No More Learning

’

‘He wrote two days ago, but when we steamed the letter open we found it was nothing of
importance. ’

‘Ah well, we will give him something to write about. And as soon as he suspects the
doctor, then is the time for that other affair I spoke to you of. Thus we shall — what does
Mr Macgregor say? Ah yes, “kill two birds with one stone”. A whole flock of birds — ha,
ha! ’


U Po Kyin’s laugh was a disgusting bubbling sound deep down in his belly, like the
preparation for a cough; yet it was merry, even childlike. He did not say any more about



the ‘other affair’, which was too private to be discussed even upon the veranda. Ba Sein,
seeing the interview at an end, stood up and bowed, angular as a jointed ruler.

‘Is there anything else your honour wishes done? ’ he said.

‘Make sure that Mr Macgregor has his copy of the Bunnese Patriot. You had better tell
Hla Pe to have an attack of dysentery and stay away from the office. I shall want him for
the writing of the anonymous letters. That is all for the present. ’

‘Then I may go, sir? ’

‘God go with you,’ said U Po Kyin rather abstractedly, and at once shouted again for Ba
Taik. He never wasted a moment of his day. It did not take him long to deal with the
other visitors and to send the village girl away unrewarded, having examined her face and
said that he did not recognize her. It was now his breakfast time. Violent pangs of hunger,
which attacked him punctually at this hour every morning, began to tonnent his belly. He
shouted urgently:

‘Ba Taik! Hey, Ba Taik! Kin Kin! My breakfast! Be quick, I am starving. ’

In the living-room behind the curtain a table was already set out with a huge bowl of rice
and a dozen plates containing curries, dried prawns and sliced green mangoes. U Po Kyin
waddled to the table, sat down with a grunt and at once threw himself on the food. Ma
Kin, his wife, stood behind him and served him. She was a thin woman of five and forty,
with a kindly, pale brown, simian face. U Po Kyin took no notice of her while he was
eating. With the bowl close to his nose he stuffed the food into himself with swift, greasy
fingers, breathing fast. All his meals were swift, passionate and enormous; they were not
meals so much as orgies, debauches of curry and rice. When he had finished he sat back,
belched several times and told Ma Kin to fetch him a green Burmese cigar. He never
smoked English tobacco, which he declared had no taste in it.

Presently, with Ba Taik’s help, U Po Kyin dressed in his office clothes, and stood for a
while admiring himself in the long mirror in the living-room. It was a wooden-walled
room with two pillars, still recognizable as teak-trunks, supporting the roof-tree, and it
was dark and sluttish as all Burmese rooms are, though U Po Kyin had furnished it



‘Ingaleik fashion’ with a veneered sideboard and chairs, some lithographs of the Royal
Family and a fire-extinguisher. The floor was covered with bamboo mats, much splashed
by lime and betel juice.

Ma Kin was sitting on a mat in the comer, stitching an ingyi. U Po Kyin turned slowly
before the mirror, trying to get a glimpse of his back view. He was dressed in a
gaungbaung of pale pink silk, an ingyi of starched muslin, and a paso of Mandalay silk, a
gorgeous salmon-pink brocaded with yellow. With an effort he turned his head round and
looked, pleased, at the paso tight and shining on his enormous buttocks. He was proud of
his fatness, because he saw the accumulated flesh as the symbol of his greatness. He who
had once been obscure and hungry was now fat, rich and feared. He was swollen with the
bodies of his enemies; a thought from which he extracted something very near poetry.

‘My new paso was cheap at twenty-two rupees, hey, Kin Kin? ’ he said.

Ma Kin bent her head over her sewing. She was a simple, old-fashioned woman, who had
learned even less of European habits than U Po Kyin. She could not sit on a chair without
discomfort. Every morning she went to the bazaar with a basket on her head, like a
village woman, and in the evenings she could be seen kneeling in the garden, praying to
the white spire of the pagoda that crowned the town. She had been the confidante of El Po
Kyin’s intrigues for twenty years and more.

‘Ko Po Kyin,’ she said, ‘you have done very much evil in your life. ’

El Po Kyin waved his hand. ‘What does it matter? My pagodas will atone for everything.
There is plenty of time. ’

Ma Kin bent her head over her sewing again, in an obstinate way she had when she
disapproved of something that El Po Kyin was doing.

‘But, Ko Po Kyin, where is the need for all this scheming and intriguing? I heard you
talking with Ko Ba Sein on the veranda. You are planning some evil against Dr
Veraswami. Why do you wish to hann that Indian doctor? He is a good man. ’

‘What do you know of these official matters, woman? The doctor stands in my way. In
the first place he refuses to take bribes, which makes it difficult for the rest of us. And



besides — well, there is something else which you would never have the brains to
understand. ’


‘Ko Po Kyin, you have grown rich and powerful, and what good has it ever done you?
We were happier when we were poor. Ah, I remember so well when you were only a
Township Officer, the first time we had a house of our own. How proud we were of our
new wicker furniture, and your fountain-pen with the gold clip! And when the young
English police-officer came to our house and sat in the best chair and drank a bottle of
beer, how honoured we thought ourselves! Happiness is not in money. What can you
want with more money now? ’

‘Nonsense, woman, nonsense! Attend to your cooking and sewing and leave official
matters to those who understand them. ’

‘Well, I do not know. I am your wife and have always obeyed you. But at least it is never
too soon to acquire merit. Strive to acquire more merit, Ko Po Kyin! Will you not, for
instance, buy some live fish and set them free in the river? One can acquire much merit in
that way. Also, this morning when the priests came for their rice they told me that there
are two new priests at the monastery, and they are hungry. Will you not give them
something, Ko Po Kyin? I did not give them anything myself, so that you might acquire
the merit of doing it. ’

U Po Kyin turned away from the mirror. The appeal touched him a little. He never, when
it could be done without inconvenience, missed a chance of acquiring merit. In his eyes
his pile of merit was a kind of bank deposit, everlastingly growing. Every fish set free in
the river, every gift to a priest, was a step nearer Nirvana. It was a reassuring thought. He
directed that the basket of mangoes brought by the village headman should be sent down
to the monastery.

Presently he left the house and started down the road, with Ba Taik behind him carrying a
file of papers. He walked slowly, very upright to balance his vast belly, and holding a
yellow silk umbrella over his head. His pink paso glittered in the sun like a satin praline.
He was going to the court, to try his day’s cases.



CHAPTER 2


At about the time when U Po Kyin began his morning’s business, ‘Mr Porley’ the timber
merchant and friend of Dr Veraswami, was leaving his house for the Club.

Flory was a man of about thirty-five, of middle height, not ill made. He had very black,
stiff hair growing low on his head, and a cropped black moustache, and his skin, naturally
sallow, was discoloured by the sun. Not having grown fat or bald he did not look older
than his age, but his face was very haggard in spite of the sunburn, with lank cheeks and a
sunken, withered look round the eyes. He had obviously not shaved this morning. He was
dressed in the usual white shirt, khaki drill shorts and stockings, but instead of a topi he
wore a battered Terai hat, cocked over one eye. He carried a bamboo stick with a wrist-
thong, and a black cocker spaniel named Flo was ambling after him.

All these were secondary expressions, however. The first thing that one noticed in Flory
was a hideous birthmark stretching in a ragged crescent down his left cheek, from the eye
to the corner of the mouth. Seen from the left side his face had a battered, woebegone
look, as though the birthmark had been a bruise — for it was a dark blue in colour. He was
quite aware of its hideousness. And at all times, when he was not alone, there was a
sidelongness about his movements, as he manoeuvred constantly to keep the birthmark
out of sight.

Flory’s house was at the top of the maidan, close to the edge of the jungle. From the gate
the maidan sloped sharply down, scorched and khaki-coloured, with half a dozen
dazzling white bungalows scattered round it. All quaked, shivered in the hot air. There
was an English cemetery within a white wall half-way down the hill, and near by a tiny
tin-roofed church. Beyond that was the European Club, and when one looked at the
Club — a dumpy one-storey wooden building — one looked at the real centre of the town.
In any town in India the European Club is the spiritual citadel, the real seat of the British
power, the Nirvana for which native officials and millionaires pine in vain. It was doubly
so in this case, for it was the proud boast of Kyauktada Club that, almost alone of Clubs



in Burma, it had never admitted an Oriental to membership. Beyond the Club, the
Irrawaddy flowed huge and ochreous glittering like diamonds in the patches that caught
the sun; and beyond the river stretched great wastes of paddy fields, ending at the horizon
in a range of blackish hills.

The native town, and the courts and the jail, were over to the right, mostly hidden in
green groves of peepul trees. The spire of the pagoda rose from the trees like a slender
spear tipped with gold. Kyauktada was a fairly typical Upper Burma town, that had not
changed greatly between the days of Marco Polo and 1910, and might have slept in the
Middle Ages for a century more if it had not proved a convenient spot for a railway
tenninus. In 1910 the Government made it the headquarters of a district and a seat of
Progress — interpretable as a block of law courts, with their army of fat but ravenous
pleaders, a hospital, a school and one of those huge, durable jails which the English have
built everywhere between Gibraltar and Hong Kong. The population was about four
thousand, including a couple of hundred Indians, a few score Chinese and seven
Europeans. There were also two Eurasians named Mr Francis and Mr Samuel, the sons of
an American Baptist missionary and a Roman Catholic missionary respectively. The
town contained no curiosities of any kind, except an Indian fakir who had lived for
twenty years in a tree near the bazaar, drawing his food up in a basket every morning.

Flory yawned as he came out of the gate. He had been half drunk the night before, and
the glare made him feel liverish. ‘Bloody, bloody hole! ’ he thought, looking down the
hill. And, no one except the dog being near, he began to sing aloud, ‘Bloody, bloody,
bloody, oh, how thou art bloody’ to the tune of ‘Holy, holy, holy, oh how Thou art holy ‘
as he walked down the hot red road, swishing at the dried-up grasses with his stick. It was
nearly nine o’clock and the sun was fiercer every minute. The heat throbbed down on
one’s head with a steady, rhythmic thumping, like blows from an enormous bolster. Flory
stopped at the Club gate, wondering whether to go in or to go farther down the road and
see Dr Veraswami. Then he remembered that it was ‘English mail day’ and the
newspapers would have arrived. He went in, past the big tennis screen, which was
overgrown by a creeper with starlike mauve flowers.

In the borders beside the path swaths of English flowers — phlox and larkspur, hollyhock
and petunia — not yet slain by the sun, rioted in vast size and richness. The petunias were



huge, like trees almost. There was no lawn, but instead a shrubbery of native trees and
bushes — gold mohur trees like vast umbrellas of blood-red bloom, frangipanis with
creamy, stalkless flowers, purple bougainvillea, scarlet hibiscus and the pink Chinese
rose, bilious-green crotons, feathery fronds of tamarind. The clash of colours hurt one’s
eyes in the glare. A nearly naked mali, watering-can in hand, was moving in the jungle of
flowers like some large nectar-sucking bird.

On the Club steps a sandy-haired Englishman, with a prickly moustache, pale grey eyes
too far apart, and abnormally thin calves to his legs, was standing with his hands in the
pockets of his shorts. This was Mr Westfield, the District Superintendent of Police. With
a very bored air he was rocking himself backwards and forwards on his heels and pouting
his upper lip so that his moustache tickled his nose. He greeted Flory with a slight
sideways movement of his head. His way of speaking was clipped and soldierly, missing
out every word that well could be missed out. Nearly everything he said was intended for
a joke, but the tone of his voice was hollow and melancholy.

‘Hullo, Flory me lad. Bloody awful morning, what? ’

‘We must expect it at this time of year, I suppose,’ Flory said. He had turned himself a
little sideways, so that his birthmarked cheek was away from Westfield.

‘Yes, dammit. Couple of months of this coming. Last year we didn’t have a spot of rain
till June. Look at that bloody sky, not a cloud in it. Like one of those damned great blue
enamel saucepans. God! What’d you give to be in Piccadilly now, eh? ’

‘Have the English papers come? ’

‘Yes. Dear old Punch, Pink’un and Vie Parisienne. Makes you homesick to read ‘em,
what? Let’s come in and have a drink before the ice all goes. Old Lackersteen’s been
fairly bathing in it. Half pickled already. ’

They went in, Westfield remarking in his gloomy voice, ‘Lead on, Macduff. ’ Inside, the
Club was a teak-walled place smelling of earth-oil, and consisting of only four rooms,
one of which contained a forlorn ‘library’ of five hundred mildewed novels, and another
an old and mangy billiard-table — this, however, seldom used, for during most of the year



hordes of flying beetles came buzzing round the lamps and littered themselves over the
cloth. There were also a card-room and a ‘lounge’ which looked towards the river, over a
wide veranda; but at this time of day all the verandas were curtained with green bamboo
chicks. The lounge was an unhomelike room, with coco-nut matting on the floor, and
wicker chairs and tables which were littered with shiny illustrated papers. For ornament
there were a number of ‘Bonzo’ pictures, and the dusty skulls of sambhur. A punkah,
lazily flapping, shook dust into the tepid air.

There were three men in the room. Under the punkah a florid, fine-looking, slightly
bloated man of forty was sprawling across the table with his head in his hands, groaning
in pain. This was Mr Lackersteen, the local manager of a timber firm. He had been badly
drunk the night before, and he was suffering for it. Ellis, local manager of yet another
company, was standing before the notice-board studying some notice with a look of bitter
concentration. He was a tiny wiry-haired fellow with a pale, sharp-featured face and
restless movements. Maxwell, the acting Divisional Forest Officer, was lying in one of
the long chairs reading the Field, and invisible except for two large-boned legs and thick
downy forearms.

‘Look at this naughty old man,’ said Westfield, taking Mr Lackersteen half affectionately
by the shoulders and shaking him. ‘Example to the young, what? There but for the grace
of God and all that. Gives you an idea what you’ll be like at forty. ’

Mr Lackersteen gave a groan which sounded like ‘brandy’.

‘Poor old chap,’ said Westfield, ‘regular martyr to booze, eh? Look at it oozing out of his
pores. Reminds me of the old colonel who used to sleep without a mosquito net. They
asked his servant why and the servant said: “At night, master too drunk to notice
mosquitoes; in the morning, mosquitoes too drunk to notice master. ” Look at him —
boozed last night and then asking for more. Got a little niece coming to stay with him,
too. Due tonight, isn’t she, Lackersteen? ’

‘Oh, leave that drunken sot alone,’ said Ellis without turning round. He had a spiteful

Cockney voice. Mr Lackersteen groaned again, ‘ the niece! Get me some brandy, for

Christ’s sake. ’



‘Good education for the niece, eh? Seeing uncle under the table seven times a week. Hey,
butler! Bringing brandy for Lackersteen master! ’

The butler, a dark, stout Dravidian with liquid, yellow-irised eyes like those of a dog,
brought the brandy on a brass tray. Flory and Westfield ordered gin. Mr Lackersteen
swallowed a few spoonfuls of brandy and sat back in his chair, groaning in a more
resigned way. He had a beefy, ingenuous face, with a toothbrush moustache. He was
really a very simple-minded man, with no ambitions beyond having what he called ‘a
good time’.
His wife governed him by the only possible method, namely, by never letting
him out of her sight for more than an hour or two. Only once, a year after they were
married, she had left him for a fortnight, and had returned unexpectedly a day before her
time, to find Mr Lackersteen, drunk, supported on either side by a naked Burmese girl,
while a third up-ended a whisky bottle into his mouth. Since then she had watched him,
as he used to complain, Tike a cat over a bloody mousehole’. However, he managed to
enjoy quite a number of ‘good times’, though they were usually rather hurried ones.

‘My Christ, what a head I’ve got on me this morning,’ he said. ‘Call that butler again,
Westfield. I’ve got to have another brandy before my missus gets here. She says she’s
going to cut my booze down to four pegs a day when our niece gets here. God rot them
both! ’ he added gloomily.

‘Stop playing the fool, all of you, and listen to this,’ said Ellis sourly. He had a queer
wounding way of speaking, hardly ever opening his mouth without insulting somebody.
He deliberately exaggerated his Cockney accent, because of the sardonic tone it gave to
his words. ‘Have you seen this notice of old Macgregor’s? A little nosegay for everyone.
Maxwell, wake up and listen! ’

Maxwell lowered the Field. He was a fresh-coloured blond youth of not more than
twenty-five or six — very young for the post he held. With his heavy limbs and thick
white eyelashes he reminded one of a cart-horse colt. Ellis nipped the notice from the
board with a neat, spiteful little movement and began reading it aloud. It had been posted
by Mr Macgregor, who, besides being Deputy Commissioner, was secretary of the Club.

‘Just listen to this. “It has been suggested that as there are as yet no Oriental members of
this club, and as it is now usual to admit officials of gazetted rank, whether native or



European, to membership of most European Clubs, we should consider the question of
following this practice in Kyauktada. The matter will be open for discussion at the next
general meeting. On the one hand it may be pointed out” — oh, well, no need to wade
through the rest of it. He can’t even write a notice without an attack of literary diarrhoea.
Anyway, the point’s this. He’s asking us to break all our rules and take a dear little
nigger-boy into this Club. DEAR Dr Veraswami, for instance. Dr Very-slimy, I call him.
That WOULD be a treat, wouldn’t it? Little pot-bellied niggers breathing garlic in your
face over the bridge -table. Christ, to think of it! We’ve got to hang together and put our
foot down on this at once. What do you say, Westfield? Flory? ’

Westfield shrugged his thin shoulders philosophically. He had sat down at the table and
lighted a black, stinking Burma cheroot.

‘Got to put up with it, I suppose,’ he said. ‘B — s of natives are getting into all the Clubs
nowadays. Even the Pegu Club, I’m told. Way this country’s going, you know. We’re
about the last Club in Burma to hold out against ‘em. ’

‘We are; and what’s more, we’re damn well going to go on holding out. I’ll die in the
ditch before I’ll see a nigger in here. ’ Ellis had produced a stump of pencil. With the
curious air of spite that some men can put into their tiniest action, he re-pinned the notice
on the board and pencilled a tiny, neat ‘B. F. ’ against Mr Macgregor’s signature — ‘There,
that’s what I think of his idea. I’ll tell him so when he comes down. What do YOU say,
Flory? ’

Flory had not spoken all this time. Though by nature anything but a silent man, he seldom
found much to say in Club conversations. He had sat down at the table and was reading
G. K. Chesterton’s article in the London News, at the same time caressing Flo’s head
with his left hand. Ellis, however, was one of those people who constantly nag others to
echo their own opinions. He repeated his question, and Flory looked up, and their eyes
met. The skin round Ellis’s nose suddenly turned so pale that it was almost grey. In him it
was a sign of anger. Without any prelude he burst into a stream of abuse that would have
been startling, if the others had not been used to hearing something like it every morning.

‘My God, I should have thought in a case like this, when it’s a question of keeping those
black, stinking swine out of the only place where we can enjoy ourselves, you’d have the



decency to back me up. Even if that pot-bellied greasy little sod of a nigger doctor IS
your best pal. / don’t care if you choose to pal up with the scum of the bazaar. If it
pleases you to go to Veraswami’s house and drink whisky with all his nigger pals, that’s
your look-out. Do what you like outside the Club. But, by God, it’s a different matter
when you talk of bringing niggers in here. I suppose you’d like little Veraswami for a
Club member, eh? Chipping into our conversation and pawing everyone with his sweaty
hands and breathing his filthy garlic breath in our faces. By god, he’d go out with my
boot behind him if ever I saw his black snout inside that door. Greasy, pot-bellied little —
! ’ etc.

This went on for several minutes. It was curiously impressive, because it was so
completely sincere. Ellis really did hate Orientals — hated them with a bitter, restless
loathing as of something evil or unclean. Living and working, as the assistant of a timber
firm must, in perpetual contact with the Burmese, he had never grown used to the sight of
a black face. Any hint of friendly feeling towards an Oriental seemed to him a horrible
perversity. He was an intelligent man and an able servant of his firm, but he was one of
those Englishmen — common, unfortunately — who should never be allowed to set foot in
the East.

Flory sat nursing Flo’s head in his lap, unable to meet Ellis’s eyes. At the best of times
his birthmark made it difficult for him to look people straight in the face. And when he
made ready to speak, he could feel his voice trembling — for it had a way of trembling
when it should have been firm; his features, too, sometimes twitched uncontrollably.

‘Steady on,’ he said at last, sullenly and rather feebly. ‘Steady on. There’s no need to get
so excited, / never suggested having any native members in here. ’

‘Oh, didn’t you? We all know bloody well you’d like to, though. Why else do you go to
that oily little babu’s house every morning, then? Sitting down at table with him as
though he was a white man, and drinking out of glasses his filthy black lips have
slobbered over — it makes me spew to think of it. ’


‘Sit down, old chap, sit down,’ Westfield said. ‘Forget it. Have a drink on it. Not worth
while quarrelling. Too hot. ’



‘My God,’ said Ellis a little more calmly, taking a pace or two up and down, ‘my God, I
don’t understand you chaps. I simply don’t. Here’s that old fool Macgregor wanting to
bring a nigger into this Club for no reason whatever, and you all sit down under it without
a word. Good God, what are we supposed to be doing in this country? If we aren’t going
to rule, why the devil don’t we clear out? Here we are, supposed to be governing a set of
damn black swine who’ve been slaves since the beginning of history, and instead of
ruling them in the only way they understand, we go and treat them as equals. And you
silly b — s take it for granted. There’s Flory, makes his best pal a black babu who calls
himself a doctor because he’s done two years at an Indian so-called university. And you,
Westfield, proud as Punch of your knock-kneed, bribe-taking cowards of policemen. And
there’s Maxwell, spends his time running after Eurasian tarts. Yes, you do, Maxwell; I
heard about your goings-on in Mandalay with some smelly little bitch called Molly
Pereira. I suppose you’d have gone and married her if they hadn’t transferred you up
here? You all seem to LIKE the dirty black brutes. Christ, I don’t know what’s come over
us all. I really don’t. ’

‘Come on, have another drink,’ said Westfield. ‘Hey, butler! Spot of beer before the ice
goes, eh? Beer, butler! ’

The butler brought some bottles of Munich beer. Ellis presently sat down at the table with
the others, and he nursed one of the cool bottles between his small hands. His forehead
was sweating. He was sulky, but not in a rage any longer. At all times he was spiteful and
perverse, but his violent fits of rage were soon over, and were never apologized for.
Quarrels were a regular part of the routine of Club life. Mr Lackersteen was feeling better
and was studying the illustrations in La Vie Parisienne. It was after nine now, and the
room, scented with the acrid smoke of Westfield’s cheroot, was stifling hot. Everyone’s
shirt stuck to his back with the first sweat of the day. The invisible chokra who pulled the
punkah rope outside was falling asleep in the glare.

‘Butler! ’ yelled Ellis, and as the butler appeared, ‘go and wake that bloody chokra up! ’
‘Yes, master. ’


‘And butler! ’



‘Yes, master? ’


‘How much ice have we got left? ’

“Bout twenty pounds, master. Will only last today, I think. I find it very difficult to keep
ice cool now. ’

‘Don’t talk like that, damn you — “I find it very difficult! ” Have you swallowed a
dictionary? “Please, master, can’t keeping ice cool” — that’s how you ought to talk. We
shall have to sack this fellow if he gets to talk English too well. I can’t stick servants who
talk English. D’you hear, butler? ’

‘Yes, master,’ said the butler, and retired.

‘God! No ice till Monday,’ Westfield said. ‘You going back to the jungle, Flory? ’

‘Yes. I ought to be there now. I only came in because of the English mail. ’

‘Go on tour myself, I think. Knock up a spot of Travelling Allowance. I can’t stick my
bloody office at this time of year. Sitting there under the damned punkah, signing one
chit after another. Paper-chewing. God, how I wish the war was on again! ’

‘I’m going out the day after tomorrow,’ Ellis said. ‘Isn’t that damned padre coming to
hold his service this Sunday? I’ll take care not to be in for that, anyway. Bloody knee-
drill. ’

‘Next Sunday,’ said Westfield. ‘Promised to be in for it myself. So’s Macgregor. Bit hard
on the poor devil of a padre, I must say. Only gets here once in six weeks. Might as well
get up a congregation when he does come. ’

‘Oh, hell! I’d snivel psalms to oblige the padre, but I can’t stick the way these damned
native Christians come shoving into our church. A pack of Madrassi servants and Karen
school-teachers. And then those two yellow-bellies, Francis and Samuel — they call
themselves Christians too. Last time the padre was here they had the nerve to come up
and sit on the front pews with the white men. Someone ought to speak to the padre about
that. What bloody fools we were ever to let those missionaries loose in this country!



Teaching bazaar sweepers they’re as good as we are. “Please, sir, me Christian same like
master. ” Damned cheek. ’

‘How about that for a pair of legs? ’ said Mr Lackersteen, passing La Vie Parisienne
across. ‘You know French, Flory; what’s that mean underneath? Christ, it reminds me of
when I was in Paris, my first leave, before I married. Christ, I wish I was there again! ’

‘Did you hear that one about “There was a young lady of Woking”? ’ Maxwell said. He
was rather a silent youth, but, like other youths, he had an affection for a good smutty
rhyme. He completed the biography of the young lady of Woking, and there was a laugh.
Westfield replied with the young lady of Ealing who had a peculiar feeling, and Flory
came in with the young curate of Horsham who always took every precaution. There was
more laughter. Even Ellis thawed and produced several rhymes; Ellis’s jokes were always
genuinely witty, and yet filthy beyond measure. Everyone cheered up and felt more
friendly in spite of the heat. They had finished the beer and were just going to call for
another drink, when shoes creaked on the steps outside. A booming voice, which made
the floorboards tingle, was saying jocosely:

‘Yes, most distinctly humorous. I incorporated it in one of those little articles of mine in
Blackwood’s, you know. I remember, too, when I was stationed at Prome, another
quite — ah — diverting incident which — ’

Evidently Mr Macgregor had arrived at the Club. Mr Lackersteen exclaimed, ‘Hell! My
wife’s there,’ and pushed his empty glass as far away from him as it would go. Mr
Macgregor and Mrs Lackersteen entered the lounge together.

Mr Macgregor was a large, heavy man, rather past forty, with a kindly, puggy face,
wearing gold-rimmed spectacles. His bulky shoulders, and a trick he had of thrusting his
head forward, reminded one curiously of a turtle — the Burmans, in fact, nicknamed him
‘the tortoise’. He was dressed in a clean silk suit, which already showed patches of sweat
beneath the armpits. He greeted the others with a humorous mock-salute, and then
planted himself before the notice-board, beaming, in the attitude of a schoolmaster
twiddling a cane behind his back. The good nature in his face was quite genuine, and yet
there was such a wilful geniality about him, such a strenuous air of being off duty and
forgetting his official rank, that no one was ever quite at ease in his presence. His



conversation was evidently modelled on that of some facetious schoolmaster or
clergyman whom he had known in early life. Any long word, any quotation, any
proverbial expression figured in his mind as a joke, and was introduced with a bumbling
noise like ‘er’ or ‘ah’, to make it clear that there was a joke coming. Mrs Lackersteen was
a woman of about thirty-five, handsome in a contourless, elongated way, like a fashion
plate. She had a sighing, discontented voice. The others had all stood up when she
entered, and Mrs Lackersteen sank exhaustedly into the best chair under the punkah,
fanning herself with a slender hand like that of a newt.

‘Oh dear, this heat, this heat!