The gong was not for use. It stood on the table in the hall because Kathleen liked to see it there. And the Colonel and father didn’t care a brass farthing who saw it, or where they saw it, so long as no one ever hit it. And no one ever had from the day he paid for it till now.
Doctor Traherne used it now.
He picked up the mallet, and whacked that gong as if he’d suddenly gone gong-beating mad.
Ali Halim clutched at him. The khansamah almost knelt at his feet, and tears of sheer fright brimmed in the old native’s eyes. Private Grainger stood soldierly stock-still on guard, waiting outside his Colonel’s door. But the irreproachable buttons on his tunic shook, his neck rippled and turned purple with mirth. But the private did not stir. He had been told to see that no one came in to the Commandant’s room; he had not been told to do anything else, and if a Bengal Tiger and the Taj Mahal had come into the hall, and begun waltzing together, Private Grainger would not have stirred—but not a white ant could have passed by him in to the Colonel.
But the Colonel passed by him—violently.
“What the hell!” he raged as he wrenched the door open, and nearly wrenched it off.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” Traherne said nicely, laying down the mallet. “But I must see you. And Halim would neither let me go in, or tell you I was here.”
“Quite right,” was the gruff reply. “Come back to-morrow.”
“I must see you now,” Traherne insisted.
The Colonel’s neck grew as purple as the private’s.