The Dop Doctor Part 35

You could get vegetables from the Chinaman, who continued to cultivate onions, cabbages, potatoes, and melons in the market-gardens about the town, imperturbable under shot and sh.e.l.l, his large straw hat affording an admirable target from the Boer sniper's point of view, as metaphorically he gathered his fat harvest of dollars from the soil. What you could not get for any amount of dollars was peace and rest, clean air, and s.p.a.ce to stretch your cramped-up limbs in, until Sunday came, bringing the Truce of G.o.d for Englishman and Transvaaler.

The Hospital, like each of the smaller hospitals that had sprung from the parent stalk, was crowded. The operating theatre had been turned into a ward where the lane between the beds just gave room for a surgeon or a nurse to pa.s.s, and hourly the cry went up: "Room, more room for the wounded and the sick!" And among these Saxham worked, night and day, like a man upheld by forces superhuman.

"By-and-by," he would say impatiently, when they urged him to take rest, and would bend his black brows, and hunch those great shoulders of his to the work again.

"Ye have a demon, man," said Taggart, Major of the R.A.M.C., himself a haggard-eyed but tireless labourer in the red fields of pain. "At three o'

the smalls ye got to your bed, and at six ye made the rounds, at seven ye were dealing with a select batch o' sh.e.l.l-fire an' rifle-shot casualties--our friends outside being a gey sicht better marksmen when refreshed by a guid nicht's sleep; at eight ye had had your bit o'

breakfast, and got doon your gun an' gane oot for an hour o' calm, invigorating sniping on the veld before returning punctually at ten o' the clock to attack the business o' the day, wi' a bag o' twa Boers to your creedit."

"I only got one, Major. The other chap hobbled down bandaged, upon crutches, to-day, and had a pot-shot at me as I lay doggo behind my particular stone. I put up my hat on a stick, and--see!" Saxham gravely exhibited a felt Service smasher with a clean hole through it, an inch above the lining-edge. "He's a snowy-locked, h.o.a.ry-bearded, Father Noah-hatted patriarch of seventy at least, and very proud of his shooting, and I've let him think he got me this time, just to make him happy for one night. To-morrow he is to make the painful discovery that I am still in the flesh."

"Aweel, aweel! But I would point out to ye that Fortune is a fickle, tricksy jade, and the luck o' the game might fall to your patriarch in the antediluvian headgear to-morrow."

Then the luck of the game, thought the hearer, deep in that wounded heart of his, would not only be with the patriarch. And the great puzzle, Life, would be solved for good.

Taggart had said he, Saxham, had a demon. He could have answered that only by hard, unceasing, unremitting work, or, when no more work was there to do, by the fierce excitement of those grilling hours spent lying behind the stone, was the demon to be kept out. Of all things he dreaded inactivity, and though he would drop upon his cot in the tiny bedroom that had been a Hospital ward-pantry, and sleep the heavy sleep of weariness the moment his head touched the pillow, yet he would start awake after an hour or two, parched with that savage, unquenched thirst, and drink great draughts of the brackish well-water, boiled for precaution's sake, and tramp the confined s.p.a.ce until the grip of desire grew slack. But he had never once yielded since the night when a man with the eye and voice of a leader among men had come to the house in Harris Street and taken him by the hand.

Do you say impossible, that the man in whom the habit of vice had formed should be able to cast off his degrading weakness, like a shameful garment, by sheer force of will, and be sane and strong and masterful again? I say, possible with this man. You see him plucked from the slough by the strong hand of manly fellowship, and nerved and strengthened, if only for a little while, to play the game for the sake of that other's belief in him. Such influence have such men among their fellows for good or for ill.

You can see the Dop Doctor upon this brilliant November morning mounting a charger lent him by his friend, a handsome Waler full of mettle and spirit--oats not being yet required for the support of humans--and calling au revoir to Taggart as he rides away from the Hospital gates followed by an orderly of the R.A.M.C. in a spider, pulled by a wiry, shabby little Boer mare.

"The man rides like a fox-hunter," commented Taggart, noticing the ease of the seat, the light handling of the rein, the way in which the fidgety, spirited beast Saxham rode answered to the gentling hand and the guiding pressure of the rider's knee, as a sharp storm of rifle-fire swept from the enemy's northern trenches, and the Mauser bullets spurted sand between the wheels of the spider and under the horses' bellies.

Saxham spurred ahead, the spider following. The bullet-pierced, grey felt smasher hat, a manly and not unpicturesque headgear, sat on the man's close-cropped head with a soldierly air becoming to the square, opaque-skinned face that had power and strength and virility in every line of it. The blue eyes, under their black bar of meeting eyebrows, were clear now, and the short aquiline nose, rough-hewn but not coa.r.s.e, and the grimly-tender mouth were no longer thickened and swollen and reddened by intemperance. The figure, perfect in its manliness, if marred by the too heavy muscular development of the throat and the slightly bowed shoulders, looked well in the jacket of Service khaki, the Bedford cords and puttees and spurred brown boots that had replaced the worn white drills, the blue shirt and shabby black kamarband and canvas shoes. Looking at Saxham, even with knowledge of his past, you could not have a.s.sociated a personality so striking and distinguished, an individuality so original and so strong, with the idea of the tipsy wastrel, wallowing like a hog in self-chosen degradation.

The Mother-Superior, coming up the ladder leading out of her underground abode as the horseman and the attendant spider drew near, thought of Bartolomeo Colleoni, as you see him, last of the great Condottieri, in the bronze by great Verrochio at Venice to-day. In armour, complete in the embossed morion, one with the great Flemish war-horse, he sat to the sculptor, the baton of Captain-General, given him by the Doge of Venice, in the powerful hand that only a little while before aided his picked men of the infantry to pack and harden snow about the granite boulders of the mountains in the Val Seriana, and sent the giant snow-b.a.l.l.s thundering down, crushing b.l.o.o.d.y lanes through the ranks of the Venetian cavalry ma.s.sed in the narrow defile below, and striking chill terror to the hearts of Doge and Prince and Senate.

Only the baton was a well-worn staghorn-handled crop, Squire Saxham's gift, together with a hunter, to his boy Owen, at seventeen. It was one of the few relics of home that had stayed by Saxham during his wanderings.

He reined up now, saluting the Mother-Superior with marked respect.

"Good-morning, ma'am. All well with you and yours?"

She answered with unusual hesitation:

"All the Sisters are well, thank you. But--if you could spare me a minute, Dr. Saxham, there is a question I should like to ask."

"As many minutes as you wish, ma'am. It is not your day for the Hospital, I think?"

"Ah, no!" she said, with the velvety South of Ireland vowel-inflection.

"We keep Wednesday for the Women's Laager, always. Many of them are so miserable, poor souls, about their husbands and sons and brothers who are in the trenches, or who have been killed, and then there are the children to be cared for and washed. Not only the siege orphans, but so many who have sick or neglectful mothers. It takes us the whole day once we get there."

Saxham dismounted as she stooped to seize the end of a blue cotton-covered washing-basket impelled from below by an ascending Sister. The spider pulled up under cover of the brick-and-corrugated-iron house vacated by the railway-official, as another short storm of riflery cracked and rattled among the eastern foothills, and a whistling hurry of the sharp-nosed little messengers of death pa.s.sed through Gueldersdorp. Some of them hit and flattened on the gable of the railway-official's house, one went through the leathern splashboard of the spider. Saxham moved instinctively to place himself between the closely-standing group of nuns and possible danger.

"No, no!" they cried, as one woman, their placid, cheerful tones taking a shade of anxiety. "You must not do that!"

"I know you are all well-seasoned," he said, looking at them with the smile that made his stern face changed and gentle.

"I am not so sure. The bullets come in the usual way of things. We take our chance of them," the Mother-Superior answered. But she pressed her lips together and grew pale as a faint cry came up from the subterranean dwelling, roofed with sheets of corrugated iron laid upon steel rails, and made bombproof with bags of earth. And Saxham, looking at the fine face, with its worn lines of fatigue and over-exertion, and noting the deep shadowy caves that housed the great luminous grey eyes, said:

"I think we must have you take some rest, or I shall be having my best helper on my hands as a patient. And that won't do, you know."

"No, it would not do," she said, looking fully and seriously at him. "And therefore I think our Lord will not permit it. But if He should, be sure another will rise up to fill my place."

"Whoever your successor might be," said Saxham sincerely, "she would not fulfil my ideal of an absolutely efficient nurse, as you do. So from the personal, if not the altruistic point of view, let me beg you to be careful."

"I take all reasonable care," she told him. "It is true, the work has been heavy this week; but to-morrow is Sunday, and we shall rest all day and sleep at the Convent. Indeed, some of us have taken it in turn to be on guard there every night, or nothing would be left us."

"I understand."

He knew how prowlers and night-thieves made harvest in the darkness among the deserted dwellings since Police and Town Guardsmen had been requisitioned to man the trenches. She went on:

"The upper story of the house is sheer wreck, as you may see, but the ground-floor is quite habitable. So much so that if the sh.e.l.ls did not strike the poor dear place so often, I should suggest your turning it into a Convalescent Home."

"We may have to try the plan yet," said Saxham. "The Railway Inst.i.tute is frightfully overcrowded."

"And," she told him, "a sh.e.l.l struck there yesterday evening, and burst in the larger ward."

"I had not heard of it," he said. "Was anybody hurt?"

"No one, thank G.o.d! But the fire was difficult to put out, until one of the Sisters thought of sand."

"It was an incendiary sh.e.l.l?" Disgust and contempt swelled his deep-cut nostrils and flamed from his vivid blue eyes. "And yet these Kaiser's gunners, in their blue-and-white Death or Glory uniforms, can hardly pretend ignorance of the Geneva Convention. But--your question?"

"It is--Children!" She beckoned to the two nuns, who stood at a little distance apart holding the washing-basket between them. "I will ask you to go on slowly before me with the basket. I will overtake you when I have spoken to Dr. Saxham."

"Surely, Reverend Mother." One tall, pale, and thin, the other round and rosy, they were alike in the placid, cheerful serenity of their good eyes and readily smiling lips. "And won't we be after taking the bundle?"

"No, no! It is heavy, and I am as strong as both of you together."

"Very well, Reverend Mother."

They were obediently moving on.

"A moment." Saxham stopped them. "If you two ladies have no objection to a little crowding, the spider will hold both of you as well as the bundle and the basket of washing. At least, it looks like a basket of washing."

All three laughed as they accepted his offer, a.s.suring him that his suspicions were correct. For neither Kaffir laundrywoman or Hindu _dhobi_ would go down any more to the washing troughs by the river, for fear of crossing that Stygian flood of blackness rivalling their own, supposing, as Beauvayse once suggested, that there is a third-cla.s.s ferry for n.i.g.g.e.rs and persons of colour? And from the waterworks on the Eastern side of the town the supply had been cut off by the enemy, so that the taps of Gueldersdorp had ceased to yield.

Old wells and springs had been reopened, cleaned, and brought into use for drinking purposes, so that of a water-famine there could be no fear. But the element became expensive when retailed by the tin bucketful, a bath a rare luxury when the contents of the said bucket might be spilled or thrown away in the course of the gymnastics wherewith the sable or coffee-brown bearer sought to evade the travelling unexploded sh.e.l.l or the fan-shaped charge of shrapnel. Therefore, the Sisters had turned laundry-women. You could hear the sound of Sister Tobias's smoothing-iron coming up from below, thump-thumping on the blanketed board.

"And where do you think we get the water, now?" the rosy Sister, in process of being packed into the spider, leaned over the wheel to ask.

"Not from the Convent?" Saxham thought of the strip of veld between there and the Hospital, even more fraught with peril than the patch he had just traversed, or the distance yet to be covered between the Sisters'

bombproof and the Women's Laager, where Death, with the red sickle in his fleshless hand, stalked openly from dawn to nightfall.

"From the Convent, carrying it across after dark. And no well there, either, that you'd get the fill of a teaspoon out of"--a "tayspoon" it was in the rosy Sister's Dublin brogue--"and yet there's water there."

"But how----" Saxham began. The Mother-Superior shook her head, and the rosy Sister was silent.