"i ope yu wil Engoy this Pip Deer; i Fild it A Purpus with Love and Menney Apey Riturnse. from"Fare Air."
"i ope yu wil Engoy this Pip Deer; i Fild it A Purpus with Love and Menney Apey Riturnse. from
"Fare Air."
"'Is gal?" interrogated the Reserve man.
"His girl," assented the man who had read.
"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 hadstaggered 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 bloodyhead 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 piercedthrough 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 soundupon 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.
"TheSiege 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 professêtre 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 perdrixmay sate in the long-run, but perpetually tofaire maigreis 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."
Saxham has not been staring at the printed words because they have struck him to the heart with their intelligence, but—or so it seems to him—because they convey nothing. There is an aching pain at the back of his neck, and his mind is curiously dull and sluggish. But after a little he becomes aware that somebody is knocking at his door.
"Who is it——"
The Doctor thinks he utters these words, but in realityhe has only made a harsh croaking sound that might mean anything. The door opens and shows the Chaplain standing smiling on the threshold.
The Reverend Julius Fraithorn, no longer a worn and wasted pilgrim stumbling amongst the thorns and sharp stones of the Valley of the Shadow, appears in these days as a perfectly sound and healthy, if rather too narrow-shouldered, young Anglican clergyman, not unbecomingly arrayed, in virtue of his official position under martial authority, in a suit of Service khâki such as Saxham wears, with the black Maltese Cross on the collar and the band of the wide-peaked cap. Yellow puttees conceal the unduly spare proportions of his active legs, and the brown boots upon his long slender feet are dusty, as, indeed, is the rest of him, not with the reddish dust of the veld that powders Saxham to the very eyelashes, and lies in light drifts in every wrinkle of his garments, but with the yellowish dust of the town.
"I rather thought," the Chaplain says, hesitating, as Saxham, without lifting his eyes, turns his square, white face upon the visitor, "that you said 'Come in'?"
"Come in, and shut the door, and sit down," says Saxham heavily and thickly. And Julius does so, and, occupying the single cane-seated chair the bedroom boasts, glows upon Saxham with a sincerity of affection and a simplicity of admiration pleasant to see, and asks in his thin, sweet voice how things are going.
"Thingsaregoing," Saxham returns, seeming to wake from a heavy brown study. "You could not put it better or more clearly. Will you smoke?" He pitches a rubber tobacco-pouch to the Chaplain, who catches it, and the treasured box of matches that comes after, and as one man sparingly fills a well-browned meerschaum, and the other a blackened briar-root, with the weed that grows more rare and precious with every hour of these days of dearth: "That's one of the things that are going quickest after perchloride of mercury, carbolic, and extract of beef. As a fact, we are using formaldehyde as an anæsthetic in minor operations; and violet powder and starch, upon the external use of which I laid an embargo weeks ago, to the great indignation of the younger nurses, are being employedinstead of arrowroot. And the more the medical stores diminish, the more the patients come rolling in."
"And each new want that arises, and each new difficulty that crops up, finds in you the man to meet it and overcome it," says the Chaplain fervently. He is disposed to make a hero of this brilliant surgeon who has saved his life, and his enthusiasm is only marred by Saxham's painfully-apparent lack of belief in certain vital spiritual truths that are the daily bread of fervent Christian souls. Now that he has become aware of the black band upon the sleeve of the jacket that lies across Saxham's knees, where he sits upon the end of the cot-bed that, with a tiny chest of drawers and a hanging bookshelf laden with volumes and instrument-cases, completes the furnishing of the narrow room, he says, with sympathy in his gentle voice and in the brown eyes that have the soft lustre of a deer's or of a beautiful woman's:
"I am sorry to see this, Saxham. You have lost a friend?"
"Lost a friend?"
Saxham, echoing the last three words, stares at the Chaplain in a strange, dull way, and then forgets him for a minute or more. Baths are not to be had in Gueldersdorp in these days, and though it is not Sunday, when bathing in the river becomes a possibility, the Chaplain observes that the Doctor's thick, close-cropped black hair is wet, and that broad streaks of shining moisture are upon his pale, square face, and that he breathes as though he had been running. But perhaps he has been sluicing his head in the washstand basin, thinks the Chaplain. No; the basin has not recently been used. And then it occurs to Julius, but not until he has noticed the starting veins and corded muscles on the backs of the hands that are clenched upon the jacket, that Saxham is suffering.
"I always said he felt a great deal more than he permitted himself to show," reflects the man of Religion looking at the man of Medicine. "And the absence of belief in Divine Redemption and a Future State must terribly intensify the pain of a bereavement. If I only knew how to comfort him!" And all he can do is to ask, still in that tone of sympathy, when the Funeral is to be.
"Perhaps about the midday coffee-drinking," says Saxham heavily, "they would scrape a hole and dump him in. But they're not over fond of risks, and they would probably leave him where he is till nightfall."
Julius Fraithorn longs, more than ever, that eloquence and inspiration were his to employ in the healing of the man who has raised himself almost from the dead. But he can only falter something about the inscrutable designs of Providence, and not a sparrow falling to the ground unnoticed. And he expresses, somewhat tritely, the hope that Saxham's friend was prepared to meet his end.
"I don't exactly suppose he expected it. He had a right to count upon pulling off the match," says Saxham, with a dreary shadow of a grin, "because a better man behind a gun than Father Noah you wouldn't easily meet. And Boers are fine shots, as a rule."
"Boers.... A Boer.... I thought you told me you had lost a friend?" Mild astonishment is written on the Chaplain's face. And Saxham looks up, and the other sees that his eyeballs are heavily injected with blood, and that the vivid blue of their irises has strangely faded.
"I gave him every opportunity to be my friend," says the dull voice heavily, "by moving out from cover, even by standing up. But no good. He suspected a ruse, and it worried him. Then he climbed a tree, emptied his bandolier at me from a perch of vantage among the branches, and had started to refill it from a fresh package, when I got the chance, and brought him down spreadeagled. And so ends Father Noah."
The Chaplain comprehends fully now, turns pale, and shudders. A blue line marks itself about his mouth; he is conscious of a qualm of positive nausea as he says:
"You—you don't mean you have been talking of a man you have shot?"
"Just so," assents Saxham, and the sentence that follows is not uttered aloud. "And I wish with all my soul that the man had shot me!"
"And this is War," says Julius Fraithorn. He pulls out his handkerchief and wipes his damp forehead and the beady blue lines about his mouth, and the crack and rattle of rifle-fire sweeping over the veld and through thetown, and the ping, ping, ping! of Mauser bullets flattening on the iron gutter-pipe and the corrugated iron of the roof above them seem to answer "Certainly, War."
"Why, you look sick, man," says Saxham the surgeon, whose keen professional eye has not missed the Chaplain's pallor, though the other Saxham is still dazed and blind, and stupefied by the blow that has been dealt him by Lady Hannah's gold fountain-pen. He leans forward, and lightly touches one of the Chaplain's thin wrists, suspecting him of a touch of fever, or town-water dysentery. But Julius jerks the wrist away.
"I am perfectly well. It was—the way in which you spoke just now that rather—rather——"
"Revolted you, eh?" says Saxham, again with the dim shadow of a smile. "Revealed me as a brute and a savage. Well, and why not, if I choose to be one or the other, or both? You Churchmen believe in the power of choice, don't you? Prove to a man that there is something worth having in the bowels of the earth, he burrows like a mole and gets it. Let him once see utility in flying, give him time and opportunity, and he will fly. So if it is to his interests to be clean-lived, high-minded, exemplary, he will be all these things to admiration. Or, if he should happen to have lost thegoûtfor virtue, if he determines that Evil shall be his good, he will make it so." He smiled dourly. "Deprive him of a solid reason for living, he can die. Hold up before his dying eyes the prospect of continued existence under hopeful conditions, he takes up his bed and walks, like the moribund paralytic in the Gospel you preach. You're a living proof of the human power of working miracles.... Granted I cut away a tumour from under your breast-bone more skilfully than a certain percentage of surgeons could have done it. But what brought you safely through the operation, healed your wound by the first intention, and set you on your legs again? I'll trouble you to tell me?"
"The mercy and the grace of God," says the Chaplain, "manifested in His unworthy servant through your science and your skill."
"You employ the technical terminology of your profession," Saxham answers, with a shrug.
The blank stare and the congested redness have gone out of his eyes, and his voice is less dull and toneless. He is coming back to his outward self again, even while the inner man lies mangled and bleeding, crushed by that tremendous broadsword stroke of Fate that has been dealt him by the gold pen of Lady Hannah, and he is ready enough to argue with the Chaplain. He gets off the bed and slips on his jacket, takes a turn or two across the narrow floor-space, then leans against the distempered wall beside the window, puffing at his jetty briar-root, his muscular arms folded on his great chest, his powerful shoulders bowed, his square, black head thrust forward, and his blue eyes coolly studying Julius as he talks.
"Let me—without rubbing your cloth the wrong way—put the case in mine. Your belief in a Power that my reason tells me is non-existent stimulated your nervous centres, roused and sustained in you the determination without which my science and my skill—and I do not value them lightly, I assure you—would have availed you nothing. You said to yourself, 'If God will it, I shall get over this,' and becauseyouwilled it, it was so. Were I a drunkard, an outcast, the very refuse of humanity, tainted with vice to the very centre of my being, I have but to will to be sober and live decently, and while I continue to will it, I shall be what I desire to be."
Saxham's eyes hold Julius's, and challenge them. But no shadow of a Dop Doctor who once reeled the streets of Gueldersdorp rises from those clear brown depths as the speaker ends, "Don't underestimate the power of the Human Will, Fraithorn, for it can remove mountains, and raise the living dead."
"Nor do you venture to deny the Power of the Almighty Hand, Saxham," answers the thin, sweet voice of the Churchman; "because It strewed the myriad worlds in the Dust of the The Infinite, and set the jewelled feathers in the butterfly's wing, and forged the very intellect whose power you misuse in uttering the boast that denies It. Think again. Can you assure me with truth that you have never, in the stress of some great mental or physical crisis, cried to Heaven for help when the struggle was at its worst? Think again, Saxham."
But Saxham obstinately shakes his head, still smiling. As he stands there transfigured by the dark, fierce spirit that has come upon him and possessed him, there is something about the hulking man with the square, black head and the powerful frame, that breathes of that superb and terrible Prince of the Heavenly Hierarchy who fell through a kindred sin, and the priest in Julius shudders, recognising the tremendous power of such a nature as this, whether turned towards Evil or bent to achieve Good. The while, in letters of delicate, keen flame, the denier sees written on the tables of his inward consciousness the utterance that once broke from him, as, racked and tortured in body and in soul, he wrestled with his devil on that unforgettable night.
"O God! if indeed Thou Art, and I must perforce return to live the life of a man amongst men, help me to burst the chains that fetter me. Help me—oh, help me to be free!"
And in his heart he knows that the desperate prayer has been granted. But in this new-born, curious mood of his he will not yield, but combats his own innermost conviction, being, in a strange, perverted way, even prouder of this Owen Saxham who has gone down of his own choice to the muddiest depths of moral and physical decadence, and come up of the strength of his own will from among the hideous things that hang suspended and drifting in the primeval sludge, than he ever was of the man before his fall. His is a combative nature, and the great blow he has sustained this day in the wreck and ruin of his raft of hope has left him quivering to the centre of his being with resentment that strikes back.
"Think again yourself. Ask yourself whether the Deity who creates, preserves, blesses, punishes, slays, and raises up, is the natural outcome of man's need of such a Being, or His own desire of Himself? And which conception is the greater—that the God in whom you Churchmen and the millions of lay-folk who recognise you as Divinely-appointed teachers believe, should have commanded, 'Let the universe exist,' and have been obeyed, or that the stupendous pigmy Man should have dared to say, 'Let there be God,' and so created Him?"
He laughs jarringly as he knocks the ashes out of the blackened pipe upon the corner of the window-ledge.
"Give credit to the human imagination and the humanwill for inventing a personage so useful to the Christian Churches as the Devil. For as in the beginning it was necessary for Man to build up Heaven and set his God therein, so, to throw His unimaginable purity and inconceivable perfection into yet more glorious relief, it was required that Hell should be delved out and the objective personality of Satan conceived and kennelled there, and given just sufficient power to pay the marplot where the Divine plans are concerned, and just enough malevolence to find amusement in the occupation. What should we do, where should we be, without our Satanicsouffre-douleur—our horned scapegoat, our black puppet, without whose suggestions we should never have erred, whose wooden head we bang when things go wrong with us," says Saxham bitterly. He reaches out a hand for the tobacco-pouch and his glance falls upon the day's issue of theSiege Gazettelying on the parquet linoleum, where it has fallen from his hand a little while ago. He stoops and picks it up, and offers it to Julius.
"There's the announcement of an engagement here——" He smooths the crumpled sheet, holds it under the Chaplain's eye, and points to the two last paragraphs of the "Social Jottings" column. "Take it as an instance.... Did Heaven play the matchmaker here, or has Hell had a finger in the matrimonial pie? Or has the blind and crazy chance that governs this desolate world for me, tipped the balance in favour of one young rake, who may be saved and purified and renewed by such a marriage, while his elder in iniquity is doomed to be wrecked upon it, ruined by it, destroyed through it, damned socially and morally because of it ..."
The fierce words break from Saxham against his will. He resents the betrayal of his own confidence savagely, even as he utters them. But they are spoken, beyond recall. And the effect of the paragraph upon the Chaplain is remarkable. His meek, luminous brown eyes blaze with indignation. He is aflame, from the edge of his collar—a patent clerical guillotine of washable xylonite, purchased at a famous travellers' emporium in the Strand—to the thin, silky rings of dark hair that are wearing from his high, pale temples. He says, and stutters angrily in saying:
"This is a lie—a monstrous misstatement which shall be withdrawn to-morrow!"
"How do you know that?"
The Chaplain crushes theSiege Gazetteinto a ball, pitches it into a corner of the room, grabs his Field-Service cap and the cane he carries in lieu of the carbine or rifle without which the male laity of Gueldersdorp and a good many of the women do not stir abroad, and makes a stride for the door. He meets there Saxham, whose square face and powerful figure bar his flaming exit.
"It is enough that I do know it. Kindly allow me to pass."
"What are you going to do?"
The Chaplain is plainly uncertain, as he wrestles with the clerical guillotine of washable xylonite, and stammers something about unwarrantable liberty and a lady's reputation! And Saxham recognises that Saxham is not the only sufferer from the festering smart of jealousy, and that the vivid red-and-white carnation-tinted beauty of the delicate face in its setting of red-brown hair has grievously disturbed, if it has not altogether dissipated, the pale young Anglican's views of the celibate life.
Agnostic and Churchman, denier and believer, have split on the same amatory rock. The knowledge breathes no sympathy in the Dop Doctor.
He observes the Chaplain's face, dispassionately and yet intently, as in the old Hospital days he might have studied the expression of a monkey or a guinea-pig, or other organism upon which he was experimenting with some new drug. And the Reverend Julius demands, with resentful acerbity:
"What are you staring at? Do you imagine that the colour of my cloth debars me from—from taking the part of a lady whose name has been dragged before the public? I shall call at the office where this rag is published, and insist upon a contradiction of this—thiscanard!"
"Don't you know who edits the rag?" asks Saxham raspingly. "Do you suppose that any unauthorised announcement, or statement that has not been officially corroborated would be allowed to pass? The paragraph comes from an authoritative source, you may be sure!"
"I am in a position to disprove it, from whatever source it comes!" cried the Chaplain hotly. "He shall contradict ithimself, if there is necessity. He may be a prodigal and a rake—he bears that reputation—but at least he is not a liar and a scoundrel."
"Who?" Saxham's heart is drubbing furiously. A cool, vivifying liquid like ether seems to have passed into his blood. His quiet, set, determined face and masterful, observant eyes oppose the Chaplain's heat and indignation, as if these were waves of boiling lava beating on a cliff of granite. "Who is not a liar and a scoundrel?"
"I speak of Lord Beauvayse," says the Reverend Julius Fraithorn in the high-pitched voice that shakes with rage. "He is a married man, Saxham; I have incontrovertible testimony to prove it. He gave his name to the woman who was his mistress a week before he sailed for Cape Town. He——"
There is a strange rattling noise in the throat of the man who listens. Julius looks at him, and his own resentment appears, even to himself, as impotent and ridiculous as the anger of a child. If just before it has seemed to him that he has heard the voice of mankind's arch-enemy speaking with Saxham's mouth, he discerns at this moment, reflected in Saxham's, the face of the primal murderer. And being, as well as a sincere and simple-hearted clergyman, something of a weakling, he is shocked to silence.
An instant, and Saxham's own face looks calmly at the dazed Chaplain, and the curt, brusque voice demands:
"What is this incontrovertible testimony?"
"A letter," says Julius breathlessly, "from a person who saw the entry of the marriage at the Registrar's office where it took place."
"Is anyone else in possession of this information?"
"With the exception of the Registrar and the witnesses of the marriage, up to the middle of last September, when the letter was written, nothing had leaked out. I received the communication by the last mail from England that was delivered at the Hospital before I underwent the operation."
"That was the last mail that got through. Who was your correspondent?"
"One of the senior officiating priests of St. Margaret's, Wendish Street, the London church where I did duty as junior curate."
"Have you kept the letter?"
"It is in my desk at my hotel, with some other correspondence of Father Tatham's. You may see it if you wish."
"I will see it. In the meanwhile, let me have the pith of it. This clergyman—happening to visit a Registrar's office—— Where was the office?"
"At Cookham-on-Thames, where Father Tatham has established a Holiday Rest Home for the benefit of our London working lads"—the Chaplain begins. He is sitting on the end of the bed, weak and worn and exhausted with the emotions that have torn him in the last half-hour. Beads of perspiration thickly stud the high temples, out of which the flushing colour has sunk; his cheeks are pallid and hollow. His eyes have lost their fire; his muscles are flaccidly relaxed; his sloping shoulders stoop; his long, limp hands hang nervelessly at his sides.
"One moment." Saxham glances at the gold chronometer that was a presentation from the students of St. Stephen's years ago. It is rather typical of the man that, even when under stress of his heroic thirst he has pawned the watch for money wherewith to buy whisky, he should have only borrowed upon it such small sums as are easily repaid. He has yet another five minutes to bestow in listening to the Chaplain's story, yet even as he returns the chronometer to its pocket, his quick ear catches the frou-frou of feminine petticoats outside the door. He opens it, frowning. A nurse is standing there with a summons in her face. She delivers her low-toned message, receives a brusque reply, and rustles down the corridor between the long lines of pallets as Saxham draws back his head and shuts the door, and, setting his great shoulders against it, and facing Julius, orders:
"Go on!"
Julius goes on:
"At Roselawn Cottage—a pretty place of the toy-residence description, standing in charming gardens not farfrom the Holiday Rest Home, lived a lady—an actress very popular in Musical Comedy—who was known to be the mistress of Lord Beauvayse. I need hardly tell you the Father touched on the unpleasant features of the story as delicately as possible——"
"Without doubt. But—get on a little quicker," says Saxham grimly, jerking his head towards the door. "For I am wanted. And don't speak loud, for there are people on the other side there. With regard to this woman—actress, or whatever she may be——?"
"With all her moral laxities," goes on Julius, "Miss Lessie Lavigne——"
"Ah, I know the name," says Saxham sharply. "On with you to the end. 'With all her moral laxities——'"
"Miss Lessie Lavigne is a generous, kindly, charitable young woman," goes on Julius. "And the Holiday Home has benefited largely by her purse. She is known to the Matron; and Father Tatham—having occasion to visit the Registrar's office at Cookham on the 29th of last June, for the purpose of looking up the books, with the Registrar's consent, and satisfying himself of the existence of the entry regarding a marriage between one of our young fellows then at the Home and a girl he very foolishly married when on a hopping excursion in the autumn of the previous year—Father Tatham encountered Miss Lavigne—or Lady Beauvayse, to give her her proper title——"
"In the Registrar's office?"
"In the act of quitting the Registrar's outer office," says the burnt-out Julius in a weary voice, "in the company of Lord Beauvayse, and followed by his valet and a woman who probably were witnesses; for when the Father entered the inner office the register was lying open on the table, the entry of the marriage still wet upon the page."
"And your religious correspondent pried first," says Saxham, with savage irony, "and afterwards tattled?"
"And afterwards, seeing in theTimesthat Lord Beauvayse was under orders for South Africa, mentioned his accidental discovery when writing to me," says Julius Fraithorn wearily.
"That will do. When can I see the letter at your hotel? The sooner the better," says Saxham, with a curious smile,"for all purposes. Can you walk there with me now? Very well"—as Julius assents—"that is arranged, then."
"What is to be done, Saxham?" Julius stumbles up. The fires that burned in him a few moments ago are quenched; his slack hand trembles irresolutely at his beautiful weak mouth, and his deer-like eyes waver.
"I advise you," says Saxham, "to leave the doing of what is to be done to me." His own blue eyes have so strange a flare in them, and his heavy form seems so alive and instinct with threatening and dangerous possibilities, that Julius falters:
"You believe Lord Beauvayse has been a party to—has wilfully compromised Miss Mildare? You—you mean to remonstrate with him? Do you—do you think that he will listen to a remonstrance?"
"He will find it best in this instance," says Saxham dourly.
"Do not—do not be tempted to use any violence, Saxham," urges the Chaplain nervously, looking at the tense muscles of the grim, square face and the purposeful right hand that hovers near the butt of the Doctor's revolver. "For your own sake as much as for his!"
Saxham's laugh is ugly to hear.
"Do you think that Lord Beauvayse would wind up as top-dog if it came to a struggle between us?"
"It must not come to a struggle, Saxham," says the Chaplain, very pale. "We—we are under Martial Law. He is your superior officer." (Saxham, Attached Medical Staff, holds the honorary rank of Lieutenant in Her Majesty's Army.) "Remember, if Carslow—the man who killed Vickers, of thePittsburg Trumpeter"—he refers to a grim tragedy of the beginning of the siege—"had not been medically certified insane, they would have taken him out and shot him."
Saxham shrugs his massive shoulders, and with the utter unmelodiousness that distinguishes the performance of a man devoid of a musical ear, whistles a fragment of a little tune. It is often on the lips of another man, and the Doctor has picked it up unconsciously, with one or two other characteristic habits and phrases, and has fallen into the habit of whistling it as he goes doggedly, unwearyingly,upon his ever-widening round of daily duties. It helps him, perhaps, though it gets upon the nerves of other people, making the younger nurses, not unmindful of his arbitrary action in the matter of the violet powder, want to shriek.
"The Military Executive would be perfectly welcome to take me out and shoot me, if first I might be permitted to look in at Staff Bomb proof South, and render Society the distinguished service of ridding it of Lord Beauvayse. Who's there?"
Saxham reopens the door, at which the nurse, now returned, has knocked. The tired but cheerful-faced young woman, in an unstarched cap and apron, and rumpled gown of Galatea cotton-twill, informs the Doctor that they have telephoned up from Staff Bomb proof South Lines, and that the password for the day is "Honour."
"You are going to him now?" asks the Chaplain anxiously and apprehensively.
"Oddly enough, I have been sent for to attend to a shell casualty," says Saxham, picking up and putting on his Service felt, and moving to take down the canvas wallet that is his inseparable companion, from the hook on which it hangs. "Or, rather, Taggart was; and as he has thirty diphtheria cases for tracheotomy at the Children's Hospital, and McFadyen's hands are full at the Refugees' Infirmary, the Major asks if I will take the duty. It's an order, I suppose, couched in a civil way."
He swings the heavy wallet over his shoulders, and picks up his worn hunting-crop.
"And so, let's be moving," he says, his hand upon the door-knob. "Your hotel is on my way. I may need that letter, or I may not. And in any case I prefer to have seen it before I meet the man."
"One moment." The Chaplain speaks with a strained look of anxiety, squeezing a damp white handkerchief into a ball between his palms. "You have taken upon yourself the duty of bringing Lord Beauvayse to book over this—very painful matter.... I should like ... I should wish you to leave the task of enlightening Miss Mildare to me."
"To you. And why?"
Saxham waits for the answer, a heavy figure filling up thedoorway, with scowling brows, and sullen eyes that carefully avoid the Chaplain's face.
"Because I—because in inflicting upon her what must necessarily be a—a painful humiliation"—the Rev. Julius clears his throat, and laboriously rolls the damp handkerchief-ball into a sausage—"I wish to convince Miss Mildare that my respect and my—esteem for her have—not diminished."
"And how do you propose to drive this conviction home?"
The Reverend Julius flushes to the ear-tips. The coldness of the questioning voice gives him a nervous shudder. He says with an effort, looking at the thick white, black-fringed lids that bide the Doctor's queer blue eyes:
"By offering Miss Mildare the honourable protection of my name. My views, as regarding the celibacy incumbent upon an anointed servant of the altar, have, since I knew her, undergone a—a change.... And it occurs to me, when she has got over the first shock of hearing that she has been deceived and played with by a person of Lord Beauvayse's lack of principle——"
"That she may be induced to look with favour on the parson's proposal?" comments Saxham with an indifference to the feelings of the person he addresses that is positively savage. The raucous tones flay Julius's sensitive ears, the terrible blue eyes blaze upon him, scorch him. He falters:
"I—I trust my purpose is pure from vulgar self-seeking? I hope my attitude towards Miss Mildare is not unchivalrous—or ungenerous?"
"In manipulating her disadvantage to serve your own interests," says Saxham's terrible voice, "you would undoubtedly be playing a very low-down game."
Julius laughs, shortly and huffily.
"A low-down game!... Ha, ha, ha! You don't mince your words, Doctor!"
"I can phrase my opinion even more plainly, if you desire it," returns Saxham brutally. "To bespatter a rival for the gaining of an advantage by contrast is a Yahoo's trick to which no decent gentleman would stoop."
"At a pinch," retorts the Chaplain, stung to the point of being sarcastic, "your 'decent gentleman' would be likely to remember the old adage, 'All's fair in Love and——'"
"Exactly. Allisfair," returns Saxham, squaring his dogged jaws at the other, and folding his great arms upon his deep wide chest. "And all shall be, please to understand it. It is, unfortunately, necessary that Miss Mildare should be undeceived as regards Lord Beauvayse. But the painful duty of opening her eyes will be undertaken by that"—the break before the designation is scathingly contemptuous—"by that—distinguished nobleman himself, and by no other."
"How can you compel the man to give himself away?" demands the Reverend Julius incredulously. Saxham answers, mechanically opening and closing his small, muscular surgeon's hand, and watching the flexions and extensions of the supple fingers with an ugly kind of interest:
"I shall compel him to. How doesn't concern you at the moment. What matters is—your parole of honour that you will never by word, or deed, or sign disclose to Miss Mildare that Lord Beauvayse was not, when he engaged himself to marry her, in a position to fulfil his matrimonial proposals. Short of betraying your rival, you are at liberty to further your own views as may seem good to you. The plan of campaign that I, in your place, should choose might not find favour in your eyes...."
His look bears upon the younger man with intolerable weight, his heavily-shouldered figure seems to swell and fill the room. Julius is clearly conscious of hating his saviour, and the consciousness is acid on his palate as he asks, with a wry smile:
"What would your plan be if you were in my place?"
"To praise where a rival was worthy of praise; to be silent where it would be easy to depreciate; to win her from him, not because of my own greater worth, but in spite of the worst she could know of me. That would, in my opinion, be a conquest worthy of a man."
The pupils of the speaker's flaming blue eyes have dwindled to mere pin-points, a rush of blood has darkened the square pale face, to sink away again and leave it opaquely colourless, as Saxham says with cool distinctness:
"And now, before we leave this room, I must trouble you for that promise—oath, if you feel it would be more in your line of business. I don't possess a copy of the Scriptures,but I think that is a Crucifix you wear upon your watch-chain?"
It is. And when the Reverend Julius has kissed the sacred symbol with shaking lips, and taken the oath as Saxham dictates, his heart tattooing furiously under the baggy khâki jacket, and an angry pulse beating in his thin cheek, Saxham adds, with the flickering shadow of a smile, as he opens the door, and signs to the Chaplain to pass out before him:
"You observe, I have turned the weapons of your profession against you. Exactly as—replying to your question of a moment back with regard to compelling—exactly as I intend to do in the case of Lord Beauvayse!"
He motions to the other to pass out before him, and locks the door upon his stuffy little sanctum whose shelves are piled with a heterogeneous confusion of tubes and bottles, books and instruments, specimens of foodstuffs under the process of analysis for values, and carefully-sealed watch-glasses containing choice cultures of deadly microbes in bouillon, before he leads his way down the long corridor, where narrow pallets, upon which sick men and boys are stretched, range along the walls upon either hand, and the air is heavy with the taint of suppurating wounds, and the hot, sickly breath of fever and malaria.
He walks quickly, his keen blue eyes glancing right and left with the effect of carelessness, yet missing nothing. He stops, and loosens the bandage, and relieves the swollen limb. He delays to kneel a moment beside one low pillow, and turn gently to the light a face that is ghastly, with its bristly beard and glassy, staring eyes, and its pallor that is of the hue of old wax, and lay it gently back again as he beckons to the nurse to bring the screens, and hide the Dead from the sight of the living.
He is in his element; salient and masterful and strong. But the haggard eyes that turn upon him do not shine with gratitude. He has not reached these hearts. They accuse him, quite unjustly, of a liking for cutting and carving. They suspect him, quite correctly, of being in no hurry for the ending of the siege. How should he be, when, these strenuous days once over, he sees nothing before him but the murky blackness of the night out of which he came, from which he has emerged for one brief draught of renewedjoy in living before the dark shall close over him again, and wrap him round for ever?
He has suffered horribly of late. But at the worst his work has never failed to bring relief and distraction. Pure loyalty to a man in whom he believes, has been the main-spring of his unflagging strength. He is not liked or popular in any way, though Surgeon-Major Taggart upholds him manfully, and McFadyen is loyal to the old bond. His harshness repels regard, his coldness blights confidence, and so, though he is admired for his dazzling skill in surgery, for his dogged perseverance and unremitting power of application, for his fine horsemanship and iron nerve; he is not regarded with affection.
He is not in the least aware of it, to do him justice, when his rough ironies and his brusque repartees give offence. In the heyday of his London success he has not truckled to Rank, or Influence, or Affluence. The owner of a gouty or a varicose leg has never had the more civil tongue from Saxham that the uneasy limb or its fellow was privileged upon State occasions to wear the Garter. He trod upon corns then, as he treads upon them now, without being aware of it, as he goes upon his way.
Julius goes with him, rent by apprehensions, stealing nervous side-glances at the impassive, opaque-skinned face as Saxham swings along with his powerful, rather lurching gait over the ploughed and littered waste that divides the Hospital from the town beyond it. He speaks once or twice, but Saxham seems not to hear.
The Doctor is listening to a dialogue that is as yet unspoken. He is crushing a resistance that has not yet been made. In imagination his small, strong, muscular hands are gripped about the throat of the man who has lied to her and deceived her; and he is listening with joy to the gurgling, choking efforts to phrase a prayer for mercy, or utter a final defiance; and he sees with grim pleasure how the fine skin blackens under his deadly hold, and how the lazy, beautiful, grey-green eyes, no longer sleepy or defiant, but staring and horribly bloodshot, are already rolling upwards in the death-agony. The primitive savage that is in every man lusts at a juncture such as this, to kill with the bare hands rather than to slay with any weapon known to civilisation.
"Let him look to it how he deals with her! Let him look to it!"
How long it seems since Saxham muttered those words, turning sullenly away to recross the stepping-stones, leaping from boulder to boulder as the river wimpled and laughed in mockery of his clumsy tender of protection and her rejection of it, and Beauvayse's tall figure stood, erect and triumphant, on the flower-starred bank, waiting to recommence his wooing until the intruder should be gone, divining, as Saxham had instinctively known, the hidden passion that rent and tortured him, glowing with the consciousness of secret mastery....
If this meek, thin-blooded young clergyman who walks beside him might have won her, it seems to Saxham that he could have borne it. But that Beauvayse of all others should venture to approach her, presume to rear an image of himself in the shrine of her pure breast; win her from her high aims and lofty ideals with a bold look and a few whispered words, and, having thrown his honourable name into the lap of a light woman as indifferently as a jewelled trinket, should dare to offer Lynette Mildare dishonour, is monstrous, hideous, unbearable....
How comes it that she of all women should be so easily allured, so lightly drawn aside? Was there no baser conquest within reach that this white, virginal, slender saint should becomehisprey? Shall she be made even as those others of whom she spoke, when the veil of a girlish innocence was drawn aside, and strange and terrible knowledge looked out of those clear eyes, and she said, in answer to his question:
"They are the most unhappy of all the souls that suffer upon earth. For they are the slaves, and the victims, and the martyrs of the unrelenting, merciless, dreadful pleasures of men...."
Of men like Beauvayse.
Not only swart and shaggy, or pale and bloated beast-men, or white-haired, toothless, blear-eyed satyrs grown venerable in vice. But beautiful, youthful profligates, limbed like the gods and fauns of the old Greek sculptors; soft of skin, golden of hair, with sleepy eyes like green jewels, soft persuasive voices with which to pour poisonedwords into innocent and guileless ears, and the bold, brave blood of old-time heroes running in their veins, prompting them to the doing of dashing, reckless, gallant deeds, no less than sins of lust and luxury.
Let him look to it, this splendid young soldier with the ancient name, hope of his House, pride of his Regiment. Let him look to it how he has dealt with her, who had no thought or dream but to save others from the fate he destines for her, until his cursed, beautiful face smiled down into her own. For every lying oath he has sworn to her, for every false promise made to the wrecking of her maiden peace, for every kiss those innocent lips have been despoiled of, for every touch of his that has soiled her, for every breath of his that has scorched the white petals of the Convent-reared lily, he shall pay the price.
Silently Saxham registers this oath upon that beloved red-brown head, since he denies its Maker His honour, and the whirling blackness that is within him is rent and cloven, for one blinding instant, by the levin-fires of Hell. He knows thenceforward what he will do, as he walks with the pale Chaplain between the shell-torn houses, and along the littered streets, where men and women and children, thin and haggard and listless with hunger, and the deadly inertia of long confinement, pass and repass as indifferently as though no guns were battering and growling from the low grey hills south and east, and the incessant rattle of rifle-fire were the innocent expenditure of blank cartridge incidental to a sham fight.
They reach the Chaplain's hotel, and go to his room. Saxham waits silently while Julius searches for and finds Father Tatham's letter, takes it and reads it attentively, puts it carefully away in a worn notecase, restores the notecase to the inner pocket of his jacket, and, without a nod or word of farewell, is gone.
To the remarkably complete system of underground wires installed by the Garrison Telephone Corps, Lady Hannah Wrynche, on duty at the Convalescent Hospital that wasonce the Officers' Club, was, upon the Thursday that saw the publication of the string of paragraphs previously quoted from theSiege Gazette, indebted for what she afterwards described with ruefulness as a "heckled morning."
Once a week the "Social Jottings," bubbling from the effervescent Gold Pen, descended like rain upon the parched soil of drouthy Gueldersdorp. To make gossip where there is none is as difficult as making bricks without clay, or trimming a hat when you are a member of the Wild Birds' Protection Society, and plumage is Fashion's latest cry. Under the circumstances a genuine item of general and public interest was a pearl of price. And yet something had told the little lady that the ruthless Blue Pencil of Supreme Authority would deprive her of the supreme joy of casting it before the readers of theSiege Gazette. She seemed to hear him saying, in the pleasant voice she knew so well:
"No personalities shall be published in a paper I control."
He had said that on Sunday, when she had pleaded for a freer hand. Well, he could hardly call the announcement of an engagement a personality, and, supposing he did, how easy to convince him that it was nothing of the kind!
She dashed off her description of the Convent kettledrum, and added the paragraphs we know of, each one accentuated by an explosion of asterisks, and gave the blotty sheets to Young Evans, who combined in his sole person the offices of sub-editor, engineer, chief-compositor, feeder, and devil.
Young Evans, who, next to the single-cylinder printing-press driven by the little oil-engine that had sustained a shell-casualty at the beginning of the siege, adored Lady Hannah, vanished behind the corrugated partition that separated the office from the printing-room, and presently came back in inky shirt-sleeves with a smear of lubricating-oil upon his forehead, and laid the wet slips upon the Editorial table. Then he went back, and fell to tinkering at his machine. Lady Hannah corrected her proof. When she had done she looked at her wrist-watch. In ten minutes Supreme Authority would descend the ladder, wield the Blue Pencil, and depart. Would he have mercy and not sacrifice? The suspense was torturing.
Then a simple plan occurred to her by which Supreme Authority might be—she dared not use the word "circumvented.""Got round" was even worse; "evaded" sounded nicest. To resist the promptings of her own feminine ingenuity required a greater storage of cold moral force than Lady Hannah desired to possess. She took the editorial scissors, and daintily cut off the three paragraphs from the bottom of the slip.
The thing was done, and the snipped-off paragraphs concealed, as a pair of brown boots, with steel jack-spurs attached, came neatly down the ladder. The Chief gave her his cheery "Good-morning," and congratulated her on looking well. Her cheeks burned and her heart rat-tatted against the hidden paper, as he ran his keen eye down slip after slip, and initialled them for the press. She almost shrieked as he took up the "Social Jottings." The underground office whirled about her as the blue pencil steadily travelled down. Then—he was gone—and the initialled proof lay before her. She had nothing to do but neatly and delicately paste on the bit she had snipped off. This done, she gathered up her various small belongings, swept them into her bag, and went, leaving the passed proof of the "Social Jottings" column waiting for Young Evans with the rest.
In the middle of the night she realised what she had done. But even in a beleaguered town under the sway of Martial Law you cannot hang a lady, or order her out and shoot her for Mutiny and Treason combined. There would be a reprimand; what Bingo pleasantly termed "an official wigging," unless the Blue Pencil could, by any feminine art, be persuaded that it had passed those pars.
But, of course, she would never stoop to such a deception. The ruse she had employed was culpable. The other thing would be infamous. And—he would be sure to see that the end of the proof-slip had been pasted on.
She slept jerkily, rose headachy, and set out for the Convalescent Hospital in that stage of penitence that immediately precedes hysterical breakdown. She experienced a crisis of the nerves upon meeting a man, who, regardless of quite a brisk bombardment that happened to be going on just then, was walking along reading theSiege Gazette. Shirt-sleeved Young Evans had worked until daylight getting the Thursday's issue out. And there was a tremendous run upon copies. Every other person LadyHannah encountered upon the street seemed to have got one, and to find it unusually interesting. The women especially. None of them were dull, or languid, or dim-eyed this morning. The siege crawl was no longer in evidence. They walked upon springs. Upon the stoep of the Hospital, where the long rows of convalescents were airing, every patient appeared plunged in perusal. Those who had not the paper were waiting, with watering mouths, until those who had would part. A reviving breath seemed to have passed over them, and spots of colour showed in their yellow, haggard faces. They talked and laughed....
Lady Hannah passed in, conscious of an agreeable tingling all down her spine. The hall-porter, a brawny, one-armed ex-Irregular, who had lost what he was wont to term his "flapper" at the outset of hostilities, was too deeply absorbed in spelling out a paragraph of the "Social Jottings" column to salute her. Inside you heard little beyond the crackling of the flimsy sheet, mingled with the comments, exclamations, anticipations, expectations that went off on all sides, met each other, and rebounded, exploding in coruscations of sparks. Something had happened, something was going to happen, after months and months of eventless monotony. It warmed the thin blood in their veins like comet champagne, and quickened their faded appetites like some salt breath from the far-distant sea.
The flavour of success upon the palate may, like Imperial Tokay, be sensed but once in a lifetime, but you can never forget that once. Out of her gold fountain-pen Lady Hannah had spurted a little ink upon the famished Gueldersdorpians, and their dry bones moved and lived. She knew a fine must be paid for this dizzying draught of popularity, even as she tied on a bibbed apron, and superintended the serving and distribution of the patients' one-o'clock dinner.
Horse-soup, with a few potato-sprouts, and one or two slivered carrots to the gallon, formed the menu to-day. There was no more white bread, and a villainous bannock of crushed oats had to be soaked in your porringer if you had no strength to chew it. Sweetened bran-jelly followed, and upon this the now apologetic but smiling porter, with the intelligence that her ladyship was wanted at the wall-jigger in the Matron's room.
The ring-up came from Hotchkiss Outpost North, where Captain Bingo was this day on duty,viàthe Staff Headquarter office in Market Square, and the voice that filtered to the ear of Lady Hannah was unmistakably that of her spouse, and tinged with a gruffness as unusual as ominous.
"Hullo. Is that you?"
"Qu'il ne vous en déplaise!"
Bingo growled in a perfectly audible aside:
"And devil a doubt. What other woman would jabber French through a telephone?"
"A Frenchwoman would, possibly."
"Don't catch what you're saying. Look here, what made you shove such a whacking bouncer into theSiege Gazette?"
"Please put that into English." She underwent a quaking at the heart.
"I say, that announcement about Toby and the Mildare filly is all my eye."
"It isn't all your eye. It's first-hand, fully-authorised fact."
"Rot!"
"Paix et peu! Say rot, if it pleases you!"
"You'll have to withdraw and apologise."
"I can't make out what you're saying."
"It will end in your eating humble-pie. Can you hear that?"
"I can hear that you are in a bearish temper."
"I've reason to be. If a man had written what you have I should punch his head."
"Say that again!"
"I say, if a stranger of the kickable sex had told such a pack of infernal——"
Click!
Lady Hannah hung up the receiver, blew a contemptuous kiss into the gape of the celluloid mouthpiece, and turned to go. There was another ring-up as she reached the door.
"Hallo. Are you the Convalescent Hospital?"
"Yes. Who are you?"
"Staff Bombproof South. I want to speak to Lady Hannah Wrynche."
"I'm here, Lord Beauvayse."
"I say, I'm going to rag you frightfully. Why on earth have you given us away in that beastly paper?"
"Whom do you mean by 'us'?"
"Well, me and Miss Mildare."
"Didn't you tell me on Sunday that you were engaged?" she demanded indignantly.
"I did." The answer came back haltingly.
"And that you didn't care who knew it?"
"Fact."
"And that you two were going to be married as soon as you could pull off the event?"
"Yes." The voice was palpably embarrassed. "But——"
"Well?"
"But—things you don't mind people knowing look beastly in cold print."
"If I were in your shoes I should think they looked beautiful."
Nothing but a faint buzz came back. Lady Hannah went on:
"If I were in your shoes, and such a pearl and prize and paragon as Lynette Mildare had consented to marry me, I should want the whole world to envy me my colossal good luck. I should go about in sandwich-boards advertising it. I should buy a megaphone, and proclaim it through that. I should——"
There was no response beyond the buzzing of the wire. Beauvayse had evidently hung up the receiver.
"Is there any creature upon earth more cowardly than a man engaged?" Lady Hannah demanded of space. There was a futile struggle inside the telephone-box. Somebody else was trying to ring up. She put the receiver back upon the crutches, and—
"Ting—ting—ting!" said the bell in a high, thin voice.
"Who is it?" she asked.
The answer came back with official clearness:
"Officer of the day, Staff Headquarters. If you're the Convalescent Hospital, the Colonel would like to speak to Lady Hannah Wrynche."
Her knees became as jelly, and her heart seemed to turn a somersault. She answered in a would-be jaunty voice that wobbled horribly:
"Here—here—is Lady Hannah."
"Hold on a minute, please!"
She held on. She had not shuddered at the end of the wire for more than a minute when the well-known, infinitely-dreaded voice said in her ear, so clearly that she jumped:
"Lady Hannah there? How d'you do?"
She gulped, and quavered:
"It—it depends on what you're going to say."
"I see." There was the vibration of a stifled laugh, and her heart jumped to meet it. "So you anticipated a hauling over the coals?"
Revived, she shrugged her little shoulders.
"Have I deserved one?"
The voice said, with unmistakable displeasure in it:
"Thoroughly. Why were not the last three paragraphs of the weekly 'Social Jottings' column submitted to me yesterday with the rest?"
She heard herself titter imbecilely. Then a voice, which she could hardly believe her own, said, with a pitiable effort to be gay and natural:
"Weren't they? Perhaps you overlooked them?"
"You know I did not overlook them."
This was the cold, incisive, cutting, rasping voice which Bingo was wont to describe as razors and files. Her ears burned like fire, and her bright, birdlike eyes were round and scared. She gasped:
"Oh ... do you really——"
"I want the truth, please, without quibbling." The voice was harsh and cold, and inexorably compelling. "Why were those paragraphs not shown to me?"
She winked away her tears.
"Because I was sure you'd blue-pencil them out of existence. And a genuine bit of news is such a roc's egg in these times of scarcity."
"Genuine!"
There was incredulity in the tone.
"Upon my honour as the wife of a British Dragoon."
He said crisply:
"Precipitate publication, even of authentic information, is likely to be resented by the persons concerned."
She remembered, with a sinking at the heart, that one person concerned had already objected.
"Both of them authorised the insertion."
"And the official consent to it was obtained by a trick."
She whispered, her heart in the heels of her Louis Quinze shoes:
"Please—please don't call it that!"
"How can I call it anything else? Besides, has it occurred to you that, should any copies of to-day's issue get through these lines, the Foltlebarres will be thrown into a state of volcanic eruption?"