‘It is that accursed woman, I suppose. Now we must carry him carefully. You take his heels, I’ll take his head. That’s right. Hoist him up!’
They carried Flory into the other room and laid him gently on the bed.
‘Is he really going to marry this “Ingaleikma”?’ said Ba Pe.
‘Heaven knows. She is the mistress of the young police officer at present, so I was told. Their ways are not our ways. I think I know what he will be wanting tonight,’ he added as he undid Flory’s braces—for Ko S’la had the art, so necessary in a bachelor’s servant, of undressing his master without waking him.
The servants were rather more pleased than not to see this return to bachelor habits. Flory woke about midnight, naked in a pool of sweat. His head felt as though some large, sharp-cornered metal object were bumping about inside it. The mosquito net was up, and a young woman was sitting beside the bed fanning him with a wicker fan. She had an agreeable negroid face, bronze-gold in the candlelight. She explained that she was a prostitute, and that Ko S’la had engaged her on his own responsibility for a fee of ten rupees.
Flory’s head was splitting. ‘For God’s sake get me something to drink,’ he said feebly to the woman. She brought him some soda-water which Ko S’la had cooled in readiness, and soaked a towel and put a wet compress round his forehead. She was a fat, good-tempered creature. She told him that her name was Ma Sein Galay, and that besides plying her other trade she sold paddy baskets in the bazaar near Li Yeik’s shop. Flory’s head felt better presently, and he asked for a cigarette; whereupon Ma Sein Galay, having fetched the cigarette, said naïvely, ‘Shall I take my clothes off now, thakin?’
Why not? he thought dimly. He made room for her in the bed. But when he smelled the familiar scent of garlic and coco-nut oil, something painful happened within him, and with his head pillowed on Ma Sein Galay’s fat shoulder he actually wept, a thing he had not done since he was fifteen years old.
XX
Next morning there was great excitement in Kyauktada, for the long-rumoured rebellion had at last broken out. Flory heard only a vague report of it at the time. He had gone back to camp as soon as he felt fit to march after the drunken night, and it was not until several days later that he learned the true history of the rebellion, in a long, indignant letter from Dr Veraswami.
The doctor’s epistolary style was queer. His syntax was shaky and he was as free with capital letters as a seventeenth-century divine, while in the use of italics he rivalled Queen Victoria. There were eight pages of his small but sprawling handwriting.
MY DEAR FRIEND (the letter ran),—You will much regret to hear that the wiles of the crocodile have matured. The rebellion—the so-called rebellion—is all over and finished. And it has been, alas! a more Bloody affair than I had hoped should have been the case.
All has fallen out as I have prophesied to you it would be. On the day when you came back to Kyauktada U Po Kyin’s spies have informed him that the poor unfortunate men whom he have Deluded are assembling in the jungle near Thongwa. The same night he sets out secretly with U Lugale, the Police Inspector, who is as great a Rogue as he, if that could be, and twelve constables. They make a swift raid upon Thongwa and surprise the rebels, of whom there are only Seven!! in a ruined field hut in the jungle. Also Mr Maxwell, who have heard rumours of the rebellion, came across from his camp bringing his Rifle and was in time to join U Po Kyin and the police in their attack on the hut. The next morning the clerk Ba Sein, who is U Po Kyin’s jackall and dirty worker, have orders to raise the cry of rebellion as Sensationally as possible, which was done, and Mr Macgregor, Mr Westfield and Lieutenant Verrall all rush out to Thongwa carrying fifty sepoys armed with rifles besides Civil Police. But they arrive to find it is all over and U Po Kyin was sitting under a big teak tree in the middle of the village and putting on airs and lecturing the villagers, whereat they are all bowing very frightened and touching the ground with their foreheads and swearing they will be forever loyal to the Government, and the rebellion is already at an end. The so-called weiksa, who is no other than a circus conjurer and the minion of U Po Kyin, have vanished for parts unknown, but six rebels have been Caught. So there is an end.
Also I should inform you that there was most regrettably a Death. Mr Maxwell was I think too anxious to use his Rifle and when one of the rebels try to run away he fired and shoot him in the abdomen, at which he died. I think the villagers have some bad feeling towards Mr Maxwell because of it. But from the point of view legal all is well for Mr Maxwell, because the men were undoubtedly conspiring against the Government.
Ah, but, my Friend, I trust that you understand how disastrous may all this be for me! You will realise, I think, what is its bearing upon the Contest between U Po Kyin and myself, and the supreme leg-up it must give to him. It is the triumph of the crocodile. U Po Kyin is now the Hero of the district. He is the pet of the Europeans. I am told that even Mr Ellis has praised his conduct. If you could witness the abominable Conceitedness and the lies he is now telling as to how there were not seven rebels but Two Hundred!! and how he rushed upon them revolver in hand—he who was only directing operations from a safe distance while the police and Mr Maxwell creep up upon the hut—you would find it veritably Nauseous I assure you. He has had the effrontery to send in an official report of the matter which started, ‘By my loyal promptitude and reckless daring’, and I hear that positively he had had this Conglomeration of lies written out in readiness days before the occurrence. It is Disgusting. And to think that now when he is at the Height of his triumph he will again begin to calumniate me with all the venom at his disposal etc. etc.
The rebels’ entire stock of weapons had been captured. The armoury with which, when their followers were assembled, they had proposed to march upon Kyauktada, consisted of the following:
Item, one shotgun with a damaged left barrel, stolen from a Forest Officer three years earlier.
Item, six home-made guns with barrels of zinc piping stolen from the railway. These could be fired, after a fashion, by thrusting a nail through the touch-hole and striking it with a stone.
Item, thirty-nine twelve-bore cartridges.
Item, eleven dummy guns carved out of teakwood.
Item, some large Chinese crackers which were to have been fired in terrorem.
Later, two of the rebels were sentenced to fifteen years’ transportation, three to three years’ imprisonment and twenty-five lashes, and one to two years’ imprisonment.
The whole miserable rebellion was so obviously at an end that the Europeans were not considered to be in any danger, and Maxwell had gone back to his camp unguarded. Flory intended to stay in camp until the rains broke, or at least until the general meeting at the Club. He had promised to be in for that, to propose the doctor’s election; though now, with his own trouble to think of, the whole business of the intrigue between U Po Kyin and the doctor sickened him.
More weeks crawled by. The heat was dreadful now. The overdue rain seemed to have bred a fever in the air. Flory was out of health, and worked incessantly, worrying over petty jobs that should have been left to the overseer, and making the coolies and even the servants hate him. He drank gin at all hours, but not even drinking could distract him now. The vision of Elizabeth in Verrall’s arms haunted him like a neuralgia or an earache. At any moment it would come upon him, vivid and disgusting, scattering his thoughts, wrenching him back from the brink of sleep, turning his food to dust in his mouth. At times he flew into savage rages, and once even struck Ko S’la. What was worse than all was the detail—the always filthy detail—in which the imagined scene appeared. The very perfection of the detail seemed to prove that it was true.
Is there anything in the world more graceless, more dishonouring, than to desire a woman whom you will never have? Throughout all these weeks Flory’s mind held hardly a thought which was not murderous or obscene.