whose appearance still made her shudder!
The subject cropped up in a hundred ways. A knot of Burmans would pass them on the road. She, with her still fresh eyes, would gaze after them, half curious and half repelled; and she would say to Flory, as she would have said to anybody:
‘How revoltingly ugly these people are, aren’t they?’
‘Are they? I always think they’re rather charming-looking, the Burmese. They have such splendid bodies! Look at that fellow’s shoulders—like a bronze statue. Just think what sights you’d see in England if people went about half naked as they do here!’
‘But they have such hideous-shaped heads! Their skulls kind of slope up behind like a tom-cat’s. And then the way their foreheads slant back—it makes them look so wicked. I remember reading something in a magazine about the shape of people’s heads; it said that a person with a sloping forehead is a criminal type.’
‘Oh, come, that’s a bit sweeping! Round about half the people in the world have that kind of forehead.’
‘Oh, well, if you count coloured people, of course——!’
Or perhaps a string of women would pass, going to the well: heavy-set peasant-girls, copper brown, erect under their water-pots with strong mare-like buttocks protruded. The Burmese women repelled Elizabeth more than the men; she felt her kinship with them, and the hatefulness of being kin to creatures with black faces.
‘Aren’t they too simply dreadful? So coarse-looking; like some kind of animal. Do you think anyone could think those women attractive?’
‘Their own men do, I believe.’
‘I suppose they would. But that black skin—I don’t know how anyone could bear it!’
‘But, you know, one gets used to the brown skin in time. In fact they say—I believe it’s true—that after a few years in these countries a brown skin seems more natural than a white one. And after all, it is more natural. Take the world as a whole, it’s an eccentricity to be white.’
‘You do have some funny ideas!’
And so on and so on. She felt all the while an unsatisfactoriness, an unsoundness in the things he said. It was particularly so on the evening when Flory allowed Mr Francis and Mr Samuel, the two derelict Eurasians, to entrap him in conversation at the Club gate.
Elizabeth, as it happened, had reached the Club a few minutes before Flory, and when she heard his voice at the gate she came round the tennis-screen to meet him. The two Eurasians had sidled up to Flory and cornered him like a pair of dogs asking for a game. Francis was doing most of the talking. He was a meagre, excitable man, and as brown as a cigar-leaf, being the son of a South Indian woman; Samuel, whose mother had been a Karen, was pale yellow with dull red hair. Both were dressed in shabby drill suits, with vast topis beneath which their slender bodies looked like the stalks of toadstools.
Elizabeth came down the path in time to hear fragments of an enormous and complicated autobiography. Talking to white men—talking, for choice, about himself—was the great joy of Francis’s life. When, at intervals of months, he found a European to listen to him, his life-history would pour out of him in unquenchable torrents. He was talking in a nasal, sing-song voice of incredible rapidity:
‘Of my father, sir, I remember little, but he was very choleric man and many whackings with big bamboo stick all knobs on both for self, little half-brother and two mothers. Also how on occasion of bishop’s visit little half-brother and I dress in longyis and sent among the Burmese children to preserve incognito. My father never rose to be bishop, sir. Four converts only in twenty-eight years, and also too great fondness for Chinese rice-spirit very fiery noised abroad and spoil sales of my father’s booklet entitled The Scourge of Alcohol, published with the Rangoon Baptist Press, one rupee eight annas. My little half-brother die one hot weather, always coughing, coughing,’ etc. etc.
The two Eurasians perceived the presence of Elizabeth. Both doffed their topis with bows and brilliant displays of teeth. It was probably several years since either of them had had a chance of talking to an Englishwoman. Francis burst out more effusively than ever. He was chattering in evident dread that he would be interrupted and the conversation cut short.
‘Good evening to you, madam, good evening, good evening! Most honoured to make your acquaintance, madam! Very sweltering is the weather these days, is not? But seasonable for April. Not too much you are suffering from prickly heat, I trust? Pounded tamarind applied to the afflicted spot is infallible. Myself I suffer torments each night. Very prevalent disease among we Europians.’
He pronounced it Europian, like Mr Chollop in Martin Chuzzlewit. Elizabeth did not answer. She was looking at the Eurasians somewhat coldly. She had only a dim idea as to who or what they were, and it struck her as impertinent that they should speak to her.
‘Thanks, I’ll remember about the tamarind,’ Flory said.
‘Specific of renowned Chinese doctor, sir. Also, sir-madam, may I advise to you, wearing only Terai hat is not judicious in April, sir. For the natives all well, their skulls are adamant. But for us sunstroke ever menaces. Very deadly is the sun upon Europian skull. But is it that I detain you, madam?’
This was said in a disappointed tone. Elizabeth had, in fact, decided to snub the Eurasians. She did not know why Flory was allowing them to hold him in conversation. As she turned away to stroll back to the tennis court, she made a practice stroke in the air with her racquet, to remind Flory that the game was overdue. He saw it and followed her, rather reluctantly, for he did not like snubbing the wretched Francis, bore though he was.
‘I must be off,’ he said. ‘Good evening, Francis. Good evening, Samuel.’
‘Good evening, sir! Good evening, madam! Good evening, good evening!’ They receded with more hat-flourishes.
‘Who are those two?’ said Elizabeth as Flory came up with her. ‘Such extraordinary creatures! They were in church on Sunday. One of them looks almost white. Surely he isn’t an Englishman?’
‘No, they’re Eurasians—sons of white fathers and native mothers. Yellow-bellies is our friendly nickname for them.’
‘But what are they doing here? Where do they live? Do they do any work?’
‘They exist somehow or other in the bazaar. I believe Francis acts as clerk to an Indian moneylender, and Samuel to some of the pleaders. But they’d probably starve now and then if it weren’t for the charity of the natives.’
‘The natives! Do you mean to say they—sort of cadge from the natives?’
‘I fancy so. It would be a very easy thing to do, if one cared to. The Burmese won’t let anyone starve.’
Elizabeth had never heard of anything of this kind before. The notion of men who were at least partly white living in poverty among ‘natives’ so shocked her that she stopped short on the path, and the game of tennis was postponed for a few minutes.
‘But how awful! I mean, it’s such a bad example! It’s almost as bad as if one of us was like that. Couldn’t something be done for those two? Get up a subscription and send them away from here, or something?’
‘I’m afraid it wouldn’t help much. Wherever they went they’d be in the same position.’
‘But
