Burmese Days Page 16

  U Po Kyin laughed and gave a careless wave of his hand that meant 'pagodas'.

  'Well, I hope you may still laugh when it comes to the end. But for myself, I should not care to look back upon such a life.'

  She re-lighted her cigar with her thin shoulder turned disapprovingly on U Po Kyin while he took several more turns up and down the room. When he spoke, it was more seriously than before, and even with a touch of diffidence.

  'You know, Kin Kin, there is another matter behind all this. Something that I have not told to you or to anyone else. Even Ba Sein does not know. But I believe I will tell it you now.'

  'I do not want to hear it, if it is more wickedness.'

  'No, no. You were asking just now what is my real object in this affair. You think, I suppose, that I am ruining Veraswami merely because I dislike him and his ideas about bribes are a nuisance. It is not only that. There is something else that is far more important, and it concerns you as well as me.'

  'What is it?'

  'Have you never felt in you, Kin Kin, a desire for higher things? Has it never struck you that after all our successes-all my successes, I should say-we are almost in the same position as when we started? I am worth, I dare say, two lakhs of rupees, and yet look at the style in which we Live! Look at this room! Positively it is no better than that of a peasant. I am tired of eating with my fingers and associating only with Burmans-poor, inferior people-and living, as you might say, like a miserable Township Officer. Money is not enough; I should like to feel that I have risen in the world as well. Do you not wish sometimes for a way of life that is a little more-how shall I say-elevated?'

  'I do not know how we could want more than what we have already. When I was a girl in my village I never thought that I should live in such a house as this. Look at those English chairs-I have never sat in one of them in my life. But I am very proud to look at them and think that I own them.'

  'Ch! Why did you ever leave that village of yours, Kin Kin? You are only fit to stand gossiping by the well with a stone water-pot on your head. But I am more ambitious, God be praised. And now I will tell you the real reason why I am intriguing against Veraswami. It is in my mind to do something that is really magnificent. Something noble, glorious! Something that is the very highest honour an Oriental can attain to. You know what I mean, of course?'

  'No. What do you mean?'

  'Come, now! The greatest achievement of my life! Surely you can guess?'

  'Ah, I know! You are going to buy a motor-car. But oh, Ko Po Kyin, please do not expect me to ride in it!'

  U Po Kyin threw up his hands in disgust. 'A motor-car! You have the mind of a bazaar peanut-seller! I could buy twenty motor-cars if I wanted them. And what use would a motor-car be in this place? No, it is something far grander than that.'

  'What, then?'

  'It is this. I happen to know that in a month's time the Europeans are going to elect one native member to their Club. They do not want to do it, but they will have orders from the Commissioner, and they will obey. Naturally, they would elect Veraswami, who is the highest native official in the district. But I have disgraced Veraswami. And so----'

  'What?'

  U Po Kyin did not answer for a moment. He looked at Ma Kin, and his vast yellow face, with its broad jaw and numberless teeth, was so softened that it was almost childlike. There might even have been tears in his tawny eyes. He said in a small, almost awed voice, as though the greatness of what he was saying overcame him:

  'Do you not see, woman? Do you not see that if Veraswami is disgraced I shall be elected to the Club myself?'

  The effect of it was crushing. There was not another word of argument on Ma Kin's part. The magnificence of U Po Kyin's project had struck her dumb.

  And not without reason, for all the achievements of U Po Kyin's life were as nothing beside this. It is a real triumph-it would be doubly so in Kyauktada-for an official of the lower ranks to worm his way into the European Club. The European Club, that remote, mysterious temple, that holy of holies far harder of entry than Nirvana! Po Kyin, the naked gutter-boy of Mandalay, the thieving clerk and obscure official, would enter that sacred place, call Europeans 'old chap', drink whisky and soda and knock white balls to and fro on the green table! Ma Kin, the village woman, who had first seen the light through the chinks of a bamboo hut thatched with palm leaves, would sit on a high chair with her feet imprisoned in silk stockings and high-heeled shoes (yes, she would actually wear shoes in that place!) talking to English ladies in Hindustani about baby-linen! It was a prospect that would have dazzled anybody.

  For a long time Ma Kin remained silent, her lips parted, thinking of the European Club and the splendours that it might contain. For the first time in her life she surveyed U Po Kyin's intrigues without disapproval. Perhaps it was a feat greater even than the storming of the Club to have planted a grain of ambition in Ma Kin's gentle heart.

  XIII

  As Flory came through the gate of the hospital compound four ragged sweepers passed him, carrying some dead coolie, wrapped in sackcloth, to a foot-deep grave in the jungle. Flory crossed the brick-like earth of the yard between the hospital sheds. All down the wide verandas, on sheetless charpoys, rows of grey-faced men lay silent and moveless. Some filthy-looking curs, which were said to devour amputated limbs, dozed or snapped at their fleas among the piles of the buildings. The whole place wore a sluttish and decaying air. Dr Veraswami struggled hard to keep it clean, but there was no coping with the dust and the bad water-supply, and the inertia of sweepers and half-trained Assistant Surgeons.

  Flory was told that the doctor was in the out-patients' department. It was a plaster-walled room furnished only with a table and two chairs, and a dusty portrait of Queen Victoria, much awry. A procession of Burmans, peasants with gnarled muscles beneath their faded rags, were filing into the room and queueing up at the table. The doctor was in shirt-sleeves and sweating profusely. He sprang to his feet with an exclamation of pleasure, and in his usual fussy haste thrust Flory into the vacant chair and produced a tin of cigarettes from the drawer of the table.

  'What a delightful visit, Mr Flory! Please to make yourself comfortable-that iss, if one can possibly be comfortable in such a place ass this, ha, ha! Afterwards, at my house, we will talk with beer and amenities. Kindly excuse me while I attend to the populace.'

  Flory sat down, and the hot sweat immediately burst out and drenched his shirt. The heat of the room was stifling. The peasants steamed garlic from all their pores. As each man came to the table the doctor would bounce from his chair, prod the patient in the back, lay a black ear to his chest, fire off several questions in villainous Burmese, then bounce back to the table and scribble a prescription. The patients took the prescriptions across the yard to the Compounder, who gave them bottles filled with water and various vegetable dyes. The Compounder supported himself largely by the sale of drugs, for the Government paid him only twenty-five rupees a month. However, the doctor knew nothing of this.

  On most mornings the doctor had not time to attend to the out-patients himself, and left them to one of the Assistant Surgeons. The Assistant Surgeon's methods of diagnosis were brief. He would simply ask each patient, 'Where is your pain? Head, back or belly?' and at the reply hand out a prescription from one of three piles that he had prepared beforehand. The patients much preferred this method to the doctor's. The doctor had a way of asking them whether they had suffered from venereal diseases-an ungentlemanly, pointless question-and sometimes he horrified them still more by suggesting operations. 'Belly-cutting' was their phrase for it. The majority of them would have died a dozen times over rather man submit to 'belly-cutting'.

  As the last patient disappeared the doctor sank into his chair, fanning his face with the prescription-pad.

  'Ach, this heat! Some mornings I think that never will I get the smell of garlic out of my nose! It iss amazing to me how their very blood becomes impregnated with it. Are you not suffocated, Mr Flory? You English have the sense
of smell almost too highly developed. What torments you must all suffer in our filthy East!'

  'Abandon your noses, all ye who enter here, what? They might write that up over the Suez Canal. You seem busy this morning?'

  'Ass ever. Ah but, my friend, how discouraging iss the work of a doctor in this country! These villagers-dirty, ignorant savages! Even to get them to come to hospital iss all we can do, and they will die of gangrene or carry a tumour ass large ass a melon for ten years rather than face the knife. And such medicines ass their own so-called doctors give to them! Herbs gathered under the new moon, tigers' whiskers, rhinoceros horn, urine, menstrual blood! How men can drink such compounds iss disgusting.'

  'Rather picturesque, all the same. You ought to compile a Burmese pharmacopoeia, doctor. It would be almost as good as Culpeper.'

  'Barbarous cattle, barbarous cattle,' said the doctor, beginning to struggle into his white coat. 'Shall we go back to my house? There iss beer and I trust a few fragments of ice left. I have an operation at ten, strangulated hernia, very urgent. Till then I am free.'

  'Yes. As a matter of fact there's something I rather wanted to talk to you about.'

  They re-crossed the yard and climbed the steps of the doctor's veranda. The doctor, having felt in the ice-chest and found that the ice was all melted to tepid water, opened a bottle of beer and called fussily to the servants to set some more bottles swinging in a cradle of wet straw. Flory was standing looking over the veranda rail, with his hat still on. The fact was that he had come here to utter an apology. He had been avoiding the doctor for nearly a fortnight-since the day, in fact, when he had set his name to the insulting notice at the Club. But the apology had got to be uttered. U Po Kyin was a very good judge of men, but he had erred in supposing that two anonymous letters were enough to scare Flory permanently away from his friend.

  'Look here, doctor, you know what I wanted to say?'

  'I? No.'

  'Yes, you do. It's about that beastly trick I played on you the other week. When Ellis put that notice on the Club board and I signed my name to it. You must have heard about it. I want to try and explain----'

  'No no, my friend, no no!' The doctor was so distressed that he sprang across the veranda and seized Flory by the arm. 'You shall not explain! Please never to mention it! I understand perfectly-but most perfectly.'

  'No, you don't understand. You couldn't. You don't realise just what kind of pressure is put on one to make one do things like that. There was nothing to make me sign the notice. Nothing could have happened if I'd refused. There's no law telling us to be beastly to Orientals-quite the contrary. But-it's just that one daren't be loyal to an Oriental when it means going against the others. It doesn't do. If I'd stuck out against signing the notice I'd have been in disgrace at the Club for a week or two. So I funked it, as usual.'

  'Please, Mr Flory, please! Possitively you will make me uncomfortable if you continue. Ass though I could not make all allowances for your position!'

  'Our motto, you know, is, "In India, do as the English do".'

  'Of course, of course. And a most noble motto. "Hanging together", ass you call it. It iss the secret of your superiority to we Orientals.'

  'Well, it's never much use saying one's sorry. But what I did come here to say was that it shan't happen again. In fact----'

  'Now, now, Mr Flory, you will oblige me by saying no more upon this subject. It iss all over and forgotten. Please to drink up your beer before it becomes ass hot ass tea. Also, I have a thing to tell you. You have not asked for my news yet.'

  'Ah, your news. What is your news, by the way? How's everything been going all this time? How's Ma Britannia? Still moribund?'

  'Aha, very low, very low! But not so low ass I. I am in deep waters, my friend.'

  'What? U Po Kyin again? Is he still libelling you?'

  'If he iss libelling me! This time it iss-well, it iss something diabolical. My friend, you have heard of this rebellion that is supposed to be on the point of breaking out in the district?'

  'I've heard a lot of talk. Westfield's been out bent on slaughter, but I hear he can't find any rebels. Only the usual village Hampdens who won't pay their taxes.'

  'Ah yes. Wretched fools! Do you know how much iss the tax that most of them have refused to pay? Five rupees! They will get tired of it and pay up presently. We have this trouble every year. But ass for the rebellion-the so-called rebellion, Mr Flory-I wish you to know that there iss more in it than meets the eye.'

  'Oh? What?'

  To Flory's surprise the doctor made such a violent gesture of anger that he spilled most of his beer. He put his glass down on the veranda rail and burst out:

  'It iss U Po Kyin again! That unutterable scoundrel! That crocodile deprived of natural feeling! That-that----'

  'Go on. "That obscene trunk of humours, that swol'n parcel of dropsies, that bolting-hutch of beastliness"-go on. What's he been up to now?'

  'A villainy unparalleled-' and here the doctor outlined the plot for a sham rebellion, very much as U Po Kyin had explained it to Ma Kin. The only detail not known to him was U Po Kyin's intention of getting himself elected to the European Club. The doctor's face could not accurately be said to flush, but it grew several shades blacker in his anger. Flory was so astonished that he remained standing up.

  'The cunning old devil! Who'd have thought he had it in him? But how did you manage to find all this out?'

  'Ah, I have a few friends left. But now do you see, my friend, what ruin he iss preparing for me? Already he hass calumniated me right and left. When this absurd rebellion breaks out, he will do everything in his power to connect my name with it. And I tell you that the slightest suspicion of my loyalty could be ruin for me, ruin! If it were ever breathed that I were even a sympathiser with this rebellion, there iss an end of me.'

  'But, damn it, this is ridiculous! Surely you can defend yourself somehow?'

  'How can I defend myself when I can prove nothing? I know that all this iss true, but what use iss that? If I demand a public inquiry, for every witness I produce U Po Kyin would produce fifty. You do not realise the influence of that man in the district. No one dare speak against him.'

  'But why need you prove anything? Why not go to old Macgregor and tell him about it? He's a very fair-minded old chap in his way. He'd hear you out.'

  'Useless, useless. You have not the mind of an intriguer, Mr Flory. Qui s'excuse s'accuse, iss it not? It does not pay to cry that there iss a conspiracy against one.'

  'Well, what are you going to do, then?'

  'There iss nothing I can do. Simply I must wait and hope that my prestige will carry me through. In affairs like this, where a native official's reputation iss at stake, there iss no question of proof, of evidence. All depends upon one's standing with the Europeans. If my standing iss good, they will not believe it of me; if bad, they will believe it. Prestige iss all.'

  They were silent for a moment. Flory understood well enough that 'prestige iss all.' He was used to these nebulous conflicts, in which suspicion counts for more than proof, and reputation for more than a thousand witnesses. A thought came into his head, an uncomfortable, chilling thought which would never have occurred to him three weeks earlier. It was one of those moments when one sees quite clearly what is one's duty, and, with all the will in the world to shirk it, feels certain that one must carry it out. He said:

  'Suppose, for instance, you were elected to the Club? Would that do your prestige any good?'

  'If I were elected to the Club! Ah, indeed, yes! The Club! It iss a fortress impregnable. Once there, and no one would listen to these tales about me any more than if it were about you, or Mr Macgregor, or any other European gentleman. But what hope have I that they will elect me after their minds have been poisoned against me?'

  'Well now, look here, doctor, I tell you what. I'll propose your name at the next general meeting. I know the question's got to come up then, and if someone comes forward with the name of a candidate, I dare say
no one except Ellis will blackball him. And in the meantime----'

  'Ah, my friend, my dear friend!' The doctor's emotion caused him almost to choke. He seized Flory by the hand. 'Ah, my friend, that iss noble! Truly it iss noble! But it iss too much. I fear that you will be in trouble with your European friends again. Mr Ellis, for example-would he tolerate it that you propose my name?'

  'Oh, bother Ellis. But you must understand that I can't promise to get you elected. It depends on what Macgregor says and what mood the others are in. It may all come to nothing.'

  The doctor was still holding Flory's hand between his own, which were plump and damp. The tears had actually started into his eyes, and these, magnified by his spectacles, beamed upon Flory like the liquid eyes of a dog.

  'Ah, my friend! If I should but be elected! What an end to all my troubles! But, my friend, ass I said before, do not be too rash in this matter. Beware of U Po Kyin! By now he will have numbered you among hiss enemies. And even for you hiss enmity can be a danger.'

  'Oh, good Lord, he can't touch me. He's done nothing so far-only a few silly anonymous letters.'

  'I would not be too sure. He hass subtle ways to strike. And for sure he will raise heaven and earth to keep me from being elected to the Club. If you have a weak spot, guard it, my friend. He will find it out. He strikes always at the weakest spot.'

  'Like the crocodile,' Flory suggested.

  'Like the crocodile,' agreed the doctor gravely. 'Ah but, my friend, how gratifying to me if I should become a member of your European Club! What an honour, to be the associate of European gentlemen! But there iss one other matter, Mr Flory, that I did not care to mention before. It iss-I hope this iss clearly understood-that I have no intention of using the Club in any way. Membership iss all I desire. Even if I were elected, I should not, of course, ever presume to come to the Club.'