Burmese Days

‘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–demimondaines 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, dhe 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 ICS, 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!’ Elizabedi 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.

VIII

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 patronised him for lack of any other. The barber was waiting on the veranda when Flory came back from tennis, and Flory sterilised 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 Hory 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 his shaving things into the badiroom. 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, men 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 further 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 authence 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, ‘Myaypè! Myaypè!’