The little girl clapped her hands and laughed too. A moment later the bird on her shoulder joined in with peal upon peal of loud demonic laughter that filled the glade and echoed among the trees, so that the whole universe seemed to be fairly splitting its sides over the enormous joke of existence.
3
"Well, I'm glad it's all so amusing," a deep voice suddenly commented.
Will Farnaby turned and saw, smiling down at him, a small spare man dressed in European clothes and carrying a black bag. A man, he judged, in his late fifties. Under the wide straw hat the hair was thick and white, and what a strange beaky nose! And the eyes-how incongruously blue in the dark face!
"Grandfather!" he heard Mary Sarojini exclaiming.
The stranger turned from Will to the child.
"What was so funny?" he asked.
"Well," Mary Sarojini began, and paused for a moment to marshal her thoughts. "Well, you see, he was in a boat and there was that storm yesterday and he got wrecked-somewhere down there. So he had to climb up the cliff. And there were some snakes, and he fell down. But luckily there was a tree, so he only had a fright. Which was why he was shivering so hard, so I gave him some bananas and I made him go through it a million times. And then all of a sudden he saw that it wasn't anything to worry about. I mean, it's all over and done with. And that made him laugh. And when he laughed, I laughed. And then the mynah bird laughed."
"Very good," said her grandfather approvingly. "And now," he added, turning back to Will Farnaby, "after the psychological first aid, let's see what can be done for poor old Brother Ass. I'm Dr. Robert MacPhail, by the way. Who are you?"
"His name's Will," said Mary Sarojini before the young man could answer. "And his other name is Far-something."
"Farnaby, to be precise. William Asquith Farnaby. My father, as you might guess, was an ardent Liberal. Even when he was drunk. Especially when he was drunk." He gave vent to a harsh derisive laugh strangely unlike the full-throated merriment which had greeted his discovery that there was really nothing to make a fuss about.
"Didn't you like your father?" Mary Sarojini asked with concern.
"Not as much as I might have," Will answered.
"What he means," Dr. MacPhail explained to the child, "is that he hated his father. A lot of them do," he added parenthetically.
Squatting down on his haunches, he began to undo the straps of his black bag.
"One of our ex-imperialists, I assume," he said over his shoulder to the young man.
"Born in Bloomsbury," Will confirmed.
"Upper class," the doctor diagnosed, "but not a member of the military or county subspecies."
"Correct. My father was a barrister and political journalist. That is, when he wasn't too busy being an alcoholic. My mother, incredible as it may seem, was the daughter of an archdeacon. An archdeacon,'" he repeated, and laughed again as he had laughed over his father's taste for brandy.
Dr. MacPhail looked at him for a moment, then turned his attention once more to the straps.
"When you laugh like that," he remarked in a tone of scientific detachment, "your face becomes curiously ugly."
Taken aback, Will tried to cover his embarrassment with a piece of facetiousness. "It's always ugly," he said.
"On the contrary, in a Baudelairean sort of way it's rather beautiful. Except when you choose to make noises like a hyena. Why do you make those noises?"
"I'm a journalist," Will explained. "Our Special Correspondent, paid to travel about the world and report on the current horrors. What other kind of noise do you expect me to make? Coo-coo? Blah-blah? Marx-Marx?" He laughed again, then brought out one of his well-tried witticisms. "I'm the man who won't take yes for an answer."
"Pretty," said Dr. MacPhail. "Very pretty. But now let's get down to business." Taking a pair of scissors out of his bag, he started to cut away the torn and bloodstained trouser leg that covered Will's injured knee.
Will Farnaby looked up at him and wondered, as he looked, how much of this improbable Highlander was still Scottish and how much Palanese. About the blue eyes and the jutting nose there could be no doubt. But the brown skin, the delicate hands, the grace of movement-these surely came from somewhere considerably south of the Tweed.
"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.