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He took off the giant cap with the brass ventilators, and turned it round and round, looking carefully inside it. But he found no eloquence therein. "Why did I bring a skirt, I arsk, if I'm to do the patter?" He addressed himself in an audible aside to Mrs. Keyse. "You might as well 'ave stopped at 'ome with the nipper," he added, complainingly, "if I ain't to 'ave no better 'elp than this!"
"Because you're arter one young woman wot wouldn't be seen dead in the syme street wi' you ..." Pierced with the awful thought that the adored one might be listening, W. Keyse lifted up his voice. "Sentry.... 'Ere!... Mister!" he cried despairingly, "You on the other side, can't you hear?" In vain the call.
"I seen the Doctor many, many times," the woman went on, as W. Keyse reluctantly ungagged her, "watchin' Keyse and me in our poor 'ome-life together with the eyes of a starvin' dog lookin' at a bone. You ought to know 'ow starvin' 'urts...." The strenuous voice soared and quivered. "You learned that at Gueldersdorp! Yet you can see your 'usband dyin' of 'unger, an' never put out your 'and!
When I was a little nipper at Board School there was a fairy tyle in the Third Standard Class Reader, all about a Lion wot 'ad syved the life of a Louse, an' 'ow the Louse laid out to do somethin' to pay the Lion back...." "I remember the tyle, deer," confirmed Mrs. Keyse, "But it was a mouse" she repressed a shudder "an' not the thing you said."
He took the lean chin of W. Keyse between his white, strong, supple fingers, and turned the triangular, hollow-cheeked face to the light, and said, touching the little round blue scar left by the enemy's bullet at the angle of the wide left nostril and the other mark of its egress below the inner corner of the right eye: "You found out what a woman can be, my man, when she helped to nurse you at the Hospital."
He drew back the great arms that had been hanging over the edge of his impromptu pillow, and heaved up his massive stooping shoulders, and got slowly upon his feet. Then, lurching in his walk, but not stumbling, he moved across the little space of saw-dusted, hard-beaten earth that divided him from W. Keyse, and drew up beside that insignificant minority.
The wide, thin-lipped Cockney mouth grinned a little consciously as W. Keyse jerked his thumb towards the still vibrating doors of the saloon. "Reg'ler 'ornets' nest o' Dutchies. And I was up agynst it, an' no mistyke, when you rallied up. An', Mister, you're a Fair Old Brick, an' if you've no objection to shykin' 'ands ...?" But the big man did not seem to see the little Cockney's offered hand.
She knelt an instant by the woman on the ground, put her arms round her, kissed her wet cheek, and then rose up, pale and calm and collected, saying to W. Keyse: "Take her to the Plas. Ask for Mrs. Pugh, the housekeeper. She is to prepare a room for you; you are to breakfast, and rest all day, and return to London by the night mail. Good-bye! God bless you both!
William Keyse, expectant mother of a potential Briton, sat behind them, and as she patched the shirts that had been taken out of pawn and whether they're let out on hire to parties wanting such things or whether the mice eat 'oles in 'em, who can say? but the styte in which they come back from Them Plyces is something chronic! she sang, sometimes "Come, Buy My Coloured 'Erring," which they learned you along of the Tonic Sofa at the Board School in Kentish Town; and sometimes "The Land Where Dreams Come True!"
Languishing in seclusion, week and week about, cooking scant meals of the Commissariat beef, moistened with gravy made from them patent packets of Consecrated Soup, can you wonder that her burden of bitterness against W. Keyse, author of all her wrongs, instrument most actively potential in the jogging of her young man, bulked larger every day?
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