"Your medicine, Dakktar Sahib!" insisted the man.
Trent released him, realizing the futility of pressing the question.
"Very well. I'll report you to the Karnal Sahib and he'll have you strung up by your toes!"
He left the house abruptly—followed by feverish, glowing eyes.
Out of Meera he rode, past the temple on the river bank and along the jungle-lined road toward Gaya.
Trent was angry. But his face gave no indication of it. Twenty-three years under a tropical sun (add the ten years at school in Britain and you'll have his age) had baked his skin to a leather brown, and a third of that time spent in the army had taught him that impassivity is man's chief advantage—a citadel against the aggressive. He had, in the vernacular of the times, a "poker face"—the mask of those who share their secrets with few. In either mufti or khaki he was not particularly handsome, and this evening, after a day of work in viscid heat, he was almost ugly. Dust was ingrained into his skin, like an ocher pigment; his throat and brows were moist with perspiration. Yet there was about him something arresting and vital—a challenging strength that pronounced him a man's man. And he was. He talked with men; ate with men; lived with men; understood men. Scales that dip into earth-dust and swing again to regions of exquisite idealism—the eternal weight and counter-weight of Self. That was how he defined them. And his definitions were usually metaphors. An idiosyncrasy. Give him a chair in a dim room with one of Beethoven's sonatas swelling in throat-gripping chords, or a pipe and congenial darkness somewhere close to the stars, and he was in his prime element.
As for women.... That there had been one—one or more—at some time in his life, nobody who knew him doubted; but it was the general opinion at Gaya and thereabouts that he was as little concerned with women as with anything else that habited the planet. Envious subordinates hinted that at one time or other he had run afoul some feminine reef. When these remarks drifted to Trent (and such remarks always do) he only smiled, for he had a generous supply of humor packed away under his impassivity. It was never known that he deliberately avoided women; it appeared that he simply accepted them as a matter of form, inevitable as waves on a sea, and sometimes as disastrous.
Only Richard Manlove, also an army doctor, who shared his bungalow, had penetrated beyond the outer-rampart of his seeming seclusiveness—"Dicky" Manlove whom Trent first saw out in dead Mesopotamia. Their friendship was a popular topic of discussion on warm afternoons when feminine Gaya gathered to perspire under one common punkah. So different, you know.... Young "Dicky"—a delicious boy ... and the major—oh, rather a decent chap, a human manual of Hindustani and all those other perfectly impossible languages, but ... well, it's so disconcerting not to know what a man is thinking, isn't it?
Thus feminine Gaya catalogued him, and thus he appeared—immobile—this late afternoon as he rode out of Meera.
His anger died as he trotted on, and by the time he came within view of his bungalow, built on the flank of one of Gaya's hills, he was watching, in a whimsical, almost detached manner, the fireflies dance and reel in the dusk. When he drew nearer, he saw a figure in a white dress leave his compound, a figure that paused at the diverging roads not far from the bungalow, and, after a slight hesitation, chose the branch in his direction. Instantly he indexed her as a stranger; no female resident would think of using the isolated Meera road after dusk.