Part 70

It was a long, rambling programme, scrawled in huge, black-paint characters on a white planed board, hung where everyone could read it. There were comic songs and Christy Minstrel choruses by people who had developed vocal talent for this occasion only, and a screaming display of conjuring tricks by an amateur of legerdemain who had forgotten the art, if ever he had mastered it. At every new mistake or blunder, and with each fresh change of expression on the entertainer's streaky face, conveying the idea of his being under the influence of a bad dream, and hoping to wake up in his own quarters by-and-by, to find that he had never really undertaken to make a pudding in a hat, and smash a gentleman's watch and produce it intact from some unexpected place of concealment, the spectators rocked and roared. Then there was a Pantomimic Interlude, with a great deal of genuine knockabout, and, the crowning item of the entertainment, a comic song and stump-speech, announced to be given by The Anonymous Mammoth Comique--an incognito not dimly suspected to conceal the identity of the Chief himself, being delayed by the Mammoth's character top-hat--a fondly cherished property of the Stiggins brand--and the cabbage umbrella that went with it, having been accidentally left behind at the Mammoth's hotel, the Master of the Revels, still distinguished by the jib-sail collar and shiny burnt-cork complexion of the corner-man, was sent to the front to ask if any lady or gentleman in the audience would kindly oblige with a ten-minute turn?

"All right, Mister!"

A soiled cotton glove waved, a flowery hat nodded to the appeal from behind the acetylene footlights. The faces in the front rows of seats, pale and brick-dust, gingerbread and cigar-browned European, African countenances with rolling eyes and shining teeth; and here and there the impassive, almond-eyed, yellow mask of the Asiatic, slewed round as Emigration Jane rose up in the place beside W. Keyse, a little pale, and with damp patches in the palms of the washed white cotton gloves, as she said: If the gentleman pleased, she could sing--just a little!

No, thank you! She wasn't afryde, not she; they was all friends there. And do 'er best she would. She took off the big flowery hat quite calmly, giving it to W. Keyse to keep. The panic came on later, when the Christy-minstrel-collared, burnt-corked Master of the Revels was gallantly helping her up the short side-ladder, and culminated when he retreated, and left her there, standing on the platform in the bewildering glare of the acetylene footlights, a little, rather slight and flat-chested figure of a girl, blue-eyed and yellow-haired, in a washed-out flowery "blowse," and a "voylet" delaine skirt that had lost its pristine beauty, and showed faded and shabby in the yellow gas-flare.

Oh! 'owever 'ad she dared? That dazzling sea of faces, with the eyes all fixed on her, was terrifying. A big lump grew in her throat, and the crowded benches tilted, and the flaming lights leaped to the roof as the helpless, timid tears welled into her blue eyes.

And then the miracle happened.

W. Keyse sat on a back-bench, the thin Cockney face a little raised above the others, because he had slipped a rolled-up overcoat under him, pretending that it was to get it out of the way, you understand. Always very sensitive about his shortness, W. Keyse. And she saw his face, as plain as you please, and with a look in the pale, eager eyes, that for once was for Emigration Jane, her very own self, and not for That There Other One. She knew in that moment of revelation that she had always been jealous. Oh, wasn't it strynge? Her heart surged out to W. Keyse across the gulf of crowded faces. And her eyes had in them, all at once, the look that is born of Love.

Ah! who can mistake it? It begets a solitude in a vast thronged assemblage for you and for me. It sends its silent, wordless, eloquent message thrilling to the heart of the Beloved, and wins its passionate answer back. Ah! who can err about the look of Love?

She drew a deep breath that was her longing sigh for him, infinitely dear, and never to belong to her, and began her song. She sang it quite simply and naturally, in an untutored but sweet and plaintive voice, and with the Cockney accent that spoke of home to nearly all that heard. And her eyes never moved from his face as she sang.

The song was, I dare say, a foolish, trivial thing. But the air was pretty, and the words were simple, and it had a haunting refrain. To this effect, that the world is a big place and a hard place, with scant measure of joy in it, for you or for me. Bitter herbs grow side by side with the flowers in our Earth gardens. Salt tears mingle with our laughter; Night comes down in blotting darkness--perhaps in drenching rain,--at the close of every short, bright day of sunshine. But Life gone by, its hopes and fears and sorrows laid with our once-beating hearts in the good grey dust to rest, I shall meet with you again, in the Land where dreams come true.

"The Land Where Dreams Come True." That was the title of the song and its refrain, and somehow it caught the listeners by the heart strings, making the women sob aloud, and wringing bright sudden drops from the bold eyes of rough, strong, hardy men. You are to remember how the people stood: that scarcely one was there that had not lost brother or sister, mother or husband, child or friend or comrade since the beginning of the siege; and thus the touch of Nature made itself felt, and the simple pathos went home to the sore quick. They sang the refrain with her, fervently, and when the song was done, they sat in touched silence but one moment--and then the applause came down. As it fell upon her like a wall, she screamed in terror, and ran away behind the scene, and was found by W. Keyse a minute later, sobbing hysterically, with her head jammed into an angle of the wall of un-plastered brick-work.

None saw. He put his arms manfully about the waistline of the flowery blouse.

"Oh, let me go! Oh, what a wicked, wicked girl I've bin! Oh, it's all come over me on a sudden, like a flood! Don't touch me--I'm not good enough! Oh! how can you, can you?"

She sobbed the words out, and W. Keyse had kissed her. He did not get another utterance of her that night. She parted from him in tingling silence. His own uneasy sense of faithlessness to One immeasurably beloved, to whom he had pledged inviolable and eternal fidelity, nearly prompted him to ask her not to up and tell. But he manfully kept silence.

The worst of one kiss of that kind is that it begets the desire for others like it. She had turned her mouth to his in that whirling, breathless moment, and it was small, and warm, and clung. He tried to shake off the remembrance, but it haunted persistently.

He knew he had behaved like a regular beast--a low cur, in fact. To kiss one girl and mean it for another was, in the Keysian Code of morals, to be guilty of a baseness. The worst of it was that he knew, given the chance, he would do the same thing again.

For he could not shake off the memory of the blushing face, wetted with streaming tears from the wide bright eyes that pleaded so. They were blue, too, and the fringe above them might, by a not too exhausting stretch of the imagination, be termed golden. He heard her voice crying to him, "How can you, can you?" And he trembled at the thought of the mouth that kissed and clung.

He had known bought kisses, of the kind that brand the lips and shame the buyer as the seller. Never the kiss of Love, until now.

And now--was any other worth the taking?

"Cr'ripps!" said W. Keyse. "Not much!"

XXXII

It was Wednesday again, and Saxham came riding through the embrasure in the oblong earthwork, and down the gravelly glacis that led into the Women's Laager. An obsequious Hindu, in an unclean shirt and a filthy red turban, rose up salaaming, almost under his horse's feet, and took the bridle. He dismounted and went his rounds.

It might have been the dry bed of a high-banked placer-river, with spare lengths of steel railway-line borne across from bank to bank, covered with beams and sheets of corrugated iron and tarpaulins, with wide chinks to let in the much-needed air and light. A line of living-waggons, crowded with women and children--English, American, Irish, Dutch, and half-caste--ran down the centre of the giant trench. In each of its sloping faces a row of dug-out habitations gave accommodation to twice the number that the waggons held. At the eastern end a line of camp cooking-places had been arranged in military fashion, but the Dutchwomen's little coffee-pipkin-bearing fires of dung and chips burned everywhere, and possibly they did something towards purifying the air. For, to be frank, it vied with the native village in the compound and variegated nature of its smells, without the African muskiness of odour that is perceptible in the vicinity of our sable brother. The fat, slatternly, frankly dirty vrouws had not the remotest idea of sanitation; the Germans and Irish, blandly or doggedly impervious to savage smells, pursued their unsavoury way in defiance of the clamorous necessity for hygienic measures, until the majority of the pallid, untidy, scared Englishwomen, the energetic Americans, and the sturdier Africanders, after making what headway was possible against the ever-rising tide of filth, had yielded to the lethargy bred of despair and lack of exercise, and ceased to strive. A few, worthy of honour, still stoutly battled with the demon of Uncleanliness.

But the first April rainfall would turn the dry ditch into an open sewer--a vast trough of muddy water--in which draggled women would paddle for submerged household gods. Many would prefer to tramp back to the town at night and sleep in their own shrapnel-riddled homes. But the majority stayed, of choice or of necessity, incubating sickness in that fetid place where nothing would thrive but fierce social and political hatreds, and petty grudges, and rankling jealousies, and shrieking quarrels that burst out and raged a hundred times in a day.

From one of the dug-out refuges Saxham now saw Lynette Mildare coming, making her swift way between the knots of frowsy refugees, the negro women-servants squatting over the little cooking-fires, the pallid children swarming on the narrow pathways.

"Dr. Saxham." Her simple brown holland skirt and thin linen blouse hung loosely upon her. Her face, too, had grown thinner, and looked tired. But the eyes were no longer unnaturally dilated, and the face had a more healthful pallor. "Mrs. Greening begged me to look out for you. She is so anxious about Berta. We have been doing everything we can, but I am afraid the child is seriously ill. It is the third shelter from the end, south side." She pointed out the place.

He had lifted his hat with his short, brusque salute. His vivid eyes wore a preoccupied look, his mobile nostrils angrily sniffed the villainous air.

"I'll come directly, Miss Mildare. But--who can expect children to keep healthy under conditions as insanitary as these?"