In the Wet by Nevil Shute Page B

Presently she pulled the sheet over him to the waist, and stood there looking down at him in silence. “Peritonitis, I should think,” she said at last. “He’s so heavily doped there’s not much we can do.”
    She turned to Liang. “Show me the things that were on this chair, Liang,” she said, and there was no acrimony in her tone. “The pipe, and the opium.”
    He brought them out and showed them to her in silence.
    “Does he smoke much of this?” she asked.
    “Three,” he said. “Three, when it is dark, to sleep. Not good smoke more.”
    “You smoke it yourself, I suppose?” I asked.
    He nodded.
    Sister Finlay asked him, “Do three pipes send a man to sleep like that?”
    He shook his head. “He smoke more yesterday, today. Good for pain.”
    “How many pipes do you think he’s had today?”
    He picked up the saucer and looked at the remnant of brown, treacle paste smeared on the bottom. “Ten—eleven,” he said. “I not know. I think when he wake up he smoke one, two pipes, good for pain, and then he sleeps again, one, two hours.”
    She leaned over the patient and raised one eyelid carefully; I held the lamp for her while she looked at the eye. Then she stood back again from the bed. “It’s not a bad thing, in a way,” she said at last. “We’ll have to get him to the aerodrome tomorrow somehow, and get the ambulance to fly him to the Curry. There’ll have to be an operation. If I’d had my case with me I’d probably have had to give him a dope, and now he’s doped himself. In a way, and in the circumstances, it may be rather a good thing.”
    I nodded. “What
is
opium?” I asked.
    “It’s morphine,” she said. “I don’t know what else it is, but that’s the element that works in it. It’s what I should have given him in any case, so far as the narcotic goes.”
    There was nothing to be done, and I sat down wearily on a packing case beside a table that was littered with the remains of a meal; my head was swimming and I was very hot. From a great distance I heard Finlay say, “We’ll just have to watch him tonight, and hope we can get him out of this tomorrow, somehow.”
    I forced attention to what she was saying. “The water will be higher, with all this rain,” I said.
    “I know. That’s what I’ve been thinking about.” There was a pause, and then she said, “Are you feeling all right, Mr. Hargreaves?”
    “I’m all right,” I said. The next thing that I knew was that her hand was on my wrist taking my pulse. “You’re not all right at all,” she said. “You’ve got a temperature.”
    “Not bad,” I said. “I’d like a drink of water, though.”
    She spoke to Liang, and in a dream I heard her arguing about something with him, but I could not comprehend what it was all about. Then she was giving me a glass of water, thick in colour and tasting of the floods, but it refreshed me, and I felt more myself.
    Presently Liang appeared from the other room, where there was a wood fuel cooking stove, and began to lay the table for a meal. He produced three large wooden bowls, three cheap spoons, and bread that was mis-shapen and home made as a sort of a flat bun. Lastly he brought in from the other room a copper saucepan full of hot, steaming soup, thickened with many vegetables. This was our supper, and very good it was; I had two bowls of the soup and felt a great deal better. At the end of the meal there was a cup of black tea, without sugar.
    It was while we were drinking our tea, sitting at the table in silence, that the rain stopped. The drumming on the iron roof had made a background noise that we had been unconscious of, but now it reduced, and finally stopped altogether. I raised my head and looked at Sister Finlay, and she looked at me.
    “That’s better,” I said. “I was beginning to get a little bit worried about getting him away tomorrow.”
    “I was thinking of that, too,” she said. “If it gets any deeper we shall have to have a