The flowers, oppressive to the eyes, blazed with not a petal stirring, in a debauch of sun. The glare sent a weariness through one’s bones. There was something horrible in it–horrible to think of that blue, blinding sky, stretching on and on over Burma and India, over Siam, Cambodia, China, cloudless and interminable. The plates of Mr Macgregor’s waiting car were too hot to touch. The evil time of day was beginning, the time, as the Burmese say, ‘when feet are silent.’ Hardly a living creature stirred, except men, and the black columns of ants, stimulated by the heat, which marched ribbon-like across the path, and the tailless vultures which soared on the currents of the air.

III

Flory turned to the left outside the Club gate and started down the bazaar road, under the shade of the peepul trees. A hundred yards away there was a swirl of music, where a squad of Military Policemen, lank Indians in greenish khaki, were marching back to their lines with a Gurkha boy playing the bagpipes ahead of them. Flory was going to see Dr Veraswami. The doctor’s house was a long bungalow of earth-oiled wood, standing on piles, with a large unkempt garden which adjoined that of the Club. The back of the house was towards the road, for it faced the hospital, which lay between it and the river.

As Flory entered the compound there was a frightened squawk of women and a scurrying within the house. Evidently he had narrowly missed seeing the doctor’s wife. He went round to the front of the house and called up to the veranda:

‘Doctor! Are you busy? May I come up?’

The doctor, a little black and white figure, popped from within the house like a jack-in-the-box. He hurried to the veranda rail, exclaiming effusively:

‘If you may come up! Of course, of course, come up this instant! Ah, Mr Flory, how very delightful to see you! Come up, come up. What drink will you have? I have whisky, beer, vermouth and other European liquors. Ah, my dear friend, how I have been pining for some cultured conversation!’

The doctor was a small, black, plump man with fuzzy hair and round, credulous eyes. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles, and he was dressed in a badly-fitting white drill suit, with trousers bagging concertina-like over clumsy black boots. His voice was eager and bubbling with a hissing of the s’s. As Flory came up the steps the doctor popped back to the end of the veranda and rummaged in a big tin ice-chest, rapidly pulling out bottles of all descriptions. The veranda was wide and dark, with low eaves from which baskets of fern hung, making it seem like a cave behind a waterfall of sunlight. It was furnished with long, cane-bottomed chairs made in the jail, and at one end there was a bookcase containing a rather unappetising little library, mainly books of essays, of the Emerson-Carlyle-Stevenson type. The doctor, a great reader, liked his books to have what he called a ‘moral meaning’.

‘Well, doctor,’ said Flory–the doctor had meanwhile thrust him into a long chair, pulled out the leg-rests so that he could lie down, and put cigarettes and beer within reach. ‘Well, doctor, and how are things? How’s the British Empire? Sick of the palsy as usual?’

‘Aha, Mr Flory, she iss very low, very low! Grave complications setting in. Septicaemia, peritonitis and paralysis of the ganglia. We shall have to call in the specialists, I fear. Aha!’

It was a joke between the two men to pretend that the British Empire was an aged female patient of the doctor’s. The doctor had enjoyed this joke for two years without growing tired of it.

‘Ah, doctor,’ said Flory, supine in the long chair, ‘what a joy to be here after that bloody Club. When I come to your house I feel like a Nonconformist minister dodging up to town and going home with a tart. Such a glorious holiday from them’–he motioned with one heel in the direction of the Club–‘from my beloved fellow Empirebuilders. British prestige, the white man’s burden, the pukka sahib sans peur et sans reproche–you know. Such a relief to be out of the stink of it for a little while.’

‘My friend, my friend, now come, come, please! That iss outrageous. You must not say such things of honourable English gentlemen!’