No More Learning

Francis



and Samuel, doing perhaps the first useful deed of their lives, suddenly sprang from their
pew, grabbed Ma Hla May by the arms and hauled her outside, still screaming.

It seemed very silent in the church when they had finally dragged her out of hearing. The
scene had been so violent, so squalid, that everyone was upset by it. Even Ellis looked
disgusted. Flory could neither speak nor stir. He sat staring fixedly at the altar, his face
rigid and so bloodless that the birth-mark seemed to glow upon it like a streak of blue
paint. Elizabeth glanced across the aisle at him, and her revulsion made her almost
physically sick. She had not understood a word of what Ma Hla May was saying, but the
meaning of the scene was perfectly clear. The thought that he had been the lover of that
grey-faced, maniacal creature made her shudder in her bones. But worse than that, worse
than anything, was his ugliness at this moment. His face appalled her, it was so ghastly,
rigid and old. It was like a skull. Only the birthmark seemed alive in it. She hated him
now for his birthmark. She had never known till this moment how dishonouring, how
unforgivable a thing it was.

Like the crocodile, U Po Kyin had struck at the weakest spot. For, needless to say, this
scene was U Po Kyin’s doing. He had seen his chance, as usual, and tutored Ma Hla May
for her part with considerable care. The clergyman brought his sermon to an end almost
at once. As soon as it was over Flory hurried outside, not looking at any of the others. It
was getting dark, thank God. At fifty yards from the church he halted, and watched the
others making in couples for the Club. It seemed to him that they were hurrying. Ah, they
would, of course! There would be something to talk about at the Club tonight! Flo rolled
belly-upwards against his ankles, asking for a game. ‘Get out, you bloody brute! ’ he said,
and kicked her. Elizabeth had stopped at the church door. Mr Macgregor, happy chance,
seemed to be introducing her to the clergyman. In a moment the two men went on in the
direction of Mr Macgregor’ s house, where the clergyman was to stay for the night, and
Elizabeth followed the others, thirty yards behind them. Flory ran after her and caught up
with her almost at the Club gate.

‘Elizabeth! ’


She looked round, saw him, turned white, and would have hurried on without a word. But
his anxiety was too great, and he caught her by the wrist.



‘Elizabeth! I must — I’ve got to speak to you! ’


‘Let me go, will you! ’

They began to struggle, and then stopped abruptly. Two of the Karens who had come out
of the church were standing fifty yards away, gazing at them through the half-darkness
with deep interest. Flory began again in a lower tone:

‘Elizabeth, I know I’ve no right to stop you like this. But I must speak to you, I must!
Please hear what I’ve got to say. Please don’t run away from me! ’

‘What are you doing? Why are you holding on to my arm? Let me go this instant! ’

‘I’ll let you go — there, look! But do listen to me, please! Answer me this one thing. After
what’s happened, can you ever forgive me? ’

‘Forgive you? What do you mean, FORGIVE you? ’

‘I know I’m disgraced. It was the vilest thing to happen! Only, in a sense it wasn’t my
fault. You’ll see that when you’re calmer. Do you think — not now, it was too bad, but
later — do you think you can forget it? ’

‘I really don’t know what you’re talking about. Forget it? What has it got to do with ME?
I thought it was very disgusting, but it’s not MY business. I can’t think why you’re
questioning me like this at all. ’

He almost despaired at that. Her tone and even her words were the very ones she had
used in that earlier quarrel of theirs. It was the same move over again. Instead of hearing
him out she was going to evade him and put him off — snub him by pretending that he had
no claim upon her.

‘Elizabeth! Please answer me. Please be fair to me! It’s serious this time. I don’t expect
you to take me back all at once. You couldn’t, when I’m publicly disgraced like this. But,
after all, you virtually promised to marry me — ’


‘What! Promised to marry you? WHEN did I promise to marry you? ’



‘Not in words, I know. But it was understood between us. ’


‘Nothing of the kind was understood between us! I think you are behaving in the most
horrible way. I’m going along to the Club at once. Good evening! ’

‘Elizabeth! Elizabeth! Listen. It’s not fair to condemn me unheard. You knew before
what I’d done, and you knew that I’d lived a different life since I met you. What
happened this evening was only an accident. That wretched woman, who, I admit, was
once my — well — ’

‘I won’t listen, I won’t listen to such things! I’m going! ’

He caught her by the wrists again, and this time held her. The Karens had disappeared,
fortunately.

‘No, no, you shall hear me! I’d rather offend you to the heart than have this uncertainty.
It’s gone on week after week, month after month, and I’ve never once been able to speak
straight out to you. You don’t seem to know or care how much you make me suffer. But
this time you’ve got to answer me. ’

She struggled in his grip, and she was surprisingly strong. Her face was more bitterly
angry than he had ever seen or imagined it. She hated him so that she would have struck
him if her hands were free.

‘Let me go! Oh, you beast, you beast, let me go! ’

‘My God, my God, that we should fight like this! But what else can I do? I can’t let you
go without even hearing me. Elizabeth, you MUST listen to me! ’

‘I will not! I will not discuss it! What right have you to question me? Let me go! ’

‘Forgive me, forgive me! This one question. Will you — not now, but later, when this vile
business is forgotten — will you marry me? ’


‘No, never, never! ’



‘Don’t say it like that! Don’t make it final. Say no for the present if you like — but in a
month, a year, five years — ’


‘Haven’t I said no? Why must you keep on and on? ’

‘Elizabeth, listen to me. I’ve tried again and again to tell you what you mean to me — oh,
it’s so useless talking about it! But do try and understand. Haven’t I told you something
of the life we live here? The sort of horrible death-in-life! The decay, the loneliness, the
self-pity? Try and realize what it means, and that you’re the sole person on earth who
could save me from it. ’

‘Will you let me go? Why do you have to make this dreadful scene? ’

‘Does it mean nothing to you when I say that I love you? I don’t believe you’ve ever
realized what it is that I want from you. If you like. I’d marry you and promise never
even touch you with my finger. I wouldn’t mind even that, so long as you were with me.
But I can’t go on with my life alone, always alone. Can’t you bring yourself ever to
forgive me? ’

‘Never, never! I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man on earth. I’d as soon marry
the — the sweeper! ’

She had begun crying now. He saw that she meant what she said. The tears came into his
own eyes. He said again:

‘For the last time. Remember that it’s something to have one person in the world who
loves you. Remember that though you’ll find men who are richer, and younger, and better
in every way than I, you’ll never find one who cares for you so much. And though I’m
not rich, at least I could make you a home. There’s a way of living — civilized, decent — ’

‘Haven’t we said enough? ’ she said more calmly. ‘Will you let me go before somebody
comes? ’

He relaxed his grip on her wrists. He had lost her, that was certain. Like a hallucination,
painfully clear, he saw again their home as he had imagined it; he saw their garden, and
Elizabeth feeding Nero and the pigeons on the drive by the sulphur-yellow phloxes that



grew as high as her shoulder; and the drawing-room, with the water-colours on the walls,
and the balsams in the china bowl mirrored by the table, and the book-shelves, and the
black piano. The impossible, mythical piano — symbol of everything that that futile
accident had wrecked!

‘You should have a piano,’ he said despairingly.

‘I don’t play the piano. ’

He let her go. It was no use continuing. She was no sooner free of him than she took to
her heels and actually ran into the Club garden, so hateful was his presence to her.
Among the trees she stopped to take off her spectacles and remove the signs of tears from
her face. Oh, the beast, the beast! He had hurt her wrists abominably. Oh, what an
unspeakable beast he was! When she thought of his face as it had looked in church,
yellow and glistening with the hideous birthmark upon it, she could have wished him
dead. It was not what he had done that horrified her. He might have committed a
thousand abominations and she could have forgiven him. But not after that shameful,
squalid scene, and the devilish ugliness of his disfigured face in that moment. It was,
finally, the birthmark that had damned him.

Her aunt would be furious when she heard that she had refused Flory. And there was her
uncle and his leg-pinching — between the two of them, life here would become
impossible. Perhaps she would have to go Home unmarried after all. Black beetles! No
matter. Anything — spinsterhood, drudgery, anything — sooner than the alternative. Never,
never, would she yield to a man who had been so disgraced! Death sooner, far sooner. If
there had been mercenary thoughts in her mind an hour ago, she had forgotten them. She
did not even remember that Verrall had jilted her and that to have married Flory would
have saved her face. She knew only that he was dishonoured and less than a man, and
that she hated him as she would have hated a leper or a lunatic. The instinct was deeper
than reason or even self-interest, and she could no more have disobeyed it than she could
have stopped breathing.

Flory, as he turned up the hill, did not run, but he walked as fast as he could. What he had
to do must be done quickly. It was getting very dark. The wretched Flo, who even now
had not grasped that anything serious was the matter, trotted close to his heels,



whimpering in a self-pitying manner to reproach him for the kick he had given her. As he
came up the path a wind blew through the plaintain trees, rattling the tattered leaves and
bringing a scent of damp. It was going to rain again. Ko S’ la had laid the dinner-table and
was removing some flying beetles that had committed suicide against the petrol-lamp.
Evidently he had not heard about the scene in church yet.

‘The holy one’s dinner is ready. Will the holy one dine now? ’

‘No, not yet. Give me that lamp. ’

He took the lamp, went into the bedroom and shut the door, The stale scent of dust and
cigarette-smoke met him, and in the white, unsteady glare of the lamp he could see the
mildewed books and the lizards on the wall. So he was back again to this — to the old,
secret life — after everything, back where he had been before.

Was it not possible to endure it! He had endured it before. There were palliatives — books,
his garden, drink, work, whoring, shooting, conversations with the doctor.

No, it was not endurable any longer. Since Elizabeth’s coming the power to suffer and
above all to hope, which he had thought dead in him, had sprung to new life. The half-
comfortable lethargy in which he had lived was broken. And if he suffered now, there
was far worse to come. In a little while someone else would marry her. How he could
picture it — the moment when he heard the news!
— ‘Did you hear the Lackersteen kid’s
got off at last? Poor old So-and-so — booked for the altar, God help him,’ etc. , etc. And
the casual question — ‘Oh, really? When is it to be? ’ — stiffening one’s face, pretending to
be uninterested. And then her wedding day approaching, her bridal night — ah, not that!
Obscene, obscene. Keep your eyes fixed on that. Obscene. He dragged his tin uniform-
case from under the bed, took out his automatic pistol, slid a clip of cartridges into the
magazine, and pulled one into the breech.

Ko S’la was remembered in his will. There remained Flo. He laid his pistol on the table
and went outside. Flo was playing with Ba Shin, Ko S’la’s youngest son, under the lee of
the cookhouse, where the servants had left the remains of a woodlire. She was dancing
round him with her small teeth bared, pretending to bite him, while the tiny boy, his belly
red in the glow of the embers, smacked weakly at her, laughing, and yet half frightened.



‘Flo! Come here, Flo! ’


She heard him and came obediently, and then stopped short at the bedroom door. She
seemed to have grasped now that there was something wrong. She backed a little and
stood looking timorously up at him, unwilling to enter the bedroom.

‘Come in here! ’

She wagged her tail, but did not move.

‘Come on, Flo! Good old Flo! Come on! ’

Flo was suddenly stricken with terror. She whined, her tail went down, and she shrank
back. ‘Come here, blast you! ’ he cried, and he took her by the collar and flung her into
the room, shutting the door behind her. He went to the table for the pistol.

‘No come here! Do as you’re told! ’

She crouched down and whined for forgiveness. It hurt him to hear it. ‘Come on, old girl!
Dear old Flo! Master wouldn’t hurt you. Come here! ’ She crawled very slowly towards
his feet, flat on her belly, whining, her head down as though afraid to look at him. When
she was a yard away he fired, blowing her skull to fragments.

Her shattered brain looked like red velvet. Was that what he would look like? The heart,
then, not the head. He could hear the servants running out of their quarters and
shouting — they must have heard the sound of the shot. He hurriedly tore open his coat
and pressed the muzzle of the pistol against his shirt. A tiny lizard, translucent like a
creature of gelatine, was stalking a white moth along the edge of the table. Flory pulled
the trigger with his thumb.

As Ko S’la burst into the room, for a moment he saw nothing but the dead body of the
dog. Then he saw his master’s feet, heels upwards, projecting from beyond the bed. He
yelled to the others to keep the children out of the room, and all of them surged back
from the doorway with screams. Ko S’la fell on his knees behind Flory’s body, at the
same moment as Ba Pe came running through the veranda.



‘Has he shot himself? ’


‘I think so. Turn him over on his back. Ah, look at that! Run for the Indian doctor! Run
for your life! ’

There was a neat hole, no bigger than that made by a pencil passing through a sheet of
blotting-paper, in Flory’s shirt. He was obviously quite dead. With great difficulty Ko
STa managed to drag him on to the bed, for the other servants refused to touch the body.
It was only twenty minutes before the doctor arrived. He had heard only a vague report
that Flory was hurt, and had bicycled up the hill at top speed through a storm of rain. He
threw his bicycle down in the flower-bed and hurried in through the veranda. He was out
of breath, and could not see through his spectacles. He took them off, peering myopically
at the bed. ‘What iss it, my friend? ’ he said anxiously. ‘Where are you hurt? ’ Then,
coming closer, he saw what was on the bed, and uttered a harsh sound.

‘Ach, what is this? What has happened to him? ’

The doctor fell on his knees, tore Flory’s shirt open and put his ear to his chest. An
expression of agony came into his face, and he seized the dead man by the shoulders and
shook him as though mere violence could bring him to life. One arm fell limply over the
edge of the bed. The doctor lifted it back again, and then, with the dead hand between his
own, suddenly burst into tears. Ko STa was standing at the foot of the bed, his brown face
full of lines. The doctor stood up, and then losing control of himself for a moment, leaned
against the bedpost and wept noisily and grotesquely his back turned on Ko STa. His fat
shoulders were quivering. Presently he recovered himself and turned round again.

‘How did this happen? ’

‘We heard two shots. He did it himself, that is certain. I do not know why. ’

‘How did you know that he did it on purpose? How do you know that it was not an
accident? ’

For answer, Ko STa pointed silently to Flo’s corpse. The doctor thought for a moment,
and then, with gentle, practised hands, swathed the dead man in the sheet and knotted it at



foot and head. With death, the birthmark had faded immediately, so that it was no more
than a faint grey stain.


‘Bury the dog at once. I will tell Mr Macgregor that this happened accidentally while he
was cleaning his revolver. Be sure that you bury the dog. Your master was my friend. It
shall not be written on his tombstone that he committed suicide. ’


CHAPTER 25

It was lucky that the padre should have been at Kyauktada, for he was able, before
catching the train on the following evening, to read the burial service in due form and
even to deliver a short address on the virtues of the dead man. All Englishmen are
virtuous when they are dead. ‘Accidental death’ was the official verdict (Dr Veraswami
had proved with all his medico-legal skill that the circumstances pointed to accident) and
it was duly inscribed upon the tombstone. Not that anyone believed it, of course. Flory’s
real epitaph was the remark, very occasionally uttered — for an Englishman who dies in
Burma is so soon forgotten — ‘Flory? Oh yes, he was a dark chap, with a birthmark. He
shot himself in Kyauktada in 1926. Over a girl, people said. Bloody fool. ’ Probably no
one, except Elizabeth, was much surprised at what had happened. There is a rather large
number of suicides among the Europeans in Burma, and they occasion very little surprise.

Flory’s death had several results. The first and most important of them was that Dr
Veraswami was ruined, even as he had foreseen. The glory of being a white man’s
friend — the one thing that had saved him before — had vanished. Flory’s standing with the
other Europeans had never been good, it is true; but he was after all a white man, and his
friendship conferred a certain prestige. Once he was dead, the doctor’s ruin was assured.
U Po Kyin waited the necessary time, and then struck again, harder than ever. It was
barely three months before he had fixed it in the head of every European in Kyauktada
that the doctor was an unmitigated scoundrel. No public accusation was ever made
against him — U Po Kyin was most careful of that. Even Ellis would have been puzzled to
say just what scoundrelism the doctor had been guilty of; but still, it was agreed that he



was a scoundrel. By degrees, the general suspicion of him crystallized in a single
Burmese phrase — ‘shok de’. Veraswami, it was said, was quite a clever little chap in his
way — quite a good doctor for a native — but he was THOROUGHLY shok de. Shok de
means, approximately, untrustworthy, and when a ‘native’ official comes to be known as
shok de, there is an end of him.

The dreaded nod and wink passed somewhere in high places, and the doctor was reverted
to the rank of Assistant Surgeon and transferred to Mandalay General Hospital. He is still
there, and is likely to remain. Mandalay is rather a disagreeable town — it is dusty and
intolerably hot, and it is said to have five main products all beginning with P, namely,
pagodas, pariahs, pigs, priests and prostitutes — and the routine-work of the hospital is a
dreary business. The doctor lives just outside the hospital grounds in a little bake-house
of a bungalow with a corrugated iron fence round its tiny compound, and in the evenings
he runs a private clinic to supplement his reduced pay. He has joined a second-rate club
frequented by Indian pleaders. Its chief glory is a single European member — a Glasgow
electrician named Macdougall, sacked from the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company for
drunkenness, and now making a precarious living out of a garage. Macdougall is a dull
lout, only interested in whisky and magnetos. The doctor, who will never believe that a
white man can be a fool, tries almost every night to engage him in what he still calls
‘cultured conversation’; but the results are very unsatisfying.

Ko S’la inherited four hundred rupees under Flory’s will, and with his family he set up a
tea-shop in the bazaar. But the shop failed, as it was bound to do with the two women
fighting in it at all hours, and Ko S’la and Ba Pe were obliged to go back to service. Ko
S’la was an accomplished servant. Besides the useful arts of pimping, dealing with
money-lenders, carrying master to bed when drunk and making pick-me-ups known as
prairie oysters on the following morning, he could sew, dam, refill cartridges, attend to a
horse, press a suit, and decorate a dinner-table with wonderful, intricate patterns of
chopped leaves and dyed rice-grains. He was worth fifty rupees a month. But he and Ba
Pe had fallen into lazy ways in Flory’s service, and, they were sacked from one job after
another. They had a bad year of poverty, and little Ba Shin developed a cough, and
finally coughed himself to death one stifling hot-weather night. Ko S’la is now a second
boy to a Rangoon rice-broker with a neurotic wife who makes unending kit-kit, and Ba
Pe is pani-wallah in the same house at sixteen rupees a month. Ma Hla May is in a



brothel in Mandalay. Her good looks are all but gone, and her clients pay her only four
annas and sometimes kick her and beat her. Perhaps more bitterly than any of the others,
she regrets the good time when Flory was alive, and when she had not the wisdom to put
aside any of the money she extracted from him.

U Po Kyin realized all his dreams except one. After the doctor’s disgrace, it was
inevitable that U Po Kyin should be elected to the Club, and elected he was, in spite of
bitter protests from Ellis. In the end the other Europeans came to be rather glad that they
had elected him, for he was a bearable addition to the Club. He did not come too often,
was ingratiating in his manner, stood drinks freely, and developed almost at once into a
brilliant bridge-player. A few months later he was transferred from Kyauktada and
promoted. For a whole year, before his retirement, he officiated as Deputy
Commissioner, and during that year alone he made twenty thousand rupees in bribes. A
month after his retirement he was summoned to a durbar in Rangoon, to receive the
decoration that had been awarded to him by the Indian Government.

It was an impressive scene, that durbar. On the platform, hung with flags and flowers, sat
the Governor, frock-coated, upon a species of throne, with a bevy of aides-de-camp and
secretaries behind him. All round the hall, like glittering waxworks, stood the tall,
bearded sowars of the Governor’s bodyguard, with pennoned lances in their hands.
Outside, a band was blaring at intervals. The gallery was gay with the white ingyis and
pink scarves of Burmese ladies, and in the body of the hall a hundred men or more were
waiting to receive their decorations. There were Burmese officials in blazing Mandalay
pasos, and Indians in cloth-of-gold pagris, and British officers in full-dress uniform with
clanking sword-scabbards, and old thugyis with their grey hair knotted behind their heads
and silver-hilted dahs slung from their shoulders. In a high, clear voice a secretary was
reading out the list of awards, which varied from the C. I. E. to certificates of honour in
embossed silver cases. Presently U Po Kyin’s turn came and the secretary read from his
scroll:

‘To U Po Kyin, Deputy Assistant Commissioner, retired, for long and loyal service and
especially for his timely aid in crushing a most dangerous rebellion in Kyauktada
district’ — and so on and so on.



Then two henchmen, placed there for the purpose hoisted U Po Kyin upright, and he
waddled to the platfonn, bowed as low as his belly would pennit, and was duly decorated
and felicitated, while Ma Kin and other supporters clapped wildly and fluttered their
scarves from the gallery.

U Po Kyin had done all that mortal man could do. It was time now to be making ready for
the next world — in short, to begin building pagodas. But unfortunately, this was the very
point at which his plans went wrong. Only three days after the Governor’s durbar, before
so much as a brick of those atoning pagodas had been laid, U Po Kyin was stricken with
apoplexy and died without speaking again. There is no armour against fate. Ma Kin was
heartbroken at the disaster. Even if she had built the pagodas herself, it would have
availed U Po Kyin nothing; no merit can be acquired save by one’s own act. She suffers
greatly to think of U Po Kyin where he must be now — wandering in God knows what
dreadful subterranean hell of fire, and darkness, and serpents, and genii. Or even if he has
escaped the worst, his other fear has been realized, and he has returned to the earth in the
shape of a rat or a frog. Perhaps at this very moment a snake is devouring him.

As to Elizabeth, things fell out better than she had expected. After Flory’s death Mrs
Lackersteen, dropping all pretences for once, said openly that there were no men in this
dreadful place and the only hope was to go and stay several months in Rangoon or
Maymyo. But she could not very well send Elizabeth to Rangoon or Maymyo alone, and
to go with her practically meant condemning Mr Lackersteen to death from delirium
tremens. Months passed, and the rains reached their climax, and Elizabeth had just made
up her mind that she must go home after all, penniless and unmarried, when — Mr
Macgregor proposed to her. He had had it in his mind for a long time; indeed, he had only
been waiting for a decent interval to elapse after Flory’s death.

Elizabeth accepted him gladly. He was rather old, perhaps, but a Deputy Commissioner is
not to be despised — certainly he was a far better match than Flory. They are very happy.
Mr Macgregor was always a good-hearted man, but he has grown more human and
likeable since his marriage. His voice booms less, and he has given up his morning
exercises. Elizabeth has grown mature surprisingly quickly, and a certain hardness of
manner that always belonged to her has become accentuated. Her servants live in terror
of her, though she speaks no Burmese. She has an exhaustive knowledge of the Civil List,



gives charming little dinner-parties and knows how to put the wives of subordinate
officials in their places — in short, she fills with complete success the position for which
Nature had designed her from the first, that of a hurra memsahib.