Emigration Jane, the new under-housemaid on trial at the Convent, had a
gathering on the top joint of the first finger of the hand that burned to
wear Walt Slabberts' betrothal-ring, and the abscess being ripe for the
lancet, she had an extra afternoon in the week to get it attended to. She
found Walt waiting at the street-corner under the lamp-post, and her heart
bounded, for by their punctuality at the trysting-place you know whether
they are serious in their intentions towards you, or merely carrying on,
and her other young men had invariably kept her waiting. This new one was
class, and no mistake.
"Watto, Walt!" she hailed joyously.
Her Walt uttered a guttural greeting in the Taal, and displayed
uncared-for and moss-grown teeth in the smile that Emigration Jane found
strangely fascinating. To the eye that did not survey Walt through the
rose-coloured glasses of affection he appeared merely as a
high-shouldered, slab-sided young Boer, whose cheap store-clothes bagged
where they did not crease, and whose boots curled upwards at the toes with
mediaeval effect. His cravat, of a lively green, patterned with yellow
rockets, warred with his tallowy complexion; his drab-coloured hair hung
in clumps; he was growing a beard that sprouted in reddish tufts from the
tough hide of his jaws, leaving bare patches between, like the karroo. The
Slabberts was an assistant-clerk at the Gueldersdorp Railway-Station
Parcels-Office, and his widowed mother, the Tante Slabberts, took in
washing from Uitlanders, who are mad enough to change their underwear with
frequency, and did the cleaning at the Gerevormed Kerk at Rustenberg, a
duty which involves the emptying of spittoons. Her boy was her joy and
pride.
Young Walt, the true Boer's son that he was, did not entertain the idea of
marrying Emigration Jane. The child of the Amalekite might never be
brought home as bride to the Slabberts roof. But all the same, her style,
which was that of the Alexandra Crescent, Kentish Town, London, N.W., and
her manners, which were easy, and her taste in dress, which was dazzling,
attracted him. As regards their spoken intercourse, it had been hampered
by the Slabbertian habit of pretending only a limited acquaintance with
the barbarous dialect of England. But a young man who conversed chiefly by
grunts, nudges, and signs was infinitely more welcome than no young man at
all, and Emigration Jane knew that the language of love is universal. She
had sent him a lovely letter in the Taal making this appointment, causing
his pachydermatous hide to know the needle-prick of curiosity. For only
last Sabbath she had spoken nothing but the English, and a young woman
capable of mastering Boer Dutch in a week might be made useful in a
variety of ways--some of them tortuous, all of them secret, as the
Slabbertian ways were wont to be.
He advanced to her, without the needless ceremony of touching his hat,
eagerly asking how she had acquired her new accomplishment?
But the brain crowned by the big red hat that had come from the Maison
Cluny, and cost a hundred francs, and had been smartened up with a bunch
of pink and yellow artificial roses, and three imitation ostrich-tips of a
cheerful blue, did not comprehend. Someone who spoke the Taal had written
for her. The bilingual young woman who was to be of such use to Walt had
only existed in his dreams. And yet--the disappointing creature was
exceeding fair.
"Pity you left your eyes be'ind you, Dutchy!" giggled Emigration Jane,
deliciously conscious that those rather muddy orbs were glued on her
admiringly.
The hair crowned by the screaming hat was waved and rolled over the
horsehair frame she had learned to call a "Pompydore"; the front locks,
usually confined in the iron cages called "curlers," frizzled wonderfully
about her moist, crimson face. She had on a "voylet" delaine skirt, with
three bias bands round the bottom, and a "blowse" of transparent muslin
stamped with floral devices. Her shoes were of white canvas; her stockings
pink and open-worked; her gloves were of white thread, and had grown grey
in the palms with agitation. One of them firmly grasped a crimson
"sunshyde," with green and scarlet cherries growing out of the end of the
stick.
The young Dopper warmly grasped the other, provoking a squeal from the
enchantress.
"Mind me bad finger! Lumme! you did give us a squeeze an' a' arf."
"If I shall to hurt you I been sorry, Miss!" apologized the Slabbert.
"All righto, Dutchy!" smiled Emigration Jane. "Don't tear your features."
She bestowed a glance of almost vocal disdain upon a Kaffir girl in
turkey-red cotton twill, with a green hat savagely pinned upon her woolly
hair. At another ebony female who advanced along the sidewalk pushing a
white baby in a perambulator she tossed her head. "Funny," she observed,
"when I was 'ome I used to swaller all the tales what parsons kep'
pitchin' about that black lot 'aving souls like me an' you. When I got out
'ere, an' took my fust place at Cape Town, an' 'eard the Missis and the
Master continual sayin', 'Don't do this or that, it ain't Englishwomen's
work; leave it to the Caffy,' or 'Call the 'Ottintot gal,' I felt quite
'urt for 'em. Upon me natural, I did! But when I knoo these blackies a bit
better, I didn't make no more bones. Monkeys, they are, rigged up in brown
'olland an' red braid, wot 'ave immytated 'uman beings till they've come
to talk langwidge wot we can understand, and tumble to our meanings. 'Ow
do you like me dress, Walty dear? An' me 'at? That chap what passed with
the red mustash said to 'is friend as I looked a bit of fair all right,
and no mistake. But I'd rather 'ear you say so nor 'im if you 'ad enough
English to do it with. Wot do I care about the perisher along of you?"
It was hard work to talk for two, and keep the ball of courtship rolling
after the approved fashion of Kentish Town, when the slouching young Boer
would only grunt in reply, or twinkle at her out of his piggish eyes. But
Emigration Jane had come out to South Africa, hearing that places at five
shillings a day were offered you by employers, literally upon their knees,
and that husbands were thick as orange-peel and programmes on the
pit-floor of the Britanniar Theayter, 'Oxton, or the Camden Varieties on
the morning after a Bank Holiday. She had left her first situation at Cape
Town, being a girl of spirit, because her mistress had neglected to
introduce her to eligible gentlemen acquaintances, as the pleasant-spoken
agent at the Emigrants' Information Office in Cheapside, the young
gentleman of Hebrew strain, whose dark eyes, waxed moustache, and diamond
tie-pin had made a deep impression upon the susceptible heart of his
client, had assured Jane the South African employer would take an early
opportunity of doing. The reality had not corresponded with the glowing
picture. The employer had failed in duty, the husbands-aspirant had not
appeared. Ephemeral flirtations there had been, with a postman, with a
trooper of the Cape Mounted Police, with an American bar-tender. But not
one of these had breathed of indissoluble union, though each had wanted to
borrow her savings. And Emigration Jane had "bin 'ad" in that way before,
and gone with her bleeding heart and depleted Post Office Savings-book
before the fat, sallow magistrate at the Regent's Road County Court, and
winced and smarted under his brutal waggeries, only to learn that the
appropriator of her womanly affections and her fifteen sovereigns had
already three wives.
The brute, the 'artless beast! Emigration Jane wondered at herself, she
did, as 'ad bin such a reg'ler soft as to be took in by one to whom she
never referred in speech except as "That There Green." That she softened
to him in her weaker moments, in spite of his remembered appetite for
savings and his regrettable multiplicity of wives, gave her the fair hump.
That something in the expression of this new one's muddy eyes recalled the
loving leer of "That There Green," she admitted to herself. Womanly
anxiety throbbed in the bosom, not too coyly hidden by the pneumonia
blouse, as the couple passed the gilded portals of a public bar, and the
Slabberts' elbow was thrust painfully into her side, as its owner said
heavily:
"Have you thirst?"
She coyly owned to aridity, and they entered the saloon, kept by a
Dutchman who spoke English. Two ginger-beers with a stick of Hollands were
supplied, and the stick of Slabberts was as the rod of Moses to the other
stick for strength and power. But as Emigration Jane daintily sipped the
cooling beverage, giggling at the soapy bubbles that snapped at her nose,
the restless worm of anxiety kept on gnawing under the flowery "blowse."
Too well did she know the ways of young men who hospitably ask you if
you're thirsty, and 'ave you in, whether or no, and order drinks as
liberal as lords, and then discover that they're short of the bob, and
borrow from you in a joking way.... Her heart bounded as the Slabberts put
his hand in his pocket, saying:
"Wat kost het?"
The Dutch bar-keeper, who seemed to know Slabberts, answered in English,
looking at Emigration Jane:
"Half a dollar."
Half a dollar is South African for eighteenpence. Slabberts rattled
something metallic in his trousers-pocket, and said something rapidly in
the Taal. The Dutch bar-keeper leaned across the counter, and said to
Emigration Jane:
"Your young man has not got the money."
They were all, all alike. A tear rose to her eye. She bravely dried it
with a finger of a white cotton glove, and produced her purse, an
imitation crocodile-leather and sham-silver affair, bought in Kentish
Town, where you may walk through odorous groves of dried haddocks that are
really whiting, and Yarmouth bloaters that never were at Yarmouth, and
purchase whole Rambler roses, the latest Paris style, for threepence, and
try on feather-boas at two-and-eleven-three, plucked from the defunct
carcase of the domestic fowl. She paid for the drinks with a florin, and
it was quite like old times when Slabberts calmly pocketed the sixpence of
change. The bar-keeper leaned over to her again, and said, surrounding her
with a confidential atmosphere of tobacco and schnaps:
"He is a good man, that young man of yours, and gets much money. He means
to give you a nice present by-and-by."
Her grateful heart overflowed to this friendly patronage. She showed the
bar-keeper her gathered finger, and said it did 'urt a treat. She expected
it would 'urt worse before Dr. de Boursy-Williams--"'adn't 'e got a toff's
name?"--'ad done with it.
"You go to that Engelsch doktor on Harris Street, eh?" said the
bar-keeper, spitting dexterously.
"Sister Tobias--that's the nun wot 'ousekeeps at the Convent--give me a
order to see 'im, to 'ave me finger larnced," explained Emigration Jane.
"Ain't 'e all right?"
"Right enough," said the bar-keeper, winking at the Slabberts, and adding
something in the Taal, that provoked chuckles among the bystanders and
called forth a fine display of neglected teeth on the part of the
personage addressed. "There are plenty other Engelsch will be wishing to
be as right, oh, very soon! For De Boursy-Williams, he has sent his wife
and his two daughters away on the train for Cape Town yesterday morning,
and he has gone after them that same night, and he has left all his
patients to the Dop Doctor."
"Some red-necked baboons are wiser than others," said the Slabberts in the
Taal, and there was a hoarse laugh, and the humorist turned his big heavy
body away, and became one of a crowd of other Dutchmen, who were, in
veiled hints and crooked allusions, discussing the situation across the
Border. Emigration Jane was not sensitive to the electricity in the
atmosphere. She knew no Dutch, and was perfect in the etiquette of the
outing, which, when the young woman has been supplied with the one
regulation drink, stands her up in the corner like an umbrella in dry
weather as long as her young man is a-talking to 'is pals.
"So," the bar-keeper went on, "if you shall want that bad finger of yours
looked to, you will have to wait until the Dop Doctor wakes up. He is a
big man, who can drink as much as three Boers.... He came in this morning
to get drunk, and you shall not wake him now if you fire off a rifle at
his ear. But he will get up presently and shake himself, and then he will
be quite steady; you would not guess how drunk he had been unless you had
seen.... He is over there, sleeping on that table in the corner, and it
will be very bad for the man who shall wake him up. For, look you, that
Dop Doctor is a duyvel. I have seen him break a man like a stick between
his hands for nothing but cutting up a thieving monkey of a little Kaffir
with the sjambok. And he took the verdoemte thing home where he lives,
they say, and strapped up its black hide with plaster, and set its arm as
if it had been a child of Christians. But every Engelschman is mad. Groot
Brittanje breeds a nation of madmen."
The saloon got fuller and fuller. The air solidified with the Taal and the
tobacco, and other things less pleasant. It was not the hour for a crowd
of customers, but nobody had seemed to be working much of late. They were
all Transvaalers and Free Staters, tradesmen of the town, or Boers from
outlying farms, and not a man there but was waiting a certain signal to
clear out and leave Gueldersdorp to her fate, or remain in the place on a
salary paid by the Republics as a spy. The English customer who came in
knew at one whiff of the thick atmosphere that it was unhealthy, and if
the man happened to be alone, he ordered, and paid, and drank, and went
out quickly. If he happened to be with friends, he pointedly addressed his
conversation to his countrymen, and left with a certain degree of swagger,
and without the appearance of undue haste.
Once the swing-doors of the saloon opened to admit a short, spare,
hollow-chested, dapper young Englishman, whose insignificant Cockney
countenance was splashed with orange-coloured freckles of immense size.
Between his thin anaemic lips dangled the inevitable cigarette. And
Emigration Jane, toying with the dregs of her tumbler, recognized the
pert, sharp, sallow face seen over the sleeve of a large burgher's
outstretched arm. With some trouble she caught the eye of the short, pale
young man, and he instantly became a red one. To reach her was difficult,
but he dived and wriggled his way across the saloon, wedging his frail
person between the blockish bodies with a cool address that reminded her
of the first night of a "noo show" at the Camden "Theayter," and the queue
outside the gallery door.
"'Ullo, 'ullo! Thought I reckonised you, Miss." He touched his cheap
imitation Panama with swaggering gallantry, and winked. "But seeing you
eight sizes more of a toff than what you were when I previously 'ad the
pleasure, I 'esitated to tip you the 'Ow Do."
She tossed her imitation ostrich plumes in joyous coquetry.
"As if I didn't know wot you're after. Garn! You only wants to know if I
acted on the stryte about ..."
His projecting ears burned crimson.
"Well, an' suppose I do. Did she----"
"Did she wot?"
"You pipe well enough. Did she 'ave it?"
"Ain't you anxious?"
"Tyke it I am anxious. Did she? No cod?"
"Did she git your letter wot you put in the box o' choc's? O' course she
did, Mister. Wot do you tyke me for? A silly looney or a sneakin' thief?"
"I'll tell you what I tyke you for. A jolly little bit of English All
Right. Say! Do you think ..." The prominent Adam's apple jutting over the
edge of the guillotining double collar worked emotionally. "Think she'll
send an answer, eh?"
"Reckon she will; you watch out an' see!"
"You fust-clarss little brick!"
"Garn!"
"I mean it. Stryte. Next door to a angel--that's wot you are. She's the
angel. Tell 'er I said so--that's if you can, you twig? And say that when
I 'eard that nearly all the gay old crowd o' pupils 'ad gone away, day
before yesterday, I could 'a blooming well cut me throat, thinkin' she'd
gone too. Becos' when I swore in for the Town Guard, it was with the
idear--mind you rub that in!--of strikin' a blow for Beauty as well as for
Britanniar, twig?" The thin elbow in the tweed sleeve nudged her,
provoking a joyous giggle.
"I'm fly, no fear. Are you to 'ave a uniform, an' all like that?"
His face fell. "The kit don't run to much beyond a smasher 'at an'
puttees, but they're the regular Service kind, an' then there's the
bandolier--an' the gun. She ain't the newest rifle served out to Her
Majesty's Army, not by twenty years. Condemned Martini, a chap says, who's
in the know--an' kicks like a mule when I let 'er off--made me nose bleed
fust time I tried with blank. But when we gets a bit more used to each
other, it 'll be a case of bloomin' Doppers rollin' over in the dust, like
rock-rabbits. Don't forget to tell 'er as wot I said so."
"Why ... ain't she a Dutchy 'erself? She wrote a letter for me in their
rummy lingo to my young man!"
"Cripps!" He stared in dismay. "Blessed if I 'adn't forgot. But if an
Englishman marries a foreigner," he swelled heroic, "that puts 'er in the
stryte runnin'. And 'art an' 'and I'm 'ers, whenever she'll 'ave me! Tell
'er THAT--with a double row of crosses from W. Keyse! And--can you
remember a bit o' poetry?" He recited with shamefaced rapidity:
"It is my sentry-go to-night,
And when I watch the moon so bright,
Shining o'er South Africa plain,
I'll think of thee, sweet Greta Du Taine."
Her eyes were full of awe and wonder. "Lor! you don't mean to say you made
up that by yourself?"