The Dop Doctor Part 45

"The Mother.... How can she approve your joining the ranks of the Shrieking Sisterhood?"

"She knows," Lynette explained, with adorable gravity, "that I should never shriek."

"How will you bear parting from her? And how will she endure parting from you?"

The girl's mobile lips began to tremble. The luminous amber eyes were dimmed with moisture as she said:

"It will not be losing me. Nor could I ever bear to leave her if I did not know that I should come back. But I shall come back. And she will ask me what I have done. And I shall tell her: 'This, and this, and all the rest, my Mother, for the love of you, and for the sake of those others who once sat in darkness and the Shadow of Death, and now have found the Way of Peace.'"

"And those others, Beatrice?"

Saxham knew now the secret of the haunting familiarity of the beautiful girlish face. The delicate oval outline, the pale wild-rose colouring, the reddish-brown of the fine, glistening tresses, the amber-hazel of the wistful, brilliant eyes, reproduced to a wonderful degree the modelling and tinting of the wonderful Guido portrait, the white-draped head in the Barberini Gallery, which, in defiance of Bertolotti and the _Edinburgh Review_, will always be a.s.sociated with the name of the sorrowful-sweet heroine of the most sombre of s.e.x-tragedies.

"Why do you call me Beatrice?" she asked, with that sudden darkening of those luminous eyes. He told her:

"Because you are like the Daughter of the Cenci. Sh.e.l.ley used to be my favourite among the English poets, and when I first went to Rome, years ago, the first thing I did was to hunt up the portrait in the Barberini Palace Gallery; and it is marvellous. No reproduction has ever done justice to it. One could not forget it if one tried."

"I am glad I am like Beatrice," she said slowly. "I have always loved and pitied her. I pray to her as my friend among the Blessed Souls in Paradise, and she always hears. And by-and-by she will help me when I go out into the world----"

"To look for those others," Saxham interpolated. "Tell me who they are?"

She looked at him, and for an instant the virginal veil fell from her, and there was strange and terrible knowledge in her eyes.

"They are women, and girls, and children," she answered him. "They are the most unhappy of all the souls that suffer on earth. For they are the slaves and the victims and the martyrs of the unrelenting, merciless, dreadful pleasures of Man. And I want to go among them and lift them up, and say to them, 'You are free!' And one day I will do it."

There was a dull burning under Saxham's opaque skin, and a drumming in his ears. His authority and knowledge fell from him as that virginal veil had fallen from her; he stood before her humbled and ashamed, shunning her eyes, that penetrated and scathed his soul as the eyes of an avenging Angel might, with their clear, simple, direct estimate of himself and his fellow-men. And the distance between them, that had seemed to be lessening as they talked, spread illimitably vast; a dark, sunless plain, bounded by a livid horizon, reflected in the slimy pools of foul swamps and pestilential marshes, where poisonous reptiles bred in slimy, writhing knots, and the Eaters of Human Flesh lurked under the tangled shade of the jungles. Less vile of life, even in his degradation, than many men, he felt himself beside this girl a moral leper.

"Unclean, unclean!"

While that voice yet echoed in the desert places of his soul, he heard her saying:

"I don't know why I should talk to you of these plans and projects of mine. I never have spoken of them yet to anyone except the Mother.

But--you spoke of sympathy with those who suffer. I think you have it, Dr.

Saxham, and that you have suffered yourself. It is in your face. And--you are not to suppose that I believe all men to be----"

He ended for her: "To be devouring beasts. No; but we are bad enough, the best of us, if the truth must be told. And--I _have_ suffered, Miss Mildare, at the hands of men and women, and through the unwritten laws, as through the accepted inst.i.tutions of what is called Society, most brutally. I would not soil and scorch your ears with the recital of my experiences, for all that a miracle could give me back. I swear to you that I would not!"

She touched the little ears with a smile that had pathos in it.

"They have heard much that is evil, these ears of mine."

"And the evil has left them undefiled," said Saxham.

"Thank you!"

She begged him again not to forget the sick child at Mrs. Greening's shelter, and hurried away, keeping her face from Saxham. He knew that there was no hope for him, that there never would be any. And he loved her--hungrily, hopelessly loved her. Dear innocent, wise enthusiast, with her impossible scheme for cleansing the Augean stable of this world!

Chivalrous child-Quixote, tilting at the Black Windmills, whose sails are whirled by burning blasts from h.e.l.l, and whose millstones grind the souls of Eve's lost daughters into the dust that makes the devil's daily bread--how should the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp dare to love her? But he did not cease to, for all the height of his self-knowledge and all the depth of his self-scorn.

He seemed to Lynette a strange, harsh man, but there was something in him that won her liking. He had a stern mouth, she thought, and sorrowful, angry eyes, with that thunder-cloud of black, lowering eyebrow above them.

And he looked at her as though she reminded him of someone he knew.

Perhaps he had sisters, though they could hardly be very young. Or it was not a sister. He must be quite old--the Mother had thought him certainly thirty-five--but possibly he had a young wife in England--or somewhere else? And she had spoken to him of her great project. She wondered now at that impulse of confidence. Perhaps she had yielded to it to convince herself that her enthusiasm was as strong, her purpose still as clear, as ever, in the mirror of the Future; that no gay, youthful reflection had ever risen up of late days between it and her wistful eyes when she peeped in. The remembered image of the handsome face that had laughed, even as Beauvayse had declared:

"Even if I die to-day, it won't end there. I shall think of you, and long for you, and worship you wherever I am."

The thought of Beauvayse's dying was horrible, intolerable. His name came after the Mother's in her prayers. He had asked her to keep the secret--his and hers--and called her such exquisite, impossible things for promising that the mere remembrance of his words and his eyes as he said them in that low, pa.s.sionate, eager voice, took her breath deliciously.

"_Sweetest, kindest, loveliest...._" She whispered them to herself as she hurried back to comfort worried Mrs. Greening with the news that the doctor was coming.

Meanwhile Saxham went on his accustomed way between the long line of waggons and the corrugated-iron lined huts on the other hand, in a cross-fire of appeals, requests, complaints. Nothing escaped him. He would pa.s.s by, with the most casual glance and nod, women who volubly protested themselves dying, and single out the face that bore the dull, scorched flush of fever or the yellow or livid stamp of rheumatism, or ague, or liver-trouble, with a beckon of his hand, and the owner of such a face, invariably declaring herself a well woman, would be summarily dealt with, and dosed with tabloid or tincture out of the inexhaustible wallet he carried, slung about his shoulders by its webbing band.

"Dokter," screeched a portly Tante in a soiled cotton bedgown and flapping kappje, appearing, copper stewpan in hand, from between the canvas tilt-curtains of a living-waggon. "You are come at last; the Lord be thanked for it! I have much, much trouble inside." She groaned, and laid her fat, unoccupied hand upon the afflicted area, adding: "I feel I shall not be quite wholesome here."

"Wat scheelt er aan, Tante?" He spoke the Taal with ease.

The large Tante snorted:

"What is the matter? Do you ask me what is the matter? As if a dokter oughtn't to tell me that! But the Engelsch are regular devils for asking questions. Since you must know, I have a mighty wallowing under my ap.r.o.n-band, and therewith a pain. How is it begun? It is begun since middageten yesterday. And little Dierck here has the belly-ache, and is giddy in the head."

"Little Dierck will have something worse than the belly-ache, and you also, if you eat of broth or vegetables cooked in a vessel as unclean as that, mevrouw."

"Hoe?" The large flabby face under the expansive kappje became red as the South African sunset. She flourished the venerable copper stewpan, its rim liberally garnished with verdigris, ancient deposit of fatty matters acc.u.mulated at the bottom. "Do you call my good stewpan, that my mother cooked beef and succotash and pottage-herbs in before me, an unclean vessel--you? And were the pan otherwise than clean as my hand--as my ap.r.o.n!"--a double comparison of the unfortuitous kind--"how should I alter matters in a heathen place like this?" Her large bosom rocked tumultuously. "Dwelling at the bottom of a mud-hole like a frog, O G.o.d of my fathers! with bullets as big as pumpkins trundling overhead, ready to whip your head off your body if you as much as stick your nose above ground--the accursed things!"

"They are pumpkins sent by your own countrymen, Tante, so you ought to speak of them more civilly. And--scour the pot with a double-handful of clean sand; it will be for your health as well as the kind's. Come here, jongen--give me a look at the little tongue." The boy went to him confidently, and stuck it out, looking up with innocent wide eyes in the square, powerful face, as Saxham swung round his wallet, continuing, "Here, mevrouw, is a packet of Epsom salts. Take half of it, stirred in a cup of warm water, to-morrow morning fasting----"

"Alamachtig!" she protested. "Is that the Engelsch way of doctoring? To put another belly-grief on the top of the one you have got, what sense is in that?"

"It is the new nail, Tante, that drives out the rusty old one. Give the boy a teaspoonful in half a cup of water, and remember to scour the pans."

Saxham pa.s.sed on, stepping neatly with his small, tan-booted, spurred feet between the dung and chip fires curling up in blue smoke-spirals, and the sprawling children, seeming as though he did not notice them, yet catching up one that had a rash, and satisfying himself that the eruption was innocent ere he pa.s.sed on, visiting every waggon-dwelling and cave-refuge, rating the inhabitants of some, dosing the occupants of others, emerging from three or four of the stuffy, ill-smelling places with a heavy frown that boded ill for somebody. For though Famine had not yet begun to gnaw the vitals of those immured in Gueldersdorp, Disease had here and there sprung into active, threatening, infectious being, menacing the crowded community with invisible, maleficent forces. Soon the hospitals were to be crowded to the doors, to remain crowded for many months to come; and the cry, "Room for the sick! more room!" was to go up unceasingly.

Coming out of a miserable habitation, where lay a woman in rheumatic fever, whose three children had developed measles on the previous day, and, seeing about the door of a neighbouring hovel a particularly noisome aggregation of garbage and waste, he paused but to give a brief direction to the mild-faced Sister who had a.s.sumed charge of the sick. Then his voice rang out above all the feminine and childish Babel, strong, resonant, masculine:

"Where are the head-boys of the gangs that I told off to clean up and carry ash-buckets to the dumping-place?"

Whence, under cover of night, the garbage and waste were carted to the destructor in connection with the Acetylene Gas Company's plant, soon to be shattered by one of Meisje's sh.e.l.ls. There was no answer. Saxham took the worn hunting-crop from under his arm, and with an easy movement shook out the twisted thong.

"Where are those two boys? Jim Gubo! Rasu!"

A pale young woman peeling potatoes at her door looked up knowingly. "They won't carry away a cabbage-leaf unless they're bribed, and they open their mouths wider every day. It's a tikkie a bucket now."

The young woman went back to her potatoes. The offenders, visibly quaking, crept from under a waggon, where they had been gambling with dry mealies for ill-gotten tikkies. A big Kaffir boy in ragged tan-cords and the crownless brim of an Oxford straw, with a red-turbaned, blue dungaree-clad, supple Oriental of the coolie cla.s.s. Jim Gubo, with liberal display of ivory, a.s.sured the Baas, in defiance of the Baas's own eyes and the organ in juxtaposition, that the work had been regularly done. Rasu the Sweeper, with many oaths and protestations, a.s.sured the Presence that such neglect as was apparent was owing to the incapacity of the hubshi and his myrmidons, Rasu's own share of the labour and that of his fellow-countryman being scrupulously performed.

The Presence made short work of Kaffir and Hindu. Shrill feminine clamours filled the air as the singing lash performed its work of castigation; and while Saxham scored repentance upon the hide of his blacker brother, holding him writhing, shouting, and bellowing at the full stretch of one muscular arm, as he plied the other he kept a foot on Rasu the Sweeper, so as to have him handy when his turn came. Meanwhile, the Oriental, with tears and lamentable howlings, wound about the doctor's leg, a vocal worm, deprecating tyranny.

"Your Honour is my father and mother. Let the hand of justice refrain from excoriating the person of the unfortunate, wreaking double vengeance upon the hubshi, who is but fuel for h.e.l.l, like all his accursed race, and full explanation shall be made."

He was jerked upward by the scruff, as, smarting, blubbering Africa retired to the shadow of the waggons.