Rough Diamond, page 3
Barney said nothing, but marched steadily along. Six hundred bloody miles to go, at what he guessed would only be ten or twelve miles a day, and that was if they were lucky. Two bloody months! There were mountains to cross, and rivers, and perhaps—although the proprietor of the rooming house had smiled faintly when he said it—angry tribes of natives. That last was probably nonsense, but the mountains weren’t, nor the rivers. Still, there was nothing for it but to accept it and hope he could make up the time in getting rich once he eventually reached Kimberley. If the bloody diamonds weren’t really all gone by then! But there was no purpose in thinking of that. Better to use the time on the long trek to some constructive and—
“ ‘I know not ’ow to tell thee ’oo I am; me name, dear saint, is ’ateful to meself—’” He caught Andries’ curious eyes upon him across the wagon. “Romeo and Juliet,” he said defensively. “It’s a play. Wrote by a bloke named Shakespeare.”
“Oh,” Andries said, and cracked his whip.
They paused at eleven in the morning, the sun high in the almost white sky. Andries brought the team from the trail and began to unhitch them. Barney stared. He thought he had noticed a commiserating look from Andries every now and then over the past hour.
“Look,” he said half angrily, “if yer stoppin’ because you think I’m beat, well, I ain’t. I can walk all day and then some!” Good God! Stopping at eleven in the morning after less than four hours on the way? The old man don’t look that tired and neither do the animals. At this rate we’ll never bloody get to Kimberley!
“Barney, boy,” Andries said calmly without stopping his out-spanning of the team, “let me tell you something about the Cape ox. You take him when he’s a bull calf and you castrate him—” He glanced at Barney. “You know what castrate means, boy?”
“Sure. You cut off his knockers.”
“More or less. Anyway, then he becomes a steer. Wait a few years and he becomes an ox. You castrate him to make him quieter and easier to work, but you owe him something for that. You owe yourself something, too, if you want a healthy animal.” He finished unhitching the final animal and watched it wander off to graze. He squatted down, tracing his finger in the soil a moment, watching the animals at their grazing, and then looked up at Barney. “Now,” he went on, “if you want the best from your oxen—if you don’t want them to lie down and die on you and leave you a long way to go and no way to carry your water or your mealies or your biltong—then you treat your animals right. You don’t work them more than eight hours a day, and six or seven is better, with a break at midday. An ox needs eight hours to graze and eight hours to sleep and chew his cud.” He suddenly smiled. “Probably work as well for a man if a man cared as much about himself or his Kaffirs as he does about his ox and his wagon.” He tilted his head, coming to his feet. “Come over here.”
Barney moved closer.
“Now, we’re going to be a fair spell on this trek,” Andries said, “and you might as well earn a bit of your keep. You saw me unspan the animals. Watch again in an hour when I span them again. Watch tomorrow. After that it will be your chore.” He smiled at Barney in an almost fatherly manner. “Now, go find some branches or some dried ox dung for a fire and we’ll have some tea.”
So he was going to learn to span and outspan oxen, and how to make a fire with dried cowshit, was he? You’re really startin’ at the bottom, Barney, me boy, he said to himself, and went out to find the branches or the dung.
They had been on the trail a week when one noon, over their tea and while the unspanned oxen grazed, Andries suddenly pointed. “Os,” he said.
Barney frowned. “Eh?”
“Ox,” Andries said, and pointed upward. “Hemel. Sky, or heaven. In Afrikaans. It’s a dialect, sort of, of Dutch.” He shrugged. “You seem to be so set on spending time in this country, you ought to learn the language.”
“Everybody talked English in Cape Town, an’ you talk English,” Barney pointed out logically.
“Not everybody speaks English, not even in the Cape. The farmers you’ll meet speak only Afrikaans. After all, less than a hundred years ago in southern Africa, nobody spoke English, and there were a lot of people here, even then. I think an hour every night before sleep, if we’re not too tired, would be good for a lesson. It wouldn’t hurt you a bit. Take your mind off all those diamonds you’re going to pick up in the street in Kimberley.” He made a chewing motion and pointed to the remains of some mealies. “Voedsel. Food. You’d better learn that word if you don’t want to go hungry someday, diamonds or no diamonds,” he added dryly, and pointed. “Let’s go. Os.”
“You said before sleep,” Barney said.
“This is extra,” Andries said, biting back a smile, and dug in his pocket for his after-meal pipe. “No extra charge. All right, let’s have it. Os.”
“Os” Barney repeated obediently. “Ox.”
The sky at night was clearer than Barney could ever remember; the millions of stars seemed almost within reach, pinpricks in a velvet dome seemingly hand-high. There was no moon to dissipate the sharpness of the starlight; in the far distance the shadows of mountains blocked out the edge of the sky. Barney lay beside the wagon, wondering that the oxen did not step on him as they moved about in the dark. Beside the dying fire a few feet away Andries was working on some tanned leather he had dug from the rear depths of the wagon; it seemed to Barney that the large wagon contained almost every necessity of life, in addition to the heavy crates of pumping machinery being taken to Dutoitspan, which Andries had told him was now a part of the new Kimberley. The older man finished whatever he had been doing with the leather and came to stand beside Barney.
“Got a decent hat for you, boy,” he said, and placed it on Barney’s chest. Barney no longer resented Andries calling him “boy.” “That derby of yours looks a bit out of place in the Karroo.”
They had been on the trail for three weeks and had become fast friends. Barney had become accustomed to his daily chores, to the endless walking, to his Afrikaans lesson each night, and had even come to understand that the small additional weight that he and Andries might have added to the wagon, were they to ride, would have been that much extra for the ox team, and would have cost them up to a mile a day, or as much as four or five extra days for the trip. He had also become accustomed to the tea and mealies and biltong, the dried maize and dried beef that served almost exclusively as their diet, supplemented by whatever bird or small animal Andries could bring down with his long gun, or by the rare decent meal served them as they came by some even rarer farm in that desolate country, the farther they came from the Cape and civilization. The land here was largely uninhabited, offering the barest minimum of forage for the animals; ahead of them during their day’s march the distant mountains seemed to maintain their position in the clear desert air, sometimes reflected from the flat pans, the shallow water holes that would be filled after a sudden desert downpour, and seemingly as quickly emptied either by the thirsty oxen or by evaporation under the hot sun.
On occasion they would be passed in the opposite direction by a mule train or coach filled with weary and discouraged passengers returning to Cape Town after failure in the diamond fields, or by an ox wagon with as many as twenty men inside and as many taking their turn walking silently beside it, making it back to the Cape and to decent amenities for those who still had a shilling in their purse. A rare horseman would also occasionally pass, although a single man with a single animal that far from civilization was taking a chance on being found together with his horse as mere bones bleached by the relentless sun, should they wander far from the trail and possible help. There were limits to the supplies one could carry in saddlebags, and a horse could not do on the slim forage that barely served for the oxen. And distances were great in that region, and the land inhospitable.
Barney sat up and tried on the hat. It fit loosely but he knew it would provide far better protection against the sun than the narrow-brimmed derby he had brought from home, a final concession to style from a mother worried that her youngest should not appear as gauche to the savages.
“Thanks,” he said gratefully, and grinned. “Harry won’t recognize me when I get there, I’ll look such a trekker.”
“Harry … Your brother, you said.”
“Right, me older brother by three years.” Barney smiled in remembrance. The memories seemed awfully far away here in the South African desert, almost as if he were recalling a distant place that did not really exist except in his mind, experiences he might have read of instead of having lived. “Him and me, we used to do lots of things together. Acrobats, we was, in the music halls. Songs and dance. You name it, if there was a shillin’ in it, we done it. Here, I’ll show you.”
He came to his feet, did a quick comio shuffle, a fast twist, and ended with a flip that tossed his new loose-fitting hat to one side. He picked it up, grinning, brushed it off and pushed it back onto his head. “We was called the Barnato Brothers, fast songs and patter, tumblers and clowns, and we was known all over the East End. That’s in London,” he added in case Andries did not know.
“Barnato Brothers?”
“Yeah. We got the name one night when Harry was takin’ his bow and the crowd started callin’ ‘Barney, too; Barney, too.’ We’d been lookin’ for a good name for the act, so after that night we called ourselves the Barnato Brothers.”
“It sounds as if you had a rather interesting childhood.”
“Yeah. Oh, we was always flat, y’know; we never had no brass, but we had fun. And I fought a lot, too.” He fell silent, recalling the many fights he had had, sometimes in the King of Prussia for a few bob, sometimes in an alley to keep from getting his head torn off, or to avenge some insult to his religion, or his clothes, or anything else an opponent chose to rile him with. But there was no point in trying to explain all that to Andries. “Boxin’, y’know.”
“And the acting?”
Barney felt his face get red. “That was just fer fun,” he said defensively. “I like the theater. I like the make-believe. I—” He tried to put it in a way the other man might understand, and not make fun of him. “I—I like the way the words sound, not like people was just talkin’, but, well—easier, like. Like they’d put some thought into the words, and not just sayin’ the first thing that come to mind. You know?”
“No.” Andries shrugged and took his pipe from his mouth. “I don’t know. I’ve never been in a theater in my life. When I was a child such things were forbidden; they still are in Boer country. Mockery, my mother said; it was mockery of God to pretend to be what you weren’t.”
Barney stared at him. “But didn’t you ever pretend when you was a young ’un? Like you was a hunter and the stick you was carryin’ was a gun, and you was goin’ to kill the biggest lion in the country? We even done that in London, and the only lions we got was in the Kensington zoo.”
“I didn’t have to,” Andries said dryly. “I got my first gun when I was nine and I killed my first lion when I was thirteen.” He changed the subject. “And now you’re off to get rich in the diamond fields, is that it?”
Barney wondered at the abrupt change of subject. He also wondered at the man’s tone. “Right,” he said, a bit mystified. “You know that.”
“Mind all made up?”
“Sure,” Barney said, and frowned at the very serious Andries. Then he thought he understood the other’s reason for questioning him. “Oh, I heard all them stories about how the diamonds was all run out, but I don’t believe that fer a minute. Me brother, he made it big up there and so’ll I. You wait and see.”
Andries sighed. He packed his pipe and lit it, drawing on it carefully as he chose his words.
“Barney, boy,” he said at last, puffing steadily, and paused to stare about him as if he could see what he was talking about in the moonless darkness. “I came out from Stellenbosch with my folks when I was eight years old. My mother, my father, two uncles, and the family of one of them; the other wasn’t married. We had over four thousand sheep with us, and five hundred cattle and horses. My folks wanted to get away from the English in the Cape, get away from their pagan ways. My father was a very religious man. He believed in every word of the Bible. Me—?” Andries shrugged. “Me, I don’t know what I believe in. I’ve been away from my people too long, maybe. I go back and forth from one place to another; I see mostly English towns. I’m used to the English. I know the English. Too well I know them! And I never wanted to be a farmer, anyway. Had a farm, hated it. Sold my farm to a cousin when I was twenty. Just took the wagon and the oxen. Oh, not these. That was many teams ago …”
He paused and stared into the surrounding darkness, puffing steadily, as if picturing the land as it had been thirty years before. Barney waited, curiously. He could not see where any of this had anything to do with diamonds or his going to look for them, but in the three weeks he had been trekking with Andries he had learned that the older man was almost always oblique in approaching any subject or problem.
“In those days,” Andries went on at last, “the land we passed over—the land we’re on now—had herds and herds of animals. You wouldn’t think so looking at it now, but there were. Wild sheep, wild horses, wildebeests, rhinoceros, giraffes. And natives—Hottentots, Bushmen. We had to fight to protect ourselves more than once, and to protect the farms and the animals once we had established ourselves.” His voice warmed with memory. “I fought side by side with Paul Kruger, when he was a full field cornet and second in command only to Scholtz, when we chased the Bechuana chief Secheli back into the bush. Kruger was wounded, wounded bad, but it didn’t stop him fighting. The natives thought he had to be some sort of a god because they couldn’t seem to kill him. And I fought with Paul Kruger the very next year when he went after the Kaffir chiefs Mapela and Makapaan in the Waterberg district near Makapaanspoort. That was a battle, believe me!” He paused and sighed. “It was all so different then …”
He fell silent. In the darkness there was only the sound of the oxen moving about as they grazed. Barney hesitated a moment and then cleared his throat. “About the diamonds—”
“Ah, the diamonds.” Andries looked at him, brought from his reverie. “I was about to tell you. This was a great land, this land we fought for. But now it’s all being thrown away. Diamonds are a curse, boy, don’t you know that? Can’t you see that? But of course you can’t…”
“A curse?”
“The worst curse there is, boy! They brought in the Uitlanders—the outsiders—yes, like you, boy. You’re a good boy, I like you, Barney, but wait until you’ve been here awhile. You’ll be like the rest.”
“And what’s wrong with the rest?”
“You’ll see. Wait until you see Kimberley. It was farmland, boy, decent farmland. The Vooruitzigt farm, and Bultfontein and Dutoitspan—good farms until the English came in and bought them up. Bought them up? Stole them, better said! Now what do you have in your so-called Kimberley? What the Uitlanders have brought in—brothels and whores and drunkenness and gambling. They brought in greed. They’ve made the price of everything so high the average Boer farmer can’t buy what he needs. I know; I often carry food, cases of it, not just machinery or iron. And crime? We didn’t know what crime was. Oh, an occasional Kaffir would get his hands on some whiskey someplace and maybe knife another, but now? Nobody is safe anymore. The diamonds are running out and the diggers are hungry and dangerous. Those young Boer lads have been tempted from the land by greed and have fallen into the ways of the wicked. This much of the Bible I still believe in. The average Boer farmer who lived peacefully with his Kaffir help before the diamonds, now suffers a hundred ways because of the cursed stones. His help has run off to work for the white outsiders in the diamond mines; his land has been sold for far less than it’s worth, because if he didn’t sell it the diggers would have dug it up anyway, with or without permission. His daughters are marrying the English, those that get married at all and don’t live in sin in the bars and hotels—”
“Aw, the English ain’t all that bad—” Barney began. He felt uncomfortable. In all the time he had known Andries, in all their many conversations around either the noon or the evening fire, he had never heard the other man speak with such passion, such vehemence. He wondered what had brought it on.
“You know nothing of the English, boy. You know nothing of any race where diamonds are concerned,” Andries said flatly. “Where the mines are now—the Colesberg Kopje, Dutoitspan, Bultfontein, De Beers—the place they call Kimberley now, even gave it an English name after they stole it—that was rightfully part of the Free State, Boer territory, and everybody knew it. Went right up to the banks of the Vaal River, twenty miles farther west. Always had been part of the Free State, ever since the treaty. Now what is it? A part of the Cape Colony, English, by as dirty a bit of politicking as you ever saw. And why? Because they found diamonds! If they’d have found ox shit in barrels they would have forced the Free State to take it if they had to bring guns to make them!”
He spat. Barney sat silent. At last Andries sighed. He tapped out his pipe and tucked it into a pocket.
“I hate to see happen to you what I know is going to happen,” he said quietly. There were several moments of silence. “Let’s get some sleep, boy,” Andries said, and bent to bank the fire, almost as if ashamed of his unexpected outburst.
It was three nights later. A sliver of a new moon curved low near the horizon; overhead dark clouds obscured the stars, threatening or promising rain before morning, depending upon one’s need for water or for comfort. Andries was stretched out under the wagon snoring lightly; the wagon’s rear canvas had been partially eased to form a pocket to catch whatever rain it might capture. Barney had decided to chance the possibility of a downpour in order to sleep near the dying fire and catch the final warmth of the fading coals. No longer a stranger to sleeping on the hard ground, he had come to welcome its comfort after a long day’s march.
