Completely Unexpected Tales Read online

  ‘Shall we draw the sheet back quick and brush it off before it has time to strike?’

  ‘Never! We are not entitled to take a risk.’ He spoke sharply and his voice was pitched a little higher than usual.

  ‘We can’t very well leave him lying there,’ I said. ‘He’s getting nervous.’

  ‘Please! Please!’ he said, turning round, holding both hands up in the air. ‘Not so fast, please. This is not a matter to rush into baldheaded.’ He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and stood there, frowning, nibbling his lip.

  ‘You see,’ he said at last. ‘There is a way to do this. You know what we must do – we must administer an anaesthetic to the creature where it lies.’

  It was a splendid idea.

  ‘It is not safe,’ he continued, ‘because a snake is cold-blooded and anaesthetic does not work so well or so quick with such animals, but it is better than any other thing to do. We could use ether… chloroform…’ He was speaking slowly and trying to think the thing out while he talked.

  ‘Which shall we use?’

  ‘Chloroform,’ he said suddenly. ‘Ordinary chloroform. That is best. Now quick!’ He took my arm and pulled me towards the balcony. ‘Drive to my house! By the time you get there I will have waked up my boy on the telephone and he will show you my poisons cupboard. Here is the key of the cupboard. Take a bottle of chloroform. It has an orange label and the name is printed on it. I stay here in case anything happens. Be quick now, hurry! No, no, you don’t need your shoes!’

  I drove fast and in about fifteen minutes I was back with the bottle of chloroform. Ganderbai came out of Harry’s room and met me in the hall. ‘You got it?’ he said. ‘Good, good. I just been telling him what we are going to do. But now we must hurry. It is not easy for him in there like that all this time. I am afraid he might move.’

  He went back to the bedroom and I followed, carrying the bottle carefully with both hands. Harry was lying on the bed in precisely the same position as before with the sweat pouring down his cheeks. His face was white and wet. He turned his eyes towards me and I smiled at him and nodded confidently. He continued to look at me. I raised my thumb, giving him the okay signal. He closed his eyes. Ganderbai was squatting down by the bed, and on the floor beside him was the hollow rubber tube that he had previously used as a tourniquet, and he’d got a small paper funnel fitted into one end of the tube.

  He began to pull a little piece of the sheet out from under the mattress. He was working directly in line with Harry’s stomach, about eighteen inches from it, and I watched his ringers as they tugged gently at the edge of the sheet. He worked so slowly it was almost impossible to discern any movement either in his fingers or in the sheet that was being pulled.

  Finally he succeeded in making an opening under the sheet and he took the rubber tube and inserted one end of it in the opening so that it would slide under the sheet along the mattress towards Harry’s body. I do not know how long it took him to slide that tube in a few inches. It may have been twenty minutes, it may have been forty. I never once saw the tube move. I knew it was going in because the visible part of it grew gradually shorter, but I doubted that the krait could have felt even the faintest vibration. Ganderbai himself was sweating now, large pearls of sweat standing out all over his forehead and along his upper lip. But his hands were steady and I noticed that his eyes were watching, not the tube in his hands, but the area of crumpled sheet above Harry’s stomach.

  Without looking up, he held out a hand to me for the chloroform. I twisted out the ground-glass stopper and put the bottle right into his hand, not letting go till I was sure he had a good hold on it. Then he jerked his head for me to come closer and he whispered, ‘Tell him I’m going to soak the mattress and that it will be very cold under his body. He must be ready for that and he must not move. Tell him now.’

  I bent over Harry and passed on the message.

  ‘Why doesn’t he get on with it?’ Harry said.

  ‘He’s going to now, Harry. But it’ll feel very cold, so be ready for it.’

  ‘Oh, God Almighty, get on, get on!’ For the first time he raised his voice, and Ganderbai glanced up sharply, watched him for a few seconds, then went back to his business.

  Ganderbai poured a few drops of chloroform into the paper funnel and waited while it ran down the tube. Then he poured some more. Then he waited again, and the heavy sickening smell of chloroform spread out over the room bringing with it faint unpleasant memories of white-coated nurses and white surgeons standing in a white room around a long white table. Ganderbai was pouring steadily now and I could see the heavy vapour of the chloroform swirling slowly like smoke above the paper funnel. He paused, held the bottle up to the light, poured one more funnelful and handed the bottle back to me. Slowly he drew out the rubber tube from under the sheet; then he stood up.

  The strain of inserting the tube and pouring the chloroform must have been great, and I recollect that when Ganderbai turned and whispered to me, his voice was small and tired, ‘We’ll give it fifteen minutes. Just to be safe.’

  I leaned over to tell Harry. ‘We’re going to give it fifteen minutes, just to be safe. But it’s probably done for already.’

  ‘Then why for God’s sake don’t you look and see!’ Again he spoke loudly and Ganderbai sprang round, his small brown face suddenly very angry. He had almost pure black eyes and he stared at Harry and Harry’s smiling-muscle started to twitch. I took my handkerchief and wiped his wet face, trying to stroke his forehead a little for comfort as I did so.

  Then we stood and waited beside the bed, Ganderbai watching Harry’s face all the time in a curious intense manner. The little Indian was concentrating all his will power on keeping Harry quiet. He never once took his eyes from the patient and although he made no sound, he seemed somehow to be shouting at him all the time, saying: Now listen, you’ve got to listen, you’re not going to go spoiling this now, d’you hear me, and Harry lay there twitching his mouth, sweating, closing his eyes, opening them, looking at me, at the sheet, at the ceiling, at me again, but never at Ganderbai. Yet somehow Ganderbai was holding him. The smell of chloroform was oppressive and it made me feel sick, but I couldn’t leave the room now. I had the feeling someone was blowing up a huge balloon and I could see it was going to burst, but I couldn’t look away.

  At length Ganderbai turned and nodded and I knew he was ready to proceed. ‘You go over to the other side of the bed,’ he said. ‘We will each take one side of the sheet and draw it back together, but very slowly, please, and very quietly.’

  ‘Keep still now, Harry,’ I said and I went around to the other side of the bed and took hold of the sheet. Ganderbai stood opposite me, and together we began to draw back the sheet, lifting it up clear of Harry’s body, taking it back very slowly, both of us standing well away but at the same time bending forward, trying to peer underneath it. The smell of chloroform was awful. I remember trying to hold my breath and when I couldn’t do that any longer I tried to breathe shallow so the stuff wouldn’t get into my lungs.

  The whole of Harry’s chest was visible now, or rather the striped pyjama top which covered it, and then I saw the white cord of his pyjama trousers, neatly tied in a bow. A little farther and I saw a button, a mother-of-pearl button, and that was something I had never had on my pyjamas, a fly button, let alone a mother-of-pearl one. This Harry, I thought, he is very refined. It is odd how one sometimes has frivolous thoughts at exciting moments, and I distinctly remember thinking about Harry being very refined when I saw that button.

  Apart from the button there was nothing on his stomach.

  We pulled the sheet back faster then, and when we had uncovered his legs and feet we let the sheet drop over the end of the bed on to the floor.

  ‘Don’t move,’ Ganderbai said, ‘don’t move, Mr Pope’, and he began to peer around along the side of Harry’s body and under his legs.

  ‘We must be careful,’ he said. ‘It may be anywhere. It could be up the leg