In front of her she could see Matthew’s head, with its dark, dry-looking hair, inclined to dustiness, like a cap that has not been brushed. It was his head, she imagined, which so oppressed her, crushing her in some way, as a weight might crush the blood out of her heart. He was very complacent after his triumph over her. And back to his chivalrous pose again. He was very devoted and attentive, looking at her with a proud gleam of private ownership in his manly eye, making no advances for the moment. But he was getting tired of chivalry and restraint, she could see. Soon he would start bullying again.
The passengers got excited, packing and saying good-bye, and so the boat steamed on till it came to Rangoon. Then there was a fuss and a scramble with servants and luggage, a confusion of meetings and farewells, and finally a drive in an open car to the station. Anna was vaguely disappointed. Rangoon was a big town with modern buildings and trams everywhere. Without the brown faces and the brilliant clothes, it might have been Marseilles over again. She sat and ate in the station restaurant while Matthew fussed over the luggage.
Towards evening they were in the train, in a queer white wooden box of a carriage, travelling up the middle of Burma. In a trance of indifference Anna watched the flat, unreal-seeming country outside the windows, the squalid, ramshackle bamboo huts and the gaudily dressed crowds. Then it was dark, the train running on in the black night, worlds away from everywhere it seemed. The familiar universe had vanished away, and in its place had come this strange black void, and the train thumping on for ever and ever, nothing but darkness and the heavily throbbing train. Only at the infrequent stations there was light and noise, a flare of hot, reddish lights, and the hubbub of seething humanity, a sharp, breath-taking odour of hot foods.
The slow discomfort of the night proceeded. It grew rather cold. Matthew was sound asleep. The train rumbled on; or came to an occasional halt. Anna saw glimpses of stations, still crowded, but quieter now, with strange, cocoon-like figures lying on the ground. Occasionally she caught sight of names — Pegu, Prome. What in the world could they stand for but stations, weird, spectral platforms brightly lighted in the profound black night, and rows of muffled figures outstretched?
At last it was morning. The sky filled slowly with a ghostly pallor. Drop by drop the greyish-luminous light distilled into the great, smooth cup of the sky. Then came the pinkness of dawn, and the golden sun swinging up, suddenly, as if surprised, out of the level land. Anna was pleased. In the midst of her weariness and indifference, she felt a shaft of appreciation. Suddenly, she was pleased to be in the East. It pleased her to watch the queer, flat, unearthly-looking country, the people pleased her, the brown, rather flat-faced people with their brilliant skirts and the flowers in their hair.
After a time the hills appeared. The train panted up, slowly, laboriously. They seemed to be among the tops of the hills. Dazzling little pagodas perched on the rocky summits, hills swelled up and down, like a tapestry landscape, pools of water sprinkled with bright blue lilies trembled in the low places; it all seemed brilliant and gay, rather childish, like a fairy-tale country come alive. The train pottered along, and stopped more often. Finally it left the hills and meandered out on to the level ground.
They were going back to Matthew’s old district. He put on his hat and leaned out of the window expectantly. There was a station and a hideous water-tank in the midst of the plain that flowed up to the feet of the hills like a lake. The train stopped. This was their destination.
Anna stood at the carriage door, looking out at the inevitable station crowd of lively, high-coloured figures. It was late afternoon. Matthew was expecting to be met by Jonsen, the man he was to relieve, but Jonsen was not visible. So Matthew stepped down among the crowd and went to look for him, leaving Anna to wait. The people stared at her and made remarks in their quick, gulping, guttural language which seemed to be all monosyllables. She rather liked the look of them; their clear, round, moonish faces, their good-natured, slightly cheeky appearance. Back came Matthew, looking annoyed, and followed by two men, natives of India, with much darker, almost purple skins, and large metal badges worn on a sort of sash over one shoulder.
‘Here are the chuprassies, but Jonsen hasn’t turned up,’ said Matthew. ‘It’s really too bad of him.’ He scowled in his irritable, ineffectual style. Things were going wrong, as usual. The inevitable hitch had occurred.
Anna got down on to the platform. The chuprassies climbed into the carriage and fetched out the luggage. The train went on. Matthew and Anna went out to the back of the station, the chuprassies pushing a way for them with the hand-luggage through the crowd. Here was a nondescript space of trampled ground, with people waiting, and a row of bullock-carts. The luggage was deposited in a pile on the dusty earth. Off went Matthew, and disappeared once more, leaving Anna beside the luggage. She waited, feeling abandoned. The bullocks rolled great eyes of apprehension at her.
At last Matthew returned, accompanied by a fairish, rather heavily-built, vaguely Teutonic type of man, wearing khaki and a battered pith helmet. This was Jonsen. He was introduced to Anna.
‘I’m sorry I wasn’t in time to meet your train,’ he said. ‘I thought I had allowed ample time, but my watch must be slow.’
He seemed to look at Anna with astonishment. She could feel that he thought her an extraordinary person to come to Naunggyi. And she herself felt distinctly out of the picture in her smart dress of yellow shantung. But she climbed into the back of the old Ford car, and sat on the dirty cushion with her dressing-bag at her side. Matthew got up in front, beside Jonsen, who was at the wheel. There they sat in front of her, the two men, turning the backs of their necks, and the bulky breadth of their shoulders towards her, and taking no more notice of her than of the man in the moon.
The sun was slanting down to the tops of the hills, gold auras of dust encircled the moving carts as the rays caught them. The Ford ran busily over the narrow road, which was banked up several feet above the marshy level. Along the road, brown men in skirts, women in skirts with short white bodices, walked in the pale dust, carrying baskets or bundles, or leading children by the hand. Most of the women had flowers tucked behind their ears, something like the pictures of Carmen, with their sleek black hair. And they all moved along with an easy, childish grace, swaying a little from the hips, whilst their bare feet, or their coloured heelless slippers, ruffled the soft dust.
On went the car, over the marshy plain; the station was left well behind. Occasionally they had to pull out to the very edge of the road, hanging almost over the embankment, while neat, mouse-grey bullocks tripped past, drawing a two-wheeled cart. They were going towards the hills. Looking ahead Anna could see the blue ridge of hills about ten miles away, and nearer, a darkness of large trees, with buildings showing between, where the village was.
She looked at the two heads, bobbing so foolishly before her in their clumsy hats. And the two necks: Matthew’s, hard and leathery-smooth and somewhat skinny, but with a tough, almost rubber-like turgidity, like the stem of some forceful plant; and Jonsen’s, flaccid and red and deeply creased and rather unappetising. She didn’t like the look of them at all, those necks. But somehow they fascinated her even more than the novel landscape.
A few houses came in sight. This was the place towards which they had been travelling for more than a month. They had arrived. The Ford rattled in between two wooden gate-posts, and up to a dark wooden house, the ultimate goal of the journey. Servants appeared and took the hand-luggage. Anna got out. There she stood, on the hot, caked, dusty earth in front of the house. The building rose on a little hillock. A bare, brownish stretch of ground went down to the road, with a solitary palm, very tall and dilapidated, with an air of having run to seed, in the middle. Enormous trees, neither quite in nor quite out of leaf, grew on the left, with some flowering bushes. On the right, where the ground fell away, was the edge of the marsh. And there were blue little flowers, very vivid. The sun had just set, the sky was empty.