Part 50 (1/2)
scientific side and his sledge-hammer manner. But that a man with a record of that kind should set his heart upon a girl like Lynette Mildare is horrible, intolerable, Wrynche; and while, for the man's own sake, I should respect his beastly secret, for _her_ sake and in _her_ interests, and if I consider that he's putting himself forward at the risk of my--my prospects and my hopes, I shall make use of what I know.”
”You don't mean you'd split on the man!” splutters Bingo; ”because, if you do----”
”All's fair in Love and War,” says Beauvayse, with a ring of defiance in his pleasant, boyish voice, and a gleam of triumph in his beautiful sleepy eyes. ”And this is Love in War. You've put a trump card in my hand against Saxham, whether you meant to or not, and when the time comes, I shall play it.”
He gets up and lounges away. And Captain Bingo, emitting another wailing whistle as he slews round to stare after the tall, retreating figure with the crisp, golden head, is sure of nothing so certainly as that Beauvayse will play that trump card. He is repentant for having broached the Doctor's secret as he climbs up by the narrow iron stair that leads out upon the roof of Nixey's Hotel, to relieve his commanding officer at the binoculars.
x.x.xV
You are invited, the very Sunday upon which the previously-recorded conversation took place, to make the acquaintance of the sprightly P.
Blinders, Acting-Secretary to Commandant Selig Brounckers, Head Laager, Transvaal Republic and Orange Free State's United Forces, Tweipans.
P. Blinders, a long-bodied, short-legged young Dutch apothecary of the Free State, with short-sighted eyes behind hugely magnifying spectacles, and many fiery pimples bursting through the earthy crust of him, possibly testifying to the presence of volcanic fires beneath, had acted in the clerkly capacity to the Volksraad at Groenfontein. When Government did not sit at the Raad Zaal, Blinders, as calmly as any ordinary being might have done, dispensed jalap, castor-oil, and pill-stick over the counter of his store. These are the three heroic besoms employed by enlightened and conscientious Boer housewives for sweeping out the interiors of their families.
Pill-stick is rhubarb-pill in the concrete. The thrifty mother buys a foot or so, and pinches off a bolus of the required magnitude thrice in the year. No dosing is allowed in between; the members of the family get it when the proper time comes round. To everyone his or her share, not forgetting the baby.
When P. Blinders came away, he left his grandfather to keep store, previously explaining to the aged man the difference between hydrocyanic acid and almond-essence for cake-flavouring, powders of corrosive sublimate and Gregory's. By a subtle transition the apothecary-clerk then became the epistolary right-hand of General Brounckers, whose wife, son, and grandson, with P. Blinders, made up his personal staff. And round the Commandant's living-waggon, where they harboured, Chaos reigned and Confusion prevailed, and disputes in many tongues--English severely excepted--made Babel. And, side by side with the domestic, decent virtues weltered all the vices rampant in the Cities of The Plain.
It goes without saying that the fresh site of Head Laager had been cunningly chosen. It occupied a s.h.i.+eld-shaped plateau among low, flat-topped hills. The single street of Tweipans bounded it upon the east, and a rocky ridge upon the western side that might have been the vertebra of some huge reptile of the Diluvian Period, protected camp and village from British sh.e.l.l-practice.
Signs of this were not lacking. Waggons with shattered timbers and fantastically twisted irons, broken carts, and guns dismounted from their carriages, were to be seen, near the dismembered or disembowelled bodies of the beasts that had drawn them. Dead horse or mule or bullock, decomposing in the sun, seemed to have nothing of offence for Republican noses. The yellow smear of lyddite was everywhere, and, looking over the rock-rampart upon the works below, you saw it like a blight, or yolk of egg spilt upon a war-map.
Family parties bivouacked in those bottle-shaped trenches where each fighting unit had his separate box of provisions sunk in the earth beside him, and his cooking-fire of chips and dry dung, and ate and slept and smoked and shot as he thought good. And in despite of such fires, the unrestricted s.p.a.ce and pure hill-air notwithstanding, the noisome ditches wherein the cribbed, cabined, and confined defenders of Gueldersdorp alternately grilled and soaked, were alleys of musk-roses, marvels of sanitary purity compared with the works of the besiegers, and the abominable camps, where, in the absence of a nocturnally active Quartermaster-Sergeant, with his band of pioneers, stench took you by the throat and nose, while filth absorbed you over the ankles.
A whiff of peculiarly overpowering potency, reaching you, made you turn away, and then the immense disorder of the camp seized and held your eyes.
Arms, saddles, karosses, blankets, clothing, panniers of provisions and boxes of ammunition, were piled about in mountainous heaps. Of military organisation, discipline, authority, law, as these are understood by civilised nations, there was nothing whatever. Men in well-worn velveteens and felt billyc.o.c.ks, hobn.o.bbed with men in the gaudiest uniforms ever evolved by the theatrical costumier. Green velvet and gold lace, topped by c.o.c.ked hats that had despoiled the ostrich to make a human biped vainly ridiculous, adorned Ginirals and Cornels that had no rigiments belongun'
to 'um at all at all! and had come over from the Distressful Country to make a bould bid for glory, with the experience of warfare acquired while lurking behind hedges with shot-guns, in waiting for persons in disfavour with the Land League.
Patriarchs of eighty years and callow schoolboys of sixteen fought side by side with the fine flower and the l.u.s.ty prime of Boer manhood, and many had their wives and children with them under the Transvaal colours, and not a few had brought their mothers. When an officer had any order to give his men, he prefaced it with the Boer equivalent for ”Hi!” When the men had heard as much as they considered necessary, they would say, ”Come on; let's be going,” and slouch away.
P. Blinders, being a Dutchman of the Free State, minded smells no more than a Transvaal Boer. Yet it sometimes occurred to him as odd that the duties of a Secretary should embrace the peeling of potatoes and the performance of other duties of the domestic kind.
He was squatting in the shadow of the Commandant's living-waggon, polis.h.i.+ng off the last of a panful, when Van Busch came along. English being an unpopular language, the big Johannesburger and the little Free Stater exchanged greetings in the Taal.
”Ging oop, and leave your woman's work there, and walk a piece with me,”
said Van Busch. ”I have something to say to you about my sister that married the German drummer, and is stopping at Kink's Hotel.”
You can see Van Busch taking off his broad-brimmed hat, and knocking the sweat from the leather lining-band. He was dressed in a black broadcloth tailed-coat, flannel s.h.i.+rt, and cord breeches, wore heavy veldschoens, and carried a Mauser rifle, as did everybody else, and had a long hunting-knife as well as a heavy six-shooter in the wide canvas pouch-belt, and a bandolier heavy with cartridges. Thus panoplied, he accurately resembled ten thousand other men.
But his dark, overfed, full-blooded, whiskered face was not that of an agriculturist, and the strange light eyes, rust-coloured like those of an adder, and, like the ophidian's, set flush with the oddly-flattened edges of their orbits, were at variance with the high, rounded, benevolent temples crowned with a thinning brake of curly hair. The rapacious mouth, with the thick scarlet lips, belonged to the eyes.
He had put on his hat again, but he swept it off in a flouris.h.i.+ng bow, as Mevrouw Brounckers, in high-kilted wincey, a man's hat of coa.r.s.e straw perched on her weather-beaten, sandy-grey head, came stumping down the waggon-ladder, calling for her potatoes. What was that lazy bedelaar of a Secretary about, and it nearly eleven of the clock? Didn't he know that her Commandant liked his meals on time?
Mevrouw received the politeness less graciously than the potatoes. That man with the eyes and the greedy red mouth was a woman-eater, she knew.
Not for sheep and bear would she, grandmother as she was, trust herself in house barn alone with a klant like that. But her Commandant had uses for him, the twinkling-eyed, soft-mannered, big rogue. She watched him walking off with P. Blinders, for whom she entertained a distaste grounded on the knowledge that no good ever came of these double-tongued Free Staters.
And this one could _write_ in the accursed s.h.i.+bboleth of England as well as in the Taal. She shook her head as the potatoes rattled into the big pot hanging over the fire. And he walked out on Sundays with the young German woman who was maid to the refugee-widow staying at Kink's Hotel, and who never showed her nose inside the Gerevormed Kerk, the G.o.dless thing! or went out except by bat-light. Of that one the Mevrouw Brounckers had her opinion also. And time would show who was right.