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Updated: June 2, 2025
W. Keyse thanked them soberly, and put the gift of his lost love away. His pale, unbeautiful eyes had the anguish of despair in them, and the tooth of that sharp death-hunger of which Kildare had spoken was gnawing what he would have termed with simplicity "his inside." For if Emigration Jane were dead, what had Life left for him?
He nodded, looking with the bloodshot and extremely blue eyes that were set under his heavy straight black brows, not at W. Keyse, but over the boy's head, and with a surly noise in his throat that stopped short of being speech, swung heavily round and went down the dusty street, that was grilling in the full blaze of the afternoon heat, lurching a little in his walk.
When did you leave London?" "Yes'dy mornin' at 'arf-past six," said W. Keyse, carefully avoiding her eyes. A spasm contracted the tired face under the dusty peonies. Their wearer put her hand to the collar of the green-and-yellow ulster, and undid a button there. "'Yesterday morning at half-past six'!" Lynette repeated in wonder.
Something W. Keyse dragged behind him, not by a rope, but by a pigtail; an animated bundle of clean blue cotton, topped by the impassive, almond-eyed countenance of John Tow, the letter-carrying Chinaman, who in the unlawful pursuit of tikkies, finding the letter written by the foreign lady-devil to the male one eagerly paid for on the nail, had offered for half as much again to induce her for the future to write two instead of one.
But the soles of W. Keyse's boots were worn to their last thickness of brown paper, and all his clothes and Emigration Jane's, with the exception of the things him and her had on, had been pawned before it occurred to the man that that kind of walking ended in the Workhouse. The woman had known it from the very beginning. The valorous deeds of W. Keyse stood him in no good stead.
W. Keyse felt a little awkward, and the rifle was uncommonly heavy. The Slabberts felt it tremble, and thought about taking his hands down and reaching for that Colts six-shooter he kept in his hip-pocket. But though the finger wobbled, it was at the trigger, and Walt was not fond of risks. "Tell him, Jannje!" he spluttered once more. She had not needed a second bidding.
"And he never saw her no more, so he did not!" commented the Cardiff stoker as the pipe travelled from hand to hand to be smelt at, dandled, worshipped by every man in turn. Only the Sergeant-gunner, the grey-headed ex-Royal Field Artilleryman, maintained self-command by dint of looking very hard the other way. Then said Kildare impetuously: "Take ut back, Corp'ril Keyse.
Dead or livin' oh, my darlin'! my darlin'!" The bearers interchanged a look as they laid their burden down. It was not heavy, for Corporal W. Keyse, even when not living under conditions of semi-starvation, was a short man and a spare.
Keyse with his elbow. "An' look at 'er! Doin' a blub on the strength of it! That's wot it is to be a woman! Ain't it, sir?" Saxham's keen glance took in the altered shape of the thin girl in the mended jacket and the large and feathered hat that topped the colossal structure of fair, frizzled hair, even as she dried her eyes with a twopenny handkerchief edged with cotton lace, and tried to laugh.
W. Keyse had thought of soliciting a re-engagement at the fried-fish shop in the High Street, Camden Town, but it had been swept away in favour of an establishment where they mended your boots while you waited. So he sought elsewhere. The War had drained away so many men, one would have thought employment could be had by any chap who took the trouble to walk about and look for it.
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