Burmese Days: Chapter 17 Summary & Analysis

Flory goes to the Club after dinner, hoping to see Elizabeth. Instead he runs into Westfield and Ellis, who are furious because they’ve learned the editor of the Burmese Patriot, which slandered Macgregor, only got four months in jail. Ellis picks a fight with Flory over his friendship with Dr. Veraswami, and Westfield lectures him about white men’s duties. Flory, preoccupied with Elizabeth, tries to shut them up by announcing that he plans to suggest Veraswami for club membership. That angers Ellis and Westfield, but the butler interrupts the fight.

The Lackersteens, all better-dressed than usual, enter the club. Mrs. Lackersteen starts affecting a very posh accent, which confuses everyone. When she suggests that they play cards, they all move to the card-room—and, as Elizabeth takes up the rear, Flory waylays her in the doorway and begs her to tell him how he offended her. She claims not to know what he means. When he says he “can’t let everything end” like this, she claims “there was nothing to end.” When Flory insists on knowing what he’s done, Elizabeth—angry at having to speak of it—says she’s learned that he’s “keeping a Burmese woman.” Then she moves past him into the card-room. Flory is left humiliated, thinking that that isn’t even true and wondering how she heard.

In a flashback to the evening before, Mrs. Lackersteen is in the club reading the Civil List, which contains “the exact income of every official in Burma.” She decides to look up Verrall, whom Macgregor has told her is coming to Kyauktada, only to learn that he’s an “Honourable.” Thinking immediately of her unmarried niece, she rushes to find Flory and Elizabeth to prevent Flory—who only makes 700 rupees a month—from proposing. Then the earthquake hits. Later, as the Lackersteens are returning home, Mrs. Lackersteen informs Elizabeth that Flory is “keeping a Burmese woman.”

Flory, out behind the club staring at the river, remembers the hundred-odd Burmese women with whom he’s had sex and decides with “deadly self-knowledge and self-loathing” that he deserves exactly this outcome. He walks around the club and out of the gate when a woman whispers “give me the money” in Burmese. Ma Hla May emerges from the shadows and loudly demands that Flory give her the additional money he promised. When he tells her to be quiet lest people in the club hear her, she says that she’ll scream and bring them all running. Flory calls her “bitch” but throws his last 25 rupees at her. When she keeps pestering him for more money, he at last gives her his gold cigarette case to pawn. He’s surprised by her determination—it’s “as though someone else were egging her on.”