Burmese Days 缅甸岁月 Chapter 5

In spite of the whisky he had drunk at the Club, Flory had little sleep that night. The pariah¹ 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 systematically². Sitting on its bottom fifty yards from the gate, it let out sharp, angry yelps³, 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, rummaged⁴ in the tin uniform case under his bed for a rifle and a couple of cartridges⁶, and went out on to the veranda⁷.

 

It was fairly light in the quarter moon. He could see the dog, and he could see his foresight⁸. He rested himself against the wooden pillar of the veranda and took aim carefully; then, as he felt the hard vulcanite butt⁹ against his bare shoulder, he flinched¹⁰. The rifle had a heavy kick, and it left a bruise¹¹ when one fired it. The soft flesh of his shoulder quailed¹². 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. Phantoms¹³ of dogs were chasing one another on the maidan. Over to the left the gravestones of the English cemetery¹⁴ glittered whitish, rather sinister¹⁵, and one could see the mounds¹⁶ near by, that were the remains¹⁷ 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. 'Sneaking¹⁸, 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 oafish²⁰ way. Not cowards, not liars²². 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 precedent²³; but still dingy²⁴, cowardly, dishonouring²⁶.

 

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 amicably²⁷ when Westfield came in, his sandy face quite pink with rage, bringing a copy of a Burmese paper called the Burmese Patriot²⁸. 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 commissioner²⁹, 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 demurred³⁰ 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 loathed³¹ a row! The nagging³², the jeers³³! 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 Burma one learns 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, aged⁵ 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 bum³⁵,

 

 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 liar²¹, 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 spiked³⁶ running shoe for being caught writing a sonnet³⁷. 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 Referee³⁸. But it lacked the chief virtue³⁹ of the great public schools, their atmosphere of literary scholarship. The boys learned as nearly as possible nothing. There was not enough caning⁴⁰ to make them swallow the dreary⁴¹ 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 lout¹⁹. 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 devoted⁴² to him, had found him a place in a timber firm. They had had great difficulty in getting him the job, had paid a premium⁴³ they could not afford; later, he had rewarded them by answering their letters with careless scrawls⁴⁴ at intervals⁴⁵ 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 swilled⁴⁶ whisky which they privately⁴⁷ hated, they stood round the piano bawling⁴⁸ songs of insane filthiness⁴⁹ and silliness, they squandered⁵⁰ 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 discomfort⁵¹, the loneliness, and what is almost the worst thing in Burma, the filthy⁵², monotonous⁵³ 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, corrupting⁵⁴.

 

He acclimatized himself to Burma. His body grew attuned⁵⁵ 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 monsoon⁵⁶ blew westward⁵⁷, first in sharp squalls, then in a heavy ceaseless downpour that drenched⁵⁸ 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 stuffy⁵⁹, vaporous heat. The lower jungle paths turned into morasses⁶⁰, and the paddy-fields were wastes of stagnant⁶¹ water with a stale, mousy smell. Books and boots were mildewed⁶². Naked Burmans in yard-wide hats of palm-leaf ploughed the paddy-fields, driving their buffaloes⁶³ through knee-deep water. Later, the women and children planted the green seedlings⁶⁴ of paddy, dabbing⁶⁵ 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 ripened⁶⁶, the Burmese 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 enormous kettles. One went shooting after duck and snipe. There were snipe in countless⁶⁷ myriads⁶⁸, and wild geese in flocks that rose from the jeel with a roar like a goods train crossing an iron bridge. The ripening⁶⁹ paddy, breast-high and yellow, looked like wheat. The Burmans went to their work with muffled⁷⁰ heads and their arms clasped across their breasts, their faces yellow and pinched with the cold. In the morning one marched through misty⁷¹, incongruous wilderness⁷², clearings of drenched, almost English grass and naked trees where monkeys squatted⁷³ in the upper branches, waiting for the sun. At night, coming back to camp through the cold lanes, one met herds⁷⁴ of buffaloes which the boys were driving home, with their huge horns looming⁷⁵ 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 holly⁷⁶, casting a circle of light at the edge of which servants and coolies squatted, too shy to intrude⁷⁷ 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 dodged⁷⁸ military service, which was easy to do and seemed natural at the time. The civilians⁷⁹ 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 patriotism⁸⁰; there was even a covert⁸¹ hostility⁸² 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 corrupted⁸³ him, and he did not want to exchange his whisky, his servants and his Burmese girls for the boredom⁸⁴ 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 voraciously⁸⁵, and learned to live in books when life was tiresome⁸⁶. He was growing adult, tiring of boyish pleasures, learning to think for himself, almost willy-nilly.

 

He celebrated⁸⁷ his twenty-seventh birthday in hospital, covered from head to foot with hideous⁸⁸ 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 intermittent⁸⁹ 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 hatred⁹⁰ of the atmosphere of imperialism⁹¹ 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-- benevolent⁹², 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 incapable⁹³ 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 wrecked⁹⁴ liver and a pine-apple backside from sitting in cane⁹⁵ 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 delusion⁹⁶. 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 provincial⁹⁷ town in England. The real work of administration is done mainly by native subordinates; and the real backbone⁹⁸ of the despotism is not the officials but the Army. Given the Army, 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 fortifying⁹⁹ their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.

 

It is a stifling¹⁰⁰, stultifying¹⁰¹ world in which to live. It is a world in which every word and every thought is censored¹⁰². 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 permitted. 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 dictated¹⁰³ for you by the pukka sahibs' code.

 

In the end the secrecy¹⁰⁴ 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 bloody¹⁰⁵ Nationalists should be boiled in oil. You hear your Oriental friends called 'greasy¹⁰⁶ 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 honourable¹⁰⁷, hardly even any sincerity¹⁰⁸. For, au fond, what do you care if the Indian Empire is a despotism, if Indians are bullied¹⁰⁹ 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 monk³⁴ or a savage¹¹⁰ 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 hiccuped¹¹¹ over 'Forty years on', than to live silent, alone, consoling oneself in secret, sterile¹¹² 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 dreaded¹¹³ facing it, as one dreads¹¹⁴ facing a pretty girl when one is collarless and unshaven. When he left home he had been a boy, a promising¹¹⁵ boy and handsome in spite of his birthmark; now, only ten years later, he was yellow, thin, drunken, almost middle-aged¹¹⁶ 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 civilized¹¹⁷ 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 retirement¹¹⁸, 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 platform. He had handed them over en bloc¹¹⁹ 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 kindly¹²⁰ brown faces, offering presents. Ko S'la 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 dangling¹²¹ 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 sickle¹²². The wives of the cook and the mali were kneeling in front of the servants' quarters, grinding curry¹²³ paste on the stone slab¹²⁴.

 

Something turned over in Flory's heart. It was one of those moments when one becomes conscious of a vast change and deterioration¹²⁵ 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 applied¹²⁶ 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 wrecks¹²⁷ in Bath and Cheltenham! Those tomb-like boarding-houses with Anglo-Indians littered about in all stages of decomposition¹²⁸, all talking and talking about what happened in Boggleywalah in '88! Poor devils, they know 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 cocktails¹²⁹, 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 jingle¹³⁰ but appropriate--something about 'discoursing¹³¹ on your complicated state of mind'. Gilbert was a gifted little skunk¹³². 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 woes¹³³? 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 dishonour²⁵ and horrible futility¹³⁴, 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 wincing¹³⁵ 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 rhythmically¹³⁶ baying.

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