“Very good of you.
Just my usual morning tray — coffee, toast, fruit.
And the morning papers.
If her ladyship has been called I will have it with her …”
Mr. Todd went into the back room of the house and dragged a tin canister from under a heap of skins.
It was full of a mixture of dried leaf and bark.
He took a handful and went outside to the fire.
When he returned his guest was bolt upright astride the hammock, talking angrily.
“… You would hear better and it would be more polite if you stood still when I addressed you instead of walking round in a circle.
It is for your own good that I am telling you … I know you are friends of my wife and that is why you will not listen to me.
But be careful.
She will say nothing cruel, she will not raise her voice, there will be no hard words.
She hopes you will be great friends afterwards as before.
But she will leave you.
She will go away quietly during the night.
She will take her hammock and her rations of farine … Listen to me.
I know I am not clever but … that is no reason why we should forget courtesy.
Let us kill in the gentlest manner.
I will tell you what I have learned in the forest, where time is different.
There is no City.
Mrs. Beaver has covered it with chromium plating and converted it into flats.
Three guineas a week with a separate bathroom.
Very suitable for base love.
And Polly will be there.
She and Mrs. Beaver under the fallen battlements …”
Mr. Todd put a hand behind Tony's head and held up the concoction of herbs in the calabash.
Tony sipped and turned away his head.
“Nasty medicine,” he said, and began to cry.
Mr. Todd stood by him holding the calabash.
Presently Tony drank some more, screwing up his face and shuddering slightly at the bitterness.
Mr. Todd stood beside him until the draught was finished; then he threw out the dregs on to the mud floor.
Tony lay back in the hammock sobbing quietly.
Soon he fell into a deep sleep.
Tony's recovery was slow.
At first, days of lucidity alternated with delirium; then his temperature dropped and he was conscious even when most ill.
The days of fever grew less frequent, finally occurring in the normal system of the tropics, between long periods of comparative health.
Mr. Todd dosed him regularly with herbal remedies.
“It's very nasty,” said Tony, “but it does do good.”
“There is medicine for everything in the forest,” said Mr. Todd; “to make you well and to make you ill.
My mother was an Indian and she taught me many of them.
I have learned others from time to time from my wives.
There are plants to cure you and give you fever, to kill you and send you mad, to keep away snakes, to intoxicate fish so that you can pick them out of the water with your hands like fruit from a tree.
There are medicines even I do not know.
They say that it is possible to bring dead people to life after they have begun to stink, but I have not seen it done.”
“But surely you are English?”
“My father was — at least a Barbadian.
He came to Guiana as a missionary.
He was married to a white woman but he left her in Guiana to look for gold.
Then he took my mother.
The Pie-wie women are ugly but very devoted.