Saxham has not been staring at the printed words because they have struck
him to the heart with their intelligence, but--or so it seems to
him--because they convey nothing. There is an aching pain at the back of
his neck, and his mind is curiously dull and sluggish. But after a little
he becomes aware that somebody is knocking at his door.
"Who is it----"
The Doctor thinks he utters these words, but in reality he has only made
a harsh croaking sound that might mean anything. The door opens and shows
the Chaplain standing smiling on the threshold.
The Reverend Julius Fraithorn, no longer a worn and wasted pilgrim
stumbling amongst the thorns and sharp stones of the Valley of the Shadow,
appears in these days as a perfectly sound and healthy, if rather too
narrow-shouldered, young Anglican clergyman, not unbecomingly arrayed, in
virtue of his official position under martial authority, in a suit of
Service khaki such as Saxham wears, with the black Maltese Cross on the
collar and the band of the wide-peaked cap. Yellow puttees conceal the
unduly spare proportions of his active legs, and the brown boots upon his
long slender feet are dusty, as, indeed, is the rest of him, not with the
reddish dust of the veld that powders Saxham to the very eyelashes, and
lies in light drifts in every wrinkle of his garments, but with the
yellowish dust of the town.
"I rather thought," the Chaplain says, hesitating, as Saxham, without
lifting his eyes, turns his square, white face upon the visitor, "that you
said 'Come in'?"
"Come in, and shut the door, and sit down," says Saxham heavily and
thickly. And Julius does so, and, occupying the single cane-seated chair
the bedroom boasts, glows upon Saxham with a sincerity of affection and a
simplicity of admiration pleasant to see, and asks in his thin, sweet
voice how things are going.
"Things _are_ going," Saxham returns, seeming to wake from a heavy brown
study. "You could not put it better or more clearly. Will you smoke?" He
pitches a rubber tobacco-pouch to the Chaplain, who catches it, and the
treasured box of matches that comes after, and as one man sparingly fills
a well-browned meerschaum, and the other a blackened briar-root, with the
weed that grows more rare and precious with every hour of these days of
dearth: "That's one of the things that are going quickest after
perchloride of mercury, carbolic, and extract of beef. As a fact, we are
using formaldehyde as an anaesthetic in minor operations; and violet powder
and starch, upon the external use of which I laid an embargo weeks ago, to
the great indignation of the younger nurses, are being employed instead
of arrowroot. And the more the medical stores diminish, the more the
patients come rolling in."
"And each new want that arises, and each new difficulty that crops up,
finds in you the man to meet it and overcome it," says the Chaplain
fervently. He is disposed to make a hero of this brilliant surgeon who has
saved his life, and his enthusiasm is only marred by Saxham's
painfully-apparent lack of belief in certain vital spiritual truths that
are the daily bread of fervent Christian souls. Now that he has become
aware of the black band upon the sleeve of the jacket that lies across
Saxham's knees, where he sits upon the end of the cot-bed that, with a
tiny chest of drawers and a hanging bookshelf laden with volumes and
instrument-cases, completes the furnishing of the narrow room, he says,
with sympathy in his gentle voice and in the brown eyes that have the soft
lustre of a deer's or of a beautiful woman's:
"I am sorry to see this, Saxham. You have lost a friend?"
"_Lost a friend?_"
Saxham, echoing the last three words, stares at the Chaplain in a strange,
dull way, and then forgets him for a minute or more. Baths are not to be
had in Gueldersdorp in these days, and though it is not Sunday, when
bathing in the river becomes a possibility, the Chaplain observes that the
Doctor's thick, close-cropped black hair is wet, and that broad streaks of
shining moisture are upon his pale, square face, and that he breathes as
though he had been running. But perhaps he has been sluicing his head in
the washstand basin, thinks the Chaplain. No; the basin has not recently
been used. And then it occurs to Julius, but not until he has noticed the
starting veins and corded muscles on the backs of the hands that are
clenched upon the jacket, that Saxham is suffering.
"I always said he felt a great deal more than he permitted himself to
show," reflects the man of Religion looking at the man of Medicine. "And
the absence of belief in Divine Redemption and a Future State must
terribly intensify the pain of a bereavement. If I only knew how to
comfort him!" And all he can do is to ask, still in that tone of sympathy,
when the Funeral is to be.
"Perhaps about the midday coffee-drinking," says Saxham heavily, "they
would scrape a hole and dump him in. But they're not over fond of risks,
and they would probably leave him where he is till nightfall."
Julius Fraithorn longs, more than ever, that eloquence and inspiration
were his to employ in the healing of the man who has raised himself almost
from the dead. But he can only falter something about the inscrutable
designs of Providence, and not a sparrow falling to the ground unnoticed.
And he expresses, somewhat tritely, the hope that Saxham's friend was
prepared to meet his end.
"I don't exactly suppose he expected it. He had a right to count upon
pulling off the match," says Saxham, with a dreary shadow of a grin,
"because a better man behind a gun than Father Noah you wouldn't easily
meet. And Boers are fine shots, as a rule."
"Boers.... A Boer.... I thought you told me you had lost a friend?" Mild
astonishment is written on the Chaplain's face. And Saxham looks up, and
the other sees that his eyeballs are heavily injected with blood, and that
the vivid blue of their irises has strangely faded.
"I gave him every opportunity to be my friend," says the dull voice
heavily, "by moving out from cover, even by standing up. But no good. He
suspected a ruse, and it worried him. Then he climbed a tree, emptied his
bandolier at me from a perch of vantage among the branches, and had
started to refill it from a fresh package, when I got the chance, and
brought him down spreadeagled. And so ends Father Noah."
The Chaplain comprehends fully now, turns pale, and shudders. A blue line
marks itself about his mouth; he is conscious of a qualm of positive
nausea as he says:
"You--you don't mean you have been talking of a man you have shot?"
"Just so," assents Saxham, and the sentence that follows is not uttered
aloud. "And I wish with all my soul that the man had shot me!"
"And this is War," says Julius Fraithorn. He pulls out his handkerchief
and wipes his damp forehead and the beady blue lines about his mouth, and
the crack and rattle of rifle-fire sweeping over the veld and through the
town, and the ping, ping, ping! of Mauser bullets flattening on the iron
gutter-pipe and the corrugated iron of the roof above them seem to answer
"Certainly, War."
"Why, you look sick, man," says Saxham the surgeon, whose keen
professional eye has not missed the Chaplain's pallor, though the other
Saxham is still dazed and blind, and stupefied by the blow that has been
dealt him by Lady Hannah's gold fountain-pen. He leans forward, and
lightly touches one of the Chaplain's thin wrists, suspecting him of a
touch of fever, or town-water dysentery. But Julius jerks the wrist away.
"I am perfectly well. It was--the way in which you spoke just now that
rather--rather----"
"Revolted you, eh?" says Saxham, again with the dim shadow of a smile.
"Revealed me as a brute and a savage. Well, and why not, if I choose to be
one or the other, or both? You Churchmen believe in the power of choice,
don't you? Prove to a man that there is something worth having in the
bowels of the earth, he burrows like a mole and gets it. Let him once see
utility in flying, give him time and opportunity, and he will fly. So if
it is to his interests to be clean-lived, high-minded, exemplary, he will
be all these things to admiration. Or, if he should happen to have lost
the _gout_ for virtue, if he determines that Evil shall be his good, he
will make it so." He smiled dourly. "Deprive him of a solid reason for
living, he can die. Hold up before his dying eyes the prospect of
continued existence under hopeful conditions, he takes up his bed and
walks, like the moribund paralytic in the Gospel you preach. You're a
living proof of the human power of working miracles.... Granted I cut away
a tumour from under your breast-bone more skilfully than a certain
percentage of surgeons could have done it. But what brought you safely
through the operation, healed your wound by the first intention, and set
you on your legs again? I'll trouble you to tell me?"
"The mercy and the grace of God," says the Chaplain, "manifested in His
unworthy servant through your science and your skill."
"You employ the technical terminology of your profession," Saxham answers,
with a shrug.
The blank stare and the congested redness have gone out of his eyes, and
his voice is less dull and toneless. He is coming back to his outward self
again, even while the inner man lies mangled and bleeding, crushed by that
tremendous broadsword stroke of Fate that has been dealt him by the gold
pen of Lady Hannah, and he is ready enough to argue with the Chaplain. He
gets off the bed and slips on his jacket, takes a turn or two across the
narrow floor-space, then leans against the distempered wall beside the
window, puffing at his jetty briar-root, his muscular arms folded on his
great chest, his powerful shoulders bowed, his square, black head thrust
forward, and his blue eyes coolly studying Julius as he talks.
"Let me--without rubbing your cloth the wrong way--put the case in mine.
Your belief in a Power that my reason tells me is non-existent stimulated
your nervous centres, roused and sustained in you the determination
without which my science and my skill--and I do not value them lightly, I
assure you--would have availed you nothing. You said to yourself, 'If God
will it, I shall get over this,' and because _you_ willed it, it was so.
Were I a drunkard, an outcast, the very refuse of humanity, tainted with
vice to the very centre of my being, I have but to will to be sober and
live decently, and while I continue to will it, I shall be what I desire
to be."
Saxham's eyes hold Julius's, and challenge them. But no shadow of a Dop
Doctor who once reeled the streets of Gueldersdorp rises from those clear
brown depths as the speaker ends, "Don't underestimate the power of the
Human Will, Fraithorn, for it can remove mountains, and raise the living
dead."
"Nor do you venture to deny the Power of the Almighty Hand, Saxham,"
answers the thin, sweet voice of the Churchman; "because It strewed the
myriad worlds in the Dust of the The Infinite, and set the jewelled
feathers in the butterfly's wing, and forged the very intellect whose
power you misuse in uttering the boast that denies It. Think again. Can
you assure me with truth that you have never, in the stress of some great
mental or physical crisis, cried to Heaven for help when the struggle was
at its worst? Think again, Saxham."
But Saxham obstinately shakes his head, still smiling. As he stands there
transfigured by the dark, fierce spirit that has come upon him and
possessed him, there is something about the hulking man with the square,
black head and the powerful frame, that breathes of that superb and
terrible Prince of the Heavenly Hierarchy who fell through a kindred sin,
and the priest in Julius shudders, recognising the tremendous power of
such a nature as this, whether turned towards Evil or bent to achieve
Good. The while, in letters of delicate, keen flame, the denier sees
written on the tables of his inward consciousness the utterance that once
broke from him, as, racked and tortured in body and in soul, he wrestled
with his devil on that unforgettable night.
"O God! if indeed Thou Art, and I must perforce return to live the life of
a man amongst men, help me to burst the chains that fetter me. Help
me--oh, help me to be free!"
And in his heart he knows that the desperate prayer has been granted. But
in this new-born, curious mood of his he will not yield, but combats his
own innermost conviction, being, in a strange, perverted way, even prouder
of this Owen Saxham who has gone down of his own choice to the muddiest
depths of moral and physical decadence, and come up of the strength of his
own will from among the hideous things that hang suspended and drifting in
the primeval sludge, than he ever was of the man before his fall. His is a
combative nature, and the great blow he has sustained this day in the
wreck and ruin of his raft of hope has left him quivering to the centre of
his being with resentment that strikes back.
"Think again yourself. Ask yourself whether the Deity who creates,
preserves, blesses, punishes, slays, and raises up, is the natural outcome
of man's need of such a Being, or His own desire of Himself? And which
conception is the greater--that the God in whom you Churchmen and the
millions of lay-folk who recognise you as Divinely-appointed teachers
believe, should have commanded, 'Let the universe exist,' and have been
obeyed, or that the stupendous pigmy Man should have dared to say, 'Let
there be God,' and so created Him?"
He laughs jarringly as he knocks the ashes out of the blackened pipe upon
the corner of the window-ledge.
"Give credit to the human imagination and the human will for inventing a
personage so useful to the Christian Churches as the Devil. For as in the
beginning it was necessary for Man to build up Heaven and set his God
therein, so, to throw His unimaginable purity and inconceivable perfection
into yet more glorious relief, it was required that Hell should be delved
out and the objective personality of Satan conceived and kennelled there,
and given just sufficient power to pay the marplot where the Divine plans
are concerned, and just enough malevolence to find amusement in the
occupation. What should we do, where should we be, without our Satanic
_souffre-douleur_--our horned scapegoat, our black puppet, without whose
suggestions we should never have erred, whose wooden head we bang when
things go wrong with us," says Saxham bitterly. He reaches out a hand for
the tobacco-pouch and his glance falls upon the day's issue of the _Siege
Gazette_ lying on the parquet linoleum, where it has fallen from his hand
a little while ago. He stoops and picks it up, and offers it to Julius.
"There's the announcement of an engagement here----" He smooths the
crumpled sheet, holds it under the Chaplain's eye, and points to the two
last paragraphs of the "Social Jottings" column. "Take it as an
instance.... Did Heaven play the matchmaker here, or has Hell had a finger
in the matrimonial pie? Or has the blind and crazy chance that governs
this desolate world for me, tipped the balance in favour of one young
rake, who may be saved and purified and renewed by such a marriage, while
his elder in iniquity is doomed to be wrecked upon it, ruined by it,
destroyed through it, damned socially and morally because of it ..."
The fierce words break from Saxham against his will. He resents the
betrayal of his own confidence savagely, even as he utters them. But they
are spoken, beyond recall. And the effect of the paragraph upon the
Chaplain is remarkable. His meek, luminous brown eyes blaze with
indignation. He is aflame, from the edge of his collar--a patent clerical
guillotine of washable xylonite, purchased at a famous travellers'
emporium in the Strand--to the thin, silky rings of dark hair that are
wearing from his high, pale temples. He says, and stutters angrily in
saying:
"This is a lie--a monstrous misstatement which shall be withdrawn
to-morrow!"
"How do you know that?"
The Chaplain crushes the _Siege Gazette_ into a ball, pitches it into a
corner of the room, grabs his Field-Service cap and the cane he carries in
lieu of the carbine or rifle without which the male laity of Gueldersdorp
and a good many of the women do not stir abroad, and makes a stride for
the door. He meets there Saxham, whose square face and powerful figure bar
his flaming exit.
"It is enough that I do know it. Kindly allow me to pass."
"What are you going to do?"
The Chaplain is plainly uncertain, as he wrestles with the clerical
guillotine of washable xylonite, and stammers something about
unwarrantable liberty and a lady's reputation! And Saxham recognises that
Saxham is not the only sufferer from the festering smart of jealousy, and
that the vivid red-and-white carnation-tinted beauty of the delicate face
in its setting of red-brown hair has grievously disturbed, if it has not
altogether dissipated, the pale young Anglican's views of the celibate
life.
Agnostic and Churchman, denier and believer, have split on the same
amatory rock. The knowledge breathes no sympathy in the Dop Doctor.
He observes the Chaplain's face, dispassionately and yet intently, as in
the old Hospital days he might have studied the expression of a monkey or
a guinea-pig, or other organism upon which he was experimenting with some
new drug. And the Reverend Julius demands, with resentful acerbity:
"What are you staring at? Do you imagine that the colour of my cloth
debars me from--from taking the part of a lady whose name has been dragged
before the public? I shall call at the office where this rag is published,
and insist upon a contradiction of this--this _canard_!"
"Don't you know who edits the rag?" asks Saxham raspingly. "Do you suppose
that any unauthorised announcement, or statement that has not been
officially corroborated would be allowed to pass? The paragraph comes from
an authoritative source, you may be sure!"
"I am in a position to disprove it, from whatever source it comes!" cried
the Chaplain hotly. "He shall contradict it himself, if there is
necessity. He may be a prodigal and a rake--he bears that reputation--but
at least he is not a liar and a scoundrel."
"Who?" Saxham's heart is drubbing furiously. A cool, vivifying liquid like
ether seems to have passed into his blood. His quiet, set, determined face
and masterful, observant eyes oppose the Chaplain's heat and indignation,
as if these were waves of boiling lava beating on a cliff of granite. "Who
is not a liar and a scoundrel?"
"I speak of Lord Beauvayse," says the Reverend Julius Fraithorn in the
high-pitched voice that shakes with rage. "He is a married man, Saxham; I
have incontrovertible testimony to prove it. He gave his name to the woman
who was his mistress a week before he sailed for Cape Town. He----"
There is a strange rattling noise in the throat of the man who listens.
Julius looks at him, and his own resentment appears, even to himself, as
impotent and ridiculous as the anger of a child. If just before it has
seemed to him that he has heard the voice of mankind's arch-enemy speaking
with Saxham's mouth, he discerns at this moment, reflected in Saxham's,
the face of the primal murderer. And being, as well as a sincere and
simple-hearted clergyman, something of a weakling, he is shocked to
silence.