No More Learning

Good-bye in case I don’t see you again. I hope it’ll
be all right at the general meeting. Macgregor’s not a bad old stick. I dare say he’ll insist
on their electing you. ’



‘Let us hope so, my friend. With that I can defy a hundred U Po Kyins. A thousand!
Good-bye, my friend, good-bye. ’


Then Flory settled his Terai hat on his head and went home across the glaring maidan, to
his breakfast, for which the long morning of drinking, smoking and talking had left him
no appetite.


CHAPTER 4

Flory lay asleep, naked except for black Shan trousers, upon his sweat-damp bed. He had
been idling all day. He spent approximately three weeks of every month in camp, coming
into Kyauktada for a few days at a time, chiefly in order to idle, for he had very little
clerical work to do.

The bedroom was a large square room with white plaster walls, open doorways and no
ceiling, but only rafters in which sparrows nested. There was no furniture except the big
four-poster bed, with its furled mosquito net like a canopy, and a wicker table and chair
and a small mirror; also some rough bookshelves, containing several hundred books, all
mildewed by many rainy seasons and riddled by silver fish. A tuktoo clung to the wall,
flat and motionless like a heraldic dragon. Beyond the veranda eaves the light rained
down like glistening white oil. Some doves in a bamboo thicket kept up a dull droning
noise, curiously appropriate to the heat — a sleepy sound, but with the sleepiness of
chloroform rather than a lullaby.

Down at Mr Macgregor’s bungalow, two hundred yards away, a durwan, like a living
clock, hammered four strokes on a section of iron rail. Ko STa, Flory’s servant,
awakened by the sound, went into the cookhouse, blew up the embers of the woodfire
and boiled the kettle for tea. Then he put on his pink gaungbaung and muslin ingyi and
brought the tea-tray to his master’s bedside.



Ko S’la (his real name was Maung San Hla; Ko S’la was an abbreviation) was a short,
square-shouldered, rustic-looking Burman with a very dark skin and a harassed
expression. He wore a black moustache which curved downwards round his mouth, but
like most Burmans he was quite beardless. He had been Flory’s servant since his first day
in Burma. The two men were within a month of one another’s age. They had been boys
together, had tramped side by side after snipe and duck, sat together in machans waiting
for tigers that never came, shared the discomforts of a thousand camps and marches; and
Ko STa had pimped for Flory and borrowed money for him from the Chinese money-
lenders, carried him to bed when he was drunk, tended him through bouts of fever. In Ko
S’la’s eyes Flory, because a bachelor, was a boy still; whereas Ko STa had married,
begotten five children, married again and become one of the obscure martyrs of bigamy.
Like all bachelors’ servants, Ko STa was lazy and dirty, and yet he was devoted to Flory.
He would never let anyone else serve Flory at table, or carry his gun or hold his pony’s
head while he mounted. On the march, if they came to a stream, he would carry Flory
across on his back. He was inclined to pity Flory, partly because he thought him childish
and easily deceived, and partly because of the birthmark, which he considered a dreadful
thing.

Ko STa put the tea-tray down on the table very quietly, and then went round to the end of
the bed and tickled Flory’s toes. He knew by experience that this was the only way of
waking Flory without putting him in a bad temper. Flory rolled over, swore, and pressed
his forehead into the pillow.

‘Four o’clock has struck, most holy god,’ Ko STa said. ‘I have brought two teacups,
because THE WOMAN said that she was coming. ’

THE WOMAN was Ma Hla May, Flory’s mistress. Ko STa always called her THE
WOMAN, to show his disapproval — not that he disapproved of Flory for keeping a
mistress, but he was jealous of Ma Hla May’s influence in the house.

‘Will the holy one play tinnis this evening? ’ Ko STa asked.


‘No, it’s too hot,’ said Flory in English. ‘I don’t want anything to eat. Take this muck
away and bring some whisky. ’



Ko S’ la understood English very well, though he could not speak it. He brought a bottle
of whisky, and also Flory’s tennis racquet, which he laid in a meaning manner against the
wall opposite the bed. Tennis, according to his notions, was a mysterious ritual
incumbent on ah Englishmen, and he did not like to see his master idling in the evenings.

Flory pushed away in disgust the toast and butter that Ko STa had brought, but he mixed
some whisky in a cup of tea and felt better after drinking it. He had slept since noon, and
his head and ah his bones ached, and there was a taste like burnt paper in his mouth. It
was years since he had enjoyed a meal. Ah European food in Burma is more or less
disgusting — the bread is spongy stuff leavened with palm-toddy and tasting like a penny
bun gone wrong, the butter comes out of a tin, and so does the milk, unless it is the grey
watery catlap of the dudh- wallah. As Ko STa left the room there was a scraping of
sandals outside, and a Bunnese girl’s high-pitched voice said, ‘Is my master awake? ’

‘Come in,’ said Flory rather bad temperedly.

Ma Hla May came in, kicking off red-lacquered sandals in the doorway. She was allowed
to come to tea, as a special privilege, but not to other meals, nor to wear her sandals in
her master’s presence.

Ma Hla May was a woman of twenty-two or — three, and perhaps five feet tall. She was
dressed in a longyi of pale blue embroidered Chinese satin, and a starched white muslin
ingyi on which several gold lockets hung. Her hair was coiled in a tight black cylinder
like ebony, and decorated with jasmine flowers. Her tiny, straight, slender body was a
contourless as a bas-relief carved upon a tree. She was like a doll, with her oval, still face
the colour of new copper, and her narrow eyes; an outlandish doll and yet a grotesquely
beautiful one. A scent of sandalwood and coco-nut oil came into the room with her.

Ma Hla May came across to the bed, sat down on the edge and put her arms rather
abruptly round Flory. She smelled at his cheek with her flat nose, in the Burmese fashion.

‘Why did my master not send for me this afternoon? ’ she said.


‘I was sleeping. It is too hot for that kind of thing. ’



‘So you would rather sleep alone than with Ma Hla May? How ugly you must think me,
then! Am I ugly, master? ’

‘Go away,’ he said, pushing her back. ‘I don’t want you at this time of day. ’

‘At least touch me with your lips, then. (There is no Burmese word for to kiss. ) All white
men do that to their women. ’

‘There you are, then. Now leave me alone. Fetch some cigarettes and give me one. ’

‘Why is it that nowadays you never want to make love to me? Ah, two years ago it was
so different! You loved me in those days. You gave me presents of gold bangles and silk
longyis from Mandalay. And now look’ — Ma Hla May held out one tiny muslin-clad
ann — ‘not a single bangle. Last month I had thirty, and now all of them are pawned. How
can I go to the bazaar without my bangles, and wearing the same longyi over and over
again? I am ashamed before the other women. ’

‘Is it my fault if you pawn your bangles? ’

‘Two years ago you would have redeemed them for me. Ah, you do not love Ma Hla May
any longer! ’

She put her anns round him again and kissed him, a European habit which he had taught
her. A mingled scent of sandalwood, garlic, coco-nut oil and the jasmine in her hair
floated from her. It was a scent that always made his teeth tingle. Rather abstractedly he
pressed her head back upon the pillow and looked down at her queer, youthful face, with
its high cheekbones, stretched eyelids and short, shapely lips. She had rather nice teeth,
like the teeth of a kitten. He had bought her from her parents two years ago, for three
hundred rupees. He began to stroke her brown throat, rising like a smooth, slender stalk
from the collarless ingyi.

‘You only like me because I am a white man and have money,’ he said.

‘Master, I love you, I love you more than anything in the world. Why do you say that?
Have I not always been faithful to you? ’



‘You have a Burmese lover. ’


‘Ugh! ’ Ma Hla May affected to shudder at the thought. ‘To think of their horrible brown
hands, touching me! I should die if a Burman touched me! ’

‘Liar. ’

He put his hand on her breast. Privately, Ma Hla May did not like this, for it reminded her
that her breasts existed — the ideal of a Burmese woman being to have no breasts. She lay
and let him do as he wished with her, quite passive yet pleased and faintly smiling, like a
cat which allows one to stroke it. Flory’s embraces meant nothing to her (Ba Pe, Ko
S’la’s younger brother, was secretly her lover), yet she was bitterly hurt when he
neglected them. Sometimes she had even put love-philtres in his food. It was the idle
concubine’s life that she loved, and the visits to her village dressed in all her finery, when
she could boast of her position as a ‘bo-kadaw’ — a white man’s wife; for she had
persuaded everyone, herself included, that she was Flory’s legal wife.

When Flory had done with her he turned away, jaded and ashamed, and lay silent with his
left hand covering his birthmark. He always remembered the birthmark when he had done
something to be ashamed of. He buried his face disgustedly in the pillow, which was
damp and smelt of coco-nut oil. It was horribly hot, and the doves outside were still
droning. Ma Hla May, naked, reclined beside Flory, fanning him gently with a wicker fan
she had taken from the table.

Presently she got up and dressed herself, and lighted a cigarette. Then, coming back to
the bed, she sat down and began stroking Flory’s bare shoulder. The whiteness of his skin
had a fascination for her, because of its strangeness and the sense of power it gave her.
But Flory twitched his shoulder to shake her hand away. At these times she was
nauseating and dreadful to him. His sole wish was to get her out of his sight.

‘Get out,’ he said.

Ma Hla May took her cigarette from her mouth and tried to offer it to Flory. ‘Why is
master always so angry with me when he has made love to me? ’ she said.


‘Get out,’ he repeated.



Ma Hla May continued to stroke Flory’s shoulder. She had never learned the wisdom of
leaving him alone at these times. She believed that lechery was a fonn of witchcraft,
giving a woman magical powers over a man, until in the end she could weaken him to a
half-idiotic slave. Each successive embrace sapped Flory’s will and made the spell
stronger — this was her belief. She began tormenting him to begin over again. She laid
down her cigarette and put her arms round him, trying to turn him towards her and kiss
his averted face, reproaching him for his coldness.

‘Go away, go away! ’ he said angrily. ‘Look in the pocket of my shorts. There is money
there. Take five rupees and go. ’

Ma Hla May found the five-rupee note and stuffed it into the bosom of her ingyi, but she
still would not go. She hovered about the bed, worrying Flory until at last he grew angry
and jumped up.

‘Get out of this room! I told you to go. I don’t want you in here after Eve done with you. ’

‘That is a nice way to speak to me! You treat me as though I were a prostitute. ’

‘So you are. Out you go,’ he said, pushing her out of the room by her shoulders. He
kicked her sandals after her. Their encounters often ended in this way.

Flory stood in the middle of the room, yawning. Should he go down to the Club for tennis
after all? No, it meant shaving, and he could not face the effort of shaving until he had a
few drinks inside him. He felt his scrubby chin and lounged across to the mirror to
examine it, but then turned away. 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.