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to remind you that they’ve got European skulls. A kind of coat-of-arms. The bend sinister, you might
say.’
This did not satisfy Elizabeth. She perceived that Flory, as usual, had a sneaking sympathy with the
Eurasians. And the appearance of the two men had excited a peculiar dislike in her. She had placed
their type now. They looked like Dagoes. Like those Mexicans and Italians and other Dago people
who play the mauvais rôle in so many a film.
‘They looked awfully degenerate types, didn’t they? So thin and weedy and cringing; and they
haven’t got at all honest faces. I suppose these Eurasians are very degenerate? I’ve heard that halfcastes
always inherit what’s worst in both races. Is that true?’
‘I don’t know that it’s true. Most Eurasians aren’t very good specimens, and it’s hard to see how
they could be, with their upbringing. But our attitude towards them is rather beasdy. We always talk of
them as though they’d sprung up from the ground like mushrooms, with all their faults ready-made. But
when all’s said and done, we’re responsible for their existence.’
‘Responsible for their existence?’
‘Well, they’ve all got fathers, you see.’
‘Oh… Of course there’s that… But after all, you aren’t responsible. I mean, only a very low kind
of man would–er–have anything to do with native women, wouldn’t he?’
‘Oh, quite. But the fathers of both those two were clergymen in holy orders, I believe.’
He thought of Rosa McFee, the Eurasian girl he had seduced in Mandalay in 1913. The way he
used to sneak down to the house in a gharry with the shutters drawn; Rosa’s corkscrew curls; her
withered old Burmese mother, giving him tea in the dark living-room with the fern pots and the
wicker divan. And afterwards, when he had chucked Rosa, those dreadful, imploring letters on
scented notepaper, which, in the end, he had ceased opening.
Elizabeth reverted to the subject of Francis and Samuel after tennis.
‘Those two Eurasians–does anyone here have anything to do with them? Invite them to their houses
or anything?’
‘Good gracious, no. They’re complete outcasts. It’s not considered quite the thing to talk to them, in
fact. Most of us say good morning to them–Ellis won’t even do that.’
‘But you talked to them.’
‘Oh well, I break the rules occasionally. I meant that a pukka sahib probably wouldn’t be seen
talking to them. But you see, I try–just sometimes, when I have the pluck–not to be a pukka sahib.’
It was an unwise remark. She knew very well by this time the meaning of the phrase ‘pukka sahib’
and all it stood for. His remark had made the difference in their viewpoint a little clearer. The glance
she gave him was almost hostile, and curiously hard; for her face could look hard sometimes, in spite
of its youth and its flower-like skin. Those modish tortoise-shell spectacles gave her a very selfpossessed
look. Spectacles are queerly expressive things–almost more expressive, indeed, than eyes.
As yet he had neither understood her nor quite won her trust. Yet on the surface, at least, things had
not gone ill between them. He had fretted her sometimes, but the good impression that he had made
that first morning was not yet effaced. It was a curious fact that she scarcely noticed his birthmark at
this time. And there were some subjects on which she was glad to hear him talk. Shooting, for