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XVII
Flory did not see Elizabeth again until he went down to the Club after dinner. He had not, as he might
have done, sought her out and demanded an explanation. His face unnerved him when he looked at it
in the glass. With the birthmark on one side and the graze on the other it was so woe-begone, so
hideous, that he dared not show himself by daylight. As he entered the Club lounge he put his hand
over his birthmark–pretext, a mosquito bite on the forehead. It would have been more than his nerve
was equal to, not to cover his birthmark at such a moment. However, Elizabeth was not there.
Instead, he tumbled into an unexpected quarrel. Ellis and Westfield had just got back from the
jungle, and they were sitting drinking, in a sour mood. News had come from Rangoon that the editor
of the Burmese Patriot had been given only four months’ imprisonment for his libel against Mr
Macgregor, and Ellis was working himself up into a rage over this light sentence. As soon as Flory
came in Ellis began baiting him with remarks about ‘that little nigger Very-slimy’. At the moment the
very thought of quarrelling made Flory yawn, but he answered incautiously, and diere was an
argument. It grew heated, and after Ellis had called Flory a nigger’s Nancy Boy and Flory had replied
in kind, Westfield too lost his temper. He was a good-natured man, but Flory’s Bolshie ideas
sometimes annoyed him. He could never understand why, when there was so clearly a right and a
wrong opinion about everything, Flory always seemed to delight in choosing the wrong one. He told
Flory ‘not to start talking like a damned Hyde Park agitator’, and then read him a snappish little
sermon, taking as his text the five chief beatitudes of the pukka sahib, namely:
Keeping up our prestige,
The firm hand (without the velvet glove),
We white men must hang together,
Give them an inch and they’ll take an ell, and
Esprit de corps.
All the while his anxiety to see Elizabeth was so gnawing at Flory’s heart that he could hardly hear
what was said to him. Besides, he had heard it all so often, so very often–a hundred times, a thousand
times it might be, since his first week in Rangoon, when his burra sahib (an old Scotch gin-soaker
and great breeder of racing ponies, afterwards warned off the turf for some dirty business of running
the same horse under two different names) saw him take off his topi to pass a native funeral and said
to him reprovingly: ‘Remember laddie, always remember, we are sahiblog and they are dirrt!’ It
sickened him, now, to have to listen to such trash. So he cut Westfield short by saying blasphemously: