The Dop Doctor

"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 shining 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 scrape 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 eyeballs 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," assents 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 goût 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 God," 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-space, 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.

"Let me – without rubbing your cloth the wrong way – put the case in mine. Your belief in a Power that my reason tells me is non-existent stimulated your nervous centres, roused and sustained in you the determination without which my science and my skill – and I do not value them lightly, I assure you – would have availed you nothing. You said to yourself, 'If God will it, I shall get over this,' and because you willed it, it was so. Were I a drunkard, an outcast, the very refuse of humanity, tainted with vice to the very centre of my being, I have but to will to be sober and live decently, and while I continue to will it, I shall be what I desire to be."

Saxham's eyes hold Julius's, and challenge them. But no shadow of a Dop Doctor who once reeled the streets of Gueldersdorp rises from those clear brown depths as the speaker ends, "Don't underestimate the power of the Human Will, Fraithorn, for it can remove mountains, and raise the living dead."

"Nor do you venture to deny the Power of the Almighty Hand, Saxham," answers the thin, sweet voice of the Churchman; "because It strewed the myriad worlds in the Dust of the The Infinite, and set the jewelled feathers in the butterfly's wing, and forged the very intellect whose power you misuse in uttering the boast that denies It. Think again. Can you assure me with truth that you have never, in the stress of some great mental or physical crisis, cried to Heaven for help when the struggle was at its worst? Think again, Saxham."

But Saxham obstinately shakes his head, still smiling. As he stands there transfigured by the dark, fierce spirit that has come upon him and possessed him, there is something about the hulking man with the square, black head and the powerful frame, that breathes of that superb and terrible Prince of the Heavenly Hierarchy who fell through a kindred sin, and the priest in Julius shudders, recognising the tremendous power of such a nature as this, whether turned towards Evil or bent to achieve Good. The while, in letters of delicate, keen flame, the denier sees written on the tables of his inward consciousness the utterance that once broke from him, as, racked and tortured in body and in soul, he wrestled with his devil on that unforgettable night.

"O God! if indeed Thou Art, and I must perforce return to live the life of a man amongst men, help me to burst the chains that fetter me. Help me – oh, help me to be free!"

And in his heart he knows that the desperate prayer has been granted. But in this new-born, curious mood of his he will not yield, but combats his own innermost conviction, being, in a strange, perverted way, even prouder of this Owen Saxham who has gone down of his own choice to the muddiest depths of moral and physical decadence, and come up of the strength of his own will from among the hideous things that hang suspended and drifting in the primeval sludge, than he ever was of the man before his fall. His is a combative nature, and the great blow he has sustained this day in the wreck and ruin of his raft of hope has left him quivering to the centre of his being with resentment that strikes back.

"Think again yourself. Ask yourself whether the Deity who creates, preserves, blesses, punishes, slays, and raises up, is the natural outcome of man's need of such a Being, or His own desire of Himself? And which conception is the greater – that the God in whom you Churchmen and the millions of lay-folk who recognise you as Divinely-appointed teachers believe, should have commanded, 'Let the universe exist,' and have been obeyed, or that the stupendous pigmy Man should have dared to say, 'Let there be God,' and so created Him?"

He laughs jarringly as he knocks the ashes out of the blackened pipe upon the corner of the window-ledge.

"Give credit to the human imagination and the human will for inventing a personage so useful to the Christian Churches as the Devil. For as in the beginning it was necessary for Man to build up Heaven and set his God therein, so, to throw His unimaginable purity and inconceivable perfection into yet more glorious relief, it was required that Hell should be delved out and the objective personality of Satan conceived and kennelled there, and given just sufficient power to pay the marplot where the Divine plans are concerned, and just enough malevolence to find amusement in the occupation. What should we do, where should we be, without our Satanic souffre-douleur– our horned scapegoat, our black puppet, without whose suggestions we should never have erred, whose wooden head we bang when things go wrong with us," says Saxham bitterly. He reaches out a hand for the tobacco-pouch and his glance falls upon the day's issue of the Siege Gazette lying on the parquet linoleum, where it has fallen from his hand a little while ago. He stoops and picks it up, and offers it to Julius.

"There's the announcement of an engagement here – " He smooths the crumpled sheet, holds it under the Chaplain's eye, and points to the two last paragraphs of the "Social Jottings" column. "Take it as an instance… Did Heaven play the matchmaker here, or has Hell had a finger in the matrimonial pie? Or has the blind and crazy chance that governs this desolate world for me, tipped the balance in favour of one young rake, who may be saved and purified and renewed by such a marriage, while his elder in iniquity is doomed to be wrecked upon it, ruined by it, destroyed through it, damned socially and morally because of it …"

The fierce words break from Saxham against his will. He resents the betrayal of his own confidence savagely, even as he utters them. But they are spoken, beyond recall. And the effect of the paragraph upon the Chaplain is remarkable. His meek, luminous brown eyes blaze with indignation. He is aflame, from the edge of his collar – a patent clerical guillotine of washable xylonite, purchased at a famous travellers' emporium in the Strand – to the thin, silky rings of dark hair that are wearing from his high, pale temples. He says, and stutters angrily in saying:

"This is a lie – a monstrous misstatement which shall be withdrawn to-morrow!"

"How do you know that?"

The Chaplain crushes the Siege Gazette into a ball, pitches it into a corner of the room, grabs his Field-Service cap and the cane he carries in lieu of the carbine or rifle without which the male laity of Gueldersdorp and a good many of the women do not stir abroad, and makes a stride for the door. He meets there Saxham, whose square face and powerful figure bar his flaming exit.

"It is enough that I do know it. Kindly allow me to pass."

"What are you going to do?"

The Chaplain is plainly uncertain, as he wrestles with the clerical guillotine of washable xylonite, and stammers something about unwarrantable liberty and a lady's reputation! And Saxham recognises that Saxham is not the only sufferer from the festering smart of jealousy, and that the vivid red-and-white carnation-tinted beauty of the delicate face in its setting of red-brown hair has grievously disturbed, if it has not altogether dissipated, the pale young Anglican's views of the celibate life.

Agnostic and Churchman, denier and believer, have split on the same amatory rock. The knowledge breathes no sympathy in the Dop Doctor.

He observes the Chaplain's face, dispassionately and yet intently, as in the old Hospital days he might have studied the expression of a monkey or a guinea-pig, or other organism upon which he was experimenting with some new drug. And the Reverend Julius demands, with resentful acerbity:

"What are you staring at? Do you imagine that the colour of my cloth debars me from – from taking the part of a lady whose name has been dragged before the public? I shall call at the office where this rag is published, and insist upon a contradiction of this – this canard!"

"Don't you know who edits the rag?" asks Saxham raspingly. "Do you suppose that any unauthorised announcement, or statement that has not been officially corroborated would be allowed to pass? The paragraph comes from an authoritative source, you may be sure!"

"I am in a position to disprove it, from whatever source it comes!" cried the Chaplain hotly. "He shall contradict it himself, if there is necessity. He may be a prodigal and a rake – he bears that reputation – but at least he is not a liar and a scoundrel."

"Who?" Saxham's heart is drubbing furiously. A cool, vivifying liquid like ether seems to have passed into his blood. His quiet, set, determined face and masterful, observant eyes oppose the Chaplain's heat and indignation, as if these were waves of boiling lava beating on a cliff of granite. "Who is not a liar and a scoundrel?"

"I speak of Lord Beauvayse," says the Reverend Julius Fraithorn in the high-pitched voice that shakes with rage. "He is a married man, Saxham; I have incontrovertible testimony to prove it. He gave his name to the woman who was his mistress a week before he sailed for Cape Town. He – "

There is a strange rattling noise in the throat of the man who listens. Julius looks at him, and his own resentment appears, even to himself, as impotent and ridiculous as the anger of a child. If just before it has seemed to him that he has heard the voice of mankind's arch-enemy speaking with Saxham's mouth, he discerns at this moment, reflected in Saxham's, the face of the primal murderer. And being, as well as a sincere and simple-hearted clergyman, something of a weakling, he is shocked to silence.

XLVI

An instant, and Saxham's own face looks calmly at the dazed Chaplain, and the curt, brusque voice demands:

"What is this incontrovertible testimony?"

"A letter," says Julius breathlessly, "from a person who saw the entry of the marriage at the Registrar's office where it took place."

"Is anyone else in possession of this information?"

"With the exception of the Registrar and the witnesses of the marriage, up to the middle of last September, when the letter was written, nothing had leaked out. I received the communication by the last mail from England that was delivered at the Hospital before I underwent the operation."

"That was the last mail that got through. Who was your correspondent?"

"One of the senior officiating priests of St. Margaret's, Wendish Street, the London church where I did duty as junior curate."

"Have you kept the letter?"

"It is in my desk at my hotel, with some other correspondence of Father Tatham's. You may see it if you wish."

"I will see it. In the meanwhile, let me have the pith of it. This clergyman – happening to visit a Registrar's office – Where was the office?"

"At Cookham-on-Thames, where Father Tatham has established a Holiday Rest Home for the benefit of our London working lads" – the Chaplain begins. He is sitting on the end of the bed, weak and worn and exhausted with the emotions that have torn him in the last half-hour. Beads of perspiration thickly stud the high temples, out of which the flushing colour has sunk; his cheeks are pallid and hollow. His eyes have lost their fire; his muscles are flaccidly relaxed; his sloping shoulders stoop; his long, limp hands hang nervelessly at his sides.

"One moment." Saxham glances at the gold chronometer that was a presentation from the students of St. Stephen's years ago. It is rather typical of the man that, even when under stress of his heroic thirst he has pawned the watch for money wherewith to buy whisky, he should have only borrowed upon it such small sums as are easily repaid. He has yet another five minutes to bestow in listening to the Chaplain's story, yet even as he returns the chronometer to its pocket, his quick ear catches the frou-frou of feminine petticoats outside the door. He opens it, frowning. A nurse is standing there with a summons in her face. She delivers her low-toned message, receives a brusque reply, and rustles down the corridor between the long lines of pallets as Saxham draws back his head and shuts the door, and, setting his great shoulders against it, and facing Julius, orders:

"Go on!"

Julius goes on:

"At Roselawn Cottage – a pretty place of the toy-residence description, standing in charming gardens not far from the Holiday Rest Home, lived a lady – an actress very popular in Musical Comedy – who was known to be the mistress of Lord Beauvayse. I need hardly tell you the Father touched on the unpleasant features of the story as delicately as possible – "

"Without doubt. But – get on a little quicker," says Saxham grimly, jerking his head towards the door. "For I am wanted. And don't speak loud, for there are people on the other side there. With regard to this woman – actress, or whatever she may be – ?"

"With all her moral laxities," goes on Julius, "Miss Lessie Lavigne – "

"Ah, I know the name," says Saxham sharply. "On with you to the end. 'With all her moral laxities – '"

"Miss Lessie Lavigne is a generous, kindly, charitable young woman," goes on Julius. "And the Holiday Home has benefited largely by her purse. She is known to the Matron; and Father Tatham – having occasion to visit the Registrar's office at Cookham on the 29th of last June, for the purpose of looking up the books, with the Registrar's consent, and satisfying himself of the existence of the entry regarding a marriage between one of our young fellows then at the Home and a girl he very foolishly married when on a hopping excursion in the autumn of the previous year – Father Tatham encountered Miss Lavigne – or Lady Beauvayse, to give her her proper title – "

"In the Registrar's office?"

"In the act of quitting the Registrar's outer office," says the burnt-out Julius in a weary voice, "in the company of Lord Beauvayse, and followed by his valet and a woman who probably were witnesses; for when the Father entered the inner office the register was lying open on the table, the entry of the marriage still wet upon the page."

"And your religious correspondent pried first," says Saxham, with savage irony, "and afterwards tattled?"

"And afterwards, seeing in the Times that Lord Beauvayse was under orders for South Africa, mentioned his accidental discovery when writing to me," says Julius Fraithorn wearily.

"That will do. When can I see the letter at your hotel? The sooner the better," says Saxham, with a curious smile, "for all purposes. Can you walk there with me now? Very well" – as Julius assents – "that is arranged, then."

"What is to be done, Saxham?" Julius stumbles up. The fires that burned in him a few moments ago are quenched; his slack hand trembles irresolutely at his beautiful weak mouth, and his deer-like eyes waver.

"I advise you," says Saxham, "to leave the doing of what is to be done to me." His own blue eyes have so strange a flare in them, and his heavy form seems so alive and instinct with threatening and dangerous possibilities, that Julius falters:

"You believe Lord Beauvayse has been a party to – has wilfully compromised Miss Mildare? You – you mean to remonstrate with him? Do you – do you think that he will listen to a remonstrance?"

"He will find it best in this instance," says Saxham dourly.

"Do not – do not be tempted to use any violence, Saxham," urges the Chaplain nervously, looking at the tense muscles of the grim, square face and the purposeful right hand that hovers near the butt of the Doctor's revolver. "For your own sake as much as for his!"

Saxham's laugh is ugly to hear.

"Do you think that Lord Beauvayse would wind up as top-dog if it came to a struggle between us?"

"It must not come to a struggle, Saxham," says the Chaplain, very pale. "We – we are under Martial Law. He is your superior officer." (Saxham, Attached Medical Staff, holds the honorary rank of Lieutenant in Her Majesty's Army.) "Remember, if Carslow – the man who killed Vickers, of the Pittsburg Trumpeter" – he refers to a grim tragedy of the beginning of the siege – "had not been medically certified insane, they would have taken him out and shot him."

Saxham shrugs his massive shoulders, and with the utter unmelodiousness that distinguishes the performance of a man devoid of a musical ear, whistles a fragment of a little tune. It is often on the lips of another man, and the Doctor has picked it up unconsciously, with one or two other characteristic habits and phrases, and has fallen into the habit of whistling it as he goes doggedly, unwearyingly, upon his ever-widening round of daily duties. It helps him, perhaps, though it gets upon the nerves of other people, making the younger nurses, not unmindful of his arbitrary action in the matter of the violet powder, want to shriek.

"The Military Executive would be perfectly welcome to take me out and shoot me, if first I might be permitted to look in at Staff Bomb proof South, and render Society the distinguished service of ridding it of Lord Beauvayse. Who's there?"

Saxham reopens the door, at which the nurse, now returned, has knocked. The tired but cheerful-faced young woman, in an unstarched cap and apron, and rumpled gown of Galatea cotton-twill, informs the Doctor that they have telephoned up from Staff Bomb proof South Lines, and that the password for the day is "Honour."

"You are going to him now?" asks the Chaplain anxiously and apprehensively.

"Oddly enough, I have been sent for to attend to a shell casualty," says Saxham, picking up and putting on his Service felt, and moving to take down the canvas wallet that is his inseparable companion, from the hook on which it hangs. "Or, rather, Taggart was; and as he has thirty diphtheria cases for tracheotomy at the Children's Hospital, and McFadyen's hands are full at the Refugees' Infirmary, the Major asks if I will take the duty. It's an order, I suppose, couched in a civil way."

He swings the heavy wallet over his shoulders, and picks up his worn hunting-crop.

"And so, let's be moving," he says, his hand upon the door-knob. "Your hotel is on my way. I may need that letter, or I may not. And in any case I prefer to have seen it before I meet the man."

"One moment." The Chaplain speaks with a strained look of anxiety, squeezing a damp white handkerchief into a ball between his palms. "You have taken upon yourself the duty of bringing Lord Beauvayse to book over this – very painful matter… I should like … I should wish you to leave the task of enlightening Miss Mildare to me."