563296589345

III
Flory turned to the left outside the Club gate and started down the bazaar road, under the shade of the
peepul trees. A hundred yards away there was a swirl of music, where a squad of Military
Policemen, lank Indians in greenish khaki, were marching back to their lines with a Gurkha boy
playing the bagpipes ahead of them. Flory was going to see Dr Veraswami. The doctor’s house was a
long bungalow of earth-oiled wood, standing on piles, with a large unkempt garden which adjoined
that of the Club. The back of the house was towards the road, for it faced the hospital, which lay
between it and the river.
As Flory entered the compound there was a frightened squawk of women and a scurrying within the
house. Evidently he had narrowly missed seeing the doctor’s wife. He went round to the front of the
house and called up to the veranda:
‘Doctor! Are you busy? May I come up?’
The doctor, a little black and white figure, popped from within the house like a jack-in-the-box. He
hurried to the veranda rail, exclaiming effusively:
‘If you may come up! Of course, of course, come up this instant! Ah, Mr Flory, how very delightful
to see you! Come up, come up. What drink will you have? I have whisky, beer, vermouth and other
European liquors. Ah, my dear friend, how I have been pining for some cultured conversation!’
The doctor was a small, black, plump man with fuzzy hair and round, credulous eyes. He wore
steel-rimmed spectacles, and he was dressed in a badly-fitting white drill suit, with trousers bagging
concertina-like over clumsy black boots. His voice was eager and bubbling with a hissing of the s’s.
As Flory came up the steps the doctor popped back to the end of the veranda and rummaged in a big
tin ice-chest, rapidly pulling out bottles of all descriptions. The veranda was wide and dark, with low
eaves from which baskets of fern hung, making it seem like a cave behind a waterfall of sunlight. It
was furnished with long, cane-bottomed chairs made in the jail, and at one end there was a bookcase
containing a rather unappetising little library, mainly books of essays, of the Emerson-Carlyle-
Stevenson type. The doctor, a great reader, liked his books to have what he called a ‘moral meaning’.
‘Well, doctor,’ said Flory–the doctor had meanwhile thrust him into a long chair, pulled out the legrests
so that he could lie down, and put cigarettes and beer within reach. ‘Well, doctor, and how are
things? How’s the British Empire? Sick of the palsy as usual?’
‘Aha, Mr Flory, she iss very low, very low! Grave complications setting in. Septicaemia,
peritonitis and paralysis of the ganglia. We shall have to call in the specialists, I fear. Aha!’