Salvator does receive patients?”
“Indians. They flock to him from everywhere-from as far away as Tierra del Fuego and the Amazon.”
Not satisfied with this information Zurita went up to Buenos Aires.
There too he learned that Salvator treated only Indians with whom he enjoyed the fame of a miracle-worker. Medical men told Zurita that Salvator was an exceptionally gifted surgeon, indeed a man of genius, but very eccentric, as is often the case with men of his calibre. His name was well known in medical circles on both sides of the Atlantic. In America he was famed for his bold imaginative surgery. When surgeons gave up a case as hopeless Salvator was asked to step in. He never refused. During the Great War he was on the French front where he operated almost exclusively on the brain. Thousands of men owed him their lives. After the Armistice he went back home. His practice and real estate operations landed in his lap quite a fortune. He threw up his practice, bought some land near Buenos Aires, had a high wall built round it (another of his eccentricities), and settled down there. He was known to have taken up research. Now he only treated Indians, who called him God descended on earth.
Finally Zurita found out that before the War right where his present vast holding lay Salvator had had a house with an orchard also walled in on all sides. When Salvator had been away in France the house had been closely guarded by a Black and a pack of ferocious bloodhounds.
Of late Salvator had lived a still more cloistered life. He wouldn’t receive even his old university colleagues.
Having gleaned all this information, Zurita decided to take illness so as to get inside the grounds.
Once again he was in front of the stout steel gate guarding Salvator’s property. He rapped on the gate. Nobody answered. He kept rapping on it for some time and still there was not a stir inside. His blood up, Zurita picked up a stone and started battering the gate, raising a din fit to wake the dead.
Dogs barked somewhere well inside and at last the spy-hole was slid open.
“What do you want?” a voice asked in broken Spanish.
“A sick man to see the doctor-hurry up now, open the door.”
“Sick men do not knock in this way,” came the placid rejoinder and an eye peeped through at Zurita. “Doctor’s not receiving.”
“He can’t refuse help to a sick man,” insisted Zurita.
The spy-hole shut; the footsteps died away. Only the dogs kept up their furious barking.
Venting some of his anger in choice invective, the Spaniard set out for the schooner.
Should he lodge a complaint against Salvator in Buenos Aires, he asked himself once he was aboard. But what was the use? Zurita shook in futile rage. His bushy black moustache was in real danger now as he kept tugging at it in his agitation, making it fall like a barometer showing the doldrums.
Little by little, however, he quietened down and set to thinking what he should do next.
As he went on thinking his sunburnt fingers would travel up more and more often to give a flip to his drooping moustache. The barometer was rising.
At last he emerged on deck, and to everybody’s surprise, ordered the crew to weigh anchor.
The Jellyfish stood for Buenos Aires.
“And about time too,” Baltasar commented. “So much time and effort wasted. A curse on that ‘devil’ with a ‘god’ for a crony!”
The Sick Granddaughter
The sun was angrily hot. An old Indian, thin and ragged, was plodding along a dusty country road that ran through alternating fields of wheat, maize and oats. In his arms he carried a child covered against the sun with a little blanket very much the worse for wear. The child’s eyes were half-closed; an enormous tumour bulged high on its neck. Whenever the old man stumbled the child groaned hoarsely and its eyelids quivered. Then the old man would stand still to blow into its face.
“If only I can get it there alive,” he whispered and quickened his pace.
Once in front of the steel gate the old Indian shifted the child onto his left arm and gave the side door four raps with his right hand.
He had a glimpse of an eye through the spy-hole, the bolts rattled and the door swung open.
The Indian stepped timidly inside. Standing in front of him was a white-smocked old Black with a head of snowwhite hair.
“I’ve brought a sick child,” the Indian said.
The Black nodded, shot the bolts home and motioned to the Indian to follow.
The Indian looked round him. He found himself in a small prison-like court, paved with big flagstones, with not a blade of grass anywhere. A wall lower than the outer one divided the court from the rest of the estate. At the gateway in the inner wall stood a large-windowed whitewashed building. Near it squatted a group of Indians-men, women and children.
Some of the children were playing jackstones with shells, others were wrestling in silence. The old Black saw to it that they did not disturb the peace of the place.
The old man eased himself down submissively in the shade of the building and started blowing into the child’s bluish inert face. An old Indian woman squatting down beside him threw a glance at the pair.
“Daughter?” she asked.
“Granddaughter,” the Indian replied.
“It’s the bog spirit as entered your child. But he’s stronger’n any evil spirit, he is. Hell bring the poor thing back to health.”
The Indian nodded.
The white-smocked Black, who was making a round of the sick, stopped in front of the Indian and beckoned to him to go in.
The room that the Indian entered was big and bare, except for a long narrow table, covered with a white sheet, standing in the centre of the flagged floor. A second, frost-glass panelled door was opened and in strode Dr. Salvator, a tall, broad-shouldered, dark-complexioned man wearing a white smock. The black eyelashes and eyebrows were the only hair on his head. He must have taken to shaving his head long ago, for it wore as good a coat of tan as his face. An aquiline nose, a jutting chin and tightly compressed lips lent to his face a cruel, one might say, predatory expression. The cold look of his brown eyes sent little shivers down the Indian’s spine.
The Indian made a low bow and stretched his arms with the girl in them towards the doctor. With quick, sure and yet careful hands Salvator took the sick girl from the Indian’s arms, unwound the rags with which she was swathed and tossed them very neatly into a receptacle in the corner. The Indian made to retrieve them but was stopped in his tracks by a peremptory “Leave them where they are”.
Then Salvator laid the little girl on the table and bent over her. In profile now, he seemed to the Indian a bird of prey poised to strike. Salvator was examining the tumour with his fingers. These too struck the Indian’s imagination. They were long and amazingly supple and seemed to be able to bend not only downwards, but from side to side and even upwards. The Indian, normally a plucky man, tried to fight down the feeling of fear the extraordinary doctor had aroused in him.
“Excellent, splendid,” Salvator was saying, as if in admiration of what he
