Читать книгу The Dop Doctor - Richard Dehan - Страница 19

The Dop Doctor lifted his head as the bell of the front door rang loudly at the back passage-end. Two mounted officers of the Military Staff at Gueldersdorp had trotted up the street with an orderly behind them a moment before. The elder of the two had pulled sharply up in front of the green door whose brass-plate flamed in the last rays of sunset. He had dismounted lightly and gone up the steps and rung, saying something to his companion. The other officer had saluted and ridden on, as though to carry out some order: the orderly had come up and got off his horse and taken the bridle of the officer's, as the Dutch dispensary-attendant, Koets, had plodded heavily along the passage and opened the door, and now slouched heavily back, ushering in a presumable patient.

"Light the lamp," said the Dop Doctor in Dutch to the factotum, as he rose up heavily out of his chair. "It will be dark directly."

"There is no need of more light, I am obliged to you," said the stranger, cool, alert, brown of face as of dress: a thin man, distinct of speech, quiet of manner, and with singularly vivid eyes of light hazel. "In the actual dark I can see quite clearly. A matter of training and habit, because I began life as a short-sighted lad. Do we need your assistant further?"

In indirect answer to the pointed question, the Dop Doctor turned to the Dutch dispensary-assistant, and said curtly:

"Ga uit!"

Koets went, not without a scowl at the visitor.

"A sulky man and a surly master," thought the stranger, scanning with those observant eyes of his the gaunt figure in the shabby tweed suit. "Has seen trouble and lived hard," he added, mentally noting the haggard lines of the square face under the massive forehead, over which a plume of badly-brushed hair, black with threads of grey in it, fell awkwardly.

"English and a University man, I should say. Those clothes were cut by a Bond Street tailor in the height of fashion about five years ago. And the man is in the second stage of recovery from a bout of drunkenness – unless he drugs?" But even while the visitor was taking these memoranda, he was saying in the customary tone of polite inquiry:

"I have, I think, the pleasure of speaking to Dr. Williams?"

"Sir, you have not. Dr. De Boursy-Williams has left for Cape Town with his family. You are speaking to his temporary substitute." The bloodshot blue eyes met his own indifferently.

"Indeed! Well, I do not grudge the family if, as I believe is the case, it chiefly ranks upon the distaff side. But the Doctor will miss a good deal of interesting practice. As to yourself, you will allow the inquiry… Are you a surgeon as well as a medical practitioner?"

"If I were not, I should not be here."

"I will put my question differently. I trust you will not consider its repetition offensive. Have you an extensive experience in dealing with gunshot wounds?"

Saxham said roughly:

"I have experience to a certain extent. I will go no further than to say so. I am not undergoing examination as to my professional capabilities that I am aware of, and if you doubt them you are perfectly at liberty to seek medical advice elsewhere."

"My good sir, I have been elsewhere, and the other doctor, when he learned the purport of my visit, relished it as little as your principal is likely to do. With the imminent prospect of a siege before us, we are making …" The speaker, slipping one hand behind him, moved a step backwards and nearer to the room-door. "As I said, sir, with the imminent prospect of a siege before us, we are making a house-to-house requisition… Ah, I thought as much!"

The door-knob had been quietly turned, the door suddenly pulled open, bringing with it Koets, the Dutch dispensary-attendant, whose large red ear had been glued to the outer keyhole.

"Your Dutch factotum has been listening. Pick yourself off the mat, Jan, and take yourself out of earshot." The stranger whistled the beginning of a pleasant little tune, with a flavour of Savoy Opera about it.

"Ik heb not the neem of Jan," snarled the detected Koets, retiring in disorder.

The whistler left off in the middle of a deftly-executed embellishment to say: "Unfortunate; because I don't know the Dutch word for spy." The keen hazel eyes and the haggard blue ones met, and there was the faint semblance of a smile on the grim mouth of the Dop Doctor. Keeping the door open, the visitor went on:

"I have some notes here – entries copied from the Railway freight-books. Three weeks ago twenty carboys of carbolic acid, with a considerable consignment of other antiseptics, surgical necessaries, drugs, and so forth were delivered to Dr. Williams' order at this address. Frankly, as the officer commanding Her Majesty's troops on this border, I am here to make a sequestration of the things I have mentioned, with all other medical and surgical requisites stored upon the premises, that are likely to be of use to us at the Hospital. In the name of the Imperial Government."

The smile died out on the grim mouth. A sombre anger burned in the blue eyes of the haggard man in shabby tweeds.

"Damn the Imperial Government!" said the Dop Doctor.

The stranger nodded in serious assent. "Certainly, damn it! It is your privilege and mine, shared in common with all other Britons, to damn our Government, as long as we remain loyal to our Queen and country."

The other man quivered with a sudden uncontrollable spasm of hate, rage, and loathing. He clenched his hand and shook it in the air as he cried:

"You employ the stock phrases of your profession. They have long ceased to mean anything to me. I have been the victim and the sacrifice of British laws. I have been formally pardoned by the State for a crime I never committed. I have been robbed, plundered, ruined, betrayed, by the monstrous thing that bears the name of British Justice. And as I loathe and hate it, so do I cast off and repudiate the name of Englishman. You speak of the imminent prospect of a siege. What other causes have operated to bring it about but British greed, and the British lust for paramountcy and suzerainty and possession? Liberal, or Conservative, or Radical, or Unionist, the diplomats and lawyers and financiers who urge on your political machinery by bombast and bribes and catchwords and lying promises, are swayed by one motive – governed by one desire – lands and diamonds and gold. Wealth that is the property of other men, soil that has been fertilised by the sweat of a nation of agriculturists, whom Great Britain despised until she learned that gold lay under their orchards and cornfields." He broke into a jarring laugh. "And it is for these, the robbers and desperadoes, that the British Army is to do its duty, and for them that De Boursy-Williams is to help pay the piper. As for his property, which you are about to commandeer in the name of the British Imperial Government, I suppose I am legally responsible, being left here in charge. Well, be it so!.. I can only protest against what I am free to regard as an act of brigandage, reflecting small credit upon your Service, and leave you, sir, to discover the whereabouts of the carboys for yourself!"

He waved his hand contemptuously, and swung towards the door.

"A moment," said the other man, "in which to assure you that the fullest acknowledgments will be given in the case of the stores, and that their owner will be paid for them liberally and ungrudgingly. And, granting that much of what you have said is true, and that the leaven of self-seeking is to be found in every man's nature, and that greed is the predominating motive with those men who, more than others, work for the building-up of an Empire and the profitable union of Britain with her Colonies, don't you think that there may be something in the good old footballer's motto, 'Play the game, that your side may win'?"

The Dop Doctor made a slight sound that might have been of indifferent assent or of contradiction. The other chose to take it as assent.

"Take the present situation, purely as football. They have picked me as a forward player. And I mean – to play the game!"

The Dop Doctor might or might not have heard. His square, impassive face looked as if carved in stone.

"To play the game, Doctor. Perhaps I have my bone or two to pick with – several of the Institutions of my country. Possibly, but I mean to play the game. Fate has ridden me on a saddle-gall or two, and mixed too much chopped straw in proportion to the beans, but – there's the game, and I'm going to play it for all I'm worth. As an old University man, that way of looking at things ought to appeal to you."

Still no answer from the big, sullen, black-haired man in the shabby worn clothes. But his breathing was a little quickened, and a faint, smouldering glow of something not yet quenched in him showed in the haggard blue eyes.

"It's a confoundedly handicapped game, too, on the defending side. Doesn't that fact rather appeal to the sportsman in you, Doctor?"

The other said slowly:

"I gather that the struggle will be unequal. It was stated in my hearing yesterday afternoon that a considerable force of Boers were advancing on Gueldersdorp from the direction of Geitfontein, and, later, that another large body of them were on the march along the river-valley from the west. I did not attempt to verify what I had heard from my own observation. I was – otherwise engaged." The half-incredulous surprise that the other man could not keep out of his eyes stung him into adding: "Frankly, I did not care to trouble. It did not interest me."

The Colonel said, with a dry chuckle:

"No? But it will presently, though! And, seen through the glass even now, it's an instructive spectacle. Masses of Dutchmen, well-weaponed and thoroughly fed if insufficiently washed, gathering in all quarters – marching to the assembly points, dismounting, unlimbering, going into laager. Ten thousand Boers, at a rough estimate, not counting the blacks they have armed against us… And, behind our railway-sleepers and sand-bags, eight hundred fighting European units, twenty per cent, of them raw civilians; and seven thousand neutral Barala and Kaffirs and Zulus in the native Stad – an element of danger lying dormant, waiting the spark that may hurry us all sky-high… By God, Doctor, the game's worth playing, except by cowards and curs!"

The smouldering glow in the Dop Doctor's eyes had been fanned into a fire. The visitor saw the flame leap, and went on:

"There's a native proverb – I wonder whether you know it? – a kind of Zulu version of the regimental motto, Vestigia nulla retrorsum. It runs like this: 'If we go forward, we die; if we go backward, we die. Better go forward and die.'" He reached out a long, lean, brown right hand. "Come forward with us, Doctor. We can do with a man like you!"

The impassive face broke up. Saxham gripped the offered hand as a drowning man might have done. He cried out hoarsely:

"You don't know the sort of man I am, Colonel. But everybody else in this cursed place knows, or should know. They call me the Dop Doctor. You understand what that nickname implies?" He held out his shaking hands. "Look at these! They would tell you the truth, even if I lied. What use can a man like me be to you, or men like you? I am a drunkard, sir. I have not gone to bed sober one night in the last five years!"

There was a pause before the Colonel answered, filled up in the odd way characteristic of the man by a softly-whistled repetition of the opening bars of the pleasant little tune. Then he said quietly and dryly:

"There is another proverb, not Latin nor Zulu, but English, which impresses on us that it is never too late to mend!" He looked at a tarnished Waterbury watch, worn on a horse's lip-strap. "I am due to inspect the Hospital tomorrow at ten o'clock sharp. If you will meet me there punctually at the half-hour, I shall have the pleasure of introducing you to – your Colleagues of the Medical Staff. And now, if you please, as I have just five minutes left to spare, we will have a look at those carboys of carbolic."

"They are in the old Chinese godown at the bottom of the garden," said Saxham. He felt in one of the baggy pockets of the old tweed coat, pulled out a key, and offered it silently to the conqueror, who motioned it back.

"Keep it, if you'll be so good. We'll send a waggon and a careful man or two round from the Army Service Stores Department within an hour; for that stuff in your friend's carboys is more precious than rubies to us just now – a man's life in every teaspoonful. And if, as you tell me, there is some mercurial perchloride, Taggart and the Medical Staff will jump for joy. What we owe to Lister, Koch, and those fellows! You'd say so if you'd ever seen gangrene on War Hospital scale – in Afghanistan, in 1880, even as recently as the Zululand Campaign of 1888. The Pathan and the Zulu are slim, and the Boer is even slimmer, but the wiliest customer of 'em all is the Microbe. No wonder Wellington's old campaigners used to slit the throats of badly-wounded soldiers, or that the ambulance-men of Soult and Bonaparte were merciful enough to knock on the head every poor beggar who had been bayonetted in the body. They knew there was not the atom of a chance. But to-day we know how to deal with the invisible enemy. Thanks to Antiseptic Surgery, that younger daughter of Science and Genius, as some smart fellow puts it in the National Review."

And the pleasant little tune was whistled through to its final grace-note as the two men went down the house-passage and crossed the garden. Verily, to some other men that have lived since Peter of the Nets has it been given to be fishers of their kind! This man said that night to an officer of the Staff: