You are invited, the very Sunday upon which the previously-recorded
conversation took place, to make the acquaintance of the sprightly P.
Blinders, Acting-Secretary to Commandant Selig Brounckers, Head Laager,
Transvaal Republic and Orange Free State's United Forces, Tweipans.
P. Blinders, a long-bodied, short-legged young Dutch apothecary of the
Free State, with short-sighted eyes behind hugely magnifying spectacles,
and many fiery pimples bursting through the earthy crust of him, possibly
testifying to the presence of volcanic fires beneath, had acted in the
clerkly capacity to the Volksraad at Groenfontein. When Government did not
sit at the Raad Zaal, Blinders, as calmly as any ordinary being might
have done, dispensed jalap, castor-oil, and pill-stick over the counter of
his store. These are the three heroic besoms employed by enlightened and
conscientious Boer housewives for sweeping out the interiors of their
families.
Pill-stick is rhubarb-pill in the concrete. The thrifty mother buys a foot
or so, and pinches off a bolus of the required magnitude thrice in the
year. No dosing is allowed in between; the members of the family get it
when the proper time comes round. To everyone his or her share, not
forgetting the baby.
When P. Blinders came away, he left his grandfather to keep store,
previously explaining to the aged man the difference between hydrocyanic
acid and almond-essence for cake-flavouring, powders of corrosive
sublimate and Gregory's. By a subtle transition the apothecary-clerk then
became the epistolary right-hand of General Brounckers, whose wife, son,
and grandson, with P. Blinders, made up his personal staff. And round the
Commandant's living-waggon, where they harboured, Chaos reigned and
Confusion prevailed, and disputes in many tongues--English severely
excepted--made Babel. And, side by side with the domestic, decent virtues
weltered all the vices rampant in the Cities of The Plain.
It goes without saying that the fresh site of Head Laager had been
cunningly chosen. It occupied a shield-shaped plateau among low,
flat-topped hills. The single street of Tweipans bounded it upon the east,
and a rocky ridge upon the western side that might have been the vertebra
of some huge reptile of the Diluvian Period, protected camp and village
from British shell-practice.
Signs of this were not lacking. Waggons with shattered timbers and
fantastically twisted irons, broken carts, and guns dismounted from their
carriages, were to be seen, near the dismembered or disembowelled bodies
of the beasts that had drawn them. Dead horse or mule or bullock,
decomposing in the sun, seemed to have nothing of offence for Republican
noses. The yellow smear of lyddite was everywhere, and, looking over the
rock-rampart upon the works below, you saw it like a blight, or yolk of
egg spilt upon a war-map.
Family parties bivouacked in those bottle-shaped trenches where each
fighting unit had his separate box of provisions sunk in the earth beside
him, and his cooking-fire of chips and dry dung, and ate and slept and
smoked and shot as he thought good. And in despite of such fires, the
unrestricted space and pure hill-air notwithstanding, the noisome ditches
wherein the cribbed, cabined, and confined defenders of Gueldersdorp
alternately grilled and soaked, were alleys of musk-roses, marvels of
sanitary purity compared with the works of the besiegers, and the
abominable camps, where, in the absence of a nocturnally active
Quartermaster-Sergeant, with his band of pioneers, stench took you by the
throat and nose, while filth absorbed you over the ankles.
A whiff of peculiarly overpowering potency, reaching you, made you turn
away, and then the immense disorder of the camp seized and held your eyes.
Arms, saddles, karosses, blankets, clothing, panniers of provisions and
boxes of ammunition, were piled about in mountainous heaps. Of military
organisation, discipline, authority, law, as these are understood by
civilised nations, there was nothing whatever. Men in well-worn velveteens
and felt billycocks, hobnobbed with men in the gaudiest uniforms ever
evolved by the theatrical costumier. Green velvet and gold lace, topped by
cocked hats that had despoiled the ostrich to make a human biped vainly
ridiculous, adorned Ginirals and Cornels that had no rigiments belongun'
to 'um at all at all! and had come over from the Distressful Country to
make a bould bid for glory, with the experience of warfare acquired while
lurking behind hedges with shot-guns, in waiting for persons in disfavour
with the Land League.
Patriarchs of eighty years and callow schoolboys of sixteen fought side by
side with the fine flower and the lusty prime of Boer manhood, and many
had their wives and children with them under the Transvaal colours, and
not a few had brought their mothers. When an officer had any order to give
his men, he prefaced it with the Boer equivalent for "Hi!" When the men
had heard as much as they considered necessary, they would say, "Come on;
let's be going," and slouch away.
P. Blinders, being a Dutchman of the Free State, minded smells no more
than a Transvaal Boer. Yet it sometimes occurred to him as odd that the
duties of a Secretary should embrace the peeling of potatoes and the
performance of other duties of the domestic kind.
He was squatting in the shadow of the Commandant's living-waggon,
polishing off the last of a panful, when Van Busch came along. English
being an unpopular language, the big Johannesburger and the little Free
Stater exchanged greetings in the Taal.
"Ging oop, and leave your woman's work there, and walk a piece with me,"
said Van Busch. "I have something to say to you about my sister that
married the German drummer, and is stopping at Kink's Hotel."
You can see Van Busch taking off his broad-brimmed hat, and knocking the
sweat from the leather lining-band. He was dressed in a black broadcloth
tailed-coat, flannel shirt, and cord breeches, wore heavy veldschoens, and
carried a Mauser rifle, as did everybody else, and had a long
hunting-knife as well as a heavy six-shooter in the wide canvas
pouch-belt, and a bandolier heavy with cartridges. Thus panoplied, he
accurately resembled ten thousand other men.
But his dark, overfed, full-blooded, whiskered face was not that of an
agriculturist, and the strange light eyes, rust-coloured like those of an
adder, and, like the ophidian's, set flush with the oddly-flattened edges
of their orbits, were at variance with the high, rounded, benevolent
temples crowned with a thinning brake of curly hair. The rapacious mouth,
with the thick scarlet lips, belonged to the eyes.
He had put on his hat again, but he swept it off in a flourishing bow, as
Mevrouw Brounckers, in high-kilted wincey, a man's hat of coarse straw
perched on her weather-beaten, sandy-grey head, came stumping down the
waggon-ladder, calling for her potatoes. What was that lazy bedelaar of a
Secretary about, and it nearly eleven of the clock? Didn't he know that
her Commandant liked his meals on time?
Mevrouw received the politeness less graciously than the potatoes. That
man with the eyes and the greedy red mouth was a woman-eater, she knew.
Not for sheep and bear would she, grandmother as she was, trust herself
in house barn alone with a klant like that. But her Commandant had uses
for him, the twinkling-eyed, soft-mannered, big rogue. She watched him
walking off with P. Blinders, for whom she entertained a distaste grounded
on the knowledge that no good ever came of these double-tongued Free
Staters.
And this one could _write_ in the accursed shibboleth of England as well
as in the Taal. She shook her head as the potatoes rattled into the big
pot hanging over the fire. And he walked out on Sundays with the young
German woman who was maid to the refugee-widow staying at Kink's Hotel,
and who never showed her nose inside the Gerevormed Kerk, the godless
thing! or went out except by bat-light. Of that one the Mevrouw Brounckers
had her opinion also. And time would show who was right.
Meanwhile, Van Busch and P. Blinders, who had left the dorp behind them,
and strolled up the almost dry bed of a sluit leading up amongst the
hills, conversed, in Sabbath security from English artillery, and
reassuring remoteness from Dutch eavesdroppers. And their theme was the
German drummer's refugee-widow who never went to kerk.
Van Busch, who found it helpful in his business never to forget faces, had
met her on the rail, months back, travelling up first-class from Cape
Town. Early in October it was, while the road was still open. And men who
kept their eyes skinned went backwards and forwards and round and about,
getting the hang of things, and laying up accurate mental notes, because
the other kind were even more risky to carry than the nuggets and raw dust
that are hidden in the padded linings of the gold-smugglers' heavy
garments.
The lady, small, dark, stylishly-tailored, and with bright black,
bird-like eyes, was not a German drummer's widow when Van Busch and she
first met. She had chatted in her native English with her square, bulky,
sleek-looking fellow-passenger, well-dressed in grey linen drill
frock-coat and trousers, with blazing diamonds studding the bosom of his
well-starched shirt and linking his cuffs.
The wide felt hat he politely removed as he came into the carriage
revealed to Lady Hannah a tall, expansive, well-developed forehead. Below
the line of the hat-rim he was burned coffee-brown, like many another
British Colonial. The observant eye of "Gold Pen" took in the man's
vulgarly handsome features and curiously light eyes, and twinkled at the
flaring jewellery and the whiskers of obsolete Dundreary pattern that
stood out on either side the jewelled one's full, smooth chin. His large,
bold, over-red mouth, with the curling outward flange to it, gave her a
disagreeable impression. One would have been grateful for a beard that hid
that mouth.
Lady Hannah found it curiously disquieting until her fellow-traveller
began to talk, in a thick, lisping voice, with curiously candid and simple
intonations. He presented himself, and she accepted him at his own
valuation, as a British Johannesburger, and influential member of the
Chamber of Mines, possessing vast interests among the tall chimneys and
white dumping-heaps of the Rand.
Van Busch called his efforts to be ingratiating "sucking up to" the lady.
He sucked up, thinking at first she might be the wife of the English field
officer who had been ordered down from the north to take over the
Gueldersdorp command. Then he found she was only the grey mare of an
officer of the Staff....
She plied Van Busch in his triple character of politician, patriot, and
mine-owner with questions. Thought she was juicing a lot of information,
whereas Van Busch was the one who learned things. Kind of playing at being
newspaper-woman she was, and taking notes for London newspaper articles
all the time. Had laid out to be a little tin imitation of Dora Corr, or,
say, nickel-plated, with cast chasings. Was burning for an opening in the
diplomatic go-betweening line; wanted to dabble in War Correspondence, and
so on. But Van Busch gathered that the biggest egg in the little lady's
nest of ambitions was the desire to do a flutter on the Secret Service
lay.
She wanted to be what he termed a "slew," and she would have called a spy.
He fiddled to her dancing, and wearied before she did.
"What Woman has done Woman may do!" was the burden of her ceaseless song.
And when she left the train at Gueldersdorp, "_Au revoir_" said she with a
flash of her bright black eyes, nodding to the big Colonial, who was so
excessively civil about handing out her dressing-case and travelling-bag.
"Many thanks, and don't give me away if you should happen to meet me in a
different skin one of these fine days, Mr. Van Busch."
"Sure, no; not I," said the burly Johannesburger, with an effusion of what
looked like genuine admiration. "By thunder! when it comes to playing the
risky game there's no daring to beat a woman's. Give me a petticoat, say
I, for a partner every time."
"Bravo!" Her eyes snapped approvingly. She waved a little hand towards a
large pink officer of the British Imperial Staff, who was looking into all
the first-class compartments in search of a wife who had been vainly
entreated to remain at Cape Town. "There's my husband, who entertains the
precisely opposite opinion. But he hasn't your experience--only a theory
worn thin by generations of ancestors, all chivalrous Conservative
noodles, who kept their females in figurative cotton-wool. Do let me
introduce you. I'd simply love to have him hear you talk."
Van Busch did not pant to make the acquaintance of the Military
Authorities. He thanked the impulsive Lady Hannah, but made haste to climb
back into the train. The big pink officer recognised the object of his
search, and strode down the platform bellowing a welcome. As Lady Hannah
waved in reply, the Johannesburger made a long arm from the window, and
thrust a pencil-scrawled card into the tiny gloved hand.
"S's'h! Shove that away somewhere safe," said Van Busch, in a thrillingly
mysterious whisper; "and, remember, any time you want to learn the lay of
the land and follow up the spoor of movements on the quiet, that Van
Busch, of the British South African Secret War-Intelligence-Bureau, is the
man to put you on. A line to that address, care of W. Bough, will always
get me. And with nerve and josh like yours, and plenty of money for
palm-oil...." His greedy mouth made a grinning red gash in the smug brown
face with the fine whiskers of blackish-brown. His cold eyes scintillated
and twinkled unspeakable things at the little lady as the train carried
him away.
Assuredly Van Busch understood women no less thoroughly than his near
relative, Bough. He knew that you could bait for and catch the sex with
things that were not tangible. Men wanted to be made sure of money or
money's worth. And for the co-operation of P. Blinders in the adroit
little game by which the German drummer's refugee-widow who stayed at
Kink's Hotel, and only went out after dark, had been relieved of a
handsome sum, Van Busch had had to part with nearly one-third of the swag.
No wonder he felt and talked like a robbed man.
"All very well to talk," said P. Blinders, scratching his newest pimple,
and looking with exaggerated moonish simplicity at nobody in particular
through his large round magnifying spectacles. "But what could you have
done without me, once the little Englishwoman smelled the porcupine in the
barrel? When she drove out to your friend Bough's plaats at Haarsgrond in
that spider, pretending she was your sister that had married a Duitscher
drummer in Gueldersdorp, and buried him, and was afraid to be shut up in
the stad with all those lustful rooineks, you thought it would be enough
to tell her Staats Police or Transvaal burghers were after her to make her
creep into a mousehole and pay you to keep her hid. And it did work
nicely--for a while. Then the Englishwoman got angry--oh, very angry!--and
told you things that were not nice. Either you should put her in the way
of getting the information she wanted, or good-bye to her dear brother,
Hendryk Van Busch, and his friend Bough."
"For a pinch of mealies I'd have let the little shrew go, by thunder!"
said the affectionate relative. "But my good heart stopped me. The country
wasn't safe for a couple of women to go looping about," he added. "And one
of them with two hundred pounds in Bank of England notes stitched into the
front of her stays...."
"_Five_ hundred pounds," said the Secretary, with pleasantly twinkling
spectacles. Van Busch's stare was admirable in its incredulity.
"Sure, no, brother; not so much as that?"
"Trudi told me," smirked P. Blinders.
"You and her seem to be great and thick together," said Van Busch, with a
flattering leer. The little ex-apothecary placed his hand upon his chest,
and said, with a gleam of tenderness lighting up his spectacles:
"I have sighed, and she has smiled." He went on, "If your friend Bough had
been brave enough to try and take away that wad of banknotes from the
little Englishwoman, he would have met trouble. For in a pocket of her
gown she carries a revolver, and sleeps with it under her pillow by night;
that is another thing that Trudi has told me." He kissed his fingers, and
waved them in the direction of Kink's Hotel. "She is a lovely maiden!" He
blew his nose without the assistance of a pocket-handkerchief, and
continued:
"Of course, Bough might have put some stuff in the Englishwoman's coffee
that would have made her sleep while he stole that money, or he might even
have killed her quietly, and buried her on the farm. But a man who does
that is not so clever and so wise as the man who makes a plan that gets
the money and keeps friends all round, and makes everybody happy--is he,
now? And that man is me, and that plan was mine. From P. Blinders you have
genuine information to sell the Englishwoman, and when she has bought it,
paying well for it, and written it all down in her despatches to the
Commandant at Gueldersdorp, she hands the letters back to you to be
smuggled through the lines, and pays through the nose for that also. And
who shall say she is cheated? For the letters do get through"--the pimply
countenance of P. Blinders was quite immobile, but the eyes behind the
great spectacles twirled and twinkled with infinite meaning--"a week or so
after date, perhaps, but what is that? Nothing--nothing at all."
"Nothing," agreed Van Busch. The two men smiled pleasantly in each other's
faces for a minute more. Then said Van Busch, with a loud sigh:
"But what I have to tell you now is something. The Englishwoman has got no
more money. Ask Trudi, if you think I lie. And, of course, the plan was a
good plan, and you were a smart fellow to hit on it; but now the two
hundred pounds is gone----"
"Three hundred remain to get." P. Blinders briskly held up five stumpy red
fingers and tucked down the thumb and little finger, leaving a trio of
mute witnesses to the correctness of his arithmetic.
"No more remains to get. The cow has run dry."
The brow of P. Blinders grew scarlet as a stormy sunrise.
"Hoe? What is this I hear?" he demanded with indignation. "Nothing left,
and I have not had but a hundred and fifty out of the five hundred. There
has been dishonesty somewhere. There have been tricks, unbefitting the
dealings of scrupulous Christian men. Foei, foei!"
Van Busch stuck his thumbs into his belt and smiled amiably down into the
indignant eyes behind the spectacles. Then he said, with his most candid
look and simplest lisp:
"No tricks, brother; all fair and above-board. Ask the Commandant whether
Van Busch is square or not? He knows that the hundred and fifty was paid
you honestly on his account, and that I kept but fifty for myself. And
you're not the chap to bilk him of his due. Sure no, you'll never do that,
never! Go and see him now, and settle up. I had a talk with young Schenk
Eybel this morning, and he says the answer to the screeve you wrote to the
Officer in Command at Gueldersdorp--to patch up an exchange of the
Englishwoman for that slim kerel of a Boer's son they got their claws on
at the beginning of the siege--has come in under the white flag this
morning. Schenk Eybel has a little plan he can't put through without Walt
Slabberts, he says. Loop, brother. You'll find the old man on his grey
pony near the Field Hospital."
The eyes behind the spectacles whirled in terror. The ex-apothecary
faltered:
"What--what is this you say? The money paid me on the Commandant's
account--when it was to be a secret between us.... Foei, foei! This is
unfair. And suppose I have spent it, how shall I replace it? Do you wish
to ruin an honest man?"
Van Busch grinned, and P. Blinders gave up hopelessly. At least, it seemed
so, for he turned sharp round, and trotted off with sorrowfully-drooping
black coat-tails, in search of the meek grey pony and the terrible old
man.
But the front view of the Secretary displayed a countenance whose pimples
radiated satisfaction, and spectacles that were alight with joy.
Much--very much--would P. Blinders have liked to have kept that hundred
and fifty, but his fear had proved greater than his desire.
He had paid every tikkie of the money faithfully to Brounckers, and his
hands were metaphorically clean, and his neck comfortably safe. He was the
poorer by a hundred and fifty pounds, but the richer in wisdom and
experience; and--he chuckled at the thought of this--in the joy of knowing
himself, in postscripts appended to those despatches of the
Englishwoman's, to have poked sly sarcasm at the British Lion. Whose spiny
tail P. Blinders imagined to be lashing, even then, at the prick of the
goad.
For another thing, very pleasant to think of, he had successfully pitted
the cunning behind his giant spectacles against the superior villainy of
Mr. Van Busch of Johannesburg.