No More Learning

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.



CHAPTER 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 Channing 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 ah the nonnal 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 LI 50 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
intenninable 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
wannly 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
ah kinds of men — policemen, forest officers, men in timber firms with QUITE good
prospects. And she refused them ah; 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.


CHAPTER 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 he 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.