n married
to Lynette Bridget-Mary Mildare at the Registrar's Office, Gueldersdorp,
and at the Catholic Church. One hour after the ceremony the happy pair
left by the mail for Cape Town.
Gueldersdorp turned out to do them honour. We have heard the people cheer.
Three days and three nights of the Express, delayed in places by the
wrecking of the line, and then the Alpine mountain-ranges sank and
dwindled with the mercury in the thermometer. The little white towns
succeeded each other like pearls on a green string. Humpy blue hills gave
way to the flats, and then in the shadow of Table Mountain--Babel's
confusion of tongues--and the stalwart flower of many nations, arrayed
and armed for battle, and the glory, and pomp, and power of War.
The grey and white transports disgorged them, ants of sober, neutral
colours, marching in columns to attack other ants. They grew upon the
vision and filled it, and the sound of their feet was louder than the
beating of the surf on Sea Point, and although martial music beat and blew
them on--a brazen whirlwind dominating the mind, blaring at the ears--the
trampling of men's feet and the hoofs of horses, and the rolling of
iron-shod wheels, triumphed in the long-run.
Saxham engaged rooms at the Trafalgar Hotel, a handsome caravanserai
standing in its own gardens at the top of Imperial Avenue, for himself and
his wife, and the savage irony that can be conveyed in the term struck
him, not for the first time since he had laid gold and silver on the open
book, and endowed a woman with the gift of himself and all his worldly
goods.
It was early in the forenoon. They were to sail next day. The big building
was crammed, not only with officers under orders for the Front, and their
wives, who had come to see them start. Society had descended like a flock
of chattering, gaudily-plumaged paroquets upon the spot where new and
exciting sensations were to be had. For the trampling feet and the rolling
wheels that ceaselessly went North imparted one set of thrills, and the
long trains of wounded and dying that met and passed them, coming down as
they went up, gave another kind. Amongst the poor dears in the trucks, and
waggons, and Ambulance-carriages you might eventually find a man you
knew.... The sporting odds were given and taken on these exciting chances;
and the fluttering and screaming paroquets that crowded the Railway
Stations, in spite of their gay feathers, bore no little resemblance to
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