Читать книгу The Dop Doctor - Richard Dehan - Страница 15

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Emigration Jane, the new under-housemaid on trial at the Convent, had a gathering on the top joint of the first finger of the hand that burned to wear Walt Slabberts' betrothal-ring, and the abscess being ripe for the lancet, she had an extra afternoon in the week to get it attended to. She found Walt waiting at the street-corner under the lamp-post, and her heart bounded, for by their punctuality at the trysting-place you know whether they are serious in their intentions towards you, or merely carrying on, and her other young men had invariably kept her waiting. This new one was class, and no mistake.

"Watto, Walt!" she hailed joyously.

Her Walt uttered a guttural greeting in the Taal, and displayed uncared-for and moss-grown teeth in the smile that Emigration Jane found strangely fascinating. To the eye that did not survey Walt through the rose-coloured glasses of affection he appeared merely as a high-shouldered, slab-sided young Boer, whose cheap store-clothes bagged where they did not crease, and whose boots curled upwards at the toes with mediæval effect. His cravat, of a lively green, patterned with yellow rockets, warred with his tallowy complexion; his drab-coloured hair hung in clumps; he was growing a beard that sprouted in reddish tufts from the tough hide of his jaws, leaving bare patches between, like the karroo. The Slabberts was an assistant-clerk at the Gueldersdorp Railway-Station Parcels-Office, and his widowed mother, the Tante Slabberts, took in washing from Uitlanders, who are mad enough to change their underwear with frequency, and did the cleaning at the Gerevormed Kerk at Rustenberg, a duty which involves the emptying of spittoons. Her boy was her joy and pride.

Young Walt, the true Boer's son that he was, did not entertain the idea of marrying Emigration Jane. The child of the Amalekite might never be brought home as bride to the Slabberts roof. But all the same, her style, which was that of the Alexandra Crescent, Kentish Town, London, N.W., and her manners, which were easy, and her taste in dress, which was dazzling, attracted him. As regards their spoken intercourse, it had been hampered by the Slabbertian habit of pretending only a limited acquaintance with the barbarous dialect of England. But a young man who conversed chiefly by grunts, nudges, and signs was infinitely more welcome than no young man at all, and Emigration Jane knew that the language of love is universal. She had sent him a lovely letter in the Taal making this appointment, causing his pachydermatous hide to know the needle-prick of curiosity. For only last Sabbath she had spoken nothing but the English, and a young woman capable of mastering Boer Dutch in a week might be made useful in a variety of ways—some of them tortuous, all of them secret, as the Slabbertian ways were wont to be.

He advanced to her, without the needless ceremony of touching his hat, eagerly asking how she had acquired her new accomplishment?

But the brain crowned by the big red hat that had come from the Maison Cluny, and cost a hundred francs, and had been smartened up with a bunch of pink and yellow artificial roses, and three imitation ostrich-tips of a cheerful blue, did not comprehend. Someone who spoke the Taal had written for her. The bilingual young woman who was to be of such use to Walt had only existed in his dreams. And yet—the disappointing creature was exceeding fair.

"Pity you left your eyes be'ind you, Dutchy!" giggled Emigration Jane, deliciously conscious that those rather muddy orbs were glued on her admiringly.

The hair crowned by the screaming hat was waved and rolled over the horsehair frame she had learned to call a "Pompydore"; the front locks, usually confined in the iron cages called "curlers," frizzled wonderfully about her moist, crimson face. She had on a "voylet" delaine skirt, with three bias bands round the bottom, and a "blowse" of transparent muslin stamped with floral devices. Her shoes were of white canvas; her stockings pink and open-worked; her gloves were of white thread, and had grown grey in the palms with agitation. One of them firmly grasped a crimson "sunshyde," with green and scarlet cherries growing out of the end of the stick.

The young Dopper warmly grasped the other, provoking a squeal from the enchantress.

"Mind me bad finger! Lumme! you did give us a squeeze an' a' arf."

"If I shall to hurt you I been sorry, Miss!" apologized the Slabbert.

"All righto, Dutchy!" smiled Emigration Jane. "Don't tear your features." She bestowed a glance of almost vocal disdain upon a Kaffir girl in turkey-red cotton twill, with a green hat savagely pinned upon her woolly hair. At another ebony female who advanced along the sidewalk pushing a white baby in a perambulator she tossed her head. "Funny," she observed, "when I was 'ome I used to swaller all the tales what parsons kep' pitchin' about that black lot 'aving souls like me an' you. When I got out 'ere, an' took my fust place at Cape Town, an' 'eard the Missis and the Master continual sayin', 'Don't do this or that, it ain't Englishwomen's work; leave it to the Caffy,' or 'Call the 'Ottintot gal,' I felt quite 'urt for 'em. Upon me natural, I did! But when I knoo these blackies a bit better, I didn't make no more bones. Monkeys, they are, rigged up in brown 'olland an' red braid, wot 'ave immytated 'uman beings till they've come to talk langwidge wot we can understand, and tumble to our meanings. 'Ow do you like me dress, Walty dear? An' me 'at? That chap what passed with the red mustash said to 'is friend as I looked a bit of fair all right, and no mistake. But I'd rather 'ear you say so nor 'im if you 'ad enough English to do it with. Wot do I care about the perisher along of you?"

It was hard work to talk for two, and keep the ball of courtship rolling after the approved fashion of Kentish Town, when the slouching young Boer would only grunt in reply, or twinkle at her out of his piggish eyes. But Emigration Jane had come out to South Africa, hearing that places at five shillings a day were offered you by employers, literally upon their knees, and that husbands were thick as orange-peel and programmes on the pit-floor of the Britanniar Theayter, 'Oxton, or the Camden Varieties on the morning after a Bank Holiday. She had left her first situation at Cape Town, being a girl of spirit, because her mistress had neglected to introduce her to eligible gentlemen acquaintances, as the pleasant-spoken agent at the Emigrants' Information Office in Cheapside, the young gentleman of Hebrew strain, whose dark eyes, waxed moustache, and diamond tie-pin had made a deep impression upon the susceptible heart of his client, had assured Jane the South African employer would take an early opportunity of doing. The reality had not corresponded with the glowing picture. The employer had failed in duty, the husbands-aspirant had not appeared. Ephemeral flirtations there had been, with a postman, with a trooper of the Cape Mounted Police, with an American bar-tender. But not one of these had breathed of indissoluble union, though each had wanted to borrow her savings. And Emigration Jane had "bin 'ad" in that way before, and gone with her bleeding heart and depleted Post Office Savings-book before the fat, sallow magistrate at the Regent's Road County Court, and winced and smarted under his brutal waggeries, only to learn that the appropriator of her womanly affections and her fifteen sovereigns had already three wives.

The brute, the 'artless beast! Emigration Jane wondered at herself, she did, as 'ad bin such a reg'ler soft as to be took in by one to whom she never referred in speech except as "That There Green." That she softened to him in her weaker moments, in spite of his remembered appetite for savings and his regrettable multiplicity of wives, gave her the fair hump. That something in the expression of this new one's muddy eyes recalled the loving leer of "That There Green," she admitted to herself. Womanly anxiety throbbed in the bosom, not too coyly hidden by the pneumonia blouse, as the couple passed the gilded portals of a public bar, and the Slabberts' elbow was thrust painfully into her side, as its owner said heavily:

"Have you thirst?"

She coyly owned to aridity, and they entered the saloon, kept by a Dutchman who spoke English. Two ginger-beers with a stick of Hollands were supplied, and the stick of Slabberts was as the rod of Moses to the other stick for strength and power. But as Emigration Jane daintily sipped the cooling beverage, giggling at the soapy bubbles that snapped at her nose, the restless worm of anxiety kept on gnawing under the flowery "blowse." Too well did she know the ways of young men who hospitably ask you if you're thirsty, and 'ave you in, whether or no, and order drinks as liberal as lords, and then discover that they're short of the bob, and borrow from you in a joking way. … Her heart bounded as the Slabberts put his hand in his pocket, saying:

"Wat kost het?"

The Dutch bar-keeper, who seemed to know Slabberts, answered in English, looking at Emigration Jane:

"Half a dollar."

Half a dollar is South African for eighteenpence. Slabberts rattled something metallic in his trousers-pocket, and said something rapidly in the Taal. The Dutch bar-keeper leaned across the counter, and said to Emigration Jane:

"Your young man has not got the money."

They were all, all alike. A tear rose to her eye. She bravely dried it with a finger of a white cotton glove, and produced her purse, an imitation crocodile-leather and sham-silver affair, bought in Kentish Town, where you may walk through odorous groves of dried haddocks that are really whiting, and Yarmouth bloaters that never were at Yarmouth, and purchase whole Rambler roses, the latest Paris style, for threepence, and try on feather-boas at two-and-eleven-three, plucked from the defunct carcase of the domestic fowl. She paid for the drinks with a florin, and it was quite like old times when Slabberts calmly pocketed the sixpence of change. The bar-keeper leaned over to her again, and said, surrounding her with a confidential atmosphere of tobacco and schnaps:

"He is a good man, that young man of yours, and gets much money. He means to give you a nice present by-and-by."

Her grateful heart overflowed to this friendly patronage. She showed the bar-keeper her gathered finger, and said it did 'urt a treat. She expected it would 'urt worse before Dr. de Boursy-Williams—"'adn't 'e got a toff's name?"—'ad done with it.

"You go to that Engelsch doktor on Harris Street, eh?" said the bar-keeper, spitting dexterously.

"Sister Tobias—that's the nun wot 'ousekeeps at the Convent—give me a order to see 'im, to 'ave me finger larnced," explained Emigration Jane. "Ain't 'e all right?"

"Right enough," said the bar-keeper, winking at the Slabberts, and adding something in the Taal, that provoked chuckles among the bystanders and called forth a fine display of neglected teeth on the part of the personage addressed. "There are plenty other Engelsch will be wishing to be as right, oh, very soon! For De Boursy-Williams, he has sent his wife and his two daughters away on the train for Cape Town yesterday morning, and he has gone after them that same night, and he has left all his patients to the Dop Doctor."

"Some red-necked baboons are wiser than others," said the Slabberts in the Taal, and there was a hoarse laugh, and the humorist turned his big heavy body away, and became one of a crowd of other Dutchmen, who were, in veiled hints and crooked allusions, discussing the situation across the Border. Emigration Jane was not sensitive to the electricity in the atmosphere. She knew no Dutch, and was perfect in the etiquette of the outing, which, when the young woman has been supplied with the one regulation drink, stands her up in the corner like an umbrella in dry weather as long as her young man is a-talking to 'is pals.

"So," the bar-keeper went on, "if you shall want that bad finger of yours looked to, you will have to wait until the Dop Doctor wakes up. He is a big man, who can drink as much as three Boers. … He came in this morning to get drunk, and you shall not wake him now if you fire off a rifle at his ear. But he will get up presently and shake himself, and then he will be quite steady; you would not guess how drunk he had been unless you had seen. … He is over there, sleeping on that table in the corner, and it will be very bad for the man who shall wake him up. For, look you, that Dop Doctor is a duyvel. I have seen him break a man like a stick between his hands for nothing but cutting up a thieving monkey of a little Kaffir with the sjambok. And he took the verdoemte thing home where he lives, they say, and strapped up its black hide with plaster, and set its arm as if it had been a child of Christians. But every Engelschman is mad. Groot Brittanje breeds a nation of madmen."

The saloon got fuller and fuller. The air solidified with the Taal and the tobacco, and other things less pleasant. It was not the hour for a crowd of customers, but nobody had seemed to be working much of late. They were all Transvaalers and Free Staters, tradesmen of the town, or Boers from outlying farms, and not a man there but was waiting a certain signal to clear out and leave Gueldersdorp to her fate, or remain in the place on a salary paid by the Republics as a spy. The English customer who came in knew at one whiff of the thick atmosphere that it was unhealthy, and if the man happened to be alone, he ordered, and paid, and drank, and went out quickly. If he happened to be with friends, he pointedly addressed his conversation to his countrymen, and left with a certain degree of swagger, and without the appearance of undue haste.

Once the swing-doors of the saloon opened to admit a short, spare, hollow-chested, dapper young Englishman, whose insignificant Cockney countenance was splashed with orange-coloured freckles of immense size. Between his thin anæmic lips dangled the inevitable cigarette. And Emigration Jane, toying with the dregs of her tumbler, recognized the pert, sharp, sallow face seen over the sleeve of a large burgher's outstretched arm. With some trouble she caught the eye of the short, pale young man, and he instantly became a red one. To reach her was difficult, but he dived and wriggled his way across the saloon, wedging his frail person between the blockish bodies with a cool address that reminded her of the first night of a "noo show" at the Camden "Theayter," and the queue outside the gallery door.

"'Ullo, 'ullo! Thought I reckonised you, Miss." He touched his cheap imitation Panama with swaggering gallantry, and winked. "But seeing you eight sizes more of a toff than what you were when I previously 'ad the pleasure, I 'esitated to tip you the 'Ow Do."

She tossed her imitation ostrich plumes in joyous coquetry.

"As if I didn't know wot you're after. Garn! You only wants to know if I acted on the stryte about … "

His projecting ears burned crimson.

"Well, an' suppose I do. Did she——"

"Did she wot?"

"You pipe well enough. Did she 'ave it?"

"Ain't you anxious?"

"Tyke it I am anxious. Did she? No cod?"

"Did she git your letter wot you put in the box o' choc's? O' course she did, Mister. Wot do you tyke me for? A silly looney or a sneakin' thief?"

"I'll tell you what I tyke you for. A jolly little bit of English All Right. Say! Do you think … " The prominent Adam's apple jutting over the edge of the guillotining double collar worked emotionally. "Think she'll send an answer, eh?"

"Reckon she will; you watch out an' see!"

"You fust-clarss little brick!"

"Garn!"

"I mean it. Stryte. Next door to a angel—that's wot you are. She's the angel. Tell 'er I said so—that's if you can, you twig? And say that when I 'eard that nearly all the gay old crowd o' pupils 'ad gone away, day before yesterday, I could 'a blooming well cut me throat, thinkin' she'd gone too. Becos' when I swore in for the Town Guard, it was with the idear—mind you rub that in!—of strikin' a blow for Beauty as well as for Britanniar, twig?" The thin elbow in the tweed sleeve nudged her, provoking a joyous giggle.

"I'm fly, no fear. Are you to 'ave a uniform, an' all like that?"

His face fell. "The kit don't run to much beyond a smasher 'at an' puttees, but they're the regular Service kind, an' then there's the bandolier—an' the gun. She ain't the newest rifle served out to Her Majesty's Army, not by twenty years. Condemned Martini, a chap says, who's in the know—an' kicks like a mule when I let 'er off—made me nose bleed fust time I tried with blank. But when we gets a bit more used to each other, it 'll be a case of bloomin' Doppers rollin' over in the dust, like rock-rabbits. Don't forget to tell 'er as wot I said so."

"Why … ain't she a Dutchy 'erself? She wrote a letter for me in their rummy lingo to my young man!"

"Cripps!" He stared in dismay. "Blessed if I 'adn't forgot. But if an Englishman marries a foreigner," he swelled heroic, "that puts 'er in the stryte runnin'. And 'art an' 'and I'm 'ers, whenever she'll 'ave me! Tell 'er that—with a double row of crosses from W. Keyse! And—can you remember a bit o' poetry?" He recited with shamefaced rapidity: