Part 69 (2/2)
”Things _are_ going,” Saxham returns, seeming to wake from a heavy brown study. ”You could not put it better or more clearly. Will you smoke?” He pitches a rubber tobacco-pouch to the Chaplain, who catches it, and the treasured box of matches that comes after, and as one man sparingly fills a well-browned meerschaum, and the other a blackened briar-root, with the weed that grows more rare and precious with every hour of these days of dearth: ”That's one of the things that are going quickest after perchloride of mercury, carbolic, and extract of beef. As a fact, we are using formaldehyde as an anaesthetic in minor operations; and violet powder and starch, upon the external use of which I laid an embargo weeks ago, to the great indignation of the younger nurses, are being employed instead of arrowroot. And the more the medical stores diminish, the more the patients come rolling in.”
”And each new want that arises, and each new difficulty that crops up, finds in you the man to meet it and overcome it,” says the Chaplain fervently. He is disposed to make a hero of this brilliant surgeon who has saved his life, and his enthusiasm is only marred by Saxham's painfully-apparent lack of belief in certain vital spiritual truths that are the daily bread of fervent Christian souls. Now that he has become aware of the black band upon the sleeve of the jacket that lies across Saxham's knees, where he sits upon the end of the cot-bed that, with a tiny chest of drawers and a hanging bookshelf laden with volumes and instrument-cases, completes the furnis.h.i.+ng of the narrow room, he says, with sympathy in his gentle voice and in the brown eyes that have the soft l.u.s.tre of a deer's or of a beautiful woman's:
”I am sorry to see this, Saxham. You have lost a friend?”
”_Lost a friend?_”
Saxham, echoing the last three words, stares at the Chaplain in a strange, dull way, and then forgets him for a minute or more. Baths are not to be had in Gueldersdorp in these days, and though it is not Sunday, when bathing in the river becomes a possibility, the Chaplain observes that the Doctor's thick, close-cropped black hair is wet, and that broad streaks of s.h.i.+ning moisture are upon his pale, square face, and that he breathes as though he had been running. But perhaps he has been sluicing his head in the washstand basin, thinks the Chaplain. No; the basin has not recently been used. And then it occurs to Julius, but not until he has noticed the starting veins and corded muscles on the backs of the hands that are clenched upon the jacket, that Saxham is suffering.
”I always said he felt a great deal more than he permitted himself to show,” reflects the man of Religion looking at the man of Medicine. ”And the absence of belief in Divine Redemption and a Future State must terribly intensify the pain of a bereavement. If I only knew how to comfort him!” And all he can do is to ask, still in that tone of sympathy, when the Funeral is to be.
”Perhaps about the midday coffee-drinking,” says Saxham heavily, ”they would sc.r.a.pe a hole and dump him in. But they're not over fond of risks, and they would probably leave him where he is till nightfall.”
Julius Fraithorn longs, more than ever, that eloquence and inspiration were his to employ in the healing of the man who has raised himself almost from the dead. But he can only falter something about the inscrutable designs of Providence, and not a sparrow falling to the ground unnoticed.
And he expresses, somewhat tritely, the hope that Saxham's friend was prepared to meet his end.
”I don't exactly suppose he expected it. He had a right to count upon pulling off the match,” says Saxham, with a dreary shadow of a grin, ”because a better man behind a gun than Father Noah you wouldn't easily meet. And Boers are fine shots, as a rule.”
”Boers.... A Boer.... I thought you told me you had lost a friend?” Mild astonishment is written on the Chaplain's face. And Saxham looks up, and the other sees that his eyeb.a.l.l.s are heavily injected with blood, and that the vivid blue of their irises has strangely faded.
”I gave him every opportunity to be my friend,” says the dull voice heavily, ”by moving out from cover, even by standing up. But no good. He suspected a ruse, and it worried him. Then he climbed a tree, emptied his bandolier at me from a perch of vantage among the branches, and had started to refill it from a fresh package, when I got the chance, and brought him down spreadeagled. And so ends Father Noah.”
The Chaplain comprehends fully now, turns pale, and shudders. A blue line marks itself about his mouth; he is conscious of a qualm of positive nausea as he says:
”You--you don't mean you have been talking of a man you have shot?”
”Just so,” a.s.sents Saxham, and the sentence that follows is not uttered aloud. ”And I wish with all my soul that the man had shot me!”
”And this is War,” says Julius Fraithorn. He pulls out his handkerchief and wipes his damp forehead and the beady blue lines about his mouth, and the crack and rattle of rifle-fire sweeping over the veld and through the town, and the ping, ping, ping! of Mauser bullets flattening on the iron gutter-pipe and the corrugated iron of the roof above them seem to answer ”Certainly, War.”
”Why, you look sick, man,” says Saxham the surgeon, whose keen professional eye has not missed the Chaplain's pallor, though the other Saxham is still dazed and blind, and stupefied by the blow that has been dealt him by Lady Hannah's gold fountain-pen. He leans forward, and lightly touches one of the Chaplain's thin wrists, suspecting him of a touch of fever, or town-water dysentery. But Julius jerks the wrist away.
”I am perfectly well. It was--the way in which you spoke just now that rather--rather----”
”Revolted you, eh?” says Saxham, again with the dim shadow of a smile.
”Revealed me as a brute and a savage. Well, and why not, if I choose to be one or the other, or both? You Churchmen believe in the power of choice, don't you? Prove to a man that there is something worth having in the bowels of the earth, he burrows like a mole and gets it. Let him once see utility in flying, give him time and opportunity, and he will fly. So if it is to his interests to be clean-lived, high-minded, exemplary, he will be all these things to admiration. Or, if he should happen to have lost the _gout_ for virtue, if he determines that Evil shall be his good, he will make it so.” He smiled dourly. ”Deprive him of a solid reason for living, he can die. Hold up before his dying eyes the prospect of continued existence under hopeful conditions, he takes up his bed and walks, like the moribund paralytic in the Gospel you preach. You're a living proof of the human power of working miracles.... Granted I cut away a tumour from under your breast-bone more skilfully than a certain percentage of surgeons could have done it. But what brought you safely through the operation, healed your wound by the first intention, and set you on your legs again? I'll trouble you to tell me?”
”The mercy and the grace of G.o.d,” says the Chaplain, ”manifested in His unworthy servant through your science and your skill.”
”You employ the technical terminology of your profession,” Saxham answers, with a shrug.
The blank stare and the congested redness have gone out of his eyes, and his voice is less dull and toneless. He is coming back to his outward self again, even while the inner man lies mangled and bleeding, crushed by that tremendous broadsword stroke of Fate that has been dealt him by the gold pen of Lady Hannah, and he is ready enough to argue with the Chaplain. He gets off the bed and slips on his jacket, takes a turn or two across the narrow floor-s.p.a.ce, then leans against the distempered wall beside the window, puffing at his jetty briar-root, his muscular arms folded on his great chest, his powerful shoulders bowed, his square, black head thrust forward, and his blue eyes coolly studying Julius as he talks.
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