Part 45 (2/2)
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 wors.h.i.+p 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 hubs.h.i.+ 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 hubs.h.i.+, 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.
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