The Dop Doctor Part 43

He swallowed the bait, and her spirits revived. Emigration Jane, if not the rose, lived with it. Strictly speaking, they spent a pleasant Sunday, though when he found himself forgetting the absent one, he pulled himself sharply up. He saw her part of the way home; more she would not allow.

"And--and"--she whispered at their parting, her eyes avoiding his--"if she can't git out next Sunday--an' it's a chance whether she does, that Sister Tobias being such a watchful old cat--would you like to 'ave me meet you an' tell you all about 'er?"

W. Keyse a.s.sented, even eagerly, and so it began. Behold the poor deceiver drinking perilous joys, and learning to shudder at the thought of discovery. Think of her cheris.h.i.+ng his letters, those pa.s.sionate epistles addressed to the owner of the golden pigtail.

Think of her pouring out her poor full heart in those wildly-spelt missives that found their way to him, and be a little pitiful.

She did not thirst for that revenge now. But, oh! the day would come when he would find out and have his, in casting her off, with what contempt and loathing of her treachery she wept at night to picture. This feeling, that lifted you to Heaven one instant, and cast you down to h.e.l.l the next, was Love. Pa.s.sion for the man, not yearning for the hearth-place, and the sheltering roof, and the security of marriage.

She left off walking round the gaol--indeed, rather avoided the vicinity of the casket that for her had once held a treasure. What would the Slabberts think of his little Boer-wife that was to have been? What would he say and do when they let him out? She took to losing breath and colour at the sound of a heavy step behind her, and would shrink close to the martial figure of W. Keyse when any hulking form distantly resembling the Boer's loomed up in the distance.

Oh, shame on her, the doubly false! But--but--she had never been so orful 'appy. Oh, what a queer thing was Love! If only---- But never, never would he. She was mistaken.

There came a moment when W. Keyse swerved from the path of single-hearted devotion to the unseen but ever-present wearer of the golden pigtail.

As Christmas drew near, and Gueldersdorp, not yet sensible of the belly-pinch of famine, sought to relieve its tense muscles and weary brains by getting up an entertainment here and there, W. Keyse escorted his beloved--by proxy, as usual--to a Sunday smoking-concert, given in a cleared-out Army Service Stores shed, lent by Imperial Government to the promoters of the entertainment.

Oh, the first delicious sniff of an atmosphere tinged with paint and acetylene from the stage-battens and footlights, and so flavoured with crowded humanity as to be strongly reminiscent of the lower troop-deck in stormy weather, when all the ports are shut and all the hatches are battened down! The excess of brilliancy which must not stream from the windows had been boarded in, and a tarpaulin was drawn over the skylight, in case the gunners of Meisje should be tempted to rouse the monster from her Sabbath quiet, and send in a ninety-four-pound sh.e.l.l to break up an orgy of G.o.dless Englanders. But the stuffiness made it all the snugger.

You could fancy yourself in the pit of the Theayter of Varieties, 'Oxton, or perched up close to the blue starred ceiling-dome of the Pavilion, Mile End, on a Sat.u.r.day night, when every gentleman sits in s.h.i.+rt-sleeves, with his arm round the waist of a lady, and the f.a.ggots and sausage-rolls and stone-gingers are going off like smoke, and the orange-peel rains from the upper circle back-benches, and the nut-cracking runs up and down the packed rows like the snapping of the breech-bolts in the trenches when the fire is hottest....

Ah! that brought one back to Gueldersdorp at once.

Meanwhile, a pale green canvas railway-truck cover, marked in black, "Light Goods--Destructible," served as a drop-curtain. Another, upon which the interior of an impossible palace had been delineated in a bewildering perspective of red and blue and yellow paint-smudges, served as a general back-scene for the performance.

The orchestra piano had been wounded by sh.e.l.l-fire, and had a leg in splints. Many members of the crowded audience were in strapping and bandages. Drink did not flow plentifully, but there was something to wet your whistle with, and the tobacco-cloud that hung above the trestle-benches, packed with black and yellow faces, as well as brown and white, could almost have been cut with a knife.

It was a long, rambling programme, scrawled in huge, black-paint characters on a white planed board, hung where everyone could read it.

There were comic songs and Christy Minstrel choruses by people who had developed vocal talent for this occasion only, and a screaming display of conjuring tricks by an amateur of legerdemain who had forgotten the art, if ever he had mastered it. At every new mistake or blunder, and with each fresh change of expression on the entertainer's streaky face, conveying the idea of his being under the influence of a bad dream, and hoping to wake up in his own quarters by-and-by, to find that he had never really undertaken to make a pudding in a hat, and smash a gentleman's watch and produce it intact from some unexpected place of concealment, the spectators rocked and roared. Then there was a Pantomimic Interlude, with a great deal of genuine knockabout, and, the crowning item of the entertainment, a comic song and stump-speech, announced to be given by The Anonymous Mammoth Comique--an incognito not dimly suspected to conceal the ident.i.ty of the Chief himself, being delayed by the Mammoth's character top-hat--a fondly cherished property of the Stiggins brand--and the cabbage umbrella that went with it, having been accidentally left behind at the Mammoth's hotel, the Master of the Revels, still distinguished by the jib-sail collar and s.h.i.+ny burnt-cork complexion of the corner-man, was sent to the front to ask if any lady or gentleman in the audience would kindly oblige with a ten-minute turn?

"All right, Mister!"

A soiled cotton glove waved, a flowery hat nodded to the appeal from behind the acetylene footlights. The faces in the front rows of seats, pale and brick-dust, gingerbread and cigar-browned European, African countenances with rolling eyes and s.h.i.+ning teeth; and here and there the impa.s.sive, almond-eyed, yellow mask of the Asiatic, slewed round as Emigration Jane rose up in the place beside W. Keyse, a little pale, and with damp patches in the palms of the washed white cotton gloves, as she said: If the gentleman pleased, she could sing--just a little!

No, thank you! She wasn't afryde, not she; they was all friends there. And do 'er best she would. She took off the big flowery hat quite calmly, giving it to W. Keyse to keep. The panic came on later, when the Christy-minstrel-collared, burnt-corked Master of the Revels was gallantly helping her up the short side-ladder, and culminated when he retreated, and left her there, standing on the platform in the bewildering glare of the acetylene footlights, a little, rather slight and flat-chested figure of a girl, blue-eyed and yellow-haired, in a washed-out flowery "blowse,"

and a "voylet" delaine skirt that had lost its pristine beauty, and showed faded and shabby in the yellow gas-flare.

Oh! 'owever 'ad she dared? That dazzling sea of faces, with the eyes all fixed on her, was terrifying. A big lump grew in her throat, and the crowded benches tilted, and the flaming lights leaped to the roof as the helpless, timid tears welled into her blue eyes.

And then the miracle happened.

W. Keyse sat on a back-bench, the thin c.o.c.kney face a little raised above the others, because he had slipped a rolled-up overcoat under him, pretending that it was to get it out of the way, you understand. Always very sensitive about his shortness, W. Keyse. And she saw his face, as plain as you please, and with a look in the pale, eager eyes, that for once was for Emigration Jane, her very own self, and not for That There Other One. She knew in that moment of revelation that she had always been jealous. Oh, wasn't it strynge? Her heart surged out to W. Keyse across the gulf of crowded faces. And her eyes had in them, all at once, the look that is born of Love.

Ah! who can mistake it? It begets a solitude in a vast thronged a.s.semblage for you and for me. It sends its silent, wordless, eloquent message thrilling to the heart of the Beloved, and wins its pa.s.sionate answer back. Ah! who can err about the look of Love?

She drew a deep breath that was her longing sigh for him, infinitely dear, and never to belong to her, and began her song. She sang it quite simply and naturally, in an untutored but sweet and plaintive voice, and with the c.o.c.kney accent that spoke of home to nearly all that heard. And her eyes never moved from his face as she sang.

The song was, I dare say, a foolish, trivial thing. But the air was pretty, and the words were simple, and it had a haunting refrain. To this effect, that the world is a big place and a hard place, with scant measure of joy in it, for you or for me. Bitter herbs grow side by side with the flowers in our Earth gardens. Salt tears mingle with our laughter; Night comes down in blotting darkness--perhaps in drenching rain,--at the close of every short, bright day of suns.h.i.+ne. But Life gone by, its hopes and fears and sorrows laid with our once-beating hearts in the good grey dust to rest, I shall meet with you again, in the Land where dreams come true.

"The Land Where Dreams Come True." That was the t.i.tle of the song and its refrain, and somehow it caught the listeners by the heart strings, making the women sob aloud, and wringing bright sudden drops from the bold eyes of rough, strong, hardy men. You are to remember how the people stood: that scarcely one was there that had not lost brother or sister, mother or husband, child or friend or comrade since the beginning of the siege; and thus the touch of Nature made itself felt, and the simple pathos went home to the sore quick. They sang the refrain with her, fervently, and when the song was done, they sat in touched silence but one moment--and then the applause came down. As it fell upon her like a wall, she screamed in terror, and ran away behind the scene, and was found by W. Keyse a minute later, sobbing hysterically, with her head jammed into an angle of the wall of un-plastered brick-work.

None saw. He put his arms manfully about the waistline of the flowery blouse.

"Oh, let me go! Oh, what a wicked, wicked girl I've bin! Oh, it's all come over me on a sudden, like a flood! Don't touch me--I'm not good enough!

Oh! how can you, can you?"

She sobbed the words out, and W. Keyse had kissed her. He did not get another utterance of her that night. She parted from him in tingling silence. His own uneasy sense of faithlessness to One immeasurably beloved, to whom he had pledged inviolable and eternal fidelity, nearly prompted him to ask her not to up and tell. But he manfully kept silence.

The worst of one kiss of that kind is that it begets the desire for others like it. She had turned her mouth to his in that whirling, breathless moment, and it was small, and warm, and clung. He tried to shake off the remembrance, but it haunted persistently.

He knew he had behaved like a regular beast--a low cur, in fact. To kiss one girl and mean it for another was, in the Keysian Code of morals, to be guilty of a baseness. The worst of it was that he knew, given the chance, he would do the same thing again.

For he could not shake off the memory of the blus.h.i.+ng face, wetted with streaming tears from the wide bright eyes that pleaded so. They were blue, too, and the fringe above them might, by a not too exhausting stretch of the imagination, be termed golden. He heard her voice crying to him, "How can you, can you?" And he trembled at the thought of the mouth that kissed and clung.

He had known bought kisses, of the kind that brand the lips and shame the buyer as the seller. Never the kiss of Love, until now.

And now--was any other worth the taking?

"Cr'ripps!" said W. Keyse. "Not much!"

x.x.xII

It was Wednesday again, and Saxham came riding through the embrasure in the oblong earthwork, and down the gravelly glacis that led into the Women's Laager. An obsequious Hindu, in an unclean s.h.i.+rt and a filthy red turban, rose up salaaming, almost under his horse's feet, and took the bridle. He dismounted and went his rounds.

It might have been the dry bed of a high-banked placer-river, with spare lengths of steel railway-line borne across from bank to bank, covered with beams and sheets of corrugated iron and tarpaulins, with wide c.h.i.n.ks to let in the much-needed air and light. A line of living-waggons, crowded with women and children--English, American, Irish, Dutch, and half-caste--ran down the centre of the giant trench. In each of its sloping faces a row of dug-out habitations gave accommodation to twice the number that the waggons held. At the eastern end a line of camp cooking-places had been arranged in military fas.h.i.+on, but the Dutchwomen's little coffee-pipkin-bearing fires of dung and chips burned everywhere, and possibly they did something towards purifying the air. For, to be frank, it vied with the native village in the compound and variegated nature of its smells, without the African muskiness of odour that is perceptible in the vicinity of our sable brother. The fat, slatternly, frankly dirty vrouws had not the remotest idea of sanitation; the Germans and Irish, blandly or doggedly impervious to savage smells, pursued their unsavoury way in defiance of the clamorous necessity for hygienic measures, until the majority of the pallid, untidy, scared Englishwomen, the energetic Americans, and the st.u.r.dier Africanders, after making what headway was possible against the ever-rising tide of filth, had yielded to the lethargy bred of despair and lack of exercise, and ceased to strive. A few, worthy of honour, still stoutly battled with the demon of Uncleanliness.

But the first April rainfall would turn the dry ditch into an open sewer--a vast trough of muddy water--in which draggled women would paddle for submerged household G.o.ds. Many would prefer to tramp back to the town at night and sleep in their own shrapnel-riddled homes. But the majority stayed, of choice or of necessity, incubating sickness in that fetid place where nothing would thrive but fierce social and political hatreds, and petty grudges, and rankling jealousies, and shrieking quarrels that burst out and raged a hundred times in a day.

From one of the dug-out refuges Saxham now saw Lynette Mildare coming, making her swift way between the knots of frowsy refugees, the negro women-servants squatting over the little cooking-fires, the pallid children swarming on the narrow pathways.

"Dr. Saxham." Her simple brown holland skirt and thin linen blouse hung loosely upon her. Her face, too, had grown thinner, and looked tired. But the eyes were no longer unnaturally dilated, and the face had a more healthful pallor. "Mrs. Greening begged me to look out for you. She is so anxious about Berta. We have been doing everything we can, but I am afraid the child is seriously ill. It is the third shelter from the end, south side." She pointed out the place.

He had lifted his hat with his short, brusque salute. His vivid eyes wore a preoccupied look, his mobile nostrils angrily sniffed the villainous air.

"I'll come directly, Miss Mildare. But--who can expect children to keep healthy under conditions as insanitary as these?"

"It is--horrible!" Disgust was in her face. "But many of the women are as ignorant as the Kaffirs and Cape boys, and they and the coolie sweepers won't carry away refuse any more unless they're paid."

"You are sure of this?" His tone was curt and official.

"I am almost certain," she told him. "I have heard some of the women complaining that the charges grew higher every day. And, when I asked one of the boys why he did not do the work properly, he was--rude.... Oh, don't punish him!"

He had not said a word, but a white-hot spark had darted from his blue eye, and his grim jaws had clamped ominously together.