Thank you, he had said, and the kaffir stopped as he turned away and the black eyes looked at him, then he moved on past the fire towards the horses, taking no food with him, no drink. Harry wondered why he had thanked the kaffir. He did not usually acknowledge them in any way. He had shaken his head, his headache was still there and he felt anger again. Damn Hannah.
Harry had cut at the tough salt meat, tearing it with his fingers when the knife fell to the ground. He was hungry and thirsty. It was cooler but not cold. He looked across the fire at his kaffir. The insects were sounding now, out there in the dark. Did kaffirs not feel hunger and thirst? He wiped his hands on his handkerchief but they still felt greasy and he could not spare water for washing, not until they had refilled their flasks at least. Christ, he could do with a drink. He took a quick nip of brandy from his flask, then shoved it back into his inside pocket before changing his mind and drinking from it again then settling into his blanket. It would protect him against the night chill, he told himself.
In the morning he had ridden on, still with his mate as guide, and had watched the contours of the ridge and the great plain which never changed as it swept up to its base. In the distance beyond the horizon were acres of maize which Frank said the Boers farmed now. It was good to see the sky and miles of scrub-covered earth, it made him feel cleaner somehow. He had not felt clean since he had arrived in this country, even when he had bathed. Why the hell was that?
He looked through the shimmering heat to the outlines of the mines, to the headgear which stood at the head of shafts thousands of feet deep. He looked down at the ground over which they rode, picturing the seams, the stopes which ran in all directions busy with the miners who worked with picks and hand-drills. There would be dust down there too. He had tied his handkerchief round his mouth and nose, coughing as he did so and turned back to the ridge, the plain, the shimmering heat, wanting only to see that, think of that.
That night he needed to taste something other than dust as he sat by the camp-fire so he took a cigarette from the case his father had given him and sucked the nicotine deep into his lungs. He watched as again his mate cooked salt mutton and boiled up tea and he smelt the smoke and the lamb. He watched as he brought over the plate and then took it by the edge again and when the tea came, hot and steaming in the white moonlight, he pointed to the ground opposite.
Sit down, boy, he had said, but why had he said it? He had not known. It had been some crazy sort of compulsion but he had not retracted his words. He could not.
He remembered how his mate had hesitated, his face in darkness because he stood between the light from the fire and the moon. Sit down, Harry had repeated, and this time it was an order but he did not use the voice he had used back at the mine and he watched as the kaffir did so, sitting with crossed legs, immobile and erect.
Harry’s cigarette had burnt down and the heat stung his fingers and so he stubbed it out in the loose earth. The soil filled his nails and he dug it out with his nailfile, looking across at his mate. ‘Are you not hungry?’ he had asked, pointing to his own plate and then his mouth, for how much could this black man understand? No, boss, his mate had said, and that was all.
‘Are you not thirsty?’ Harry had persisted, and now, as he sat on his horse looking out over the landscape he never wished to see again, he remembered the soreness of his throat as he held out his mug of tea that evening so long ago, seeing the flask which was strung from the other’s rope belt.
‘I have water, boss,’ the mate had replied but his eyes were slow to turn from the steaming cup and Harry pointed back to the fire.
‘Get yourself some tea and some meat,’ he had said and watched as the mate rose quietly and quickly, stopping to look at Harry before he turned and moved to the fire, cooking the meat and pouring tea before moving across to the horses to eat in their shadow. And still Harry did not know why he was doing any of this.
The next night Harry had ordered the mate to cook enough for them both and had ordered him to bring both plates and eat with him, and afterwards he had passed across a cigarette. Did black men smoke, he wondered.
Thank you, boss, his mate had said as he took it and the matches too. Harry watched as the flare lit up the blackness of the man’s skin, the white of his eyes which seemed more pronounced somehow than during the day. Such blackness, Harry thought. It was still strange to him.
He had asked the black man if he liked being away from the city and as the thick lips drew in the smoke he had seen a smile flicker and for a moment he allowed himself to know that this was a man he was talking to, not a beast.
I do not like Igoli, the city of gold, the mate had said, and it is good to be sleeping where the eye can see no fence.
Harry tasted again the smoke he had sucked in, dragging it deep into his lungs, exhaling, and wondering if his mouth would ever feel moist again. He ran his tongue round his teeth and he felt the dust and grit that even with the tea was still in his mouth. He remembered Frank’s voice, his heavy-bearded face, as he told him that these were not men, they were not beings with feelings and needs.
He wiped his mouth with his handkerchief but it was full of dust. He cursed and put it back in his pocket. I thought the kaffirs didn’t mind the compound, he had said, watching the bright red glow of the cigarette as the mate sucked in again.
There was a pause as the smoke was blown towards the sky and Harry saw the mate’s face as he looked upwards and heard the soft words.
We mind; all people mind filth and shame. The Boers minded too. There had been silence then and Harry had felt a confusion, and he had looked across at the fire, burning low now and he did not want to talk any more that night for this trek across the ridge was not clearing his head; the ache was back, the anger at Hannah too. They reached the limit of the ridge the next day and retraced their steps, and still there was silence between them, a closing of the space around each man. He had watched the ostriches, the dassie and the mines, which looked foreign in this landscape, their machinery too angular, their noises too loud; and there were no faults in the ground which he could report would be worth boring with the new diamond-tipped drills.
At the fire that night Harry invited the mate to sit with him and eat and drink. He did not order him. They smoked again and Harry brought his flask filled with Hine brandy from his saddle-roll and offered it to the black man. His father had sent it out from England for him.
He saw his mate hesitate and so pointed to the mug. Put it in your tea, he said, for he did not want those black lips around his flask, and he saw with something he thought might be shame that the mate understood this.
Harry asked how he knew of the camps that the Boers had been in, and his mate told him that he had been a servant with a Boer farmer and had been imprisoned when the women and children had been concentrated into these camps and Kitchener had burnt their ground, destroying the crops that he and his father and his brothers had sown for their master. How those imprisoned had all starved but the blacks had starved first for they were servants, but really slaves. In his awkward English he told how both black and white had died since illness had no sight. How his father and his brothers had died; how his Boer mistress and her child had starved and died of illness; how there had been no sanitation; how the wire had stretched around the barracks; how they had been guarded day and night by the British – as they were now.
I learn your tongue in those years, the mate had said, and there had been no emotion in his voice.
Harry had felt anger at the man, at his blackness, at the further confusion that the kaffir had brought with his words. He wanted to swear at him, to beat him, to forget what he had just heard from this black man. He did not want to know that he was part of a race which fought its wars like this. He did not want to think of the compounds his people still used, of the profits they made. It was business, wasn’t it? These things happened when countries progressed, didn’t they? It was right, wasn’t it? He did not want to have these things spoken of clearly
in a moonlit sky by a man who knew the truth of what he said. No, he did not want to hear it and he would not remember it. He would make sure he did not remember. He took out Hannah’s letter from his pocket and set fire to it with the stub of his cigarette. He did not want to read her words again.
He had told the kaffir to fetch more fuel for the fire and then see to the horses in the voice that he had used at the mine and had turned his back and smoked until his eyes were heavy. He had lain with his back to the fire and to the black man and tried to sleep, but he kept hearing Hannah speaking to their father on New Year’s Eve as the green hat slipped over their father’s eye, asking how concentration camps could be justified, hearing his answer that in war all death can be justified, concentration camps included. That orders must be obeyed, whatever they are. He kept seeing the fox torn to pieces by the hounds, its cries rising above the trees.
Harry had felt the stones beneath his shoulders as he had rolled on to his back. For Christ’s sake be quiet, he wanted to shout, but he could get no sleep. All through the night he had not thought of Esther once but of Hannah and her letters, her outrage, how she had always faced and fought all that which she thought was wrong. He had sat up and taken more brandy and had felt weary but still could not sleep. Each time he closed his eyes her words had rolled around his head and he could see the chandeliers in Arthur’s dining-room and her face as she had talked of the rights of the black men in South Africa. Be quiet, God damn you, he shouted silently. You don’t know how it has to be out here; and her face just stared at him, her chin tilted and her wide mouth firm, and he knew that he could never make her understand because he could not find words with which to argue.
In the morning Harry had not talked to the kaffir and that night he did not order him to come and sit on his side of the fire but watched as he walked without food to sit with the horses, and he was glad that the man would be hungry tonight for he had ruined the easy future he had dreamt of for so long.
All that day he had watched the mate’s back as he rode before him and heard the voices of Hannah and his father and Frank chasing round in his head; he had seen her words in print, seen the compounds, heard the moans which rose in the night. Really heard them now, for drink had not covered and softened the sounds and the sights.
The voices were sometimes loud, sometimes hushed, but always the heat shimmered and the dust thickened in his throat until he felt that his mind would burst with the noise of it all and the ache which still stabbed behind his eyes. And over everything lay those moans that seemed to come from all around but which he had known must only be in his imagination. Did it matter that these men lived as they did? Did it matter that they had no rights? It was not his problem. He could change nothing, but still her face looked at him and her voice carried through his thoughts into the corners of his mind where the truth lay quiet, not wanting to be discovered. Votes, rights, these were her province, not his. Let her be quiet, for God’s sake.
They set up camp for the last time that night for tomorrow they would be back in Johannesburg. Harry was tired, so bloody tired, and at last Hannah had gone, his father and Frank too but not the compounds. Would they ever go from behind his eyes, from his ears? Would they ever leave him in peace?
He watched the mate as he cooked the meat, only enough for the white man and Harry did not move, did not speak, as the mate brought it to him. He took it, and the tea and watched as he walked back, past the fire to the horses. Harry could not eat the meat but he drank his tea, feeling the steam on his face. He smoked his cigarette and ground it out in the sand half-smoked. For God’s sake, Hannah, be quiet, he thought because she was back again, and he wondered for a moment if he had shouted the words.
He sat for longer, not smoking, not listening to the voice of his sister. He lay down and pulled his blanket up over his ears and buried himself in the sound of the insects but in the end they could not drown out her voice and he finally knew as he rose that it was not just her voice that he heard but his own as well, unsodden by drink, clear at last.
He walked past the fire which was low now. His feet kicked up dust and he could see it quite clearly as he walked. The horses stirred as he approached and his mate sat up, his hat still on his head, still pulled low. Harry said nothing but handed him his flask, pushing it towards him as the black man hesitated.
Take it, he had said, and watched as he drank from it, his lips dark against the silver. The mate wiped it on his sleeve and handed it back, watching as Harry also drank, not noticing the bite of the brandy as the voice faded from his head. He smiled as he brought the flask down.
My name is Harry Watson, he had said, offering his hand, and the black man rose. My name is Baralong, Smith in your tongue, he had replied, and had taken Harry’s hand and in the white moonlight his grasp had been firm.
On this quiet evening Harry looked about him as he approached Johannesburg. Baralong had been his friend from that day onwards but he still lived in the compound, he was still searched before he went back to his mother’s hut at the end of his spell. He still needed a pass. He could not alter that, not here anyway, but one day perhaps it would happen. One day perhaps he would try, because Hannah would want that, just as much as she wanted the rights she was fighting for in England. How could she bear to face prison, he wondered, and shuddered.
After they had returned from the ridge he had been unable to do anything openly, but he had quietly given money to the kaffir hospital to provide beds for the kaffirs so that they no longer had to sleep on the mud floor, and medicine so that perhaps they did not die of injuries and illnesses quite so readily. He had not written to tell Esther for she would not understand that his stake money was being used in this way.
He had taken the daughter of a friend of Baralong’s as his servant to save her going to a Boer, something that Baralong dreaded for any of his people, and he had treated her well but he had not slept with her. He had not slept with anyone since the ride along the ridge for he no longer felt the urgent need. Neither did he drink until he could not see or hear, for he had no need to blank out the knowledge which he would not recognise. But he still drank a little with Frank in the evenings and laughed and talked, for to have altered in his behaviour would have been too dangerous.
Harry remembered the picture of the guinea-pigs and the girl in a white dress with a blue sash; the whippings with the towels when he had broken the rules once before.
Baralong had become the closest friend he had ever had but no one could know. He had remained his mate and they worked as a team, always together, and Frank said how well he had settled in. Harry rubbed his arm across his forehead frowning slightly, remembering how he had nearly given himself away.
In the two years following the ridge ride Harry had eased himself into more underground inspection since it was the atmosphere that he enjoyed the most. He felt less on edge, less exposed. And then two months ago he and Baralong had been together in the propped seams of the mine, the dust stinging their eyes from the drills and the picks, and the noise had blasted into their bodies as usual. The men had not heard them or seen them, working as they were in the light from the candles, ignoring the sweat which streamed off their faces on to the ground.
Baralong had been at his side pointing up the stopes leading off the main shaft. These are the ones we want, Boss, Baralong had said, for he called him Boss when others might hear, and they might hear if the drilling paused. Harry had been about to nod but had tensed instead as they bent down to pass beneath an overhang chiselled with lines from picks and drills, straightening when they reached the other side. Baralong had turned and looked, his face questioning beneath the candlelight, but Harry had said nothing, just stood quite still as he sensed the earth rebel, feeling that same feeling that Penhallon had brought him before the ceiling plunged down so long ago.
Harry had known it was about to happen again; it was in the air. His nerves had felt it somehow and he looked at Baralong and it was Sam he saw and he did not know whether
to go back or forward. This time he could not tell. Why the hell couldn’t he tell? And he knew it was because it was not his earth.
He was a stranger here and he knew it now. Baralong, he had whispered, I do not know. This time I don’t know which way to go, and he had gripped the black man’s arm and fear had filled the air between them, and this time it was his friend who had stood with his head to one side, his eyes looking but not seeing, his ears listening, his very being waiting, guessing, and still the men worked on around them and Harry knew it would happen but not where so he could not shout an order to leave. He could not until he knew which way they should go. Oh God, which way? And then he felt Baralong’s arm around him, throwing him back, pushing him, dragging him, shouting orders which Harry could not give, and he knew that Baralong had guessed because this was his land. Then the noise came and the wind and the screams and the weight. But there had not been much weight on his legs nor on Baralong’s. The weight was on the men who had been drilling further forward and had not heard the order.
As the dust cleared and the pain receded Harry had pushed the ore from his body, hating for the first time its rough edges, its size, its smell, then crawled across to Baralong and moved the splintered pit prop from his legs, coughing and choking.
They had heard the men who had been using the drills, behind the wall of rock and beneath it. It was dark though, so bloody dark, because the rush of wind had blown the candles out and filled the air with dust. After Harry had ripped his jacket and bound the cut in his right leg that would not stop bleeding he had found his matches and almost struck one, but remembered the danger of fire. Go back for help, he had instructed Baralong, scrabbling carefully to his knees, not wanting to cause sparks, and then on to his feet. And for God’s sake, hurry.
Baralong had said, what of fire? His hand had gripped his sleeve and as he rode on this dark evening Harry could still feel the pressure; still feel the fear because he knew that there could indeed be fire.
A Time for Courage Page 29
