We sat down opposite each other. John Young reached under his seat and I nearly said, ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you.’ However, he pulled out nothing more dangerous than the zinc tray in which the porter at Calcutta had placed an outsized block of ice. It was mainly water in the tray now, with some bottles of Evian rolling with the motion of the train. John Young handed me one, and we drank from the necks of the bottles. We both fell to staring at the electrical fan above our heads. It was revolving too slowly – slower even than the one in my own compartment, which was next door.
‘It is doing its best, you know,’ said John Young, smiling.
The indications were that he was a railwayman, so my lie would have to come in soon. The Anglos were all over the railways. As a rule they were loco men (drivers or firemen), or what they called ‘traffic birds’ (train guards, ticket collectors). But John Young was evidently a superior officer of the railway, and most of those were British. It sometimes seemed to me that almost all the first class passengers on the East Indian Railway were British officers of the Railway. Generally speaking few people travelled first class on the East Indian Railway. It was said you couldn’t afford to grease the axles of the first class carriages from the receipts they earned. No, the third class man was the important one. Ninety per cent travelled third, paying about a third of a penny per mile, one-fifth the price of a British third class fare; and the first class numbers must have had fallen off still further as a result of the snakes.
John Young was smiling at me, wondering about me. There was a sheen of sweat on my face, and drops would periodically form and race towards my collar. John Young showed me up by his high-laced, well-dubbined boots, blue-and-white-spotted bow tie, and general smartness. He was about of an age with me – in the late thirties or early forties. He looked like me in other ways: a skinny sort, centre-parted dark hair, medium moustache. But he was semi-black, and he had a certain manner . . . Jovial – that was the word. It was how an Englishman was supposed to be.
I kept thinking about the bloody snakes. Several had been discovered in the past fortnight, and there had been two fatalities. First to die had been a Mr Herbert Milner, an Assistant Auditor with the Railway. On Tuesday 10 April he’d been bitten by a common krait when he entered an empty first class compartment at a spot called Asansol. That was about a hundred and forty miles from Howrah station in Calcutta, and on a different line to the one John Young and I were presently riding upon. Whereas we were heading north-westerly, Asansol was on the main, directly westerly line from Howrah, the ‘Grand Chord’ as it was known. Continue on that stretch, and you came to the capital, Delhi. Asansol was a place of railway works and coal mines – also great fuming mountains of stored coal, from photographs I’d seen. Herbert Milner had not closed his compartment door, and after killing him, the snake had moved into the corridor of the carriage, where it had been discovered by a train guard at the next-but-one stop, Dhanbaid, where the train had terminated.
The other fatality had occurred at Howrah itself. An Englishwoman, a Miss Schofield, had stepped into a first class compartment and the snake was waiting for her. She had not booked the compartment into which she had stepped, just as Mr Milner had not booked his. So neither she nor he was the intended target. Nobody in particular could have been the intended target, only the general category of first class passengers.
Miss Schofield had closed the sliding door on entering, so the snake was still in with her when she was discovered. The snake was a hamadryad, a king cobra. It was twelve bloody foot long, and it was possible that it had reared up a good five feet when she entered the compartment, so that its head would have been about level with hers. Being a king cobra, it would then have widened its ribcage below the head, extending its ‘hood’ as a warning. But it had not bitten her. It hadn’t needed to. Miss Schofield had died of fright, which was most unusual, but she had had a weak heart. She was from Leamington Spa. She had come out to India to visit her brother, who was a managing agent for the British Indian Tobacco Company, and travelled about the country a good deal. I could not remember where her train was bound for, but that seemed hardly to matter, since no two of the snakes had been put on the same service.
John Young said, ‘What do you say to a peg, Jim Stringer? I have a bottle somewhere about.’ And I held my breath as he reached under his seat again.
II
‘Do you know Leamington Spa at all, Jim?’ enquired John Young, because we had been discussing the snakes as we drank our pegs.