Chapter 9

They were all, all alike. A tear rose to her eye. She bravely dried it with a finger of a white cotton glove, and produced her purse, an imitation crocodile-leather and sham-silver affair, bought in Kentish Town, where you may walk through odorous groves of dried haddocks that are really whiting, and Yarmouth bloaters that never were at Yarmouth, and purchase whole Rambler roses, the latest Paris style, for threepence, and try on feather-boas at two-and-eleven-three, plucked from the defunct carcase of the domestic fowl. She paid for the drinks with a florin, and it was quite like old times when Slabberts calmly pocketed the sixpence of change. The bar-keeper leaned over to her again, and said, surrounding her with a confidential atmosphere of tobacco and schnaps:

"He is a good man, that young man of yours, and gets much money. He means to give you a nice present by-and-by."

Her grateful heart overflowed to this friendly patronage. She showed the bar-keeper her gathered finger, and said it did 'urt a treat. She expected it would 'urt worse before Dr. de Boursy-Williams--"'adn't 'e got a toff's name?"--'ad done with it.

"You go to that Engelsch doktor on Harris Street, eh?" said the bar-keeper, spitting dexterously.

"Sister Tobias--that's the nun wot 'ousekeeps at the Convent--give me a order to see 'im, to 'ave me finger larnced," explained Emigration Jane. "Ain't 'e all right?"

"Right enough," said the bar-keeper, winking at the Slabberts, and adding something in the Taal, that provoked chuckles among the bystanders and called forth a fine display of neglected teeth on the part of the personage addressed. "There are plenty other Engelsch will be wishing to be as right, oh, very soon! For De Boursy-Williams, he has sent his wife and his two daughters away on the train for Cape Town yesterday morning, and he has gone after them that same night, and he has left all his patients to the Dop Doctor."

"Some red-necked baboons are wiser than others," said the Slabberts in the Taal, and there was a hoarse laugh, and the humorist turned his big heavy body away, and became one of a crowd of other Dutchmen, who were, in veiled hints and crooked allusions, discussing the situation across the Border. Emigration Jane was not sensitive to the electricity in the atmosphere. She knew no Dutch, and was perfect in the etiquette of the outing, which, when the young woman has been supplied with the one regulation drink, stands her up in the corner like an umbrella in dry weather as long as her young man is a-talking to 'is pals.

"So," the bar-keeper went on, "if you shall want that bad finger of yours looked to, you will have to wait until the Dop Doctor wakes up. He is a big man, who can drink as much as three Boers.... He came in this morning to get drunk, and you shall not wake him now if you fire off a rifle at his ear. But he will get up presently and shake himself, and then he will be quite steady; you would not guess how drunk he had been unless you had seen.... He is over there, sleeping on that table in the corner, and it will be very bad for the man who shall wake him up. For, look you, that Dop Doctor is a duyvel. I have seen him break a man like a stick between his hands for nothing but cutting up a thieving monkey of a little Kaffir with the sjambok. And he took the verdoemte thing home where he lives, they say, and strapped up its black hide with plaster, and set its arm as if it had been a child of Christians. But every Engelschman is mad. Groot Brittanje breeds a nation of madmen."

The saloon got fuller and fuller. The air solidified with the Taal and the tobacco, and other things less pleasant. It was not the hour for a crowd of customers, but nobody had seemed to be working much of late. They were all Transvaalers and Free Staters, tradesmen of the town, or Boers from outlying farms, and not a man there but was waiting a certain signal to clear out and leave Gueldersdorp to her fate, or remain in the place on a salary paid by the Republics as a spy. The English customer who came in knew at one whiff of the thick atmosphere that it was unhealthy, and if the man happened to be alone, he ordered, and paid, and drank, and went out quickly. If he happened to be with friends, he pointedly addressed his conversation to his countrymen, and left with a certain degree of swagger, and without the appearance of undue haste.

Once the swing-doors of the saloon opened to admit a short, spare, hollow-chested, dapper young Englishman, whose insignificant Cockney countenance was splashed with orange-coloured freckles of immense size. Between his thin anaemic lips dangled the inevitable cigarette. And Emigration Jane, toying with the dregs of her tumbler, recognized the pert, sharp, sallow face seen over the sleeve of a large burgher's outstretched arm. With some trouble she caught the eye of the short, pale young man, and he instantly became a red one. To reach her was difficult, but he dived and wriggled his way across the saloon, wedging his frail person between the blockish bodies with a cool address that reminded her of the first night of a "noo show" at the Camden "Theayter," and the queue outside the gallery door.

"'Ullo, 'ullo! Thought I reckonised you, Miss." He touched his cheap imitation Panama with swaggering gallantry, and winked. "But seeing you eight sizes more of a toff than what you were when I previously 'ad the pleasure, I 'esitated to tip you the 'Ow Do."

She tossed her imitation ostrich plumes in joyous coquetry.

"As if I didn't know wot you're after. Garn! You only wants to know if I acted on the stryte about ..."

His projecting ears burned crimson.

"Well, an' suppose I do. Did she----"

"Did she wot?"

"You pipe well enough. Did she 'ave it?"

"Ain't you anxious?"

"Tyke it I am anxious. Did she? No cod?"

"Did she git your letter wot you put in the box o' choc's? O' course she did, Mister. Wot do you tyke me for? A silly looney or a sneakin' thief?"

"I'll tell you what I tyke you for. A jolly little bit of English All Right. Say! Do you think ..." The prominent Adam's apple jutting over the edge of the guillotining double collar worked emotionally. "Think she'll send an answer, eh?"

"Reckon she will; you watch out an' see!"

"You fust-clarss little brick!"

"Garn!"

"I mean it. Stryte. Next door to a angel--that's wot you are. She's the angel. Tell 'er I said so--that's if you can, you twig? And say that when I 'eard that nearly all the gay old crowd o' pupils 'ad gone away, day before yesterday, I could 'a blooming well cut me throat, thinkin' she'd gone too. Becos' when I swore in for the Town Guard, it was with the idear--mind you rub that in!--of strikin' a blow for Beauty as well as for Britanniar, twig?" The thin elbow in the tweed sleeve nudged her, provoking a joyous giggle.

"I'm fly, no fear. Are you to 'ave a uniform, an' all like that?"

His face fell. "The kit don't run to much beyond a smasher 'at an' puttees, but they're the regular Service kind, an' then there's the bandolier--an' the gun. She ain't the newest rifle served out to Her Majesty's Army, not by twenty years. Condemned Martini, a chap says, who's in the know--an' kicks like a mule when I let 'er off--made me nose bleed fust time I tried with blank. But when we gets a bit more used to each other, it 'll be a case of bloomin' Doppers rollin' over in the dust, like rock-rabbits. Don't forget to tell 'er as wot I said so."

"Why ... ain't she a Dutchy 'erself? She wrote a letter for me in their rummy lingo to my young man!"

"Cripps!" He stared in dismay. "Blessed if I 'adn't forgot. But if an Englishman marries a foreigner," he swelled heroic, "that puts 'er in the stryte runnin'. And 'art an' 'and I'm 'ers, whenever she'll 'ave me! Tell 'er THAT--with a double row of crosses from W. Keyse! And--can you remember a bit o' poetry?" He recited with shamefaced rapidity:

"It is my sentry-go to-night, And when I watch the moon so bright, Shining o'er South Africa plain, I'll think of thee, sweet Greta Du Taine."

Her eyes were full of awe and wonder. "Lor! you don't mean to say you made up that by yourself?"

The poet nodded. "Reckon about as much. Like it?"

"It's perfect lovely! Better than they 'ave in the penny books."

"Where Coralline and the Marquis are playin' the spooney game, and 'im with a Lady Reginer up 'is dirty sleeve. An' there's another thing I want you to let 'er know." His eyes were on hers, his breath fanned her hot cheeks. "There isn't another woman on the earth but her for me. Dessay there may be others; wot I say is--I don't see 'em!" He waved his hand, dismissing the ardent creatures.

A pang transpierced the conscience hiding under the cheap flowery blouse. Emigration Jane hesitated, biting the dog's-eared finger-ends of a cotton glove. Should she tell this ardent, chivalrous lover that the Convent roof no longer sheltered the magnificent fair hair-plait and the mischievous blue eyes of his adored? That Miss Greta Du Taine had left for Johannesburg with the latest batch of departing pupils! If she told, W. Keyse would vanish out of her life, it might be for ever; or, if by chance encountered on the street, pass by with a casual greeting and a touch of the cheap Panama. Emigration Jane was no heroine, only a daughter of Eve. Arithmetic and what was termed the "tonic sofa" had been more sternly inculcated than the moral virtues at the Board School in Kentish Town. And she was not long in making up her mind that she would not tell him--not just yet, anyway.

What was he saying, in the Cockney that cut like a knife through the thick gutturals of the Taal? "I shall walk past the Convent to-morrer in kit and 'cetras, on the charnce of 'Er seein' me. Two sharp. And, look 'ere, Miss, you've done me a good turn. And--no larks!--if ever I can do you another--trust me. Stryte--I mean it! You ask chaps 'oo know me if Billy Keyse ever went back on a pal?"

She swayed her hips, and disclaimed all obligation. But, garn! he was gittin' at 'er, she knew!

"I ain't; I mean it! You should 'ave 'arf me 'eredittary estates--if I 'ad any. As I 'aven't, say wot you'll drink? Do, Miss, to oblige yours truly, W. Keyse, Esquire."

W. Keyse plunged a royal, reckless hand into the pocket of his tweed riding-breeches, bought against the time when he should bestride something nobler than a bicycle, and produced a half-sovereign. He owed it to his landlady and the rest, the coin that he threw down so magnificently on the shiny counter, but you do not treat your good angel every day.... Emigration Jane bridled, and swayed her hips still more. His largeness was intoxicating. One had dreamed of meeting such young men.

"Port or sherry? Or a glass of cham, with a lump o' ice in for a cooler? They keep the stuff on draught 'ere, and not bad by 'arf for South Africa. 'Ere, you, Mister! Two chams for self and the young lydy, an' look slippy!"

The brimming glasses of sparkling, creaming fluid, juice of vines that never grew in the historic soil of France, were passed over the bar. A miniature berg clinked in each, the coldness of its contact with the glowing lip forcing slight rapturous shrieks from Emigration Jane.

"We'll drink 'Er 'ealth!" W. Keyse raised his goblet. "And Friends at 'Ome in our Isle across the Sea!"

He drank, pleased with the sentiment, and set down the empty glass.

The Dutch bar-keeper leaned across the counter, and tapped him on the arm with a thick, stubby forefinger.

"Mister Engelschman, I think you shall best go out of here."

"Me? Go out? 'Oo are you gettin' at, Myn'eer Van Dunck?" swaggered W. Keyse. And he slipped one thin, freckled hand ostentatiously under his coat of shoddy summer tweed. A very cheap revolver lurked in the hip-pocket of which Billy was so proud. In his third-floor back bed-sitting-room in Judd Street, London, W.C., he had promised himself a moment when that hip-pocket should be referred to, just in that way. It was a cheap bit of theatrical swagger, but the saloon was full, not of harmless theatrical pretences, but bitter racial antagonisms, seething animosities, fanged and venomed hatreds, only waiting the prearranged signal to strike and slay.

Emigration Jane tugged at the hero's sleeve, as he felt for an almost invisible moustache, scanning the piled-up, serried faces with pert, pale, hardy eyes.

"'E ain't coddin'. See 'ow black they're lookin'."

"I see 'em, plyne enough. Waxworks only fit for the Chamber of 'Orrors, ain't 'em?"

"It's a young woman wot arsks you to go, not a bloke! Please! For my syke, if you won't for your own!"

Billy Keyse, with a flourish, offered the thin, boyish arm in the tweed sleeve.

"Righto! Will you allow me, Miss?"

She faltered:

"I--I can't, deer. I--I'm wiv my young man."

"Looks after you a proper lot, I don't think. Which is 'im? Where's 'e 'id 'isself? There's only one other English-lookin' feller 'ere, an' 'e's drunk, lyin' over the table there in the corner. That ain't 'im, is it?"

"Nah, that isn't 'im. That big Dutchy, lookin' this way, showin' 'is teeth as 'e smiles. That's my young man."

She indicated the Slabberts, heavily observant of the couple with the muddy eyes under the tow-coloured thatch.

"'Strewth!" W. Keyse whistled depreciatively between his teeth, and elevated his scanty eyebrows. "That tow-'eaded, bung-nosed, 'ulking, big Dopper. An' you a daughter of the Empire!"

Oh! the thrice-retorted scorn in the sharp-edged Cockney voice! The scorching contempt in the pale, ugly little eyes of W. Keyse! She wilted to her tallest feather, and the tears came crowding, stinging the back of her throat, compelling a miserable sniff. Yet Emigration Jane was not destitute of spirit.

"I ... I took 'im to please meself ... not you, nor the Hempire neither."

"Reckon you was precious 'ard up for a chap. Good-afternoon, Miss."

He touched the cheap Panama, and swung theatrically round on his heel. Between him and the saloon-door there was a solid barricade of heavy Dutch bodies, in moleskin, tan-cord, and greasy homespun, topped by lowering Dutch faces. Brawny right hands that could have choked the reedy crow out of the little bantam gamecock, clenched in the baggy pockets of old shooting-jackets. Others gripped leaded sjamboks, and others crept to hip-pockets, where German army revolvers were. The bar-keeper and the Slabberts exchanged a meaning wink.

"Gents, I'll trouble you. By your leave?..."

Nobody moved. And suddenly W. Keyse became conscious that these were enemies, and that he was alone. A little hooliganism, a few street-fights, one scuffle with the police, some rows in music-halls constituted all his experience. In the midst of these men, burly, brutal, strong, used to shed blood of beast and human, his cheap swagger failed him with his stock of breath. He was no longer the hero in an East End melodrama; his heroic mood had gone, and there was a feel of tragedy in the air. The Boers waited sluggishly for the next move. It would come when there should be a step forward on the part of the little Englishman. Then a clumsy foot in a cow-leather boot or heavy wooden-pegged veldschoen would be thrust out, and the boy would be tripped up and go down, and the crowd would deliberately kick and trample the life out of him, and no one would be able to say how or by whom the thing had been done. And, reading in the hard eyes set in the stolid yellow and drab faces that he was "up against it," and no mistake, W. Keyse felt singularly small and lonely.

Then something happened.

The drunken Englishman who had been lying in a hoggish stupor over the little iron table in the corner of the saloon hiccoughed, and lifted a crimson, puffy face, with bleary eyes in it that were startlingly blue. He drew back the great arms that had been hanging over the edge of his impromptu pillow, and heaved up his massive stooping shoulders, and got slowly upon his feet. Then, lurching in his walk, but not stumbling, he moved across the little space of saw-dusted, hard-beaten earth that divided him from W. Keyse, and drew up beside that insignificant minority. The action was not purposeless or unimpressive. The alcoholic wastrel had suddenly become protagonist in the common little drama that was veering towards tragedy. Beside the man, Billy Keyse dwindled to a stunted boy, a steam-pinnace bobbing under the quarter of an armoured battle-ship, its huge mailed bulk pregnant with possibilities of destruction, its barbettes full of unseen, watchful eyes, and hands powerful to manipulate the levers of Titanic death-machines.

Let it be understood that the intervener did not present the aspect of a hero. He had been drunk, and would be again, unless some miraculous quickening of the alcohol-drugged brain-centres should rouse and revivify the dormant will. His square face, with the heavy smudge of bushy black eyebrows over the fierce blue eyes, and the short, blunt, hooked nose, and grim-lipped yet tender mouth, from the corner of which an extinct and forgotten cigar-butt absurdly jutted, bore, like his great gaunt frame, the ravaging traces of the consuming drink-lust. His well-cut, loosely-fitting grey morning-coat and trousers were soiled and slovenly; his blue linen shirt was collarless and unbuttoned at the neck. His grey felt smasher hat was crammed on awry. But there was a thick lanyard round the muscular neck, ending in a leather revolver-pouch that was attached to his stout belt of webbing. A boy with a fifteen-and-sixpenny toy revolver you can laugh at and squelch; but, Alamachtig! a big man with a Webley and Scott was another thing. And the frowy barrier of thick, coarsely-clad, bulky bodies and scowling, yellow-tan faces, began to melt away.

When a clear lane showed to the saloon door, the Dop Doctor took it, walking with a lurch in his long stride, but with the square head held upright on his great gaunt shoulders. W. Keyse, Esquire, moved in the shadow of him, taking two steps to one of his. The swing doors opened, thudded to behind them....

"Outside.... Time, too!"

The wide, thin-lipped Cockney mouth grinned a little consciously as W. Keyse jerked his thumb towards the still vibrating doors of the saloon. "Reg'ler 'ornets' nest o' Dutchies. And I was up agynst it, an' no mistyke, when you rallied up. An', Mister, you're a Fair Old Brick, an' if you've no objection to shykin' 'ands ...?"

But the big man did not seem to see the little Cockney's offered hand. He nodded, looking with the bloodshot and extremely blue eyes that were set under his heavy straight black brows, not at W. Keyse, but over the boy's head, and with a surly noise in his throat that stopped short of being speech, swung heavily round and went down the dusty street, that was grilling in the full blaze of the afternoon heat, lurching a little in his walk.

Then, suddenly, running figures of men came round the corner. Voices shouted, and houses and shops and saloons emptied themselves of their human contents. The news flew from kerb to kerb, and jumped from windows to windows, out of which women, European and coloured, thrust eager, questioning heads.

The Cape Town train that had started at midday had returned to Gueldersdorp, having been held up by a force of armed and mounted Boers twenty miles down the line. And a London newspaper correspondent had handed in a cable at the post-office, and the operator's instrument, after a futile click or so, had failed to work any more.

The telegraphic wire was cut. Hostilities had commenced in earnest, and Gueldersdorp, severed from the South by this opening act of war, must find her salvation thenceforwards in the cool brains and steady nerves of the handful of defenders behind her sand-bags, when the hour of need should come.

History has it written in her imperishable record, that is not only printed upon paper, and graven upon brass, and cut in marble, but stamped into the minds and hearts of millions of men and women of the British race, how, when that hour came, the hero-spirit in their countrymen rose up to meet it. And for such undying memories as these, and not for the mere word of suzerainty, it is worth while to have paid as Britain has paid, in gold, and blood, and tears.

XIII

"Dop," being the native name for the cheapest and most villainous of Cape brandies, has come to signify alcoholic drinks in general to men of many nations dwelling under the subtropical South African sun. Thus, apple-brandy, and peach liqueur, "Old Squareface," in the squat, four-sided bottles beloved no less by Dutchman and Afrikander, American and Briton, Paddy from Cork, and Heinrich from the German Fatherland, than by John Chinkey--in default of arrack--and the swart and woolly-headed descendant of Ham, may be signified under the all-embracing designation.

It did not matter what the liquor was, the bar-tenders were aware who served the Dop Doctor, as long as the stuff scorched the throat and stupefied the brain, and you got enough of it for your money.

His eyes were blood-red with brutal debauch now, as he neared the De Boursy-Williams dwelling, a one-storied, soft brick-built, corrugated-iron-roofed house on Harris Street, behind the Market Square. It had been a store, but green and white paint and an iron garden-fence had turned it into a gentlemanly residence for a medical practitioner. Mrs. De Boursy-Williams, a lady of refinement, stamped with the ineffaceable cachet of Bayswater, had hung cheap lace curtains in all the windows, tying them up with silk sashes of Transvaal green. Between the wooden pillars of the stoep dangled curtains yet other, of chopped, dyed, and threaded bamboo, while whitewashed drain-pipes, packed with earth and set on end, overflowed with Indian cress, flowering now in extravagant, gorgeous hues of red and brown, sulphur and orange.

The Dop Doctor, left to maintain the inviolate sanctity of this English Colonial home, hiccoughed as he stumbled up the stately flight of three cement steps that led between white-painted railings, enclosing on the left hand a narrow strip of garden with some dusty mimosa shrubs growing in it, to the green door that bore the brass plate, and had the red lamp fitted in the hall-light above it. The plate bore this comprehensive inscription:

G. DE BOURSY-WILLIAMS, M.D., F.R.C.S. Lond.

CONSULTING-ROOM HOURS: 10 A.M. TO 12 A.M.; 6 P.M. TO 8 P.M.

MODERN DENTISTRY IN ALL ITS BRANCHES.

And, scanning the inscription for perhaps the thousandth time, the grim, tender mouth under the ragged black moustache took a satirical twist at the corners, for nobody knew better than Owen Saxham, called of men in Gueldersdorp the "Dop Doctor," what a brazen lie it proclaimed. He heard the town-clock on the stad square strike five as he pulled out the latchkey from his pocket and let himself in, shouting:

"Koets!"

A glazed door at the end of the passage, advertised in letters of black paint upon the ground-glass as "Dispensary," opened, and a long, thin Dutchman, dressed in respectable black, looked out. He had been hoping that the drunken Englishman had been shot or stabbed in a saloon-brawl, or had fallen down in apoplexy in a liquor-bout, and had been brought home dead on a shutter at last. His long ginger-coloured face showed his cruel disappointment. But he said, as though the question had been asked:

"No, there is no telegram from Cape Town."

Then he shut the glazed door, and returned to the very congenial occupation in which he had been engaged, and Owen Saxham went heavily to the bedroom placed at the disposal of the _locum tenens_. The single window looked out upon a square garden with a tennis-ground, where the De Boursy-Williams girls had been used to play. The apricot on the south wall was laden with the as yet immature fruit, an abandoned household cat slept, unconscious of impending starvation, upon a bench under a pepper-tree.