"They are pumpkins sent by your own countrymen, Tante, so you ought to speak of them more civilly. And—scour the pot with a double-handful of clean sand; it will be for your health as well as the kind's. Come here, jongen—give me a look at the little tongue." The boy went to him confidently, and stuck it out, looking up with innocent wide eyes in the square, powerful face, as Saxham swung round his wallet, continuing, "Here, mevrouw, is a packet of Epsom salts. Take half of it, stirred in a cup of warm water, to-morrow morning fasting——"
"Alamachtig!" she protested. "Is that the Engelsch way of doctoring? To put another belly-grief on the top of the one you have got, what sense is in that?"
"It is the new nail, Tante, that drives out the rusty old one. Give the boy a teaspoonful in half a cup of water, and remember to scour the pans."
Saxham passed on, stepping neatly with his small, tan-booted, spurred feet between the dung and chip fires curling up in blue smoke-spirals, and the sprawling children, seeming as though he did not notice them, yet catching up one that had a rash, and satisfying himself that the eruption was innocent ere he passed on, visiting every waggon-dwelling and cave-refuge, rating the inhabitants of some, dosing the occupants of others, emerging from three or four of the stuffy, ill-smelling places with a heavy frown that boded ill for somebody. For though Famine had not yet begun to gnaw the vitals of those immured in Gueldersdorp, Disease had here and there sprung into active, threatening, infectious being, menacing the crowded community with invisible, maleficent forces. Soon the hospitals were to be crowded to the doors, to remain crowded for many months to come; and the cry, "Room for the sick! more room!" was to go up unceasingly.
Coming out of a miserable habitation, where lay a woman in rheumatic fever, whose three children had developed measles on the previous day, and, seeing about the door of a neighbouring hovel a particularly noisome aggregation of garbage and waste, he paused but to give a brief direction to the mild-faced Sister who had assumed charge of the sick. Then his voice rang out above all the feminine and childish Babel, strong, resonant, masculine:
"Where are the head-boys of the gangs that I told off to clean up and carry ash-buckets to the dumping-place?"
Whence, under cover of night, the garbage and waste were carted to the destructor in connection with the Acetylene Gas Company's plant, soon to be shattered by one of Meisje's shells. There was no answer. Saxham took the worn hunting-crop from under his arm, and with an easy movement shook out the twisted thong.
"Where are those two boys? Jim Gubo! Rasu!"
A pale young woman peeling potatoes at her door looked up knowingly. "They won't carry away a cabbage-leaf unless they're bribed, and they open their mouths wider every day. It's a tikkie a bucket now."
The young woman went back to her potatoes. The offenders, visibly quaking, crept from under a waggon, where they had been gambling with dry mealies for ill-gotten tikkies. A big Kaffir boy in ragged tan-cords and the crownless brim of an Oxford straw, with a red-turbaned, blue dungaree-clad, supple Oriental of the coolie class. Jim Gubo, with liberal display of ivory, assured the Baas, in defiance of the Baas's own eyes and the organ in juxtaposition, that the work had been regularly done. Rasu the Sweeper, with many oaths and protestations, assured the Presence that such neglect as was apparent was owing to the incapacity of the hubshi and his myrmidons, Rasu's own share of the labour and that of his fellow-countryman being scrupulously performed.