The Dop Doctor

The Market Square is populous with a chatting, sauntering crowd of people, who enjoy the luxury of using their limbs without being called on to displays of acrobatic agility in dodging trundling shell. There are Irregulars and B.S.A.P., Baraland Rifles and Town Guardsmen. There are the Native Contingent from the stad, and a company of Zulus, and the Kaffirs and the Cape Boys with their gaspipe rifles that do good service in default of better, and bring down Oom Paul's Scripturally-flavoured denunciations upon Englishmen, who arm black and coloured folk to do battle for their own sable or brown or yellow rights. These have donned odd garments and quaint bits of finery to mark the holiday, and every white man has indulged in the luxury of a comprehensive wash, a shave with hot water, and a change of clothing, if it is obtainable. Also, drooping feminine vanity revives in hair-waves and emerges from underground burrows of Troglodytic type, arrayed in fluttering muslins, and crowned with coquettish hats, which walk about in company with ragged khâki and clay-stained duck and out-at-elbows tweed, and are proud to be seen in its brave company.

Husbands and wives, fathers and daughters, sons and mothers, lovers and sweethearts, meet after the week whose separating days have seemed like weeks, and visit the houses whose pierced walls and roofs, that let the white-hot sunshine in through many jagged holes, may one day, so they whisper, holding one another closely, shelter them again in peace. Home has become a sweet word, even to those who thought little of home before. And many who were sinful have found conviction of sin and the saving grace of repentance, and many more who denied their God have learned to know Him, in this village town of battered dwellings, whose streets are littered with all the grim débris of War.

Nixey's has not come scathless through the ordeal. The stately brick chimneys of the kitchen and coffee-room have been broken off like carrots, and replaced by tin funnels. Patches of the universal medium, corrugated iron, indicate where one of Meisje's ninety-four-pound projectiles recently plumped in through the soft brick of the east wall end, and departed by the west frontage, leaving two holes that might have accommodated a chest of drawers, and carrying a window with it. Mrs. Nixey, the children, and the women of the staff inhabit a bombproof in the back-yard. The waiters have developed a grasshopper-like nimbleness, otherwise things go on as usual.

It being Sunday, a large long man and another as long, but less bulky, are extended in a couple of long bamboo chairs on Nixey's longish front verandah. The blue, fragrant smoke of two long cigars curls upwards over their supine heads, and two long drinks containing a very meagre modicum of inferior whisky are contained in two long tumblers, resting in the bamboo nests cunningly devised for their accommodation in the chair-arms.

It is hot, but both the men look cool and lazy, and almost too fresh to have spent the greater part of the night, the younger upon advanced patrol-duty, and the elder at the Staff bombproof in the Southern Lines, where messages come in and where messages go out, and where reports are received and from whence orders are despatched from sunset to the peep of day, and from peep of day to sunset.

The wardrobes of both warriors are much impaired by active service, but their originally white flannel trousers, if patched, discoloured, and shrunken by amateur lavations, boast the cut of Bond Street; their shirts, if a trifle ragged, are immaculately clean, and the cracks in their canvas shoes are disguised by a lavish expenditure of pipeclay. Beauvayse has rummaged out and mounted a snowy double collar in honour of the day, with a knitted silk necktie of his Regimental colours, and a kamarband to match is wound about his narrow, springy waist, and knotted to perfection. Both men might be basking on an English river-bank after a stiff pull up-stream, or resting after a bout at tennis on an English lawn, but for the revolver-lanyards round their strong, bronzed throats, ending in the butts of Smith and Wesson's revolvers of Service calibre, the bandoliers and belts that lie handy on a table, and the Lee-Metford carbines that lean in an angle made by the house-wall and the verandah end. Also, but for the tension of long-sustained watchfulness on both faces, making it plain that, though resting and reposeful, they are neither of them unexpectant of a summons to be the opposite of these things. It is a look that, at different degrees of intensity, is stamped on every face in Gueldersdorp. And the same uncertainty possesses and pervades even unsentient things. The Union Jack, hanging listlessly from the summit of its lofty staff, bathed in the golden, glowing atmosphere of this January day, may, in an instant's space, give place to the red signal of danger; the bugle, now silent, may at any moment blare out its loud and dismal note of warning; the bells that call with peaceful insistence, "Come to church! come to church!" in the twinkling of an eye may be clanging scared townsfolk to their burrowed hiding-places. You never know. For General Brounckers, though a God-fearing man, sometimes goes in for Sunday gun-practice, quite unintentionally, as he afterwards explains. Hence, even on the Sabbath, it is as well to be prepared.

Beauvayse is the first to break the drowsy silence by knocking the lengthened ash off his cigar, and expressing his opinion that the weed might be a worse one.

"Considerin' the price the box of fifty was knocked down to me for at Kreils' auction yesterday," states Captain Bingo, "it's simply smokin' gold. Nine pound fifteen-and-six runs me into, how much apiece?" He yawns cavernously, and gives the calculation up. "Always was a duffer at figures," he says, and relapses into silence until, in the act of throwing the nearly smoked-out cigar-butt away, he pulls himself up, and, economically impaling it on his penknife-blade, secures a few more whiffs.

"Against the Lenten days to come, when there will be no balm left in Gilead," says Beauvayse, cocking a grey-green eye at him in sleepy derision, "and no tobacco in Gueldersdorp."

"Kreils' are sellin' dashed bad cigarettes at a pound the box of a hundred now," says Captain Bingo; "and I've a notion of layin' in a stock of 'em. We smoked tea in the Sudan, and I had a shot at hemp, but it plays the very devil with the nerves. All jumps and twitches, you know, after a pipe or two. Nervous as a cat, or a woman. And, talking of women, I wonder where my wife is?"

He turns a large, pink, disconsolate face upon Beauvayse. Beauvayse responds with the air of one who has suffered boredom from the too frequent enumeration of this conjecture. "Not knowing, can't say." And there is another silence.

"How she got the maggot into her head," presently resumes Lady Hannah's spouse, "I can't think. I did suppose her vaultin' ambition to rival Dora Corr – woman who managed to burn her own and a lot of other people's fingers by meddlin' in South African politics over the Raid business – had been quenched for good that mornin' you took those fifty chaps of the Irregulars out for what she would call their 'baptism of fire.'"

"That's newspaperese," yawns Beauvayse, his supple brown hands knitted at the back of his sleek golden head. "Goes with 'the tented field' and casus belli: cherchez la femme and cui bono?"

"She's got the lingo at her finger-ends and in her blood, or we wouldn't be cherchaying now," says Bingo dolorously. "I asked her if she was particularly keen on gettin' killed…"

"Shouldn't have done that. Put her on her mettle not to show funk if she felt it," mumbles Beauvayse.

"A man can't always be diplomatic," grumbles Bingo. "Anyhow, she'd seen a bit of a scrap at the outset of affairs, when the B.S.A. went out with the Armoured Train, and was wild with me for wantin' to deprive her of another 'glorious experience.' … And next morning she rides out with a Corporal and two troopers, both chaps beastly sensible of their responsibility, and wishin' her at Cape Town, she in toppin' spirits and as keen as mustard. It was about six o'clock, morning, and she hadn't been gone five minutes before we heard you fellows poundin' away and bein' pounded at like Jimmy O! I was on the roof with the Chief, the sweat runnin' down into the binoculars, until the veld seemed swarmin' with brown mares and grey linen habits and drab smasher hats, with my wife's head under 'em, and hoverin' troopers. But I did make out that your party had got into difficulties – "

"We opened on 'em at a thousand yards, and pushed to within five hundred, and if the fellows in charge of the Hotchkiss could have got her into play," Beauvayse interrupts rather huffily, "we'd have been as right as rain."

"Possibly. If I hadn't been on special duty that day, and as nervous as a cat in a thunderstorm, I'd have volunteered to bring No. 2 Troop of A out to the rescue, instead of Heseltine. As it was, I nearly fell off the roof when I saw my wife coming, one trooper, as pale with fright as a piece of soap, supportin' her on his saddle, another man leading the mare, dead lame and the Corporal's hairy. Plugged in the upper works, the Corporal, poor beggar! but he'd managed to stick on somehow until they got to the Hospital. Have you ever had to deal with a woman in hysterics?"

Beauvayse nods sagely.

"Once or twice."

"Once is an experience that lasts a man all his lifetime. Phew!" Captain Bingo mops his large pink face. "Never had such a dressing-down in my life."

"But what had you to do with the Corporal getting chipped?"

"The Lord only knows!" says Bingo piously. "But, if you'd heard her, all the rest of the day and half through the night!.."

"I did," Beauvayse says with a faint grin. "Mine's the next bedroom to yours, you know."

"'Oh, the blood! Oh, the blood!' …" Not unsuccessfully does the spouse of Lady Hannah attempt to render the recurrent hiccough and the whooping screech of hysteria. "'Damn it, my dear!' I said, tryin' to reason with her, 'what else did you expect the fellow had got in him? Sawdust?' That seemed to rouse her like nothing else… Turned on me like a tigress, by the living Tinker! – called me everything she could lay her tongue to, and threatened that she'd apply for a separation if I continued to outrage every feeling of decency that association with such a thundering brute hadn't uprooted from her nature."

"Whe – ew!"

Beauvayse's comment is a shrill-toned whistle.

"Of course, her nerves were knocked to smithereens, and a man can overlook a lot, under the circumstances. She was a mere jelly when the bombardment began – " goes on rueful Captain Bingo.

" – Rather!" confirms Beauvayse. – "Lived in the hotel cellar for the first fortnight, only emergin' from among the beer-barrels and wine-casks and liqueur-cases after dark – "

" – To blow me up and forgive me, turn and turn about, until daylight did appear. Luckily," reflects Bingo, with a rather dreary chuckle, "I had plenty of night-duty on just then, and so escaped a lot."

"That gave her her chance to shoot the moon!" hints Beauvayse, in accents muffled by his long tumbler.

"By the Living Tinker!" asseverates Captain Bingo, jerked out of his reclining attitude by vigorous utterance of the expletive, "you could have bowled me over with a scent-squirter when I came back to brekker and found her gone, and a cocked-hat note of farewell left for me on the dressing-table pincushion, in regular elopement style; and another for the Chief, sayin' – he read it to me – that she'd gone to retrieve the Past, with a capital 'P,' and hoped to convince him ere long that one of her despised sex– underlined, 'despised sex' – can be useful to her country."

"'Can be useful to her country,'" repeats Beauvayse "Question is, in what way?"

"Damme if I can imagine!" bursts explosively from the deserted husband. "All I know up to date, and all you know, is that before it was quite light she drove out of our lines in Nixey's spider, his mouse-coloured trotter pullin', and her German maid sittin' behind, wavin' a white towel tied to the end of a walkin'-stick of mine, and went straight over to the enemy. We hear in the course of things from a Kaffir despatch-runner that she's stayin' in a hotel of sorts at Tweipans, where Brounckers has had his headquarters since he shifted Chief Laager from Geitfontein. And for any further information we may knock our rotten heads against a brick wall and twiddle our thumbs. Never you marry, Toby, my boy!"

A V-shaped vein swells and darkens between the handsome grey-green eyes and on the broad forehead, white as a girl's where the sun-tan leaves off. Beauvayse takes his cigar again from his mouth, and knocks the ash off deliberately before he responds:

"Thanks for the advice."

"Be warned," says Captain Bingo sententiously, "by me. Know when you're well off, as I didn't. Take the advice of your seniors, as I was too pig-headed a fool to do, and don't put it in the power of any woman to make you as rottenly wretched as I am at this minute."

"Why! women can make you rottenly wretched," admits Beauvayse, with a confirmatory creak of the bamboo chair. "But, on the other hand, they can make you awfully happy – what?"

Captain Bingo throws his long legs off their resting-place, and sits sideways, staring rather owlishly at his young friend. He shakes his head in a dismal way several times, and sucks hard at his cigar as he shakes it.

"For a bit, but does it last? When I came down to hunt you up last June at the cottage at Cookham – "

"Look here, old man!" The bamboo chair creaks angrily as Beauvayse in his turn sits up and drops his own long legs on either side of it, and drives the foot-rest back under the table seat with a vicious punch. "Don't remind me of the cottage at Cookham, will you? It's one of the things I want to forget just now."

"You were as proud as Punch of it last June. Have you let it?" pursues Bingo, ignoring his junior's request.

Beauvayse yawns with ostentatious weariness of the subject.

"No; I haven't let it."

"Ought to go off like smoke, properly advertised. Somethin' like this: 'To let, Roselawn Cottage, Cookham: a charmin' Thames-side bijou residence. Small grounds and large cellar, a boathouse and a houseboat, stables, a pigeon-cote, and a private post-box. Duodecimo oak dinin'-room, boudoir by Rellis. Ideal nest for a honeymoon, real thing or imitation. Might have become the real thing if owner hadn't been whisked off in time to South Africa.' And a dashed good job for him. For you've had a decentish lot of narrow escapes, Toby, my boy!" pursues the oracular Captain Bingo, disregarding his junior's forbidding scowl, "and come out of a goodish few tight places, and you've got out of 'em, if I may say so, more through luck than wit; but that little entanglement I'm delicately alludin' to was one of the closest things on record in the career of a Prodigal Son."

"Thanks. You're uncommonly complimentary to-day." Beauvayse pitches away his cigar, knocks a feather of ash from his clean silk shirt, and folds his arms resignedly on his broad flat chest.

"Upon my word, I didn't mean to be. Does it ever strike you," goes on Captain Bingo doggedly, "that if that wire from the Chief asking for your address hadn't found me at the Club, and if I hadn't run down and dug you out at the – I won't repeat the name of the place, since you don't seem to like it – you'd have been married and done for, old chap – any date you like to name between then and the beginning of the war? And, to put things mildly, there would have been the mischief to pay with your people."

"Yes," Beauvayse agrees rather dreamily; "there would have been an awful lot of bother with my people."

"Not that I object to the stage myself," Captain Bingo says, waving a large, tolerant hand; "and it seems getting to be rather the fashion to recruit the female ranks of the Peerage from Musical Comedy, and a prettier and cleverer little woman than Lessie … What are you stoppin' your ears for?"

"I'm not," says a muffled, surly voice. "It's a – twinge of toothache."

"All I've got to say is," declares Captain Bingo, "that marriage with one's equal in point of breedin' is sometimes a blank draw, but marriage with one's inferior is a howling error. And if you had done as I'd stake my best hat you would have done, supposin' you'd been left to loll in the lap of the lovely Lessie – "

Beauvayse jumps up in a rage.

"Wrynche, how much longer do you think I can go on listening to this? You're simply maundering, man, and my nerves won't stand it."

"Oh, very well! But you haven't the ghost of a right to lay claim to nerves," Captain Bingo obstinately asseverates. "Now look at me."

"I'm hanged if I want to!" declares Beauvayse. "You're not a cheering object." He drops back into the bamboo chair again.

"Flyblown, do I look?" inquires Bingo, with dispassionate interest.

"Well, yes, decidedly," Beauvayse agrees, without removing his eyes from the whitewashed verandah-pillar at which they blankly stare.

"Streaky yellow in the whites of the eyes, and pouchy under 'em?" Captain Bingo demands of his young friend with unmistakable relish. "'Yes' again? And I grouse and maunder? Of course I do, my dear chap! How can I help it? A married man who, for all he knows, may be a widower – "

"I wish to God I knew I was one!"

"My good fellow?"

"You heard what I said," Beauvayse flings over his shoulder.

Captain Bingo, his hands upon his straddling knees, regards his junior with circular eyes staring out of a large, kind, rather foolish face of utter consternation.

"That you wished to God you were a widower?"

"Well, I mean it."

XXXIV

"Good Lord!"

There is a gap of silence only broken when Captain Bingo says heavily:

"Then you did marry the Lavigne after all? When was it – "

"We'd pulled off the marriage at the local Registrar's a fortnight before you came down with —his wire."

"By the Living Tinker, then it was a genuine honeymoon after all!" A faint grin appears on Captain Wrynche's large perturbed face.

"Don't be epigrammatic, Wrynche." The dull weariness in the young voice gives place to quick affront. "And keep the secret. Don't give me away."

"Did I ever give you, or any other man who ever trusted me, away? Tell me that."

Captain Bingo gets up and covers the distance between the deck-chairs with a single stride, and puts a big kind hand on the averted shoulder.

"Of course you never did." The boy reaches up and takes the hand, and squeezes it with the shyness of the Englishman who responds to some display of solicitude or affection on the part of a comrade. "Don't mind my rotting like this. There are times when one must let off steam or explode."

"I thought – and so did a few others, the Chief among 'em – that South Africa had saved you by the skin of your teeth," says Captain Bingo, smoking vigorously, and driving his hands very deep into his pockets. "Confoundedly odd how taken in we were! I could have sworn, my part, that you'd just stopped short at – "

"At making a blithering idiot of myself," interpolates Beauvayse. "If you'll go back and sit decently in your chair, instead of standing behind me rattlin' keys and coins in your pocket, and dropping hot cigar-ash on my head, I'll tell you how it happened. Nobody listening?"

"Not a soul," says Captain Bingo, padding back after a noiseless prowl to the coffee-room window.

Beauvayse grips either arm of the chair he sits in so fiercely that they crack again.

"I – I was desperately hard hit over Lessie a year ago – "

"So were a lot of other young idiots."

"That's a pleasant reflection. They were."

"Of course, I" – Bingo's large face becomes very red – "I inferred nothing in any way against Miss Lavigne's chara – Dash it, I beg your pardon! I ought to call her Lady Beauvayse."

"Don't trouble. I think I'd rather you didn't. It would rub things in rather too much," says Beauvayse, paling as the other has reddened.

"Wouldn't it be as well," hints Captain Bingo, "to get used to it?"

"No," Beauvayse throws over his shoulder. "And don't assume a delicacy in speaking of the – the lady, because it's unnecessary. As I've said, I was very much in love. She had – kept house with a man I knew, before we came together, and there may have been other affairs – for all I can tell, at least – I should say most probably." Something in Captain Bingo's face seems to say "uncommonly probably," though he utters no word. "But she was awfully pretty, and I lost my head." He shuts his eyes and leans back, and the lines of his young face are strained and wan. "I – I lost my head."

"It's – it's natural enough," volunteers Captain Bingo.

There is another short interval of silence in which the two men on Nixey's verandah see the same vision – lime-lights of varying shades and colours thrown from different angles across a darkened garden-scene where impossible tropical flowers expand giant petals, and a spangled waterfall tumbles over the edge of a blue precipice in sparkling foam. The nucleus of a cobweb of quivering rays, crossing and intersecting, is a dazzling human butterfly, circling, spinning, waving white arms like quivering antennæ, flashing back the coloured lights from the diamonds that are in her hair and on her bosom, are clasped about her rounded waist and wrists, gleam like fireflies from the folds of her diaphanous skirts, and sparkle on her fingers. A provoking, beguiling Impertinence with great stage eyes encircled by blue rims, a small mouth painted ruby-red, a complexion of theatrical lilies and roses, and tiny, twinkling feet that beat out a measure to which Beauvayse's pulses have throbbed madly and now throb no more.

"It began in the usual way," he goes on, waking from that stage day-dream, "with suppers and stacks of flowers, and a muff-chain of turquoise and brilliants, and ended up with – "

"With an electric motor-brougham and a flat in Mayfair. Oh Lord, what thunderin' donkeys we fellows are!" groans Captain Bingo, rubbing his head, which has hair of a gingery hue, close-cropped until the scalp blushes pinkly through it, and rubbing nothing in the way of consolation into the brain inside it.

"I bought the cottage at Cookham as a surprise for her birthday," goes on the boy. "She's a year or two older than me – "

"And the rest," blurts out Captain Bingo. But he drowns the end of the sentence in a giant sneeze. "Must have caught cold last night without knowin' it. Dashed treacherous climate this," he murmurs behind the refuge of a pocket-handkerchief. "And so you bought the cottage for Lessie? Another nibble out of the golden cheese that the old man's nursing up for you, – what? And in thingumbob retirement by the something-or-other stream you hit on the notion of splicing the lovely Lessie Lavigne. Poetry, by the Living Tinker!"

"Do you want to hear how I came to cut my own throat?" snarls the boy, with white, haggard anger alternating with red misery and shame in his young, handsome face; "because if you do, leave off playing the funny clown and listen."

"Never felt less inclined to be funny in my life. 'Pon my word, I assure you!" asseverates Bingo. "You're simply a bundle of irritable nerves, my dear chap, and that's the truth."

"You wouldn't wonder if you knew … Oh, damn it, Wrynche!" – the young voice breaks in a miserable sob – "I'm so thundering miserable. And all because there – there was a kid coming, and I did the straight thing by its mother."

"Whew!" Captain Bingham Wrynche gives vent to a long, piercing, dismal whistle, which so upsets a gaunt mongrel prowling vainly for garbage in the gutters of Market Square that he puts up his nose and howls in answer. "Was that how you fell into the – " He is obviously going to say "trap," but with exceeding clumsiness substitutes "state." And wonders at the thing having been pulled off so quietly in these days, when confounded newspapers won't let you call your soul your own.

"That's because I signed my name 'John Basil Edward Tobart,'" explains Beauvayse; "and because the Registrar – a benevolent old cock in a large white waistcoat, like somebody's father in a farcical comedy – wasn't sufficiently up in the Peerage to be impressed."

"Weren't there witnesses of sorts?" hints Bingo.