No More Learning

The nagging, the jeers! At the very thought of
it he flinched; he could feel his birthmark palpable on his cheek, and something
happening in his throat that made his voice go flat and guilty. Not that! It was easier to
insult his friend, knowing that his friend must hear of it.



Flory had been fifteen years in Burma, and in Bunna one leams not to set oneself up
against public opinion. But his trouble was older than that. It had begun in his mother’s
womb, when chance put the blue birthmark on his cheek. He thought of some of the early
effects of his birthmark. His first arrival at school, aged nine; the stares and, after a few
days, shouts of the other boys; the nickname Blueface, which lasted until the school poet
(now, Flory remembered, a critic who wrote rather good articles in the Nation) came out
with the couplet:

New-tick Flory does look rum, Got a face like a monkey’s bum,

whereupon the nickname was changed to Monkey-bum. And the subsequent years. On
Saturday nights the older boys used to have what they called a Spanish Inquisition. The
favourite torture was for someone to hold you in a very painful grip known only to a few
illuminati and called Special Togo, while someone else beat you with a conker on a piece
of string. But Flory had lived down ‘Monkey-bum’ in time. He was a liar, and a good
footballer, the two things absolutely necessary for success at school. In his last term he
and another boy held the school poet in Special Togo while the captain of the eleven gave
him six with a spiked running shoe for being caught writing a sonnet. It was a formative
period.

From that school he went to a cheap, third-rate public school. It was a poor, spurious
place. It aped the great public schools with their traditions of High Anglicanism, cricket
and Latin verses, and it had a school song called ‘The Scrum of Life’ in which God
figured as the Great Referee. But it lacked the chief virtue of the great public schools,
their atmosphere of literary scholarship. The boys learned as nearly as possible nothing.
There was not enough caning to make them swallow the dreary rubbish of the
curriculum, and the wretched, underpaid masters were not the kind from whom one
absorbs wisdom unawares. Flory left school a barbarous young lout. And yet even then
there were, and he knew it, certain possibilities in him; possibilities that would lead to
trouble as likely as not. But, of course, he had suppressed them. A boy does not start his
career nicknamed Monkey-bum without learning his lesson.

He was not quite twenty when he came to Burma. His parents, good people and devoted
to him, had found him a place in a timber firm. They had had great difficulty in getting



him the job, had paid a premium they could not afford; later, he had rewarded them by
answering their letters with careless scrawls at intervals of months. His first six months in
Burma he had spent in Rangoon, where he was supposed to be learning the office side of
his business. He had lived in a ‘chummery’ with four other youths who devoted their
entire energies to debauchery. And what debauchery! They swilled whisky which they
privately hated, they stood round the piano bawling songs of insane filthiness and
silliness, they squandered rupees by the hundred on aged Jewish whores with the faces of
crocodiles. That too had been a formative period.

From Rangoon he had gone to a camp in the jungle, north of Mandalay, extracting teak.
The jungle life was not a bad one, in spite of the discomfort, the loneliness, and what is
almost the worst thing in Burma, the filthy, monotonous food. He was very young then,
young enough for hero-worship, and he had friends among the men in his firm. There
were also shooting, fishing, and perhaps once in a year a hurried trip to Rangoon —
pretext, a visit to the dentist. Oh, the joy of those Rangoon trips! The rush to Smart and
Mookerdum’s bookshop for the new novels out from England, the dinner at Anderson’s
with beefsteaks and butter that had travelled eight thousand miles on ice, the glorious
drinking-bout! He was too young to realize what this life was preparing for him. He did
not see the years stretching out ahead, lonely, eventless, corrupting.

He acclimatized himself to Burma. His body grew attuned to the strange rhythms of the
tropical seasons. Every year from February to May the sun glared in the sky like an angry
god, then suddenly the monsoon blew westward, first in sharp squalls, then in a heavy
ceaseless downpour that drenched everything until neither one’s clothes, one’s bed nor
even one’s food ever seemed to be dry. It was still hot, with a stuffy, vaporous heat. The
lower jungle paths turned into morasses, and the paddy-fields were wastes of stagnant
water with a stale, mousy smell. Books and boots were mildewed. Naked Burmans in
yard-wide hats of palm-leaf ploughed the paddy-fields, driving their buffaloes through
knee-deep water. Later, the women and children planted the green seedlings of paddy,
dabbing each plant into the mud with little three-pronged forks. Through July and August
there was hardly a pause in the rain. Then one night, high overhead, one heard a
squawking of invisible birds. The snipe were flying southward from Central Asia. The
rains tailed off, ending in October. The fields dried up, the paddy ripened, the Bunnese
children played hop-scotch with gonyin seeds and flew kites in the cool winds. It was the



beginning of the short winter, when Upper Burma seemed haunted by the ghost of
England. Wild flowers sprang into bloom everywhere, not quite the same as the English
ones, but very like them — honeysuckle in thick bushes, field roses smelling of pear-
drops, even violets in dark places of the forest. The sun circled low in the sky, and the
nights and early mornings were bitterly cold, with white mists that poured through the
valleys like the steam of enonnous kettles. One went shooting after duck and snipe. There
were snipe in countless myriads, and wild geese in flocks that rose from the jeel with a
roar like a goods train crossing an iron bridge. The ripening paddy, breast-high and
yellow, looked like wheat. The Burmans went to their work with muffled heads and their
arms clasped across their breasts, their faces yellow and pinched with the cold. In the
morning one marched through misty, incongruous wilderness, clearings of drenched,
almost English grass and naked trees where monkeys squatted in the upper branches,
waiting for the sun. At night, coming back to camp through the cold lanes, one met herds
of buffaloes which the boys were driving home, with their huge horns looming through
the mist like crescents. One had three blankets on one’s bed, and game pies instead of the
eternal chicken. After dinner one sat on a log by the vast camp-fire, drinking beer and
talking about shooting. The flames danced like red holly, casting a circle of light at the
edge of which servants and coolies squatted, too shy to intrude on the white men and yet
edging up to the fire like dogs. As one lay in bed one could hear the dew dripping from
the trees like large but gentle rain. It was a good life while one was young and need not
think about the future or the past.

Flory was twenty-four, and due for home leave, when the War broke out. He had dodged
military service, which was easy to do and seemed natural at the time. The civilians in
Burma had a comforting theory that ‘sticking by one’s job’ (wonderful language,
English! ‘Sticking BY’ — how different from ‘sticking TO’) was the truest patriotism;
there was even a covert hostility towards the men who threw up their jobs in order to join
the Army. In reality, Flory had dodged the War because the East already corrupted him,
and he did not want to exchange his whisky, his servants and his Bunnese girls for the
boredom of the parade ground and the strain of cruel marches. The War rolled on, like a
storm beyond the horizon. The hot, blowsy country, remote from danger, had a lonely,
forgotten feeling. Flory took to reading voraciously, and learned to live in books when
life was tiresome. He was growing adult, tiring of boyish pleasures, learning to think for
himself, almost willy-nilly.



He celebrated his twenty-seventh birthday in hospital, covered from head to foot with
hideous sores which were called mud-sores, but were probably caused by whisky and bad
food. They left little pits in his skin which did not disappear for two years. Quite
suddenly he had begun to look and feel very much older. His youth was finished. Eight
years of Eastern life, fever, loneliness and intermittent drinking, had set their mark on
him.

Since then, each year had been lonelier and more bitter than the last. What was at the
centre of all his thoughts now, and what poisoned everything, was the ever bitterer hatred
of the atmosphere of imperialism in which he lived. For as his brain developed — you
cannot stop your brain developing, and it is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that
they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life — he had
grasped the truth about the English and their Empire. The Indian Empire is a despotism —
benevolent, no doubt, but still a despotism with theft as its final object. And as to the
English of the East, the sahiblog, Flory had come so to hate them from living in their
society, that he was quite incapable of being fair to them. For after all, the poor devils are
no worse than anybody else. They lead unenviable lives; it is a poor bargain to spend
thirty years, ill-paid, in an alien country, and then come home with a wrecked liver and a
pine-apple backside from sitting in cane chairs, to settle down as the bore of some
second-rate Club. On the other hand, the sahiblog are not to be idealized. There is a
prevalent idea that the men at the ‘outposts of Empire’ are at least able and hardworking.
It is a delusion. Outside the scientific services — the Forest Department, the Public Works
Department and the like — there is no particular need for a British official in India to do
his job competently. Few of them work as hard or as intelligently as the postmaster of a
provincial town in England. The real work of administration is done mainly by native
subordinates; and the real backbone of the despotism is not the officials but the Anny.
Given the Anny, the officials and the businessmen can rub along safely enough even if
they are fools. And most of them ARE fools. A dull, decent people, cherishing and
fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.

It is a stifling, stultifying world in which to live. It is a world in which every word and
every thought is censored. In England it is hard even to imagine such an atmosphere.
Everyone is free in England; we sell our souls in public and buy them back in private,
among our friends. But even friendship can hardly exist when every white man is a cog in



the wheels of despotism. Free speech is unthinkable. All other kinds of freedom are
pennitted. You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but
you are not free to think for yourself. Your opinion on every subject of any conceivable
importance is dictated for you by the pukka sahibs’ code.

In the end the secrecy of your revolt poisons you like a secret disease. Your whole life is
a life of lies. Year after year you sit in Kipling-haunted little Clubs, whisky to right of
you, Pink’un to left of you, listening and eagerly agreeing while Colonel Bodger
develops his theory that these bloody Nationalists should be boiled in oil. You hear your
Oriental friends called ‘greasy little babus’, and you admit, dutifully, that they ARE
greasy little babus. You see louts fresh from school kicking grey-haired servants. The
time comes when you burn with hatred of your own countrymen, when you long for a
native rising to drown their Empire in blood. And in this there is nothing honourable,
hardly even any sincerity. For, au fond, what do you care if the Indian Empire is a
despotism, if Indians are bullied and exploited? You only care because the right of free
speech is denied you. You are a creature of the despotism, a pukka sahib, tied tighter than
a monk or a savage by an unbreakable system of tabus.

Time passed and each year Flory found himself less at home in the world of the sahibs,
more liable to get into trouble when he talked seriously on any subject whatever. So he
had learned to live inwardly, secretly, in books and secret thoughts that could not be
uttered. Even his talks with the doctor were a kind of talking to himself; for the doctor,
good man, understood little of what was said to him. But it is a corrupting thing to live
one’s real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it. It would be
better to be the thickest-skulled pukka sahib who ever hiccuped over ‘Forty years on’,
than to live silent, alone, consoling oneself in secret, sterile worlds.

Flory had never been home to England. Why, he could not have explained, though he
knew well enough. In the beginning accidents had prevented him. First there was the
War, and after the War his firm were so short of trained assistants that they would not let
him go for two years more. Then at last he had set out. He was pining for England,
though he dreaded facing it, as one dreads facing a pretty girl when one is collarless and
unshaven. When he left home he had been a boy, a promising boy and handsome in spite
of his birthmark; now, only ten years later, he was yellow, thin, drunken, almost middle-



aged in habits and appearance. Still, he was pining for England. The ship rolled westward
over wastes of sea like rough-beaten silver, with the winter trade wind behind her. Flory’s
thin blood quickened with the good food and the smell of the sea. And it occurred to
him — a thing he had actually forgotten in the stagnant air of Burma — that he was still
young enough to begin over again. He would live a year in a civilized society, he would
find some girl who did not mind his birthmark — a civilized girl, not a pukka
memsahib — and he would marry her and endure ten, fifteen more years of Burma. Then
they would retire — he would be worth twelve or fifteen thousand pounds on retirement,
perhaps. They would buy a cottage in the country, surround themselves with friends,
books, their children, animals. They would be free for ever of the smell of pukka
sahibdom. He would forget Burma, the horrible country that had come near ruining him.

When he reached Colombo he found a cable waiting for him. Three men in his firm had
died suddenly of black-water fever. The firm were sorry, but would he please return to
Rangoon at once? He should have his leave at the earliest possible opportunity.

Flory boarded the next boat for Rangoon, cursing his luck, and took the train back to his
headquarters. He was not at Kyauktada then, but at another Upper Burma town. All the
servants were waiting for him on the platfonn. He had handed them over en bloc to his
successor, who had died. It was so queer to see their familiar faces again! Only ten days
ago he had been speeding for England, almost thinking himself in England already; and
now back in the old stale scene, with the naked black coolies squabbling over the luggage
and a Burman shouting at his bullocks down the road.

The servants came crowding round him, a ring of kindly brown faces, offering presents.
Ko STa had brought a sambhur skin, the Indians some sweetmeats and a garland of
marigolds, Ba Pe, a young boy then, a squirrel in a wicker cage. There were bullock carts
waiting for the luggage. Flory walked up to the house, looking ridiculous with the big
garland dangling from his neck. The light of the cold-weather evening was yellow and
kind. At the gate an old Indian, the colour of earth, was cropping grass with a tiny sickle.
The wives of the cook and the mali were kneeling in front of the servants’ quarters,
grinding curry paste on the stone slab.



Something turned over in Flory’s heart. It was one of those moments when one becomes
conscious of a vast change and deterioration in one’s life. For he had realized, suddenly,
that in his heart he was glad to be coming back. This country which he hated was now his
native country, his home. He had lived here ten years, and every particle of his body was
compounded of Burmese soil. Scenes like these — the sallow evening light, the old Indian
cropping grass, the creak of the cartwheels, the streaming egrets — were more native to
him than England. He had sent deep roots, perhaps his deepest, into a foreign country.

Since then he had not even applied for home leave. His father had died, then his mother,
and his sisters, disagreeable horse-faced women whom he had never liked, had married
and he had almost lost touch with them. He had no tie with Europe now, except the tie of
books. For he had realized that merely to go back to England was no remedy for
loneliness; he had grasped the special nature of the hell that is reserved for Anglo-
Indians. Ah, those poor prosing old wrecks in Bath and Cheltenham! Those tomb-like
boarding-houses with Anglo-Indians littered about in all stages of decomposition, all
talking and talking about what happened in Boggleywalah in ‘88! Poor devils, they kn ow
what it means to have left one’s heart in an alien and hated country. There was, he saw
clearly, only one way out. To find someone who would share his life in Burma — but
really share it, share his inner, secret life, carry away from Burma the same memories as
he carried. Someone who would love Burma as he loved it and hate it as he hated it. Who
would help him to live with nothing hidden, nothing unexpressed. Someone who
understood him: a friend, that was what it came down to.

A friend. Or a wife? That quite impossible she. Someone like Mrs Lackersteen, for
instance? Some damned memsahib, yellow and thin, scandalmongering over cocktails,
making kit-kit with the servants, living twenty years in the country without learning a
word of the language. Not one of those, please God.

Flory leaned over the gate. The moon was vanishing behind the dark wall of the jungle,
but the dogs were still howling. Some lines from Gilbert came into his mind, a vulgar
silly jingle but appropriate — something about ‘discoursing on your complicated state of
mind’. Gilbert was a gifted little skunk. Did all his trouble, then, simply boil down to
that? Just complicated, unmanly whinings; poor-little-rich-girl stuff? Was he no more
than a loafer using his idleness to invent imaginary woes? A spiritual Mrs Wititterly? A



Hamlet without poetry? Perhaps. And if so, did that make it any more bearable? It is not
the less bitter because it is perhaps one’s own fault, to see oneself drifting, rotting, in
dishonour and horrible futility, and all the while knowing that somewhere within one
there is the possibility of a decent human being.

Oh well, God save us from self-pity! Flory went back to the veranda, took up the rifle,
and wincing slightly, let drive at the pariah dog. There was an echoing roar, and the bullet
buried itself in the maidan, wide of the mark. A mulberry-coloured bruise sprang out on
Flory ’s shoulder. The dog gave a yell of fright, took to its heels, and then, sitting down
fifty yards farther away, once more began rhythmically baying.


CHAPTER 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 STa had
set down beside Flory’s bed. Flory crawled through the mosquito net, shouted to Ko STa
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 anned 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 Bunnese 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 STa 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 Tittle 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 STa 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 Bunnese-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, tha nk 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 Bunnans
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 hannless 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.