Part 33

"Whose? Well, up to the present they have belonged to the Dop Doctor."

"That man!" The Mayor, in the act of taking another slice of the roast, looked round as at the mention of a name familiar, shrugging his portly shoulders. "Surely you know who the fellow is, Colonel? He drifted up here from Cape Colony three years ago. A capable--confoundedly capable man, handicapped by a severe muscular strain," the Mayor's twinkling eye heralded the resurrection of an ancient jest--"contracted in lifting a cask of whisky--a glass at a time!"

White teeth flashed in alert tanned faces. The schoolboy laugh went round the table; then the Babel of talk rose up again. Most of these men were quite young ... their seniors barely middle-aged, not a man but was what they themselves would have termed both "fit" and "keen." They had wrought for many days in the erection of sand-bag defences, in the digging of trenches, in the drilling of Baraland Irregulars and Rifle Volunteers and the newly-enrolled Town Guard. This was the pleasant social time of lull before the storm, and they were not to get many more good dinners or peaceful nights in bed for a long siege to come. They did not show outwardly the tension of strung nerves that waited, as the whole world waited, for the echo of the first shot, rattling amongst the low hills to the south. Nor did it occur to them that there was anything heroic or dramatic in their quiet unaffected pose. Gathered together upon one little spot of border earth destined to be the vital, tragic, throbbing centre of great events and tremendous issues, actions glorious, and deeds scarce paralleled upon the page of History, let us look upon them, well-groomed, well-bred, easy-mannered, cheery, demolishing the good dishes furnished by the chef of Nixey's Hotel, with the hungry zest of schoolboys, exchanging fusillades of not very brilliant chaff.

Scraps of scientific and technical conversation with reference to telephonic and telegraphic installations between outlying forts and headquarters, electric communication with mines, automatic warning-apparatus, the most effective methods of constructing bomb-proof shelters, the comparative merits of Maxim and Nordenfeldt, crossed in the air like fragments of bursting projectiles, impelled by those admirable engines of destruction. Mingled with reminiscences of cricket, golf, tennis, polo, and motoring, then in its infancy; anecdotes new and old, and conjectures as to what the fellows at home were doing? Hurlingham and Ranelagh, Maidenhead and Henley, Eton and Oxford, Sandhurst and Aldershot, Piccadilly in the season, Simla in the heats, the results for Kempton Park and Newmarket Races--of all these they talked, with rhino and elephant shooting and the big battues of pheasants now taking place in the Home Midlands and up North. But though the watch-fires of their pickets burned upon the veld, and though the Boer lay in laager over the Border, of him they said not one word. That reticence upon the vital point was characteristically English. The excitable Gaul would have wept, kneaded his manly bosom, and alluded to his mother; the stolid Muscovite would have wept also, referring to his Little Father, the Czar; the Teuton would have poured forth oceans of turgid sentiment about the Fatherland; the dignified Spaniard would have recognised himself as a warrior upon the verge of a Homeric struggle, and said so candidly; the hysterical American would have sung "Hail, Columbia!" and waved pocket-handkerchief-sized replicas of the Star-Spangled Banner until too exhausted to agitate or vocalise. But to these men indulgence in sentiment was "bad form," and unrestrained patriotic utterance merely "gas," tainting the air with an odour as of election-eggs or sulphuretted hydrogen. Therefore were many words to be avoided.

A pose, if you will, an affectation, this studied avoidance of all appearance of enthusiasm or excitement; showing the weak spot in the armour of these heroes, henceforth to be of epic fame. But Man is essentially a weak being. It is only when the immortal spirit of him nerves the frame of perishable bone and muscle that he rises to heights that are sublime. Such souls of fire burned within these men, that when the Wind of Death blew coldest and the lead-and-iron hail beat hardest, they only glowed more fiercely radiant; and Want and Privation, instead of weakening, only seemed to make them more strong;--strong to endure, strong to foresee plots and avert perils and oppose wit to cunning, and strategy to deceit; so strong that, by reason of their strength, that little frontier town became a fortress of Titans. And their names, other than those I have given them in this story, shall go ringing down the grooves of Time, until Time itself shall be no more.

While they ate and drank, laughed, and chatted, the man who was to be their comrade, sharer in all those perils and privations yet to come, was tramping up and down the bare boards of the dingy bedchamber in Harris Street, wrestling desperately with his tragic thirst.

"Why did he come and look at me, and take me by the hand, and awaken my deadened senses to the sting of anguish that has no name? Why could he not have left me alone in this living death I had attained!" he cried. "When first I took to the infernal, blessed liquor, it was for the sake of respite from mental pain, torture unbearable. Then I was a man, only unhappy. Now I am lower than the lowest of the sensible, cleanly, decent brutes, because I desire the drink for its own sake, and find gratification in physical degradation. O God, if Thou indeed art, and I must perforce return to live the life of a man amongst men, help to burst the chains that fetter me! Help me to be free!"

He swallowed a great draught of water, and stumbled to the unused bed, and threw himself across it, raging and panting, and defiant of the very Power he invoked. And then, against hope, sleep came to him, drowning memory and obliterating thought, and relieving physical suffering. The lines smoothed out of the heavy forehead, and the grim mouth relaxed in the smile that his dead mother had kissed, coming in with the shaded candle to look at her sleeping boy.

Just as the Mayor of Gueldersdorp, that stalwart Yorkshireman, mighty hunter of elephant, rhino, giraffe, and lion in the reckless days of bloodshed that were before the introduction of the Game Laws into South Africa, was saying to the Colonel:

"Irreclaimable, sir. Hopeless! A confirmed drunkard, who has soaked away all self-respect, who has been cautioned and warned and fined a score of times, by myself and other magistrates. Dr. de Boursy-Williams, our leading practitioner here, has taken the fellow under his wing, in a manner--bails him out when it is necessary, and, I believe, when the man is sober enough, gives him work in his dispensary and allows him to administer the anæsthetic when it's a question of a surgical operation. Wonder he trusts him, for my part! Yet De Boursy-Williams is a remarkably successful operator, and hardly ever loses a case. It is unfortunate that he should have been called away to Cape Town at this juncture."

"He has left Dr. Saxham as locum tenens, I understand."

The Mayor shrugged his portly shoulders

"As to his qualifications, there's no doubt. Ranked high at one time as a London West End specialist. I have seen his name myself in a British Medical Directory of some years back as principal visiting-surgeon to St. Stephen's and the Ludgate Hospital for Diseases of the Chest. Has written books--scientific works that are quoted now. Must have been making money hand-over-hand when the collapse came. The usual thing--one slip--and a Police-court Inquiry follows, and down goes the unlucky wretch with the Crown on top of him, and all the Press pack yelping for soft snaps. True, the finding of the Jury was 'Not Guilty,' but the fact of there having been a prosecution was enough to ruin Saxham professionally. Ah, I thought you must have heard the name!"

For the listener had moved suddenly. He did remember the name of the distinguished London practitioner who had been discreditably mixed up in the case of Mrs. Bough, the young, miserable, murdered creature, who might possibly have been the daughter of Richard Mildare. Tough and cool as his tried nerves were, he shuddered at the thought, and a sickly heat made the points of perspiration stand out upon his forehead. But the Mayor, good man, was prosing on:

"I can't say the facts of the case are very clear in my recollection, but I have a file of the Daily Wire at home, extending over six years back, so the Criminal Court proceedings must be reported in it. The woman's name, I do remember, was Bough. As regards her age, now you ask me"--for the Colonel had put a quick question--"I fancy she must have been twenty-two or three. Indeed, I am almost certain that was the age as stated by the Medical Witness for the Prosecution.... However, I'll go into the reports and let you know for certain."

"Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And, in case those Daily Wire files are bomb-proof, possibly it would be better to take the family with you--and stop until times improve."

"Not bad, not half bad, Colonel! But to tell the truth, I wouldn't miss what we used to call the shindy, and these boys of yours term the 'scrap' for a pile of Kruger sovereigns. And--I can shoot better than most men, if I am in the sere and yellow sixties." The Mayor was slightly ruffled; the diplomatic touch smoothed him down.

"My money is on you, Mr. Mayor, when it comes to stopping a Boer with a rifle-bullet at four hundred yards. By the way, I have a little confidence to repose in you. When you meet--as I am convinced you will meet--Dr. Saxham at the Hospital or elsewhere, metaphorically clothed and in his right mind, and in the active discharge of duties which no man, judging by your own testimony, is better fitted to perform, let him down gently."

The Mayor, conscious of civic dignity and magisterial warnings from the Bench ignored, swelled obviously.

"My dear sir, you can't let the Dop Doctor down anyhow. He is--just about as low as a man can get--short of being underground."

"Lend him a hand up--in the first instance--by forgetting that confounded nickname which I was clumsy enough to blurt out just now. Be oblivious of what he is, because of what he has been in the past, and will be in the future. For there is tremendous stuff in the fellow even now--or I am a bad judge of men."

"Colonel, you're a thundering bad judge of drunkards, from the Bench's point of view, but you'd be a damned good special pleader for a client in need of all the excuses that could be trumped up for him."

"We all have something we'd like to have an excuse for, Mr. Mayor." The keen hawk-eyes held a twinkle in reserve. "There was a man I knew, a mighty hunter before the Lord--and before the Game Laws." The thin brown fingers of the muscular hard-palmed hand played with the stem of a wineglass as the sentences came out, crisp and pointed. "Well, this is the story of a mistake, and an old shikari of your experience can find even more excuses for it than I can ... but perhaps I bore you?"

"On the contrary--on the contrary, sir."

The fish had taken the bait, remained to play the quivering captive until his last swirling struggle brought him within reach of the skilful dip and lift of the angler's net.

"It was about four years ago, in the Portuguese coast-lands, South of the Zambesi, where elephants are to be had, and rhino, particularly the Keitloa variety with the long posterior horn, and a bad habit of charging the man behind the 600 bore...."

Mr. Mayor's capacious white waistcoat was agitated by a subterranean chuckle. His double chin shook merrily. "A side shot through the head--solid bullet--is the best cure for that, Colonel. But you had to wait in the high swamp-grass and keep the wind of him, and make sure of your aim."

"Quite so. This man, from the shelter of a rock, waited to make sure of his aim. The rhino was feeding tsetse as he dozed in the high swamp-grass. His biggest horn showed, and a bit of his shiny black skin. One forward lunge of the brute's head--and the hunter could get that side-shot. For that he waited, patience being, as we know, a virtue to be cultivated by the successful stalker of big game----"