It was Wednesday again, and Saxham came riding through the embrasure in
the oblong earthwork, and down the gravelly glacis that led into the
Women's Laager. An obsequious Hindu, in an unclean shirt and a filthy red
turban, rose up salaaming, almost under his horse's feet, and took the
bridle. He dismounted and went his rounds.
It might have been the dry bed of a high-banked placer-river, with spare
lengths of steel railway-line borne across from bank to bank, covered with
beams and sheets of corrugated iron and tarpaulins, with wide chinks to
let in the much-needed air and light. A line of living-waggons, crowded
with women and children--English, American, Irish, Dutch, and
half-caste--ran down the centre of the giant trench. In each of its
sloping faces a row of dug-out habitations gave accommodation to twice the
number that the waggons held. At the eastern end a line of camp
cooking-places had been arranged in military fashion, but the Dutchwomen's
little coffee-pipkin-bearing fires of dung and chips burned everywhere,
and possibly they did something towards purifying the air. For, to be
frank, it vied with the native village in the compound and variegated
nature of its smells, without the African muskiness of odour that is
perceptible in the vicinity of our sable brother. The fat, slatternly,
frankly dirty vrouws had not the remotest idea of sanitation; the Germans
and Irish, blandly or doggedly impervious to savage smells, pursued their
unsavoury way in defiance of the clamorous necessity for hygienic
measures, until the majority of the pallid, untidy, scared Englishwomen,
the energetic Americans, and the sturdier Africanders, after making what
headway was possible against the ever-rising tide of filth, had yielded to
the lethargy bred of despair and lack of exercise, and ceased to strive. A
few, worthy of honour, still stoutly battled with the demon of
Uncleanliness.
But the first April rainfall would turn the dry ditch into an open
sewer--a vast trough of muddy water--in which draggled women would paddle
for submerged household gods. Many would prefer to tramp back to the town
at night and sleep in their own shrapnel-riddled homes. But the majority
stayed, of choice or of necessity, incubating sickness in that fetid place
where nothing would thrive but fierce social and political hatreds, and
petty grudges, and rankling jealousies, and shrieking quarrels that burst
out and raged a hundred times in a day.
From one of the dug-out refuges Saxham now saw Lynette Mildare coming,
making her swift way between the knots of frowsy refugees, the negro
women-servants squatting over the little cooking-fires, the pallid
children swarming on the narrow pathways.
"Dr. Saxham." Her simple brown holland skirt and thin linen blouse hung
loosely upon her. Her face, too, had grown thinner, and looked tired. But
the eyes were no longer unnaturally dilated, and the face had a more
healthful pallor. "Mrs. Greening begged me to look out for you. She is so
anxious about Berta. We have been doing everything we can, but I am afraid
the child is seriously ill. It is the third shelter from the end, south
side." She pointed out the place.
He had lifted his hat with his short, brusque salute. His vivid eyes wore
a preoccupied look, his mobile nostrils angrily sniffed the villainous
air.
"I'll come directly, Miss Mildare. But--who can expect children to keep
healthy under conditions as insanitary as these?"
"It is--horrible!" Disgust was in her face. "But many of the women are as
ignorant as the Kaffirs and Cape boys, and they and the coolie sweepers
won't carry away refuse any more unless they're paid."
"You are sure of this?" His tone was curt and official.
"I am almost certain," she told him. "I have heard some of the women
complaining that the charges grew higher every day. And, when I asked one
of the boys why he did not do the work properly, he was--rude.... Oh,
don't punish him!"
He had not said a word, but a white-hot spark had darted from his blue
eye, and his grim jaws had clamped ominously together.
"It is my duty to put down insubordination, and chastise inefficiency
where I encounter it. May I ask you to point out the fellow who behaved
insolently?"
She said: "I--I think he is head of the carting-gang. A Kaffir boy they
call Jim Gubo."
"That will do, thank you, Miss Mildare. You are not alone here?"
Her glad smile assured him of that. "Oh no, I am with the Mother. I go
everywhere with her, and I think I am of use. I am not at all afraid of
sickness, you know, or--the other things."
"But yet," Saxham said, "you must be careful of your health."
"You have no idea how tremendously strong I am," she answered him, and he
broke into laughter in spite of himself. She looked so tender, so
delicately frail a creature to be there in that malodorous Gehenna,
ministering to the wants of slatternly vrouws and stalwart, down-at-heel
Irishwomen. His smile emboldened her to say: "I did not thank you the
other day, after all."
"The Krupp shell came along and changed the subject of the conversation."
He added: "Were you alarmed? You had rather an escape."
"I was with Mother."
"You love her very dearly?" The words had escaped him unconsciously. They
were his spoken thought. She flushed, and said with a thrill of tenderness
in her clear girlish tones:
"More dearly than it is possible to say. I don't believe God Himself will
be angry with me that I have always seen His Face and Our Blessed Lady's
shining through hers and beyond it; for He knows as no one else can ever
know what she has been since they brought me to the Convent years and
years ago."
"They" were her people, presumably. It was odd--Saxham supposed it the
outcome of that Convent breeding--that she should speak of God as simply,
to quote Gladstone's criticism on the Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff, as
though He were her grandfather. Saxham had been reared in the Christian
faith by a pious Welsh mother, but there had always been a little
awkwardness about domestic references to the Deity. In times of sadness or
bereavement He was frequently referred to. But always in a deprecatory
tone.
"Your family is not Colonial?" he asked.
She shook her lovely red-brown head.
"I--don't know."
"Mildare is an unusual surname."
"You think it pretty?"
He thought her very pretty as she stood there, a slender willowy creature
with the golden shadow of her rough straw-hat intensifying the clear amber
of her thoughtful eyes.
"Very."
She looked him in the face and smiled.
"So did I when the Mother gave it to me. I think it belonged to someone
she used to know, and her mother was Lynette. So they baptised me Lynette
Mildare. It seems rather strange not having a name of one's own, but
really I never had one."
"Never had one?"
Saxham echoed her half-consciously, revelling in the play of light and
shadow over the delicate face, and the gleaming as of golden dust upon the
outer edges of the waves of red-brown hair drawn carelessly back over the
little ears.
"Not to my knowledge. Of course, I may have had one once." She added, as
he looked at her in suddenly roused surprise, "I must have had one once."
She was looking beyond him at a broad ray of moted white-hot sunshine that
slanted through one of the wide openings above, and cleft the thick
atmosphere of the crowded place like a fiery sword. "I have often wondered
what it really is, and whether I should like it if I heard it? To exchange
Lynette Mildare for Eliza Smith ... that would be horrible. Don't you
think so?"
Saxham smiled. "I think you are joking, and that a young lady who can do
so under the present circumstances deserves to be commended."
She looked at him full.
"I am not joking." Borne by a waft of the sickly air a downy winged seed
came floating towards her, a frail gossamer courier coming from the world
above with tidings that Dame Nature, in spite of all the destruction
wreaked by men, was carrying on her business. "And--I do not even know
that I am a young lady. See there"--she blew a little puff of breath at
the moving messenger, and it wafted away upon a new air-pilgrimage, and,
rising, caught a stronger current, and soared out of sight--"that is me.
It came from somewhere, and it is going somewhere. That is all I know
about myself; perhaps as much as I shall ever know. Why do you look so
glad?"
His lips were sealed. The throb of selfish triumphant exultation came of
the belief that the gulf between them was less wide and deep than he had
thought it. A wastrel may woo and wed a waif, surely, without many
questions being asked. And then, at the clear, innocent questioning of her
eyes, rushed in upon him, scalding, the memories he had thrust away. He
saw the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp, his short daily stint of labour done,
settling down to drink himself into hoggish oblivion in his accustomed
corner of the Dutchman's liquor-saloon. He beheld him, his purpose
accomplished, sleeping stertorously, spilled out like the very dregs of
manhood in the sawdust of that foul place; he shuddered as the bloated,
dishevelled thing roused and reeled homewards, trickling at the mouth, as
the clear primrose day peeped over the flat-topped eastern hills. And he
sickened at the thing he had been.
"I felt glad," he lied, with looks that shunned Lynette's, "that in your
need you found so good a friend as the Mother-Superior. Yours must have
been a sorrowful, lonely childhood."
Her own vision rose before her, blotting out his face. She saw the little
kopje with the grave at its foot. She saw a ragged child sitting there
watching for the earliest flush of dawn or the solemn folding of night's
wide wing over the lonely veld, and the coming of the great white
stars....
"She is much, much more than a friend. She is the Mother." Her loyal heart
was in her face. "I have no secrets from her. I tell her everything."
Was that deeper flush born of the remembrance of a secret unshared? And
how strange that every change of colour and expression in the delicate
face should mean so much, so soon. He said, with a hungry flash of the
gentian-blue eyes:
"Your love and confidence repay her richly."
"I can do so little." There was an anxious fold between the slender
eyebrows. "Only follow her and be near her; only look on as she spends
herself for others, never resting, never sparing, never discouraged or
cast down." Great tears brimmed the white, darkly-fringed underlids, and
ran over. "And she only laughs at me at night when I cry at the sight of
her dear, blistered feet."
"You will be able to laugh with her when this is over," Saxham said rather
clumsily.
"Shall I? Perhaps." Still that fold between the fine, delicate eyebrows.
"You have seen War," Saxham went on, his own voice sounding strange to
him. "And that is a terrible experience for a woman, young or old, but you
will be the richer by it in the end, believe me, Miss Mildare. Richer in
courage and endurance and calmness in the presence of danger and death,
and in sympathy with the pain and suffering inevitable under such
circumstances."
"Sympathy? They had all my sympathy before." Her fair throat swelled
against its encircling band of moss-green velvet, her voice rang, her eyes
flashed golden fire under the shadow of the wide straw hat. "Do you think
it needed War to teach me how hideously women suffer? How they have
suffered since the world began, and how they will suffer until its end,
unless they rise up in revolt once for all, against the wickedness of
men?"
She was transformed under Saxham's eyes. The slender virginal body
increased in stature and proportions as he gazed, and what obscure
emotions seemed striving in her face!
"Look at them," she said, indicating with a slight revealing gesture the
swarming, dowdy, listless occupants of the crowded trench. "How patient
they are, how resigned to the dreadful life they drag on here from day to
day, full of the horror and the pain and the suffering that you say is
inevitable. Why should it be inevitable? Did these women who are the chief
victims of it and the greatest losers by it, choose that there should be
War? See that poor soul with the rag of crape upon her hat, who sits at
her door peeling potatoes. Did she desire it? Yet her young husband was
shot in the trenches a week ago and her little baby died of fever this
morning.... And, did those other women whose homes have been wrecked and
ruined, whose sons and husbands and fathers may be shot, and whose
children may sicken with the same fever before night, demand of their
Governments, Imperial or Republican, that there should be War? You see
them patient and submissive because they neither realise their wrongs or
understand their rights. But a day will come when they will understand,
and then"--her eyes grew dreamy--"I do not know exactly what will happen.
But these international questions, with others, will be decided by a
general plebiscite, the women will vote as well as the men; and as women
are in the majority, and every woman will vote for Peace--how can there be
War?"
"You are an advocate of Universal Suffrage, then? You believe that there
must be absolute sex-equality before the world can be--I think 'finally
regenerated' is the stock phrase of the militant apostle of Women's
Rights? I have heard this outcry from many feminine throats in London, but
Gueldersdorp," said Saxham drily, "is about the last place one would
expect to ring with it."
"'Universal Suffrage, Sex-Equality, Women's Rights....'" The shibboleth
that Saxham quoted was evidently unfamiliar to the girl. "I know"--there
was a sombre shadow in her glance--"what Women's Wrongs are, but I am not
very well informed about the things you speak of. The Mother tells me that
there are many well-educated women in London and Paris, in Berlin and in
New York, who have devoted their lives to the study of such questions. Who
write and speak and labour to teach their fellow-women that they have only
to band themselves together to be powerful, only to be powerful to be
feared, only to will it to be free. When I am twenty-four I mean to go out
into the world and meet those leader-women. Some of them, I am told, have
suffered loss and ill-usage; some of them have even undergone imprisonment
for the sake of what they believe and teach. Well, I will hear what they
have to say, and then they will listen to me. For until my work is done,
theirs will never be accomplished, Something tells me that with a most
certain voice."
"And until that time comes?" said Saxham.
Her eyes grew bright again, a smile played about her exquisite lips.
"Until that time comes I will study and gather more knowledge, and
capacity to fit myself for a struggle with the world."
"_You_ 'struggle with the world'!"
Her girlish pride in her high purpose being sensitive, she mistook the
brusque tenderness in Saxham's face and voice for irony.
"Yes. Perhaps you may not believe it, but I know a great many useful
things. Latin and French and German and Italian, well enough to teach and
translate. I am well grounded in History and Science and Mathematics. I
can take a temperature and make a poultice, or sweep a room and cook a
dinner." She nodded at Saxham with a little spark of laughter underlying
the sweet earnestness of her look. "Also, I have learned book-keeping and
typewriting, and shorthand. I earn enough now, by bookbinding, to pay for
my clothes. The Mother says that I am competent to earn my living
anywhere, and to teach others to earn theirs. But I am not to begin until
I am twenty-four. That is our agreement."
Saxham understood the fine maternal tact that never set this ardent young
enthusiast chafing at the tightened rein. But he said roughly:
"The Mother.... How can she approve your joining the ranks of the
Shrieking Sisterhood?"
"She knows," Lynette explained, with adorable gravity, "that I should
never shriek."
"How will you bear parting from her? And how will she endure parting from
you?"
The girl's mobile lips began to tremble. The luminous amber eyes were
dimmed with moisture as she said:
"It will not be losing me. Nor could I ever bear to leave her if I did not
know that I should come back. But I shall come back. And she will ask me
what I have done. And I shall tell her: 'This, and this, and all the rest,
my Mother, for the love of you, and for the sake of those others who once
sat in darkness and the Shadow of Death, and now have found the Way of
Peace.'"
"And those others, Beatrice?"
Saxham knew now the secret of the haunting familiarity of the beautiful
girlish face. The delicate oval outline, the pale wild-rose colouring, the
reddish-brown of the fine, glistening tresses, the amber-hazel of the
wistful, brilliant eyes, reproduced to a wonderful degree the modelling
and tinting of the wonderful Guido portrait, the white-draped head in the
Barberini Gallery, which, in defiance of Bertolotti and the _Edinburgh
Review_, will always be associated with the name of the sorrowful-sweet
heroine of the most sombre of sex-tragedies.
"Why do you call me Beatrice?" she asked, with that sudden darkening of
those luminous eyes. He told her:
"Because you are like the Daughter of the Cenci. Shelley used to be my
favourite among the English poets, and when I first went to Rome, years
ago, the first thing I did was to hunt up the portrait in the Barberini
Palace Gallery; and it is marvellous. No reproduction has ever done
justice to it. One could not forget it if one tried."
"I am glad I am like Beatrice," she said slowly. "I have always loved and
pitied her. I pray to her as my friend among the Blessed Souls in
Paradise, and she always hears. And by-and-by she will help me when I go
out into the world----"
"To look for those others," Saxham interpolated. "Tell me who they are?"
She looked at him, and for an instant the virginal veil fell from her, and
there was strange and terrible knowledge in her eyes.
"They are women, and girls, and children," she answered him. "They are the
most unhappy of all the souls that suffer on earth. For they are the
slaves and the victims and the martyrs of the unrelenting, merciless,
dreadful pleasures of Man. And I want to go among them and lift them up,
and say to them, 'You are free!' And one day I will do it."
There was a dull burning under Saxham's opaque skin, and a drumming in his
ears. His authority and knowledge fell from him as that virginal veil had
fallen from her; he stood before her humbled and ashamed, shunning her
eyes, that penetrated and scathed his soul as the eyes of an avenging
Angel might, with their clear, simple, direct estimate of himself and his
fellow-men. And the distance between them, that had seemed to be lessening
as they talked, spread illimitably vast; a dark, sunless plain, bounded by
a livid horizon, reflected in the slimy pools of foul swamps and
pestilential marshes, where poisonous reptiles bred in slimy, writhing
knots, and the Eaters of Human Flesh lurked under the tangled shade of the
jungles. Less vile of life, even in his degradation, than many men, he
felt himself beside this girl a moral leper.
"Unclean, unclean!"
While that voice yet echoed in the desert places of his soul, he heard her
saying:
"I don't know why I should talk to you of these plans and projects of
mine. I never have spoken of them yet to anyone except the Mother.
But--you spoke of sympathy with those who suffer. I think you have it, Dr.
Saxham, and that you have suffered yourself. It is in your face. And--you
are not to suppose that I believe all men to be----"
He ended for her: "To be devouring beasts. No; but we are bad enough, the
best of us, if the truth must be told. And--I _have_ suffered, Miss
Mildare, at the hands of men and women, and through the unwritten laws, as
through the accepted institutions of what is called Society, most
brutally. I would not soil and scorch your ears with the recital of my
experiences, for all that a miracle could give me back. I swear to you
that I would not!"
She touched the little ears with a smile that had pathos in it.
"They have heard much that is evil, these ears of mine."
"And the evil has left them undefiled," said Saxham.
"Thank you!"
She begged him again not to forget the sick child at Mrs. Greening's
shelter, and hurried away, keeping her face from Saxham. He knew that
there was no hope for him, that there never would be any. And he loved
her--hungrily, hopelessly loved her. Dear innocent, wise enthusiast, with
her impossible scheme for cleansing the Augean stable of this world!
Chivalrous child-Quixote, tilting at the Black Windmills, whose sails are
whirled by burning blasts from Hell, and whose millstones grind the souls
of Eve's lost daughters into the dust that makes the devil's daily
bread--how should the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp dare to love her? But he
did not cease to, for all the height of his self-knowledge and all the
depth of his self-scorn.
He seemed to Lynette a strange, harsh man, but there was something in him
that won her liking. He had a stern mouth, she thought, and sorrowful,
angry eyes, with that thunder-cloud of black, lowering eyebrow above them.
And he looked at her as though she reminded him of someone he knew.
Perhaps he had sisters, though they could hardly be very young. Or it was
not a sister. He must be quite old--the Mother had thought him certainly
thirty-five--but possibly he had a young wife in England--or somewhere
else? And she had spoken to him of her great project. She wondered now at
that impulse of confidence. Perhaps she had yielded to it to convince
herself that her enthusiasm was as strong, her purpose still as clear, as
ever, in the mirror of the Future; that no gay, youthful reflection had
ever risen up of late days between it and her wistful eyes when she peeped
in. The remembered image of the handsome face that had laughed, even as
Beauvayse had declared:
"Even if I die to-day, it won't end there. I shall think of you, and long
for you, and worship you wherever I am."
The thought of Beauvayse's dying was horrible, intolerable. His name came
after the Mother's in her prayers. He had asked her to keep the
secret--his and hers--and called her such exquisite, impossible things for
promising that the mere remembrance of his words and his eyes as he said
them in that low, passionate, eager voice, took her breath deliciously.
"_Sweetest, kindest, loveliest...._" She whispered them to herself as she
hurried back to comfort worried Mrs. Greening with the news that the
doctor was coming.
Meanwhile Saxham went on his accustomed way between the long line of
waggons and the corrugated-iron lined huts on the other hand, in a
cross-fire of appeals, requests, complaints. Nothing escaped him. He would
pass by, with the most casual glance and nod, women who volubly protested
themselves dying, and single out the face that bore the dull, scorched
flush of fever or the yellow or livid stamp of rheumatism, or ague, or
liver-trouble, with a beckon of his hand, and the owner of such a face,
invariably declaring herself a well woman, would be summarily dealt with,
and dosed with tabloid or tincture out of the inexhaustible wallet he
carried, slung about his shoulders by its webbing band.
"Dokter," screeched a portly Tante in a soiled cotton bedgown and flapping
kappje, appearing, copper stewpan in hand, from between the canvas
tilt-curtains of a living-waggon. "You are come at last; the Lord be
thanked for it! I have much, much trouble inside." She groaned, and laid
her fat, unoccupied hand upon the afflicted area, adding: "I feel I shall
not be quite wholesome here."
"Wat scheelt er aan, Tante?" He spoke the Taal with ease.
The large Tante snorted:
"What is the matter? Do you ask me what is the matter? As if a dokter
oughtn't to tell me that! But the Engelsch are regular devils for asking
questions. Since you must know, I have a mighty wallowing under my
apron-band, and therewith a pain. How is it begun? It is begun since
middageten yesterday. And little Dierck here has the belly-ache, and is
giddy in the head."
"Little Dierck will have something worse than the belly-ache, and you
also, if you eat of broth or vegetables cooked in a vessel as unclean as
that, mevrouw."
"Hoe?" The large flabby face under the expansive kappje became red as the
South African sunset. She flourished the venerable copper stewpan, its rim
liberally garnished with verdigris, ancient deposit of fatty matters
accumulated at the bottom. "Do you call my good stewpan, that my mother
cooked beef and succotash and pottage-herbs in before me, an unclean
vessel--you? And were the pan otherwise than clean as my hand--as my
apron!"--a double comparison of the unfortuitous kind--"how should I alter
matters in a heathen place like this?" Her large bosom rocked
tumultuously. "Dwelling at the bottom of a mud-hole like a frog, O God of
my fathers! with bullets as big as pumpkins trundling overhead, ready to
whip your head off your body if you as much as stick your nose above
ground--the accursed things!"
"They are pumpkins sent by your own countrymen, Tante, so you ought to
speak of them more civilly. And--scour the pot with a double-handful of
clean sand; it will be for your health as well as the kind's. Come here,
jongen--give me a look at the little tongue." The boy went to him
confidently, and stuck it out, looking up with innocent wide eyes in the
square, powerful face, as Saxham swung round his wallet, continuing,
"Here, mevrouw, is a packet of Epsom salts. Take half of it, stirred in a
cup of warm water, to-morrow morning fasting----"
"Alamachtig!" she protested. "Is that the Engelsch way of doctoring? To
put another belly-grief on the top of the one you have got, what sense is
in that?"
"It is the new nail, Tante, that drives out the rusty old one. Give the
boy a teaspoonful in half a cup of water, and remember to scour the pans."
Saxham passed on, stepping neatly with his small, tan-booted, spurred feet
between the dung and chip fires curling up in blue smoke-spirals, and the
sprawling children, seeming as though he did not notice them, yet catching
up one that had a rash, and satisfying himself that the eruption was
innocent ere he passed on, visiting every waggon-dwelling and cave-refuge,
rating the inhabitants of some, dosing the occupants of others, emerging
from three or four of the stuffy, ill-smelling places with a heavy frown
that boded ill for somebody. For though Famine had not yet begun to gnaw
the vitals of those immured in Gueldersdorp, Disease had here and there
sprung into active, threatening, infectious being, menacing the crowded
community with invisible, maleficent forces. Soon the hospitals were to be
crowded to the doors, to remain crowded for many months to come; and the
cry, "Room for the sick! more room!" was to go up unceasingly.
Coming out of a miserable habitation, where lay a woman in rheumatic
fever, whose three children had developed measles on the previous day,
and, seeing about the door of a neighbouring hovel a particularly noisome
aggregation of garbage and waste, he paused but to give a brief direction
to the mild-faced Sister who had assumed charge of the sick. Then his
voice rang out above all the feminine and childish Babel, strong,
resonant, masculine:
"Where are the head-boys of the gangs that I told off to clean up and
carry ash-buckets to the dumping-place?"
Whence, under cover of night, the garbage and waste were carted to the
destructor in connection with the Acetylene Gas Company's plant, soon to
be shattered by one of Meisje's shells. There was no answer. Saxham took
the worn hunting-crop from under his arm, and with an easy movement shook
out the twisted thong.
"Where are those two boys? Jim Gubo! Rasu!"
A pale young woman peeling potatoes at her door looked up knowingly. "They
won't carry away a cabbage-leaf unless they're bribed, and they open their
mouths wider every day. It's a tikkie a bucket now."
The young woman went back to her potatoes. The offenders, visibly quaking,
crept from under a waggon, where they had been gambling with dry mealies
for ill-gotten tikkies. A big Kaffir boy in ragged tan-cords and the
crownless brim of an Oxford straw, with a red-turbaned, blue
dungaree-clad, supple Oriental of the coolie class. Jim Gubo, with liberal
display of ivory, assured the Baas, in defiance of the Baas's own eyes and
the organ in juxtaposition, that the work had been regularly done. Rasu
the Sweeper, with many oaths and protestations, assured the Presence that
such neglect as was apparent was owing to the incapacity of the hubshi and
his myrmidons, Rasu's own share of the labour and that of his
fellow-countryman being scrupulously performed.
The Presence made short work of Kaffir and Hindu. Shrill feminine clamours
filled the air as the singing lash performed its work of castigation; and
while Saxham scored repentance upon the hide of his blacker brother,
holding him writhing, shouting, and bellowing at the full stretch of one
muscular arm, as he plied the other he kept a foot on Rasu the Sweeper, so
as to have him handy when his turn came. Meanwhile, the Oriental, with
tears and lamentable howlings, wound about the doctor's leg, a vocal worm,
deprecating tyranny.
"Your Honour is my father and mother. Let the hand of justice refrain from
excoriating the person of the unfortunate, wreaking double vengeance upon
the hubshi, who is but fuel for Hell, like all his accursed race, and
full explanation shall be made."
He was jerked upward by the scruff, as, smarting, blubbering Africa
retired to the shadow of the waggons.
"Well, what have you got to say?"
The bellow of the town batteries, with the clack--clack--clack! of the
Hotchkiss that had been removed from the armoured train and mounted on the
North Fort, reduced the tirade to pantomime.
"This is a bad, a very bad, place for the son of my mother." The lean
brown right hand swept upwards to the thick canopy of white smoke that the
shifting breeze rolled back from the Cemetery Earthworks. "The food of
coarse grain is diet for camels, and the water stinks very greatly.
Moreover, it is better for thy slave to die amongst defilements than to
carry buckets and be chased by devils in iron pots thirsting for the blood
of men. Aie--aie!"
One of the enemy's Maxim-Nordenfelts had loosed off a group of the
gaily-painted little shells. With the reduplicated rattle of the
detonation, they passed over the laager, bursting as they went, sending
their fan-shaped showers of splinters broadcast. Slatternly women and
scared children bolted for their burrows. Rasu the Sweeper dived
frantically between the fore and hind wheels of a waggon, praying to all
the gods of the low-caste to ward off those wicked little bits of rending
metal....
"Anyone hurt?" called Saxham.
"No one, I think," called back the strong sweet voice of the
Mother-Superior, who had come out of a hovel, where she was tending some
sick. There was a glint in her deep eyes as she regarded Saxham's thorough
handiwork that told her approval of castigation well deserved. Then:
"Maharaj! Oh, Maharaj! Succour in calamity! Aid for the dying! Hai, hai,
behold how I bleed!"
The red-turbaned martyr rolled in the unclean litter, elevating a
stick-like brown leg, in the lean, muscular calf of which one of the
smallest of the wicked little splinters had, as Rasu the Sweeper dived for
the waggon, found a home.
"That has saved you a well-earned hiding, so thank your stars for it. Let
the Kaffir see to it that he insults no more English ladies, or he shall
pay for every word with an inch of skin. Now put up your leg." Saxham
whipped out the splinter with a little pair of tweezers, deftly cleansed
and dressed the wound, bandaged it, and, dismissing Rasu the Sweeper with
a caution, was coming across to the Reverend Mother when a chorus of cries
and piercing shrieks broke forth:
"Mijn jongen! mijn jongen!"
She was a bulky Dutch vrouw, with a dishevelled head of coarse black hair,
and a dirty cotton gown, and dirty bare feet in bulgy shoes that were
trodden down at heel. But with her livid, purple face and protruding,
bloodshot eyeballs uplifted to the drifting cloud of greenish lyddite
vapour that thinned away overhead, she was great and terrible, and the
very incarnation of Maternity Bereft.
One huge arm gripped the little body to her broad, panting bosom. She had
called him, and he had not answered; she had sought and found him, just as
he had slidden off the box-seat, where he had been playing driver of the
ox-span, lying curled up against the dashboard, the little whip of stick
and string he had been at pains to make only yesterday fallen from the
lax, childish hand. The fair hair on the left temple was dabbled in blood,
that trickled from the tiny three-cornered bluish hole. His eyes were
open, as if in wonder at the sudden darkness that had fallen at bright
midday; the smile had frozen on the parted, innocent lips....
Oh, look at this, Premier and President! Look at this, my Lords and
Commons and militant Burghers of Republican States! Grave Ministers who
decide in Cabinet Councils that the prestige of the Government you
represent is at stake, and that the bedraggled honour of the Country can
only be washed clean in one red river, flowing from the veins of Humanity,
look, look here! You who lust for Sovereignty, hiding rapacious Ambitions
and base lust for gold behind the splendid ermined folds of the Imperial
purple. You who resented Suzerainty, coveting to keep in your hands riches
that you could not use, resources that your ignorance could not develop,
greedy to have and hold what you wrested from the Sons of Ham, lest white
men should snatch it back from you again; and prating of Liberty and
Freedom while the necks of three races of men were bending under the yoke
of an oligarchy more imperious, more pitiless, more covetous, besotted,
brutal, and ignorant than any other that the spotted records of History
can show--look here, look here!
Nations that rush to dreadful War, loosing the direful threefold plague of
Iron, Fire, and Disease to scourge and brand and desolate the once smiling
face of your Mother Earth, pause as you roll onwards in desolating
cataclysms of armed and desperate men, and forgetting the bloodstained
she-devil you misname Glory, look here, in the Name of One who loved and
suffered little children, rating their innocent bodies and spotless souls
at such high value that Little Dierck and his countless
brother-and-sister-babes that have perished of Iron, Fire, and Disease, as
of Terror and Famine, Death's twin henchmen, shall weigh in the balance
against Crowned Heads and Lords and Commons and Presidents and
Representatives and Deputies, until they kick the beam!
Should there be War? Of course there should be War! you say.
Have you seen War? Perhaps, even as I have. And, having seen it, dare you
justify the shedding, by men who hold the Christian Faith, of these
spilled-out oceans of Christian blood?
That question will be settled when the Trumpet of the Great Angel sounds,
and the Sea and the Earth shall give up their dead, and everyone shall
answer for his deeds before the Throne of God. And until then, look to it
that if you war in any cause, the cause be a just one.
"My Dierck! My little Dierck! O God! God!----"
Standing with that tragic purple mask turned upwards to the silent sky,
and the wild eyes blazing, and the great fist at the end of the uplifted
arm brandished in the Face of Heaven itself, the Boer mother demanded of
her Maker why this thing had been done?
"He was so good. Never a fib since last I gave him the ox-reim end to
taste. Never a lump of sugar or a cookie or a plum pilfered--he would take
them as bold as brass before your face if you didn't give. He said the
night-prayer regularly. For the morning, Lord, Thou knowest boys want to
be up and at mischief as soon as they have rubbed the sleep out of their
eyes--'tis only natural. And the father a God-fearing man, and me a woman
of piety. For when have I backslidden before Thee? If any of mine have
hung back when I told them to loop and do a thing, or sneaked off and hid
when we were inspanned for the kerk-going, did I fail to whack them as a
mother should? Nooit, nooit! And now--Death has fallen out of the sky upon
the Benjamin of my bosom. Oh, blasted be the eyesight and withered be the
hand of the man that sighted and laid and fired the gun!"
She cursed the Kaiser's blue-and-white-uniformed gunner in every function
of his body and every corner of his soul, waking and sleeping, dying and
dead, with fluent Scriptural curses. The crowded faces about her went
white. Some of the women were crying, others shook their heads:
"Thim that puts the Bad Black Wish on odhers finds sorra knock harrd at
their dure," said an Irish voice oracularly. "An' who but herself did be
callin' down all manner av' misfortune on ivery wan that crassed her?"
"It's a judgment--my opinion," agreed the thin young woman who had been
peeling potatoes, and who wore a wisp of draggled crape round a soiled
rush hat. "Never a shell busted but you'd a-heered her say she hoped that
one had sent another parcel of verdant rooineks to Hell. And me sitting
over against her with crape on for my husband and baby. 'Tis a judgment,
that's what I say."
"Oh, hush, Mrs. Lennan!" said the Mother-Superior. "Be pitiful and forget.
She did not think--she had not suffered. Be pitiful, now that her hour has
come!"
The thick voice of the Boer woman broke out again:
"Did ever I miss of the Nachtmaal? Alamachtig, no! Virtuous as Sarah have
I lain in the marriage-bed--never a sly look for another, and my husband
with dropsy-legs as thick as boomstammen, and sixty years upon his loins.
Thou knewest, and yet the joy of my life is taken from me. Where wert
Thou, O God of Israel, when they killed my little Dierck?"
The Mother-Superior leaned to her, and threw a strong, tender arm about
the fleshy shoulders. She said, speaking in the Taal:
"Hush, hush! Remember that He gave the joy before He sent the sorrow. And
we must submit ourselves to the Holy Will."
The Boer woman snorted:
"As if I didn't know that better than a Papist. Look you, have I shed one
tear?" She blinked hard bright eyes defiantly. The Mother went on in that
velvet voice of hers, making the uncouth dialect sound like the cooing of
an Irish dove:
"Better that you had tears, poor mother! Ah! best to weep. Did not our
Lord weep over His dearest city, and for His beloved friend? And when He
pitied the Widow of Nain, do you think His eyes were dry? Ah! best to
weep."
She strove to wrench herself away, shouting:
"He raised Lazarus from the dead for Mary his sister, and she had been a
shameless wench. And He gave the other back her boy. What has He done for
me?"
The sisterly arm held her fast; the great grey eyes looked into hers, wet
with the tears that were denied to her.
"He has given you an Angel to pray for you in Heaven."
She snorted rebelliously:
"His mother wants him down here.... And what is Heaven to little Dierck,
when he could be sailing his boat in the river-pools, and playing at
driving the span?"
But she let the Mother-Superior take him from her, and dropped her great
arms doggedly at her sides, watching still dry-eyed as they laid him down,
and Saxham stooped above him, feeling at the pulseless heart. She saw the
doktor shake his head and lay down the little hand. She saw the
Mother-Superior coax down the eyelids with tender, skilful fingers, and
put a kiss on each, making the Sign of the Cross on the still, childish
breast, and murmuring a little prayer. She would have screamed to avert
the defiling, heathen thing from him, but the memory of the sister-embrace
and the sister-look held her dumb.
It was only when they were stripping him for the last sad toilet, and the
cherished top and half a dozen highly-prized marbles rolled out of the
pocket in the stumpy little round jacket she had made out of a cast-off
garment of his father's that her bosom heaved, and the fountains of her
grief sprang from the stony soil. She wept copiously, and found
resignation. Soon she was sufficiently herself to scold a
prodigally-minded spinster relative who had proposed that Little Dierck
should be coffined in his new black Sabbath suit.
"But you old maids have no sense, no more than so many cabbages. Little
angels in the hemel can fly about in clean nightgowns--look in the
grandfather's big picture-Bible if you don't believe me. But live boys
can't loop about without breeches. So I'll lay these by for the next one."