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 than 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
