Caravans By Night Part 8

The silhouette ceased wailing long enough to quaver: "Dakktar Sahib!"

The Englishman, his eyes now accustomed to the gloom, strode over to a thong-strung bed and peered down at the form stretched upon it. Unable to see clearly, he struck a match. The tiny flare flickered upon bare brown skin.... Trent swore.

"Stop that d.a.m.ned nonsense!" he commanded. "Chatterjee, you've had some infernal _hakim_ here again--against my orders!"

"My little Ratanamma, dove of my bosom, is dead!" wailed the man.

"Did you give her the medicine I left?"

"Yes, Dakktar Sahib! It was your medicine that killed her. The _hakim_ said so."

Trent swore again. "I've a notion to report you to the Karnal Sahib and have you taken up! You old murderer! Didn't you know better than to let some filthy, stinking _hakim_ burn her stomach with a hot iron?"

The native was wailing again.

"Listen to me, Chatterjee," said Trent sternly, gripping the man's shoulder. "Who did this?"

"Your medicine, Dakktar Sahib!"

Trent shook him roughly. "Will you answer me--or...."

"Your medicine, Dakktar Sahib!" insisted the man.

Trent released him, realizing the futility of pressing the question.

"Very well. I'll report you to the Karnal Sahib and he'll have you strung up by your toes!"

He left the house abruptly--followed by feverish, glowing eyes.

Out of Meera he rode, past the temple on the river bank and along the jungle-lined road toward Gaya.

Trent was angry. But his face gave no indication of it. Twenty-three years under a tropical sun (add the ten years at school in Britain and you'll have his age) had baked his skin to a leather brown, and a third of that time spent in the army had taught him that impa.s.sivity is man's chief advantage--a citadel against the aggressive. He had, in the vernacular of the times, a "poker face"--the mask of those who share their secrets with few. In either mufti or khaki he was not particularly handsome, and this evening, after a day of work in viscid heat, he was almost ugly. Dust was ingrained into his skin, like an ocher pigment; his throat and brows were moist with perspiration. Yet there was about him something arresting and vital--a challenging strength that p.r.o.nounced him a man's man. And he was. He talked with men; ate with men; lived with men; understood men. Scales that dip into earth-dust and swing again to regions of exquisite idealism--the eternal weight and counter-weight of Self. That was how he defined them. And his definitions were usually metaphors. An idiosyncrasy. Give him a chair in a dim room with one of Beethoven's sonatas swelling in throat-gripping chords, or a pipe and congenial darkness somewhere close to the stars, and he was in his prime element.

As for women.... That there had been one--one or more--at some time in his life, n.o.body who knew him doubted; but it was the general opinion at Gaya and thereabouts that he was as little concerned with women as with anything else that habited the planet. Envious subordinates hinted that at one time or other he had run afoul some feminine reef. When these remarks drifted to Trent (and such remarks always do) he only smiled, for he had a generous supply of humor packed away under his impa.s.sivity.

It was never known that he deliberately avoided women; it appeared that he simply accepted them as a matter of form, inevitable as waves on a sea, and sometimes as disastrous.

Only Richard Manlove, also an army doctor, who shared his bungalow, had penetrated beyond the outer-rampart of his seeming seclusiveness--"d.i.c.ky" Manlove whom Trent first saw out in dead Mesopotamia. Their friends.h.i.+p was a popular topic of discussion on warm afternoons when feminine Gaya gathered to perspire under one common punkah. So different, you know.... Young "d.i.c.ky"--a delicious boy ...

and the major--oh, rather a decent chap, a human manual of Hindustani and all those other perfectly impossible languages, but ... well, it's so disconcerting not to know what a man is thinking, isn't it?

Thus feminine Gaya catalogued him, and thus he appeared--immobile--this late afternoon as he rode out of Meera.

His anger died as he trotted on, and by the time he came within view of his bungalow, built on the flank of one of Gaya's hills, he was watching, in a whimsical, almost detached manner, the fireflies dance and reel in the dusk. When he drew nearer, he saw a figure in a white dress leave his compound, a figure that paused at the diverging roads not far from the bungalow, and, after a slight hesitation, chose the branch in his direction. Instantly he indexed her as a stranger; no female resident would think of using the isolated Meera road after dusk.

She wore a pith helmet with a veil. The veil was lifted, but as he approached, she lowered it--curiously enough, he thought. He was certain she had come from his compound; therefore, when she was within a few yards, he drew rein.

"Your pardon...." as he lifted his helmet. "Do you wish to see me? I'm Major Trent."

She halted, resting one hand upon a tree-trunk. He caught the glint of a bracelet on her white arm, and, being a man to notice details, observed a design worked in heavy relief upon it--a design that, in the half-tone of the early night, was almost indistinguishable.

"No," came the answer from under the veil, in a voice with a soft, thrilling timbre. "No."

He was still studying the bracelet out of the corner of his eye, and he perceived that the intricate workmans.h.i.+p represented a king-cobra; its hood was lifted in bizarre relief.... A barbaric ornament for a white woman to wear, he thought.

"But, really," he persisted, "it isn't quite safe for you to go along this road. Beasts, you know."

A pause. He saw the dark pools of her eyes upon him.

"Thank you," she murmured. "I thought I was going to the dak bungalow."

With that she turned and moved away in the direction of the metalled main highway.

"Now, that's queer," he observed to himself, staring after her. "Anybody with even bad sight could see that this road...." Certainly she was at the compound gate. Why had she falsified?

He removed his helmet and furrowed his hair--a characteristic gesture; then, still watching the woman, he jerked the reins and trotted toward the bungalow.

2

A native servant in a white cotton _chuddah_ and turban switched on the light in the living-room as Trent entered.

"Has Manlove Sahib come in, Ganeesh?" asked the Englishman.

"No, Dakktar Sahib."

Trent placed his helmet upon the table and sank into a chair.

"I sha'n't want anything to eat, so you may as well go. If Manlove Sahib hasn't eaten, he can go to the barracks."

As the native quitted the room, Trent, at a sudden thought, called after him.

"Ganeesh," he said, as his servant reappeared, "has anyone been here this afternoon?"

"No, Dakktar Sahib."

"Didn't a lady call a few minutes ago?"

The man answered in the negative.

"Hmm. Very well. That's all."

Still puzzling over the strange woman, he removed a pipe and a sack of tobacco from his s.h.i.+rt pocket, and when he had filled the bowl he lighted it. For several minutes he drew upon the amber stem, looking abstractedly into the whorls of smoke; then he picked up a brown volume from the table and opened it at a leaf that was turned under.

Here was another trait that Gaya had not discovered. Frequently when he was tired he turned to poetry--sometimes to books on the art-treasures and ancient lore of India, Indo-China and China--for relaxation.

His eyes followed these lines:

Star of the South that now through orient mist, At nightfall off Tampico or Belize, Greetest the sailor, rising from those seas Where first in me, a fond romanticist, The tropic sunset's bloom on cloudy piles Cast out industrious cares with dreams of fabulous isles.

He rather fancied that pa.s.sage. Fabulous isles. His brain toyed with the thought. For, although he walked down among mortals, sheathing himself in indifference and impa.s.sivity, he kept, in secret, a ladder to the stars--a concession to return at will to a guarded kingdom of his youth, the dominion of Romance and Adventure. He would have dwelt in this kingdom, secluded from earth, but for a thorn that was fastened deep within him. This thorn had p.r.i.c.ked him since that period of adolescence when first visions and aspirations stirred in his boyish brain and set him to dreaming of the future. It had goaded him relentlessly into achievement, against the will of his adventurous spirit.