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streaming egrets–were more native to him than England. He had sent deep roots, perhaps his deepest,
into a foreign country.
Since then he had not even applied for home leave. His father had died, then his mother, and his
sisters, disagreeable horse-faced women whom he had never liked, had married and he had almost
lost touch with them. He had no tie with Europe now, except the tie of books. For he had realised that
merely to go back to England was no remedy for loneliness; he had grasped the special nature of the
hell that is reserved for Anglo-Indians. Ah, those poor prosing old wrecks in Bath and Cheltenham!
Those tomb-like boarding-houses with Anglo-Indians littered about in all stages of decomposition, all
talking and talking about what happened in Boggleywalah in ’88! Poor devils, they know what it
means to have left one’s heart in an alien and hated country. There was, he saw clearly, only one way
out. To find someone who would share his life in Burma–but really share it, share his inner, secret
life, carry away from Burma the same memories as he carried. Someone who would love Burma as
he loved it and hate it as he hated it. Who would help him to live with nothing hidden, nothing
unexpressed. Someone who understood him: a friend, that was what it came down to.
A friend. Or a wife? The quite impossible she. Someone like Mrs Lackersteen, for instance? Some
damned mem-sahib, yellow and thin, scandalmongering over cocktails, making kit-kit with the
servants, living twenty years in the country without learning a word of the language. Not one of those,
please God.
Flory leaned over the gate. The moon was vanishing behind the dark wall of the jungle, but the
dogs were still howling. Some lines from Gilbert came into his mind, a vulgar silly jingle but
appropriate–something about ‘discoursing on your complicated state of mind’. Gilbert was a gifted
little skunk. Did all his trouble, then, simply boil down to that? Just complicated, unmanly whinings;
poor-little-rich-girl stuff? Was he no more than a loafer using his idleness to invent imaginary woes?
A spiritual Mrs Wititterly? A Hamlet without poetry? Perhaps. And if so, did that make it any more
bearable? It is not the less bitter because it is perhaps one’s own fault, to see oneself drifting, rotting,
in dishonour and horrible futility, and all the while knowing that somewhere within one there is the
possibility of a decent human being.
Oh well, God save us from self-pity! Flory went back to the veranda, took up the rifle, and,
wincing slightly, let drive at the pariah dog. There was an echoing roar, and me bullet buried itself in
the maidan, wide of the mark. A mulberry-coloured bruise sprang out on Flory’s shoulder. The dog
gave a yell of fright, took to its heels, and then, sitting down fifty yards further away, once more began
rhythmically baying.