The Complete Works. George Orwell
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one had paid any attention to the child—the incident was too normal to be noticed—and now they all felt horribly ashamed. Everyone began putting the blame on the child. There were exclamations of ‘What a disgraceful child! What a disgusting child!’ The old Chinese woman carried the child, still howling, to the door, and held it out over the step as though wringing out a bath sponge. And in the same moment, as it seemed, Flory and Elizabeth were outside the shop, and he was following her back to the road with Li Yeik and the others looking after them in dismay.
‘If that’s what you call civilised people——!’ she was exclaiming.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said feebly. ‘I never expected——’
‘What absolutely disgusting people!’
She was bitterly angry. Her face had flushed a wonderful delicate pink, like a poppy bud opened a day too soon. It was the deepest colour of which it was capable. He followed her past the bazaar and back to the main road, and they had gone fifty yards before he ventured to speak again.
‘I’m so sorry that this should have happened! Li Yeik is such a decent old chap. He’d hate to think that he’d offended you. Really it would have been better to stay a few minutes. Just to thank him for the tea.’
‘Thank him! After that!’
‘But honestly, you oughtn’t to mind that sort of thing. Not in this country. These people’s whole outlook is so different from ours. One has to adjust oneself. Suppose, for instance, you were back in the Middle Ages——’
‘I think I’d rather not discuss it any longer.’
It was the first time they had definitely quarrelled. He was too miserable even to ask himself how it was that he offended her. He did not realise that this constant striving to interest her in Oriental things struck her only as perverse, ungentlemanly, a deliberate seeking after the squalid and the ‘beastly’. He had not grasped even now with what eyes she saw the ‘natives’. He only knew that at each attempt to make her share his life, his thoughts, his sense of beauty, she shied away from him like a frightened horse.
They walked up the road, he to the left of her and a little behind. He watched her averted cheek and the tiny gold hairs on her nape beneath the brim of her Terai hat. How he loved her, how he loved her! It was as though he had never truly loved her till this moment, when he walked behind her in disgrace, not even daring to show his disfigured face. He made to speak several times, and stopped himself. His voice was not quite steady, and he did not know what he could say that did not risk offending her somehow. At last he said, flatly, with a feeble pretence that nothing was the matter:
‘It’s getting beastly hot, isn’t it?’
With the temperature at 90 degrees in the shade it was not a brilliant remark. To his surprise she seized on it with a kind of eagerness. She turned to face him, and she was smiling again.
‘Isn’t it simply baking!’
With that they were at peace. The silly, banal remark, bringing with it the reassuring atmosphere of Club-chatter, had soothed her like a charm. Flo, who had lagged behind, came puffing up to them dribbling saliva; in an instant they were talking, quite as usual, about dogs. They talked about dogs for the rest of the way home, almost without a pause. Dogs are an inexhaustible subject. Dogs, dogs! thought Flory as they climbed the hot hillside, with the mounting sun scorching their shoulders through their thin clothes, like the breath of a fire—were they never to talk of anything except dogs? Or failing dogs, gramophone records and tennis racquets? And yet, when they kept to trash like this, how easily, how amicably they could talk!
They passed the glittering white wall of the cemetery and came to the Lackersteens’ gate. Gold mohur trees grew round it, and a clump of hollyhocks eight feet high, with round red flowers like blowsy girls’ faces. Flory took off his hat in the shade and fanned his face.
‘Well, we’re back before the worst of the heat comes. I’m afraid our trip to the bazaar wasn’t altogether a success.’
‘Oh, not at all! I enjoyed it, really I did.’
‘No—I don’t know, something unfortunate always seems to happen.—Oh, by the way! You haven’t forgotten that we’re going out shooting the day after tomorrow? I hope that day will be all right for you?’
‘Yes, and my uncle’s going to lend me his gun. Such awful fun! You’ll have to teach me all about shooting. I am so looking forward to it.’
‘So am I. It’s a rotten time of year for shooting, but we’ll do our best. Good-bye for the present, then.’
‘Good-bye, Mr Flory.’
She still called him Mr Flory though he called her Elizabeth. They parted and went their ways, each thinking of the shooting trip, which, both of them felt, would in some way put things right between them.
XII
In the sticky, sleepy heat of the living-room, almost dark because of the beaded curtains, U Po Kyin was marching slowly up and down, boasting. From time to time he would put a hand under his singlet and scratch his sweating breasts, huge as a woman’s with fat. Ma Kin was sitting on her mat, smoking slender white cigars. Through the open door of the bedroom one could see the corner of U Po Kyin’s huge square bed, with carved teak posts, like a catafalque, on which he had committed many and many a rape.
Ma Kin was now hearing for the first time of the ‘other affair’ which underlay U Po Kyin’s attack on Dr Veraswami. Much as he despised her intelligence, U Po Kyin usually let Ma Kin into his secrets sooner or later. She was the only person in his immediate circle who was not afraid of him, and there was therefore a pleasure in impressing her.
‘Well, Kin Kin,’ he said, ‘you see how it has all gone according to plan! Eighteen anonymous letters already, and every one of them a masterpiece. I would repeat some of them to you if I thought you were capable of appreciating them.’
‘But supposing the Europeans take no notice of your anonymous letters? What then?’
‘Take no notice? Aha, no fear of that! I think I know something about the European mentality. Let me tell you, Kin Kin, that if there is one thing I can do, it is to write an anonymous letter.’
This was true. U Po Kyin’s letters had already taken effect and especially on their chief target, Mr Macgregor.
Only two days earlier than this, Mr Macgregor had spent a very troubled evening in trying to make up his mind whether Dr Veraswami was or was not guilty of disloyalty to the Government. Of course, it was not a question of any overt act of disloyalty—that was quite irrelevant. The point was, was the doctor the kind of man who would hold seditious opinions? In India you are not judged for what you do, but for what you are. The merest breath of suspicion against his loyalty can ruin an Oriental official. Mr Macgregor had too just a nature to condemn even an Oriental out of hand. He had puzzled as late as midnight over a whole pile of confidential papers, including the five anonymous letters he had received, besides two others that had been forwarded to him by Westfield, pinned together with a cactus thorn.
It was not only the letters. Rumours about the doctor had been pouring in from every side. U Po Kyin fully grasped that to call the doctor a traitor was not enough in itself; it was necessary to attack his reputation from every possible angle. The doctor was charged not only with sedition, but also with extortion, rape, torture, performing illegal operations, performing operations while blind drunk, murder by poison, murder by sympathetic magic, eating beef, selling death certificates to murderers, wearing his shoes in the precincts of the pagoda and making homosexual attempts on the Military Police drummer-boy. To hear what was said of him, anyone would have imagined the doctor a compound of Machiavelli, Sweeney Todd and the Marquis de Sade. Mr Macgregor had not paid much attention at first. He was too accustomed to this kind of thing. But with the last of the anonymous letters U Po Kyin had brought off a stroke that was brilliant even for