No More Learning

He did not want to see the yellow, su nk en face that
would look back at him. For several minutes he stood slack-limbed, watching the tuktoo
stalk a moth above the bookshelves. The cigarette that Ma Hla May had dropped burned
down with an acrid smell, browning the paper. Flory took a book from the shelves,
opened it and then threw it away in distaste. He had not even the energy to read. Oh God,
God, what to do with the rest of this bloody evening?

Flo waddled into the room, wagging her tail and asking to be taken for a walk. Flory went
sulkily into the little stone-floored bathroom that gave on to the bedroom, splashed
himself with lukewarm water and put on his shirt and shorts. He must take some kind of



exercise before the sun went down. In India it is in some way evil to spend a day without
being once in a muck-sweat. It gives one a deeper sense of sin than a thousand lecheries.
In the dark evening, after a quite idle day, one’s ennui reaches a pitch that is frantic,
suicidal. Work, prayer, books, drinking, talking — they are all powerless against it; it can
only be sweated out through the pores of the skin.

Flory went out and followed the road uphill into the jungle. It was scrub jungle at first,
with dense stunted bushes, and the only trees were half-wild mangoes, bearing little
turpentiny fruits the size of plums. Then the road struck among taller trees. The jungle
was dried-up and lifeless at this time of year. The trees lined the road in close, dusty
ranks, with leaves a dull olive-green. No birds were visible except some ragged brown
creatures like disreputable thrushes, which hopped clumsily under the bushes; in the
distance some other bird uttered a cry of ‘AH ha ha! AH ha ha! ’ — a lonely, hollow sound
like the echo of a laugh. There was a poisonous, ivy-like smell of crushed leaves. It was
still hot, though the sun was losing its glare and the slanting light was yellow.

After two miles the road ended at the ford of a shallow stream. The jungle grew greener
here, because of the water, and the trees were taller. At the edge of the stream there was a
huge dead pyinkado tree festooned with spidery orchids, and there were some wild lime
bushes with white waxen flowers. They had a sharp scent like bergamot. Flory had
walked fast and the sweat had drenched his shirt and dribbled, stinging, into his eyes. He
had sweated himself into a better mood. Also, the sight of this stream always heartened
him; its water was quite clear, rarest of sights in a miry country. He crossed the stream by
the stepping stones, Flo splashing after him, and turned into a narrow track he knew,
which led through the bushes. It was a track that cattle had made, coming to the stream to
drink, and few human beings ever followed it. It led to a pool fifty yards upstream. Here a
peepul tree grew, a great buttressed thing six feet thick, woven of innumerable strands of
wood, like a wooden cable twisted by a giant. The roots of the tree made a natural cavern,
under which the clear greenish water bubbled. Above and all around dense foliage shut
out the light, turning the place into a green grotto walled with leaves.

Flory threw off his clothes and stepped into the water. It was a shade cooler than the air,
and it came up to his neck when he sat down. Shoals of silvery mahseer, no bigger than
sardines, came nosing and nibbling at his body. Flo had also flopped into the water, and



she swam round silently, otter-like, with her webbed feet. She knew the pool well, for
they often came here when Flory was at Kyauktada.

There was a stirring high up in the peepul tree, and a bubbling noise like pots boiling. A
flock of green pigeons were up there, eating the berries. Flory gazed up into the great
green dome of the tree, trying to distinguish the birds; they were invisible, they matched
the leaves so perfectly, and yet the whole tree was alive with them, shimmering, as
though the ghosts of birds were shaking it. Flo rested herself against the roots and
growled up at the invisible creatures. Then a single green pigeon fluttered down and
perched on a lower branch. It did not know that it was being watched. It was a tender
thing, smaller than a tame dove, with jade-green back as smooth as velvet, and neck and
breast of iridescent colours. Its legs were like the pink wax that dentists use.

The pigeon rocked itself backwards and forwards on the bough, swelling out its breast
feathers and laying its coralline beak upon them. A pang went through Flory. Alone,
alone, the bitterness of being alone! So often like this, in lonely places in the forest, he
would come upon something — bird, flower, tree — beautiful beyond all words, if there
had been a soul with whom to share it. Beauty is meaningless until it is shared. If he had
one person, just one, to halve his loneliness! Suddenly the pigeon saw the man and dog
below, sprang into the air and dashed away swift as a bullet, with a rattle of wings. One
does not often see green pigeons so closely when they are alive. They are high-flying
birds, living in the treetops, and they do not come to the ground, or only to drink. When
one shoots them, if they are not killed outright, they cling to the branch until they die, and
drop long after one has given up waiting and gone away.

Flory got out of the water, put on his clothes and recrossed the stream. He did not go
home by the road, but followed a foot- track southward into the jungle, intending to make
a detour and pass through a village that lay in the fringe of the jungle not far from his
house. Flo frisked in and out of the undergrowth, yelping sometimes when her long ears
caught in the thorns. She had once turned up a hare near here. Flory walked slowly. The
smoke of his pipe floated straight upwards in still plumes. He was happy and at peace
after the walk and the clear water. It was cooler now, except for patches of heat lingering
under the thicker trees, and the light was gentle. Bullock-cart wheels were screaming
peacefully in the distance.



Soon they had lost their way in the jungle, and were wandering in a maze of dead trees
and tangled bushes. They came to an impasse where the path was blocked by large ugly
plants like magnified aspidistras, whose leaves terminated in long lashes anned with
thorns. A firefly glowed greenish at the bottom of a bush; it was getting twilight in the
thicker places. Presently the bullock-cart wheels screamed nearer, taking a parallel
course.

‘Hey, saya gyi, saya gyi! ’ Flory shouted, taking Flo by the collar to prevent her running
away.

‘Ba le-de? ’ the Bunnan shouted back. There was the sound of plunging hooves and of
yells to the bullocks.

‘Come here, if you please, O venerable and learned sir! We have lost our way. Stop a
moment, O great builder of pagodas! ’

The Bunnan left his cart and pushed through the jungle, slicing the creepers with his dah.
He was a squat middle-aged man with one eye. He led the way back to the track, and
Flory climbed on to the flat, uncomfortable bullock cart. The Bunnan took up the string
reins, yelled to the bullocks, prodded the roots of their tails with his short stick, and the
cart jolted on with a shriek of wheels. The Burmese bullock-cart drivers seldom grease
their axles, probably because they believe that the screaming keeps away evil spirits,
though when questioned they will say that it is because they are too poor to buy grease.

They passed a whitewashed wooden pagoda, no taller than a man and half hidden by the
tendrils of creeping plants. Then the track wound into the village, which consisted of
twenty ruinous, wooden huts roofed with thatch, and a well beneath some barren date-
palms. The egrets that roosted in the palms were streaming homewards over the treetops
like white flights of arrows. A fat yellow woman with her longyi hitched under her
annpits was chasing a dog round a hut, smacking at it with a bamboo and laughing, and
the dog was also laughing in its fashion. The village was called Nyaunglebin — ‘the four
peepul trees’; there were no peepul trees there now, probably they had been cut down and
forgotten a century ago. The villagers cultivated a narrow strip of fields that lay between
the town and the jungle, and they also made bullock carts which they sold in Kyauktada.



Bullock-cart wheels were littered everywhere under the houses; massive things five feet
across, with spokes roughly but strongly carved.

Flory got off the cart and gave the driver a present of four annas. Some brindled curs
hurried from beneath the houses to sniff at Flo, and a flock of pot-bellied, naked children,
with their hair tied in top-knots, also appeared, curious about the white man but keeping
their distance. The village headman, a wizened, leaf-brown old man, came out of his
house, and there were shikoings. Flory sat down on the steps of the headman’s house and
relighted his pipe. He was thirsty.

‘Is the water in your well good to drink, thugyi-min? ’

The headman reflected, scratching the calf of his left leg with his right big toenail. ‘Those
who drink it, drink it, thakin. And those who do not drink it, do not drink it. ’

‘Ah. That is wisdom. ’

The fat woman who had chased the pariah brought a blackened earthenware teapot and a
handleless bowl, and gave Flory some pale green tea, tasting of wood-smoke.

‘I must be going, thugyi-min. Thank you for the tea. ’

‘God go with you, thakin. ’

Flory went home by a path that led out on to the maidan. It was dark now. Ko S’la had
put on a clean ingyi and was waiting in the bedroom. He had heated two kerosene tins of
bath-water, lighted the petrol lamps and laid out a clean suit and shirt for Flory. The clean
clothes were intended as a hint that Flory should shave, dress himself and go down to the
Club after dinner. Occasionally he spent the evening in Shan trousers, loafing in a chair
with a book, and Ko S’la disapproved of this habit. He hated to see his master behaving
differently from other white men. The fact that Flory often came back from the Club
drunk, whereas he remained sober when he stayed at home, did not alter Ko S’la’s
opinion, because getting drunk was normal and pardonable in a white man.



‘The woman has gone down to the bazaar,’ he announced, pleased, as he always was
when Ma Hla May left the house. ‘Ba Pe has gone with a lantern, to look after her when
she comes back. ’


‘Good,’ Flory said.

She had gone to spend her five rupees — gambling, no doubt. ‘The holy one’s bath-water
is ready. ’

‘Wait, we must attend to the dog first. Bring the comb,’ Flory said.

The two men squatted on the floor together and combed Flo’s silky coat and felt between
her toes, picking out the ticks. It had to be done every evening. She picked up vast
numbers of ticks during the day, horrible grey things that were the size of pin-heads when
they got on to her, and gorged themselves till they were as large as peas. As each tick was
detached Ko S’la put it on the floor and carefully crushed it with his big toe.

Then Flory shaved, bathed, dressed, and sat down to dinner. Ko S’la stood behind his
chair, handing him the dishes and fanning him with the wicker fan. He had arranged a
bowl of scarlet hibiscus flowers in the middle of the little table. The meal was pretentious
and filthy. The clever ‘Mug’ cooks, descendants of servants trained by Frenchmen in
India centuries ago, can do anything with food except make it eatable. After dinner Flory
walked down to the Club, to play bridge and get three parts drunk, as he did most
evenings when he was in Kyauktada.


CHAPTER 5


In spite of the whisky he had drunk at the Club, Flory had little sleep that night. The
pariah curs were baying the moon — it was only a quarter full and nearly down by
midnight, but the dogs slept all day in the heat, and they had begun their moon-choruses
already. One dog had taken a dislike to Flory’s house, and had settled down to bay at it



systematically. Sitting on its bottom fifty yards from the gate, it let out sharp, angry
yelps, one to half a minute, as regularly as a clock. It would keep this up for two or three
hours, until the cocks began crowing.

Flory lay turning from side to side, his head aching. Some fool has said that one cannot
hate an animal; he should try a few nights in India, when the dogs are baying the moon.
In the end Flory could stand it no longer. He got up, rummaged in the tin uniform case
under his bed for a rifle and a couple of cartridges, and went out on to the veranda.

It was fairly light in the quarter moon. He could see the dog, and he could see his
foresight. He rested himself against the wooden pillar of the veranda and took aim
carefully; then, as he felt the hard vulcanite butt against his bare shoulder, he flinched.
The rifle had a heavy kick, and it left a bruise when one fired it. The soft flesh of his
shoulder quailed. He lowered the rifle. He had not the nerve to fire it in cold blood.

It was no use trying to sleep. Flory got his jacket and some cigarettes, and began to stroll
up and down the garden path, between the ghostly flowers. It was hot, and the mosquitoes
found him out and came droning after him. Phantoms of dogs were chasing one another
on the maidan. Over to the left the gravestones of the English cemetery glittered whitish,
rather sinister, and one could see the mounds near by, that were the remains of old
Chinese tombs. The hillside was said to be haunted, and the Club chokras cried when
they were sent up the road at night.

‘Cur, spineless cur,’ Flory was thinking to himself; without heat, however, for he was too
accustomed to the thought. ‘Sneaking, idling, boozing, fornicating, soul-examining, self-
pitying cur. All those fools at the Club, those dull louts to whom you are so pleased to
think yourself superior — they are all better than you, every man of them. At least they are
men in their oafish way. Not cowards, not liars. Not half-dead and rotting. But you — ’

He had reason to call himself names. There had been a nasty, dirty affair at the Club that
evening. Something quite ordinary, quite according to precedent; but still dingy,
cowardly, dishonouring.

When Flory had arrived at the Club only Ellis and Maxwell were there. The Lackersteens
had gone to the station with the loan of Mr Macgregor’s car, to meet their niece, who was



to arrive by the night train. The three men were playing three-handed bridge fairly
amicably when Westfield came in, his sandy face quite pink with rage, bringing a copy of
a Burmese paper called the Bunnese Patriot. There was a libellous article in it, attacking
Mr Macgregor. The rage of Ellis and Westfield was devilish. They were so angry that
Flory had the greatest difficulty in pretending to be angry enough to satisfy them. Ellis
spent five minutes in cursing and then, by some extraordinary process, made up his mind
that Dr Veraswami was responsible for the article. And he had thought of a counterstroke
already. They would put a notice on the board — a notice answering and contradicting the
one Mr Macgregor had posted the day before. Ellis wrote it out immediately, in his tiny,
clear handwriting:

‘In view of the cowardly insult recently offered to our Deputy commissioner, we the
undersigned wish to give it as our opinion that this is the worst possible moment to
consider the election of niggers to this Club,’ etc ,etc.

Westfield demurred to ‘niggers’. It was crossed out by a single thin line and ‘natives’
substituted. The notice was signed ‘R. Westfield, P. W. Ellis, C. W. Maxwell, J. Flory. ’

Ellis was so pleased with his idea that quite half of his anger evaporated. The notice
would accomplish nothing in itself, but the news of it would travel swiftly round the
town, and would reach Dr Veraswami tomorrow. In effect, the doctor would have been
publicly called a nigger by the European community. This delighted Ellis. For the rest of
the evening he could hardly keep his eyes from the notice-board, and every few minutes
he exclaimed in glee, ‘That’ll give little fat-belly something to think about, eh? Teach the
little sod what we think of him. That’s the way to put ‘em in their place, eh? ’ etc.

Meanwhile, Flory had signed a public insult to his friend. He had done it for the same
reason as he had done a thousand such things in his life; because he lacked the small
spark of courage that was needed to refuse. For, of course, he could have refused if he
had chosen; and, equally of course, refusal would have meant a row with Ellis and
Westfield. And oh, how he loathed a row! 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.