“Fever,” said the doctor.
I felt very weak and sick from the reaction from what we’d had to do, but I grinned feebly.
The doctor handed Cary a package that was wrapped up in part of a sheet; he wanted it dropped overboard in deep water. The handle stuck out of it, and the handle was that of the kris the young Malay with the hawk-like eyes had been caressing while he sat with Buro Sitt on our boat deck.
“M-my God!” said Cary, shaken and sick. “He—he⸺”
“He died,” said the doctor firmly, “of fever. A special sort that always follows paranoia. I’m a doctor and my report will stand, if we get him buried before the gunboat gets here. Fever, Cary, fever.”
And his report did stand. I heard later that the next Political to take Vetter’s post made shocked reports of how Vetter had been mistreating the natives. He had Grossly Exceeded his Authority, and all that sort of thing. Every effort would have to be made to restore the loyalty to la belle France that Vetter’s actions would have undermined. That meant, of course, scrupulously fair treatment thereafter.
But it struck me as rather humorous that the doctor met Vetter’s successor later on and listened for half an hour to hair-raising accounts of the evil deeds Vetter had done.
“M’sieur,” said the new Political, excitedly, “it is incredible that he was not assassiné! That he died naturally, of fever, c’est incroyable!”
“Oh, not at all,” said the doctor. “That’s the price one pays for not taking things in time. Vetter had paranoia, and he didn’t do anything to cure himself. His ‘fever’ was the inevitable price of his neglect.”
In my mind I was contrasting Buro Sitt, with the price that had been set on his honor as a man, and the greater price set on his faith with his people. But just then a young doctor laughed at the doctor’s ignorance in speaking of Vetter’s death as the price he paid for not trying to cure his paranoia—which is usually nothing more or less than a swelled head, or the belief that one is lord of creation.