Part 111

"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 être 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."