Part 35 (2/2)
”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 was.h.i.+ng-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 was.h.i.+ng. At least, it looks like a basket of was.h.i.+ng.”
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 was.h.i.+ng 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.
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