Men of Men (39 page)

T
en days after Neville Pickering’s funeral, Zouga signed the transfer deeds to the Devil’s Own claims, and watched while one of
Rhodes’ secretaries registered them in favour of the Central Diamond Company. Then he walked out into the cold.

For the first time in living memory it was snowing over the diamond fields. Big soft flakes came twisting down like feathers from a shimmering white egret struck by birdshot.

The snowflakes vanished as they touched the earth, but the cold was a vindictive presence and Zouga’s breath steamed in the air and condensed on his beard as he trudged up to the workings
to watch the shift come off the Devil’s Own claims for the last time. As he walked he tried to compose the words to tell Ralph that this was the last shift.

They were coming up in the skip. Zouga could make out Ralph, for he was the only man who wore a coat. The other men with him were almost naked.

Once again Zouga wondered idly that the men had not rebelled against the harsh measures of the new Diamond Trade Act, enforced by Colonel John Fry of the recently recruited Diamond Police, and
aimed at stamping out I.D.B. on the fields.

Nowadays the black workers were compounded behind barbed wire; there were new curfew regulations to keep them in the compounds after nightfall; and there were spot searches and checks of the
compounds, of men on the streets even during daylight, and body searches of each shift coming out of the pit.

Even the diggers, or at least a few of them, had protested at the most draconian of John Fry’s new regulations. All black workers had been forced to go into the pit stark naked, so that
they would not be able to hide stones in their clothing.

John Fry had been amazed when Zouga and a dozen other diggers had demanded to see him.

‘Good Lord, Ballantyne, but they are a bunch of naked savages anyway. Modesty, forsooth!’

In the end, with the co-operation of Rhodes, they had forced him to compromise.

Grudgingly Fry had allowed every worker a strip of seamless cotton ‘limbo’ to cover himself.

Thus Bazo and his Matabele wore only a strip of loincloth each as they rode up beside Ralph in the skip. The wind threw an icy noose about them, and Bazo shivered as goose-bumps rose upon the
smooth dark skin of his chest and upper arms.

Above him stood Ralph Ballantyne, balancing easily on the rim of the steel skip, ignoring the wind and the deadly drop below him.

Ralph glanced down at Bazo crouching below the side of the steel bucket, and on impulse slipped the scrap of stained canvas off his own shoulders. Under it Ralph wore an old tweed jacket and
dusty cardigan. He dropped the canvas over Bazo’s neck.

‘It’s against the white man’s law,’ Bazo demurred, and made as if to shrug it off.

‘There are no police in this skip,’ Ralph grunted, and Bazo hesitated a moment and then crouched lower and gratefully pulled the canvas over his head and shoulders.

Ralph took the butt of a half-smoked cheroot from his breast pocket, and carefully reshaped it between his fingers; the dead ash flaked away on the wind and wafted down into the yawning depths
below. He lit the butt and drew the smoke down deeply, exhaled and drew again, held the smoke and passed the butt to Bazo.

‘You are not only cold, but you are unhappy,’ Ralph said, and Bazo did not answer. He cupped the stubby cheroot in both hands and drew carefully upon it.

‘Is it Donsela?’ Ralph asked. ‘He knew the law. Bazo. He knows what the law says of those who steal the stones.’

‘It was a small stone,’ murmured Bazo, the words and blue smoke mingled on his lips. ‘And fifteen years is a long time.’

‘He is alive,’ Ralph pointed out and took the cheroot that Bazo passed back to him. ‘In the old days before the Diamond Trade Act, he would be dead by now.’

‘He might as well be dead,’ Bazo whispered bitterly. ‘They say that men work like animals, chained like monkeys, on the breakwater wall at Cape Town harbour.’

He drew again on the cheroot and it burned down with a fierce little glow that scorched his fingers. He crushed it out on the workhardened calluses of his palm and let the shreds of tobacco blow
away.

‘And you, Henshaw – are you then so happy?’ he asked quietly, and Ralph shrugged.

‘Happy? Who is happy?’

‘Is not this pit’ – with a gesture Bazo took in the mighty excavation over which they dangled – ‘is not this your prison, does it not hold you as surely as the
chains that hold Donsela as he places the rocks on the breakwater over the sea?’

They had almost reached the high stagings and Bazo slipped off his canvas covering before he could be spotted by one of the black constables who patrolled the area inside the new security
fences.

‘You ask me if I am unhappy.’ Bazo stood up, and did not look at Ralph’s face. ‘I was thinking of the land in which I am a prince of the House of Kumalo. In that land the
calves I tended as a boy have grown into bulls and have bred calves which I have never seen. Once I knew every beast in my father’s herds, fifteen thousand head of prime cattle, and I knew
each of them, the season of its birth, the twist of its horns and the markings of its hide.’

Bazo sighed and came to stand beside Ralph on the rim of the skip. They were of a height, two tall young men, well formed, and each, in the manner of his race, comely.

‘Ten times I have not been with my impi when it danced the Festival of Fresh Fruits, ten times I did not witness my king throw the war-spear and send us out on the red road.’

Bazo’s sombre mood deepened, and his voice sank lower.

‘Boys have grown to men since I left, and some of them wear the cowtails of valour on their legs and arms.’ Bazo glanced down at his own naked body with its single dirty rag at the
waist. ‘Little girls have grown into maidens, with ripe bellies, ready to be claimed by the warriors who have won the honour on the red road of war.’ And both of them thought of the
lonely nights when the phantoms came to haunt them. Then Bazo folded his arms across his wide chest and went on.

‘I think of my father, and I wonder if the snows of age have yet settled upon his head. Every man of my tribe that comes down the road from the north brings me the words of Juba, the Dove,
who is my mother. She has twelve sons, but I am the first and the eldest of them.’

‘Why have you stayed so long?’ Ralph asked harshly.

‘Why have you stayed so long, Henshaw?’ The young Matabele challenged him quietly, and Ralph had no answer.

‘Have you found fame and riches in this hole?’ Again they both glanced down into the pit, and from this height the off-shift waiting to come up in the skips were like columns of
safari ants.

‘Do you have a woman with hair as long and pale as the winter grass to give you comfort in the night, Henshaw? Do you have the music of your sons’ laughter to cheer you, Henshaw?
What keeps you here?’

Ralph lifted his eyes and stared at Bazo, but before he could find an answer the skip came level with the platform on the first ramp of the stagings. The jerk brought Ralph back to reality and
he waved to his father on the platform above them.

The roar of the steam winch subsided. The skip slowed and Bazo led the party of Matabele workers onto the ramp. Ralph saw them all clear before he jumped across the narrow gap to the wooden
platform and felt it tremble under the combined weight of twenty men.

Ralph signalled again. Then the winch growled, and the steel cable squealed in its sheaves. The heavy-laden skip ran on until it hit the striker blocks. Ralph and Bazo drove the jumper bars
under it, and threw their full weight on them. The skip tipped over, and the load of gravel went roaring down the chute into the waiting cart.

Ralph looked up to see his father’s encouraging smile and to hear his shouted congratulations.

‘Well done, boy! Two hundred tons today!’

But the staging was deserted. Zouga had gone.

Z
ouga had packed a single chest, the chest that had belonged to Aletta and which had come up with her from the Cape. Now it was going back, and it
was almost all that was going back.

Zouga put Aletta’s Bible in the bottom of the chest, and with it her diary and the trinket box which contained the remaining pieces of her jewellery. The more valuable pieces had long ago
been sold, to support the dying dream.

Over these few mementoes he packed his own diaries and maps, and his books. When he came to the bundled pile of his unfinished manuscript, he paused to weigh it in his hand.

‘Perhaps I shall find time to finish it now,’ he murmured, and laid it gently in the chest.

On top of that went his clothing, and there was so little of that – four shirts, a spare pair of boots – barely an armful.

The chest was only half-full, and he carried it easily down the steps into the yard. That was all that he was taking – the rest of it, the meagre furnishings of the bungalow he had sold to
one of the auctioneers in Market Square. Ten pounds the lot. As Rhodes had predicted, he was leaving as he had come.

‘Where is Ralph?’ he demanded of Jan Cheroot, and the little Hottentot paused in chaining the cooking-pot and black iron kettle onto the tailboard of the cart.

‘Perhaps he stopped at Diamond Lil’s. The boy has got a right to his thirst – he worked hard enough for it.’

Zouga let it pass, and instead ran an appraising eye over the cart. It was the newest and strongest of the three vehicles he owned. One cart had gone with Louise St John, and she had taken the
best mules – but this rig would get them back to Cape Town, even under the additional burden that he was planning to put into it.

Jan Cheroot ambled across to Zouga and took the other handle of the chest, ready to boost it up into the body of the cart.

‘Wait,’ Zouga told him. ‘That first.’ And he pointed to the roughly-hewn block of blue mottled rock that lay below the camel-thorn tree.

‘My mother—’ Jan Cheroot gaped. ‘This I don’t believe. In twenty-two years I’ve seen you do some stupid crazy things—’

Zouga strode across to the block of blue ground that Ralph had brought up from the Devil’s Own and put his foot on it. ‘We’ll hoist it up with the block and tackle.’ He
glanced at the sturdy branch above his head from which the sheave block and manila rope hung. ‘And we’ll back the cart up under it.’

‘That’s it!’ Jan Cheroot sat down on the chest and folded his arms. ‘This time I refuse. Once before I broke my back for you, but that was when I was young and
stupid.’

‘Come on, Jan Cheroot, you are wasting time.’

‘What do you want with that – piece of ugly bloody stone? With another piece of thundering nonsense.’

‘I have lost the bird – I need a household god.’

‘I have heard of someone putting up a monument to a brave man, or a great battle – but to put up a stone to stupidity,’ Jan Cheroot mourned.

‘Back the cart up.’

‘I refuse – this time I refuse. I won’t do it. Not for anything. Not for any price.’

‘When we get it loaded – you can have a bottle of Smoke all to yourself to celebrate.’

Jan Cheroot sighed, and stood up. ‘That’s my price.’ He shook his head and came across to stand beside Zouga. He glared at the block of blue stone venomously. ‘But
don’t expect me to like it.’

Zouga chuckled, for the first time in weeks, and in an unusual display of affection he put one arm around Jan Cheroot’s shoulders.

‘Now that you have something to hate again – just think how happy it will make you,’ he said.

‘Y
ou have been drinking,’ Zouga said, and Ralph tossed his hat into the corner and agreed.

‘Yes, I have had a beer or two.’ He went to the black iron stove and warmed his hands. ‘I would have had more – if I had had the money.’

‘I have been waiting for you,’ Zouga went on, and Ralph turned back to him truculently.

‘I give you every hour of my day. Papa – let me have a little time at the end of it.’

‘I have something of great importance to tell you,’ Zouga nodded to the deal chair facing him. ‘Sit down, Ralph.’

Zouga rubbed his eyes with forefinger and thumb as he collected his words. He had tried so often in the last days to find an easy way to tell Ralph that it was over, that they were destitute,
that all that toil and heartbreak had been in vain – but there was no easy way. There were only the stark hard words of reality.

He dropped his hand, and looked at his son, and then slowly and carefully he told him, and when he had finished he waited for Ralph to speak. Ralph had not moved during the long recital, and now
he stared at Zouga stonily.

Zouga was forced to speak again. ‘We shall leave in the morning. Jan Cheroot and I have loaded the No. 2 wagon and we shall need all the mules, double team – it’s a long
haul.’

Again he waited, but there was still no reaction.

‘You will be wondering where we are going and what we shall do. Well, once we get back to the Cape we still have the Harkness cottage.’

‘You gambled it all.’ Ralph spoke at last. ‘Without telling me. You – you, who are always preaching to me about gambling, and honesty.’

‘Ralph!’

‘It wasn’t yours, it belonged to all of us.’

‘You are drunk,’ Zouga said flatly.

‘All these years I have listened to your promises. We shall go north, Ralph.’ He mimicked Zouga with a sudden savagery in his tone. ‘It’s for all of us, Ralph. It’s
yours to share. There is a land waiting for us, Ralph. It will be yours as well as mine, Ralph.’

‘It’s not over – I still have the concession. When we get back to Cape Town—’

‘You, not me.’ Ralph’s voice was flat, angry. ‘You go back to Cape Town. Go dream your old man’s dreams. I am sick of them.’

‘You dare to use that tone to me?’

‘Yes, I dare. And by God, I’ll dare more than that. I’ll dare what you are too weak or afraid to dare—’

‘You insolent and stupid puppy!’

‘You toothless old dog!’

Zouga threw himself half across the table, and his right arm lashed out. He caught Ralph open-handed across the face, and the crack of palm on flesh was stunning as a pistol shot.

Ralph’s head snapped back, and then slowly he brought it upright again. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is the last time you will strike me, ever.’ He stood up and strode towards
the door, and there he turned. ‘Go dream your dreams – I will go live mine out.’