“Were you born here?” he asked.
The doctor nodded affirmatively. “At Shivapuram, on the day of Queen Victoria’s funeral.”
There was a final click of the scissors, and the trouser leg fell away, exposing the knee. “Messy,” was Dr. MacPhail’s verdict after a first intent scrutiny. “But I don’t think there’s anything too serious.” He turned to his granddaughter. “I’d like you to run back to the station and ask Vijaya to come here with one of the other men. Tell them to pick up a stretcher at the infirmary.”
Mary Sarojini nodded and, without a word, rose to her feet and hurried away across the glade.
Will looked after the small figure as it receded—the red skirt swinging from side to side, the smooth skin of the torso glowing rosily golden in the sunlight.
“You have a very remarkable granddaughter,” he said to Dr. MacPhail.
“Mary Sarojini’s father,” said the doctor after a little silence, “was my eldest son. He died four months ago—a mountain-climbing accident.”
Will mumbled his sympathy, and there was another silence.
Dr. MacPhail uncorked a bottle of alcohol and swabbed his hands.
“This is going to hurt a bit,” he warned. “I’d suggest that you listen to that bird.” He waved a hand in the direction of the dead tree, to which, after Mary Sarojini’s departure, the mynah had returned.
“Listen to him closely, listen discriminatingly. It’ll keep your mind off the discomfort.”
Will Farnaby listened. The mynah had gone back to its first theme.
“Attention,” the articulate oboe was calling. “Attention.”
“Attention to what?” he asked, in the hope of eliciting a more enlightening answer than the one he had received from Mary Sarojini.
“To attention,” said Dr. MacPhail.
“Attention to attention?”
“Of course.”
“Attention,” the mynah chanted in ironical confirmation.
“Do you have many of these talking birds?”
“There must be at least a thousand of them flying about the island. It was the Old Raja’s idea. He thought it would do people good. Maybe it does, though it seems rather unfair to the poor mynahs. Fortunately, however, birds don’t understand pep talks. Not even St. Francis’. Just imagine,” he went on, “preaching sermons to perfectly good thrushes and goldfinches and chiff-chaffs! What presumption! Why couldn’t he have kept his mouth shut and let the birds preach to him? And now,” he added in another tone, “you’d better start listening to our friend in the tree. I’m going to clean this thing up.”
“Attention.”
“Here goes.”
The young man winced and bit his lip.
“Attention. Attention. Attention.”
Yes, it was quite true. If you listened intently enough, the pain wasn’t so bad.
“Attention. Attention…”
“How you ever contrived to get up that cliff,” said Dr. MacPhail, as he reached for the bandage, “I cannot conceive.”
Will managed to laugh. “Remember the beginning of Erewhon,” he said. “‘As luck would have it, Providence was on my side.’”
From the further side of the glade came the sound of voices. Will turned his head and saw Mary Sarojini emerging from between the trees, her red skirt swinging as she skipped along. Behind her, naked to the waist and carrying over his shoulder the bamboo poles and rolled-up canvas of a light stretcher, walked a huge bronze statue of a man, and behind the giant came a slender, dark-skinned adolescent in white shorts.
“This is Vijaya Bhattacharya,” said Dr. MacPhail as the bronze statue approached. “Vijaya is my assistant.”
“In the hospital?”
Dr. MacPhail shook his head. “Except in emergencies,” he said, “I don’t practice any more. Vijaya and I work together at the Agricultural Experimental Station. And Murugan Mailendra” (he waved his hand in the direction of the dark-skinned boy) “is with us temporarily, studying soil science and plant breeding.”
Vijaya stepped aside and, laying a large hand on his companion’s shoulder, pushed him forward. Looking up into that beau tiful, sulky young face, Will suddenly recognized, with a start of surprise, the elegantly tailored youth he had met, five days before, at Rendang-Lobo, had driven with in Colonel Dipa’s white Mercedes all over the island. He smiled, he opened his mouth to speak, then checked himself. Almost imperceptibly but quite unmistakenly, the boy had shaken his head. In his eyes Will saw an expression of anguished pleading. His lips moved soundlessly. “Please,” he seemed to be saying, “please…” Will readjusted his face.
“How do you do, Mr. Mailendra,” he said in a tone of casual formality.
Murugan looked enormously relieved. “How do you do,” he said, and made a little bow.
Will looked round to see if the others had noticed what had happened. Mary Sarojini and Vijaya, he saw, were busy with the stretcher and the doctor was repacking his black bag. The little comedy had been played without an audience. Young Murugan evidently had his reasons for not wanting it to be known that he had been in Rendang. Boys will be boys. Boys will even be girls. Colonel Dipa had been more than fatherly towards his young protégé, and towards the Colonel, Murugan had been a good deal more than filial—he had been positively adoring. Was it merely hero worship, merely a schoolboy’s admiration for the strong man who had carried out a successful revolution, liquidated the opposition, and installed himself as dictator? Or were other feelings involved? Was Murugan playing Antinoüs to this black-mustached Hadrian?
Well, if that was how he felt about middle-aged military gangsters, that was his privilege. And if the gangster liked pretty boys, that was his. And perhaps, Will went on to reflect, that was why Colonel Dipa had refrained from making a formal introduction. “This is Muru” was all he had said when the boy was ushered into the presidential office. “My young friend Muru,” and he had risen, had put his arm around the boy’s shoulders, had led him to the sofa and sat down beside him. “May I drive the Mercedes?” Murugan had asked. The dictator had smiled indulgently and nodded his sleek black head. And that was another reason for thinking that more than mere friendliness was involved in that curious relationship. At the wheel of the Colonel’s sports car Murugan was a maniac. Only an infatuated lover would have entrusted himself, not to mention his guest, to such a chauffeur.
On the flat between Rendang-Lobo and the oil fields the speedometer had twice touched a hundred and ten; and worse, much worse, was to follow on the mountain road from the oil fields to the copper mines. Chasms yawned, tires screeched round corners, water buffaloes emerged from bamboo thickets a few feet ahead of the car, ten-ton lorries came roaring down on the wrong side of the road. “Aren’t you a little nervous?” Will had ventured to ask. But the gangster was pious as well as infatuated. “If one knows that one is doing the will of Allah—and I do know it, Mr. Farnaby—there is no excuse for nervousness. In those circumstances, nervousness would be blasphemy.” And as Murugan swerved to avoid yet another buffalo, he opened his gold cigarette case and offered Will a Balkan Sobranje.
“Ready,” Vijaya called.
Will turned his head and saw the stretcher lying on the ground beside him.
“Good!” said Dr. MacPhail. “Let’s lift him onto it. Carefully. Carefully…”
A minute later the little procession was winding its way up the narrow path between the trees. Mary Sarojini was in the van, her grandfather brought up the rear and, between them, came Murugan and Vijaya at either end of the stretcher.
From his moving bed Will Farnaby looked up through the green darkness as though from the floor of a living sea. Far overhead, near the surface, there was a rustling among the leaves, a noise of monkeys. And now it was a dozen hornbills hopping, like the figments of a disordered imagination, through a cloud of orchids.
“Are you comfortable?” Vijaya asked, bending solicitously to look into his face.
Will smiled back at him.
“Luxuriously comfortable,” he said.
“It isn’t far,” the other went on reassuringly. “We’ll be there in a few minutes.”
“Where’s ‘there’?”
“The Experimental Station. It’s like Rothamsted. Did you ever go to Rothamsted when you were in England?”
Will had heard of it, of course, but never seen the place.
“It’s been going for more than a hundred years,” Vijaya went on.
“A hundred and eighteen, to be precise,” said Dr. MacPhail. “Lawes and Gilbert started their work on fertilizers in 1843. One of their pupils came out here in the early fifties to help my grandfather get our station going. Rothamsted in the tropics—that was the idea. In the tropics and for the tropics.”
There was a lightening of the green gloom and a moment later the litter emerged from the forest into the full glare of tropical sunshine. Will raised his head and looked about him. They were not far from the floor of an immense amphitheater. Five hundred feet below stretched a wide plain, checkered with fields, dotted with clumps of trees and clustered houses. In the other direction the slopes climbed up and up, thousands of feet towards a semicircle of mountains. Terrace above green or golden terrace, from the plain to the crenelated wall of peaks, the rice paddies followed the contour lines, emphasizing every swell and recession of the slope with what seemed a deliberate and artful intention. Nature here was no longer merely natural; the landscape had been composed, had been reduced to its geometrical essences, and rendered, by what in a painter would have been a miracle of virtuosity, in terms of these sinuous lines, these streaks of pure bright color.
“What were you doing in Rendang?” Dr. Robert asked, breaking a long silence.
“Collecting materials for a piece on the new regime.”
“I
