Men of Men - Smith Wilbur - Страница 48

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"You like that, Ralph?" And his reply was broken and ragged: "Oh yes. Oh yes, Miss. Suddenly she was sad. The snow was trodden, the magic was passing, just as the power she had wielded was transitory.

She had not cried in ten long hard years, not since that first evening in the Mayfair house, but now she was shocked to find the constriction in her throat and the burning behind her eyes.

"What is there to cry for?" she wondered desolately.

"It's far too late for tears."

She rolled Ralph expertly onto his back, his body limp and unresisting, and for a moment she stared at him hatefully. He had touched something in her which had hurt unbearably. Then the hating passed and there was only the sadness.

She kissed him once more, softly and regretfully.

"You must go now, Ralph," she said.

He lingered at the door, with his jacket over his arm and his cap in his hand.

"I will come and see you again, Lilly."

She formed a bow with her lips and painted them with quick deft strokes before she replied, but while she worked she was watching him in the mirror.

He was altered already, she saw. He stood four-square, his shoulders wide and his neat young head proud on the column of his sun-tanned neck. The sweet diffidence was gone, the appealing shyness evaporated. An hour before he would have said: "Please can I come and see you again, Miss Lill?"

She smiled at him in the mirror, that bright burnished smile, and the diamond in her tooth winked sardonically.

"You come any time, dearie, any time you have saved ten guineas."

It was only surprising that the full report of Ralph's foray into the lilac fields of Venus took so long to reach Zouga, for Barry Lennox had repeated the story with zest and embroidery to anyone who would listen, and the chaff and banter had flown like a Kalahari dust-storm every evening in Diamond Lil's canteen.

"Gentlemen, you are speaking about the eldest son of one of the pillars of Kimberley Society," Lil admonished them saucily. "Remember that Major Ballantyne is not only a member of the Kimberley Club, but a respected ornament of the Diggers" Committee." She knew that one of them would soon succumb to the temptation to take the story to Zouga Ballantyne. "I would love to hear what that cold-bellied, stuck-up prig will say when he hears," she told herself secretly. "Even the iced water in his veins will boil."

"Whores and whore masters," said Zouga. He stood on the wide verandah, in the shade of the thatched roof which had replaced the original tent of the first camp.

Ralph stood below him in the sunlight, blinking up at his father.

"Perhaps you have no respect for your family, for the name of Ballantyne, but do you have none for yourself and for your own body?"

Zouga was barring the front door to the cottage of raw unbaked brick. He was bare-headed, so that his thick dark gold hair shone like a war helmet and his neatlycropped beard emphasized the jut of his heavy jaw, and the long black tapered hippohide kurbash whip hung from his right hand, touching the floor at the toe of his riding boot.

"Do you have an answer?" Zouga's tone was quiet, and deadly cold.

Ralph was still dusty as a miller from the pit. The dust was thick and red in his hair, and outlined the curl of his nostrils and ran like tears from the corners of his eyes. He wiped his forehead on his shirtsleeve, an excuse to break the gaze of his father's eyes, and then examined the muddy smear with attention.

"Answer me," Zouga's voice did not alter. "Give me a reason, just one reason why I should not throw you out of this home, for ever."

Jordan could bear it no longer, the thought of losing Ralph overcame his terror of his father's wrath.

He ran down the length of the verandah, and seized the arm that held the whip.

"Papa! Please, Papa, don't send him away."

Without glancing at Jordan, Zouga lashed out and the blow caught Jordan across the chest and hurled him back against the verandah wall.

"Jordie did nothing," said Ralph, as quietly as his father had spoken.

"Oh, you do have a tongue?" Zouga asked.

"Get out of it, Jordie," Ralph ordered. "This is not your business."

"Stay where you are, Jordan." Zouga still did not look at him, his gaze was riveted on Ralph's face. "Stay here and learn about whores and the kind of men who lust after them."

Jordan was stricken, his face like last night's camp-fire ashes, his lips dry and white as bone. He knew what they were talking about, for he had listened while Bazo and Ralph wove their fantasies aloud, and with his interest piqued, he had questioned Jan Cheroot furtively and the replies had disgusted and terrified him.

"Not like animals, Jan Cheroot, surely not like dogs or goats."

Jordan's questions to Jan Cheroot had been generalized , men and women, not any person he knew or loved or respected. It had taken him days fully to appreciate Jan Cheroot's reply, and then the terrible realization had struck, all men and women, his father who epitomized for him all that was noble and strong and right, his mother, that sweet and gentle being who was already a fading wraithlike memory, not them, surely not them.

He had been physically sickened, vomiting and wracked by excruciating bowel cramps so that Zouga had dosed him with sulphur and treacle molasses.

Now they were talking about that thing, that thing so dreadful that he had tried to purge his memory of it.

Now the two most important people in his world were talking about it openly, using words he had only seen in print and which had even then shamed him. They were mouthing those words and the air was full of shame and hatred and revulsion.

"You have wallowed like a pig where a thousand other pigs have wallowed before you, in the foetid cesspool between that scarlet whore's thighs."

Jordan crept away along the wall, and reached the corner of the stoep. He could go no further.

"If you were not ashamed to muck in that trough, did you not give a thought to what those other rutting boars had left there for you?"

His father's words conjured up vivid images in Jordan's mind. His stomach heaved, and he covered his mouth with his hand.

"The sickness a harlot carries there is the curse of God upon venery and lust. If you could only see them in the pox hospital at Greenwich, raving idiots with their brains eaten half away by the disease, drooling from empty mouths, their teeth rotted out, their noses fallen into black festering holes, blind eyes rolling in their crazed skulls, " Jordan doubled over, and sicked up on his own rawhide boots.

"Stop it," said Ralph. "You have made Jordie sick."

"I have made him sick?" Zouga asked quietly. "It is you who would make any decent person sick."

Zouga came down the steps into the dusty yard, and he swung the whip, cutting the air with it, across and back and the lash fluted sharply.

Ralph stood his ground, and now his chin was up defiantly.

"If you take that whip to me, Papa, I shall defend myself."

"You challenge me," Zouga stopped.

"You only use a whip on an animal."

"Yes," Zouga nodded. "An animal, that's why I take it to you."

"Papa, I warn you."

Gravely Zouga inclined his head and considered the young man before him. "Very well. You claim to be a man, make good that claim."

Zouga tossed the hippohide whip casually onto the verandah, and then turned back to his son.

Ralph was prepared, his weight balanced on the balls of his feet, although his hands were held low before him, they were balled into fists.

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