563296589345

He was anything but tactful with her. Like all men who have lived much alone, he adjusted himself
better to ideas than to people. And so, though all their talk was superficial, he began to irritate her
sometimes; not by what he said but by what he implied. There was an uneasiness between them, illdefined
and yet often verging upon quarrels. When two people, one of whom has lived long in the
country while the other is a newcomer, are thrown together, it is inevitable that the first should act as
cicerone to the second. Elizabeth, during these days, was making her first acquaintance with Burma; it
was Flory, naturally, who acted as her interpreter, explaining this, commenting upon that. And the
things he said, or the way he said them, provoked in her a vague yet deep disagreement. For she
perceived that Flory, when he spoke of the ‘natives’, spoke nearly always in favour of them. He was
forever praising Burmese customs and the Burmese character; he even went so far as to contrast them
favourably with the English. It disquieted her. After all, natives were natives–interesting, no doubt,
but finally only a ‘subject’ people, an inferior people with black faces. His attitude was a little too
tolerant. Nor had he grasped, yet, in what way he was antagonising her. He so wanted her to love
Burma as he loved it, not to look at it with the dull, incurious eyes of a memsahib! He had forgotten
that most people can be at ease in a foreign country only when they are disparaging the inhabitants.
He was too eager in his attempts to interest her in things Oriental. He tried to induce her, for
instance, to learn Burmese, but it came to nothing. (Her aunt had explained to her that only
missionary-women spoke Burmese; nice women found kitchen Urdu quite as much as they needed.)
There were countless small disagreements like that. She was grasping, dimly, that his views were not
the views an Englishman should hold. Much more clearly she grasped that he was asking her to be
fond of the Burmese, even to admire them; to admire people with black faces, almost savages, whose
appearance still made her shudder!
The subject cropped up in a hundred ways. A knot of Burmans would pass them on the road. She,
with her still fresh eyes, would gaze after them, half curious and half repelled; and she would say to
Flory, as she would have said to anybody:
‘How revoltingly ugly these people are, aren’t they?’
‘Are they? I always think they’re rather charminglooking, the Burmese. They have such splendid
bodies! Look at that fellow’s shoulders–like a bronze statue. Just think what sights you’d see in
England if people went about half naked as they do here!’
‘But they have such hideous-shaped heads! Their skulls kind of slope up behind like a tom-cat’s.
And then the way their foreheads slant back–it makes them look so wicked. I remember reading
something in a magazine about the shape of people’s heads; it said that a person with a sloping
forehead is a criminal type.’
‘Oh, come, that’s a bit sweeping! Round about half me people in the world have that kind of
forehead.’
‘Oh, well, if you count coloured people, of course !——’
Or perhaps a string of women would pass, going to the well: heavy-set peasant-girls, copper
brown, erect under their water-pots with strong mare-like buttocks protruded. The Burmese women
repelled Elizabeth more man the men; she felt her kinship with them, and the hatefulness of being kin
to creatures with black faces.