The Dop Doctor Part 30

"I could not oblige the gentleman with a blanket, Mr. Brooker, but I relieved him of his rifle and left him, to tell his picket a c.o.c.k-and-bull story of having been drugged and hypnotised by Boer spies. And--I will overlook it upon the present occasion, but in War-time, Mr. Brooker, men have been shot for less. I think I need not detain you further. Your rifle has been sent to your headquarters--with my card and an explanation. One word more, Mr. Brooker----"

Brooker, grey, streaky, and desperately wretched, was blind to the laughter br.i.m.m.i.n.g the keen hazel eyes.

"I am entrusted by the Imperial Government with the preservation of Public Morality in Gueldersdorp, as well as with the maintenance of the Public Safety--and I should be glad of an a.s.surance from you that Mrs. Brooker's Christian name is really Annie?"

"I--I swear it, Colonel!"

Brooker fled, leaving the preserver of public morality to have his laugh out before he rejoined the Staff, glancing at the Waterbury on the short steel chain. Half-past ten. Would the Dop Doctor turn up to appointment, or had the battle with habit and the deadly craving born of indulgence ended in defeat? As his eyes moved from the dial, they lighted upon the man:

"_Clothed and in his right mind...._"

His own words of the night before recurred to memory as he came forwards with his long, light step, greeting the new-comer with the easy, cordial grace of high-breeding.

"Ah, Dr. Saxham, obliged to you for being punctual. Let me introduce you to Major Lord Henry Leighbury, D.S.O., Grenadier Guards, our D.A.A.G. Dr.

Saxham, Colonel Ware, Baraland Rifles, and Sir George Wendysh, Wess.e.x Regiment, commanding the Irregular Horse; Captain Bingham Wrynche, Royal Bay Dragoons, my senior aide-de-camp, and his junior, Lieutenant Lord Beauvayse, of the Grey Hussars. And Dr. Saxham, Major Taggart, R.A.M.C., our Chief Medical Officer."

He watched the man keenly as he made the introductions, saying to himself that this was better than he had hoped. The ragged black moustache had been shaved away; the frayed but spotless suit of white drill fitted the heavy-shouldered, thin-flanked, muscular figure perfectly; the faded blue flannel s.h.i.+rt, with the white double collar and narrow black tie; the shabby black kamarband about his waist, the black-ribboned Panama, maintaining respectability in extremest old age, as that expensive but lasting headgear is wont to do, possessed, as worn by the Dop Doctor, a certain _cachet_ of style. His slight, curt, almost frowning salutations displayed a well-graduated recognition of the official status of each individual to whom he was made known, betokening the man accustomed to move in circles where such knowledge and the application of it was indispensable, and who knew, too, that slight from him would have given chagrin. But another moment, and the junior Medical Officer, a black-avised little Irishman from County Meath, had gripped him by both hands, and was exclaiming in his juicy brogue, real delight beaming in his round, rosy face:

"Saxham! Saxham of St. Stephens, and the grand ould days! Deny me now, to my face. Say, 'Tom McFadyen, I don't know you,' if you dare."

The blue eyes shone out vivid gentian-colour in the kindly smile that illumined them, the stern lips parted in a laugh that showed the sound white closely-set teeth.

"Tom McFadyen, I do know you. But if you offer to pay me that cab-fare you owe me, I shall say I'm wrong, and that it's another man."

"Hould your tongue, jewel," drolled the little junior, who delighted in exaggerating the brogue that tripped naturally off his Irish tongue.

"Don't be after giving me away to the Chief and the Senior that believe me, by me own account, to be descended from Ollamh Fodla, that was King of Tara, and owned the cow-grazing from Trim to Athboy, and ate boiled turnips off s.h.i.+elds of gold before potatoes were invented, when the bog-oaks were growing as acorns on the tree. And as to the cab-fare, sure I hailed the hansom out of politeness to your honour's glory, the day that saw me going off to the Army Medical School at Netley, wid all my worldly belongin's in wan ould hat-box and the half of a carpet-bag. Wirra, wirra!

but it's some folks have luck, says I, as the train took me out av'

Waterloo in a third-cla.s.s smoker, while you were left on the platform sheddin' half-crowns out av every pore for the newspaper boys an' porters to pick up, and smilin' like a baby dhramin' av the bottle. You'd pa.s.sed your exam in Anatomy wid wan hand held behind you an' a glove on the other, you'd got your London University Scholars.h.i.+p in Physiology, and you'd fallen head over ears in love with the prettiest and sweetest girl that ever wore out shoe-leather. You wrote to me two years later to say you'd been appointed an in-surgeon on the Junior Staff, an' that you were engaged to be married. But divil the taste of weddin'-cake did I ever get off you. What----"

The little Irishman, thoughtlessly rattling on, pulled up in an instant, seeing the ghastly unmistakable change upon the other's face. He remembered the grim black reason for the change in Saxham, and for once, his habitual tact deserted him. His rosy gills purpled, even as had the Mayor's on the Dop Doctor's entrance. His eyes winced under the heavy petrifying, unseeing stare of Saxham's blue ones....

"Sorry to stem the flood of your reminiscences, McFadyen, but we're going to overhaul the Hospital now."

It was the voice of the visitor who had come to the Harris Street house on the previous night, the tall, loosely-built, closely-knit figure in the easily fitting Service-dress that now stepped across the gulf that had suddenly opened between the two old friends, and laid a hand in pleasant, familiar fas.h.i.+on upon Saxham's heavy, rather bowed shoulders. But for that scholar's stoop they would have been of equal height. He went on: "You will be able to give us points, Saxham, where they will be needed most.

Can't expect Colonial inst.i.tutions, even at the best, to keep abreast of London."

The blue eyes met his almost defiantly.

"As I think I remember telling you, sir, it is five years since I saw London."

"Well, I don't blame you for taking a long holiday while it was procurable. There are a few of us who would benefit by a gallop without the halter, eh, Taggart?"

Saxham would not stoop even to benefit indirectly by the shrewd, kindly tact. He drew himself to his full height, and the words were spoken with such ringing clearness that they arrested the attention of every man present.

"My holiday was compulsory. I underwent--innocently--a legal prosecution for malpractice. The Crown Jury decided in my favour, but my West End connection was ruined. I resigned my Hospital and other appointments, and left England."

"Ay!" It was the Chief Medical Officer's broad Scots tongue that droned out the bagpipe note. "Weel, Doctor, it's an ill wind blaws naebody guid, and ye canna expect Captain McFadyen or mysel' to sympatheese overmuch wi'

the West End for a loss that is our gain. And, Colonel, it's in my memory that ye had set your mind on beginnin' wi' the Operating Theatre?..."

XXV

The chart-nurse looked in to say that the Medical officers of the Garrison Staff were making the rounds, and was stricken to the soul by the discovery that the Reverend Julius Fraithorn had had no breakfast.

Occupying a small, single-cotted, electric-bell-less room in the outlying ward--brick-lined and corrugated-iron-built like the greater building, and reserved for infectious cases--the Reverend Julius might have been said to be marooned, had not his dark-eyed, transparent, wasted young face created such hot compet.i.tion among the nurses for the privilege of attending on him, that he had frequently received breakfast and dinner in duplicate, and once three teas. Some of the probationers, reared in the outer darkness of Dissent, knew no better than to term him "the minister." To the matron, who was High Church, he existed as "Father Fraithorn." Julius is hardly complete to the reader without an intimation that he very dearly loved to be dubbed "Father." The matron had never failed in this.

A letter from Father Tatham, Julius's senior at St. Margaret's, lay under the bony hand--a mere bunch of fleshless fingers, in which the skin-covered stick that had been a man's arm ended. Father Tatham wrote to say that, after a bright, enjoyable summer holiday, spent with a chosen band of West-Central London barrow-boys at a Rest Home at Cookham-on-Thames, he has started his Friday evening Confirmation cla.s.ses for young costermongers in Little Schoolhouse Court, and obtained a record attendance by the simple plan of rewarding punctual attendance and ultimate mastery gained over the Catechism and Athanasian Creed with pairs of trousers. Julius had shaken his head over the trousers, knowing that the first walk taken by the garments in company with the winners would be as far as the pop-shop. But lying there in the clean-smelling, airy Hospital ward, he yearned with a mighty yearning for the stuffy West-Central cla.s.sroom, and the rowdy crew of London roughs hulking and hustling on the benches, learning per medium of "the dodger," that one's duty to one's neighbour was not to abuse him foully without cause, to refrain one's hands from pocket-picking, shop-raiding, hustling, and jellying heads with bra.s.s-buckled belts or iron knuckle-dusters, and not to get drunk before Sat.u.r.day night.

He had come out to South Africa upon the advice of physicians--honestly-meaning wiseacres--ignorant of the s.h.i.+fts, the fatigues, the inevitable exertions and privations that the panting, tottering invalid must inevitably undergo, in company with the hale traveller and the sound emigrant; the rough, protracted journeys, the neglect and discomfort of the inns and taverns and boarding-houses, where Kaffirs are the servants, and dirt and discomfort reign. He bore them because he must, and struggled on, learning by painful experience that fever-patches are best avoided, and finding out what dust-winds mean to the man who has got sick lungs, and sometimes thinking he was getting better, and would be one day able to go back to the Clergy House, and take up his mission in the West and West-Central districts, and begin work again.

Now, lying panting on his pillows, raised high by the light chair slipped in behind them, hospital-fas.h.i.+on, he looked beyond the whitewashed walls northwards, to grimy London. He dreamed, while the chart-nurse was still apologising about the forgotten breakfast, of the High Ritual in the sacred place, and the solemn joy of the vested celebrant of the Eucharistic Sacrifice. The incense rose in clouds to the gilded, diapered roof, the organ pealed ... then the ward seemed to fill with men in khaki Service dress, keen-eyed and tan-faced beings, of quiet movements and well-bred gestures, obviously stamped with the _cachet_ of authority.

Upright, alert, well-knit, and strong, the visitors exhaled the compound fragrance of healthy virility, clean linen, and excellent cigars; and the poor sufferer yielded to a pang of envy as he looked at them, standing about his bed, and thought of that resting-place even narrower, in which his wasted body must soon lie. And then he mentally smote his breast and repented. What was he, the unworthy servant of Heaven, that he should dare to oppose the Holy Will?

"Weel now, and how are we the day?" said the Chief Medical Officer, presented by the Resident Surgeon to the occupant of the bed. He read approaching death in the sunken face against the pillows, and in the feeble pulse as he touched the skeleton wrist, and the Resident Surgeon, catching the Scotsman's eye, shook his head slightly, imparting information that was not needed.

"It is not in my power, I am afraid, sir, to return you the conventional answer," said Julius Fraithorn. "To be plain and brief, I am suffering from tuberculous lung-disease, and I am advised that I have not many days to live."

He smiled gratefully at the Resident Surgeon.

"Everything that can be done for me here is done. I cannot be too thankful. But I should have liked--I should have wished to have been spared to return to England, if not to live a little longer among my friends, at least to ..." He broke off panting, and his rattling breaths seemed to shake him. He sounded like Indian corn shaken in a gunny-bag; he wheezed like the mildewed harmonium in the Hospital chapel, on which he had once tried to play. When he had spoken, his voice had had the flat, deadly softness of the exhausted phthisical sufferer's. When he had moved he had suffered torture: the shoulder-blades and hip-bones had pierced the wasted muscular tissues and projected through the skin.

"I can't!" he gasped out. "You see----"

A dizziness of deadly weakness seized him. His soft, m.u.f.fled voice trailed away into a whisper, blue shadows gathered about his large, mobile, sensitive mouth, much like that of Keats as shown in the Death Cast, and his head fell back upon the pillows. Julius had fainted.

"Poor beggar!" said a large, pink man, wearing the red shoulder-straps and brown-leather leggings of the Staff, to another, a fair, handsome, young giant who leaned against the opposite door-post, as the chart-nurse hurried to take away the pillows, and lay the patient flat, and the shorter of the two medical officers dropped brandy from a flask into a gla.s.s with water in it, while the tall Scot, his finger on the pulse, stooped over the pale figure on the bed;

"No doubt about his next address being the Cemetery. Should grouse myself if I was in his shoes--or bed-socks would be the proper word--what?"

Beauvayse agreed. "He looks like a chap I saw once get into a coffin at the Cabaret de l'Enfer--that shady restaurant place in the Boulevard de Clichy. When they turned on the lights ..." He shrugged. "The women of the party thought it simply ripping. I wanted to be sick."

Captain Bingo had also known the sensation of nausea during a similar experience. "But women'll stand anything," he said, "particularly if they've been told it's _chic_. My own part, I can stand any amount of dead men--healthy dead men, don't you know? But--give you my word--a cadaverous spectacle like that poor chap, bones stickin' out of his hide, and breathin' as if he was stuffed with dry shavin's, or husks like the Prodigal Son, gives me the downright horrors!"

Thus they conferred, supporting opposite door-posts with solid shoulders, until the C.M.O., turning his head, addressed them brusquely, curtly:

"Wrynche, if you'd transfer yourself with Lord Beauvayse to the pa.s.sage, myself and my colleagues here would be the better obliged to ye."

"Pleasure!" They removed, with a simultaneous clink of scabbards and a ring of spurred heels on the tiled pavement.

The Colonel remained, making those about the bed a group of five. The chart-nurse stayed, pending the nod of dismissal, a rigid statue of capped and ap.r.o.ned discipline, upright in the corner.

"Phew!" Captain Bingo blew a vast sigh of relief, and produced a cigar-case. "Well out of that, my boy. All jumps this morning; wouldn't take the odds you're not as bad?"

"Rather!" Beauvayse nodded, and drew the elder man's attention, with a look, to the strong young hand that held a choice Havana just accepted from the offered case. "Shaky, isn't it? and yet I didn't punish the champagne much last night. It's sheer excitement, just what one feels before riding a steeplechase, or going into Action early on a raw morning.

Not that I've been in anything but a couple of Punitive Expeditions--from Peshawar, under Wilks-Dayrell, splitting up some North-West Frontier tribes that had lumped themselves together against British Authority--up to now. But I'm looking out for the chance of something better worth having, like you and all the rest of us. Trouble you for a light!"