Cupid in Africa Part 25

Berners joined the group and saluted the Major. "Ammunition and ration indents all present and correct, sir," said he.

"Rum ration all right?" asked the Major. "How do you know the jars aren't full of water?"

"P'raps he'd better select one at random as a sample and bring it over here, Major," suggested Macke. And it was so. . . .

Another officer drifted in and was introduced to Bertram as Lieutenant Halke of the Coolie Corps, in charge of the Kavirondo, Wakamba, and Monumwezi labourers and porters attached to the Butindi garrison.

He was an interesting man, a big, burly planter, who had been in the colony for twenty years. "I want your birds to dig another trench to-morrow, Halke," said the Major. "Down by the water-picket."

"Very good, sir," replied Halke. "I'm glad that convoy rolled up safely to-day. Their _posho_ {167} was running rather low . . ." and the conversation became technical.

Bertram felt distinctly better for his rum and milk. His weariness fell from him like a garment, and life took on brighter hues. He was not a wretched, weary lad, caught up in the maelstrom of war and flung from pleasant city streets into deadly primeval jungles, where lurked Death in the form of bacillus, savage beast, and more savage and more beastly Man.

Not at all. He was one of a band of Britain's soldiers in an outpost of Empire on her far-flung battle-line. . . . One of a group of cheery comrades, laughing and jesting in the face of danger and discomfort. . . .

He had Answered His Country's Call, and was of the great freemasonry of arms, sword on thigh, marching, marching. . . . Camp-fire and bivouac. . . . The Long Trail. . . . Beyond the Ranges. . . . Men who have Done Things. . . . A sun-burnt, weather-beaten man from the Back of Beyond. . . . Strong, silent man with a Square Jaw. . . . Romance. . . .

Adventure. . . . Life. He drank some more of his rum and felt very happy. He nodded, drooped, snored-and nearly fell off his stool. Wavell smiled as he jerked upright again, and tried to look as though he had never slept in his life.

"So Pappa behaved nasty," Gussie Augustus Gus was saying to a deeply interested audience. "He'd just been turned down himself by a gay and wealthy widowette whom he'd marked down for his Number 2. When I said, 'Pappa, I'm going to be married on Monday, please,' he spake pompous plat.i.tudes, finis.h.i.+ng up with: '_A young man married is a young man marred_.' . . . 'Yes, Pappa,' says I thoughtlessly, '_and an old man jilted is an old man jarred_.' . . . Caused quite a coolness. So I went to sea." Augustus sighed and drank-and then almost choked with violent spluttering and coughing.

"That blasted Eustace!" he said, as he suddenly and vehemently expelled something.

"Did you marry her?" asked Vereker, showing no sympathy in the matter of the unexpected recovery of the body of Eustace.

"No," said Augustus. "Pappa did." . . .

"That's what I went to see," he added.

"Don't believe you ever had a father," said Vereker.

"I didn't," said Gussie Augustus Gus. "I was an orphan. . . . Am still.

. . . Poignant. . . . Searching. . . ."

Lieutenant Bupendranath Chatterji listened to this sort of thing with an owlish expression on his fat face. When anybody laughed he laughed also, loudly and raucously.

It was borne in upon Bertram that it took more than fever, hunger, boredom, mud, rain and misery to depress the spirits of the officers of the garrison of Butindi. . . .

"_Khana tyar hai_, {168a} _Sahib_," announced the Major's butler, salaaming.

"Come and gnaw ropes and nibble bricks, Greene," said the officer addressed, and with adieux to Wavell and Forbes, who ran a mess of their own, the guests departed from the Bristol Bar and entered the Officers'

Mess. Here Bertram learnt the twin delights of a native bedstead when used as a seat. You can either sit on the narrow wooden edge until you feel as though you have been sitting on a hot wire for a week, or you can slide back on to the string part and slowly, slowly disappear from sight, and from dinner.

"This water drawn from the river and been standing in the bath all day, boy?"

"_Han_, {168b} _Sahib_," replied that worthy.

"Alum in the water?"

"_Han_, _Sahib_."

"Water then filtered?"

"_Han_, _Sahib_."

"Water then boiled?"

"_Han_, _Sahib_."

"_Pukka_ boiled?"

"_Han_, _Sahib_, all bubbling."

"Filtered again? You saw it all done yourself?"

"_Han_, _Sahib_."

"That's all right, then," concluded the Major.

This catechism was the invariable prelude to the Major's use of water for drinking purposes, whether in the form of _aqua pura_, whisky and water, or tea. For the only foe that Major Mallery feared was the disease-germ.

To bullet and bayonet, shrapnel and sh.e.l.l-splinter, he gave no thought.

To cholera, enteric and dysentery he gave much, and if care with his drinking water would do it, he intended to avoid those accursed scourges of the tropics. Holding up the gla.s.s to the light of the hurricane lamp which adorned the clothless table of packing-case boards, he gazed through it-as one may do when caressing a gla.s.s of crusted ruby port-and mused upon the wisdom that had moved him to make it the sole and special work of one special man to see that he had a plentiful supply of pure fair water.

He gazed. . . . And slowly his idle abstracted gaze became a stare and a glare. His eyes protruded from his head, and he gave a yell of gasping horror and raging wrath that drew the swift attention of all-

While round and round in the alum-ised, filtered, boiled and re-filtered water, there slowly swam-a little fish.

Dinner was painfully similar to that at M'paga, save that the party, being smaller, was more of a Happy Family. It began with what Vereker called "Chatty" soup (because it was "made from talkative meat, in a chattie"), proceeded to inedible bully-beef, and terminated with dog-biscuit and coco-nut-unless you chose to eat your daily banana then.

During dinner, another officer, who had been out all day on a reconnaissance-patrol, joined the party, drank a pint of rum-and-coco-nut milk and fell asleep on the bedstead whereon he sat. He looked terribly thin and ill.

Macke punched him in the ribs, sat him up, and banged the tin plate of cold soup with his knife till the idea of "dinner" had penetrated the sleepy brain of the new-corner. "Feed yer face, Murie," he shouted in his ear.

"Thanks awf'ly," said that gentleman, took up his spoon, and toppled over backwards on to the bed with a loud snore.

"Disgustin' manners," said Gussie Augustus Gus.

"I wish we had a siphon of soda-water. I'd wake him all right."

"Set him on fire," suggested Vereker.

"He's too beastly wet, the sneak," complained Gussie.

"Oah, he iss sleepee," observed Lieutenant Bupendranath Chatterji.

Vereker regarded him almost with interest.

"What makes you think so?" he asked politely. In the laugh that followed, the sleeper was forgotten and remained where he was until Stand-to the following morning. He was living on quinine and his nerves-which form an insufficient diet in tropical Africa.