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XIX
The heat was growing worse and worse. April was nearly over, but there was no hope of rain for
another three weeks, five weeks it might be. Even the lovely transient dawns were spoiled by the
thought of the long, blinding hours to come, when one’s head would ache and the glare would
penetrate through every covering and glue up one’s eyelids with restless sleep. No one, Oriental or
European, could keep awake in the heat of the day without a struggle; at night, on the other hand, with
the howling dogs and the pools of sweat that collected and tormented one’s prickly heat, no one could
sleep. The mosquitoes at the Club were so bad that sticks of incense had to be kept burning in all the
corners, and the women sat with their legs in pillow-slips. Only Verrall and Elizabeth were
indifferent to the heat. They were young and their blood was fresh, and Verrall was too stoical and
Elizabeth too happy to pay any attention to the climate.
There was much bickering and scandalmongering at the Club these days. Verrall had put everyone’s
nose out of joint. He had taken to coming to the Club for an hour or two in the evenings, but he
ignored the other members, refused the drinks they offered him, and answered attempts at
conversation with surly monosyllables. He would sit under the punkah in the chair that had once been
sacred to Mrs Lackersteen, reading such of the papers as interested him, until Elizabeth came, when
he would dance and talk with her for an hour or two and then make off without so much as a goodnight
to anybody. Meanwhile Mr Lackersteen was alone in his camp, and, according to the rumours
which drifted back to Kyauktada, consoling his loneliness with quite a miscellany of Burmese
women.
Elizabeth and Verrall went out riding together almost every evening now. Verrall’s mornings, after
parade, were sacred to polo practice, but he had decided that it was worth while giving up the
evenings to Elizabeth. She took naturally to riding, just as she had to shooting; she even had the
assurance to tell Verrall that she had ‘hunted quite a lot’ at Home. He saw at a glance that she was
lying, but at least she did not ride so badly as to be a nuisance to him.
They used to ride up the red road into the jungle, ford the stream by the big pyinkado tree covered
with orchids, and then follow the narrow cart-track, where the dust was soft and the horses could
gallop. It was stifling hot in the dusty jungle, and diere were always mutterings of far-away, rainless
thunder. Small martins flitted round the horses, keeping pace with them, to hawk for the flies their
hooves turned up. Elizabeth rode the bay pony, Verrall the white. On the way home they would walk
their sweat-dark horses abreast, so close that sometimes his knee brushed against hers, and talk.