According to one's individual point of view, Cape Town, on that New Year morning of nineteen hundred and one, was either a point of departure for the front, or a city of refuge for the sleek and portly Uitlanders who thronged the hotels and made too audible mourning for their imperiled possessions.Viewed in either light, it was hot, crowded and unclean.From his caricature of a hansom, Weldon registered his swift impression that he wished to get off to the front as speedily as possible.The hansom contributed to this impression no less than did the city.Out of a multitude of similar vehicles, he had chosen this for its name, painted across its curving front.The Lady of the Snows had obviously been christened as a welcome to the scores of his fellow colonials who had gone that way before; and he and Carew had dashed past Killarney and The Scotch Thistle, to take possession of its padded interior.
It was almost noon, as they drove through the Dock Gates, past the Amsterdam Battery, and turned eastward towards Adderley Street and the Grand Hotel.It was nightfall before their luggage was safe through the custom house and in their room.Carew eyed his boxes askance.Weldon attacked the straps of his nearest trunk.
"Wherefore?" Carew queried languidly from the midst of a haze of smoke.
"To take account of stock."
"What's the use?"
"To find out what we need, of course."
"But we don't need anything.We've tobacco for our pipes and quinine for our stomachs and fuller's earth for our feet.What more can a man need?" As he spoke, Carew hooked his toe around a second chair, drew it towards him and promptly converted it into a foot-rest.
"Besides," he added tranquilly; "to-morrow is Boxing Day, and the bank won't be open until the day after.You know you can't buy anything more than a pink-bordered handkerchief out of your present supplies."Weldon laughed.
"Don't be too sure I can make out even that," he said, as he dived into the trunk and pulled out a Klondyke sleeping-bag.
Carew watched him from between half-closed lids.
"Going beddy?" he inquired.
"Confound it, no! I thought my calling kit was in there." A pair of dark gray blankets landed in the corner on top of the sleeping-bag.
"That looks jolly comfortable.You'd better bunk in there, and leave the bed to me," Carew advised him."You're in the wrong trunk for your calling clothes, anyway.What under heaven do you want of them, Weldon?""I don't want them to lie all in a heap.""They'll lie in heaps for a good long time, before you are out of this country," Carew predicted cheerfully."Moreover, from the look of the place, you could make calls in either pajamas or khaki, and it would pass muster.I saw one fellow, this noon, in evening clothes and a collar button.Besides, there isn't anybody for us to call on."Weldon smiled contentedly, as he drew out a frock-coat and inspected its satin-faced lapels.
"Not for you, perhaps," he observed quietly.
"Oh, I see." Carew puffed vigorously."So you have a bidding to call upon Miss Dent."Weldon dislodged Carew's feet from the extra chair and utilized the chairback as a temporary coat-rack.
"No; quite the contrary," he replied."I am invited to call upon Miss Ophelia Arthur.Now you will please to keep quiet, for I think I shall go to bed."In silence, Carew watched him half through the process of undressing.Then, emptying his pipe and snapping open its case, he rose and faced his friend.
"Weldon," he said sententiously; "we don't care to hang around this place longer than we must; and we shall have all we can do to get ourselves enlisted and our horses into condition.We haven't time for much else.I hope you will remember that you came out here, not to fuss the girls, but for the fuss with the Boers."From his seat on the edge of the bed, Weldon eyed him amicably.
"Don't preach, Carew," he answered coolly."It doesn't do my soul any good, and it only renders you a bore.It has always been a clause of my creed that two good things are better than one."Nevertheless, in spite of his haste to unpack his calling clothes, it was full three days later that Weldon turned his face eastward in search of the home of Ethel Dent.Moreover, in all those three days, he had given scarcely a thought to the companion of his voyage.
Notwithstanding his first impressions, Weldon had found much to interest him in Cape Town.The streets, albeit unlovely, were full of novel sights and the patter of novel tongues.Cape carts and Kaffirs, traction engines and troopers, khaki everywhere and yet more khaki, and, rising grimly behind it all, the naked face of Table Mountain covered with its cloth of clouds! It was all a tumult of busy change, bounded by the unchanging and the eternal.For one entire morning, Weldon loitered about the streets, viewing all things with his straightforward Canadian gaze, jostling and jostled by turns.War had ceased to be a myth, and, of a sudden, was become a grim reality; yet in the face of it all his courage never faltered.His sole misgivings concerned themselves with the contrast between the seasoned regulars marching to their station, and his boyish self, full of eager enthusiasm, but trained only in the hunting field, the polo ground and the gymnasium.Then, gripping his hope in both hands, he resolutely shouldered his way into the nearest recruiting office.He went into the office as Harvard Weldon, amateur athlete and society darling of his own home city.He came out as Trooper Weldon of the First Regiment of Scottish Horse.
He spent the next morning in sorting over his miscellaneous luggage.
