by Talbot Mundy
“Curse and damn my luck!” Smith exploded. “Why the devil is that fat brute taking all this time to bring a doctor?” To have a murder on his hands — a palace murder — with a little less than three months more to go before leaving India forever— “Damn that Rajah! Damn and blast him for a skunk in velvet! Does he think this is Chicago? To avoid a scandal I shall have to accept whatever lies he cares to trump up. But for two-pence, if I had my own way, I would hang him, dammit!”
He had learned of the shooting of Syed-Suraj two hours after the event, through palace spies who brought the information to the back door. He had spent a whole night disbelieving it, inertia suggesting to him that it might, after all, be another rumor cooked up by the Rajah’s enemies. But with the dawn Chullunder Ghose had come — that scoundrelly babu with the know-nothing face and omniscient eyes. The babu had had the story first-hand from the female servant of a woman in the Rajah’s over-full zenana; she had heard and seen the whole thing through a panel in the wall above a bookshelf, where she had been lurking to report the Rajah’s movements for the information of her own neglected mistress.
And the worst of that was that Chullunder Ghose would write his own report to a Department that regarded Smith as less than nobody, but that employed the babu and accepted his information at face value because —
“Oh, dammit! Why do they insist on knowing everything that goes on? Not a chance for a man to use his own discretion! I could smooth this over. I suppose they’ll order me to investigate. God-dammit, and the chances are some idiot will get his lies all mixed up. Then the cat’s out of the bag — and gee- whiz! I had better send my own report in — telegram in code — before the babu gets his off. Confound him, the fat brute has probably wired from rail-head! I had better ask for full discretion, on the ground that all reports are not in, and it may be possible to clear the individual on whom suspicion now rests. That’s it.”
He wrote his telegram, translated it to code, checked and rechecked it, destroyed the original, gave the coded version to his office babu to be signaled and then returned to the veranda.
He was nearly frantic from the bandaged neck boils when a Ford car with a flat tire clattered to the front door, and its abominable honking jarred Smith’s nerves so that a murder seemed like sweetly, reasonable justice. If a snarl and a scowl could kill he would have slain his servant.
“Show them in, you idiot! The library — yes — where else? Do I receive visitors in the bathroom?”
He paced the veranda again a few times, trying to calm himself. But the abominable bull-frog mocked him, a mosquito bit him and he slapped his face to kill it. That jerked his head and sent a stab of pain into his neck that nearly made him cry out.
“Going all to hell!” he muttered. “Eustace, old fellow, take a pull now — steady! — steady!”
He thrust both his fists into the blazer pockets and tried to stroll into the library, remembering that he had donned that ancient blazer merely to impress the damned American, who very likely would expect him to be wearing gold-braid and a cocked hat. Nothing like a little informality with foreigners. It takes em off guard.
“Ah, I’m pleased to meet you, Doctor Copeland. It is very kind, indeed, of you to come and see me. I am only sorry that I had to send a Ford car and a very unofficial babu to escort you. But the Residency staff is quite inadequate for such emergencies.”
“That’s perfectly all right,” said Copeland, setting his bag on the table. He glanced at Chullunder Ghose, and even Smith could see that those two understood each other. Chullunder Ghose answered the glance and then stared out of the window.
“Did you send a telegram from rail-head?” Smith asked.
“No, sir,” said the babu. He had sent one from the city before seeing Smith that morning, in a code more intricate than Smith’s, so he was saved from lying. But he would have lied, if necessary.
“I can see you need a sedative,” said Copeland. “Let me give you that first. As a working rule, it’s not a bad idea to get rid of the discomfort and then see what’s left that needs attention.” He was looking into Smith’s eyes. He felt his pulse without glancing at it. “Tongue, please.” There were no apparent symptoms of the solitary drinking that he half-suspected. “If you’ll swallow these—” He gave him three big, sugar-coated pellets. “Now, if I may have a basin of warm water, we’ll take that bandage off.”
“Is yours what you would call a bedside manner?” Smith asked. He could not resist the impulse to be disagreeable. He hated anyone who dared to take charge. The suggestion to remove the bandage should have come from himself, as the senior. “May I ask how much your fee is for a consultation?”
Copeland stared at him, then caught the babu’s eye again and smiled.
“There will be no charge for the consultation. I will tell you in advance how much the rest of it will cost you when I know what needs doing.”
“And if I let you do it!”
“Quite so”
Then the basin came, and towels. Smith sat with his back to a window and Copeland carefully undid the bandage. Then he wetted the dressing and snatched it off so suddenly that Smith screamed. “Dammit! Oh, my God, that hurt me!”
It had hurt him all right. He put his head between his hands and moaned; but that was eyewash, to explain away the scream; the pain was over in a fraction of a second. Copeland studied the boils.
“They’re bad,” he said, “and they’ll be worse before they’re better. Do you like pain?”
“That’s an idiotic question! What needs doing?”
“I should say you need to wangle me a permit to go tiger-hunting.”
“Quite impossible, my dear sir. You Americans imagine you can do as you jolly well please, whatever government you favor with your disrespect. But I assure you this is one place where you toe the line like other people. You may not go after tiger in Kutchdullub.”
“I will bandage you again,” said Copeland. “Keep still.”
“Do you mean you can do nothing for me?” Smith turned suddenly to look at him. The involuntary movement was a torture worse than pulling off the dressing, and it lasted longer. “Yow! It’s agony, I tell you!”
“No doubt. But it isn’t serious,” said Copeland. “You can stick it out, I reckon. Once a surgeon names his fee it’s scarcely ethical to take less. My fee is a tiger permit — just one tiger.”
“I have no authority to grant one.”
“Then we’re two of a kind,” Copeland answered. “I have no license to practise surgery in the State of Kutchdullub. I have a complimentary license for British-India, but Native States aren’t mentioned.”
Smith smiled, forcing it; he tried hard to recover geniality and decent manners. “Did you see the British flag?” he answered. “Within the walls of this Residency you are on British ground.”
But either somebody had tutored Copeland or he had done his own thinking exceedingly well in advance. “That may be law,” he said, “but it’s a mighty thin excuse for me to bet on. I came here to treat boils, not to split hairs. Do I get a crack at tiger? Come along, I’ll match you! You risk your certificate, and I’ll risk mine!”
“Perfectly unheard of!” Smith exploded. But Chullunder Ghose came over from the other window and, as meek as Moses, sat at Smith’s feet, smiling upward.
“Will your honor kindly send for secret correspondence file and study letter number O-A-7, date of August 30th?” he asked. “I saw a copy of it. Same applies to this case.”
“You may go to the devil,” said Smith. But his memory stirred uneasy thought. Official secret correspondence was about as rare as fresh eggs for his breakfast, so he could hardly forget that letter. But the babu quoted from it — one whole paragraph:
“In view of all the circumstances, it is therefore urged upon all acting representatives of H.M. British-India Foreign Office to avoid any but the most discreet and only absolutely necessary interference at the courts of Native States. It is important that the public should not be enco
uraged, at this juncture, to believe that Native Princes are in any danger of removal from the throne or of loss of prerogatives; since obviously, if that impression should gain ground in an already heated and disturbed condition of affairs that may be likened to a major crisis, the authority of Princes might be challenged by their subjects, with results that it is difficult to foresee.”
Smiling at him, confidently impudent, but curiously oozing a sort of wise benevolence, the babu paused. He had done with quoting. Now for some diplomacy.
“The Devil,” he said, “quotes scripture, sahib. But your honor’s humble servant, this babu, is devilishly compos mentis when it comes to stern realities. I think your honor would appreciate an O.M., or perhaps a C.S.I., before retirement? Same is not impossible.”
“Curse your damned impertinence!” Smith answered. “Do you mean you sell ’em?”
“Sahib, no. I wangle ’em! A decoration is a public honor worn by diplomats who know enough to trust a totally dishonorable person in a tight place. This is tight place — very. Verb. sap. Self am a dishonorable person; nobody could easily imagine me bedecorated with a star and ribbon. Reprimands are my meat; I enjoy same. I was reprimanded — and received a pay-raise incidentally — for getting the goods on the Afghan minister; but it was General Aloysius McCann who got the decoration. General McCann had hives; they made him as indignant as a hornet in a big drum. He threatened me with mayhem. But we saved an international imbroglio, and he got decorated for it. Now you! Why not be a properly bejeweled personage at your retirement three months hence? And is the neck not painful?”
“Dammit, yes!” Smith answered, grateful for the opportunity to answer yes. Dignity did not permit him, in the presence of a damned American, to traffic for a ribbon. Humor beamed forth from the babu’s mild eyes. He understood perfectly.
“Let us suppose that you make a mistake,” he suggested. “Then we lose what? Nothing! You retire in three months — pension check as regular as Hawkesey’s presentation watch! And you can blame me, who am too notoriously unrespectable to dare to answer! But suppose it comes off — !”
“What do you propose to do?” Smith asked him.
“Ah! If I myself knew, I might argue with myself, and that is fatal. And if you knew, you might try to educate me, which is much worse.”
“But you dare to try to educate me!”
“God forbid it! I propose that you should give this eleemosynary eye- enthusiast a cagey sort of letter which his Yankee optimism can interpret into an authority from you to shoot a tiger on the Rajah’s territory.”
“I can’t do it.”
“He can make boils painless!” said the babu. With an angry gesture Smith repudiated the suggestion that his personal discomfort influenced him in any way whatever. But the movement almost made him yell with agony. He had to wait a minute before he could speak. He devoted the minute to furious thought.
“If you should tell me, on your honor,” he said then, “that you require this for the doctor for the purposes of C.I.D. I could stretch a point then. But I would require such an assurance from you.”
“Sahib, I assure you on my honor that I need it.”
“And your honor rooted in dishonor stands!” Smith answered. He could not resist the obvious retort; he never could; no more than he could understand why so few friendships had graced his career. “It’s a very risky course to take. I know nothing of Doctor Copeland. However, I might give him a note to His Highness asking for permission for him to go and shoot one tiger. There would be no obligation to present the letter to His Highness. He might possibly interpret it as—”
“He will do so!” said the babu. “Will your honor kindly write it?”
Major Eustace Smith, as desperately nervous as a schoolboy cheating at examinations, almost tiptoed to his desk. He wrote on Residency paper, with a quill pen, as illegibly as self-respect would let him — blotted it, which made it more illegible — inclosed it in an envelope, then crossed the room and handed it to Copeland.
“That’s your fee in advance,” he remarked, “but I want it clearly understood between us that I haven’t given you permission to go tiger-shooting. I have merely asked His Highness whether he would care to give you that permission.”
“It’s as good as Greek to me,” said Copeland. “I’m taking my cue from Chullunder Ghose. A Rajah and a circus amount to about the same thing in my—”
“In your ignorance!” Smith snapped back. “Now, will you be good enough to earn your fee, sir?”
Stanley Copeland went to work on him with pitifully skillful hands, a local anaesthetic and a lancet that had learned to stab as accurately as a sculptor’s chisel. If he lacked a bedside manner he redeemed that by precision and the confidence that he had bought with hard work. The relief on Smith’s face, when the job was over and the patient lying on the couch, was almost comical; his character, the habitual mask relaxed, leered upward loose-lipped and selfish.
“Yours is an easy way to earn a living, isn’t it?” he volunteered. “In New York I suppose you’d charge a hundred dollars a boil for play that’s as easy to you as cutting toenails.”
“No, in New York I would send you to a Christian Scientist,” said Copeland, “for a dose of divine intelligence. Take these in water — once every two hours, twice; then every four hours. Have you someone who can change the dressing once a day? Very well, I’ll look in on you on my way back to the border. If anything goes wrong meanwhile, just cross the border to the Sikh dispensary — Kater Singh, his name is — he has no diploma, but he’s O.K.”
“And we thank you,” said the babu. “Have we now your honor’s leave to give ourselves an absence treatment?”
“Certainly, yes. Go to hell!” said Smith. “You make me want to get my gun and—”
“Good-by,” said the babu.
CHAPTER 13. “Let us hope you have no conscience”
A spirit of mischief — nothing else whatever — actuated Copeland. He was coming up for air, and neither principalities nor powers — least of all a sense of reverence for stuffed shirts or responsibility to dead tradition — controlled his behavior. For months on end — particularly for the last ten days, he had been seeing humanity stripped, in the raw, with its weaknesses upward. His regard for it was limited to sympathy, without much of the sauce of admiration; and at the moment, as long as the mood should last, whoever failed to make him smile was no one, but whoever gave him belly-laughs was somebody. In plain words, he was tired out, and Chullunder Ghose had dawned on him like the rising sun at the end of a long, dark night.
The tire was still flat; nobody had dreamed of fixing it. Another tire went presently. The babu drove serenely on the rims; he seemed unconscious of the jolting. Also, he seemed to believe that the horn was part of the propelling mechanism; from the Residency gate until they reached the city he scarcely stopped using it. There was an elephant in mid-street; it was half a mile ahead when they saw it first; it was still in mid-street when they caught up; it remained there; and the more the babu honked, the less inclined it seemed to get out of the way. The street grew narrower, and the crowds were out because the rain had let up for a few hours; it was a sullen swarm, touchy from close confinement indoors, and averse to making room for anyone. The elephant grew more and more afraid of the infernal noise behind him; the mahout, afraid of what might happen, concentrated on his mount and never once glanced backward; but the babu kept on honking.
“For a C.I.D. man, I should say you advertise,” said Copeland. “If I was the elephant I’d face about and squash us like a pat of wheat-cake. What’s your hurry?”
“That is the Rajah’s elephant. Observe the mud on him. And there is Hawkesey’s luggage in the howdah, but no Hawkesey. I must talk with the mahout.”
“You need a telephone. Jee-rusalem, this is a crazy city! What’s that show ahead of us? A circus?”
It was Kali’s priesthood, reawakening the public consciousness of death by holding a procession through the streets. They ha
d the image of the goddess Kali on a huge float drawn by twelve white oxen. Conch-horns blared amid a jamboree of cymbals, drums of lizard-skin, and jangling brass bells. Drawn towards it down a dozen streets, like water towards a central drain, the multitude roared — surged — sweated — beat its breasts and grew delirious with frenzy. Those in front of the procession lay to let the sacred oxen trample them, and had to be prodded away by the priests’ sharp- ended sticks — a substituted pain, symbolical of the invited death and less embarrassing to the temporal power that prefers to gather taxes from the living rather than support the orphans of the dead.
A Ford horn honking at his rump, and all that din ahead of him, the elephant chose hysteria as the only consolation left. He screamed. He raised his ears. He did a trample-dance in time to the incessant drumming of the ankus on his aching skull. And then he charged into the crowd like three insulted tons of dark-gray death endeavoring to slay them all at once.
“Oh, hell! I go to work again,” said Copeland. But Chullunder Ghose ignored that. He had left off honking. He had eyes for nothing but the howdah.
The disturbance had awakened someone. Out from under a tarpaulin someone crawled who had his head through a hole in a blanket and a decorated sheaf- knife hanging at his loins. He gave a glance at the catastrophe, then seized the howdah rail. He almost flung himself over the elephant’s rump — a whirl of naked legs and lurid tartan. But he caught its tail. He streamed out like a flying devil cast forth from a monster’s flaming entrails. Then he let go suddenly, fell feet first, tumbled backwards, did a perfect somersault and landed on the radiator of the Ford.