The Dop Doctor lifted his head as the bell of the front door rang loudly
at the back passage-end. Two mounted officers of the Military Staff at
Gueldersdorp had trotted up the street with an orderly behind them a
moment before. The elder of the two had pulled sharply up in front of the
green door whose brass-plate flamed in the last rays of sunset. He had
dismounted lightly and gone up the steps and rung, saying something to his
companion. The other officer had saluted and ridden on, as though to carry
out some order: the orderly had come up and got off his horse and taken
the bridle of the officer's, as the Dutch dispensary-attendant, Koets, had
plodded heavily along the passage and opened the door, and now slouched
heavily back, ushering in a presumable patient.
"Light the lamp," said the Dop Doctor in Dutch to the factotum, as he rose
up heavily out of his chair. "It will be dark directly."
"There is no need of more light, I am obliged to you," said the stranger,
cool, alert, brown of face as of dress: a thin man, distinct of speech,
quiet of manner, and with singularly vivid eyes of light hazel. "In the
actual dark I can see quite clearly. A matter of training and habit,
because I began life as a short-sighted lad. Do we need your assistant
further?"
In indirect answer to the pointed question, the Dop Doctor turned to the
Dutch dispensary-assistant, and said curtly:
"Ga uit!"
Koets went, not without a scowl at the visitor.
"A sulky man and a surly master," thought the stranger, scanning with
those observant eyes of his the gaunt figure in the shabby tweed suit.
"Has seen trouble and lived hard," he added, mentally noting the haggard
lines of the square face under the massive forehead, over which a plume of
badly-brushed hair, black with threads of grey in it, fell awkwardly.
"English and a University man, I should say. Those clothes were cut by a
Bond Street tailor in the height of fashion about five years ago. And the
man is in the second stage of recovery from a bout of drunkenness--unless
he drugs?" But even while the visitor was taking these memoranda, he was
saying in the customary tone of polite inquiry:
"I have, I think, the pleasure of speaking to Dr. Williams?"
"Sir, you have not. Dr. De Boursy-Williams has left for Cape Town with his
family. You are speaking to his temporary substitute." The bloodshot blue
eyes met his own indifferently.
"Indeed! Well, I do not grudge the family if, as I believe is the case, it
chiefly ranks upon the distaff side. But the Doctor will miss a good deal
of interesting practice. As to yourself, you will allow the inquiry....
Are you a surgeon as well as a medical practitioner?"
"If I were not, I should not be here."
"I will put my question differently. I trust you will not consider its
repetition offensive. Have you an extensive experience in dealing with
gunshot wounds?"
Saxham said roughly:
"I have experience to a certain extent. I will go no further than to say
so. I am not undergoing examination as to my professional capabilities
that I am aware of, and if you doubt them you are perfectly at liberty to
seek medical advice elsewhere."
"My good sir, I _have_ been elsewhere, and the other doctor, when he
learned the purport of my visit, relished it as little as your principal
is likely to do. With the imminent prospect of a siege before us, we are
making ..." The speaker, slipping one hand behind him, moved a step
backwards and nearer to the room-door. "As I said, sir, with the imminent
prospect of a siege before us, we are making a house-to-house
requisition.... Ah, I thought as much!"
The door-knob had been quietly turned, the door suddenly pulled open,
bringing with it Koets, the Dutch dispensary-attendant, whose large red
ear had been glued to the outer keyhole.
"Your Dutch factotum has been listening. Pick yourself off the mat, Jan,
and take yourself out of earshot." The stranger whistled the beginning of
a pleasant little tune, with a flavour of Savoy Opera about it.
"Ik heb not the neem of Jan," snarled the detected Koets, retiring in
disorder.
The whistler left off in the middle of a deftly-executed embellishment to
say: "Unfortunate; because I don't know the Dutch word for spy." The keen
hazel eyes and the haggard blue ones met, and there was the faint
semblance of a smile on the grim mouth of the Dop Doctor. Keeping the door
open, the visitor went on:
"I have some notes here--entries copied from the Railway freight-books.
Three weeks ago twenty carboys of carbolic acid, with a considerable
consignment of other antiseptics, surgical necessaries, drugs, and so
forth were delivered to Dr. Williams' order at this address. Frankly, as
the officer commanding Her Majesty's troops on this border, I am here to
make a sequestration of the things I have mentioned, with all other
medical and surgical requisites stored upon the premises, that are likely
to be of use to us at the Hospital. In the name of the Imperial
Government."
The smile died out on the grim mouth. A sombre anger burned in the blue
eyes of the haggard man in shabby tweeds.
"Damn the Imperial Government!" said the Dop Doctor.
The stranger nodded in serious assent. "Certainly, damn it! It is your
privilege and mine, shared in common with all other Britons, to damn our
Government, as long as we remain loyal to our Queen and country."
The other man quivered with a sudden uncontrollable spasm of hate, rage,
and loathing. He clenched his hand and shook it in the air as he cried:
"You employ the stock phrases of your profession. They have long ceased to
mean anything to me. I have been the victim and the sacrifice of British
laws. I have been formally pardoned by the State for a crime I never
committed. I have been robbed, plundered, ruined, betrayed, by the
monstrous thing that bears the name of British Justice. And as I loathe
and hate it, so do I cast off and repudiate the name of Englishman. You
speak of the imminent prospect of a siege. What other causes have operated
to bring it about but British greed, and the British lust for paramountcy
and suzerainty and possession? Liberal, or Conservative, or Radical, or
Unionist, the diplomats and lawyers and financiers who urge on your
political machinery by bombast and bribes and catchwords and lying
promises, are swayed by one motive--governed by one desire--lands and
diamonds and gold. Wealth that is the property of other men, soil that has
been fertilised by the sweat of a nation of agriculturists, whom Great
Britain despised until she learned that gold lay under their orchards and
cornfields." He broke into a jarring laugh. "And it is for these, the
robbers and desperadoes, that the British Army is to do its duty, and for
them that De Boursy-Williams is to help pay the piper. As for his
property, which you are about to commandeer in the name of the British
Imperial Government, I suppose I am legally responsible, being left here
in charge. Well, be it so!... I can only protest against what I am free to
regard as an act of brigandage, reflecting small credit upon your Service,
and leave you, sir, to discover the whereabouts of the carboys for
yourself!"
He waved his hand contemptuously, and swung towards the door.
"A moment," said the other man, "in which to assure you that the fullest
acknowledgments will be given in the case of the stores, and that their
owner will be paid for them liberally and ungrudgingly. And, granting
that much of what you have said is true, and that the leaven of
self-seeking is to be found in every man's nature, and that greed is the
predominating motive with those men who, more than others, work for the
building-up of an Empire and the profitable union of Britain with her
Colonies, don't you think that there may be something in the good old
footballer's motto, 'Play the game, that your side may win'?"
The Dop Doctor made a slight sound that might have been of indifferent
assent or of contradiction. The other chose to take it as assent.
"Take the present situation, purely as football. They have picked me as a
forward player. And I mean--to play the game!"
The Dop Doctor might or might not have heard. His square, impassive face
looked as if carved in stone.
"To play the game, Doctor. Perhaps I have my bone or two to pick
with--several of the Institutions of my country. Possibly, but I mean to
play the game. Fate has ridden me on a saddle-gall or two, and mixed too
much chopped straw in proportion to the beans, but--there's the game, and
I'm going to play it for all I'm worth. As an old University man, that way
of looking at things ought to appeal to you."
Still no answer from the big, sullen, black-haired man in the shabby worn
clothes. But his breathing was a little quickened, and a faint,
smouldering glow of something not yet quenched in him showed in the
haggard blue eyes.
"It's a confoundedly handicapped game, too, on the defending side. Doesn't
that fact rather appeal to the sportsman in you, Doctor?"
The other said slowly:
"I gather that the struggle will be unequal. It was stated in my hearing
yesterday afternoon that a considerable force of Boers were advancing on
Gueldersdorp from the direction of Geitfontein, and, later, that another
large body of them were on the march along the river-valley from the west.
I did not attempt to verify what I had heard from my own observation. I
was--otherwise engaged." The half-incredulous surprise that the other man
could not keep out of his eyes stung him into adding: "Frankly, I did not
care to trouble. It did not interest me."
The Colonel said, with a dry chuckle:
"No? But it will presently, though! And, seen through the glass even now,
it's an instructive spectacle. Masses of Dutchmen, well-weaponed and
thoroughly fed if insufficiently washed, gathering in all
quarters--marching to the assembly points, dismounting, unlimbering, going
into laager. Ten thousand Boers, at a rough estimate, not counting the
blacks they have armed against us.... And, behind our railway-sleepers and
sand-bags, eight hundred fighting European units, twenty per cent, of them
raw civilians; and seven thousand neutral Barala and Kaffirs and Zulus in
the native Stad--an element of danger lying dormant, waiting the spark
that may hurry us all sky-high.... By God, Doctor, the game's worth
playing, except by cowards and curs!"
The smouldering glow in the Dop Doctor's eyes had been fanned into a fire.
The visitor saw the flame leap, and went on:
"There's a native proverb--I wonder whether you know it?--a kind of Zulu
version of the regimental motto, _Vestigia nulla retrorsum_. It runs like
this: '_If we go forward, we die; if we go backward, we die. Better go
forward and die._'" He reached out a long, lean, brown right hand. "Come
forward with us, Doctor. We can do with a man like you!"
The impassive face broke up. Saxham gripped the offered hand as a drowning
man might have done. He cried out hoarsely:
"You don't know the sort of man I am, Colonel. But everybody else in this
cursed place knows, or should know. They call me the Dop Doctor. You
understand what that nickname implies?" He held out his shaking hands.
"Look at these! They would tell you the truth, even if I lied. What use
can a man like me be to you, or men like you? I am a drunkard, sir. I have
not gone to bed sober one night in the last five years!"
There was a pause before the Colonel answered, filled up in the odd way
characteristic of the man by a softly-whistled repetition of the opening
bars of the pleasant little tune. Then he said quietly and dryly:
"There is another proverb, not Latin nor Zulu, but English, which
impresses on us that it is never too late to mend!" He looked at a
tarnished Waterbury watch, worn on a horse's lip-strap. "I am due to
inspect the Hospital tomorrow at ten o'clock sharp. If you will meet me
there punctually at the half-hour, I shall have the pleasure of
introducing you to--your Colleagues of the Medical Staff. And now, if you
please, as I have just five minutes left to spare, we will have a look at
those carboys of carbolic."
"They are in the old Chinese godown at the bottom of the garden," said
Saxham. He felt in one of the baggy pockets of the old tweed coat, pulled
out a key, and offered it silently to the conqueror, who motioned it back.
"Keep it, if you'll be so good. We'll send a waggon and a careful man or
two round from the Army Service Stores Department within an hour; for that
stuff in your friend's carboys is more precious than rubies to us just
now--a man's life in every teaspoonful. And if, as you tell me, there is
some mercurial perchloride, Taggart and the Medical Staff will jump for
joy. What we owe to Lister, Koch, and those fellows! You'd say so if you'd
ever seen gangrene on War Hospital scale--in Afghanistan, in 1880, even as
recently as the Zululand Campaign of 1888. The Pathan and the Zulu are
slim, and the Boer is even slimmer, but the wiliest customer of 'em all is
the Microbe. No wonder Wellington's old campaigners used to slit the
throats of badly-wounded soldiers, or that the ambulance-men of Soult and
Bonaparte were merciful enough to knock on the head every poor beggar who
had been bayonetted in the body. They knew there was not the atom of a
chance. But to-day we know how to deal with the invisible enemy. Thanks to
Antiseptic Surgery, that younger daughter of Science and Genius, as some
smart fellow puts it in the _National Review_."
And the pleasant little tune was whistled through to its final grace-note
as the two men went down the house-passage and crossed the garden. Verily,
to some other men that have lived since Peter of the Nets has it been
given to be fishers of their kind! This man said that night to an officer
of the Staff: