Some eighteen months afterwards, the doctor, being busy over that great hunt for the comma-shaped bacillus, which, as is told elsewhere, ended in a full stop for the seeker, saw a man come into his verandah with a note.
"The old swash-buckler, by all that's sinful," he said to himself. "Now, what can he want?" According to the superscription of the letter, it was a "Civil Surgeon"; according to a few almost illegible words inside, help for a suspected case of cholera in the European room of the serai.
Dr. Taylor, with grave doubts as to being able to supply either of these desires, went into the verandah.
"Is it Sonny baba?" he asked.
Dhurm Singh's delight was boundless; since a sahib to whom you have once spoken is not as other sahibs; just as a sahib whom you have once served becomes a demi-god--transfigured, immortal. Undoubtedly it was the Baba-sahib[[11]]--for unto this semi-religious title the old man had compounded his memories and his respect; who else was it likely to be, seeing that he, Dhurm Singh, had taken service with the master's son? Undoubtedly also he was ill, though, in the poor opinion of the dustlike one, it was not cholera--at least it need not have been if the Baba-sahib had only taken the remedy proposed to him.
"Opium? hey!" asked Taylor, who in a huge pith hat which made him look like an animated mushroom, was by this time walking over to the serai, which was but a few hundred yards off.
The old Akâli grinned from ear to ear, the massive curves of his lips stretching like india-rubber. "The Huzoor knows the great gift of God in the bad places of mind and body. But the Baba-sahib will not have it so. He understands not many things through being so young. But he learns, he learns!"
There was a cheerful content in the apology, suggestive of the possibility that Dhurm Singh had something to do with the teaching. If so, he had been an unsafe guide in one point; for it was cholera; cholera of the type which merges into a dreary convalescence of malarial fever, during which Dr. Taylor saw a good deal, necessarily and unnecessarily, of his old cabin companion; thus renewing a friendship which, like the majority of those struck up on board ship, would have been forgotten but for an accident--the accident of his doing civil duty for a colleague during ten days' leave.
"Civil Surgeon, indeed!" he would say, as he sat on the edge of the bed amusing Sonny baba when the latter began to pull round. "Deuce take me if I could be that to save my life! One of my patients the other day said I was the most uncivil person calling himself a gentleman she ever came across, just because I told her she couldn't expect her liver to act if she lived the life of a Strasburg goose. 'Liver!' she cried, 'why, doctor, it's all heart that is the matter with me.' Now, my dear boy, can you tell me why that unfortunate viscera, the liver, has got into such disrepute? You may tell a patient every other organ in the body is in a disgraceful state of disrepair, but if you hint at bile it's no use trying to be a popular physician. Stick to the heart! that's my advice to a youngster entering the lists. Both for the healer and the healed it is ennobling. Now you, for instance! you will put it all down to your ardent affection for your fellow-man; but what the devil have you done with your muscle, my dear fellow? Oh, I know! you have been doing the dâl-bhât[[12]] trick, in order to show your sympathy with the people, and to assimilate your wants to theirs, so that in some occult way they are to assimilate their religious beliefs to yours. Lordy, Lordy, what an odd creature man is! But you didn't get old Dhurm Singh to give up his kid pullao, I'll go bail. Now, he looks fit--more like your Church Militant business than you do."
"I've--I've given up the Army," said Sonny baba after an embarrassed pause.