Doctor's Assistant

by Celine Conway

  What Laurette would have managed to reply to that she never knew. Her father came in just then carrying a sheaf of papers. He had the genial, absorbed expression which invariably accompanied happiness in his work, and Laurette deemed this a propitious moment to slip away to her room.

  CHAPTER THREE

  LATER, while Laurette and her father were at dinner, she learned the real reason for Charles Heron’s visit. It seemed that Charles, upon hearing that John Delaney turned out really good drawings, had reconsidered a pet scheme of his which had to be shelved some time ago. The scheme was simple, designed to persuade the Basuto that proper cultivation and tree planting would enrich their land and the people themselves.

  “He thinks a thin book with many pictures and descriptive text in large print would help a lot,” said John Delaney. “The whole would comprise the story of a Basuto family, their agricultural ups and downs, the solutions to their problems, and so on. He’ll provide the prose in Sesuto.”

  “And you’ll do the illustrations?”

  “That’s his suggestion. For those who can’t read, the pictures must tell the story, and he wants humor in them. He’s given me an English version of the text, and I’ve promised to make a dozen preliminary sketches. After that we’ll talk it over again.”

  Laurette helped herself to tomato and pineapple salad. “Is he sure of finding a publisher?”

  “To start with he’s financing it himself, but it’s possible the government will like it enough to order several thousand copies. It will have to be distributed free, of course.”

  “He doesn’t give one the impression of being an altruist.”

  Her father laughed. “He’s not a gentle personality, if that’s what you mean, but I believe I understand him fairly well. His life is like a soldier’s, only more exacting. He has a tremendous comprehension of black people’s problems and much sympathy for the people. He has faith that gradual education will solve most of the difficulties.”

  “He might extend some of his tolerance to white folk.” He shrugged. “You can’t have everything in one man. Men will drive in one direction are often blind in other ways.”

  “He isn’t blind,” she retorted with a trace of tartness. “He sees everything and puts his own construction on it. He’s a self-centred, self-opinionated beast.”

  The Captain raised his brows. “Strong words,” he said mildly. “He’s pretty well impregnable, I grant you, but hardly as bad as that. However, from the woman’s viewpoint I daresay he’s the sort you love or loathe, and frankly”—with a quizzical twist to his mouth—“I’d rather you didn’t love him. There’s too much steel in Charles Heron.”

  “Don’t worry, darling,” she said. “I’ll never have the smallest wish to compete with Basutoland.”

  John Delaney began making his sketches the very next day. He used Bwazi as a model for one of them, and persuaded a woman who happened to be passing the house with a flat basket of green mealies on her head to stand still for ten minutes while he got down her posture. But many of the pictures had depict village life, and he decided that as the mud kraals of Pondoland were little different from those in use throughout the rest of southern Africa, he would go out into the hills so that his villages should have the authentic mountainous background.

  He chose Saturday afternoon for his excursion, and Laurette accompanied him. They started off in the rickety little car, wound for some way along the high cliffs which looked down over the tunnel of the river, then climbed out of the coastal range and seemed to be weaving about the top of the world, with mountains crumpled all about them as far as eye could see.

  Except for a few wisps of white cloud, the sky was a deep, African blue. The mountains were rust, the innumerable valleys green, threaded with the silver of little rivers. And everywhere one looked there were kraals, composed of five to a dozen round huts with conical thatched roofs, set in a circle of beaten earth and surrounded by the new fresh green of mealie fields. The Pondos keenly preserved the privacy of their families by building their kraals at least half a mile apart. This was native country, hundreds of square miles of it veined all over by footpaths and served by tiny, isolated trading stations.

  The road became hardly discernible from the short tough grass on either side, and as they hit a big rounded boulder the Captain groaned.

  “This poor old bus! If I’d known the house would work out so cheaply I’d have gone in for a new one. You need the best on these roads.”

  “It’s coughing, too.” Laurette did not sound very concerned. There was too much exhilaration, too much sparkle in the atmosphere. “We never go far—it suits us.”

  They saw the mission in the distance, a big, rectangular building of the same mud and thatch as the huts, with smaller buildings nearby. Considering the dense population of the reserve—each kraal housed between twenty and fifty people—here were very few signs of life. Here and there the dark figure of a woman could be seen pounding corn or merely squatting against a wall in the sun, an occasional piccaninny strutted, stark naked, from a doorway or a round-faced boy herded cattle, but an air of lazy serenity pervaded the country.

  About three miles farther on the track petered out altogether. There were still no trees, and the Captain said they would just have to do without shade. The spot at which he eventually stopped gave magnificent views, and not so far away to the right was an excellent kraal of eight houses set against a craggy eminence whose outline suggested the head of a lioness.

  “Made for me,” he said; and, jamming a misshapen straw hat upon his head, he settled himself with paper and board.

  Laurette read a book for an hour, then she walked out to the brow of their hill to get still another view of this strange reserve. This was Africa, even more so than the sub-tropic lushness of Port Quentin. She loved the groups of huts, looking, in the distance, like fairy rings of toadstools on countless hillsides. She wished it were possible to communicate with the occupants and find out more about them.

  Contentedly, she wandered back to the car and poured tea from the flask. Her father accepted his cup and indicated a couple of drawings.

  “Put them away for me, will you? I’ve finished. When we’ve had tea we’ll go back the way we came.”

  “It’s only five, and this is the first time we’ve been for a drive in months.” With a biscuit tin in one hand and hugging her knees with her other arm, she gestured towards the westering sun and went on dreamily, “If I were you I’d rather work in water colors. Look at the light and shade over the hills, and the marvellous lavender and gold of the sky. It’s achingly peaceful.”

  “I thought you preferred upheaval to peacefulness.”

  Her smile at him was affectionate. “I’ll take life mixed—it’s more interesting. I’m mostly at peace when I’m with you, anyway.”

  He gave her the suspicion of a wink. “I’m only your father.”

  In similar spirit she answered, “The only man in my life!”

  He said no more for a while, but presently he spoke of Peter, up in Nigeria; the boy’s letters revealed that he loathed the climate.

  “He needn’t renew his contract,” Laurette said comfortingly. “In a year he can go back to England, or even come down here to us.”

  “I’ve always been uneasy about him,” her father admitted. “You’d think a man of twenty-five would have grown out of wild ways—but not Peter. He has far less mental stamina than you have.”

  “One day he’ll marry someone solid and become a model husband. Peter’s all right, I’ve always loved him as if he were really my brother.”

  “I’m glad of that. He’s fond of you, too.”

  They sat on, gazing at the changing scene, till the sun had dipped, and the lavender of the sky turned mauve and the early darkness began to brush in from the east. Then Laurette got up and offered a hand.

  “Yes, we daren’t leave it any longer,” said her father. “There’s the track to find and some tricky mountain bends before we hit the river road.
Slide in, child.”

  She obeyed. The Captain took his place and thumbed the starter. The battery, always reluctant, refused to act. He tried again, with a similar negative result.

  “It ought to be sound,” he grumbled. “It isn’t so long since it was charged.”

  “Perhaps the carburetor’s run dry through standing so long in the sun,” she offered. “Have we any loose petrol?”

  “No. I’m not much of a mechanic, but I think it’s the battery.” He had another go, without result. Sighing with exasperation, he pushed back his hat. “There’s only one thing for it. I’ll have to go to one of the huts and get some boys to come up and give us a shove. You stay right here, Laurette, and if I’m not back within twenty minutes switch the headlights on and off a few times, in case I’ve missed the way.”

  “Please let me go with you.”

  “No, that would be foolish. It’ll be pitch dark soon and we might both lose our bearings. It’s safer for you to stay.”

  She hated to see him go. She watched him striding erectly down the first slope, saw him drop out of sight and reappear much farther away, a small figure vanishing into the dusk. She peered at her watch, then leaned back uneasily in her seat.

  The brief twilight was nearly spent. She looked about her and saw a clump of spiky aloes which were spectral and threatening in the dimness, and tiny scattered points of light which were the native fires. Faintly, she smelled the woodsmoke and other veld scents released by the night air. She felt alone in the whole of black Africa.

  Growing fear accelerated her heartbeats. Again she looked at her watch, calculating the very second when she might switch on the car beams. If the battery was down they would be weak. She mustn’t waste them. She would have given anything, just then, for an ordinary, homely torch.

  The minutes passed, and at last it was the moment to send out her signal. She timed herself: on and off, then a minute’s interval—ten times.

  The following half-hour dragged by like a nightmare. Desperately she flicked the lights and between times she made further onslaughts on the starter. Finally she sat back trembling behind the wheel. He wasn’t coming. What was she to do? How could she hope to follow her father in the dark? There was no fire-glow in the direction he had taken, nothing to guide her, and once she had left the car there would be no means of finding her way back to it. If her father turned up and found her gone, he would be frantic. Yet she could not stand much more of this.

  It occurred to her that if he had succeeded in his quest, the boys he had mustered would carry some sort of light. Anxiously she got out of the car and scanned the blackness for a bobbing spark; but even the fires seemed to have dwindled and there was nothing, anywhere, to suggest a moving group of men.

  Utter stillness, the sky black and velvety and mazed with low-hanging stars. Utter stillness, except for the rhythmic pulsing of drums which Laurette, in her fright, confused with her own heartbeats.

  Again she sent out the pallid beams, but this time only once. For in their weak radiance she had seen a blanketed native, his face staring and startled. Palpitating, she struggled with a paralysis in her throat, but by the time, she could shout he was gone, doubtless fleeing from one of the monsters which he had thought clung only to the roads.

  Quite how she got through the next few hours Laurette could never afterwards explain. She remembered realizing that something dreadful must have happened to her father, for whether he could obtain help or not, he would never have left her alone in such a place in the dark for so long. He was a soldier, and he’d have made her enjoy a night with him in the car. She also recalled getting out of the car, the creeping horror of the loneliness, and the torturing drum-beats which had ceased almost simultaneously around midnight.

  After that there had been the cool night air upon her face and arms, and the regular yet uncertain movements of her legs. She had walked and climbed with the vague intention of making the river road, and at one time she had noticed a stationary car many miles away flooding the road with light. In her condition it had not struck her as odd that a car should be parked through the dark hours on that little-used road; she had imagined herself suffering from the delusion that it was her father’s car.

  Dawn broke in a thick grey mist. Shivering with damp and fatigue, Laurette sank down and laid her head upon her arms. She might even have lost consciousness for a bit, for she was eventually roused by the sun’s warmth on her back, and when she sat up there were the hills all about her, green and tranquil under a deepening sky. And away over on a footpath in the neighboring hillside, a solitary motor-cyclist coasted slowly, looking alternately to the right and to the left.

  Laurette stood up and waved, ran with her arms spread, her throat emitting little sobs. The rider saw her. He raised a gloved hand and shot down the path; in an incredibly short time his machine was bounding across the turf. She recognized the traffic policeman who lived in Port Quentin.

  “My word, you’ve given us a fright,” he said. “Where’s your father?”

  “Haven’t you ... seen him?”

  The croak of her voice, her pallor and the rumpled state of her hair and dress smote him suddenly. He slung a leg back over his cycle.

  “Stay just here, Miss Delaney. I’ll have a car pick you up in a jiffy.”

  Laurette had no urge to move. She felt sick and weary, and so full of fear for her father that she would rather they left her here and concentrated on searching for him. But soon she looked up to see Charles Heron loping over the grass towards her.

  He dropped at once to his knees at her side, drew a flask from his pocket and tipped whisky into a small metal cup. His shoulder slipped behind hers and he held the cup to her lips.

  “Steady,” he said. ‘Take it slowly.”

  She managed a few sips. They burned and she gasped. “My father?” she whispered.

  “His car was found soon after dawn and they’re scouring that district. When you’ve recovered you can tell me what happened. It may help us to trace him.” His tones were singularly unemotional. His arm was firm across her back, his fingers hard about her elbow. “We’ve been on the job all night. When you didn’t return for dinner last night your boy got worried. At about ten he came up to us, and I questioned him, but he knew no more than that you’d gone for a drive during the afternoon. I went about fifty miles along the road in case you’d had a breakdown and were stranded. Afterwards, I guessed you’d taken one of the tracks into the reserve and would probably have to stay there the night. I kept out on the road with my lights on. Tell me something”—his voice changed slightly—“how did you and your father become separated?”

  Haltingly it came out, and when, finally, her breath caught, he made her swallow the rest of the whisky.

  “We’ll find the Captain,” he said quietly, “but I’m taking you home first.”

  She sat upright. “Let me go with you. I can show you the kraal he was making for.”

  “You’re flat out...”

  “Please!”

  She turned to him, her eyes large and dark in the whiteness of her face, her mouth quivering. He stood and lifted her to her feet.

  “You can’t help except by resting,” he told her abruptly. “If he’s hurt in any way you’ll need all that nursing skill of yours. And for heaven’s sake don’t cry,” he said softly and savagely. “If you’d had the sense to lock yourself in the car we’d have found you over two hours ago. Only someone completely young and irresponsible would leave the safety of a car to wander around a native reserve during the dark hours!” He stopped, and some of the hardness went from his expression. “I’m sorry, but the very thought of a girl wilfully putting herself through such an ordeal makes a man wince. You’re going home for some food and a long sleep.”

  The car was parked half-way down the hill, precariously balanced on a steep incline. Charles put her into the seat, took his own place and released the brake. They jolted round perilous bends, dipped sickeningly into a valley to meet one of the trac
ks and presently ran out on the river road.

  The car was big and luxuriously upholstered. Laurette sat shrunk into her corner, wishing it had been Ben who had come upon her. Ben wouldn’t have gone all taut and angry at hearing her story. He would have understood the impossibility of her remaining cooped in the car with gnawing worries. And he wouldn’t have refused to let her join the party searching for her father either. Ben was human.

  Now that some of the tension was eased, she felt emotion rising in her breast, stinging at her eyelids. When Charles spoke to her she remained dumb, staring through the window at the muddy, sun-shot river and the approaching roofs of Port Quentin. It was not till he helped her out on to the drive that she saw that the house to which he had brought her was the big, colonial mansion belonging to Mr. Kelsey.

  “You ... you said you were taking me home,” she said.

  “This is what I meant,” he answered. “There are three spare bedrooms.”

  He pushed at her arm, but for a moment she wouldn’t move. Shakily, she held his cuff.

  “Charles, supposing you ... and the others ... don’t find my father?”

  “Don’t be idiotic,” he said coolly. “There are a dozen of us and squads of African boys. Get inside and stop over-working your imagination.”

  To Mr. Kelsey, who came down the steps from the wide veranda, he added, “Take care of her, will you? She needs something light to eat and several hours’ rest. I’ll get away again.”

  The car curved round the drive and disappeared. Mr. Kelsey fingered his distinguished brow, looked with some perplexity upon the forlorn and weary Laurette, and then patted her shoulder.

  “Come along in, you silly little mouse. In the long run it’s always best to do exactly as Charles orders.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  LATE that afternoon John Delaney was found in a shallow gorge between two low mountains. He was conscious, and pale with anxiety till his first question had been answered.

  “Laurette’s all right,” Ben assured him. “At least, she will be as soon as she hears you’re safe. Think you could eat a sandwich and tell us how you got here?”