Before you turn away in loathing of the man whose experience of Life's
game of football had been chiefly gained from the ball's point of view,
hear how it happened that the work of all those months of stern
self-repression and strenuous denial had been rendered useless.
In the previous July, when Sir Danvers Muller was visiting Lord Williams
of Afghanistan at Pretoria, Owen Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S., had been married
to Lynette Bridget-Mary Mildare at the Registrar's Office, Gueldersdorp,
and at the Catholic Church. One hour after the ceremony the happy pair
left by the mail for Cape Town.
Gueldersdorp turned out to do them honour. We have heard the people cheer.
Three days and three nights of the Express, delayed in places by the
wrecking of the line, and then the Alpine mountain-ranges sank and
dwindled with the mercury in the thermometer. The little white towns
succeeded each other like pearls on a green string. Humpy blue hills gave
way to the flats, and then in the shadow of Table Mountain--Babel's
confusion of tongues--and the stalwart flower of many nations, arrayed
and armed for battle, and the glory, and pomp, and power of War.
The grey and white transports disgorged them, ants of sober, neutral
colours, marching in columns to attack other ants. They grew upon the
vision and filled it, and the sound of their feet was louder than the
beating of the surf on Sea Point, and although martial music beat and blew
them on--a brazen whirlwind dominating the mind, blaring at the ears--the
trampling of men's feet and the hoofs of horses, and the rolling of
iron-shod wheels, triumphed in the long-run.
Saxham engaged rooms at the Trafalgar Hotel, a handsome caravanserai
standing in its own gardens at the top of Imperial Avenue, for himself and
his wife, and the savage irony that can be conveyed in the term struck
him, not for the first time since he had laid gold and silver on the open
book, and endowed a woman with the gift of himself and all his worldly
goods.
It was early in the forenoon. They were to sail next day. The big building
was crammed, not only with officers under orders for the Front, and their
wives, who had come to see them start. Society had descended like a flock
of chattering, gaudily-plumaged paroquets upon the spot where new and
exciting sensations were to be had. For the trampling feet and the rolling
wheels that ceaselessly went North imparted one set of thrills, and the
long trains of wounded and dying that met and passed them, coming down as
they went up, gave another kind. Amongst the poor dears in the trucks, and
waggons, and Ambulance-carriages you might eventually find a man you
knew.... The sporting odds were given and taken on these exciting chances;
and the fluttering and screaming paroquets that crowded the Railway
Stations, in spite of their gay feathers, bore no little resemblance to
carrion-feeding birds of prey.
Saxham, Recently Attached Medical Staff, Gueldersdorp, suffered from the
notoriety inseparable from the name of a man who has been thrice mentioned
in Despatches, and has been publicly thanked by the representatives of an
Imperial Government. The Interviewer yapped at his heels whithersoever he
went, and the Correspondent strove to lure him into confidences, and
Society fluttered at him with shrill squawkings, and wanted to know, don't
you know? It must have been "devey" and "twee" to have gone through all
those experiences. It was the year when "devey," and "twee," and similar
abbreviations first became fashionable.
There were pleasanter episodes than these, when soldierly, bronzed
warriors and simple, unaffected men of great affairs, expressed to Saxham
in few words their belief that he had done his duty. The approval of these
warmed him and helped to raise him higher. It was a little creature, a
human insect no bigger than a bar-tender, that brought about the mischief.
There was an American bar on the ground-floor of the Trafalgar. Saxham
stood upon the threshold of the place, replying to the questions of a
group of Colonial officers, New South Wales Mounted Engineers and Canadian
Rangers, when somebody suggested Drinks, and led the way in. Invited to
make his choice from a long list of alcoholic mixtures, beginning with
Whisky Straight, and ending with Bosom Caresser and Gin Sour, Saxham said
that he would take a glass of ice-water.
"Well, boss, since you're on the Temperance Walk," said the Australian,
his would-be host, a little huffily, "you'll please yourself, I suppose?"
He collected the preferences of his other guests, and gave the orders to
the man behind the bar.
The barman had the misfortune to be a joker of the practical kind. Seeing
Saxham held in conversation by one of the other men, he winked
portentously at the New South Waler, and whispered in his ear.
The Australian understood. A reason for Saxham's abstinence had been given
him. The new-made bridegroom as a rule shuns Alcohol. And in proportion to
his desire to avoid, grows the determination of other men to compel him to
drink. The bridegroom is fair game all the world over for the Rabelaisian
jest and the clown's horseplay.
The bar-tender, hoisting his eyebrows to his scollops of gummed hair,
winked at the New South Waler with infinite meaning, and pointed to a
cut-glass carafe that stood on the shining nickel-plated counter. It
appeared to contain pure sparkling water, but the liquor it held was
knock-out whisky, a tintless drink of exceeding potency, above proof. The
Australian shook his head. But he laughed under his neat moustache as he
turned away, and the bar-tender concluded to carry his joke through. He
dealt out the drinks to their respective owners, and with a dexterous
sweep of a shirt-sleeved arm brought the innocent-seeming carafe and a
gleaming, polished tumbler immediately before the square-faced hulking
doctor with the queer blue eyes, whose pretty bride of three days was
waiting for him in their room upon the third floor of the humming,
overcrowded caravanserai. Saxham, absorbed by the thought of her, poured
out a tumblerful of the clear, sparkling stuff, and had half emptied it
before he realised the trick. His eyes grew red with injected blood, and
his hair bristled on his head. He struck out once across the narrow
counter. The long wall-mirror behind the bar-tender cracked and starred
with the crashing impact of the joker's skull, and the man fell senseless,
bleeding from the mouth and nostrils.
Another attendant came running at the crash, and the exclamations of those
who had seen the swift retaliation wreaked. Saxham, leaving a banknote
lying on the counter, wheeled abruptly, and went out of the bar.
His brain was on fire. His blood ran riot in his burning veins, and the
vice he had deemed dead stirred in the depths of his being, lifted its
slender head, and hissed, quivered a forked tongue, and struck with
poisoned fangs. He went out into the purple night that wedded lovers would
have found so perfect. The great white stars winked down at him jeeringly,
and a little mocking breeze sniggered among the mimosas and palms of the
hotel gardens. He passed out of them into the many-tongued Babel of the
streets, packed with humanity, throbbing with virile life, and tramped the
magnificent avenues and wide electric-lighted streets of Cape Town with
the thousands who had no beds at all, and the ten thousand who had, but
preferred not to occupy them. To his narrow couch in the dressing-room
adjoining Lynette's bedroom her husband dared not go.
So he wore the night out, doggedly wrestling with the demon that boils the
blood of strong fierce men to forgetfulness of compacts and breach of
oaths. Daybreak touched him with a chilly shivering finger, a hulking
figure dozing on one of the white-painted iron seats near the Athletic
Ground on Greenpoint Common. The last lingering star throbbed itself out,
a white moth dying in the marvellous rose and orange fires of dawn, and
the overwhelming, brooding bulk of Table Mountain gleamed, an emerald and
sapphire splendour against the rising sun, and the two lesser peaks that
are the mountain's bodyguard shone glowing in golden mail as Saxham got to
his feet, and shook some order into the disorder of his dress, and faced
hotelwards.
Despair was in the heart of the Dop Doctor, and for him the wonder of the
dawn, the marvel of the sunrise meant no more than if he had been born
blind. A menial's trick had wrought him confusion; his will, in the saving
strength of which he had trusted, was a leaf in the wind of his desire.
Even now his throat and tongue were parched, his being thirsted for the
liquor he had abjured.
What was to be done? What was to happen in the future? He asked himself in
vain. As Mouille Point shut its fixed red eye in apparent derision, and
the Greenpoint Light winked a thirteen-mile wink and went out, unlike the
Hope that had burned in Saxham, and would be rekindled never more.