Roasting hot Christmas has gone by, with its services and celebrations,
its sports and entertainments, its meagre feasting, and its hearty cheer,
a bloodless triumph followed by the regrettable defeat sustained in the
battle of Big Tree Fort. To-day the Union Jack hangs limp upon the
flagstaff that rears its slender height over Nixey's, and the new year is
some weeks old. The blue, blue sky of January is without a single puff of
cloud, and the taint from the trenches is less sickening, unmingled with
the poisonous fumes of the lyddite bursting-charges, and the acrid odour
of smokeless powder. It is Sunday, when Briton and Boer hold the Truce of
God, and the church-bells ring to call and not to warn the people, and
sweet Peace and blessed Silence brood over the shrapnel-scarred veld. The
aasvogels feast undisturbed on bloated carcasses of horses and cattle
lying on the debatable ground between the Line of Investment and the Line
of Defence, the barbel in the river leap at the flies, and partridge and
wild guinea-fowl drink in the shallows, and bathe in the dry hot sand
between the boulder-stones.
The Market Square is populous with a chatting, sauntering crowd of people,
who enjoy the luxury of using their limbs without being called on to
displays of acrobatic agility in dodging trundling shell. There are
Irregulars and B.S.A.P., Baraland Rifles and Town Guardsmen. There are the
Native Contingent from the stad, and a company of Zulus, and the Kaffirs
and the Cape Boys with their gaspipe rifles that do good service in
default of better, and bring down Oom Paul's Scripturally-flavoured
denunciations upon Englishmen, who arm black and coloured folk to do
battle for their own sable or brown or yellow rights. These have donned
odd garments and quaint bits of finery to mark the holiday, and every
white man has indulged in the luxury of a comprehensive wash, a shave with
hot water, and a change of clothing, if it is obtainable. Also, drooping
feminine vanity revives in hair-waves and emerges from underground burrows
of Troglodytic type, arrayed in fluttering muslins, and crowned with
coquettish hats, which walk about in company with ragged khaki and
clay-stained duck and out-at-elbows tweed, and are proud to be seen in its
brave company.
Husbands and wives, fathers and daughters, sons and mothers, lovers and
sweethearts, meet after the week whose separating days have seemed like
weeks, and visit the houses whose pierced walls and roofs, that let the
white-hot sunshine in through many jagged holes, may one day, so they
whisper, holding one another closely, shelter them again in peace. Home
has become a sweet word, even to those who thought little of home before.
And many who were sinful have found conviction of sin and the saving grace
of repentance, and many more who denied their God have learned to know
Him, in this village town of battered dwellings, whose streets are
littered with all the grim debris of War.
Nixey's has not come scathless through the ordeal. The stately brick
chimneys of the kitchen and coffee-room have been broken off like carrots,
and replaced by tin funnels. Patches of the universal medium, corrugated
iron, indicate where one of Meisje's ninety-four-pound projectiles
recently plumped in through the soft brick of the east wall end, and
departed by the west frontage, leaving two holes that might have
accommodated a chest of drawers, and carrying a window with it. Mrs.
Nixey, the children, and the women of the staff inhabit a bombproof in the
back-yard. The waiters have developed a grasshopper-like nimbleness,
otherwise things go on as usual.
It being Sunday, a large long man and another as long, but less bulky, are
extended in a couple of long bamboo chairs on Nixey's longish front
verandah. The blue, fragrant smoke of two long cigars curls upwards over
their supine heads, and two long drinks containing a very meagre modicum
of inferior whisky are contained in two long tumblers, resting in the
bamboo nests cunningly devised for their accommodation in the chair-arms.
It is hot, but both the men look cool and lazy, and almost too fresh to
have spent the greater part of the night, the younger upon advanced
patrol-duty, and the elder at the Staff bombproof in the Southern Lines,
where messages come in and where messages go out, and where reports are
received and from whence orders are despatched from sunset to the peep of
day, and from peep of day to sunset.
The wardrobes of both warriors are much impaired by active service, but
their originally white flannel trousers, if patched, discoloured, and
shrunken by amateur lavations, boast the cut of Bond Street; their shirts,
if a trifle ragged, are immaculately clean, and the cracks in their canvas
shoes are disguised by a lavish expenditure of pipeclay. Beauvayse has
rummaged out and mounted a snowy double collar in honour of the day, with
a knitted silk necktie of his Regimental colours, and a kamarband to match
is wound about his narrow, springy waist, and knotted to perfection. Both
men might be basking on an English river-bank after a stiff pull
up-stream, or resting after a bout at tennis on an English lawn, but for
the revolver-lanyards round their strong, bronzed throats, ending in the
butts of Smith and Wesson's revolvers of Service calibre, the bandoliers
and belts that lie handy on a table, and the Lee-Metford carbines that
lean in an angle made by the house-wall and the verandah end. Also, but
for the tension of long-sustained watchfulness on both faces, making it
plain that, though resting and reposeful, they are neither of them
unexpectant of a summons to be the opposite of these things. It is a look
that, at different degrees of intensity, is stamped on every face in
Gueldersdorp. And the same uncertainty possesses and pervades even
unsentient things. The Union Jack, hanging listlessly from the summit of
its lofty staff, bathed in the golden, glowing atmosphere of this January
day, may, in an instant's space, give place to the red signal of danger;
the bugle, now silent, may at any moment blare out its loud and dismal
note of warning; the bells that call with peaceful insistence, "Come to
church! come to church!" in the twinkling of an eye may be clanging scared
townsfolk to their burrowed hiding-places. You never know. For General
Brounckers, though a God-fearing man, sometimes goes in for Sunday
gun-practice, quite unintentionally, as he afterwards explains. Hence,
even on the Sabbath, it is as well to be prepared.
Beauvayse is the first to break the drowsy silence by knocking the
lengthened ash off his cigar, and expressing his opinion that the weed
might be a worse one.
"Considerin' the price the box of fifty was knocked down to me for at
Kreils' auction yesterday," states Captain Bingo, "it's simply smokin'
gold. Nine pound fifteen-and-six runs me into, how much apiece?" He yawns
cavernously, and gives the calculation up. "Always was a duffer at
figures," he says, and relapses into silence until, in the act of throwing
the nearly smoked-out cigar-butt away, he pulls himself up, and,
economically impaling it on his penknife-blade, secures a few more whiffs.
"Against the Lenten days to come, when there will be no balm left in
Gilead," says Beauvayse, cocking a grey-green eye at him in sleepy
derision, "and no tobacco in Gueldersdorp."
"Kreils' are sellin' dashed bad cigarettes at a pound the box of a hundred
now," says Captain Bingo; "and I've a notion of layin' in a stock of 'em.
We smoked tea in the Sudan, and I had a shot at hemp, but it plays the
very devil with the nerves. All jumps and twitches, you know, after a pipe
or two. Nervous as a cat, or a woman. And, talking of women, I wonder
where my wife is?"
He turns a large, pink, disconsolate face upon Beauvayse. Beauvayse
responds with the air of one who has suffered boredom from the too
frequent enumeration of this conjecture. "Not knowing, can't say." And
there is another silence.
"How she got the maggot into her head," presently resumes Lady Hannah's
spouse, "I can't think. I did suppose her vaultin' ambition to rival Dora
Corr--woman who managed to burn her own and a lot of other people's
fingers by meddlin' in South African politics over the Raid business--had
been quenched for good that mornin' you took those fifty chaps of the
Irregulars out for what she _would_ call their 'baptism of fire.'"
"That's newspaperese," yawns Beauvayse, his supple brown hands knitted at
the back of his sleek golden head. "Goes with 'the tented field' and
_casus belli: cherchez la femme_ and _cui bono_?"
"She's got the lingo at her finger-ends and in her blood, or we wouldn't
be cherchaying now," says Bingo dolorously. "I asked her if she was
particularly keen on gettin' killed...."
"Shouldn't have done that. Put her on her mettle not to show funk if she
felt it," mumbles Beauvayse.
"A man can't always be diplomatic," grumbles Bingo. "Anyhow, she'd seen a
bit of a scrap at the outset of affairs, when the B.S.A. went out with the
Armoured Train, and was wild with me for wantin' to deprive her of another
'glorious experience.' ... And next morning she rides out with a Corporal
and two troopers, both chaps beastly sensible of their responsibility, and
wishin' her at Cape Town, she in toppin' spirits and as keen as mustard.
It was about six o'clock, morning, and she hadn't been gone five minutes
before we heard you fellows poundin' away and bein' pounded at like Jimmy
O! I was on the roof with the Chief, the sweat runnin' down into the
binoculars, until the veld seemed swarmin' with brown mares and grey linen
habits and drab smasher hats, with my wife's head under 'em, and hoverin'
troopers. But I did make out that your party had got into
difficulties----"
"We opened on 'em at a thousand yards, and pushed to within five hundred,
and if the fellows in charge of the Hotchkiss could have got her into
play," Beauvayse interrupts rather huffily, "we'd have been as right as
rain."
"Possibly. If I hadn't been on special duty that day, and as nervous as a
cat in a thunderstorm, I'd have volunteered to bring No. 2 Troop of A out
to the rescue, instead of Heseltine. As it was, I nearly fell off the roof
when I saw my wife coming, one trooper, as pale with fright as a piece of
soap, supportin' her on his saddle, another man leading the mare, dead
lame and the Corporal's hairy. Plugged in the upper works, the Corporal,
poor beggar! but he'd managed to stick on somehow until they got to the
Hospital. Have you ever had to deal with a woman in hysterics?"
Beauvayse nods sagely.
"Once or twice."
"Once is an experience that lasts a man all his lifetime. Phew!" Captain
Bingo mops his large pink face. "Never had such a dressing-down in my
life."
"But what had you to do with the Corporal getting chipped?"
"The Lord only knows!" says Bingo piously. "But, if you'd heard her, all
the rest of the day and half through the night!..."
"I did," Beauvayse says with a faint grin. "Mine's the next bedroom to
yours, you know."
"'Oh, the blood! Oh, the blood!' ..." Not unsuccessfully does the spouse
of Lady Hannah attempt to render the recurrent hiccough and the whooping
screech of hysteria. "'Damn it, my dear!' I said, tryin' to reason with
her, 'what else did you expect the fellow had got in him? Sawdust?' That
seemed to rouse her like nothing else.... Turned on me like a tigress, by
the living Tinker!--called me everything she could lay her tongue to, and
threatened that she'd apply for a separation if I continued to outrage
every feeling of decency that association with such a thundering brute
hadn't uprooted from her nature."
"Whe--ew!"
Beauvayse's comment is a shrill-toned whistle.
"Of course, her nerves were knocked to smithereens, and a man can overlook
a lot, under the circumstances. She was a mere jelly when the bombardment
began----" goes on rueful Captain Bingo.
"--Rather!" confirms Beauvayse.--"Lived in the hotel cellar for the first
fortnight, only emergin' from among the beer-barrels and wine-casks and
liqueur-cases after dark----"
"--To blow me up and forgive me, turn and turn about, until daylight did
appear. Luckily," reflects Bingo, with a rather dreary chuckle, "I had
plenty of night-duty on just then, and so escaped a lot."
"_That_ gave her her chance to shoot the moon!" hints Beauvayse, in
accents muffled by his long tumbler.
"By the Living Tinker!" asseverates Captain Bingo, jerked out of his
reclining attitude by vigorous utterance of the expletive, "you could have
bowled me over with a scent-squirter when I came back to brekker and found
her gone, and a cocked-hat note of farewell left for me on the
dressing-table pincushion, in regular elopement style; and another for the
Chief, sayin'--he read it to me--that she'd gone to retrieve the Past,
with a capital 'P,' and hoped to convince him ere long that one of her
_despised sex_--underlined, 'despised sex'--can be useful to her country."
"'Can be useful to her country,'" repeats Beauvayse "Question is, in what
way?"
"Damme if I can imagine!" bursts explosively from the deserted husband.
"All I know up to date, and all _you_ know, is that before it was quite
light she drove out of our lines in Nixey's spider, his mouse-coloured
trotter pullin', and her German maid sittin' behind, wavin' a white towel
tied to the end of a walkin'-stick of mine, and went straight over to the
enemy. We hear in the course of things from a Kaffir despatch-runner that
she's stayin' in a hotel of sorts at Tweipans, where Brounckers has had
his headquarters since he shifted Chief Laager from Geitfontein. And for
any further information we may knock our rotten heads against a brick wall
and twiddle our thumbs. Never you marry, Toby, my boy!"
A V-shaped vein swells and darkens between the handsome grey-green eyes
and on the broad forehead, white as a girl's where the sun-tan leaves off.
Beauvayse takes his cigar again from his mouth, and knocks the ash off
deliberately before he responds:
"Thanks for the advice."
"Be warned," says Captain Bingo sententiously, "by me. Know when you're
well off, as I didn't. Take the advice of your seniors, as I was too
pig-headed a fool to do, and don't put it in the power of any woman to
make you as rottenly wretched as I am at this minute."
"Why! women _can_ make you rottenly wretched," admits Beauvayse, with a
confirmatory creak of the bamboo chair. "But, on the other hand, they can
make you awfully happy--what?"
Captain Bingo throws his long legs off their resting-place, and sits
sideways, staring rather owlishly at his young friend. He shakes his head
in a dismal way several times, and sucks hard at his cigar as he shakes
it.
"For a bit, but does it last? When I came down to hunt you up last June at
the cottage at Cookham----"
"Look here, old man!" The bamboo chair creaks angrily as Beauvayse in his
turn sits up and drops his own long legs on either side of it, and drives
the foot-rest back under the table seat with a vicious punch. "Don't
remind me of the cottage at Cookham, will you? It's one of the things I
want to forget just now."
"You were as proud as Punch of it last June. Have you let it?" pursues
Bingo, ignoring his junior's request.
Beauvayse yawns with ostentatious weariness of the subject.
"No; I haven't let it."
"Ought to go off like smoke, properly advertised. Somethin' like this: 'To
let, Roselawn Cottage, Cookham: a charmin' Thames-side bijou residence.
Small grounds and large cellar, a boathouse and a houseboat, stables, a
pigeon-cote, and a private post-box. Duodecimo oak dinin'-room, boudoir by
Rellis. Ideal nest for a honeymoon, real thing or imitation. Might have
become the real thing if owner hadn't been whisked off in time to South
Africa.' And a dashed good job for him. For you've had a decentish lot of
narrow escapes, Toby, my boy!" pursues the oracular Captain Bingo,
disregarding his junior's forbidding scowl, "and come out of a goodish few
tight places, and you've got out of 'em, if I may say so, more through
luck than wit; but that little entanglement I'm delicately alludin' to was
one of the closest things on record in the career of a Prodigal Son."
"Thanks. You're uncommonly complimentary to-day." Beauvayse pitches away
his cigar, knocks a feather of ash from his clean silk shirt, and folds
his arms resignedly on his broad flat chest.
"Upon my word, I didn't mean to be. Does it ever strike you," goes on
Captain Bingo doggedly, "that if that wire from the Chief asking for your
address hadn't found me at the Club, and if I hadn't run down and dug you
out at the--I won't repeat the name of the place, since you don't seem to
like it--you'd have been married and done for, old chap--any date you like
to name between then and the beginning of the war? And, to put things
mildly, there would have been the mischief to pay with your people."
"Yes," Beauvayse agrees rather dreamily; "there would have been an awful
lot of bother with my people."
"Not that I object to the stage myself," Captain Bingo says, waving a
large, tolerant hand; "and it seems getting to be rather the fashion to
recruit the female ranks of the Peerage from Musical Comedy, and a
prettier and cleverer little woman than Lessie ... What are you stoppin'
your ears for?"
"I'm not," says a muffled, surly voice. "It's a--twinge of toothache."
"All I've got to say is," declares Captain Bingo, "that marriage with
one's equal in point of breedin' is sometimes a blank draw, but marriage
with one's inferior is a howling error. And if you had done as I'd stake
my best hat you would have done, supposin' you'd been left to loll in the
lap of the lovely Lessie----"
Beauvayse jumps up in a rage.
"Wrynche, how much longer do you think I can go on listening to this?
You're simply maundering, man, and my nerves won't stand it."
"Oh, very well! But you haven't the ghost of a right to lay claim to
nerves," Captain Bingo obstinately asseverates. "Now look at me."
"I'm hanged if I want to!" declares Beauvayse. "You're not a cheering
object." He drops back into the bamboo chair again.
"Flyblown, do I look?" inquires Bingo, with dispassionate interest.
"Well, yes, decidedly," Beauvayse agrees, without removing his eyes from
the whitewashed verandah-pillar at which they blankly stare.
"Streaky yellow in the whites of the eyes, and pouchy under 'em?" Captain
Bingo demands of his young friend with unmistakable relish. "'Yes' again?
And I grouse and maunder? Of course I do, my dear chap! How can I help
it? A married man who, for all he knows, may be a widower----"
"I wish to God I knew I was one!"
"My good fellow?"
"You heard what I said," Beauvayse flings over his shoulder.
Captain Bingo, his hands upon his straddling knees, regards his junior
with circular eyes staring out of a large, kind, rather foolish face of
utter consternation.
"That you wished to God you were a widower?"
"Well, I mean it."