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Glasgow electrician named Macdougall, sacked from the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company for
drunkenness, and now making a precarious living out of a garage. Macdougall is a dull lout, only
interested in whisky and magnetos. The doctor, who will never believe that a white man can be a
fool, tries almost every night to engage him in what he still calls ‘cultured conversation’; but the
results are very unsatisfying.
Ko S’la inherited four hundred rupees under Flory’s will, and with his family he set up a tea-shop
in the bazaar. But the shop failed, as it was bound to do with the two women fighting in it at all hours,
and Ko S’la and Ba Pe were obliged to go back to service. Ko S’la was an accomplished servant.
Besides the useful arts of pimping, dealing with moneylenders, carrying master to bed when drunk
and making pick-me-ups known as prairie oysters on the following morning, he could sew, darn, refill
cartridges, attend to a horse, press a suit, and decorate a dinner-table with wonderful, intricate
patterns of chopped leaves and dyed rice-grains. He was worth fifty rupees a month. But he and Ba
Pe had fallen into lazy ways in Flory’s service, and they were sacked from one job after another. They
had a bad year of poverty, and little Ba Shin developed a cough, and finally coughed himself to death
one stifling hot-weather night. Ko S’la is now a second boy to a Rangoon rice-broker with a neurotic
wife who makes unending kit-kit, and Ba Pe is pani-wallah in the same house at sixteen rupees a
month. Ma Hla May is in a brothel in Mandalay. Her good looks are all but gone, and her clients pay
her only four annas and sometimes kick her and beat her. Perhaps more bitterly than any of the others,
she regrets the good time when Flory was alive, and when she had not the wisdom to put aside any of
the money she extracted from him.
U Po Kyin realised all his dreams, except one. After the doctor’s disgrace, it was inevitable that U
Po Kyin should be elected to the Club, and elected he was, in spite of bitter protests from Ellis. In the
end the other Europeans came to be rather glad that they had elected him, for he was a bearable
addition to the Club. He did not come too often, was ingratiating in his manner, stood drinks freely,
and developed almost at once into a brilliant bridge-player. A few months later he was transferred
from Kyauktada and promoted. For a whole year, before his retirement, he officiated as Deputy
Commissioner, and during that year alone he made twenty thousand rupees in bribes. A month after his
retirement he was summoned to a durbar in Rangoon, to receive the decoration that had been awarded
to him by the Indian Government.
It was an impressive scene, that durbar. On the platform, hung with flags and flowers, sat the
Governor, frock-coated, upon a species of throne, with a bevy of aides-de-camp and secretaries
behind him. All round the hall, like glittering waxworks, stood the tall, bearded sowars of the
Governor’s bodyguard, with pennoned lances in their hands. Outside, a band was blaring at intervals.
The gallery was gay with the white ingyis and pink scarves of Burmese ladies, and in the body of the
hall a hundred men or more were waiting to receive their decorations. There were Burmese officials
in blazing Mandalay pasos, and Indians in cloth-of-gold pagris, and British officers in full-dress
uniform with clanking sword-scabbards, and old thugyis with their grey hair knotted behind their
heads and silver-hilted dahs slung from their shoulders. In a high, clear voice a secretary was reading
out the list of awards, which varied from the CIE to certificates of honour in embossed silver cases.
Presently U Po Kyin’s turn came and the secretary read from his scroll: