‘What’s happened?’ he said in English, and he raised himself painfully on his elbow. The Sikh made some gruff answer and pointed. Flory saw the chestnut pony careering away over the maidan, with the saddle under its belly. The girth had not been tightened and had slipped round; hence his fall.
When Flory sat up he found that he was in extreme pain. The right shoulder of his shirt was torn open and already soaking with blood, and he could feel more blood oozing from his cheek. The hard earth had grazed him. His hat, too, was gone. With a deadly pang he remembered Elizabeth, and he saw her coming towards him, barely ten yards away, looking straight at him as he sprawled there so ignominiously. My God, my God! he thought, O my God, what a fool I must look! The thought of it even drove away the pain of the fall. He clapped a hand over his birthmark, though the other cheek was the damaged one.
‘Elizabeth! Hullo, Elizabeth! Good morning!’
He had called out eagerly, appealingly, as one does when one is conscious of looking a fool. She did not answer, and what was almost incredible, she walked on without pausing even for an instant, as though she had neither seen nor heard him.
‘Elizabeth!’ he called again, taken aback; ‘did you see me fall? The saddle slipped. The fool of a sepoy hadn’t——’
There was no question that she had heard him now. She turned her face full upon him for a moment, and looked at him and through him as though he had not existed. Then she gazed away into the distance beyond the cemetery. It was terrible. He called after her in dismay—
‘Elizabeth! I say, Elizabeth!’
She passed on without a word, without a sign, without a look. She was walking sharply down the road, with a click of heels, her back turned upon him.
The sepoys had come round him now, and Verrall, too, had ridden across to where Flory lay. Some of the sepoys had saluted Elizabeth; Verrall had ignored her, perhaps not seeing her. Flory rose stiffly to his feet. He was badly bruised, but no bones were broken. The Indians brought him his hat and stick, but they did not apologise for their carelessness. They looked faintly contemptuous, as though thinking that he had only got what he deserved. It was conceivable that they had loosened the girth on purpose.
‘The saddle slipped,’ said Flory in the weak, stupid way that one does at such moments.
‘Why the devil couldn’t you look at it before you got up?’ said Verrall briefly. ‘You ought to know these beggars aren’t to be trusted.’
Having said which he twitched his bridle and rode away, feeling the incident closed. The sepoys followed him without saluting Flory. When Flory reached his gate he looked back and saw that the chestnut pony had already been caught and re-saddled, and Verrall was tent-pegging upon it.
The fall had so shaken him that even now he could hardly collect his thoughts. What could have made her behave like that? She had seen him lying bloody and in pain, and she had walked past him as though he had been a dead dog. How could it have happened? Had it happened? It was incredible. Could she be angry with him? Could he have offended her in any way? All the servants were waiting at the compound fence. They had come out to watch the tent-pegging, and every one of them had seen his bitter humiliation. Ko S’la ran part of the way down the hill to meet him, with concerned face.
‘The god has hurt himself? Shall I carry the god back to the house?’
‘No,’ said the god. ‘Go and get me some whisky and a clean shirt.’
When they got back to the house Ko S’la made Flory sit down on the bed and peeled off his torn shirt, which the blood had stuck to his body. Ko S’la clicked his tongue.
‘Ah ma lay! These cuts are full of dirt. You ought not to play these children’s games on strange ponies, thakin. Not at your age. It is too dangerous.’
‘The saddle slipped,’ Flory said.
‘Such games,’ pursued Ko S’la, ‘are all very well for the young police officer. But you are no longer young, thakin. A fall hurts at your age. You should take more care of yourself.’
‘Do you take me for an old man?’ said Flory angrily. His shoulder was smarting abominably.
‘You are thirty-five, thakin,’ said Ko S’la politely but firmly.
It was all very humiliating. Ma Pu and Ma Yi, temporarily at peace, had brought a pot of some dreadful mess which they declared was good for cuts. Flory told Ko S’la privately to throw it out of the window and substitute boracic ointment. Then, while he sat in a tepid bath and Ko S’la sponged the dirt out of his grazes, he puzzled helplessly, and, as his head grew clearer, with a deeper and deeper dismay, over what had happened. He had offended her bitterly, that was clear. But, when he had not even seen her since last night, how could he have offended her? And there was no even plausible answer.
He explained to Ko S’la several times over that his fall was due to the saddle slipping. But Ko S’la, though sympathetic, clearly did not believe him. To the end of his days, Flory perceived, the fall would be attributed to his own bad horsemanship. On the other hand, a fortnight ago, he had won undeserved renown by putting to flight the harmless buffalo. Fate is even-handed, after a fashion.
XVII
Flory did not see Elizabeth again until he went down to the Club after dinner. He had not, as he might have done, sought her out and demanded an explanation. His face unnerved him when he looked at it in the glass. With the birthmark on one side and the graze on the other it was so woe-begone, so hideous, that he dared not show himself by daylight. As he entered the Club lounge he put his hand over his birthmark—pretext, a mosquito bite on the forehead. It would have been more than his nerve was equal to, not to cover his birthmark at such a moment. However, Elizabeth was not there.
Instead, he tumbled into an unexpected quarrel. Ellis and Westfield had just got back from the jungle, and they were sitting drinking, in a sour mood. News had come from Rangoon that the editor of the Burmese Patriot had been given only four months’ imprisonment for his libel against Mr Macgregor, and Ellis was working himself up into a rage over this light sentence. As soon as Flory came in Ellis began baiting him with remarks about ‘that little nigger Very-slimy’. At the moment the very thought of quarrelling made Flory yawn, but he answered incautiously, and there was an argument. It grew heated, and after Ellis had called Flory a nigger’s Nancy Boy and Flory had replied in kind, Westfield too lost his temper. He was a good-natured man, but Flory’s Bolshie ideas sometimes annoyed him. He could never understand why, when there was so clearly a right and a wrong opinion about everything, Flory always seemed to delight in choosing the wrong one. He told Flory ‘not to start talking like a damned Hyde Park agitator’, and then read him a snappish little sermon, taking as his text the five chief beatitudes of the pukka sahib, namely:
Keeping up our prestige,
The firm hand (without the velvet glove),
We white men must hang together,
Give them an inch and they’ll take an ell, and
Esprit de corps.
All the while his anxiety to see Elizabeth was so gnawing at Flory’s heart that he could hardly hear what was said to him. Besides, he had heard it all so often, so very often—a hundred times, a thousand times it might be, since his first week in Rangoon, when his burra sahib (an old Scotch gin-soaker and great breeder of racing ponies, afterwards warned off the turf for some dirty business of running the same horse under two different names) saw him take off his topi to pass a native funeral and said to him reprovingly: ‘Remember laddie, always