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that ran down to the Irrawaddy. The sweat was running from his forehead. He could have shouted
with anger and distress. The accursed luck of it! To be caught out over a thing like that. ‘Keeping a
Burmese woman’–and it was not even true! But much use it would ever be to deny it. Ah, what
damned, evil chance could have brought it to her ears?
But as a matter of fact, it was no chance. It had a perfectly sound cause, which was also the cause
of Mrs Lackersteen’s curious behaviour at the Club this evening. On the previous night, just before the
earthquake, Mrs Lackersteen had been reading the Civil List. The Civil List (which tells you the exact
income of every official in Burma) was a source of inexhaustible interest to her. She was in the
middle of adding up the pay and allowances of a Conservator of Forests whom she had once met in
Mandalay, when it occurred to her to look up the name of Lieutenant Verrall, who, she had heard from
Mr Macgregor, was arriving at Kyauktada tomorrow with a hundred Military Policemen. When she
found the name, she saw in front of it two words that startled her almost out of her wits.
The words were ‘The Honourable’!
The Honourable! Lieutenants the Honourable are rare anywhere, rare as diamonds in the Indian
Army, rare as dodos in Burma. And when you are the aunt of the only marriageable young woman
within fifty miles, and you hear that a Lieutenant the Honourable is arriving no later than tomorrow–
well! With dismay Mrs Lackersteen remembered that Elizabeth was out in the garden with Flory–that
drunken wretch Flory, whose pay was barely seven hundred rupees a month, and who, it was only too
probable, was already proposing to her! She hastened immediately to call Elizabeth inside, but at this
moment the earthquake intervened. However, on the way home there was an opportunity to speak. Mrs
Lackersteen laid her hand affectionately on Elizabeth’s arm and said in the tenderest voice she had
ever succeeded in producing:
‘Of course you know, Elizabeth dear, that Flory is keeping a Burmese woman?’
For a moment this deadly charge actually failed to explode. Elizabeth was so new to the ways of
the country that the remark made no impression on her. It sounded hardly more significant than
‘keeping a parrot’.
‘Keeping a Burmese woman? What for?’
‘What for? My dear! what does a man keep a woman for?’
And, of course, that was that.
For a long time Flory remained standing by the river bank. The moon was up, mirrored in the water
like a broad shield of electron. The coolness of the outer air had changed Flory’s mood. He had not
even the heart to be angry any longer. For he had perceived, with the deadly self-knowledge and selfloathing
that come to one at such a time, that what had happened served him perfectly right. For a
moment it seemed to him that an endless procession of Burmese women, a regiment of ghosts, were
marching past him in the moonlight. Heavens, what numbers of them! A thousand–no, but a full
hundred at the least. ‘Eyes right!’ he thought despondently. Their heads turned towards him, but they
had no faces, only featureless discs. He remembered a blue longyi here, a pair of ruby earrings there,
but hardly a face or a name. The gods are just and of our pleasant vices (pleasant, indeed!) make
instruments to plague us. He had dirtied himself beyond redemption, and this was his just punishment.