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operations. ‘Belly-cutting’ was their phrase for it. The majority of them would have died a dozen
times over rather man submit to ‘belly-cutting’.
As the last patient disappeared the doctor sank into his chair, fanning his face with the prescriptionpad.
‘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