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:
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