They hope, of course, to recover the baby. But they never succeed. All that a revivalist can do is to siphon up a little of the dirty water. Which, in due course, has to be thrown out again. And so on, indefinitely. It’s really too boring and, as Dr. Andrew came at last to realize, wholly unnecessary. Meanwhile here he was, in the first flush of his new-found freedom. Excited, exultant—but quietly excited, exultant behind that appearance of grave and courteous detachment which he habitually presented to the world.”
“What about his father?” Will asked. “Did they have a battle?”
“No battle. Andrew didn’t like battles. He was the sort of man who always goes his own way, but doesn’t advertise the fact, doesn’t argue with people who prefer another road. The old man was never given the opportunity of putting on his Jeremiah act. Andrew kept his mouth shut about Hume and La Mettrie and went through the traditional motions. But when his training was finished, he just didn’t come home. Instead, he went to London and signed up, as surgeon and naturalist, on HMS Melampus, bound for the South Seas with orders to chart, survey, collect specimens and protect Protestant missionaries and British interests. The cruise of the Melampus lasted for a full three years. They called at Tahiti, they spent two months on Samoa and a month in the Marquesas group. After Perth, the islands seemed like Eden—but an Eden innocent unfortunately not only of Calvinism and capitalism and industrial slums, but also of Shakespeare and Mozart, also of scientific knowledge and logical thinking.
It was paradise, but it wouldn’t do, it wouldn’t do. They sailed on. They visited Fiji and the Carolines and the Solomons. They charted the northern coast of New Guinea and, in Borneo, a party went ashore, trapped a pregnant orangutan and climbed to the top of Mount Kinabalu. Then followed a week at Panay, a fortnight in the Mergui Archipelago. After which they headed west to the Andamans and from the Andamans to the mainland of India. While ashore, my great-grandfather was thrown from his horse and broke his right leg. The captain of the Melampus found another surgeon and sailed for home. Two months later, as good as new, Andrew was practicing medicine at Madras. Doctors were scarce in those days and sickness fearfully common. The young man began to prosper. But life among the merchants and officials of the presidency was oppressively boring.
It was an exile, but an exile without any of the compensations of exile, an exile without adventure or strangeness, a banishment merely to the provinces, to the tropical equivalent of Swansea or Huddersfield. But still he resisted the temptation to book a passage on the next homebound ship. If he stuck it out for five years, he would have enough money to buy a good practice in Edinburgh—no, in London, in the West End. The future beckoned, rosy and golden. There would be a wife, preferably with auburn hair and a modest competence. There would be four or five children—happy, unwhipped and atheistic. And his practice would grow, his patients would be drawn from circles ever more exalted. Wealth, reputation, dignity, even a knighthood. Sir Andrew MacPhail stepping out of his brougham in Belgrave Square.
The great Sir Andrew, physician to the Queen. Summoned to St. Petersburg to operate on the Grand Duke, to the Tuileries, to the Vatican, to the Sublime Porte. Delightful phantasies! But the facts, as it turned out, were to be far more interesting. One fine morning a brown-skinned stranger called at the surgery. In halting English he gave an account of himself. He was from Pala and had been commanded by His Highness, the Raja, to seek out and bring back with him a skillful surgeon from the West. The rewards would be princely. Princely, he insisted. There and then Dr. Andrew accepted the invitation. Partly, of course, for the money; but mostly because he was bored, because he needed a change, needed a taste of adventure. A trip to the Forbidden Island—the lure was irresistible.”
“And remember,” Susila interjected, “in those days Pala was much more forbidden than it is now.”
“So you can imagine how eagerly young Dr. Andrew jumped at the opportunity now offered by the Raja’s ambassador. Ten days later his ship dropped anchor off the north coast of the forbidden island. With his medicine chest, his bag of instruments, and a small tin trunk containing his clothes and a few indispensable books, he was rowed in an outrigger canoe through the pounding surf, carried in a palanquin through the streets of Shivapuram and set down in the inner courtyard of the royal palace. His royal patient was eagerly awaiting him. Without being given time to shave or change his clothes, Dr. Andrew was ushered into the presence—the pitiable presence of a small brown man in his early forties, terribly emaciated under his rich brocades, his face so swollen and distorted as to be barely human, his voice reduced to a hoarse whisper. Dr. Andrew examined him. From the maxillary antrum, where it had its roots, a tumor had spread in all directions.
It had filled the nose, it had pushed up into the socket of the right eye, it had half blocked the throat. Breathing had become difficult, swallowing acutely painful, and sleep an impossibility—for whenever he dropped off, the patient would choke and wake up frantically struggling for air. Without radical surgery, it was obvious, the Raja would be dead within a couple of months. With radical surgery, much sooner. Those were the good old days, remember—the good old days of septic operations without benefit of chloroform. Even in the most favorable circumstances surgery was fatal to one patient out of four. Where conditions were less propitious, the odds declined—fifty-fifty, thirty to seventy, zero to a hundred. In the present case the prognosis could hardly have been worse. The patient was already weak and the operation would be long, difficult and excruciatingly painful.
There was a good chance that he would die on the operating table and a virtual certainty that, if he survived, it would only be to die a few days later of blood poisoning. But if he should die, Dr. Andrew now reflected, what would be the fate of the alien surgeon who had killed a king? And, during the operation, who would hold the royal patient down while he writhed under the knife? Which of his servants or courtiers would have the strength of mind to disobey, when the master screamed in agony or positively commanded them to let him go?
“Perhaps the wisest thing would be to say, here and now, that the case was hopeless, that he could do nothing, and ask to be sent back to Madras forthwith. Then he looked again at the sick man. Through the grotesque mask of his poor deformed face the Raja was looking at him intently—looking with the eyes of a condemned criminal begging the judge for mercy. Touched by the appeal, Dr. Andrew gave him a smile of encouragement and all at once, as he patted the thin hand, he had an idea. It was absurd, crackbrained, thoroughly discreditable; but all the same, all the same…
“Five years before, he suddenly remembered, while he was still at Edinburgh, there had been an article in The Lancet, an article denouncing the notorious Professor Elliotson for his advocacy of animal magnetism. Elliotson had had the effrontery to talk of painless operations performed on patients in the mesmeric trance.
“The man was either a gullible fool or an unscrupulous knave. The so-called evidence for such nonsense was manifestly worthless. It was all sheer humbug, quackery, downright fraud—and so on for six columns of righteous indignation. At the time—for he was still full of La Mettrie and Hume and Cabanis—Dr. Andrew had read the article with a glow of orthodox approval. After which he had forgotten about the very existence of animal magnetism. Now, at the Raja’s bedside, it all came back to him—the mad professor, the magnetic passes, the amputations without pain, the low death rate and the rapid recoveries. Perhaps, after all, there might be something in it.
He was deep in these thoughts when, breaking a long silence, the sick man spoke to him. From a young sailor who had deserted his ship at Rendang-Lobo and somehow made his way across the Strait, the Raja had learned to speak English with remarkable fluency, but also, in faithful imitation of his teacher, with a strong Cockney accent. That Cockney accent,” Dr. MacPhail repeated with a little laugh. “It turns up again and again in my great-grandfather’s memoirs. There was something, to him, inexpressibly improper about a king who spoke like Sam Weller. And in this case the impropriety was more than merely social. Besides being a king, the Raja was a man of intellect and the most exquisite refinement; a man, not only of deep religious convictions (any crude oaf can have deep religious convictions), but also of deep religious experience and spiritual insight.
That such a man should express himself in Cockney was something that an Early Victorian Scotsman who had read The Pickwick Papers could never get over. Nor, in spite of all my great-grandfather’s tactful coaching, could
