Neither his nor Diana’s temper was improved by the behavior of the crowd. The dog’s size and apparent ferocity cleared a course, but that convenience was not so pleasant as the manners of twenty years ago, when men made way for an Englishman without hesitation—without dreaming of doing anything else.
The thrice-breathed air of Delhi gave him melancholia. It was not agreeable to see men spit with calculated insolence. The heat made the sweat drip from his beard on to the bosom of a new silk shirt. The smell of over-civilized, unnaturally clothed humans was nauseating. By the time he reached an unimaginably ugly, rawly new administration building he felt about as sweetly reasonable as a dog with hydrophobia, and was tired, with feet accustomed to the softness, and ears used to the silence, of long jungle lanes.
However, his spirits rose as he approached the steps. He may have made a signal, because the moment the chuprassi saw him he straightened himself suddenly and ran before him, up-stairs and along a corridor. By the time Ommony reached a door with no name on it, at the far end of the building, the chuprassi was waiting to open it—had already done the announcing—had already seen a said-to-be important personage shown out with, scant excuses through another door. The chuprassi’s salaam was that of a worshiper of secrets, to a man who knows secrets and can keep them; there is no more marrow-deep obeisance in the world than that.
And now no ceremony. The office door clicked softly with a spring-lock and shut out the world that bows and scrapes to hide its enmity and spits to disguise self-conscious meanness. A man sat at a desk and grinned.
“Sit. Smoke. Take your coat off. Sun in your eyes? Try the other chair. Dog need water? Give her some out of the filter. Now—”
John McGregor passed cigars and turned his back toward a laden desk. He was a middle-sized, middle-aged man with snow-white hair in a crisp mass, that would have been curly if he had let it grow long enough. His white mustache made him look older than his years, but his skin was young and reddish, although that again was offset by crow’s-feet at the corners of noticeably dark-gray eyes. His hands looked like a conjurer’s; he could do anything with them, even to keeping them perfectly still.
“So you’ve actually turned in your resignation? We grow!” he remarked, laughing. “Everything grows—except me; I’m in the same old rut. I’ll get the ax—get pensioned some day—dreadful fate! Did you have your interview with Jenkins? What happened? I can see you had the best of it—but how?”
Ommony laid three letters on the desk—purple ink on faded paper, in a woman’s handwriting. McGregor laughed aloud—one bark, like the cry of a fox that scents its quarry on the fluke of a changing wind.
“Perfect!” he remarked, picking up the letters and beginning to read the top one. “Did you blackmail him?”
“I did.”