At the other end of the veranda, between the rails, a coal-black, moustachioed face was peeping with enormous curiosity. It belonged to old Sammy, the ‘Mug’ cook. Behind him stood Ma Pu, Ma Yi, Ko S’la’s four eldest children, an unclaimed naked child, and two old women who had come down from the village upon the news that an ‘Ingaleikma’ was on view. Like carved teak statues with foot-long cigars stuck in their wooden faces, the two old creatures gazed at the ‘Ingaleikma’ as English yokels might gaze at a Zulu warrior in full regalia.
‘Those people . . .’ the girl said uncomfortably, looking towards them.
Sammy, seeing himself detected, looked very guilty and pretended to be rearranging his pagri. The rest of the audience were a little abashed, except for the two wooden-faced old women.
‘Dash their cheek!’ Flory said. A cold pang of disappointment went through him. After all, it would not do for the girl to stay on his veranda any longer. Simultaneously both he and she had remembered that they were total strangers. Her face had turned a little pink. She began putting on her spectacles.
‘I’m afraid an English girl is rather a novelty to these people,’ he said. ‘They don’t mean any harm. Go away!’ he added angrily, waving his hand at the audience, whereupon they vanished.
‘Do you know, if you don’t mind, I think I ought to be going,’ the girl said. She had stood up. ‘I’ve been out quite a long time. They may be wondering where I’ve got to.’
‘Must you really? It’s quite early. I’ll see that you don’t have to go home bareheaded in the sun.’
‘I ought really——’ she began again.
She stopped, looking at the doorway. Ma Hla May was emerging onto the veranda.
Ma Hla May came forward with her hand on her hip. She had come from within the house, with a calm air that asserted her right to be there. The two girls stood face to face, less than six feet apart.
No contrast could have been stranger; the one faintly coloured as an apple-blossom, the other dark and garish, with a gleam almost metallic on her cylinder of ebony hair and the salmon-pink silk of her longyi. Flory thought he had never noticed before how dark Ma Hla May’s face was, and how outlandish her tiny, stiff body, straight as a soldier’s, with not a curve in it except the vase-like curve of her hips. He stood against the veranda rail and watched the two girls, quite disregarded. For the best part of a minute neither of them could take her eyes from the other; but which found the spectacle more grotesque, more incredible, there is no saying.
Ma Hla May turned her face round to Flory, with her black brows, thin as pencil lines, drawn together. ‘Who is this woman?’ she demanded sullenly.
He answered casually, as though giving an order to a servant:
‘Go away this instant. If you make any trouble I will afterwards take a bamboo and beat you till not one of your ribs is whole.’
Ma Hla May hesitated, shrugged her small shoulders and disappeared. And the other, gazing after her, said curiously:
‘Was that a man or a woman?’
‘A woman,’ he said. ‘One of the servants’ wives, I believe. She came to ask about the laundry, that was all.’
‘Oh, is that what Burmese women are like? They are queer little creatures! I saw a lot of them on my way up here in the train, but do you know, I thought they were all boys. They’re just like a kind of Dutch doll, aren’t they?’
She had begun to move towards the veranda steps, having lost interest in Ma Hla May now that she had disappeared. He did not stop her, for he thought Ma Hla May quite capable of coming back and making a scene. Not that it mattered much, for neither girl knew a word of the other’s language. He called to Ko S’la, and Ko S’la came running with a big oiled-silk umbrella with bamboo ribs. He opened it respectfully at the foot of the steps and held it over the girl’s head as she came down. Flory went with them as far as the gate. They stopped to shake hands, he turning a little sideways in the strong sunlight, hiding his birthmark.
‘My fellow here will see you home. It was ever so kind of you to come in. I can’t tell you how glad I am to have met you. You’ll make such a difference to us here in Kyauktada.’
‘Good-bye, Mr—oh, how funny! I don’t even know your name.’
‘Flory, John Flory. And yours—Miss Lackersteen, is it?’
‘Yes. Elizabeth. Good-bye, Mr Flory. And thank you ever so much. That awful buffalo. You quite saved my life.’
‘It was nothing. I hope I shall see you at the Club this evening? I expect your uncle and aunt will be coming down. Good-bye for the time being, then.’
He stood at the gate, watching them as they went. Elizabeth—lovely name, too rare nowadays. He hoped she spelt it with a ‘z’. Ko S’la trotted after her at a queer uncomfortable gait, reaching the umbrella over her head and keeping his body as far away from her as possible. A cool breath of wind blew up the hill. It was one of those momentary winds that blow sometimes in the cold weather in Burma, coming from nowhere, filling one with thirst and with nostalgia for cold sea-pools, embraces of mermaids, waterfalls, caves of ice. It rustled through the wide domes of the gold mohur trees, and fluttered the fragments of the anonymous letter that Flory had thrown over the gate half an hour earlier.
VII
Elizabeth lay on the sofa in the Lackersteens’ drawing-room, with her feet up and a cushion behind her head, reading Michael Arlen’s These Charming People. In a general way Michael Arlen was her favourite author, but she was inclined to prefer William J. Locke when she wanted something serious.
The drawing-room was a cool, light-coloured room with lime-washed walls a yard thick; it was large, but seemed smaller than it was, because of a litter of occasional tables and Benares brassware ornaments. It smelt of chintz and dying flowers. Mrs Lackersteen was upstairs, sleeping. Outside, the servants lay silent in their quarters, their heads tethered to their wooden pillows by the death-like sleep of midday. Mr Lackersteen, in his small wooden office down the road, was probably sleeping too. No one stirred except Elizabeth, and the chokra who pulled the punkah outside Mrs Lackersteen’s bedroom, lying on his back with one heel in the loop of the rope.
Elizabeth was just turned twenty-two, and was an orphan. Her father had been less of a drunkard than his brother Tom, but he was a man of similar stamp. He was a tea-broker, and his fortunes fluctuated greatly, but he was by nature too optimistic to put money aside in prosperous phases. Elizabeth’s mother had been an incapable, half-baked, vapouring self-pitying woman who shirked all the normal duties of life on the strength of sensibilities which she did not possess. After messing about for years with such things as Women’s Suffrage and Higher Thought, and making many abortive attempts at literature, she had finally taken up with painting. Painting is the only art that can be practised without either talent or hard work. Mrs Lackersteen’s pose was that of an artist exiled among ‘the Philistines’—these, needless to say, included her husband—and it was a pose that gave her almost unlimited scope for making a nuisance of herself.
In the last year of the War Mr Lackersteen, who had managed to avoid service, made a great deal of money, and just after the Armistice they moved into a huge, new, rather bleak house in Highgate, with quantities