“Right into your glass of whiskey!” we cried.
“Precisely,” the Major said. “And I, thirsting like mad in the heat, had gulped him down without looking.”
The girl called Gwendoline was staring at the Major with huge eyes. “Quite honestly I don’t see what all the fuss was about,” she said. “One teeny weeny little beetle isn’t going to hurt anyone.”
“My dear child,” the Major said, “when the Blister Beetle is dried and crushed, the resulting powder is called cantharidin. That’s its pharmaceutical name. The Sudanese variety is called cantharidin sudanii. And this cantharidin sudanii is absolutely deadly. The maximum safe dose for a human, if there is such a thing as a safe dose, is one minim. A minim is one four-hundred-eightieth of a fluid ounce. Assuming I had just swallowed one whole fully grown Blister Beetle, that meant I’d received God knows how many hundreds of times the maximum dose.”
“Jesus,” we said. “Jesus Christ.”
“The throbbing was so tremendous now, it was shaking my whole body,” the Major said.
“A headache, you mean?” Gwendoline said.
“No,” the Major said.
“What happened next?” we asked him.
“My member,” the Major said, “was now like a whitehot rod of iron burning into my body. I leaped up from my chair and rushed to my car and drove like a madman for the nearest hospital, which was in Khartoum. I got there in forty minutes flat. I was scared fartless.”
“Now wait just a minute,” the Gwendoline creature said. “I’m still not quite following you. Exactly why were you so frightened?”
Boy, what a dreadful girl. I should never have invited her. The Major, to his great credit, ignored her completely this time.
“I dashed into the hospital,” he went on, “and found the casualty room where an English doctor was stitching up somebody’s knife wound. ‘Look at this!’ I cried, taking it out and waving it at him.”
“Waving what at him, for heaven’s sake?” the awful Gwendoline asked.
“Shut up, Gwendoline,” I said.
“Thank you,” the Major said. “The doctor stopped stitching and regarded the object I was holding out to him with some alarm. I quickly told him my story. He looked glum. There was no antidote for Blister Beetle, he informed me. I was in grave trouble. But he would do his best. So they stomach-pumped me and put me to bed and packed ice all around my poor throbbing member.”
“Who did?” someone asked. “Who’s they?”
“A nurse,” the Major answered. “A young Scottish nurse with dark hair. She brought the ice in small rubber bags and packed it round and kept the bags in place with a bandage.”
“Didn’t you get frostbite?”
“You can’t get frostbite on something that’s practically red hot,” the Major said.
“What happened next?”
“They kept changing the ice every three hours day and night.”
“Who, the Scottish nurse?”
“They took it in turns. Several nurses.”
“Good God.”
“It took two weeks to subside.”
“Two weeks!” I said. “Were you all right afterwards, sir? Are you all right now?”
The Major smiled and took another sip of wine. “I am deeply touched,” he said, “by your concern. You are obviously a young man who knows what comes first in this world, and what comes second. I think you will go far.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said. “But what happened in the end?”
“I was out of action for six months,” the Major said, smiling wanly. “But that is no hardship in the Sudan. Yes, if you want to know, I’m all right now. I made a miraduious recovery.”
That was the story Major Grout had told us at my little party on the eve of my departure for France. And it set me thinking. It set me thinking very deeply indeed. In fact, that night, as I lay in bed with my bags all packed on the floor, a tremendously daring plan began rapidly to evolve in my head. I say “daring” because by God it damn well was daring when you consider I was only seventeen years old at the time. Looking back on it now, I take my hat off to myself for even contemplating that sort of action. But by the following morning, my mind was made up.