Part 28 (1/2)
”The Colonel--and ain't 'e a Regular Oner! Them along of 'im--with the red shoulder-straps and brown leather leggin's, they're cav'l'ry Orficers o'
the Staff, they are. An' them others in khaki with puttees--syme as wot I've got on--they're the Medical Swells. Military Saw-boneses--twig? You can tell 'em, when you're near enough, by the bronze badges with a serpint climbin' up a stick inside a wreath, wot they 'ave on the fronts o' their caps an' on their jacket-collars, an' the instrument-cases wot they carries in their bres' pockets. I'm a bit in the know about these things, being a sort of Service man meself.”
Thus delicately did W. Keyse invite comment. Splendid additions had certainly been made to the martial outfit of the previous day. The tweed Norfolk had been replaced by a khaki jacket, evidently second-hand, and obligingly taken in by the lady of the boarding-house. A Corporal's stripe, purchased from a trooper of the B.S.A., who, as the consequence of over-indulgence in liquor and language, had one to sell, had been sewn upon the sleeve. The original owner had charged an extra tikkie for doing it, and it burned the arm that bore it like a vaccination-pustule on the fifth day.
”Being a sort of Service man meself,” repeated W. Keyse. He twitched the stripe carelessly into sight. ”C'manding orficer marked me down for this to-day,” he continued, with elaborate indifference, ”along of a Favourable Mention in the Cap'n's Guard Report. Nothin' much--little turn-up with a 'ulking big Dutch bloke, 'oo turned out to be a spy.”
In the act of feeling for the invisible moustache, he recognised the face under the Panama hat worn by the big neighbour in white drill, and blushes swamped his yellow freckles. The owner of that square, powerful face, no longer bloated and crimson, but pale and drawn, was the man who had stepped in to the rescue at the Dutchman's saloon-bar on the previous day, where Fate had stage-managed effects so badly that the heroic leading att.i.tude of W. Keyse had perforce given place to the minor role of the juvenile walking-gentleman. ”Watto!” he began. ”It's you, Mister! I bin wantin' to say thank----” But a surge of the crowd flattened W. Keyse against the green-painted iron railings surrounding a munic.i.p.al gum-tree, and the big man was lost to view. Perhaps it was as well that the acquaintance made under conditions remote from respectability should not be renewed. But W. Keyse would have preferred to thank the rescuer.
The taking over of the Hospital was accomplished in a moment, to the disappointment of the ceremony-loving Briton and the Colonial of British race, to say nothing of the Kaffirs and the Barala, who antic.i.p.ated a big indaba. The little party of officers in khaki walked up the gravel-drive between the carefully-tended gra.s.s plats to the stoep where the Mayor of Gueldersdorp, with the matron, house-surgeon, secretary, and several prominent members of the Committee--including Alderman Brooker, puffy-cheeked and yellow-eyed for lack of a night's rest--waited. Military Authority saluted Civic Dignity, shook hands, and the thing was done.
Inspection followed.
”The warr'ds, said ye?” The Chief Medical Officer, a tall raw-boned personage, very evidently hailed from North of the Tweed. ”I'm obliged to ye, ma'am,” he addressed the fl.u.s.tered matron, ”but the warr'ds an' the contents o' the beds in them are no' to say of the firr'st importance--at least, whaur I'm concerr'ned. With your permeesion we'll tak' a look at the Operating Theatre, and overhaul the sterileezing plant, and the sanitary arrangements, and maybe, after a gliff at the kitchens, there would be a moment to spend in ganging through the warr'ds. Unless the Colonel would prefer to begin wi' them?” He turned a small, twinkling pair of blue eyes set in dry wrinkles upon his Chief.
”Not I, Major. This is your department. But I shall ask five minutes more grace in the interests of the friend I spoke of, Dr. Saxham; with whom I made an appointment at the half-hour.”
”You're no' by any chance meaning the Saxham that wrote 'The Diseases of Civilisation,' are ye, Colonel? I mind a sentence in it that must have been a douse of cauld watter--toch! vitriol would be the better worr'd--in the faces o' some o' the dandy operators. '_Young men_,' he ca'ed them, as if he was a greybeard himsel', 'young men who, led to take up Surgery by the houp o' gains an' notoriety, have given themselves nae time to learn its scienteefic principles--showy operators, who diagnose wi' the knife an' endeavour to dictate to Nature and no' to a.s.sist her.' And yet Saxham could daur! 'I shall prove that the gastric ulcer can be cured wi'out exceesion,' he said, or they say he said in the _Lancet_ report o' the operation on the Grand Duke Waldimir--I cam' across a reprint o' it no'
lang ago--when Sir Henry McGavell sent for him, wi' the sweat o' mortal terror soakin' his Gladstone collar. He cut a hole in the Duke's stomach, ye will understand, in front o' the ulcer, clipped off the smaller intesteene, spliced the twa together wi' a Collins b.u.t.ton, and by a successful deveece o' plumbing--naething less--earned the eterr'nal grat.i.tude o' the autocrat an' the everlastin' currses o' the Nihilists.
All that, seven years ago, an' the thing is dune the day wi'oot a hair's-breadth difference. For why? Ye canna paint the lily, or improve upon perfection. Toch!... Colonel, that man would be worth the waitin'
for, if he stood in your friend's shoes the day!”
”Rejoice then, Major, and be exceeding glad, for I believe this is the man who wrote the book and plugged--or was it plumbed--the potentate.”
The Chief Medical Officer rubbed his hands. ”I promise myself a crack or twa wi' him, then.... But how is it a busy chiel like that can get awa'
from his private patients and his Hospital warr'ds in the London Winter Season Ahem! ahem!”
By the haste the Medical Officer developed in changing the conversation, it was plain that he had recalled the circ.u.mstances under which the ”busy chiel” had turned his back upon the private patients and the Hospital wards. ”Colonel,” he went on, ”I could be wis.h.i.+ng this varry creeditable-appearing inst.i.tution--judging from the ootside o't--were twice as big as it is, wi' maybe an Annexe or so to the back of that.”
”My dear Major, I never knew you really satisfied and happy but once, and that was when we had fifty men down with dysentery and fever in a tin-roofed Railway goods-shed, and a hundred and seventy more under leaky canvas, and you were out of chlorodyne and quinine, and could get no milk.”
”That goes to prove the eleementary difference between the male an' the female character. A man will no' keep on dithering for what he kens he canna' get. A woman, especially a young an' pretty----” He broke off to say: ”Toch! will ye hark to Beauvayse! The very name of the s.e.x sets that lad rampaging.”
”Beautiful! I tell you, sir,” the handsome, fair-haired young aide-de-camp was emphatically a.s.suring that stout, rubicund personage, the Mayor, ”the loveliest girl I ever saw in my life, or ever shall see--bar none! I saw her first on the Recreation Ground, the day a gang of Boer blackguards insulted some nuns who were in charge of a ladies' school, and to-day she pa.s.sed with two other Sisters of Mercy, and I touched my hat to her as the Staff dismounted at the gate.”
”Another _rara avis_, Beau?” the Colonel called across the intervening group of talkers. The group of khaki-clad figures separated, and turned first to the Chief, then to the bright-eyed, bright-faced enthusiast.
White teeth flashed in tanned faces, chaff began:
”In love again, for the first and only time, Toby?”
”Since he lost his heart to Miss What's-her-name, that pretty 'Jollity'
girl, with the double-barrelled repeating wink, and the postcard grin.”
”Don't forget the velvet-voiced beauty of the dark, moonless night on the Cape Town Hotel verandah!”
”_She_ turned out to be a Hottentot lady, didn't she?”
”Cavalry Problem No. 1. Put yourself in Lieutenant the Right Hon. the Lord Viscount Beauvayse's place, and give in detail the precautions you would have taken to insure the transport of your heart uninjured from the Staff Headquarters to the Hospital Gate. Show on the map the disposition of the enemy, whether desirous to enslave, or likely to be mashed....”