Part 76

Roasting hot Christmas has gone by, with its services and celebrations, its sports and entertainments, its meagre feasting, and its hearty cheer, a bloodless triumph followed by the regrettable defeat sustained in the battle of Big Tree Fort. To-day the Union Jack hangs limp upon the flagstaff that rears its slender height over Nixey's, and the new year is some weeks old. The blue, blue sky of January is without a single puff of cloud, and the taint from the trenches is less sickening, unmingled with the poisonous fumes of the lyddite bursting-charges, and the acrid odour of smokeless powder. It is Sunday, when Briton and Boer hold the Truce of God, and the church-bells ring to call and not to warn the people, and sweet Peace and blessed Silence brood over the shrapnel-scarred veld. The aasvogels feast undisturbed on bloated carcasses of horses and cattle lying on the debatable ground between the Line of Investment and the Line of Defence, the barbel in the river leap at the flies, and partridge and wild guinea-fowl drink in the shallows, and bathe in the dry hot sand between the boulder-stones.

The Market Square is populous with a chatting, sauntering crowd of people, who enjoy the luxury of using their limbs without being called on to displays of acrobatic agility in dodging trundling shell. There are Irregulars and B.S.A.P., Baraland Rifles and Town Guardsmen. There are the Native Contingent from the stad, and a company of Zulus, and the Kaffirs and the Cape Boys with their gaspipe rifles that do good service in default of better, and bring down Oom Paul's Scripturally-flavoured denunciations upon Englishmen, who arm black and coloured folk to do battle for their own sable or brown or yellow rights. These have donned odd garments and quaint bits of finery to mark the holiday, and every white man has indulged in the luxury of a comprehensive wash, a shave with hot water, and a change of clothing, if it is obtainable. Also, drooping feminine vanity revives in hair-waves and emerges from underground burrows of Troglodytic type, arrayed in fluttering muslins, and crowned with coquettish hats, which walk about in company with ragged khâki and clay-stained duck and out-at-elbows tweed, and are proud to be seen in its brave company.

Husbands and wives, fathers and daughters, sons and mothers, lovers and sweethearts, meet after the week whose separating days have seemed like weeks, and visit the houses whose pierced walls and roofs, that let the white-hot sunshine in through many jagged holes, may one day, so they whisper, holding one another closely, shelter them again in peace. Home has become a sweet word, even to those who thought little of home before. And many who were sinful have found conviction of sin and the saving grace of repentance, and many more who denied their God have learned to know Him, in this village town of battered dwellings, whose streets are littered with all the grim débris of War.

Nixey's has not come scathless through the ordeal. The stately brick chimneys of the kitchen and coffee-room have been broken off like carrots, and replaced by tin funnels. Patches of the universal medium, corrugated iron, indicate where one of Meisje's ninety-four-pound projectiles recently plumped in through the soft brick of the east wall end, and departed by the west frontage, leaving two holes that might have accommodated a chest of drawers, and carrying a window with it. Mrs. Nixey, the children, and the women of the staff inhabit a bombproof in the back-yard. The waiters have developed a grasshopper-like nimbleness, otherwise things go on as usual.

It being Sunday, a large long man and another as long, but less bulky, are extended in a couple of long bamboo chairs on Nixey's longish front verandah. The blue, fragrant smoke of two long cigars curls upwards over their supine heads, and two long drinks containing a very meagre modicum of inferior whisky are contained in two long tumblers, resting in the bamboo nests cunningly devised for their accommodation in the chair-arms.

It is hot, but both the men look cool and lazy, and almost too fresh to have spent the greater part of the night, the younger upon advanced patrol-duty, and the elder at the Staff bombproof in the Southern Lines, where messages come in and where messages go out, and where reports are received and from whence orders are despatched from sunset to the peep of day, and from peep of day to sunset.

The wardrobes of both warriors are much impaired by active service, but their originally white flannel trousers, if patched, discoloured, and shrunken by amateur lavations, boast the cut of Bond Street; their shirts, if a trifle ragged, are immaculately clean, and the cracks in their canvas shoes are disguised by a lavish expenditure of pipeclay. Beauvayse has rummaged out and mounted a snowy double collar in honour of the day, with a knitted silk necktie of his Regimental colours, and a kamarband to match is wound about his narrow, springy waist, and knotted to perfection. Both men might be basking on an English river-bank after a stiff pull up-stream, or resting after a bout at tennis on an English lawn, but for the revolver-lanyards round their strong, bronzed throats, ending in the butts of Smith and Wesson's revolvers of Service calibre, the bandoliers and belts that lie handy on a table, and the Lee-Metford carbines that lean in an angle made by the house-wall and the verandah end. Also, but for the tension of long-sustained watchfulness on both faces, making it plain that, though resting and reposeful, they are neither of them unexpectant of a summons to be the opposite of these things. It is a look that, at different degrees of intensity, is stamped on every face in Gueldersdorp. And the same uncertainty possesses and pervades even unsentient things. The Union Jack, hanging listlessly from the summit of its lofty staff, bathed in the golden, glowing atmosphere of this January day, may, in an instant's space, give place to the red signal of danger; the bugle, now silent, may at any moment blare out its loud and dismal note of warning; the bells that call with peaceful insistence, "Come to church! come to church!" in the twinkling of an eye may be clanging scared townsfolk to their burrowed hiding-places. You never know. For General Brounckers, though a God-fearing man, sometimes goes in for Sunday gun-practice, quite unintentionally, as he afterwards explains. Hence, even on the Sabbath, it is as well to be prepared.

Beauvayse is the first to break the drowsy silence by knocking the lengthened ash off his cigar, and expressing his opinion that the weed might be a worse one.

"Considerin' the price the box of fifty was knocked down to me for at Kreils' auction yesterday," states Captain Bingo, "it's simply smokin' gold. Nine pound fifteen-and-six runs me into, how much apiece?" He yawns cavernously, and gives the calculation up. "Always was a duffer at figures," he says, and relapses into silence until, in the act of throwing the nearly smoked-out cigar-butt away, he pulls himself up, and, economically impaling it on his penknife-blade, secures a few more whiffs.

"Against the Lenten days to come, when there will be no balm left in Gilead," says Beauvayse, cocking a grey-green eye at him in sleepy derision, "and no tobacco in Gueldersdorp."

"Kreils' are sellin' dashed bad cigarettes at a pound the box of a hundred now," says Captain Bingo; "and I've a notion of layin' in a stock of 'em. We smoked tea in the Sudan, and I had a shot at hemp, but it plays the very devil with the nerves. All jumps and twitches, you know, after a pipe or two. Nervous as a cat, or a woman. And, talking of women, I wonder where my wife is?"

He turns a large, pink, disconsolate face upon Beauvayse. Beauvayse responds with the air of one who has suffered boredom from the too frequent enumeration of this conjecture. "Not knowing, can't say." And there is another silence.

"How she got the maggot into her head," presently resumes Lady Hannah's spouse, "I can't think. I did suppose her vaultin' ambition to rival Dora Corr--woman who managed to burn her own and a lot of other people's fingers by meddlin' in South African politics over the Raid business--had been quenched for good that mornin' you took those fifty chaps of the Irregulars out for what she would call their 'baptism of fire.'"

"That's newspaperese," yawns Beauvayse, his supple brown hands knitted at the back of his sleek golden head. "Goes with 'the tented field' and casus belli: cherchez la femme and cui bono?"

"She's got the lingo at her finger-ends and in her blood, or we wouldn't be cherchaying now," says Bingo dolorously. "I asked her if she was particularly keen on gettin' killed...."

"Shouldn't have done that. Put her on her mettle not to show funk if she felt it," mumbles Beauvayse.

"A man can't always be diplomatic," grumbles Bingo. "Anyhow, she'd seen a bit of a scrap at the outset of affairs, when the B.S.A. went out with the Armoured Train, and was wild with me for wantin' to deprive her of another 'glorious experience.' ... And next morning she rides out with a Corporal and two troopers, both chaps beastly sensible of their responsibility, and wishin' her at Cape Town, she in toppin' spirits and as keen as mustard. It was about six o'clock, morning, and she hadn't been gone five minutes before we heard you fellows poundin' away and bein' pounded at like Jimmy O! I was on the roof with the Chief, the sweat runnin' down into the binoculars, until the veld seemed swarmin' with brown mares and grey linen habits and drab smasher hats, with my wife's head under 'em, and hoverin' troopers. But I did make out that your party had got into difficulties----"

"We opened on 'em at a thousand yards, and pushed to within five hundred, and if the fellows in charge of the Hotchkiss could have got her into play," Beauvayse interrupts rather huffily, "we'd have been as right as rain."

"Possibly. If I hadn't been on special duty that day, and as nervous as a cat in a thunderstorm, I'd have volunteered to bring No. 2 Troop of A out to the rescue, instead of Heseltine. As it was, I nearly fell off the roof when I saw my wife coming, one trooper, as pale with fright as a piece of soap, supportin' her on his saddle, another man leading the mare, dead lame and the Corporal's hairy. Plugged in the upper works, the Corporal, poor beggar! but he'd managed to stick on somehow until they got to the Hospital. Have you ever had to deal with a woman in hysterics?"

Beauvayse nods sagely.

"Once or twice."

"Once is an experience that lasts a man all his lifetime. Phew!" Captain Bingo mops his large pink face. "Never had such a dressing-down in my life."

"But what had you to do with the Corporal getting chipped?"

"The Lord only knows!" says Bingo piously. "But, if you'd heard her, all the rest of the day and half through the night!..."

"I did," Beauvayse says with a faint grin. "Mine's the next bedroom to yours, you know."

"'Oh, the blood! Oh, the blood!' ..." Not unsuccessfully does the spouse of Lady Hannah attempt to render the recurrent hiccough and the whooping screech of hysteria. "'Damn it, my dear!' I said, tryin' to reason with her, 'what else did you expect the fellow had got in him? Sawdust?' That seemed to rouse her like nothing else.... Turned on me like a tigress, by the living Tinker!--called me everything she could lay her tongue to, and threatened that she'd apply for a separation if I continued to outrage every feeling of decency that association with such a thundering brute hadn't uprooted from her nature."

"Whe--ew!"

Beauvayse's comment is a shrill-toned whistle.