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The rebels’ entire stock of weapons had been captured. The armoury with which, when their
followers were assembled, they had proposed to march upon Kyauktada, consisted of the following:
Item, one shotgun with a damaged left barrel, stolen from a Forest Officer three years earlier.
Item, six home-made guns with barrels of zinc piping stolen from the railway. These could be fired,
after a fashion, by thrusting a nail through the touch-hole and striking it with a stone.
Item, thirty-nine twelve-bore cartridges.
Item, eleven dummy guns carved out of teakwood.
Item, some large Chinese crackers which were to have been fired in terrorem.
Later, two of the rebels were sentenced to fifteen years’ transportation, three to three years’
imprisonment and twenty-five lashes, and one to two years’ imprisonment.
The whole miserable rebellion was so obviously at an end that the Europeans were not considered
to be in any danger, and Maxwell had gone back to his camp unguarded. Flory intended to stay in
camp until the rains broke, or at least until the general meeting at the Club. Hehad promised to be in
for that, to propose the doctor’s election; though now, with his own trouble to think of, the whole
business of the intrigue between U Po Kyin and the doctor sickened him.
More weeks crawled by. The heat was dreadful now. The overdue rain seemed to have bred a
fever in the air. Flory was out of health, and worked incessantly, worrying over petty jobs that should
have been left to the overseer, and making the coolies and even the servants hate him. He drank gin at
all hours, but not even drinking could distract him now. The vision of Elizabeth in Verrall’s arms
haunted him like a neuralgia or an earache. At any moment it would come upon him, vivid and
disgusting, scattering his thoughts, wrenching him back from the brink of sleep, turning his food to
dust in his mouth. At times he flew into savage rages, and once even struck Ko S’la. What was worse
than all was the detail–the always filthy detail–in which the imagined scene appeared. The very
perfection of the detail seemed to prove that it was true.
Is there anything in the world more graceless, more dishonouring, than to desire a woman whom
you will never have? Throughout all these weeks Flory’s mind held hardly a thought which was not
murderous or obscene. It is the common effect of jealousy. Once he had loved Elizabeth spiritually,
sentimentally indeed, desiring her sympathy more than her caresses; now, when he had lost her, he
was tormented by the basest physical longing. He did not even idealise her any longer. He saw her
now almost as she was–silly, snobbish, heartless–and it made no difference to his longing for her.
Does it ever make any difference? At nights when he lay awake, his bed dragged outside the tent for
coolness, looking at the velvet dark from which the barking of a gyi sometimes sounded, he hated
himself for the images that inhabited his mind. It was so base, this envying of the better man who had
beatenhim. For it was only envy–even jealousy was too good a name for it. What right had he to be
jealous? He had offered himself to a girl who was too young and pretty for him, and she had turned
him down–rightly. He had got the snub he deserved. Nor was there any appeal from that decision;
nothing would ever make him young again, or take away his birthmark and his decade of lonely
debaucheries. He could only stand and look on while the better man took her, and envy him, like–but
the simile was not even mentionable. Envy is a horrible thing. It is unlike all other kinds of suffering