Up Commissioner Street and down Commissioner Street and around and
around Market Square tramped a haggard man in khaki who surveyed all
things with dull, unseeing eyes. On his cheek, an inch or so above
his stubbly beard, was a wide cross of plaster, and his left wrist
wore a narrow bandage. He walked with quick, nervous strides; yet
every now and then he halted to rest for a moment. Then he hurried
on again, as if pursued by some unseen, but malignant foe.
Twice he turned northward and paused before the hospital, staring
irresolutely up at the lighted windows. Then, facing about abruptly,
he moved on, swiftly, but with the mechanical tread of a man in a
dream. Once he found himself resting on the steps of the Jewish
synagogue. The next time he roused himself to take note of his
surroundings, he was at the Berea Estate, following Hospital Hill
straight to the eastward. It was then that he had turned about and
faced back to the hospital. A scant half-dozen hours before, that
hospital had held what was all the world to him. Now, without
warning, that all had proved to be naught.
The blow had come crashing upon him, straight between the eyes and
so suddenly that there had been no time for him to brace himself to
meet it. From the moment of his facing Ethel in the doorway of the
hospital, that noon, he had been sure that the talk which he would
have with her, that evening, could bring but the one ending. At
sight of the soiled and haggard man before her, her blue eyes had
lighted with something far more than pleased surprise. His appearing
had been quite unexpected; her meeting with him had been the naked
impulse of her girlish heart. And, all that endless day, her grief
for the Captain had in no way hidden her evident pleasure in his own
presence. And then, all at once, had come the end, unexpected and
hence doubly crushing. His young, newborn happiness was as little
strong to bear the blow as were his exhausted body and his shattered
nerve. Like a wild beast wounded to the death, he had crept silently
away, to go through his agony, unseen.
Standing under the fierce glare of the electric light by the
hospital gate, his appearance would wellnigh have baffled the
recognition of his mother. Soiled and stained and tattered, his head
sunk between his shoulders, he looked a feeble man of middle years.
Dark shadows lay around his heavy gray eyes, and the corners of his
mouth drooped pitifully. And, somewhere inside that building, was
the girl who had snatched away from him what was dearer than life
itself. For six long months she had been the incentive to all of his
best work; it had been her influence which finally had led him to
come back into the firing line; it had been in the hope for the
future, a hope growing less and less vague as the months passed by,
that he had been willing and glad to prolong his stay through one
more torrid African summer. And to what end?
Strange to say, it never once occurred to him to try to win her love
now, after all that bad passed. Still less did it occur to him to
doubt the truth of her final words to the Captain. Weldon had missed
the look of appealing anguish in the blue eyes which she had lifted
to his; but he had heard the low, steady voice, had seen the
pressure of the living fingers answer to the slight movement of the
hand already growing cold. He had heard, and seen. It was enough.
Always he had believed implicitly in Ethel's truth. There was no
reason he should distrust her now. It was only that he had been an
egregious ass to think that he could win her love, in the face of a
man like Captain Leo Frazer. With a mighty effort, he straightened
his shoulders, faced the wing where he knew the Captain would now be
lying and reverently removed his hat. Then, for one last time, his
eyes swept over the building and, turning away, he crawled off
towards the railway station.
And, meanwhile, alone in a room behind one of those brightly-lighted
windows, a girl sat huddled together, her crossed arms on her knees
and her face buried in her arms, while she wailed to herself over
and over again,--
"He might have waited! He might have waited! My God in heaven, what
have I done? But at least he might have waited!"
A commissariat train was leaving Johannesburg at two o'clock the
next morning. His pass in his hand, Weldon clambered drearily on the
train for the long ride back to Kroonstad. Motion of any kind was
better than remaining longer in Johannesburg. Nevertheless, the
jolting of the train was wellnigh unbearable. His shoulder throbbed,
and the dull pain in his head was maddening. He had passed the stage
of weariness, however, where one is conscious of exhaustion. An
ever-tightening strain was upon him. He could not rest now; he must
go on, and on, and on, faster and ever faster, until at last
something should snap and quiet perforce should overtake him.
Early dawn found him at Kroonstad. Sleep had been impossible for
him; he had no appetite for food, and it took an ever-increasing
effort for him to pull himself together. Like a man mounting a
steep, pathless hill, he tried to drag himself up above the
consciousness of his aching head and throbbing wounds; but it was
not to be done. At the station he halted irresolutely. Then of a
sudden he faced towards the great hospital tent.
"I want something to steady me a bit," he said briefly to the first
doctor he met there. "I have two or three scratches, and I am
feeling fagged. Give me something to help me get a grip on myself
again, for I can't spend time to be ill."
The doctor remonstrated; but Weldon's answer was peremptory.
"I tell you, I can't stop. Give me something and let me go. I've
work at Lindley that must be done, and a convoy leaves in an hour."
An hour later he was trudging over the veldt in the direction of
Lindley. Lindley was forty miles away; the roads were dusty, and the
sun of early February struck down upon him with the heat of a
belated summer. Nevertheless, at Lindley was his squadron, and with
his squadron would be work. Never in all his past life had Weldon
known this imperative need for work. In it now, and in its
accompanying excitement and in its inevitable risk, would lie his
ultimate salvation. For him, the future held but one plain duty, and
that duty was to forget.
The experienced eye of the doctor had told him that the gaunt
trooper was a sick man; it had also told him that the trooper's
determination would outweigh his sickness, at least for the present
crisis. He made no effort to penetrate the cause of that
determination. He merely yielded to it. A doctor less wise would
have ordered Weldon into bed. This one saw further. He knew that a
delicately adjusted machine often receives its worst damage from the
friction needed to stop the whirring wheels. Better to wait and let
them run down, untouched.
The forty miles from Kroonstad to Lindley were reducing themselves
from a geographical fact to a matter of physical and mental anguish.
There had been no rain for days, and under the burning sun, the
dusty veldt seemed dancing up and down before Weldon's tired,
feverish eyes. Now he passed through a stretch of bare and
burned-out sand; now he tramped over patches of tall dry grass; now he
plodded wearily around a heap of smooth black stones. Brick-red
ant-hills higher than his knees dotted themselves over the veldt, their
shell-like surface shielding a crowded insect colony within.
Ant-bear holes lurked unseen in his pathway, tripping his heedless
steps; and an occasional partridge went whirring upward, making him
start aside in causeless terror at the unwonted sound. And over it
all rested the glaring, shimmering, blinding light, laden with
myriad particles of dazzling red-brown dust. Later still, the
red-brown color vanished, and he walked for weary leagues over the
fire-blackened veldt where the black rocks offered no contrast to the
eye, and where the air was heavy with ashes caught up and scattered
by the light breeze which heralded the coming night. And it was all
so lonely, so hostile, so limitless. But no more lonely and hostile
and limitless than the desolate future which stretched away and away
before his gaze.
As yet he dared not trust his mind to rest too much upon the past.
The future demanded his whole attention. It was a far cry for him
from the present up to his limit of threescore years and ten. Still,
he would not funk it now. That was the part of a sneak. Now, as
always, he would stand by his young resolution to play out the game,
to abide by the rules and to take the consequences. Nevertheless, it
would be weary work to play out the game to its end, when the end
held nothing for him in its keeping. His mind trailed off upon all
sorts or vague corollaries scarcely connected with the fact. He
recalled it with a jerk.
The Captain was dead. Ethel had loved the Captain. She had told the
Captain of her love. As consequence, she could not love himself,
Harvard Weldon. But he loved her. He had loved her for thirteen
months and twenty-one days. Carefully he reckoned up the time; then,
to make sure, he counted it off upon his fingers. Yes, he had loved
her ever since that first lunch on the steamer, when she had snubbed
him so roundly. He did not know it then. Looking backward, he knew
it now. And there had been Cape Town, and Johannesburg, and Cape
Town again. He stumbled into the open mouth of an ant-bear's hole
and came down with a crash, full upon his wounded shoulder. Strange
that his step should be so uncertain! Strange that he should feel so
little inclination to swear! As he picked himself up, he wondered
vaguely whether his pipe would be refreshing; but his wonder
stopped, impotent to lead his dangling hand in the direction of his
pocket. Then his mind took up its interrupted story, its record of
brief, categorical facts.
He had meant to go home, that winter. Instead, Ethel had fanned the
flame of his desire to go back to the front. He had left her, one
evening, to pass a sleepless night, and, the next morning, to take
himself out to enlist for another six months of service. The six
months were nearly ended. Only three weeks remained. And then?
Nothing.
The second night found him still far from Lindley. He had plodded on
mechanically, stumbling often, but halting never, while his mind
went whirling on and on, over and over the same old questions. His
lips were feverish, and his eyes burned hotly, so it was almost with
a sense of relief that he greeted the swift chill which followed the
dropping of the sun. Over his head, the great arch of the sky shaded
from east to west through every tint of purple and blue and
turquoise and emerald-green, down to the golden band of the
afterglow. Then the stars began to dot the purple, their tiny points
of light serving only to emphasize its darkness, until the full moon
swept up across the heavens, throwing its mystic silver light over
all the land and adding tenfold to the empty loneliness of the
veldt. Sleep was out of the question. He could only snuggle more
closely into his blankets and wait for morning with what grace he
could. The stopping of his physical action only increased the
swiftness of his swirling thoughts which chased each other round and
round in circling eddies about one fixed point. That point was
Ethel.
Across the veldt at his left hand, he had watched the chain of
blockhouses which lay along the country between Kroonstad and
Lindley. Their squat outlines and the shining blue of their
corrugated iron roofs had caught his wandering attention, held it,
pinned it to other associations with those same blockhouses and, of
a sudden, had brought him to a full realization that griefs did not
come singly. He had left Johannesburg, to face a future apart from
Ethel. He was coming back to Lindley, to face a future bereft of the
Captain.
It was full noon, the next day, when the camp came into view.
Leaving the convoy to follow in his wake, he headed straight for the
rise where he had so often sat with Carew and gossiped of all things
under the light of the sun. Then, as the round tents lay under his
eyes like rows of dots punched into relief above the surface of the
plain, he sank down on the coarse, parched grass and hid his eyes in
his shaking hands. Yet even then the pitiless circle of tragic
thoughts refused to stop their ceaseless round.
He roused himself at a touch on his arm. Kruger Bobs, at a distance,
was eying him with a look of chastened welcome; but Carew stood
beside him, one thin, sun-tanned hand on Weldon's shoulder.
"It's all right, old man," he was saying. "Don't try to tell me
anything about it. Kruger Bobs saw you coming, and we rode out to
meet you. Come in and rest. You look utterly done up."
Half way back to the camp, Carew spoke again; but it was only once.
"I told the fellows you were coming, and that you would be tired.
They will keep out of your way, till you have had time to rest up a
bit. Paddy is waiting to look out for you; but you needn't worry. He
knows when to hold his tongue. If you need anything, or if you care
to talk, send him out to look for me. Meanwhile, you need some
rest."