The Administrator stepped out of the writing-room quickly, through the ever-open window, tripped, and nearly fell headlong on the stoep. He looked down, as he caught the vine-clad pillar, to see what had nearly wrought his destruction. A man, a half-caste, lay huddled at his feet, in an attitude so like death that a stranger would have been deceived. Evelyn Gregory had seen that death-sleep before; he bent down closely, pushed the man over with his foot, and sniffed the heavy breath that came every thirty seconds or so through the open mouth. Then he stood up again, erect, at his full six feet three inches, and looked across the gardens of Government House, that seemed to drift away into glades of fainter and fainter colour, until it was only a green glow. His active eyes may have seen the vegetation, but they certainly saw something else—a picture inside his head rather than outside. After a second he raised his voice and called.
Two Arabs answered the Administrator’s summons, on the principle that Saadat el basha (his Excellency) usually demanded strenuous tasks too heavy for one man. Gregory looked with steady, lidless eyes from them to the apparently lifeless body, and pointed to it with a curt gesture.
“Take that away,” he said in his horribly under-breathed voice, “and lay him somewhere to recover. He is not dead—he has been smoking ganja.” He paused, looked down at the helpless body, and added three words whose bestial insult they could understand—“Ya ibn kelb!” (This is not even Malagasy—it is Arabic, and it conveys that your parentage was not all it might be with advantage to yourself.)
The Arabs lifted the half-caste native, and carried him away out of range of Gregory’s savage eyes. He was a sais in their phrase—a Zanzalaky or pony-boy in Key Island, and attached to the Government House stables. Why he had crawled on to the stoep in the state he was when he had fallen asleep they did not ask. It was a disaster sent by Allah, and would bring him the kourbash, which was their name for Gregory’s shambok.
The Administrator continued his interrupted way, walked off the stoep, and was half across the grass when he spied a pony trotting up the drive, and turned aside to speak to the rider. No man trotted in such heat save one in Key Island, and that was the O.C.T. Gregory turned back with him to the house.
“Just the man I wanted!” he said. “I was coming down to the club to look for you. Come in here.”
Churton threw his leg over his pony’s neck, polo fashion, and dropped off, a groom appearing as if by magic to take the animal. There were so many servants always waiting on noiseless bare feet at Government House that it was rarely necessary to shout as Gregory had done.
“I’ve just had a warning,” said the Administrator, leading the way back into the room he had left. “Sit down—whiskey or cého?”
“Whiskey, thanks.”
“A man was lying in a drunken sleep just outside that window,” said the Administrator, with a backward nod, as he opened the soda-water for his guest himself, and poured in the spirit. “He must have been there a very short time—he will lie like that for three days now.”