Men of Men - Smith Wilbur - Страница 71

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For seconds only they clung to each other, while Zouga thought his heart would burst; then she tore herself from his arms, and with neither a word nor a backward glance, she flew into the night, and was gone.

Ten 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 regurations. 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 cooperation 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 n, well formed, and each, in the manner of his race, becomely.

"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.

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