Solitaire

by Graham Masterton

  Harold Feinberg sat on the stoop, swinging his empty mug by the handle. ‘Barney,’ he said, ‘it makes me sorry to hear you talk like that.’

  ‘I should spend the rest of my life second-class? Is that what you’re asking me to do?’

  ‘No!’ said Harold Feinberg, fiercely. ‘Because to be a Jew, no matter how poor, that’s never second-class. We were delivered by the Lord our God out of Egypt. Do you know what that means? And you can stand there and tell me you’re going to forget about that, forget about your duty to the Lord, at least until you’re wealthy enough, and famous enough for them to let you in to all the right goyish clubs.’

  ‘You never talked this way before,’ said Barney.

  ‘I never had occasion to,’ Harold replied.

  A man in a white apron walked the length of the dusty street with a wooden tray of honey-cakes on his head, clanging a bell. In the floury white light of noon, he looked like the spectre of a leper.

  ‘I should go, then,’ said Barney.

  ‘You be careful of Mr Knight,’ warned Harold. ‘You may think he’s posh, and worth getting to know, but no lawyer brings his wife and his daughters out to a place like this unless he’s got a reason. That man practised in London first, until they struck him off. Then he tried to start up a law firm in Capetown, and they soon got wind of his little conjuring-tricks there, and that’s why he’s here. You watch him. He’s a lawyer of ill-repute.’

  Barney leaned his shoulder against the ironwood upright of Harold’s office verandah. ‘One day,’ he said, ‘you’ll understand that I’m right.’

  Harold looked up at him, and smiled. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’m afraid of.’

  In the musty gloom of his corrugated-iron office, with the walls rattling to the commercial ecstasies of the Irishwoman next door, Harold gave Barney £212 for his bag of tiny rough diamonds. Barney knew that £175 of this money had already been spent on new livestock, and on repairing the north wall of the cattle kraal. Monsaraz would take £30 for drink, and women, and laundry, Donald would have to be paid £2, and that would leave Barney with just £5 of his own. He appreciated that this was quite a respectable wage for a month’s work: a private soldier in the British Army was still getting only £1 8s od a month, with deductions for extra food. But it was not enough to pay for a diamond-digging claim at Kimberley, or to build the footings of any kind of fortune.

  He shook hands with Harold with unusual solemnity, and then walked out into the glare of the street. He wondered for a moment just what Monsaraz would do if he failed to return from Kimberley – if he kept the whole £212 for himself. But Monsaraz was an object lesson in the various ways in which a man could be gradually disassembled, morally and bodily, by self-imposed guilt, and Barney was quite aware that if he walked off with Monsaraz’s money, he would be haunted for the rest of his life by memories of that filthy wretched man in his soiled white suit, and that he would hear his whispered obscenities in his ears until he died.

  ‘That little Venda girl cried out only once … but I hit her with my sjambok and she was quiet … wet all over, shivering, naked, but quiet.’

  Harold came to the door just as Barney left – fat-bellied, sad, with his pith helmet pulled down over his ears. ‘Listen,’ he told Barney. ‘I meant what I said.’

  ‘I know,’ said Barney, and went back to embrace him. A passing digger paused unsteadily in the street and tried to focus on them through the blurring effects of two bottles of cheap London gin.

  ‘I want you to know that you can always count on me,’ said Harold, a little throatily. ‘Whatever I’ve said, I’m always around to help a brother Jew. And, well, whatever you do … don’t stay on that farm too long. You’ll never be a Boer.’

  Barney was off to find Donald now, so that he could tell him there was no need to pack the trunks nor make the surrey ready until morning. Donald had discovered that Jan Bloem, the Griqua chief, was in Kimberley, to see for himself what riches lay within the boundaries of Griqua territory, and that Bloem had set up camp a little to the west of Colesberg Kopje with his two brothers, his pipe-smoking mother, his servants, and a number of cooks and washerwomen whom Donald regarded as extremely likely candidates for sisterhood.

  Barney walked along Kimberley’s main street with his hands in the pockets of his riding breeches and his hat pulled low over his eyes. He passed makeshift gambling dens, attorneys’ offices, whorehouses, and general merchants. A half-caste girl in a tattered blue dress was leaning in the doorway of one of the shacks, and winked at him as he went by. He smiled back at her, and shook his head.

  The Kimberley Mine itself was only a few hundred yards away, across the rough rock-strewn ground. Hundreds of men were digging at a wide, shallow crater with picks, their backs bent under the dusty sky. The sound of all those scores of picks hacking away at the soil was like an extraordinary percussive chorus. For one moment, most of them would seem to be tapping away in unison, but then the chorus would spatter into disarray. There were dozens of tents all around the mine, most of them screened from the wind and the dust by fences of woven grass, and there was a crowd of ox-waggons, too, all loaded up with timber. In the first few weeks of prospecting, the diggers only had to walk across the ground and start excavating where they stood, but some diggers had already sunk their claims ten or twenty feet into the ground, and they needed balks of wood to shore up the sides.

  Barney stood for a while and watched the diggers and the kaffirs at work. Wheelbarrows of yellow soil were being propelled to the edge of the mine along the pathways between the claims until they could be emptied out in a heap by a digger’s tent, and sorted through for gems. It was hot, strenuous work, but the rewards were worth it. One Dutchman named Smuts had bought a claim in the first two weeks of digging for fifty pounds, and gathered up £20,000 worth of diamonds in less than two months. And only a few feet from the place where Damon had scooped up the first rough diamonds, another digger had picked up a single stone of 175 carats, which had sold for £33,000.

  While he was watching, a tall, sad-looking man in a droopy felt hat and a loose bush-jacket approached Barney from the direction of the mine. He stood a few feet away, his hands on his hips, and grimaced from time to time as if he disapproved of what he saw. Barney glanced at him once or twice, and then said, ‘You don’t seem impressed.’

  The man stared at him. He had a breaky nose and eyebrows as tangled as a bush. ‘No,’ he said, in a northern British accent which reminded Barney of the people he had met in Liverpool. ‘In fact, I think the whole damn mine’s a complete bog-up.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ asked Barney.

  ‘A bog-up. A pig’s dinner. Don’t you understand English? They’re hacking away there like idiots. Some of them digging five feet down. Some of them twenty. There’s no organisation. No co-operation. What’s going to happen when they get down a hundred feet?’

  ‘They won’t, will they? I mean, the yellow soil will give out way before they get down that far.’

  The tall man stared at Barney in exasperation. ‘You think the yellow soil is the end of it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Barney. ‘But that’s what the diggers say. They only found diamonds in the yellow soil along the Vaal and the Orange. Nowhere else.’

  ‘Well, they’re wrong,’ said the man. ‘Listen, why don’t you buy me a drink, and I’ll tell you how wrong they are.’

  ‘Is this a touch?’ asked Barney. ‘I don’t mind buying you a drink, but I’d like to know.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said the tall man, indignantly. He came closer, and Barney could smell the brandy on his breath. ‘My name’s Edward Nork. N-o-r-k, as in York. Or fork. I’m a geologist, late of Durham University. I once published a paper in the Geological Magazine on extinct volcanoes, and that’s precisely why I’m here.’

  ‘Volcanoes?’ asked Barney, confused.

  Nork took his elbow, and led him back to the main street, and along to a shed whose shingle announced that it was The Paradise S
aloon. They went inside, where the atmosphere was thick to within two or three inches of the mud-packed floor with negrohead tobacco smoke, and where diggers in wide straw hats took their midday ease with clay pipes and whiskey.

  ‘What would you like?’ Barney asked Nork.

  ‘A half-bottle will be sufficient,’ said Nork, sitting himself down on a small keg. ‘I’ve already been treated once this morning, and I do like to be modest in my intake.’

  Barney called the saloon-keeper over – an Irishman with a filthy apron and smeary spectacles – and asked for a half-bottle of Jamieson’s. When the bottle was brought, Nork carefully poured two or three fingers into his glass, and then proceeded to drink straight from the neck of the bottle itself.

  ‘I like to save a little for when the bottle’s empty,’ he explained, quite unashamed. Barney shrugged. Nork’s alcoholism was not his business.

  ‘Now listen,’ said Nork, ‘the theory which the diggers hold dear is that only the yellow ground contains diamonds. But, geologically, that doesn’t really make sense. If this shallow stratum of yellow ground is the only soil that contains diamonds, how did the diamonds get there, and where did they come from?’

  Barney coughed, to clear the tobacco-smoke from his throat, and shook his head.

  ‘Diamonds, my dear fellow, are nothing more nor less than a form of natural carbon, which is one of the world’s most common and inexpensive elements,’ said Nork. ‘But the reason they are so hard, and so bright, and so adamant, is that they are made of carbon which has been subjected to tremendous heat, and tremendous pressure.’

  ‘I see,’ said Barney, trying to be affable.

  ‘You don’t see,’ insisted Nork. ‘Because there is only one place in the structure of the earth where carbon could have undergone such a conversion, and that is in the throat of a volcano. In the very pipe of volcanic material which rises from the depths of the earth to the surface.’

  ‘Yes?’ Barney asked him. He still was not sure what Nork was driving at.

  ‘Don’t you understand?’ Nork said, in exasperation. ‘Colesberg Kopje is nothing more nor less than the top of a pipe of volcanic soil which has risen up from the subterranean depths. The soil at the top is yellow simply because it has weathered; and you will find this yellow diamond bearing soil along the Vaal and the Orange River simply because the river waters have washed it away from the tops of the volcanic pipes and borne it away downstream.’

  ‘You mean that the diamond-bearing soil goes deeper than the yellow ground?’ Barney asked Nork, keeping his voice down to a hoarse whisper. ‘You’re trying to suggest that it just goes down and down and down, and that we may never come to the end of it?’

  Nork raised a significant finger. ‘Not until you reach the very liquid core of the planet, my boy.’

  ‘But I’ve seen diggers give up claims after they’ve got down to the blue bedrock.’

  ‘That’s their folly, the result of their ignorance,’ smiled Nork. He took a swig from the bottle, and wiped the neck on his sleeve. ‘The blue ground lies only sixty or eighty feet down. I know that it looks like bedrock; but I can assure you that it isn’t. It’s diamond-bearing soil, exactly the same as the yellow ground, only it hasn’t yet been weathered. I’ve already christened it Norkite.’

  ‘Norkite?’ said Barney. ‘I never heard anybody else call it that.’

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t have done,’ said Nork, petulantly. ‘They’re all disbelievers, and fools. But you listen to what I’ve told you. One of these days, when they’ve dug the Kimberley mine down to the blue ground, and everybody believes they’re exhausted, you’ll be able to pick up claims for a tenth of what they’re really worth – and then you’ll be able to make a killing.’

  Barney narrowed his eyes. ‘If you’re so sure of this, why are you telling me? Why aren’t you keeping it to yourself, and buying up whatever claims you can lay your hands on?’

  Nork thought about that, and then sneezed very loudly. ‘You don’t have a handkerchief, by any chance?’ he asked Barney. Barney tossed him over a red rag that he had used earlier that morning for buffing up his shoes. ‘I’m sorry, that’s all I’ve got. But you can keep it.’

  ‘It’s the dust,’ said Nork, ‘and I’m not a healthy man. In fact, I’m a drunk, and I’m poor as all hell, and I couldn’t even raise one hundredth of the price of a claim, even if I knew that I wasn’t going to spend it on whiskey as soon as I’d saved it. Oh – you don’t have to look so sorry for me. I don’t need sympathy. We – imbibers – know just how deep we have dug our own graves.’

  ‘But why did you tell me?’ asked Barney.

  Nork pulled a face. ‘You remind me of someone I used to know,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose that sounds like a very convincing motive. But there you were – standing by the mine – and you looked so much like him that I immediately felt warm towards you. Friendly.’

  ‘I remind you of someone?’ Barney asked him. ‘Who?’

  Nork waved a dismissive hand. ‘A digger. He’s here now, at Kimberley. A splendid fellow. Very earnest, very good-humoured. But, well, you know, we fell out. People usually fall out with me after a while. It’s Madame Alcohol that does it. I drink too much and say things that I don’t mean. I once told him that he was a stingy as a Jew, and he tried to strike me with his pick. And, well …’

  Barney licked his lips. ‘This digger … his name wasn’t by any chance Barker, was it? Joel Barker?’

  Nork sniffed. ‘Barker, no. His name was Havemann. But Joel, yes. Joel Havemann. He has a claim across on the other side of the mine. Number 172.’

  Barney stood up at once. He felt breathless, short of oxygen, and the dense tobacco smoke in the saloon did not help. He said to Nork, ‘Where can I find you again, if I need you?’

  ‘Find me? Why would you wish to do that?’

  ‘Maybe I want to talk to you some more about diamonds. But right now, I’m going over to 172. I think this man Havemann could be somebody I know.’

  ‘Well … you could always leave a message for me here,’ said Nork. ‘Or at any saloon in Kimberley. Or down at Mrs Sperring’s whore-emporium. I can’t afford the girls, you know, but sometimes Mrs Sperring gives me a bed to sleep on. We’re both natives of Leeds, you know. We sit over a bottle of that awful South African cabernet franc and talk about the old times on Crown Street.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Barney. He shook Nork’s hand, and said, ‘Thanks. You may have helped me more than you know.’

  ‘I hope I’ve helped you more than you know,’ said Nork. He held up the half-bottle of whiskey, already more than three-quarters empty. ‘You wouldn’t consider … before you go …?’

  Barney laid a pound on the barrel-top table. Nork raised his eyebrows at it, and said, ‘Whoever you are, sir, you’re a gentleman.’

  Outside the saloon, Barney walked quickly through the dust and confusion of ox-waggons and donkey-carts around the rim of the mine. As he crossed the pathways through the diggings themselves, he heard German voices, Irish voices, Australians, and Greeks. As the historian James Anthony Froude had remarked on a visit to the diggings, there were ‘diggers from America and Australia, German speculators, Fenians, traders, saloon-keepers, professional gamblers, barristers, ex-officers of the Army and Navy, younger sons of good family who have not taken a profession or have been obliged to leave; a marvellous motley assemblage, among whom money flows like water from the amazing productiveness of the mine.’

  The mine was almost a mile across, and it was parcelled into more than 1600 claims. Under the determined rule of Stafford Parker, the Diggers’ Union had agreed that each claim could be no more than thirty-one feet square – ten times the size of a man’s grave – and that no individual digger could own more than two claims. That meant that the chaos of each tiny digging – with kaffirs heaving up buckets of dirt and trundling wheelbarrows around and bringing down great tumbling slides of rock with their picks – was multiplied under the hot afternoon sun more than a thousand t
imes.

  Barney heard a cheer a little way away. A kaffir driving a mule-cart had tried to steer his load along the narrow ridge between two deep claims, and the cart and mules had overturned, rolling down a twenty-foot slope and crushing the kaffir underneath one of the wheels and half a ton of rock. Two or three of the diggers were laughing loudly. Accidents were becoming so frequent that they were regarded these days as part of the general amusements.

  Barney stopped for a moment, shielding his eyes against the glare. Two other kaffirs were trying to lift the capsized waggon off the man’s pelvis, and the man was starting to screech. A gingery-haired digger was storming up and down beside them and shouting, ‘Get that damned cart off my claim! Get the damned thing off!’

  With another cheer, the cart was rolled further down the slope, dragging the mules with it. A splashy fountain of bright red blood golloped out of the kaffir’s mouth.

  It took Barney another twenty minutes to reach Claim 172, next to the claim owned by the British Diamond Mining Coy. It was dug down to a depth of about ten feet, and one of its ends was shored up against rockslides with sandbags. But there was nobody working there: only a kaffir in a brown hat and a loincloth sitting on a rock and sorting idly through a heap of dry soil.