This catechism was the invariable prelude to the Major’s use of water for drinking purposes, whether in the form of aqua pura, whisky and water, or tea. For the only foe that Major Mallery feared was the disease-germ. To bullet and bayonet, shrapnel and shell-splinter, he gave no thought. To cholera, enteric and dysentery he gave much, and if care with his drinking water would do it, he intended to avoid those accursed scourges of the tropics. Holding up the glass to the light of the hurricane lamp which adorned the clothless table of packing-case boards, he gazed through it—as one may do when caressing a glass of crusted ruby port—and mused upon the wisdom that had moved him to make it the sole and special work of one special man to see that he had a plentiful supply of pure fair water.
He gazed. . . . And slowly his idle abstracted gaze became a stare and a glare. His eyes protruded from his head, and he gave a yell of gasping horror and raging wrath that drew the swift attention of all—
While round and round in the alum-ised, filtered, boiled and re-filtered water, there slowly swam—a little fish.
* * * * *
Dinner was painfully similar to that at M’paga, save that the party, being smaller, was more of a Happy Family. It began with what Vereker called “Chatty” soup (because it was “made from talkative meat, in a chattie”), proceeded to inedible bully-beef, and terminated with dog-biscuit and coco-nut—unless you chose to eat your daily banana then.
During dinner, another officer, who had been out all day on a reconnaissance-patrol, joined the party, drank a pint of rum-and-coco-nut milk and fell asleep on the bedstead whereon he sat. He looked terribly thin and ill.
Macke punched him in the ribs, sat him up, and banged the tin plate of cold soup with his knife till the idea of “dinner” had penetrated the sleepy brain of the new-corner. “Feed yer face, Murie,” he shouted in his ear.
“Thanks awf’ly,” said that gentleman, took up his spoon, and toppled over backwards on to the bed with a loud snore.
“Disgustin’ manners,” said Gussie Augustus Gus.
“I wish we had a siphon of soda-water. I’d wake him all right.”