The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur - Страница 49
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She was pretty enough to begin with, with her green eyes shining and the vivid coppery mass of her hair upon the white satin of her dress, but when she returned the same way, this time on the arm of her new husband, she was truly beautiful.
"All right," Ralph announced. "It's all legal now the party can truly begin." He signalled to the band, a hastily assembled quartet led by, Matabeleland's only undertaker on the fiddle, and they launched into a spirited Gilbert and Sullivan. This was the only sheet music available north of the Limpopo. Each member of the quartet provided his own interpretation of The Mikado, so that the dancers could waltz or polka to it as the inclination and the champagne dictated.
By dawn of the following day, the party had started to warm up, and the first fist-fight broke out behind the church. However, Ralph settled it by announcing to the shirt sleeved contestants, "This will never do, gentlemen, it is an occasion of joy and goodwill towards all mankind." And then before they realized his intention, he dropped them on their backs in quick succession with a left and right swing that neither of them saw coming. Then he helped them solicitously back onto their feet and led them weaving groggily to the nearest drink wagon.
By dawn on the second day, the party was in full swing. The bride and bridegroom, reluctant to miss a moment of the fun, had not yet left on their honeymoon and were leading the dancing under the spathodea trees. Mr. Rhodes, who had rested during the night in the mule coach, now emerged and ate a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs cooked by Jordan over the open fire, washed it down with a tumbler of champagne, and was moved to oratory. He stood on the driver's seat of the coach and spoke with all his usual eloquence and charisma honed to an edge by a sense of occasion and his own burning belief in his subject.
"My Rhodesians," he addressed his audience, and they took it as an endearment rather than a claim to ownership, and loved him for it.
"Together you and I have made a great leap forward towards the day when the map of Africa will be painted pink from Cape Town to Cairo, when this fair continent will be set beside India, a great diamond beside a lustrous ruby, in the crown of our beloved Queen.-" They cheered him, the Americans and Greeks and Italians and Irish as loudly as the subjects of the "beloved Queen" herself.
Robyn St. John endured half an hour of these sentiments before she lost control of the frosty dignity that Ralph had counselled, and from the veranda of the homestead she began a counter reading of her own, as yet unpublished, poetry. "Mild melancholy and sedate he stands Tending another's herds upon the field.
His father's once, where now the white man builds His home and issues forth his proud commands. His dark eyes flash not, his listless hand Leans on the shepherd staff, no more he wields The gleaming steel, but to the oppressor yields.-" Her high, clear voice rang over Mr. Rhodes', heads turned back and forth between the two of them like the spectators at a tennis match.
"This is only a beginning," Mr. Rhodes raised his volume, (a great beginning, yes but a beginning nonetheless. There are ignorant and arrogant men, not all of them black," and even the dullest listener recognized that the allusion was to old Kruger, the Boer president of the South African Republic in the Transvaal, "who must be allowed the opportunity to come beneath the shield of the pox britannica of their own free will, rather than be driven to it by force of arms." His audience was once again entranced, until Robyn selected another of her works in matching warlike mood, and let fly with. "He scorns the hurt, nor regards the scar Of recent wound, but burnishes for war His assegai and targe of buffalo-hide.
Is he a rebel? Yes, it is a strife Between the black-skinned raptor and the white. A savage? Yes, though loath to aim at life Evil for evil fierce he doth requite.
A heathen? Teach him then thy better creed, Christian! If thou deserv'st that name indeed!" The audience's critical faculty was dulled by two days and two nights of revelry and they applauded Robyn's impassioned delivery with matching fervour, though the sense of it was thankfully lost upon them.
"The Lord save us," Ralph groaned, "from emetic jingoism and aperient scansion!" And he wandered away down the valley to get out of earshot of the competing orators, carrying a bottle of Mr. Rhodes" champagne in one hand, and with his son perched upon his shoulder.
Jonathan wore a sailor suit with Jack Tar collar, and a straw boater on his head, the ribbon hung down his back, and he clucked and urged his father on with his heels as though he was astride a pony. There were fifty head of slaughter-oxen and a thousand gallon pots of Juba's beer to account for, and the black wedding guests were giving the task their dedicated attention. Down here the dancing was even more energetic than that under the spathodea trees, the young men were leaping and twisting and stamping until the dust swirled waist-high about them and the sweat cut tunnels down their naked backs and chests.
The girls swayed and shuffled and sang, and the drummers hammered out their frenetic rhythms until they dropped exhausted, and others snatched up the wooden clubs to beat the booming hollowed-out tree-trunks. While Jonathan, on Ralph's back, squealed with delight, one of the slaughter-oxen, a heavy hump-backed red beast, was dragged out of the kraal. A spears man ran forward and stabbed it through the carotid and jugular. With a mournful bellow the animal collapsed, kicking spasmodically. The butchers swarmed over the carcass, flaying off the hide in a single sheet, delving for the tit bits the kidneys and liver and tripes, throwing them wet and shiny onto the live coals, hacking through the rack of ribs, slicing off thick steaks and heaping them on the racks over the cooking-fire.
Half raw, running with fat and juice, the meat was stuffed into eager mouths and the beer pots tilted to the hot blue summer sky. One of the cooks tossed Ralph a ribbon of tripe, scorched from the fierce flames, and with the contents still adhering to the stomach lining.
Without a visible qualm, Ralph stripped away the lining and bit off a chunk of the sweet white flesh beneath.
"Mushle!" he told the cook. "Good! Very good." And passed up a sliver to the child on his back. "Eat it, Jon-Jon, what doesn't kill you, makes you fat," and his son obeyed with noisy relish, and agreed with his father's verdict.
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