‘Alas that such a festive gathering should end,’ he said. ‘I must get home to breakfast. The cares of Empire. Is anybody coming my way? My man is waiting with the car.’
‘Oh, thank you,’ said Mrs Lackersteen; ‘if you’d take Tom and me. What a relief not to have to walk in this heat!’
The others stood up. Westfield stretched his arms and yawned through his nose. ‘Better get a move on, I suppose. Go to sleep if I sit here any longer. Think of stewing in that office all day! Baskets of papers. Oh Lord!’
‘Don’t forget tennis this evening, everyone,’ said Ellis. ‘Maxwell, you lazy devil, don’t you skulk out of it again. Down here with your racquet at four-thirty sharp.’
‘Après vous, madame,’ said Mr Macgregor gallantly, at the door.
‘Lead on, Macduff,’ said Westfield.
They went out into the glaring white sunlight. The heat rolled from the earth like the breath of an oven. The flowers, oppressive to the eyes, blazed with not a petal stirring, in a debauch of sun. The glare sent a weariness through one’s bones. There was something horrible in it—horrible to think of that blue, blinding sky, stretching on and on over Burma and India, over Siam, Cambodia, China, cloudless and interminable. The plates of Mr Macgregor’s waiting car were too hot to touch. The evil time of day was beginning, the time, as the Burmese say, ‘when feet are silent.’ Hardly a living creature stirred, except men, and the black columns of ants, stimulated by the heat, which marched ribbon-like across the path, and the tailless vultures which soared on the currents of the air.
III
Flory turned to the left outside the Club gate and started down the bazaar road, under the shade of the peepul trees. A hundred yards away there was a swirl of music, where a squad of Military Policemen, lank Indians in greenish khaki, were marching back to their lines with a Gurkha boy playing the bagpipes ahead of them. Flory was going to see Dr Veraswami. The doctor’s house was a long bungalow of earth-oiled wood, standing on piles, with a large unkempt garden which adjoined that of the Club. The back of the house was towards the road, for it faced the hospital, which lay between it and the river.
As Flory entered the compound there was a frightened squawk of women and a scurrying within the house. Evidently he had narrowly missed seeing the doctor’s wife. He went round to the front of the house and called up to the veranda:
‘Doctor! Are you busy? May I come up?’
The doctor, a little black and white figure, popped from within the house like a jack-in-the-box. He hurried to the veranda rail, exclaiming effusively:
‘If you may come up! Of course, of course, come up this instant! Ah, Mr Flory, how very delightful to see you! Come up, come up. What drink will you have? I have whisky, beer, vermouth and other European liquors. Ah, my dear friend, how I have been pining for some cultured conversation!’
The doctor was a small, black, plump man with fuzzy hair and round, credulous eyes. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles, and he was dressed in a badly-fitting white drill suit, with trousers bagging concertina-like over clumsy black boots. His voice was eager and bubbling with a hissing of the s’s. As Flory came up the steps the doctor popped back to the end of the veranda and rummaged in a big tin ice-chest, rapidly pulling out bottles of all descriptions. The veranda was wide and dark, with low eaves from which baskets of fern hung, making it seem like a cave behind a waterfall of sunlight. It was furnished with long, cane-bottomed chairs made in the jail, and at one end there was a bookcase containing a rather unappetising little library, mainly books of essays, of the Emerson-Carlyle-Stevenson type. The doctor, a great reader, liked his books to have what he called a ‘moral meaning’.
‘Well, doctor,’ said Flory—the doctor had meanwhile thrust him into a long chair, pulled out the leg-rests so that he could lie down, and put cigarettes and beer within reach. ‘Well, doctor, and how are things? How’s the British Empire? Sick of the palsy as usual?’
‘Aha, Mr Flory, she iss very low, very low! Grave complications setting in. Septicaemia, peritonitis and paralysis of the ganglia. We shall have to call in the specialists, I fear. Aha!’
It was a joke between the two men to pretend that the British Empire was an aged female patient of the doctor’s. The doctor had enjoyed this joke for two years without growing tired of it.
‘Ah, doctor,’ said Flory, supine in the long chair, ‘what a joy to be here after that bloody Club. When I come to your house I feel like a Nonconformist minister dodging up to town and going home with a tart. Such a glorious holiday from them’—he motioned with one heel in the direction of the Club—‘from my beloved fellow Empire-builders. British prestige, the white man’s burden, the pukka sahib sans peur et sans reproche—you know. Such a relief to be out of the stink of it for a little while.’
‘My friend, my friend, now come, come, please! That iss outrageous. You must not say such things of honourable English gentlemen!’
‘You don’t have to listen to the honourable gentlemen talking, doctor. I stood it as long as I could this morning. Ellis with his “dirty nigger”, Westfield with his jokes, Macgregor with his Latin tags and please give the bearer fifteen lashes. But when they got on to that story about the old havildar—you know, the dear old havildar who said that if the British left India there wouldn’t be a rupee or a virgin between—you know; well, I couldn’t stand it any longer. It’s time that old havildar was put on the retired list. He’s been saying the same thing ever since the Jubilee in ’eighty-seven.’
The doctor grew agitated, as he always did when Flory criticised the Club members. He was standing with his plump white-clad behind balanced against the veranda rail, and sometimes gesticulating. When searching for a word he would nip his black thumb and forefinger together, as though to capture an idea floating in the air.
‘But truly, truly, Mr Flory, you must not speak so! Why iss it that always you are abusing the pukka sahibs, ass you call them? They are the salt of the earth. Consider the great things they have done—consider the great administrators who have made British India what it iss. Consider Clive, Warren Hastings, Dalhousie, Curzon. They were such men—I quote your immortal Shakespeare—ass, take them for all in all, we shall not look upon their like again!’
‘Well, do you want to look upon their like again? I don’t.’
‘And consider how noble a type iss the English gentleman! Their glorious loyalty to one another! The public-school spirit! Even those of them whose manner iss unfortunate—some Englishmen are arrogant, I concede—have the great, sterling qualities that we Orientals lack. Beneath their rough exterior, their hearts are of gold.’
‘Of gilt, shall we say? There’s a kind of spurious good-fellowship between the English and this country. It’s a tradition to booze together and swap meals and pretend to be friends, though we all hate each other like poison. Hanging together, we call it. It’s a political necessity. Of course drink is what keeps the machine going. We should all go mad and kill one another in a week if it weren’t for that. There’s a subject for one of your uplift essayists, doctor. Booze as the cement of empire.’
The doctor shook his head. ‘Really, Mr Flory, I know not what it iss that hass made you so cynical. It iss so most unsuitable! You—an English gentleman of high gifts and character—to be uttering seditious opinions that are worthy of the Burmese Patriot!’
‘Seditious?’ Flory said. ‘I’m not seditious. I don’t want the Burmans to drive us out of this country. God forbid! I’m here to make money, like everyone else. All I object to is the slimy white man’s burden humbug. The pukka sahib pose. It’s so boring. Even those bloody fools at the Club might be better company if we weren’t all of us living a lie the whole