Kitabı oku: «The Dop Doctor», sayfa 12

XIX

"I landed twenty carboys of carbolic to-day, and a lot of other Hospital stores, by talking football to a man who knows the game, chiefly from the ball's point of view."

"That counts to you, Colonel," called out Beauvayse, the Chief's fair, boyish junior aide-de-camp, from the bottom of the table, "against the awful failure you were grousing about this morning."

"Ah! you mean when I tried to frighten some Sisters of Mercy into leaving the town by painting them a luridly-coloured verbal picture of the perils of the present situation," said the Colonel. His keen hazel eyes twinkled, though his mouth was grave. "I ought to have remembered that you can't scare a religious, be he or she Roman Catholic, Buddhist, or Mohammedan, by pointing to the King of Terrors. He does to frighten lay-folk, but for the others Death's grisly skeleton-hand holds out the Keys of Heaven."

"What will it hold for some of us others, I wonder," said one of the dinner-guests, a moody-looking civilian, of Semitic features, whose evening clothes made a dull contrast with the mess-dress of the Staff officers gathered about their Chief's table in his quarters at Nixey's Hotel on the Market Square, "before this month is out?"

The host leaned forward to reply:

"My dear Mr. Levison … special mention in Despatches Above, with honours and promotion for those of us who have been approved worthy. For others, who have tried and failed, a merciful overlooking of blunders, a generous acceptance of the intention where the performance came short… And for the rest … a grave on the yellow veld in the shadow of a rock or thorn-bush, with the turquoise sky of day overhead, shimmering in the white-hot sunshine; or an ocean of purple ether, ridden by what old Lucian called 'the golden galley of the regnant Moon.' That in South Africa; and at home in England, one's memory kept warm and living in, say, three hearts that recognised the best in one, and loved it. A mother's heart, the heart of a friend – and hers!"

There was no insincerity of flattery in the hum of applauding comment that ensued. All earnest original thought has beauty; and this man could not only think, but clothe his thoughts in direct and simple language, and add to it the charm of well-modulated and musical utterance.

"I call that good enough," said the senior Staff Officer, a dark, handsome, eagle-faced Guardsman, who bore a great historic name, "for you or me or any other fellow here – we're not taking into account the living dead ones."

The Chief leaned forward in his characteristic attitude, and spoke, a long, lean brown forefinger emphasising the sentences, his hawk-keen glance driving them home. "I tell you, Leighbury, that some of those, the rottenest corpses among 'em, will shed their grave-clothes, and rise up and do the deeds of living men before, to quote Levison, this month is out. Never take it for granted that a man is dead until the grass is growing high over his bare bones, and don't make too sure even then! Because to-day I saw such dry bones move – and it's an instructive if an uncanny sight."

"Whose were the bones, Colonel?" called out the handsome young aide at the bottom of the table.

The host, his thin, brown fingers busy at the clipped moustache, was listening to the Mayor of Gueldersdorp, who sat upon his right. He withdrew his attentive eyes from that stalwart sportsman's broad, ruddy countenance, to glance smilingly at the fair, handsome face, and reply:

"Whose? Well, up to the present they have belonged to the Dop Doctor."

"That man!" The Mayor, in the act of taking another slice of the roast, looked round as at the mention of a name familiar, shrugging his portly shoulders. "Surely you know who the fellow is, Colonel? He drifted up here from Cape Colony three years ago. A capable – confoundedly capable man, handicapped by a severe muscular strain," the Mayor's twinkling eye heralded the resurrection of an ancient jest – "contracted in lifting a cask of whisky – a glass at a time!"

White teeth flashed in alert tanned faces. The schoolboy laugh went round the table; then the Babel of talk rose up again. Most of these men were quite young … their seniors barely middle-aged, not a man but was what they themselves would have termed both "fit" and "keen." They had wrought for many days in the erection of sand-bag defences, in the digging of trenches, in the drilling of Baraland Irregulars and Rifle Volunteers and the newly-enrolled Town Guard. This was the pleasant social time of lull before the storm, and they were not to get many more good dinners or peaceful nights in bed for a long siege to come. They did not show outwardly the tension of strung nerves that waited, as the whole world waited, for the echo of the first shot, rattling amongst the low hills to the south. Nor did it occur to them that there was anything heroic or dramatic in their quiet unaffected pose. Gathered together upon one little spot of border earth destined to be the vital, tragic, throbbing centre of great events and tremendous issues, actions glorious, and deeds scarce paralleled upon the page of History, let us look upon them, well-groomed, well-bred, easy-mannered, cheery, demolishing the good dishes furnished by the chef of Nixey's Hotel, with the hungry zest of schoolboys, exchanging fusillades of not very brilliant chaff.

Scraps of scientific and technical conversation with reference to telephonic and telegraphic installations between outlying forts and headquarters, electric communication with mines, automatic warning-apparatus, the most effective methods of constructing bomb-proof shelters, the comparative merits of Maxim and Nordenfeldt, crossed in the air like fragments of bursting projectiles, impelled by those admirable engines of destruction. Mingled with reminiscences of cricket, golf, tennis, polo, and motoring, then in its infancy; anecdotes new and old, and conjectures as to what the fellows at home were doing? Hurlingham and Ranelagh, Maidenhead and Henley, Eton and Oxford, Sandhurst and Aldershot, Piccadilly in the season, Simla in the heats, the results for Kempton Park and Newmarket Races – of all these they talked, with rhino and elephant shooting and the big battues of pheasants now taking place in the Home Midlands and up North. But though the watch-fires of their pickets burned upon the veld, and though the Boer lay in laager over the Border, of him they said not one word. That reticence upon the vital point was characteristically English. The excitable Gaul would have wept, kneaded his manly bosom, and alluded to his mother; the stolid Muscovite would have wept also, referring to his Little Father, the Czar; the Teuton would have poured forth oceans of turgid sentiment about the Fatherland; the dignified Spaniard would have recognised himself as a warrior upon the verge of a Homeric struggle, and said so candidly; the hysterical American would have sung "Hail, Columbia!" and waved pocket-handkerchief-sized replicas of the Star-Spangled Banner until too exhausted to agitate or vocalise. But to these men indulgence in sentiment was "bad form," and unrestrained patriotic utterance merely "gas," tainting the air with an odour as of election-eggs or sulphuretted hydrogen. Therefore were many words to be avoided.

A pose, if you will, an affectation, this studied avoidance of all appearance of enthusiasm or excitement; showing the weak spot in the armour of these heroes, henceforth to be of epic fame. But Man is essentially a weak being. It is only when the immortal spirit of him nerves the frame of perishable bone and muscle that he rises to heights that are sublime. Such souls of fire burned within these men, that when the Wind of Death blew coldest and the lead-and-iron hail beat hardest, they only glowed more fiercely radiant; and Want and Privation, instead of weakening, only seemed to make them more strong; – strong to endure, strong to foresee plots and avert perils and oppose wit to cunning, and strategy to deceit; so strong that, by reason of their strength, that little frontier town became a fortress of Titans. And their names, other than those I have given them in this story, shall go ringing down the grooves of Time, until Time itself shall be no more.

XX

While they ate and drank, laughed, and chatted, the man who was to be their comrade, sharer in all those perils and privations yet to come, was tramping up and down the bare boards of the dingy bedchamber in Harris Street, wrestling desperately with his tragic thirst.

"Why did he come and look at me, and take me by the hand, and awaken my deadened senses to the sting of anguish that has no name? Why could he not have left me alone in this living death I had attained!" he cried. "When first I took to the infernal, blessed liquor, it was for the sake of respite from mental pain, torture unbearable. Then I was a man, only unhappy. Now I am lower than the lowest of the sensible, cleanly, decent brutes, because I desire the drink for its own sake, and find gratification in physical degradation. O God, if Thou indeed art, and I must perforce return to live the life of a man amongst men, help to burst the chains that fetter me! Help me to be free!"

He swallowed a great draught of water, and stumbled to the unused bed, and threw himself across it, raging and panting, and defiant of the very Power he invoked. And then, against hope, sleep came to him, drowning memory and obliterating thought, and relieving physical suffering. The lines smoothed out of the heavy forehead, and the grim mouth relaxed in the smile that his dead mother had kissed, coming in with the shaded candle to look at her sleeping boy.

Just as the Mayor of Gueldersdorp, that stalwart Yorkshireman, mighty hunter of elephant, rhino, giraffe, and lion in the reckless days of bloodshed that were before the introduction of the Game Laws into South Africa, was saying to the Colonel:

"Irreclaimable, sir. Hopeless! A confirmed drunkard, who has soaked away all self-respect, who has been cautioned and warned and fined a score of times, by myself and other magistrates. Dr. de Boursy-Williams, our leading practitioner here, has taken the fellow under his wing, in a manner – bails him out when it is necessary, and, I believe, when the man is sober enough, gives him work in his dispensary and allows him to administer the anæsthetic when it's a question of a surgical operation. Wonder he trusts him, for my part! Yet De Boursy-Williams is a remarkably successful operator, and hardly ever loses a case. It is unfortunate that he should have been called away to Cape Town at this juncture."

"He has left Dr. Saxham as locum tenens, I understand."

The Mayor shrugged his portly shoulders

"As to his qualifications, there's no doubt. Ranked high at one time as a London West End specialist. I have seen his name myself in a British Medical Directory of some years back as principal visiting-surgeon to St. Stephen's and the Ludgate Hospital for Diseases of the Chest. Has written books – scientific works that are quoted now. Must have been making money hand-over-hand when the collapse came. The usual thing – one slip – and a Police-court Inquiry follows, and down goes the unlucky wretch with the Crown on top of him, and all the Press pack yelping for soft snaps. True, the finding of the Jury was 'Not Guilty,' but the fact of there having been a prosecution was enough to ruin Saxham professionally. Ah, I thought you must have heard the name!"

For the listener had moved suddenly. He did remember the name of the distinguished London practitioner who had been discreditably mixed up in the case of Mrs. Bough, the young, miserable, murdered creature, who might possibly have been the daughter of Richard Mildare. Tough and cool as his tried nerves were, he shuddered at the thought, and a sickly heat made the points of perspiration stand out upon his forehead. But the Mayor, good man, was prosing on:

"I can't say the facts of the case are very clear in my recollection, but I have a file of the Daily Wire at home, extending over six years back, so the Criminal Court proceedings must be reported in it. The woman's name, I do remember, was Bough. As regards her age, now you ask me" – for the Colonel had put a quick question – "I fancy she must have been twenty-two or three. Indeed, I am almost certain that was the age as stated by the Medical Witness for the Prosecution… However, I'll go into the reports and let you know for certain."

"Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And, in case those Daily Wire files are bomb-proof, possibly it would be better to take the family with you – and stop until times improve."

"Not bad, not half bad, Colonel! But to tell the truth, I wouldn't miss what we used to call the shindy, and these boys of yours term the 'scrap' for a pile of Kruger sovereigns. And – I can shoot better than most men, if I am in the sere and yellow sixties." The Mayor was slightly ruffled; the diplomatic touch smoothed him down.

"My money is on you, Mr. Mayor, when it comes to stopping a Boer with a rifle-bullet at four hundred yards. By the way, I have a little confidence to repose in you. When you meet – as I am convinced you will meet – Dr. Saxham at the Hospital or elsewhere, metaphorically clothed and in his right mind, and in the active discharge of duties which no man, judging by your own testimony, is better fitted to perform, let him down gently."

The Mayor, conscious of civic dignity and magisterial warnings from the Bench ignored, swelled obviously.

"My dear sir, you can't let the Dop Doctor down anyhow. He is – just about as low as a man can get – short of being underground."

"Lend him a hand up – in the first instance – by forgetting that confounded nickname which I was clumsy enough to blurt out just now. Be oblivious of what he is, because of what he has been in the past, and will be in the future. For there is tremendous stuff in the fellow even now – or I am a bad judge of men."

"Colonel, you're a thundering bad judge of drunkards, from the Bench's point of view, but you'd be a damned good special pleader for a client in need of all the excuses that could be trumped up for him."

"We all have something we'd like to have an excuse for, Mr. Mayor." The keen hawk-eyes held a twinkle in reserve. "There was a man I knew, a mighty hunter before the Lord – and before the Game Laws." The thin brown fingers of the muscular hard-palmed hand played with the stem of a wineglass as the sentences came out, crisp and pointed. "Well, this is the story of a mistake, and an old shikari of your experience can find even more excuses for it than I can … but perhaps I bore you?"

"On the contrary – on the contrary, sir."

The fish had taken the bait, remained to play the quivering captive until his last swirling struggle brought him within reach of the skilful dip and lift of the angler's net.

"It was about four years ago, in the Portuguese coast-lands, South of the Zambesi, where elephants are to be had, and rhino, particularly the Keitloa variety with the long posterior horn, and a bad habit of charging the man behind the 600 bore…"

Mr. Mayor's capacious white waistcoat was agitated by a subterranean chuckle. His double chin shook merrily. "A side shot through the head – solid bullet – is the best cure for that, Colonel. But you had to wait in the high swamp-grass and keep the wind of him, and make sure of your aim."

"Quite so. This man, from the shelter of a rock, waited to make sure of his aim. The rhino was feeding tsetse as he dozed in the high swamp-grass. His biggest horn showed, and a bit of his shiny black skin. One forward lunge of the brute's head – and the hunter could get that side-shot. For that he waited, patience being, as we know, a virtue to be cultivated by the successful stalker of big game – "

The Mayor, boiled prawn-pink to the receding boundary-line of his upright white hair, coughed awkwardly.

"The man waited two hours. Then the unclad and obese native lady, carrying a long pointed grass-basket on her back, who had squatted down in the high grass to smoke a pipe and administer maternal refreshment to a shiny black piccannin of three or four – !"

The Mayor, purple now, burst out:

"Got up and went on! And, if these boys of yours get wind of that story, I shall be roasted within an inch of my life. Whoever told you? For the love of Heaven, don't give me away!"

The keen eyes, were dancing now – the big fish had fairly got the gaff.

"I promise, Mr. Mayor, upon the understanding that you don't give away my man… It's a compact? Thanks tremendously! And here comes the Manager to be congratulated upon the haunch. I never tasted better venison, Mr. Nixey, though, as you say, this is rather far North for koodoo. And the quail were beyond praise. Waiter, a glass for Mr. Nixey… Port – and we're going to ask you to join us in drinking a toast…"

The beautiful, flushed boy rose solemnly, glass in hand. About the long board, adorned with a fine epergne full of roses, Cape jessamine and purple bougainvillea, spread with Nixey's best plate and linen, crystal, and dishes of Staffordshire china piled with golden mandarins, and loquats, the fruit of October; there was a great uprising of those phlegmatic, self-contained Britons. Straight as the flames of unblown torches, they burned about the table. And with a simultaneous movement all those eyes of varied colours turned to the lean brown face of the Chief, as the sweet young clarion rang out:

"Gentlemen – the Queen!"

The brimming glasses rose high, – one crystal wave with the crimson of blood in it. The resonant English and the thinner Colonial voices answered together with a crash. As of the wave breaking on white cliffs northwards, and a great surge of love and loyalty went out from all those hearts to England, throbbing to the steps of the Throne where She sat, bowed with great griefs and great joys and great triumphs and glories, and white-haired with the full burden of her venerable years.

"The Queen!"

XXI

They lingered not long over wine and cigars. Lady Hannah Wrynche, entertaining what she disdainfully termed a "hen party" in her private rooms at Nixey's, vacated in her honour by the landlord's wife – expected them to coffee. Much to the relief of the military authorities at Cape Town, Milady, most erratic of Society meteors, had quitted that centre of painstaking official misinformation, for the throbbing spot of debatable land whence events might be gathered as they sprang. Shooting across the orbit of the reddening, low-hanging War-planet, she had descended upon Gueldersdorp in a shower of baggage-trunks, fox-terriers, and interrogations. For one thing, she explained to everybody, she had undertaken to supply a London Daily with a series of articles, written from the Seat of Hostilities, and for another, Bingo was on the Staff, and it would be so nice for him, poor dear, to have his wife near him in case he happened to get … was "chipped" the proper technical term, or "potted"? The articles were intended to be the real thing – racy of the soil, don't you know? and full of "go" and atmosphere. Let it be said here that they achieved raciness. The London print in which they appeared came to be christened by the scoffer and the incredulous the Daily Whale– it swallowed and disgorged so many of the Jonahs rejected by other editors. But the profits increased, and the proprietors could afford to smile at envy.

Just now the insatiable gold fountain-pen from whence our indefatigable Lady Correspondent derived her literary pseudonym, was employed in recording merest gossip, in the absence of the longed-for opportunity for its wielder to prove herself the equal, if not the superior, of Dora Corr. Dora was the woman Lady Hannah admired and envied above all others. Colonial Editor to The Thunderbolt, War Correspondent, financial expert, political leader-writer, and diplomatic go-between when Cabinet Ministers and Empire-builders would arrive at understandings, the serfdom of sex, the trammels of the petticoat, may have been said to weigh as lightly upon this thrice-fortunate spinster as though it were no drawback to be a daughter of Eve.

Oh! prayed Lady Hannah, for the chance of proving that another woman can equal this brilliant feminine Phœnix! Meanwhile her bright eyes and quick sense of humour took note of the toilettes of some of her guests, wives and daughters of notable citizens who had not hurried South at the first mutterings of the storm. The purple satin worn by the Mayoress tickled her no less than the unfeigned horror of its wearer when offered from her hostess's châtelaine cigarette-case the choicest of Sobranies. Lady Hannah's laugh was the rattling of a mischievous boy's stick across his sister's piano-wires, and the metallic jangle preceded her assurance that everybody did it – all women in Society, at least, and you were thought odd if you didn't. After dinner, in the most exclusive houses, the most rigid of hostesses invariably allowed their women guests to smoke. They knew people worth having wouldn't come if they weren't allowed to.

"Never beneath my roof!" gasped the shocked and scandalised wearer of the purple splendours demanded of the wife of a Chief Magistrate. "Never at my table!" Of course, the agitated Mayoress went on to say, one had heard of the doings of the Smart Set. But one had hoped it wasn't true, or, at least, had been very much exaggerated by "writing-people." The Mayoress, though a mild woman, had her sting.

Lady Hannah, immensely tickled to find the morals of Bayswater rampant, as she afterwards expressed it, in the centre of South Africa, cackled as she helped herself to a second liqueur-glass of Nixey's excellent apricot-brandy. Small, thin, restless, she presented a parched appearance, with bright, round, beady eyes continually roving in search of information from beneath the straggling fringe of a crumpled Pompadour transformation, for those horrors had recently become fashionable, and the whole world of women were vying with one another in the simulation of the criminal type of skull, with the Dolichocephalic Bulge.

"My dear lady, tobacco-ash is an excellent thing for killing moth in carpets, and Time, – when one is compelled to bestow it upon dull people; and a perfectly healthy, Nonconformist conscience must be a comfortable lodger. But as regards the sacred roof, and the defended table, it's a question how long both British institutions remain intact, with those big guns getting into position round us…" She waved her small hand, its once well-tended nails superbly ignored, its sun-cracks neglected, its load of South African diamonds coruscating magnificently in the light of Nixey's electric bulbs, and shrugged her thin, vivacious shoulders.

The entrance of the gentlemen relieved the situation. Lady Hannah jumped up and rushed at the Colonel. "As if she meant to eat the man," the Mayoress said afterwards, in the shadow of that threatened roof. But, impervious to the entreaty of the bright black eyes and the glittering hand that gesticulated with the urgent fan, he bowed, smiled, said a few pleasant words to his hostess, and walked "straight across" – as the Mayoress afterwards confided to the Mayor – to take a seat beside the large, placid, matronly figure palpitating in purple satin on an imported Maple sofa.

Pleased and flattered, she made room for him, while Lady Hannah became the gossip-centre of a knot of Mess uniforms…

"Both babies well?" It would have been unlike him not to have remembered that he had seen children at her house. "Hammy and Berta made great friends with me the other day… Tell them I haven't forgotten the promise to rummage up some odd native toys I picked up in Rhodesia – made of mud and feathers and bits of fur and queerly-shaped seed-pods – the most enchanting collection of birds and beasts that ever came out of the Ark. And the Makalaka have a legend about a big flood and a wise old man who built a house of reeds and skins that floated… The North American Indians will tell you that it was a Big Medicine Canoe, and amongst the tribes of the Nilghiri Hills you find exactly the same story that the Chaldean scribes wrote on their tablets of clay. To-day in Eastern Kurdistan they'll point you out the peak on which the Ark grounded. The Armenians hold it was Ararat… It's curious how the root-legend crops up everywhere…"

"But of course it must." Her good, calm eyes showed surprise, and her broad, white, matronly bosom was a little fluttered. "Doesn't the Bible teach us that the Deluge covered the whole earth? Even Hammy and Berta can tell you the whole story about Noah, and the raven – and the dove."

He smoothed his moustache with a palm that wiped the smile out.

"I must get them to tell it me one of these days." The twinkle in his eye was not to be repressed. "It would save such a deal of trouble to believe there was only one Noah, and only one Ark, don't you know?"

Her motherly bosom panted.

"My children shall never believe anything else!"

He was grave and sympathetic, though a muscle in his thin cheek twitched.

"I believe the toy Ark of our happy childish memories is built, if not of gopher-wood, at least upon the lines laid down in Scripture. Has Hammy ever tried to get his to float? Mine invariably used to sink – straight to the bottom of the bath. Perhaps that continually-recurrent catastrophe had something to do with the sapping of my infant faith, or the establishment of a sinking-fund of doubt regarding the veracity of the Noachian reporter?"

She leaned towards him, her placid grey eyes dilating with pity for this man.

"You ought to come and sit under our minister Mr. Oddris, on Sundays. Pray do. He would convince you if anybody could. Such an eloquent, able, well-informed man, and so truly pious and brave!"

The laugh perforce escaped him. The convincing Apostle Oddris had called on him at official headquarters that day, to inquire whether, as the said Oddris's wife and children were going to the Women's Laager, his place as a husband and father was not by their side? Being informed that able-bodied male beings were not included in the list of the defenceless, he had become importunate in the matter of at least a bomb-proof shelter to be erected in his back-yard.

"I had rather sit under Hammy and hear about Noah, with Berta on the other knee."

Her heart went out wholly to him… 'Out of the mouths of babes.' … Wasn't that one of the texts with promise?..

"You love children?"

"Bless the little beggars!" he said heartily, "they're the jolliest company in the world."

She leaned towards him, palpitating between her shyness of the Commander of the Garrison and her womanly curiosity to know more about the man.

"Hammond – the Mayor has told me – I hope it is not indiscreet to mention it – that the first thing you did, on joining your regiment in India as a young subaltern, was to gather all the European children in cantonments together and march them through the place, playing 'The Girl I Left Behind Me' on the flute."

His brow grew black as thunder. The utterance came, terse and sharp.

"Ma'am, you have been gravely misinformed."

She jumped in terror.

"Oh!.. Can it be?.. Colonel, I do so beg you to forgive me! Let me assure you that neither the Mayor nor myself will ever again repeat the story."

"Ma'am, if you do …"

"But I promise, never …"

"Ma'am, if you never do, at least remember that the flute was an ocarina."

He left the good soul in an ecstasy of giggles, and crossed to Lady Hannah. She welcomed him with a glitter of eyes and teeth and discovered the reserve-chair that had been covered by her somewhat fatigued and wilted draperies of maize Liberty-silk, veiled with black Maltese lace.

"What it is to be a man of tact! You've made that purple creature perfectly happy. Don't say you're going to be less kind to another woman!"

She tapped with a reproachful fan the scarlet sleeve of his thin serge mess-jacket, her appraising eye busy with the badges worn on the dark green roll-collar and the miniature medals and star. If a clever woman could be the confidante of a Cabinet Minister, the post of right-hand to the Officer Commanding H.M. Forces in Gueldersdorp might be won. And then the world would know what Hannah Wrynche was born for. What was he saying?

"I never warn my victims beforehand."

"Sphinx! and I hoped to find you in the relenting mood!"

"If possible, ma'am, my granite bosom is more unyielding than on the last occasion when …"

"Do go on!" said the fan.

"When you tried to tap it."

"You're all alike." She sighed. "That is, you give the keynote, and the others take up the tune. Even Bingo – Bingo, whom I firmly believed incapable of keeping a secret in which his dearest interests were concerned longer than ten minutes – Bingo has sprung a surprise on me. I shall end by falling in love with my own husband – such an indecent thing to do after seven years of married life!"

"Fortunately, the scene of your lapse from the crooked path of custom is distant from the West End of London nearly seven thousand miles. And you can rely upon me for secrecy."

"Ah, that!.. If only you did leak a little information now and then." Her eyebrows went up to the dry fringe of her Pompadour transformation. "For the sake of the thirsting public at home, to say nothing of my reputation as a Special Correspondent – "

"Drive over and call on General Brounckers at Head Laager, Geitfontein, on the Border, early to-morrow. Perhaps he would oblige you with matter for a paragraph, and forward the cable by private wire?"

Her birdlike eyes were bright on him.

"I would go if I thought I could get anything by going. Special information – with reference to a Plan of Attack. Oh! if you knew how I'm dying to be really under fire. To hear bullets zip-zip – isn't that the sound? – as they strike the ground or walls, and shells scream overhead!"

She clasped her sunburnt little jewelled hands in affected ecstasy. His eyes were stern, and the lines about his mouth deepened.