The operation was over, and the two Celts, self-appointed to the temporary
posts of assistant-surgeon and anaesthetist, expressed their emotions in
characteristic manner....
"Twelve minutes to a second between the first incision an' the last
stitch.... Och, Owen, the jewel you are! Give me the loan of your fist,
man, this minute."
"What price Sir Jedbury Fargoe the noo? The auld-farrant, scraichin',
obstinate grey gander. A hand I will tak' at him ower the head o' this, or
I'm no Taggart of Taggartshowe. Speaking wi' seriousness, Saxham, it was a
pretty operation, an' performed wi' extraordinary quickness. And I'm sorry
there are no' a baker's dozen o' patients for ye to deal wi'. It's a gran'
treat to see a borrn genius use the knife."
"You could have done it yourself, Major, in less time."
"Maybe I could, and maybe I couldna! I doubt but we Army billies are
better at puttin' men thegither than at takin' them to pieces in the long
run.... Gently now, porter, wi' liftin' the patient.... Ay, McFadyen,
that's richt, gie the man a hand. See to him, Saxham, is he no' fine to
luik at? A wheen blue an' puffy, but the pulse is better than I would have
expeckit. Wheel him awa', nurse; he'll no come round for another hour...."
They wheeled him away, back to the distant ward. The porter followed. The
three surgeons standing by that grim table in the rubber-floored central
space of the amphitheatre, fenced in by students' benches, vacant save for
half a dozen whispering dressers, looked at one another. Bloused and
aproned with sterilised material, masked, rubber-gloved, and slippered,
and splashed with the same ominous stains that were on the table and upon
the floor, Saxham's heavy-shouldered figure was as ominous and sinister as
ever played a part in mediaeval torture-chamber, or figured in a
nightmare-tale of Poe's device. You can see the other surgeons, bibbed and
sleeved, the Irishman, small and dark and wiry, sousing a lethal array of
sharp and gleaming implements in a glass bath of carbolic; Taggart,
standing at a glass table, rubber-wheeled and movable, like everything
else for use, and laden with rolls of lint and bandaging, and blue-glass
bottles of peroxide of hydrogen and mercurial perchloride, daintily
returning reels of silk-worm-gut and bobbins of silver wire to their
velvet-lined case.
"You're no' fatigued? You would no' like a steemulant?"
Saxham started and withdrew his gaze. He had been staring with dull
intensity of desire at the brandy-decanter, forgotten by the matron, whose
usual charge it was. And the sharp blue-grey eye of Surgeon-Major Taggart
followed the glance to its end in the golden-gleaming crystal.
"Fatigued? I hardly think so!"
He laughed, and the others joined in the laugh, remembering the lengthy
line of patients operated on in a single mid-week morning at St.
Stephen's. And yet his steady hand shook a little, and a curious soft,
subtle dulness of sensation was stealing over him. He had gone to bed
sober, had risen after three hours of blessed, unexpected, helpful sleep,
to battle with his desperate craving until morning. When the old woman
left in charge of the housekeeping arrangements had come to his door with
hot water and his usual breakfast--a mug of strong coffee with milk and a
roll--he had gulped down the reviving, steadying draught thirstily, and
swallowed a mouthful or two of the bread; and when he was shaved and
tubbed and clothed in the shabby white drill suit, had gone down to the
dispensary and mixed himself a dose of chloric ether and strychnine,
strong enough to brace his jarred nerves for the coming ordeal.
Not that Saxham habitually drugged: that craving was not yet known to him.
But the habitual intemperance had exacted even from his iron constitution
its forfeit of shakiness in the morning, and the rare sobriety left the
man suffering and unstrung.
Looking about him as the dose began its work of stringing the lax nerves
and stimulating the action of the heart, he saw that many of the drawers
were open, a costly set of graduated scales missing, with their
plush-lined box....
With a certain premonition of what would next be missing, he went into the
surgery. A case of silver-mounted surgical instruments had vanished from a
shelf, with a presentation loving-cup, given by admirers among De
Boursy-Williams's patients to that gifted practitioner. A roll-top desk
was partly broken open, but not rifled, the American boltlocks having
defied the clumsy efforts of the thief, Koets, the Dutch dispensarist, who
had cleared out of Gueldersdorp, under cover of the previous night,
crossing, with the portable property reft from the accursed Englander, the
barbed-wire fence that formed the line of demarcation between the British
Imperial Forces and the Army of the United Republics. He had meant to wait
yet another day, and take many things more, but the coming of those
verdoemte soldiers of the Engelsch Commandant to fetch away the carboys of
carbolic acid and the other medical stores had roused him to prompt
action.
Later, wearing the brass badge of a Surgeon on the sleeve of his greasy
black tail-coat, Koets ruled a Boer Field-Hospital, fearlessly slashing
his way into the confidence of the United Republics through the tough,
wincing brawn and muscle of Free Stater and Transvaaler. It speaks for the
enduring qualities of the Boer constitution to say that many of his
patients survived.
* * * * *
But the brandy in the decanter....
How it beckoned and allured and tempted. And the throat and palate of the
man were parched with the desire of it. And yet, a moment before, with the
toils about his feet, Saxham had wondered at the thought of these degraded
years of bondage. He shook his head sullenly as Taggart repeated his
question, and went away to wash and get dressed.
Then he meant to shake off his companions and go where he could quench
that inward fire. He loathed them as they followed, chatting
pleasantly....
But above the hissing of the hot water from the faucets over the basins
came presently another sound, most familiar to the ears of the gossiping
Celts....
"Rifle-fire! Out on the veld over yonder." McFadyen's towel waved North.
"Do ye hear it?"
"Ay, do I! First bluid has been drawn. And to which side?"
_Boom!..._
The Hospital quivered to its foundations at the tremendous detonation.
Shattered glass fell in showers of fragments from the roof of the
operating-theatre, as the force of the explosion passed beneath the
buildings in a surging of the ground on which they stood, a slow wave
rolling southwards, without a backward draw.
The lavatory door had jammed, as doors will jam in earthquakes. Saxham
tore it open, and the three shirt-sleeved, ensanguined men ran through the
theatre, strewn with the debris from the roof, and through the double
glazed doors communicating with the passage, populous with patients who
should have been in bed, pursued by nurses as pale and shaken as their
stampeding charges. The rear of the Hospital faces North, and they ran
down a corridor full of dust, ending in more glazed doors, and tore out
upon the back stoep, wide and roomy, and full of deck chairs and wicker
lounges.
"Do ye see it? Ten thousand salted South African deevils! Do ye no' see
it?" the Surgeon-Major yelled, pointing to a monstrous milk-white
soap-bubble-shaped cloud that slowly rose up in the hot blue sky to the
North and hung there, sullenly brooding.
"What is it, Major?" shouted Saxham, for behind them the Hospital was full
of clamour. Nurses and dressers were running out into the grounds to
listen and question and conjecture, the barely reclaimed veld beyond the
palings was black with hurrying, shouting men, bandoliered, and carrying
guns of every kind and calibre, from the venerable gaspipe of the native
and the aged but still useful Martini-Henry of the citizen, to the
Lee-Metford repeating-carbine, and the German magazine rifle of latest
delivery to the troops of Imperial Majesty at Berlin. Men were clustered
like bees on the flat tin roofs of the sheds at the Railway Works; men had
climbed the signal-posts and were looking out from them over the sea of
veld; the Volunteers garrisoning the Cemetery had poured from their
temporary huts and dug-out shelters, and were massed on the top of their
sand-bag mounds. A fair, handsome Staff officer, the younger of the two
men who had accompanied the Colonel, went by at a tearing gallop, mounted
on a fine grey charger, and followed by an orderly, while the pot-hat and
truncheon of a scared native constable emerged timidly from the gaping
jaws of a rusty water-cistern, long dismissed from Hospital use, and
exiled to the open with other rubbish waiting transference to the
scrap-heap; and far out upon the railway-line that vanished in the
yellowing sea of veld an unseen engine screeched and screeched....
The Chief, in his pet post of vantage upon the roof of Nixey's Hotel,
lowered his binoculars as the persistent whistle kept open. The lines
about his keen eyes and mouth curved into a cheerful smile. The sound was
coming nearer, and presently Engine 123 backed into view, a mile or so
from waiting, expectant Gueldersdorp, and snorting, raced at full speed
for her home in the railway-yard. Her driver was the young Irishman from
the County Kildare, and her guard hailed from Shoreditch. And both of them
had a tale to tell of what Taggart had called the Colonel's double
surprise-packet, to a tall man whom they found waiting on the metals by
the upper Signal Cabin.
"Six mile from the start, sorra a yard more or less, sorr! I sees a
comp'ny o' thim divils mustered on the bog, I mane the veld, sorr--smokin'
their pipes an' passin' the bottle, an' givin' the overlook to a gang av
odthers, that was rippin' up the rails undher the directions av a
head-gaffer wid a hat brim like me granny's tay-thray, an' a beard like
the Prophet Moses."
"I sor 'is whoppin' big 'at myself, though we was two mile off when we
picked the beggars out," the guard objected; "but 'ow could you twig 'is
beard or that the other blokes was smokin'?"
"Did ye ever know a Dutch boss av any kind clane-shaved an' not
hairy-faced?" was Kildare's just retort, "or see a crowd av Doppers
gathered together that the blue smoke av the Blessed Creature was not
curlin' out av their mouths an' ears an' noses, an' Old Square Face or Van
der Hump makin' the rounds?"
"You thought the blokes on the metals was a workin' gang of our chaps at
the fust go off," complained the guard, "an' you opened the whistle to
warn 'em!"
"He did that for sure," put in the Cardiff stoker. "But he was tipping me
the wink while he did it, so he was; as much as to say he knew they were
Boers all the time."
"Would they have stopped where they was, well widin range, av I had let on
I knew they was a parcel av unwashed Dutchmen?" demanded Kildare hotly.
"Would they have hung on as I pushed her towards thim--would they have
stopped to watch me uncouplin' the two thrucks, smilin' wid simple
interest in their haythen faces, av they had not taken me for a suckin'
lamb in oily overalls that took themselves for sheep av the same fold?"
"They got a bit suspicious when we steamed orf," said the guard; "more
than a bit suspicious, they did."
"They took the thrucks for the Armoured Thrain," recounted Kildare, with a
radiant smile illuminating a countenance of surpassing griminess, "an'
they rode to widin range, an' got off their hairies, an' dhropped in a
volley just to insinse them they took to be squattin' down inside them
insijious divizes, into what they would be gettin' if they put up the
heads av them." He mopped his brimming eyes with a handful of cotton
waste, not innocent of lubricating fluid. "Tower av Ivory! 'twas grand to
see the contimpt av thim when the cowards widin did not reply. 'Donder!'
says the gaffer in the tay-thray hat and the beard like the grandfather av
all the billygoats. 'Is this,' he says, 'the British pluck they talk
about? Show thim verdant English a Dutchman behind a geweer,' he says, an'
that's what they call a gun in their dirty lingo--'an' they lie down wid
all four legs in the air like a puppy that sees the whip. Plug thim again,
my sons,' says he, 'an' wid the blessin' av Heaven, we'll stiffen the
lot!'"
"You could never hear him, so you could not, not at all that distance,"
the Cardiff stoker objected.
"Could I not see him, ye blind harper, swearin' in dumb show, an' urgin'
thim to shoot sthraight for the honour av the Republics an' give the rooi
batchers Jimmy O! Ga-_lant_-ly they respondid, battherin' the sides av the
mysterious locomotive containin' the bloody an' rapacious soldiery av
threacherous England wid nickel-plated Mauser bullets, ontil she hiccoughs
indacintly, an' wid a bellow to bate St. Fin Barr's bull, kicks herself to
pieces!"
"She did so, surely," affirmed the Cardiff stoker. "Surely she did so."
"Tell the Colonel 'ow the engine jumped right off the metals," advised the
guard.
"Clane she did," went on Kildare jubilantly, "an' rattled Davis an' me
inside the cab like pays in an iron pod. See the funny-bone I sthripped
agin' the side av her!" He exhibited a raw elbow for the inspection of the
Chief. "An' when Davis gets the betther av the rest av the black that's on
him wid soft soap an' hot wather, there's an oi he'll not wash off."
"The brake-handle did that, it did so," said Davis, touching the optic
tenderly. But Kildare was answering a question of the Chiefs.
"Killed! Wisha, yarra! av I'd left a dozen an twenty to the back av that
sthretched on the bog behind me, it's a glad man I'd be to have it to tell
ye, sorr. But barrin' they wor' blown to smithereens entirely, not a
livin' man or horse av thim did I see dead at all, at all. But the
Sergeant an' the Reconnoithrin' Party will asy know the place--asy--by the
thundherin' big hole that's knocked in the permanent way there, sizable
enough to bury...." He paused, for once at a loss.
"Korah, Dathan, and Abiram," suggested Davis, who, as a Bible Baptist, had
a fund of Scripture knowledge upon which he occasionally drew, "with their
families and their pavilions and all their substance...."
"Av Cora was there," said Kildare, "she was disguised as a Dutchman, for
sorrow an' oi I clapped on any human baste that was not a square-buttocked
Boer in tan-cord throusers. Thank you, sorr, your Honour, an' good luck to
yourself an' all av us! An' we'll dhrink your Honour's health wid it."
"We will so!" agreed Davis, as the sovereign, dropped into his own
twice-greased palm, vanished in the recesses of his black and oleaginous
overalls.
"Thankee, sir. You're a gentleman, sir!" the guard acknowledged, touching
his cap and concealing the gold coin slid into his own ready hand with
professional celerity.
"Begob! an' you might have tould the Colonel somethin' that was news,"
commented Kildare, as the tall, active figure stepped lightly over the
metals and passed up the ramp, and 123 trundled on, and backed into the
engine-shed amidst a salvo of cheers and hand-clapping.
The Colonel whistled his pleasant little tune quite through as, the
Reconnoitring Party despatched to the scene of the explosion, he went
contentedly back to luncheon at Nixey's. True, Kildare had said, and as
the Sergeant in command regretfully testified later, said correctly, that
neither Boer nor beast had been put out of action by the flying debris. A
poor reprisal had been made, in the opinion of some malcontents, for the
act of War committed by the forces of the Republics in crossing the
Border, in cutting the telegraph lines, and destroying the railway-bridge.
But the moral result was anything but trifling, in its effect upon the
Boer mind. The "new square gun" became a proverb of dread, inspiring a
salutary fear of more traps of the same kind, "set by that slim duyvel,
the English Commandant," and threw over the innocent stretch of veld
outside those trivial sand-bagged defences the glamour of the Mysterious
and the Unknown. No solid Dutchman welcomed the idea of soaring skywards
in a multitude of infinitesimal fragments, in company with other Free
Staters or sons of the Transvaal Republic similarly reduced.
No more boasts on the part of Brounckers, General in command of those
massed, menacing, united laagers on the Border, seven miles from
Gueldersdorp as the crow flew. No more imaginative promises with reference
to the taking of the small, defiant hamlet before breakfast, wiping out
the garrison to a rooinek, and starting on the homeward march refreshed
with coffee and biltong, and driving the towns-people before them as
prisoners of War. The desperate perils presented by the conjectural and
largely non-existent mine were thenceforth to loom largely and luridly in
the telegrams that went up to Pretoria.
"There's a lot in bluff, you know," that "slim duyvel," the Commandant of
the rooineks, said long afterwards. "And we bluffed about the Mines, real
and dummy, for all we were worth!"
So, possibly with premonition of the telegram that was even then clicking
out its message at Pretoria, there was a note of satisfaction in his
whistle out of keeping with the execution actually done, as Nixey's Hotel
came in sight with the Union Jack floating over it, denoting that all was
well. That flagstaff, with its changing signals, was to dominate the
popular pulse ere long. But in these days it merely denoted Staff
Quarters, and War, with its grim accompanying horrors, seemed a long way
off.
A white-gowned European nursemaid on the opposite street-corner waved and
shrieked to her deserting elder charges, and the Chief's quick eye noted
that the small, sunburned, active, bare legs of the boy and girl in cool
sailor-suits of blue-and-white linen twill, were scampering in his
direction. He knew his fascination for children, and instinctively
slackened his stride as they came up, abreast now, and shyly hand in hand:
"Mister Colonel ...?" The speaker touched the expansive brim of a straw
sailor hat with a fine assumption of adult coolness.
"Quite right, and who are you?"
The small boy hesitated, plainly at a nonplus. The round-eyed girl tugged
at the boy's sailor jumper, whispering:
"I _saided_ he wouldn't know you!"
"I fought he would. Because Mummy said he wemembered our names ve uvver
night at ve Hotel ... when he promised ... about ve animals from Wodesia
... all made of mud, an' feavers, and bits of fur ..."
Memory gave up the missing names, helped by those boyish replicas of the
candid clear grey eyes of the Mayor's wife, shining under the drooping
plume of fair hair.
"Mummy was quite right, Hammy, and Berta was wrong, because I remember
your names quite well, you see. And the birds and beasts and insects are
in a box at my quarters. Come and get them."
"If Anne doesn't kick up a wow?" hesitated Hammy, his small brown hand
already in the larger one.
"We'll arrange it with Anne." He waited for the arrival of the
white-canopied perambulator and its fluttering-ribboned guardian to say,
with a tone and smile that won her instant suffrages: "I'm going to borrow
these children for a minute or so. Will you come into the shade and rest?
I promise not to keep you long."
Beauvayse and Lady Hannah's Captain Bingo, relieved from lookout duty, and
descending in quest of food from the Chief's particular eyrie on the roof
of Nixey's Hotel, heard shrieks of infant laughter coming from the
coffee-room. Knives, forks, and glasses had been ruthlessly swept from the
upper end of one of the tables laid for the Staff luncheon, and across the
fair expanse of linen, pounded into whiteness and occasional holes by the
vigorous thumpers of the Kaffir laundry-women, meandered a marvellous
procession of quagga and koodoo, rhino and hartebeest, lion and giraffe,
ostrich and elephant, modelled by the skilful hands of Matabele
toy-makers. Tarantula, with wicked bright eyes of shining berries, brought
up the rear, with the bee, and the mole-cricket, and, with bulgy brown,
white-striped body and long wings importantly crossed behind its back, a
tsetse of appallingly gigantic size....
"Oh, fank you, Mister Colonel," Hammy was saying, with shining eyes of
rapture fixed upon the glorious ones; "and is they weally my own, my vewy
own, for good?"
"Yours and Berta's, really and for good."
"And won't you"--Hammy's magnificent effort at disinterestedness brought
the tears into his eyes--"won't you want vem to play wif, _ever_
yourself?"
The deft hands swept the birds and beasts, with tarantula and tsetse, into
the wooden box, and lifted the children from their chairs, as Captain
Bingo and Beauvayse, following the D.A.A.G., came in, brimming with
various versions of what had happened out there on the veld....
"I have other things to play with just now, Hammy. Run along with Berta
now. You'll find your nurse in the hall."
Berta put up her face confidently to be kissed. Hammy, in manly fashion,
offered a hand--the left--the right arm being occupied with the box of
toys. As Berta's little legs scampered through the door, he delayed to
ask:
"What are your playfings, Mister Colonel?"
"Live men and big guns, just now, Hammy; and chances and issues, and
results and risks."
The plume of fair hair fell back, clearing the candid grey eyes as Hammy
lifted up his face, confidently lisping:
"I don't quite fink I know what wesults and wisks are, but I'd like to
play wif the live men an' the big guns too sometimes ... if you didn't
want vem always?"
"We'll see about it, Hammy, when you're grown up."
"Good-bye, Mister Colonel. And I would lend you my beasts an' fings,
because I know you wouldn't bweak them?"
"See that Berta has her share in them meanwhile. Off with you, now!"
Later, in the seclusion of the connubial bedchamber, said Captain Bingo,
dressing for dinner, the last time for many months, as it was to prove:
"What do you suppose was the Chief's next move, after the engine and
tender got in, and the crowd hoorayed him back from the Railway Works? No
use your guessin', though. Even a woman wouldn't have expected to find him
playin' Noah's Ark in the coffee-room with the Mayor's two kids!"
"I like that!" said Lady Hannah meditatively, arranging the Pompadour
transformation, not apparently the worse for the candle-accident of the
previous night.
"Because you're a woman and sentimental," said her spouse, wrestling with
a cuff-link.
"No; because I am a woman whose instinct tells her that nothing will seem
too big for a man for whom nothing is too small. And--what an incident for
a paragraph!"
He grinned: "With headin's in thunderin' big capitals.... 'The Soldier
Hero Sports With A Babbling Babe.... The Defender Of British Prestige At
Gueldersdorp Puts In Half an Hour At Cat's-Cradle Ere The Armoured Train
Toddles Out With The B.S.A.P. To Give Beans To The Blooming Boer!'"
She darted at him, caught him by the lapels ... made him look at her.
"It's true? You really mean it? The ball begins?"
"Upon the honour of a henpecked husband--before daybreak to-morrow, you'll
hear the music."
She sparkled with delight.
"Oh, poor, unlucky, humdrum women at home in England, walking with the
shooters, or lolling in hammocks under trees, and trying to flirt with fat
City financiers or vapid young attaches of Legation! I shall take the
Irish mare, and borrow an orderly, and ride out to see a Real Action!"