White Man Returns

by AGNES NEWTON KEITH

1

SEVENTY years ago this town was known as Elopura — meaning, in Sanskrit, “Beautiful City”; now it is Sandakan, North Borneo, officially described as “the worst-destroyed town in the Far East.” The land of which Sandakan is the capital is rich in timber, gold, copper, and coal; with swift-running waterways, while rapids, heavy jungle, and mountains like sleeping women outlined against the sky; and a moon, on hot silent nights, like an oversize copper ball floating in blue-ink air, and a sea like a painted picture of a tropical island sea.

This primitive country was peopled by simple savages and unsophisticated pagan tribes; men who took heads, burned villages, plundered traders, sank ships, and scuppered each other — as simply as that. Then the white man came. The natives were preserved like game and ripe peaches by the colonizing British, who pride themselves on kindness to simple savages and preservation of old tribal custom. But the towns along the coast were gradually settled with Chinese, Javanese, Indians, and Malays, who understood trading for food and living, while the natives fished, hunted, and killed for theirs.

Then the yellow man came — in 1942. With him came war, and four years of Asiatic rule for Asiatics, of semi-civilization, of moral dissolution and physical desolation. At the end of that period the country had been occupied by Japanese shock troops, held by Japanese Kempetai, raped by Japanese bums, burned by Japanese zealots, bombed by the Allies, liberated by the Australians, reoccupied by Tin Hats and Brass.

By the time of the Armistice in 1945 the jungle had closed over the charred town site of Sandakan and few ruins could be seen. The surviving populace had moved to the jungle or to small islands in the bay, the women slept with by all and married by none, the widows left without weeds, the orphans without names.

Then the news went round that the war was over and succor was near. People moved back to the weed-choked ruins, the British returned, the flag flew high, the soldier ruled, relief ships came. Soon bully beef and fur coats, vitamin tablets and pink satin slips, high-heeled slippers and woolly pajamas, stale plasma and fresh tomato juice, white face-powder and black sea-boots, malaria prophylactics and frostbite medicaments, arrived without prejudice to arctic or tropic, sent by relief agencies from half the world away. A town sprang up out of the ashes and jungle, out of the bones and bombs; Sandakan, once Beautiful City, came back to the white man’s rule.

But this wasn’t a soldier’s job; the soldiers wanted to go home, the Administration wanted to go, everybody wanted them to go. The civil servants under the Chartered Company of British North Borneo, who had run the country before the war and made a good job of it, had been in Jap prison camps; those who survived had had only a few months of freedom; they didn’t want to come back.

Yet they came. My husband had been Conservator of Forests for North Borneo under the Chartered Company for some years before the war; our life was here, our son was born here, we had lost our home and household goods here, been pauperized and placed in slavery, and confined four years in Jap prison camps here. When I was flown out of Borneo in a U.S. Navy Catalina in September, 1945, I hoped never to see the country again. Harry agreed with me; we’d had it.

But in May, 1946, because of the urgent necessity to re-establish a civil administration of men who knew the country and the people, in order to deal with the emergency of a starving, 90 per cent ill, unclothed, and homeless population, Harry agreed to return to Borneo. In July, 1947, North Borneo became a Colony and he was transferred to Colonial service.

The month before, I had started my journey back to Borneo with George, our eight-year-old son, who was born in Sandakan and imprisoned with me through the war. Leaving Tacoma, Washington, one black and starry night, with the wind from the cool Olympics behind us and the steam of the tropics ahead, and traveling as swiftly as connections allowed, we arrived back in Sandakan in October, thus having accomplished a slightly slower journey than British adventurers made in the 1800’s.

2

WHEN I first arrived in North Borneo fourteen years ago, an American bride, I was anxious to meet my English husband’s friends, and hoping to please. Although I could not speak or spell English, I had managed to communicate for some years in the United States by a series of short, sharp, nasal Midwest American syllables; these I now hoped to dampen with the foggy dew of an English accent; I was going to give up “got” and “Gee!” and spell everything with an extra “; I was ready to lengthen my shorts and to lighten my make-up; to use water for bathing only, otherwise tea, whiskey, or gin; and to love dogs and horses, tolerate children and hate foxes, in order to please. That I unconsciously hid beneath my raincoat the one really vital, surefire attribute for success in Ear East Colonial life, I did not know then — a white skin. I soon found that this alone entitled me to a position among the elite.

Nine years later I left this town a prisoner in rags, starving and ill-treated, under Japanese rule — a position to which my white skin entitled me then.

Now I return; the country is again British, my skin still white, my position enviable; but my faith in the invincibility of color is dead. It is convenient to be white, but not sufficient, and credit is due only to chromosomes; it is nice to belong to the ruling race, but is it the ruling race? I remember it when it wasn’t.

So I speak without racial prejudice, or a belief in the Herrenvolk, when 1 say that the brown races to whom this country belongs, the aborigines of North Borneo, are not ready to govern themselves and are better off under us. We do not do much for them, God knows: a dollop of medicine, a pinch of hygiene, a sniff of education, a whiff of prosperity, large schemes and limited action, an exposition of the theory of Christianity accompanied by feeble practice, an honest administration of justice, the wash-out of crime compared to other Eastern places, and the import of rice by international agreement for a non-self-supporting and very hungry people — not much, God knows, but it’s more than these people can do for themselves. It is not their skins, but their minds and manner of thought and their values, which must change through future years of social evolution.

At present the native of Borneo has no national concept, much less world concept, because he can’t think that big; he doesn’t know that he has a country because he can’t see that far. His farthest horizon is the pig under his house, the outermost tree in his clearing, the footpath over the mountain which he treads twice a year to the nearest village for salt.

The rugged and unmodified topography of this country, its heavy jungle, swift rapids, untraversable swampland, and untracked hogback mountains, plus the heavy rainfalls averaging 75 to 150 inches a year, result in a lack of roads and communications, transport and education. The pagan tribes of the interior and plains, the Moslem tribes along the coasts, all said to be of Indonesian-Polynesian-Mongoloid origin, keep alive today the ancient heritage of a simple, savage, archaic people. An interior Rundum Murut dressed simply and solely in his cardinal red loincloth, his teeth filed to the gums for purposes of beautification, his incisors knocked out to admit his poison-dart blowpipe, his gums dripping red saliva from the juice of the betel nut he chews, his long, lank black hair hanging down to his small-buttlocked behind, would occasion comment even in Hollywood.

There are five principal native tribes in North Borneo: the Dusun, Murut, Bajau, Suluk, and Dayak tribes. All these tribes speak different dialects, have no common spoken language, and no written language at all. Each tribe has different tribal customs; the only things they have in common are dark skins, bad habits, and primitiveness.

Government vernacular schools teach Malay, which is the nearest thing to a common language here, and mission schools teach English to those who can and will attend. On figures based on the last local education report it appears that one native child out of every ten goes to school long enough to be registered, but observation leads me to say that not one out of one hundred acquires any education.

Borneo, unlike the Dutch East Indies and Malaya, where education, wealth, and ensuing leisure are widespread, has no native intelligentsia. There is no moneyed class among the natives, as a man’s wealth is in his personal possessions—his dogs, pigs, buffalo, blowpipes, weapons, brass, and wives. No rich men’s sons go from Borneo to foreign universities.

Current anthropology suggests that the aborigines of North Borneo arc growing decadent and impotent because of the interference with their tribal customs. To this theory current medicine adds a postscript that malaria, dysentery, tuberculosis, and continued malnutrition caused by drinking their rice crop in home-brew instead of eating it, and ignorance of hygiene, probably contribute more to infertility and high mortality than the suppression of their head-hunting desires.

These people are a link between ourselves and the past, but a link which makes the past seem further. To deal with them, and at the same time in the same world to cope with atomic energy, modern bacteriology, the United Nations, Trygve Lie, and Einstein, is fantastic. As against me and modern methods, the natives win hands down; they have more germs than I have disinfectant, more lethargy than I have energy. The more I know of aborigines the less I know, and I suspect that only time, unhurried and unbeatable, will tell on them.

But time will tell. And meanwhile it was an Englishman, Gladstone, who said, Liberty alone prepares men for liberty. These primitive people here have more liberty under the British to prepare themselves for liberty than they would have if the white man moved out and the yellow man moved in.

3

SANDAKAN is as foreign and inaccessible to the average Borneo native as it was to me when I came from the U.S.A. It is a city inhabited principally by foreigners, the majority being Chinese, with Indians, Javanese, Filipinos, natives, and Malays mixed in. The apex of civilization is represented by the movie palace, which regularly shows Tarzan of the Apes, in a country of apes, to full houses. The nadir is the sewer system, which is simply the Sulu Sea; visitors always ask what those cute little houses over the water are.

The sea is also our bathtub, our suburbs are built on stilts over it, and children fish for breakfast from their verandas in it. The jungle grows to the gardens’ edges; bananas, coconuts, and pineapples ripen all the year; greens and beans flourish; fishermen catch their living in the sea; and water buffalo give milk, furnish steaks, and draw carts.

In town the Chinese shopkeepers begin again to make money; the lean-shanked Indians barter in the bazaar; Filipinos pound broken-down typewriters in wilted white collar jobs; the Malays laugh and dance and live on love, and the sojourning natives joke, drink, and add local color. In all there are perhaps twenty-five thousand Asiatics in Sandakan, a considerable increase over the pre-war population, while the European population remains as before, about seventy British and one American. Of this group Harry and I are known as The Oldest Living Inhabitants. People who live long in the East acquire a tropical neurasthenia which makes three on a desert island seem a crowd. To this “Alone” disease Harry and I have now added the ex-internee’s complex against any form of community living, a prejudice which makes the open stretches of Borneo desirable.

Only a small minority of the present Asiatic residents are pre-war survivors. These few, by hiding in the jungle at each alarm, or retreating to the interior, have survived the process of slaughter but not the loss of possessions and health. The majority of today’s townspeople have but recently moved in from China and other revolution-worn countries to seek the peace, security, and better living conditions of a British Colony.

Some of these newcomers to Sandakan have money, and of course they are said to have been collaborators, as is everyone in the East who has anything now. But the large majority are without resources and in need of drugs, food, clothing, housing, and education. They are cheerful, uncomplaining, brave; and they are implacable, stubborn, and poor as only Asiatics know how to be. For there is work here, and they will not do it; they have lived with destruction too long. They haven’t the energy, the vision, the future, the vitamins and vim to see a job and do it. And if there is no rice to work for, what is the object of working?

The greatest hardship today is shortage of rice, the mainstay of the Asiatic diet. The ration is about one half what the coolie is satisfied to work on. Sandakan district is not suited to the production of rice. But the import of all Far Eastern rice is regulated by international food agreements which are based on other ideas of rice sufficiency than the Asiatic’s. Tapioca root and various tubers are being promoted unsuccessfully as substitutes by expert dietitians who say they are better for the health than rice. The Asiatic answer is simply, No rice, no work. After living two years on tapioca root in prison camp I sympathize; one may re-educate the digestive tract, with pain and wind, in a lifetime, but not the psychological attitude of many lifetimes which have decreed to the Asiatic that rice is the staff of life.

This is not an easy country to regiment or reform; there is too much to do, too little to do with, and nobody who wants it done. Rather, it is a place to give freely and expect no return. It is a place to give for the reason that when such inequality exists between two ways of life as exists here between my way and that of a native or coolie it eases my conscience to give, but not because the coolie will thank me, love me, or cease to defecate in front of my house.

Yet I have never found kindness lacking here. I existed for three and one-half years during the war on the charity of Asiatic friends, but this was not based on feelings of obligation to me for the past, and today it is I who owe them.

Take our friend Ah Leong. He is an old Chinese coolie who has carried our luggage up to our house from the customs wharf all the years we have lived here, back and forth on every home leave, and every local trip we ever made. Ah Leong and we have always discussed each other’s children together, our home “villages,” our illnesses, and our businesses. We have had confidence in each other; we that he would never lose our luggage, even the paper parcels; and he that we would never take a younger, swifter coolie.

During the Japanese occupation of this country I saw him just once. This time I was the coolieprisoner dragging a suitcase, bedding roll, and baby, and trying to lift them to a ship’s deck three feet from the wharf and three feet above it, while Japanese officers stood laughingly by. Seeing me struggling alone Ah Leong came running to assist me, and was knocked down by the butt of a Japanese rifle.

Five years later I returned to Sandakan a free woman. Harry and I were walking along the sandy path towards the native village of Keramunting, with George racing far ahead along the beach, when we heard a voice shouting after us in Chinese-Malay, and steps running. We looked behind us and saw a figure in sackcloth underpants and a frayed straw hat without a crown, and under the hat a face that was glowing with gold teeth and glad greetings. It was Ah Leong, and we were as valued old friends meeting again after long adversity. We learned that an American bullet had shot off his toe, he had rheumatism and had stopped carrying luggage, he lived at Keramunting and fished for a living, the Japs had been very bad here, the children were growing up, we were all growing older. And then came the important question, “And where is your baby, Mem?" — the baby whom he had last seen tied on my back when I was a prisoner.

I pointed ahead at George’s long-legged figure, which was loping back towards us now; George had seen us talking, and feared he might be missing something. Ah Leong shouted in delight, “Wah! That big strong boy? Wah! Very good, very good! ” And he and George stood and stared at each other with flattering interest.

Early one morning a week later when I was driving home from Harry’s office Ah Leong ran out from the side of the road. Brandishing his arms in front of me like a wind-driven scarecrow, he took a stand in the middle of the road, with more confidence in our brakes than I have. I swerved around him and skidded into the drain. He came after me, and leaning informally over the hood of the car, he inserted his smiling, gold-toothed face through the open windscreen and looked over the interior of the car carefully. Ours is an English make, petrol-saver, about the size of George’s pre-war pram, and Ah Leong’s masterful attitude towards it led me to believe that he was going to offer to pick it up and carry it home for me. However, he was only trying to locate George in some corner.

“Where is that boy, Mem?”

“George is at his father’s office. Today is a school holiday, and he is going fishing.”

“Wah! That is good! That boy is very big and fine! I have brought him this basket of bokara to eat,” and he dumped a basketful of live crayfish into the bottom of the motorcar at my feet.

It was a good catch, and worth several dollars, and Ah Leong had walked three miles from his village to waylay me on my homeward route with it. I accepted the crayfish with gratitude and thanks. I was driving the motorcar; he was the coolie on the road.

Ah Leong has no obligation to us for the past, he always gave value for payment received. The only thing we ever gave him in excess of his fee was the recognition that he was human.

4

THE people of Sandakan need almost everything, but the least of these things is probably tatted handkerchiefs. Infants are vestless, babies are pantless, boys without drawers, adults without shirts; bachelors need mending, beds need bedding, houses need curtains; but my friend Angela tats tatting for handkerchiefs.

Angela, who is a pre-war survivor, makes the pilgrimage up the hill to me once a week, when the day is hottest and she looks limpest and I can feel sorriest, and my pile of handkerchiefs grows. Once innocent little pieces of cotton goods, now they are made expensively offensive through Angela’s art, for the wiping of European noses. Harry thinks that I buy them from the inability to say No. But I do not; I buy them deliberately, in the name of democracy and the memory of bananas.

Angela, whose ancestry is Goanese and Filipino, is nice to look at and titillating to the senses; with eyes like chocolate drops on white frosted cake, and skin like a bisque meringue, she was created by nature to sweeten rather than sustain. To her natural confiture of being, Angela adds lipstick lips and fuchsia cheeks, a peasant blouse and a dirndl skirt and blue barefoot sandals on spindle legs. She weighs like a toothpick and is shaped like a child, but her amorous glance holds an adult lure.

Angela’s life is pursued by a dark-browed Fate. Her husband is always out of work, her relatives break their bones, her babies have colds, her childbirth is complicated, her miscarriages are never convenient, and her dwelling places are robbed, burned, or blown away, but Angela retains her adolescent figure, her baby face, and her ingenuous mind.

Her reaction to the cruel Nemesis which pursues her is to embrace it with the resignation of a girl for a too brutal lover who, if he hurts her, at least leaves her with something to talk about. And as if to compensate for her domestic ill luck, Angela buys raffle tickets and wins prizes of face creams and powder compacts, she bets on horses and wins silver trophies, she enters dancing competitions in the Eurasian club and brings to her devastated and adversity-stricken home silver-plated mugs, embroidered tray tidies, and cut-glass cocktail shakers.

Angela comes to our house either at 10 A.M. when I am writing, or 3 P.M. when I am bathing. At either hour I would give anything to be rid of her, especially before my husband conies. But today is the third anniversary of the decapitation of Angela’s father by the Japanese, and Angela comes this morning to review the scene again.

“It was after the American motor torpedo boats came to Sandakan on May 26, in 1945,”Angela recalls. “They shelled and torpedoed the harbor and town and the Japanese ran away into the jungle. The Americans landed and came into town, and people rejoiced and were very glad to see them and gave them food and anything they wanted. My father was one to help them, and we were all happy because the Americans had come at last.

“But they went away again that night, and the Japs came back into town the next day. Then they asked all people in town to tell them who had helped those Americans. And the people who were afraid told on the others. A few had warning and ran to the jungle and escaped, but the Japs arrested sixtyseven others that night. They were some of the best people of the town, Indians, Chinese, and natives, and one was a white lady, Mrs. Feldheim, the Jewish lady who came from Germany before the war and was always sick.

“The Japs took them to Kempetai headquarters, and for many days the military police were asking them questions, and we did not know what would happen. Then one day we saw them all taken out in army trucks, and two of our men followed secretly to see. The trucks went up Ernestina Lane and stopped at the rubber trees, and the guards made everybody get out.

“Then they started to kill them. They tried to cut their heads off, but the soldier whose job this was, was not clever, and his sword not sharp enough. He killed some O.K., but others he could not make the heads come off, and even this soldier got sick with the mess. So then they had to shoot them. But the Japs were so confused by not killing neatly that one Chinese escaped.

“Mrs. Feldheim was very brave. She did not weep, she only prayed, until they killed her. My father was the last. He was buried with all the others, sixty-seven in one grave under the rubber trees on Ernestina Lane. So that was the end of my father.” Angela stopped and drank her ginger beer.

I remembered her father well, a swarthy, gallantmannered Goanese whom I had often talked with at Government House garden parties. We always talked of birds and flowers because one must at such parties, but in spite of synthetic horticulture he had registered in my memory as a man.

I remembered Mrs. Feldheim, a neurotic, undernourished little Jewess who had come to Borneo with her husband to seek refuge from the Nazis, and had buried him in this island, the victim of past brutalities; who had herself survived alone among Asiatics for two years after the other Europeans had been interned —only in the end to meet the bungled sword blow and ill-aimed gun of a little executioner. In life her outstanding quality had been to evoke pity; now in death she commanded respect.

“What happened to your mother then, Angela?”

“Very soon then my mother goes crazy; all females in her family go crazy quite easily. So she must live at the Mad House at Buli Sim Sim. Then my sister Mabel gets tuberculosis, and all she does is cry and cry. Then my sister Mary gets rheumatic fever and she cries and cries.

“When the Japs came in 1942 I got married; it was not good for a girl to be alone then. So I married a Filipino boy, and I have a baby, and the baby is always weak because we have malaria and not enough food. Then the Japs kill my father, and my husband runs away from Sandakan to hide in the jungle.

“Then peace comes, those Australians come, and everybody thinks everything will be happy again. My husband comes in from the jungle and we get another baby, and this baby is sick also because I still have malaria and no medicine and no food and no cloth for clothes. The oil field opens at Seria again and my husband gels a job there and makes some money. But soon he gets sick and loses his job and we come back to Sandakan, and my mother comes out of the Mad House because she is not so crazy now, and she comes to live with me.

“Now my third sister, Elise, who used to work for the timber company, has lost her job because she can type but not good enough. So will you ask Mr. Keith if he would like her to do his typing?”

“Mr. Keith already has too many people who can type but not good enough. However, I’ll tell him.”

5

THE Mixed Blood Club, the rendezvous in town of Asiatics and Eurasians, with European Lady and Gent Patrons, is noted for its large oil-burning refrigerator which supplies cold drinks, and its large radio-gramophone which supplies hot music.

“Are you coming to the Saturday night dance at the Club, Mrs. Keith? I do not ever see you there.”

“No, Angela, my husband will not go out much. I expect that you are going?”

“Yes, I shall be there and dance an exhibition tango with Mr. Minchen of the Singapore boat, if he is in port. We are clever dancers together. I am always popular with boat gentlemen; also with H.M.S. boats after the war when many came in to Sandakan. All petty officers call me Angela like old friends, and some of them still write to me. That is really my hobby now, writing letters to my pen friends. The stamps cost much money, but it is educational for me to have pen friends.”

Pen friendships of English-writing Asiatics are vivid still in my memory of wartime censorship, and I would not have used the word “educational to describe them. I let the conversation drop, in the hope that Angela will leave, but she still has matters to impart to me.

Angela: “I shall have a new dress for the dance. It will be white with sequins purchased per yard by order from Singapore, and I shall wear my twentyfour-dollar shoes. They also are from Singapore with very high heels, and I cannot walk in them.”

“Then how can you dance the tango in them?”

“That is different, and only for a short time. After my tango I remove them. Those shoes will make me taller like my friend of the Singapore boat, Mr. Minchen.”

“Is he a good dancer?”

“Not as good as Mr. John Grant was. When he used to tango with me before the war, everybody admired us greatly. But now he is married. Do you know his wife? She is a beautiful Eurasian girl with skin much, much whiter than yours, and yellow hair all very curling.”

The memory of Mr. John Grant is still green; he was a pre-war Anglo-Saxon product with gallant manners and lusty ways who did his best to go to bed with every pretty girl in town. The only pretty girls here are Asiatics; at home he might just have had fun, but here there is no fun; it’s either intercourse or silence, bed or boredom. The pretty girls liked Mr. Grant, and didn’t like boredom. Soon distracted parents were dispatching seductive daughters to the sticks, or marrying them off to boys of their own skins. Only the arrival of the Japanese with priority contracts, and the internment of Grant, saved interracial sin in the grand manner. Now Grant wears the conjugal yoke in submission; his gallantries live only in love-lore of Sandakan; the girls that he loved liked it, the ones that he missed regret it.

“How are your children now, Angela?”

“They have a little influenza now, and maybe a little tuberculosis. My family all has the T.B.”

“Who takes care of the children when you are away selling handkerchiefs?”

“My mother takes them — she is not so crazy she cannot take care of a few babies.”

“Here is the money for the handkerchiefs and a few dollars for your mother, and two tins of milk for the children. Now I must go back to my work.”

“Thank you. I will tat you some more handkerchiefs soon.”

“Couldn’t you make some children’s dresses instead? There are a number of babies that I would like to get some plain dresses for. I will supply you with the material if you will make them.”

“No, Madam, I am not educated in plain sewing — only in the fancy stitches for making things beautiful.”

With the milk tins in her hand, with the extra tatted handkerchiefs wrapped up in an American comic section, with her red rayon umbrella held over her permanent wave and her expensive imported complexion, with her blue dirndl doodling about her spindle legs, Angela trips down the hill, a fragile figure of elegant incompetence.

And to me the memorial of her kind; of a class of persons here who by ill-birth and limited opportunity, in their incompetence, childishness, shortsightedness, and improvidence, were unable either to settle with the Japs for profit or to win with us. But people who, when we were starving behind Japanese barbed wire, were improvident and shortsighted enough to risk their lives to smuggle food to us; were childish enough to help our prisoners of war escape; and were incompetent enough to face a firing squad in our name.

During the war Angela smuggled food to me in prison camp; today she tats handkerchiefs. This salmon one with azure blue tatting is the tin of milk that came through the Jap guards and barbed wire on Berhala Island, our first prison, “For George from Angela.” This green one with pink is the bunch of bananas which was hidden for us behind the latrine; this blue one with mauve is the dried prawns which arrived for us in the dark and rain. This bilious lavender with puce is the first letter smuggled to me from outside the wire, signed by a brown hand with the words, “We do not forget you, we are your friends.”

With the proceeds of her tatting Angela will buy a new dress with which to dance the tango on some hot night in this hot town. The neon lights of the Mixed Blood Club will shine whitely on the gaudy best dresses of the Asiatic ladies, on the genteel best dresses of the European Lady Patrons, on the starched white cotton of the young Chinese, on the ultramarine shirts of Youth Filipino, on the loose checkered blouses of Muda Malayu — but not on the native of Borneo, who will not be there. Conversation is forced, fraternizing is awkward, Lady Patrons smile resolutely, Gents push to the bar for something stronger to ease their pain, and the gramophone plays.

Sitting barefoot in our house above the town we hear the music; Angela dances the tango, glittering in her sequins, her twenty-four-dollar shoes pinching her feet but adding inches to her stature, the powder on her dark face unbecoming but adding whiteness to her skin. Beyond, the glare of the neon lights up the dark, scented alleys of the town, her crazy mother dandles her sniffling children, her husband loafs, her neighbors gossip, and her house is burgled or burns.

Thus Angela. Yet between Angela and me there is only the accident of birth and opportunity. I write. Angela dances the tango. That is her contribution to graceful living, to cultural advancement, to Western civilization, in this little tearspattered, blood-sodden, stinking-guttered, but not ignoble town.