XLVIII

Saxham, shouldering out of Julius's hotel upon his way to Staff Bombproof

South, is made aware that the hundred-foot-high dust-storm that has raged

and swirled throughout the morning is in process of being beaten down into

a porridge of red mud by a downpour of February rain.

Straight as Matabele spears it comes down, sending pedestrians who have

grown indifferent to shell-fire to huddle under cover, adding to the

wretchedness of life in trench or bombproof as nothing else can. And the

Doctor, biting hard upon the worn stem of the old briar-root, as he goes

swinging along through the hissing deluge with his chin upon his breast

and his fierce eyes sullenly fixed upon the goal ahead, recalls, even more

vividly than upon Sunday, the angry buffalo of Lady Hannah's apt analogy.

He is drenched to the skin, it goes without saying, in a minute or two. So

is the Railway Volunteer, who challenges him at the bridge that carries

the single-gauge railway southward over the Olopo, in spite of his ragged

waterproof and an additional piece of tarpaulin. So is a mounted officer

of the Staff, in whom Saxham mechanically recognises Captain Bingo

Wrynche, as he goes by at a furious gallop, spurring, and jagging savagely

at the mouth of the handsome if attenuated brown charger, who sends stones

and mud and water flying from his furious iron-shod hoofs. So is the

Barala on guard by the wattled palisade of the native village--a

muddy-legged and goose-fleshy warrior, in a plumed, brimless bowler and

leopard-skin kaross, whose teeth can be heard chattering as he stands to

attention and brings his gaspipe rifle to the slope. The Chinamen working

in the patches of market-garden, where the scant supply of vegetables that

command such famine-prices are raised, are certainly sheltered from the

wet by their colossal umbrella-hats, but the splashed-up red gruel has

imbrued them to the eyes. Yet they continue to labour cheerfully, hoeing

scattered shell-fragments out of their potato-drills and removing

incrusted masses of bullets that incommode the young kidney-beans, and

arranging this ironmongery and metal-ware in tidy piles, possibly with a

view to future commerce. And so, with another challenge from a picket,

posted between the Barala village and the south trenches, where many of

the loyal natives are doing duty, Saxham finds himself on the perilous

tongue of land that lies behind Maxim Kopje South, and where the Staff

Bombproof is situated.

As the long, low mound comes into view, a dazzling white flash leaps from

a fold of the misty grey hills beyond, and one of Meisje's great shells

goes screaming and winnowing westwards. Then a sentry of the Irregulars, a

battered, shaggy, berry-brown trooper, standing knee-deep in a hole,

burrowed in the lee of a segment of stone-dyke that is his shelter,

challenges for the last time.

"'Alt! I know you well enough, Doctor." It is a man whose wounded arm was

dressed, one blazing day last January, outside the Convent bombproof. "But

you'll 'ave to give the countersign. Pass Honour and all's well. But"--the

sentry's nostrils twitch as the savour of Saxham's pipe reaches them, and

his whisper of appeal is as piercing as a yell--"if you left a pipeful

be'ind you, it wouldn't do no 'arm. Don't pull your pouch out, sir; the

lookout officer 'as 'is eye on you. Open it by the feel, an' drop a pinch

by the stone near your toe. I'll get it when they relieve me."

Saxham complies, leaving the sentry to gloat distantly over the little

brown lump of loose tangled fibres rapidly reducing to sponginess under

the downpour from the skies. The long mound of raw red earth, crusted with

greenish-yellow streaks of lyddite from the bursting-charges, rises now

immediately before him. At its eastern end is a flagstaff displaying the

Union Jack. Under the roof of the little penthouse from which the

flagstaff rises are sheltered the vari-coloured acetylene lamps that are

used for signalling at night.

Midway of the raw mound rises the rear elevation of an officer in dripping

waterproofs, who is looking steadily through a telescope out between the

long driving lances of the rain, beyond Maxim Kopje South to those

mysterious hills, swathed in grey-black folds of storm-cloud, that look so

desolate, and whose folds are yet as full of swarming, active, malignant

life as the blanket of an unwashed Kaffir. An N.C.O. is posted a little

below the officer, whose narrow shoulders and dark hair, showing above the

edge of the turned-up collar and below the brim of the Field-Service cap,

prove him to be not Beauvayse. And the usual blizzard of rifle-fire,

varied by brisk bursts of cannonading, goes on, and the Red Scythe of the

Destroyer sweeps over these two figures and about them in the customary

way. But even women and children have grown indifferent to these things,

and the men have long ceased to be aware of them.

A bullet sings past Saxham's ear, as the acrid exhalations of a stable

rise gratefully to his nostrils, recently saluted by the fierce and

clamorous smells of the native village. The ground slopes under his feet.

He goes down the inclined way that ends in the horses' quarters, and the

orderly, who is sitting on an empty ammunition-box outside the tarpaulin

that screens off the interior of the officer's shelter, stiffens to the

salute, receives a brief message, and disappears within.

Before Saxham rise the bony brown and bay and chestnut hindquarters of

half a dozen lean horses, that are drowsing or fidgeting before their

emptied mangers. Against the division of a loose-box that holds a fine

brown charger, still saddled and steaming, and heavily splashed with mud,

there leans a stretcher, which, by the ominous red stains and splashes

upon it, has been recently in use.

Upon Saxham's left hand is the shelter for the rank and file. Here several

gaunt, hollow-eyed, and hairy troopers are sitting on rough benches at a

trestle-table, playing dominoes and draughts, or poring over tattered

books by the light of the flickering oil-lamps, with tin reflectors, that

hang against the earth walls. None of them are smoking, though several are

sucking vigorously at empty pipes; and the rapacious light that glares in

every eye as Saxham mechanically knocks out the ashes from his smoked-out

briar-root against the side-post of the entrance is sufficient witness to

the pangs that they endure.

Perhaps it is characteristic of the Doctor that, with a hell of revengeful

fury seething in his heart, and a legion of devils unloosed and shrieking,

prompting him to murder, he should have paused to relieve the

tobacco-famine of the sentry, and be moved to a further sacrifice of his

sole luxury by the sight of those empty pipes. The old rubber pouch,

pitched by a cricketer's hand, flies in among the domino-players, and

rebounds from a pondering head, as the orderly comes back, and lifts one

corner of the tarpaulin for the Doctor to pass in. A pack of ravening

wolves tussling over an unusually small baby might distantly reproduce the

scene Saxham leaves behind him. The trestle-table and benches are upset,

and men and benches, draughts and dominoes, welter in horrible confusion

over the earthen floor, when the scandalised orderly-corporal rushes in to

quell the riot, and thenceforward joins the rioters.

They fight like wolves, but the man who rises up from among the rest,

clutching the prize, and grinning a three-cornered grin because his upper

lip is split, divides the tobacco fairly to the last thread. They even

share out the indiarubber pouch, and chew the pieces as long as the

flavour lasts. When the thick, fragrant smoke curls up from the lighted

pipes, it steals round the edges of the tarpaulin that has dropped behind

Saxham, passing in to the wreaking of vengeance upon the thief whose

profane and covetous hand has plucked the white lily of the Convent

garden.

Now, with that deadly hate surging in his veins, with the lust to kill

tingling in every nerve and muscle, he will soon stand in the presence of

his enemy, and hers. As he thinks of this, suddenly a bell rings. The

sound comes from the north, so it cannot be the bell of the Catholic

Church, or that of the Protestant Church, or the bell of the Wesleyan

meeting-house, or of the Dutch Kerk.

"_Clang-clang! clang-clang! Clang----_"

The last clang is broken off suddenly, as though the rope has been jerked

from the ringer's hands, but Saxham is not diverted by it from his

occupation. With that curious fatuity to which the most logical of us are

prone, he has been conning over the brief, scorching sentences with which

he means to strip the other man's deception bare to the light, and make

known his own self-appointed mission to avenge her.

"They telephoned for me, and I have come, but not in the interests of

your sick or wounded man. Because it was imperative that I should say this

to you: Your engagement to Miss Mildare and your approaching marriage to

her were announced in to-day's _Siege Gazette_. You have received many

congratulations. Now take mine--liar, and coward, and cheat!"

And with each epithet, delivered with all the force of Saxham's muscular

arm, shall fall a stinging blow of the heavy old hunting-crop. There will

be a shout, an angry oath from Beauvayse, staggering back under the

unexpected, savage chastisement, red bars marring the insolent, high-bred

beauty of the face that has bewitched her. Saxham will continue:

"You approached this innocent, inexperienced girl as a lover. You

represented yourself to her and to her mother-guardian as a single man.

All this when you had already a wife at home in England--a gaudy stage

butterfly sleek with carrion-juices, whose wings are jewelled by the vices

of men; and who is worthy of you, as you are of her. I speak as I can

prove. Here is the written testimony of a reliable witness to your

marriage with Miss Lavigne. And now you will go to her and show yourself

to her in your true colours. You will undeceive her, or----"

There is a foggy uncertainty about what is to follow after that "or." But

the livid flames of the burning hell that is in Saxham throw upon the

greyness a leaping reflection that is red like blood. A fight to the

death, either with weapons, or, best of all, with the bare hands, is what

Saxham secretly lusts for, and savours in anticipation as he goes.

Let the humanitarian say what he pleases. Man is a manslayer by instinct

and by will.

And within the little area of this beleaguered town do not men kill, and

are not men killed, every day? The conditions are mediaeval, fast relapsing

into the primeval. The modern sanctity and inviolability attending and

surrounding human life are at a discount. Even for children, the grim King

of Terrors had become a bugaboo to laugh at; red wounds and ghastly sights

are things of everyday experience; there is a slump in mortality.

In those old, far-distant Chilworth Street days, two men who engaged in a

battle to the death about a woman desired might have seemed merely savages

to Saxham. Here things are different. The elemental bed-rock of human

nature has been laid bare, and the grim, naked scars upon it, testifying

to the combat of Ice and Fire for the round world's supremacy, will never

be quite hidden under Civilisation's green mantle of vegetation, or her

toadstool-growths of bricks and mortar, any more.

And the men are well matched. Saxham knows himself the more muscular, but

Beauvayse has the advantage of him in years, and is lithe, and strong, and

supple as the Greek wrestler who served the sculptor Polycleitos as a

model for the Athlete with the Diadem.

It will be a fight worth having. No quarter. And Saxham's breath comes

heavily, and his blue eyes have in them a steely glitter, and, as the

tarpaulin falls behind him, he shifts to a better grip on the strong old

hunting-crop.

Overhead the rain drums deafeningly on the tarpaulins. The long bombproof

is heterogeneously furnished with full and empty ammunition-boxes marked

A.O.S., a leathern sofa-divan, tattered by spurs and marked by muddy

boots, several cane or canvas deck-chairs, and others of the Windsor

pattern common to the barrack-room. Arms and accoutrements are in rude

racks against the corrugated-iron-panelled walls; a trestle-table covered

with oilcloth runs down the middle. It is lighted by a couple of acetylene

lamps hanging by their chains from iron bars that cross the trench above,

and there is another lamp, green-shaded, upon a bare deal table that

stands, strewn with papers, against the farther wall.

A man in shirt-sleeves sits there writing. Another man is busy at a

telephone that is fixed against the wall beyond the writing-table. There

is something fateful and ominous about the heavy silence in which they do

their work. It is broken only by a strange sound that comes almost

continuously from--where Saxham does not trouble to ask. It is the

groaning, undoubtedly, of the wounded man to whose aid he has been

summoned, with the added injunction, "Bring morphia," showing that little

further can be done for him, whoever he may be, than to smooth his

passage into the Beyond by the aid of the Pain Slayer.

Let him wait, however sore his need, until Saxham has dealt with his

enemy. He is resentfully impatient in the knowledge that neither of the

men present is Beauvayse.

Then, as he stands sullen and lowering, the man who has been writing gets

up and comes to him. Saxham recognises the keen-featured face with the

rusty-brown moustache, and the grip of the lean, hard hand that hauled a

Dop Doctor out of the Slough of Despair is familiar. The pleasant voice he

likes says something about somebody being very wet. It is Saxham, from

whose soaked garments the water is running in streams, and whose boots

squelch as he crosses the carpet that has been spread above the

floor-tarpaulin. The friendly hand pours out and offers him a sparing

measure of that rare stimulant, whisky.

"As preventive medicine. We can't have our Medical Staff men on the

sick-list."

Some such commonplace words accompany the proffered hospitality.

"I shall not suffer, thanks. You have a shell-casualty, you have 'phoned

us, but before I see your man it is imperative that I should speak to Lord

Beauvayse. Where is he?"

"He is here."

"My business with him is urgent, sir."

The man at the telephone makes a sound indicative that a message is coming

through. The Chief is beside him instantly, with the receiver at his ear.

He looks round for an instant at Saxham as he waits for the intelligence,

and the muscles of his face twitch as if under the influence of some

strong, repressed emotion, and the Doctor's practised glance notes the

unsteadiness of the uplifted hand. Then he is saying to the officer in

charge at Maxim Kopje South:

"The ammunition comes up to-night. Tell Gaylord that we are short-handed

here, and shall want him to help on night duty.... Practically as soon as

he can join us. No, no better. All for the present ... thanks! Saxham,

please come this way."

There is a sleeping-place at the end of the long, narrow, lamp-lit

perspective, curtained off from the rude bareness of the outer place.

Light shows between the curtains, and they are of plush, in hue a rich,

deep red. As that strong colour sinks into his brain, through his intent

and glittering eyes, Saxham the man has a sudden furious impulse to tear

the deep folds back, with a clash of brazen rings on iron rods, and call

to the betrayer who lurks behind them to come out and be dealt with. But

that hollow, feeble moaning sounds continuously from the other side, and

Saxham the surgeon stays his hand and follows the Colonel in. There are

two camp-beds in the small sleeping-place, and a washstand and a

folding-chair. A lamp hangs above, and its light falls full upon the face

of the man whom he is seeking.

Ah! where are they? His furious anger and his deadly hate, where are they

now? Like snow upon the desert they vanish away. How can one rage against

this shattered thing, stretched on the pallet of the low cot-bed from

which the blankets have been stripped away? First Aid bandages have been

not ineffectually applied. Fragments of packing-case have been employed as

splints for the broken arm and shattered hand, but, in spite of all that

has been done, the beautiful young life is sinking, waning, flowing out

with that ruddy tide that will not be stayed.

The greenish pallor and the sweat of mortal agony are upon the face of

Beauvayse, thrown back upon the pillow, and looking upwards to where the

deluging rain makes thunder on the tarpaulined roof. The atmosphere is

heavy with the sour-sickly smell of blood, and lamp-fumes; he draws each

breath laboriously, and exhales it with a whistling sound. Through his

clenched teeth, revealed by the lips that are dragged back in the

semi-grin of desperate agony, that dumb, ceaseless moaning makes its way

despite the gallant effort to restrain it. The one uninjured arm hangs

downwards, its restless fingers picking at the bloodstained matting that

covers the loose boards of the floor. A sheet has been lightly laid over

him. It is dabbled with the prevailing hue, and sinks in an ominous hollow

below the breast. And beyond the bottom of it splashed leggings and muddy

boots with spurs on them stick out with helpless stiffness.

A flask of brandy--a precious restorative treasured for use in such

desperate need as this--stands with a tumbler and a jug of water on the

camp washstand that is between the two cot-beds. Upon the second bed sits

a big and stoutish man, whose large face, not pink just now, is hidden in

his thick, quivering hands. It is Captain Bingo Wrynche, heavy Dragoon,

and honest, single-hearted gentleman, to whom belongs the blown and muddy

charger drooping in the loose-box outside. The telephone has summoned him

in haste from Hotchkiss Outpost North, to see the last of a friend.