Pray give a thought to the spy, Walt Slabberts, languishing in durance
vile under the yellow flag. Several times the first-class, up-to-date,
effective artillery of his countrymen, being brought to bear upon the
gaol, had caused the captive to bound like the proverbial parched pea, and
to curse with curses not only loud but fervent the indiscriminating zeal
of his brother patriots.
He was, though lost to sight behind the walls of what Emigration Jane
designated the jug, still fondly dear to one whose pliant affections,
rudely disentangled by the hand of perfidy from the person of That There
Green, had twined vigorously about the slouching person of the young Boer.
Letters were received, but not forwarded to suspects enjoying the
hospitality of the Government, so communication with the object of her
dreams was painfully impossible. Stratagems were not successful. A
passionate missive concealed in a plum-pudding--before it was put on to
boil--had become incorporated with the individuality of a prison official,
who objected on principle to waste.
On Sundays, when you could go out without your 'art in your mouth an
account of them 'orful shellses, a fair female form in a large and
flamboyant hat, whose imitation ostridge tips were now mere bundles of
quill shavings, and whose flowers were as wilted as the other blossoms of
her heart, wandered disconsolately round her Walt's place of bondage,
waving a lily hand on the chance of being seen and recognised. Tactics
productive of nothing but blown kisses on the part of extra-susceptible
warders, and one or two troopers of the B.S.A., who ought to have known
better. These advances Walt's bereaved betrothed rejected with ringing
sniffs of scorn, yet, of such conflicting elements is the feminine heart
composed, found them strangely solacing.
She 'ad 'ad 'er month's notice from Sister Tobias upon the morning
following the night of the tragedy, another score to the account of the
traitor Keyse. Arriving unseemly late, and in an agitated state of
mind--and could you wonder, after her young man had been pinched and took
away?--she had mechanically accounted for her late return in the well-worn
formula of Kentish Town, explaining to the surprised Sisters that there
'ad bin a haccident on the Underground between the Edgeware Road and
'Ammersmiff, an' that her sister Hemmaline had bin took bad in
consequence, the second being looked for at the month's end; and to leave
that pore dear in that state--her 'usband being at his Social Club--was
more than Emigration Jane 'ad 'ad the 'art to do. She received her
dismissal to bed, and the advice to examine her conscience carefully
before retiring, with defiance, culminating in an attack of whooping
hysteria. Nor was she repentant, but defiantly elated by the knowledge
that nobody had slept in the Convent that night, until she had run down.
The character supplied by Sister Tobias to her next employer specified
terminological inexactitude among her failings, combined with lack of
emotional self-control; but laid stress on an affectionate disposition,
and a tendency to intermittent attacks of hard work.
She was now, with her new mistress and the kids, pigging--you couldn't
call it nothink else, not to be truthful you couldn't--at the Women's
Laager, along of them there dirty Dutch frows. She refrained from too
candid criticism of her Walt's countrywomen, but it was proper 'ard all
the same not to call crock and muck by their right names!
Languishing in seclusion, week and week about, cooking scant meals of the
Commissariat beef, moistened with gravy made from them patent packets of
Consecrated Soup, can you wonder that her burden of bitterness against W.
Keyse, author of all her wrongs, instrument most actively potential in the
jogging of her young man, bulked larger every day? She was not one to 'ave
the world's 'eel upon 'er without turning like a worm. No Fear, and Chance
it! Her bosom heaved under the soiled two-and-elevenpenny peek-a-boo
"blowse" as she registered her vow. That there Keyse--the conduct of the
faithless Mr. Green appeared almost blonde in complexion beside the sable
villainy of the other--That There Keyse should Rue the Day!
How to make him?--that was the question. Then came the dazzling flash of
inspiration--but not until they had met again.
She was circulating hungry-hearted about the brick-built case that held
her jewel--the man who had held out that vista of a home, and called her
his good little Boer-wife to be. We know it was a mere bait designed to
allure and dazzle--the Boer spy had caught many women with it before. Do
you despise her and those others for the predominance of the primal
instinct, the sacred passion for the inviolate hearth? Not so much they
yearned for the man as for the roof-tree, whose roots are twined about the
heart-strings of the natural woman, the spreading rafter-branches of which
shelter little downy heads.
She encountered the traitor, I say, and her eyes darted fire beneath a
bristling palisade of iron curling-pins. She had not the heart in these
days to free her imprisoned tresses. The villain had the perishing nerve
to accost her, jauntily touching the smasher hat.
"'Day, Miss! 'Aven't seen you since when I can't think."
She replied with a ringing sniff and a glance of infinite scorn that she
would trouble him not to think; and that she regarded low, interfering,
vulgar fellows as the dirt under her feet. So there!
"Cripps!" He was took aback, but not to the extent of taking hisself off,
which he ought to. "You're fair mad with me, an' no mistyke." His pale
eyes were unmistakably good-natured; the loss of the yellow freckles,
swamped in a fine, uniform, brick-dust colour, was an improvement, she
could not help thinking. "But I only did my duty, Miss, same as another
chap would 'ave 'ad to. Look 'ere! Come and 'ave a split gingerade."
The delicious beverage was three shillings the bottle. She frowned, but
hesitated. He persisted; she ended by giving in. Weeks and weeks since she
had walked with a young man! The Dutchman's saloon was closed and
barricaded; its owner had made tracks to his Transvaal friends at the
beginning of the siege. But the aromatic-beer cellar was one of the places
open. They went in there. Oh! the deliciousness of that first sip of the
stinging, fizzling beverage! He lifted his glass in the way that she
remembered, and drank a toast.
"'Er 'ealth! If you knew how I bin wantin' to git word of 'er! She's well,
isn't she, Miss? Lumme! the Fair Old Knock-out I got when I see the
Convent standin' empty.... Gone into laager near the railway works now,
you 'ave, I know. Safe, if not stric'ly luxurious. But--I git the Regular
Hump when I think of--of a Angel like 'Er 'avin' to live an' eat an' sleep
in a--a--in a bloomin' rabbit-'ole." He sighed as he wiped the pungent
froth from his upper lip.
"Pity you can't tell 'er so!" The sarcasm would have its way, but it
failed of his great simplicity.
"That's why I bin lookin' out for you." He blushed through the brick-dust
hue as he extracted a fatigued-looking letter from a baggy left
breast-pocket in which it had sojourned in company with a tobacco-pouch, a
pipe which must not be smoked in the trenches if a man would prefer to do
without a bullet through his brain, a handful of screws not innocent of
lubricating medium, a clasp-knife, a flat tin box of carbolised vaseline,
a First-Aid bandage, and a ration of bread and cheese wrapped in old
newspaper. The bread was getting deplorable, for even the dusty seconds
flour was fast dribbling out.
"You'll give 'er this, won't you, Miss, and tell her I bin thinkin' of 'er
night and d'y? Fair live in the trenches now; and when I do git strollin'
round the stad, blimme if I ever see 'er. But she's there--an 'ere's a
ticker beatin' true to 'er." He rapped a little awkwardly upon the bulging
left breast-pocket, "To the bloomin' end, wotever it may be!"
"Oh, you--silly, you!"
She found him ridiculous and tragic, and so touching all at once that the
gibe ended in a sob. It was not the stinging effervescence of the
gingerade that made her choke and brought the smarting tears to her eyes.
It was envy of that other girl. And then she noticed, under his left eye,
a tiny scar, and she knew how he came by it, and remembered what she owed
him, and saw that the chance had come for her revenge. She could pierce
the heart beating under the khaki breast-pocket to its very core with
three words as easily as she had jabbed his face with her hat pin on that
never-to-be-forgotten night. She would tell him that the lady of his love
had gone up to Johannesburg weeks and weeks ago. Oh, but it would be sweet
to see the duped lover's face! She would give him a bit of her mind,
too--perhaps tear up the letter.
Then flashed across the murky-black night of her stormy mind the
forked-lightning inspiration of what the real revenge would be. To take
his letter--write him another back, and yet others, fool him to the top of
his bent, and presently tell him, tossing at his feet a sheaf of billets.
"And serve you glad--and no more than your deservings! Who put away my
Walt?"
She accepted the letter, only permitting herself one scornful sniff, and
put the missive in her pocket. Next day John Tow, the Chinaman, serenely
fatalistic, smilingly perpendicular in felt-soled shoes, amidst zipping
bullets, brought to the trench a reply, signed "Fare Air."
The writer Toke the Libberty of Hopeing W. Keyse was as it Left her at
preasent. She was Mutch obblig for his Dear Leter Witch it 'ad made her
Hapey to Know a Brave Man fiteing for her Saik.
"Cr'r----!" ejaculated W. Keyse, below his breath. His face was radiant as
he read. Her spelling was a bit off, it was impossible to deny.
But--Cripps!--to be called a brave man by the owner of the maddening blue
eyes, and that great thick golden pigtail. The letter went on:
"Dear mr. Keyse yu will be Plese to Kno Jane is Sutch a
Cumfut to me in Trubel. As it is Selldom Fathful Frends are
To be Fownd But Jane is trew as Stele & Cold be Trustid with
lbs & lbs. no More at Preasent from yr afexn Swetart.
"X X X X
"FARE AIR."
His senses reeled, as under pretence of masking a sneeze he pressed his
burning lips to those osculatory crosses. He wrote her a flaming answer,
begging a Sunday rendezvous. She appointed a place and an hour. He went
there on the wings of love, but nobody turned up except the Jane who could
be trusted with pounds and pounds.
She hurried to him trembling and quite pale, her blue eyes--he had never
noticed that they were blue and really pretty--wide with fright under her
yellow fringe of curls newly released from steely fetters. Her lips were
apart, but he failed to observe that the teeth they revealed were
creditably white; her cotton-gloved hand repressed her fluttering heart,
but he did not see its tumultuous throbbing. He gulped as he said, with a
fallen jaw and a look of abject misery that pierced her to the quick:
"She--couldn't come, then?"
"No, pore deer!" gasped the comfort in trouble, casting about for
something to tell him. She had made up her mind as she came along; she
would have her revenge there and then, and chance it. Something kept her
from laying the candle-flame to the time-fuse. She did not know what it
was yet. But, oh! the sharp look of terror in the thin, eager face pierced
her through and through.
"My Gawd! She's not bin killed?" he cried. "Don't tell me she's bin----"
"Lor', gracious goodness, no! What will you think of next?" She lied,
rallying him, with jealousy eating at her own poor heart. "Can't git away,
that's all. Them Sisters are so precious sharp. An'--'Go an' tell 'im,'
she says, ''e'll 'ave to put up with you this once. An' you'll come back
an' tell me all about 'im!'"
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 assented, 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 cherishing his letters, those passionate 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 Hell the next, was
Love. Passion 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 shell to break up an
orgy of godless 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 Saturday night, when every gentleman sits in shirt-sleeves, with
his arm round the waist of a lady, and the faggots 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 shell-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
identity 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 shiny 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 shining teeth; and here and there the
impassive, 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 Cockney 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 assemblage
for you and for me. It sends its silent, wordless, eloquent message
thrilling to the heart of the Beloved, and wins its passionate 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
Cockney 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 sunshine. 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 title 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 blushing 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!"