George Orwell - George Orwell - The Complete Novels (The Greatest Novelists of All Time – Book 7)

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 self-loathing 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.

He made his way slowly through the croton bushes and round the clubhouse. He was too saddened to feel the full pain of the disaster yet. It would begin hurting, as all deep wounds do, long afterwards. As he passed through the gate something stirred the leaves behind him. He started. There was a whisper of harsh Burmese syllables.

‘Pike-san pay-like! Pike-san pay-like!’

He turned sharply. The ‘pike-san pay-like’ (‘Give me the money’) was repeated. He saw a woman standing under the shadow of the gold mohur tree. It was Ma Hla May. She stepped out into the moonlight, warily, with a hostile air, keeping her distance as though afraid that he would strike her. Her face was coated with powder, sickly white in the moon, and it looked as ugly as a skull, and defiant.

She had given him a shock. ‘What the devil are you doing here?’ he said angrily in English.

‘Pike-san pay-like!’

‘What money? What do you mean? Why are you following me about like this?’

‘Pike-san pay-like!’ she repeated almost in a scream. ‘The money you promised me, thakin! You said you would give me more money. I want it now, this instant!’

‘How can I give it you now? You shall have it next month. I have given you a hundred and fifty rupees already.’

To his alarm she began shrieking ‘Pike-san pay-like!’ and a number of similar phrases almost at the top of her voice. She seemed on the verge of hysterics. The volume of noise that she produced was startling.

‘Be quiet! They’ll hear you in the Club!’ he exclaimed, and was instantly sorry for putting the idea into her head.

‘Aha! Now I know what will frighten you! Give me the money this instant, or I scream for help and bring them all out here. Quick, now, or I begin screaming!’

‘You bitch!’ he said, and took a step towards her. She sprang nimbly out of reach, whipped off her slipper, and stood defying him.

‘Be quick! Fifty rupees now and the rest tomorrow. Out with it! Or I give a scream they can hear as far as the bazaar!’

Flory swore. This was not the time for such a scene. Finally he took out his pocket-book, found twenty-five rupees in it, and threw them on to the ground. Ma Hla May pounced on the notes and counted them.

‘I said fifty rupees, thakin!’

‘How can I give it you if I haven’t got it? Do you think I carry hundreds of rupees about with me?’

‘I said fifty rupees!’

‘Oh, get out of my way!’ he said in English, and pushed past her.

But the wretched woman would not leave him alone. She began to follow him up the road like a disobedient dog, screaming out ‘Pike-san pay-like! Pike-san pay-like!’ as though mere noise could bring the money into existence. He hurried, partly to draw her away from the Club, partly in hopes of shaking her off, but she seemed ready to follow him as far as the house if necessary. After a while he could not stand it any longer, and he turned to drive her back.

‘Go away this instant! If you follow me any further you shall never have another anna.’

‘Pike-san pay-like!’

‘You fool,’ he said, ‘what good is this doing? How can I give you the money when I have not another pice on me?’

‘That is a likely story!’

He felt helplessly in his pockets. He was so wearied that he would have given her anything to be rid of her. His fingers encountered his cigarette-case, which was of gold. He took it out.

‘Here, if I give you this will you go away? You can pawn it for thirty rupees.’

Ma Hla May seemed to consider, then said sulkily, ‘Give it me.’

He threw the cigarette-case onto the grass beside the road. She grabbed it and immediately sprang back clutching it to her ingyi, as though afraid that he would take it away again. He turned and made for the house, thanking God to be out of the sound of her voice. The cigarette-case was the same one that she had stolen ten days ago.

At the gate he looked back. Ma Hla May was still standing at the bottom of the hill, a greyish figurine in the moonlight. She must have watched him up the hill like a dog watching a suspicious stranger out of sight. It was queer. The thought crossed his mind, as it had a few days earlier when she sent him the blackmailing letter, that her behaviour had been curious and unlike herself. She was showing a tenacity of which he would never have thought her capable—almost, indeed, as though someone else were egging her on.

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After the row overnight Ellis was looking forward to a week of baiting Flory. He had nicknamed him Nancy—short for nigger’s Nancy Boy, but the women did not know that—and was already inventing wild scandals about him. Ellis always invented scandals about anyone with whom he had quarrelled—scandals which grew, by repeated embroideries, into a species of saga. Flory’s incautious remark that Dr Veraswami was a ‘damned good fellow’ had swelled before long into a whole Daily Worker-ful of blasphemy and sedition.

‘On my honour, Mrs Lackersteen,’ said Ellis—Mrs Lackersteen had taken a sudden dislike to Flory after discovering the great secret about Verrall, and she was quite ready to listen to Ellis’s tales—‘on my honour, if you’d been there last night and heard the things that man Flory was saying—well, it’d have made you shiver in your shoes!’

‘Really! You know, I always thought he had such curious ideas. What has he been talking about now? Not Socialism, I hope?’

‘Worse.’