The Dop Doctor

XXII

"The Town Guard," according to W. Keyse, Esquire, who kept a Betts' Journal, one shilling net, including Rail and Ocean Accident Insurance, was "a kind of amachoor copper, swore in to look after the dorp, stand guard, and do sentry-go, and tumble to arms, just as the town dogs leave off barkin', an' the old gal in the room next yours is startin' to snore like a Kaffir sow."

Later on, even more was asked of the townie, and he rose to the demand.

The smasher hat was not unbecoming to the manly brow it shaded, when W. Keyse put it on and anxiously consulted the small greenish swing looking-glass that graced the chest of drawers, the most commanding article of furniture in his room at Filliter's Boarding-House. It was Mrs. Filliter who snored in the room on the other side of the thin partition. Like the immortal Mrs. Todgers, she was harassed by the demands of her resident gentlemen in connection with gravy; but, unlike Mrs. Todgers, she never supplied even browned and heated water as an equivalent. And the mutton was wonderfully lean, and the fowls, but for difference in size, might have been ostriches, they were so wiry of muscle, especially as regarded the legs. A time was to come when Mrs. Filliter was to cook shrapnel-killed mule and exhausted cavalry charger for her gentlemen, and when they were to bear up better than most sufferers from this tough and lasting form of diet, because of not having previously been pampered, as Mrs. Filliter expressed it, with delicacies and kickshaws.

The bandolier was heavy upon the thin shoulders and hollow chest of a pale young Cockney, who had drifted down from Southampton in the steerage, and roared and rattled up from Cape Town by the three foot six inch gauge railway, eight hundred and seventy miles, to Gueldersdorp, that he might find his crown of manhood waiting there. The second-hand Sam Browne belt was distinctly good; the yellow puttees, worn with his own brown lace-up boots, took trouble to adjust. And it was barely possible, even by standing the small swing looking-glass on the floor, and tilting it excessively, to see how one's legs looked. W. Keyse suffered from the conviction that these limbs were over-thin. Behind the counter of a fried-fish shop in High Street, Camden Town, serving slabs of browned hake, and skate, and penn'orths of fried eels and chips to the hungry customers who surge in tempestuously to be fed on their homeward way from the Oxford or the Camden Hall of Varieties, or the theatre at the junction of Gower Street and the Hampstead Road – one develops acuteness of observation, one gains experience, there being always the bloke who cuts and runs without paying, or eats and shows reversed trouser-pockets in default of settlement, to deal with… But one does not develop muscle, the thing above all that W. Keyse most longed to possess. When he went into the printing-business and bent all day over the formes of type in the composing-room, hand-setting up the columns of the North London Half-penny Herald, to the tune of three-and-eightpence a day, the hollow chest grew hollower, and he developed a "corf." The physician in charge of the out-patients' department at University College Hospital said there was lung-trouble, and a man at the printing-office who had never been there, said South Africa was the cure for that. And W. Keyse had thirty pounds in the Post-Office Savings Bank, earned by the sweat of a brow which was his best feature, and the steamships were advertising ten-pound third-class single fares to Cape Town. One of the Societies for the Aid of Emigrants would have helped him, but while W. Keyse 'ad a bit of 'is own, no Blooming Paupery, said he, for him! His sole living relative, an aunt who inhabited one of a row of ginger-brick Virginia-creeper-clad almshouses "over aginst 'Ighgyte Cimitery," sniffled a little when he called to say good-bye, bringing in a parting present of a half-pound of Liphook's Luscious Tea and a screw of snuff.

"I shan't never see you no more, William."

"Ow yes, you will, mother! Don't be such a silly!" William's step cousin 'Melia, in service as general in Adelaide Road, Chalk Farm end, had said; and she had looked coldly upon William immediately afterwards, bestowing an amorous ogle upon Lobster, who sat well forward upon a backless Windsor chair, sucking the silver top of his swagger cane, – Lobster, who was six foot high and in the Grenadier Guards, and had supplanted William in 'Melia's affections, for they 'ad used to walk out regularly on Sundays and holidays before Lobster came along… How William loved Lobster now! Why, but for him he might have been married to 'Melia to-day; – doomed to tread in the ways of commonplace, ordinary married life, fated to live and die without once having peeped into Paradise, without ever having looked upon the 'only woman in the world!' Greta, of the glorious golden pigtail, the entrancing figure and the bewitching, twinkling, teasing eyes of blue!

Suppose – only suppose – the silent threatening Thing across the border, jewelled with the glowing Argus-eyes of many camp-fires, conjecturable in dark masses flecked with the white of waggon-tilts, and sometimes giving out the dull gleam of iron or the sparkle of steel, were to choose this, W. Keyse's first night on guard, for an attack! Even to the inexperience of W. K. the sand-bagged earthworks built about Gueldersdorp, the barricades of trek-waggons and railway-trucks blocking up the roads debouching on the veld, the extending lines of trenches, the watchdog forts, the sentinelled pickets, the noiseless, continually moving patrols, all the various parts of the marvellous machinery of defence, controlled by one master-hand upon the levers, would count for nothing against that overwhelming onrush of armed thousands, that flood of men dammed up above the town, and waiting the signal to roll down and overwhelm her, and – Cripps! what a chance to make a glorious, heroic splash in Greta's sight! Die, perhaps, in saving her from them Dutchies. To be sure, she, divine creature, was a Dutchy too. But no matter – a time would come …

Confident in the coming of that time, W. Keyse took the brown rifle tenderly from the corner, and replaced the meagre little looking-glass upon the yellow chest of drawers. In the act of bestowing a final glance of scrutiny upon his upper lip, whose manly crop had unaccountably delayed, he caught sight of a cheap paper-covered book lying beside the tin candlestick whose tallow dip had aided perusal of the volume o' nights. The red surged up in his thin cheeks as he picked up the thing. There were horrible woodcuts in it, coloured with liberal splashes of red and blue and yellow, and the print contained matter more lurid still. Vice mopped and mowed and slavered, obscene and hideous, within those gaudy covers.

He looked round the mean, poor, ugly room, the volume in his hand; a photograph of the dubious sort leered from the wall beside the bed…

"If they rushed us to-night, an' I got shot in the scrap, an' they brought me back 'ere, dyin', and She came … an' saw that …!" His ears were scarlet as he dashed at the leering photograph and tore it down. Oh, W. Keyse, it is pitiful to think you had to blush, but good to know you had not forgotten how to. There was a little rusty fireplace in the room. W. Keyse burned something in it that left nothing but a feathery pile of ashes, and a little shameful heap of mud in the corner of a boy's memory, before he hurried to the Town Guardhouse, where other bandoliers were mustering, and fell in. As though the Powers deigned to reward an act of virtue on the very night of its performance, he was posted by his picket in the shadow of the high corrugated iron fence of the tree-bordered tennis-ground behind the Convent, as "Lights Out" sounded from the camp of the Irregulars, beyond the Railway-sheds and storehouses.

It was glorious to be there, taking care of Her, though it would have been nicer if one had been allowed to smoke. The moon of William's passion-inspired verse was not shining o'er South Africa's plain upon this the very night for her. It was dark and close and stiflingly hot. A dust-wind had blown that day, and the suspended particles thickened the atmosphere, to the oppression of the lungs and the hiding of the stars. He knew his picket posted a quarter of a mile away on the other side of the Cemetery; his fellow-sentry was on the opposite flank of the Convent. He was a stout, middle-aged tradesman, with a large wife and a corresponding family, and it wrung the heart of W. Keyse to think that a tricky fate might have placed that insensible man on the side where Her window was! Through the boughs of the peach and orange trees, heavily burdened with unripe fruit, you could get an occasional glimpse of whitewashed brick walls, darkened by the outline of shuttered oblongs here and there. And Imagination could blow her cloud of fragrant vapour, though tobacco were denied you.

"They're all Her windows while she's there behind them walls," was the reflection in which W. Keyse found comfort.

She was not there. She was at that moment being kissed on the stoep of the Du Taine homestead near Johannesburg, by a young officer of Staats Artillery, to whom she had agreed to be clandestinely engaged, though Papa Du Taine had other views.

W. Keyse was spared this tragic knowledge. But if the moon, shining beautifully over the Du Taine gardens and orange-groves, had chosen to tell tales!

It was still – still and quiet; a blue radiance of electric light burned here and there; at the Staff Office on the Market Square, and at other centres of purposeful activity. Aromatic-beer cellars and whisky-saloons gave out a yellow glare of gas-jets; the red lamp of an apothecary showed a wakeful eye. Gueldersdorp sprawled in the outline of a sleeping turtle on her squat hillock of gravelly earth and sand. In smoke-coloured folds, closely matching the lowering dim canopy of vapour brooding overhead, the prairie spread about her, deepening to a basined valley in the middle distances, sweeping to a rise beyond, so that the edges of the basin looked down upon the town. High on the hill-ranges in the South more chains of red sparks burned … he knew them for the watch-fires of the Boer outposts, and the raised edges of the basin East and West were set thickly with similar twinkling jewels where the laagers were; while smaller groups shone nearer, marking the situation of isolated vedettes. The sickly taint upon the faint breeze told of massed and clustered humanity. 'Strewth, how they stunk, the brutes! He hoped there was enough of 'em, lying doggo up there, waiting the word to roll down and swallow the blooming dorp! His palate grew dry, as the sweat broke out upon his temples and trickled down the back of his neck, and the palms of his hands were moist and clammy. Also, under the buckle of the Sam Browne belt was a sinking, all-gone sensation excessively unpleasant to feel. Perhaps its wearer had a touch of fever! Then the stout tradesman on the other side of the Convent sneezed suddenly, and W. Keyse, with every nerve in his body jarring from the shock, knew that he was simply suffering from funk.

Staggering from the shock of the horrible self-revelation, he gritted his teeth. There was a Billy Keyse who was a blooming coward inside the other who was not. He told the sickening, white-gilled little skulker what he thought of him. He only wished – that is, one of him only wished – that a gang of the Dutchies would come along now!

He drew a lurid picture for the benefit of the trembler, and when the young soldier had fired into the brown of them and seen the whites of their eyes, and fallen, pierced by a hundred wounds, in the successful defence of the Convent, he was carried in, and laid on a sofa, and nobody could recognise him, along of all the blood, until She came, with her white little feet peeping from the hem of a snowy nightgown, and her unbraided pigtail swamping the white with gold, and knew that it was her lover, and knelt by the hero's side. Soft music from the Orchestra, please! as with his final breath W. Keyse implores a last, first kiss. Even as William No. 1 thrilled to the rapture of that imagined osculation, Billy No. 2 experienced a ghastly fright.

For out of the enfolding velvety darkness ahead of him, and looking towards those firefly sparks shining on the heights, came the sound of stealthy measured footsteps and muffled voices talking Dutch. The enemy had made a sortie. The defences had been rushed, the town surrounded! Yet there were only two of them – a big, slouching villain and a short thin one, who wore a giant hat. The chirping sound of a kiss damped the fierce martial ardour of William, and greatly reassured Billy. It was only a townsman taking a night walk with his girl!

Crushed and discouraged, W. Keyse relaxed his grip upon the trusty rifle, and slunk back into the shadow, as the tall and the short figures halted at the angle of the fence.

"'Ain't it a 'eavenly night?" came from the short figure, who leaned against the tall one affectionately. "An' me got to go in. A crooil shyme, I call it. 'Ain't it, deer? Leggo me wyste, there's a love. You've no notion 'ow I shall cop it for bein' lyte."

He sportively declined to release her. There was the sound of a soft slap, followed by the smack of a kiss. She was very angry.

"Leggo, I tell you! Where's your manners, 'orlin' me abart! If that's the way you be'ayve with your Dutch ones …!"

He spat and asseverated:

"Neen! I no other girls but you heb got."

It was the Slabberts with Emigration Jane.

"Ho! So you can talk English a bit – give you a charnce?"

"Ja, a little now and then when it is useful. But when we are to be married, you shall only to me talk in my own moder Taal."

"Shan't I myke a gay old 'ash of it!" Recklessly she crushed the large hat against the unwieldy shoulder. "There, good-night agyne, deer! Sister Tobias – that's what they call the one that 'ousekeeps and manages the kitchen – Sister Tobias 'll be sittin' up for me, thinkin' I've got meself lost or bin run away with." She gurgled enjoyingly.

"Tell me again, before you shall go, about the Engelsch Commandant who came to visit at the Convent to-day?"

"Lor! 'Aven't I told you a'ready? 'E stopped 'arf an 'our or more … an' She – that's the Reverend Mother, as they call her – She took 'im over the 'ouse, an' after 'e'd gone through the 'ouse, an' Sister Tobias – ain't that a rummy name for a nun? – Sister Tobias, she showed 'im to the gyte, an' 'e says to 'er as wot 'e's goin' to 'ave the flagstaff rigged up in the gardin fust thing to-morrow mornin', an' 'e'll undertake that the workin'-party detached for the purpose will know 'ow to be'ayve theirselves respectful. An' then 'e touches 'is 'at an' gets on 'is 'orse an' …"

"Listen to me." The Slabbertian command of that barbaric language of the Englanders evoked her surprise, but the painful squeeze he gave her arm compelled attention. "Next time the English Commandant to the house shall come, you to listen at the keyhole is."

"Wot for?"

"For what have you before at keyholes listened, little fool?"

"To find out when they was goin' to sack me, so's to git me own notice in fust – see? Then you can say to the lydy at the Registry Office – and don't they give theirselves hairs! – as wot you're leaving because the place don't suit. Twiggy?"

"You for yourself did listen, then. Goed. Now it is for me you listen will, if you a true Boer's vrouw wish to become by-and-by."

She rose to the immemorial allure that is never out of season in angling for her simple kind.

"That word you said means – wife, don't it, deer?" Her voice trembled; the joyous, longed-for haven of marriage – was it possible that it might be in sight?

"It shall mean wife, if you obey me – ja! – otherwise it will be that I shall marry the daughter of a good countryman of mine, who many sheep has, and much land, and plenty of money to give his daughter when she a husband gets!"

Her underlip dropped pitifully, and the tears welled up. It was too dark to see her crying, but he heard her sob, and grinned, himself unseen.

"I'll do anything for you, deer! Only don't tyke an' 'ave the other One. She may be a Dutchy, but she won't never care for you like wot I do. Don't you know it, Walt?"

"I shall it know when I hear what you have found out," proclaimed the Slabberts grimly.

There was a boiling W. Keyse in the deep shadow of the tall corrugated-iron fence, who restrained with difficulty a snort of indignation.

"On'y tell me, deer. I'll find out anythink you want me to." Before her spread a lovely vista of floors – her own floors – to scrub, and a kitchen range – hers, too – which should cook dinners nice enough to make any husband adore you.

"You shall for me find out what that Commandant of the rooineks is up to under his Flag of the Red Cross."

"He didn't say nothink about no Red Cross, darlin'."

"Stilte! They will the Red Cross Flag hoist, I tell you, and it will cover more than a parcel of nuns and schoolgirls. That Commandant is so verdoemte slim! Tell me, do you cartridges well know when you shall see them? Little brown rolls with at one end a copper cap – and at the other a bullet. And gunpowder – you have that seen also?"

She quavered.

"Yes; but you don't want me to touch the narsty, dreadful stuff, do you, Walty deer?"

He scoffed.

"Afraid of gunpowder, Meisje, that like a whey-blooded Engelschwoman is. A true Boer's daughter would know how to load a gun, look you, and shoot a man – many men – if for the help of the Republic it should be! But you will learn. Watch out, I tell you, for stores that Commandant will be sending into the Convent. Square boxes and long boxes, and cases – some of them heavy as if lined with iron; painted black with white letters, and others stone-colour with black letters, and yet others grey with red letters; the letters remember – 'A.O.S.'"

"But wot'll be in the boxes, deer?"

His English, conned from recently published Imperial Army Service manuals, grew severely technical:

"If you could their big screws unscrew, and their big locks unlock, you would see, but you will not be able. What in them? Cakes! Black, square cakes, with in them holes; and grey, square cakes, and red cakes, light and crumbly, that dog-biscuits resemble; and long brown sticks, like peppermint-candy, in bundles tied together with string and paper. Boxes of stuff like the hair of horse, and packets of evil little electric detonators in tubes of copper. Alamachtig! who knows what he has not got – that Engelsch Commandant – both in the dorp and hidden in those thrice-accursed mines that he has laid on the veld about her. Prismatic powder and gun-cotton, dynamite and cordite enough to blow a dozen commandos of honest Booren into dust – a small, fine dust of bones and flesh that shall afterwards fall mingled with rain of blood. For I tell you that man has the wickedness of the duyvel in him, and the cunning of an old baboon!"

She babbled:

"'Ow pretty you talk English when you want to, Walty deer! 'Aven't you bin gittin' at me all along, makin' out …"

He swore at her savagely, and she held her tongue, worshipping this new development of masterful brutality in a man whom she had regarded as a "big softy."

He went on:

"Now you shall know what to look for, and when the verdoemte explosives come, you will know them by the boxes and the letters 'A.O.S.' – and you will tell me – and the guns of our Staats Artillery will not shoot that way, for the sake of the little woman who is going to be a true Boer's vrouw by-and-by."

She threw her arms about his rascally neck, and laid her head upon his hulking shoulder, regardless of the hat she wrecked, and cried in ecstasy:

"I'll do it, deer! I'll do it, Walty! But why should there be any shootin', lovey? At 'Ome I never could abear to see them theayter plays what 'ad guns an' firin' in 'em; it made me 'art beat so crooil bad."

He grinned over the big hat into the darkness.

"All right! I will tell the men with the guns that you do not like to hear them, and they will not perhaps shoot at all. But you will look out for the boxes with the dynamite, and send me the message when it comes?"