In fact he thought of her all night as he lay on the long bed-seat of his carriage in a fog of fine red dust, instead of sleeping or thinking of what lay before him at Taveta, whence, if all or any of the Club gossip were true, he would be embarking upon a very hard campaign, and one of “open” fighting, too. This would be infinitely more interesting than the sit-in-the-mud trench warfare, but it was not of this that he found himself thinking so much as of the length and silkiness of Miss Eva’s eyelashes, the tendrils of hair at her neck, the perfection of her lips, and similar important matters. He was exceedingly glad that he was going to be attached to a Kashmiri regiment, because it was composed of Dogras and Gurkhas, and he liked Gurkhas exceedingly, but he was ten thousand times more glad that there was a Miss Eva Stayne-Brooker in the world, that she was in Mombasa, that he could think of her there, and, best of all, that he could return and see her there when the war was o’er—and he sang aloud:
“When the war is o’er,
We’ll part no more.”
No—damn it all—one couldn’t sing “at Ehren on the Rhine,” after the German had shown his country to be the home of the most ruffianly, degraded, treacherous and despicable brute the world has yet produced; and, turning over with an impatient jerk, he tipped a little mound of drifted red dust and sand into his mouth and his song turned to dust and ashes and angry spluttering. Absit omen.
At Taveta, a name on a map and a locality beneath wooded hills, Bertram found a detachment of his regiment, and was accepted by his brother-officers as a useful-looking and very welcome addition to their small Mess. He was delighted to renew acquaintance with Augustus and with the Gurkha Subedar—whom he had last seen at M’paga. Here he also found the 29th Punjabis, the 130th Baluchis, and the 2nd Rhodesians. In the intervals of thinking of Miss Eva, he thought what splendid troops they looked, and what a grand and fortunate man he was to be one of their glorious Brigade.
When he smelt the horrible fever smell of the pestilential Lumi swamp, he hoped Miss Eva would not get fever in Mombasa.
When he feasted his delighted eyes on Kilimanjaro, on the rose-flushed snows and glaciers of Kibo and Mawenzi, their amazing beauty was as the beauty of her face, and he walked uplifted and entranced.
When the daily growing Brigade was complete, and marched west through alternating dense bush and open prairie of moving grass, across dry sandy nullahs or roughly bridged torrents, he marched with light heart and untiring body, neither knowing nor caring whether the march were long or short.
When Gussie Augustus Gus said it was dam’ hot and very thoughtless conduct of Jan Smuts to make innocent and harmless folk walk on their feet at midday, Bertram perceived that it was hot, though he hadn’t noticed it. His spirit had been in Mombasa, and his body had been unable to draw its attention to such minor and sordid details as dust, heat, thirst, weariness and weakness.
The ice-cold waters of the Himo River, which flows from the Kilimanjaro snows to the Pangani, reminded him of the coolness of her firm young hands.
As the Brigade camped on the ridge of a green and flower-decked hill looking across the Pangani Valley, to the Pare Hills, a scene of fertile beauty, English in its wooded rolling richness, he thought of her with him in England; and as the rancid smell of a frying ghee, mingled with the acrid smell of wood smoke, was wafted from where Gurkha, Punjabi, Pathan and Baluchi cooked their chapattis of atta, he thought of her in India with him. . . .