Burmese Days 缅甸岁月 Chapter 2

At about the time when U Po Kyin began his morning's business, 'Mr Porley' the timber merchant and friend of Dr Veraswami, was leaving his house for the Club., ,Flory was a man of about thirty-five, of middle height, not ill made. He had very black, stiff hair growing low on his head, and a cropped black moustache, and his skin, naturally sallow, was discoloured by the sun. Not having grown fat or bald he did not look older than his age, but his face was very haggard in spite of the sunburn, with lank ² cheeks and a sunken, withered ³ look round the eyes. He had obviously not shaved this morning. He was dressed in the usual white shirt, khaki drill shorts and stockings, but instead of a topi he wore a battered ⁴ Terai hat, cocked over one eye. He carried a bamboo stick with a wrist-thong, and a black cocker spaniel named Flo was ambling ⁵ after him., ,All these were secondary expressions, however. The first thing that one noticed in Flory was a hideous ⁶ birthmark stretching in a ragged ⁷ crescent down his left cheek, from the eye to the corner of the mouth. Seen from the left side his face had a battered, woebegone look, as though the birthmark had been a bruise--for it was a dark blue in colour. He was quite aware of its hideousness ⁸. And at all times, when he was not alone, there was a sidelongness about his movements, as he manoeuvred constantly to keep the birthmark out of sight., , ,The native town, and the courts and the jail, were over to the right, mostly hidden in green groves ¹⁴ of peepul trees. The spire ¹⁵ of the pagoda ¹⁶ rose from the trees like a slender spear tipped with gold. Kyauktada was a fairly typical Upper Burma town, that had not changed greatly between the days of Marco Polo and 1910, and might have slept in the Middle Ages for a century more if it had not proved a convenient spot for a railway terminus. In 1910 the Government made it the headquarters of a district and a seat of Progress--interpretable as a block of law courts, with their army of fat but ravenous ¹⁷ pleaders, a hospital, a school and one of those huge, durable ¹⁸ jails which the English have built everywhere between Gibraltar and Hong Kong. The population was about four thousand, including a couple of hundred Indians, a few score Chinese and seven Europeans. There were also two Eurasians named Mr Francis and Mr Samuel, the sons of an American Baptist missionary ¹⁹ and a Roman Catholic missionary respectively. The town contained no curiosities of any kind, except an Indian fakir who had lived for twenty years in a tree near the bazaar ²⁰, drawing his food up in a basket every morning., ,Flory yawned as he came out of the gate. He had been half drunk the night before, and the glare made him feel liverish. ' Bloody ²¹, bloody hole!' he thought, looking down the hill. And, no one except the dog being near, he began to sing aloud, 'Bloody, bloody, bloody, oh, how thou art bloody' to the tune ²² of 'Holy, holy, holy, oh how Thou art holy ' as he walked down the hot red road, swishing at the dried-up grasses with his stick. It was nearly nine o'clock and the sun was fiercer every minute. The heat throbbed ²³ down on one's head with a steady, rhythmic ²⁴ thumping ²⁵, like blows from an enormous bolster ²⁶. Flory stopped at the Club gate, wondering whether to go in or to go farther down the road and see Dr Veraswami. Then he remembered that it was 'English mail day' and the newspapers would have arrived. He went in, past the big tennis screen, which was overgrown by a creeper with starlike mauve flowers., ,That bout of pneumonia enfeebled her.那次肺炎的发作使她虚弱了。,He rose to lank height and grasped Billy McMahan's hand.他瘦削的身躯站了起来，紧紧地握住比利・麦默恩的手 。