Saxham was shooting on the veld, north of the Clayfields, in a ginger-hued
dust-wind and a grilling sun. Upon his right showed the raw red ridge of
the earthworks, where two ancient seven-pounders were entrenched in charge
of a handful of Cape Police. The pits of the sniping riflemen scarred
across the river-bed some fifty yards in advance. Upon his left, some two
hundred yards farther north, the recently resurrected ship's gun, twelve
feet of honeycombed metal, stamped on the flank "No. 6 Port," and casting
solid shot of eighteenth-century pattern, projected a long black nose from
Fort Ellerslie, and every time the venerable weapon went off without
bursting, the Town Guards occupying the Fort and manning the eastern
entrenchments raised a cheer.
Saxham, emptying and filling the magazine with cool, methodical
regularity, kept changing his position with a restlessness and
recklessness puzzling alike to friends and foes. Now he aimed and fired,
lying "doggo" behind his favourite stone, while bullets from the enemy's
trenches flattened themselves upon it, or buried themselves harmlessly in
the dry hot soil. Now he moved from cover, and shot squatting on his
heels, or sprawled lizard-like in the open, courting the King of Terrors
with a calm indifference that was commented upon by those who witnessed it
according to their lights.
"Begob!" said Kildare, ex-driver of Engine 123, who, with the Cardiff man,
his stoker of old, was doing duty at Fort Ellerslie _vice_ two Town
Guardsmen permanently resting, "'tis a great perfawrumance the Doc is
afther givin' as this day!" He coolly borrowed the gunner's
sighting-glasses, and, with his keen eyes glued to them and his ragged
elbows propped on the Fort parapet, he scanned the distant solitary
figure, dropping the words out slowly one by one. "Twice have I seen the
fur fly off av' wan av' thim hairy baboons av' Boers since he starrtud,
an' supposin' the air a taste thicker, 'tis punched wid bullet-holes we'd
be seem' ut all round 'um, the same as a young lady in the sky-in-terrific
dhressmakin' line would be afther jabbin' out the pattern av' a shoot av'
clothes."
"And look you now, if the man is not lighting a pipe," objected the
Cardiff stoker, whose religious tendencies were greatly fostered by the
surroundings and conditions of siege life. "Sitting on a stone, with the
rifle between his knees and the match between his two hands, as if the
teffel was got tired of waiting, and had curled up and gone to sleep." The
speaker sucked in his breath and solemnly shook his head, adding: "It is a
temptation of the Tivine Providence, so it is!"
"Sorra a timpt," rejoined Kildare, reluctantly surrendering the glasses to
the gunner, a grey ex-sergeant of R.F.A., "sorra a timpt, knowin', as the
Docthur knows, that do what he will and thry as he may, no bullut will do
more than graze the hide av him, or sing in his ear."
"And how will he know that, maybe you would be telling?" demanded the
Cardiff stoker incredulously.
"I seen his face," said Kildare, jerking a blackened thumb towards the
gunner's sighting-glasses, "minnits back through thim little jiggers, an'
to man or mortal that's as sick wid the hate av Life, an' as sharp-set
with the hunger for Death as the Docthur is this day, no harrum will come.
'Tis quare, but thrue."
"I've 'ad a try at several kinds of 'ungers," said the R.E. Reserve man,
who acted as gunner's mate. "There's the 'unger for glory, combined with a
smart uniform wot'll make the gals stare, as drives a man to 'list.
There's the 'unger for kisses an' canoodlin' wot makes yer want to please
the gals. There's the 'unger for revenge, wot drives yer to bash in a
bloke's face, and loses you yer stripes if 'e 'appens to be your Corp'ril.
Then there's the 'unger for gettin' under cover when you're bein' sniped,
an' the 'unger for blood, when you've got the Hafridis, or the Fuzzies, or
the Dutchies, at close quarters, and the bay'nits are flickerin' in an'
out of the dirty caliker shirts or the dirty greatcoats like Jimmy O!
There's the 'unger for freedom and fresh hair when you're shut up in a
filthy mud cattle-pound like this 'ere Fort, or a stinkin' trench, with a
'andful of straw to set on by day an' a ragged blanket to kip in by
nights. But the 'unger to die is a 'unger _I_ ain't acquainted with. I'm
for livin' myself."
"I was hungry when you began to jaw," snarled the man who had been clerk
to the County Court. His lips were black and cracking with fever, and his
teeth chattered despite the fierce sunshine that baked the red clay
parapet against which he leaned his thin back. "I'm hungrier now, and
thirsty as well. Give the bucket over here." He drank of the thick,
yellowish, boiled water eagerly and yet with disgust, spilling the liquid
on his tattered clothing through the shaking of his wasted hands. Then he
turned to the wall, and lay down sullenly, scowling at the lantern-jawed
sympathiser who tried to thrust a rolled-up coat under his aching head.
"They'll be bringin' us our foddher at twelve av the clock," said Kildare,
with a twinkle of inextinguishable humour in his hollow eyes.
"Shuperannuated cavalry mount stuped in warrum kettle-gravy, wid a block
av baked sawdust for aich man that can get ut down. 'Tis an insult to the
mimory av the boiled bacon an' greens I would be aiting this day at
Carricknavore, to say nothin' av' the porther an' whisky that would be
washing ut down. Lashin's and lavin's there 'ud be for ivery wan, an' what
was over, me fadher--God be good to the ould boy alive or dead!--would be
disthributin' amongst the poor forninst the dure----"
"Beg pardon, sir." Another of the famine-bitten, ragged little garrison
addressed the question to the officer in charge of the Fort battery, as he
stepped down from the lookout with his field-glass in his hand. "Can you
tell us the difference of time between South Africa and England?"
"Two hours at Capetown. I'm not quite sure about the difference at
Gueldersdorp." The Lieutenant went over to the ancient smooth-bore, and
conferred with the gunners standing at her breech. The winches groaned,
the heavy mass of metal tilted on the improvised mounting, as the man to
whom the Lieutenant had replied said, with a quaver of longing in his
voice:
"'Two hours! My God, suppose it only took that time to get home!"
"It 'ud be a sight easier to 'ang on 'ere," said the R.E. Reserve man who
acted as gunner's mate, "if there was such a thing as a plug o' baccy to
be 'ad. Wot gives me the reg'lar sick is to see them well-fed Dutchies
chawin' an' blowin', blowin' an' chawin', from mornin' till night----" He
spat disgustedly.
"When honust men," groaned Kildare, "would swop a year av life for a twist
av naygurhead. Wirra-wirra!"
There was a dry and mirthless laugh, showing teeth, white or discoloured,
in haggard and bristly faces. Then a short young Corporal, who had been
leaning back in an angle of the earthwork, hugging his sharp knees and
staring at nothing in particular with pale-coloured, ugly, honest eyes,
grew painfully crimson through his crust of sun-tan and grime, and said
something that made the lean bodies in ragged, filthy tan-cord and
dilapidated khaki, or torn and muddy tweed, slew round upon the unclean
straw on which they squatted. All eyes, were they hunger-dull or
fever-bright, sought the Corporal's face.
"Dessay you'll think me a greedy 'ound," said the Corporal, with a painful
effort that set the prominent Adam's apple in his lean throat jerking,
"when you tyke in wot I've got to s'y. It makes me want to git into me own
pocket and 'ide, to 'ave to tell it. For me an' you, we've shared an'
shared alike, wotever we 'ad, while we 'ad anythink--except in one
partic'lar." The Adam's apple jumped up and down as he gulped. He was
burning crimson now to the roots of his ragged, light-brown hair, and the
tips of his flat-rimmed, jutting ears, and the patch of thin bare chest
that showed where his coarse grey back shirt was unbuttoned at the neck.
All those eyes, feverishly bright or sickly dull, watched him as he put
his hand into the bulging breast-pocket, and slowly fished out a shining
brown briar-root with a stem unchewed as yet by any smoker.
"Twig this 'ere noo pipe. It was sent me by a--by a friend, along of a
packet of 'Oneydew, for a--for a kind o' birthday present." His voice
wobbled strangely; there was scalding water dammed up behind his ugly
honest eyes. "She--she bin an' opened the packet and filled the pipe, an'
I shared out the 'Oneydew in the trenches as far as it went, but I bin an'
kep' the pipe, sayin' to myself I'd smoke it when she lighted it wiv 'er
own 'ands, an' not--not before. Next day we"--the Adam's apple went up and
down again--"we 'ad words, an' parted. I--I never set eyes on 'er dial
since."
The voice of W. Keyse ended in an odd kind of squeak. Nobody looked at him
as he bit his thin lips furiously, and blinked the unmanly tears away.
Then he went on: "It's--it's near on two months I bin lookin' for 'er.
She--she--sometimes I think she's made a way out of the lines after
another bloke--a kind o' Dutchy spy 'oo was a pal of 'ers, or--or else
she's dead. There's times I've dreamed I seen 'er dead!" His voice bounded
up in that queer squeak again. The word "dead" was wrung out of him like a
long-fanged double molar. His lips were drawn awry in a grimace of
anguish, and the pipe he held shook in his gaunt and grimy hand, so
perilously that half a dozen other hands, as gaunt and even grimier, shot
out as by a single impulse to save it from falling. "Tyke it an' smoke it
between you," said W. Keyse, and the Adam's apple jerked again as he
gulped. "But read the writin' on the bit o' pyper first, and mind
you--mind you give it back." He resigned the treasure, and turned his face
away.
"Blessed Mary!" came in the accent of Kildare, breaking the silence, "let
me hould ut in me han's!"
"Spell out the screeve," ordered the R.E. Reserve man imperiously.
The Town Guard who had questioned the officer about the difference of
time, deciphered the blotty writing on the slip of paper pinned round the
stem of the new briar-root. It ran thus:
"i ope yu wil Engoy this Pip Deer; i Fild it A Purpus with
Love and Menney Apey Riturnse. from
"FARE AIR."
"'Is gal?" interrogated the Reserve man.
"His girl," assented the man who had read.
"And he never saw her no more, so he did not!" commented the Cardiff
stoker as the pipe travelled from hand to hand to be smelt at, dandled,
worshipped by every man in turn. Only the Sergeant-gunner, the grey-headed
ex-Royal Field Artilleryman, maintained self-command by dint of looking
very hard the other way. Then said Kildare impetuously:
"Take ut back, Corp'ril Keyse. 'Tis little wan poipe av tobacca wud count
for betune six starvin' savigees."
"Wot I wants," growled the Reserve man, "is to over-'aul a bacca factory
afire, and clap my mouth to 'er chimbley-shaft. So take it back, Corporal.
It's no manner o' good to me!"
All the other voices joined in the chorus, and the be-papered pipe was
thrust back upon its owner. W. Keyse thanked them soberly, and put the
gift of his lost love away.
His pale, unbeautiful eyes had the anguish of despair in them, and the
tooth of that sharp death-hunger of which Kildare had spoken was gnawing
what he would have termed with simplicity "his inside." For if Emigration
Jane were dead, what had Life left for him?
After his first superb assumption of cold indifference had broken down he
had sought her, feverishly at first, then doggedly, then with a dizzy
sickness of terror and apprehension that made the letters of the
type-written casualty-lists posted outside the Staff Headquarters in the
Market Square turn apparent somersaults as he strove to read them. This
was his punishment, that he should hunger as she had hungered, and still
be disappointed, and learn by fellowship in keenest suffering what her
pain had been.
The "Fare Air" letters were some comfort. In the trench at night, when
fever and rheumatism kept him from the dog-sleep that other men were
snatching, he would hear her crying over and over: "Oh, cruel, to break a
poor girl's heart!" And when sleep came he would track her through strange
places, calling her to come back--to come back and be forgiven. And when
he awakened from such dreams there would be tears upon his face. And each
day he consulted the lists of killed and wounded, and once had staggered
white-lipped to the mortuary-shed to identify a Jane Harris, and found
her--oh, with what unutterable relief!--to be a coloured lady who had
married a Rifleman. After that he had perked up, and continued his quest
for the beloved needle lost in the haystack of Gueldersdorp with renewed
belief in the ultimate possibility of finding it. Then, in the middle of
one awful night, the darkness of his mental state had been luridly
illuminated by the conviction that she had joined Slabberts. Now strange
voices whispered always in his ears, saying that she was dead, and urging
him to follow by the same dark road over which her trembling feet had
stumbled.
He heard those voices as he wrought and sweated with the gun-team at the
levers, and the ponderous muzzle-loader rolled back upon the grooves of
her improvised mounting. He heard it as they sponged the antique monster
out, and fed it with a three-pound bolus of cordite, and a ten-pound ball
of ancient pattern with the date of 1770. He heard it now again as he
kneeled at a loophole in the parapet, watching Saxham. Those pale, ugly
eyes of Billy Keyse were extraordinarily keen. He saw a grimy hand
carefully balance an old meat-tin on the top of the parapet of the enemy's
western entrenchment. He saw Saxham kneeling, aim and fire, and with the
sharp rap of the exploding cartridge came a howl from the owner of the
hand, who had not withdrawn it with sufficient quickness.
Half a dozen rifle-muzzles came nosing through the loopholes at that yell.
There was quite a little fusillade, and the sharp cracks and flashes in
Saxham's vicinity told of the employment of explosive bullets. But not one
hit the man. An unkempt Boer head bobbed up, looking for his corpse. The
Winchester cracked, and the unkempt head fell forwards, its chin over the
edge of the parapet, and stayed there staring until the comrades of its
late owner pulled the dead man down by the heels.
There was a cheer from the rifle-pits in the river-bed, and another from
Fort Ellerslie, where eager, excited spectators jostled at the loopholes.
A minute later the Fort's ancient bow-chaser barked loudly, and pitched a
solid shot. The metal spheroid hit the ploughed-up ground some ninety feet
in front of the parapet where the bloody head had hung, and over which
those explosive bullets had been fired, rose in a cloud of dust, and
literally jumped the trench. There was a roar of distant laughter as the
ball began to roll, and shaggy heads of curious Boers, inured only to the
latest inventions in lethal engineering, bobbed up to watch. More laughter
accompanied the progress of the ball. But presently it encountered a mound
of earth, behind which certain patriots were taking coffee, and rolled
through, and the laughter ceased abruptly. There was a baggage-waggon
beyond through which it also rolled, and behind the waggon a plump,
contented pony was wallowing in the sand. When the ancient cannon-ball
rolled through the pony, the owner spoke of witchcraft. But the patriots
who had been sitting behind the mound made no comment then or
thenceforward.
At this juncture, and with almost a sensation of pleasure, Saxham saw his
old acquaintance Father Noah climb out of his particular trench, briskly
for one well stricken in years, and toddle out, laden with rifle, biltong
bag, and coffee-can, to his favourite sniping-post, where a bush rose
beside a rock, which was shaded by a small group of blue-gums. Soon the
smoke of the veteran's pipe rose above his lurking-place, and as Saxham,
with a grunt of satisfaction, stretched himself upon his stomach on the
hot, sandy earth and pulled the lever, a return bullet sheared a piece off
his boot-heel, and painfully jarred his ankle-bone.
No one else was shooting at the big rooinek now. It was understood that
Father Noah had a prior claim. And the old man peered hopefully up to see
the result of his shot, and rubbed his eyes. For the hulking dief was
standing, voor den donder! standing as he emptied his magazine, and the
bullets sang about Father Noah as viciously as hornets roused to anger by
the stripping of a decayed thatch. The magazine of the repeating-rifle
emptied, Saxham calmly refilled it, causing the puzzled patriarch to waste
many cartridges in wild shooting at that erect, indifferent mark, and
finally to abandon the level-headed caution to which he owed his venerable
years, and climb a tree to obtain a better view of the tactics of the
enemy.
Saxham laughed as the invisible hornets sang in the air about him. The
battered solar helmet he wore was pierced through the hinder brim, and he
was bleeding from a bullet-graze upon the knuckle of the second finger of
his left hand. Since that Sunday afternoon beside the river, when he
learned the madness of his hope and the hopelessness of his madness, he
had taken risks like this daily, not in the deliberate desire of death,
but as a man consulting Fate negatively.
Father Noah would decide, one way or the other: the issue of their
protracted duel should determine things for Saxham. If he sent the old man
in, then there was Hope, if the superannuated, short-stocked Martini, with
that steady old finger on the trigger, and that sharp old eye at the
backsight, ended by accounting for Saxham, then there would be an end to
this burning torment for ever. Strangely, he did not believe that he could
be killed by any other hand than Father Noah's. Doubtless the long
overstrain was telling upon him mentally, though physically the man seemed
of wrought steel.
"To-day will settle it, one way or the other. To-day----"
As the thought passed through his mind, and he brought the sights into
line with the mark, a scrap of white, fluttering some twenty inches lower
down, caught his eye. He dropped the tip of the Winchester's foresight to
the bottom of the backsight's V, and knew, almost before the shot rang
out, and an ownerless Martini tumbled out of the tree-crotch, that Fate
had decided for Saxham.
Then he went back to the Hospital, grim-jawed and inscrutable as ever. A
dirty white rag was being hoisted on a pole by one of the relatives of the
deceased. Father Noah, with the long ends of his dirty grey beard raggedly
bannering in the dust-wind, was still waiting for the bearers of the
hastily improvised stretcher of sticks and green reims, as Saxham, having
obtained a strip of black cloth with a needle and thread from the Matron,
pulled off his jacket and sat down upon the end of the cot-bed in his
little room, and neatly tacked a mourning-band upon the upper part of the
left sleeve.
It was his nature to absorb himself in whatever work he undertook. As he
stitched, the crowded Hospital buzzed about him like a hive, the moans of
sick men and the rattling breaths of the dying beat in waves of sound
upon his brain, for the long rows of beds stood upon either side of the
corridors now, with barely a foot of room between them. In the necessarily
open space before the Doctor's door a woman's hurrying footsteps paused,
there came a rustling, and a sheet of printed paper folded in half was
thrust underneath.
"The _Siege Gazette_, Doctor," called the Matron's pleasant womanly voice,
as, simultaneously with the utterance of Saxham's brief word of thanks,
she passed on. In the famine for news that possessed him, as every other
human being in the town, the sight of the little badly-printed sheet was
welcome, although it could hardly contain anything to satisfy his need. He
set the last stitches, fastened and cut the thread, reached down a long
arm from the foot of the bed, and took up the paper.
The Latest Information had whiskers. The General Orders announced an issue
of paper currency in small amounts, owing to the deplorable shortage of
silver, congratulated those N.C.O.'s and men of the Baraland Irregulars
who, under Lieutenant Byass, occupying the advanced Nordenfeldt position,
had brought so effective a fire to bear upon the enemy's big gun that
Meisje had been compelled to abandon her commanding position, and take up
her quarters in a spot less advantageous, from the enemy's point of view.
A reduction in the Forage ration was hinted at, and a string of Social
Jottings followed, rows of asterisks exploding like squibs under every
paragraphic utterance of the Gold Pen.
Not for nothing had Captain Bingo dolefully boasted that his wife exuded
Journalese from her very finger-ends. Saxham recognised in the style, the
very table-Moselle of Fashionable Journalism. So like the genuine article
in the shape of the bottle, the topping of gilt-foil, the arrangement of
wire and string, that as the stinging foam overflowed the goblet, snapping
in iridescent bubbles at the cautious sipper's nose, and evaporated,
leaving nothing in particular at the bottom, it was barely possible to
believe the vintage other than the genuine article from Fleet Street.
Stay.... The French quotations were not enclosed in inverted commas. That
let Lady Hannah out.
"Society in Gueldersdorp," she wrote, "bubbles with interested expectation
of the public announcement of a matrimonial engagement with which the
intimate friends of the happy lovers profess _etre aux anges_.
* * * * *
"Not for worlds would we draw the veil of delightful mystery completely
aside from the secret of two young, charming and popular people. Yet it
may be hinted that the elder son of a representative English House and
heir of a sixteenth-century Marquisate, who is one of the most gallant and
dashing among the many heroic defenders of our beleaguered town, proposes
at no very distant date to lead to the altar one of the loveliest among
the many lovely girls who grace Gueldersdorp's social functions.
* * * * *
"Both bride-elect and bridegroom-to-be attended High Mass at the Catholic
Church on Sunday, when the Rev. Father Wix, in apprising parishioners of
the near approach of Lent, caused an irresistible smile to ripple over the
faces of his hearers. _Toujours perdrix_ may sate in the long-run, but
perpetually to _faire maigre_ is attended with even greater discomfort.
* * * * *
"We have pleasure in announcing the approaching marriage of Lieutenant the
Right Hon. Viscount Beauvayse, Grey Hussars, Junior Aide to the Colonel
Commanding H.M. Forces, Gueldersdorp, to Miss Lynette Bridget-Mary
Mildare, ward of the Mother-Superior, Convent of the Holy Way, North Veld
Road."