The Dop Doctor Part 93

"Have I ever said I was unhappy?" she demanded. Her breath came quick and short.

"Your face has said so very often," returned Saxham, looking at it, "though you were too considerate to tell me so in words. But I ask you on this night that sees you freed from an illusion, to have courage and not yield to depression. Your fetters may be broken sooner than you think!"

"Owen!..."

She was paler than before, if that could be possible. She swayed a little, and caught at the back of a chair that was near, and there was terror in her darkened, dilated eyes....

"Do you say this to prepare me? Have you any illness? Do you mean that you are going to die?"

"I meant nothing ..." answered Saxham, "except that men are mortal, sometimes fortunately for the women who are bound to them! Go to bed, my child; to sleep will do you good."

"Good-night," she said, and dropped her head, and went away. He opened the door for her, and locked it after her, and went back to the writing-table, and sat in his chair. He gripped the arms of it in anguish, and the sweat of agony stood on the broad forehead where a woman who had loved him would have laid her lips.

He had repelled her, slighted her, wounded her.... He knew what it had cost him not to take those offered hands.... He was tortured and wrung in body and in soul as he took a key that hung upon his chain and unlocked a deep drawer, and took a flask from it that gurgled as if some mocking sprite had laughed aloud when he shook it close to his ear. He whom she had praised as honourable was a traitor no less than the dead man. He had said to her, months ago in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp:

"I may die, but I will never fail you!"

He had not died, and he had failed her. The Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp was drinking hard again.

LIX

Before you turn away in loathing of the man whose experience of Life's game of football had been chiefly gained from the ball's point of view, hear how it happened that the work of all those months of stern self-repression and strenuous denial had been rendered useless.

In the previous July, when Sir Danvers Muller was visiting Lord Williams of Afghanistan at Pretoria, Owen Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S., had been married to Lynette Bridget-Mary Mildare at the Registrar's Office, Gueldersdorp, and at the Catholic Church. One hour after the ceremony the happy pair left by the mail for Cape Town.

Gueldersdorp turned out to do them honour. We have heard the people cheer.

Three days and three nights of the Express, delayed in places by the wrecking of the line, and then the Alpine mountain-ranges sank and dwindled with the mercury in the thermometer. The little white towns succeeded each other like pearls on a green string. Humpy blue hills gave way to the flats, and then in the shadow of Table Mountain--Babel's confusion of tongues--and the stalwart flower of many nations, arrayed and armed for battle, and the glory, and pomp, and power of War.

The grey and white transports disgorged them, ants of sober, neutral colours, marching in columns to attack other ants. They grew upon the vision and filled it, and the sound of their feet was louder than the beating of the surf on Sea Point, and although martial music beat and blew them on--a brazen whirlwind dominating the mind, blaring at the ears--the trampling of men's feet and the hoofs of horses, and the rolling of iron-shod wheels, triumphed in the long-run.

Saxham engaged rooms at the Trafalgar Hotel, a handsome caravanserai standing in its own gardens at the top of Imperial Avenue, for himself and his wife, and the savage irony that can be conveyed in the term struck him, not for the first time since he had laid gold and silver on the open book, and endowed a woman with the gift of himself and all his worldly goods.

It was early in the forenoon. They were to sail next day. The big building was crammed, not only with officers under orders for the Front, and their wives, who had come to see them start. Society had descended like a flock of chattering, gaudily-plumaged paroquets upon the spot where new and exciting sensations were to be had. For the trampling feet and the rolling wheels that ceaselessly went North imparted one set of thrills, and the long trains of wounded and dying that met and pa.s.sed them, coming down as they went up, gave another kind. Amongst the poor dears in the trucks, and waggons, and Ambulance-carriages you might eventually find a man you knew.... The sporting odds were given and taken on these exciting chances; and the fluttering and screaming paroquets that crowded the Railway Stations, in spite of their gay feathers, bore no little resemblance to carrion-feeding birds of prey.

Saxham, Recently Attached Medical Staff, Gueldersdorp, suffered from the notoriety inseparable from the name of a man who has been thrice mentioned in Despatches, and has been publicly thanked by the representatives of an Imperial Government. The Interviewer yapped at his heels whithersoever he went, and the Correspondent strove to lure him into confidences, and Society fluttered at him with shrill squawkings, and wanted to know, don't you know? It must have been "devey" and "twee" to have gone through all those experiences. It was the year when "devey," and "twee," and similar abbreviations first became fashionable.

There were pleasanter episodes than these, when soldierly, bronzed warriors and simple, unaffected men of great affairs, expressed to Saxham in few words their belief that he had done his duty. The approval of these warmed him and helped to raise him higher. It was a little creature, a human insect no bigger than a bar-tender, that brought about the mischief.

There was an American bar on the ground-floor of the Trafalgar. Saxham stood upon the threshold of the place, replying to the questions of a group of Colonial officers, New South Wales Mounted Engineers and Canadian Rangers, when somebody suggested Drinks, and led the way in. Invited to make his choice from a long list of alcoholic mixtures, beginning with Whisky Straight, and ending with Bosom Caresser and Gin Sour, Saxham said that he would take a gla.s.s of ice-water.

"Well, boss, since you're on the Temperance Walk," said the Australian, his would-be host, a little huffily, "you'll please yourself, I suppose?"

He collected the preferences of his other guests, and gave the orders to the man behind the bar.

The barman had the misfortune to be a joker of the practical kind. Seeing Saxham held in conversation by one of the other men, he winked portentously at the New South Waler, and whispered in his ear.

The Australian understood. A reason for Saxham's abstinence had been given him. The new-made bridegroom as a rule shuns Alcohol. And in proportion to his desire to avoid, grows the determination of other men to compel him to drink. The bridegroom is fair game all the world over for the Rabelaisian jest and the clown's horseplay.

The bar-tender, hoisting his eyebrows to his scollops of gummed hair, winked at the New South Waler with infinite meaning, and pointed to a cut-gla.s.s carafe that stood on the shining nickel-plated counter. It appeared to contain pure sparkling water, but the liquor it held was knock-out whisky, a tintless drink of exceeding potency, above proof. The Australian shook his head. But he laughed under his neat moustache as he turned away, and the bar-tender concluded to carry his joke through. He dealt out the drinks to their respective owners, and with a dexterous sweep of a shirt-sleeved arm brought the innocent-seeming carafe and a gleaming, polished tumbler immediately before the square-faced hulking doctor with the queer blue eyes, whose pretty bride of three days was waiting for him in their room upon the third floor of the humming, overcrowded caravanserai. Saxham, absorbed by the thought of her, poured out a tumblerful of the clear, sparkling stuff, and had half emptied it before he realised the trick. His eyes grew red with injected blood, and his hair bristled on his head. He struck out once across the narrow counter. The long wall-mirror behind the bar-tender cracked and starred with the crashing impact of the joker's skull, and the man fell senseless, bleeding from the mouth and nostrils.

Another attendant came running at the crash, and the exclamations of those who had seen the swift retaliation wreaked. Saxham, leaving a banknote lying on the counter, wheeled abruptly, and went out of the bar.

His brain was on fire. His blood ran riot in his burning veins, and the vice he had deemed dead stirred in the depths of his being, lifted its slender head, and hissed, quivered a forked tongue, and struck with poisoned fangs. He went out into the purple night that wedded lovers would have found so perfect. The great white stars winked down at him jeeringly, and a little mocking breeze sn.i.g.g.e.red among the mimosas and palms of the hotel gardens. He pa.s.sed out of them into the many-tongued Babel of the streets, packed with humanity, throbbing with virile life, and tramped the magnificent avenues and wide electric-lighted streets of Cape Town with the thousands who had no beds at all, and the ten thousand who had, but preferred not to occupy them. To his narrow couch in the dressing-room adjoining Lynette's bedroom her husband dared not go.

So he wore the night out, doggedly wrestling with the demon that boils the blood of strong fierce men to forgetfulness of compacts and breach of oaths. Daybreak touched him with a chilly shivering finger, a hulking figure dozing on one of the white-painted iron seats near the Athletic Ground on Greenpoint Common. The last lingering star throbbed itself out, a white moth dying in the marvellous rose and orange fires of dawn, and the overwhelming, brooding bulk of Table Mountain gleamed, an emerald and sapphire splendour against the rising sun, and the two lesser peaks that are the mountain's bodyguard shone glowing in golden mail as Saxham got to his feet, and shook some order into the disorder of his dress, and faced hotelwards.

Despair was in the heart of the Dop Doctor, and for him the wonder of the dawn, the marvel of the sunrise meant no more than if he had been born blind. A menial's trick had wrought him confusion; his will, in the saving strength of which he had trusted, was a leaf in the wind of his desire.

Even now his throat and tongue were parched, his being thirsted for the liquor he had abjured.

What was to be done? What was to happen in the future? He asked himself in vain. As Mouille Point shut its fixed red eye in apparent derision, and the Greenpoint Light winked a thirteen-mile wink and went out, unlike the Hope that had burned in Saxham, and would be rekindled never more.

LX

Pity the man now as he sat brooding alone in the consulting-room, consumed by the thirst he shuddered at, once more an unwilling slave to the habit he abhorred.

He unscrewed the large flask and drank, and his lips curled back with loathing of the whisky, and his gorge rose at it as it went down. Then he put the flask back and locked the drawer, and laid his head down upon his folded arms in silence. No help anywhere! No hope, no joy, no love!

Death must come. Death should come, before the shadow of disgrace fell upon the Beloved, of whose love he knew now that he had never been worthy.

Well for Lynette that he had never won it! Happy for her that she had never even learned to care for him a little!

A few days more, and the great Victorian Age had drawn its last breath.

The people went about the London streets softly, as though their footsteps led them through the stately, grand, and solemn chamber where lay the august, ill.u.s.trious Dead.

A subdued, busy hum of preparation was perceptible to the ear. The eye saw the thoroughfares being covered with sand, the draperies of purple rising at the bidding of the pulley and the rope, the carts laden with wreaths and garlands of laurel, pa.s.sing from point to point, discharging their loads, often renewed.

A lady was ushered into Saxham's consulting-room as a long procession of those carts went creaking by. She was a dainty, piquante, golden-haired, blue-eyed little woman, quite beautifully dressed. Her gown was of black, in deference to the national mourning, but it glittered with sequins, and huge diamonds scintillated in her tiny ears, and she wore a mantle of royal ermine, that reached to the high heels of her little shoes. Her hat was of the toque description. Ermine and lace and artificial blooms from Parisian shop-window-gardens went to make up the delicious effect. A t.i.tled name adorned her card, which bore a Mayfair address. She seemed in radiant health. As Saxham waited, leaning forward in his consulting-chair, to receive the would-be patient's confidence, you can imagine those blue eyes of his, once so hard and keen, looking out of their hollowing caves with a sorrowful, clear sympathy that was very different from their old regard. To his women-patients he was exquisitely considerate. Only to one cla.s.s of patient was he merciless and unsparing.

Upon the woman who desired to rid herself of her s.e.x-privilege, upon the wedded wanton who sought to make of her body, designed by her Maker to be the cradle of an unborn generation, its sepulchre, Saxham's glance fell like a sharp curved sword. He wasted few words upon her, but each sentence, as it fell from his grim mouth, shrivelled and corroded, as vitriol dropped on naked human flesh. He listened now in silence that grew grimmer and grimmer, and as in flute-like accents, their smooth course hampered by the very slightest diffidence, the little lady explained, those heavy brows of his grew thunderous.

Ah, the tragic errand, the snaky purpose, coiled behind those graceful, ambiguous forms of speech! Not new the tale to the man who sat and heard.

She admired the black-haired, powerful head, and the square, pale face with its short, aquiline, rather heavily-modelled features, and the broad, white forehead that the single smudge of eyebrow barred pleased her, as it did most women. Only the man's vivid blue eyes were unpleasantly hard and fixed in their regard, and his mouth frightened her, it was so stern and set.

She was not as robust as she appeared, she said. When she had been married, the family physician had mentioned to her mother that it would hardly be advisable.... Delay for a year or two would be wise. And her husband did not care for children. He was quite willing. He had sent her to Saxham, in fact. Of course, the Profession of Surgery had made such huge strides that risk need not enter into consideration for a moment....

And heaps of her women friends did the same. And expense was absolutely no object, and would not Dr. Saxham----

Saxham struck a bell that was upon his table, and rose up with his piercing eyes upon her and crossed the room in two strides. He flung the door wide. He bowed to her with cool, withering, ironical courtesy as he stood waiting for her to depart.

She hesitated, laughed with the ring of hysteria, fluttered into speech.