Роберт Фиш - Rough Diamond

“Harry!” He shook harder, looking around the filthy tent as he did so. What a mess! Their mother would have had a fit if she could have seen how her son Harry was living! They lived in poverty back in Petticoat Lane, but the house was always clean, and so were their clothes, even if they were bought as rags and fixed over. “Harry! Wake up!”

His brother rolled over, wondering at the unexpected disturbance, yawning, and then reluctantly opened his eyes. The face beneath the wide-brimmed leather hat was in shadow; Harry frowned and then suddenly smiled, a happy grin, as he came awake and recognized his brother. “Barney! When did you get here? Pa wrote you’d raised the fare to Cape Town, but I figured you’d changed your mind or you would have been here weeks ago!”

“Walked alongside an ox wagon,” Barney said succinctly, and studied his brother. Harry looked as if he hadn’t shaved in days if not in weeks; he looked a mess and smelled it. Barney shook his head. “You look a proper disaster, you do! Ma would die to see you. I thought you’d hit it big up here. That’s what your letter said.”

“My letter. That was—” Harry calculated. “That must have been four months ago I wrote.”

“And you went stony in four months?”

Harry rubbed his chin, looking sheepish. “Well, I was almost positive I was about to hit it big, but — well, the diamonds are an awful business right now.” He reached out and pushed Barney’s hat away, ruffling his brother’s hair as he had done when they were younger. “Here! Let me have a look at you! You look a proper trekker, you do!”

“At least I kept clean on the trail. You look a shame.” A thought came. “When did you eat last?”

“I eat every day,” Harry said, and shrugged. “No banquets; some mealies — that’s what they call maize here, people eat it same as cattle — and down at the Paris they give me a sandwich every night—” He smiled, always the optimist. “I’ve been doing part of our old act down there. The diggers love it!”

Barney looked at him skeptically. “What’s it pay?”

Harry looked a little shamefaced. “Well, you know, Barney, times are very difficult right now. The diggers don’t hardly have enough to feed themselves. Or their families, those poor devils that are unlucky enough to have their families with them. And they have to pay their labor, their Kaffirs. Doesn’t leave much for jugglers or comics in bars.” He looked at his brother, changing the subject. “How’d you find me?”

“Asked at the bar where you do your act.”

“They told you, eh? I tell you, everybody in town knows Harry Isaacs! Say, have you seen the mine yet?”

“Which one?”

“Kimberley, of course. The New Rush. It’s the richest, no matter what anybody says.” He sounds as if he owned a piece of the bloody thing, Barney thought; that’s me brother Harry! Harry came to his feet. “Let me show you the town.”

“What about me bags?”

“What about them?”

“Will they be safe here?”

Harry laughed. “Safer than they would be behind locked doors back in Cobb’s Court, I’ll wager you that! Nobody touches anything in anyone’s tent or shack; if that was to start there’s no telling where it would end. But it would end with somebody hanging, and we’ve done without that ever since this camp was started. No, you needn’t worry on that score. So let me put on a clean shirt and off we’ll go.”

“Only if you give yourself a good wash first,” Barney said, and wrinkled his nose. “You smell, you know.”

“I do?” Harry sounded honestly surprised. “Everything smells so bad here,” he said apologetically, “it gets to a point where you can’t smell anything anymore. Even yourself.”

They walked back toward the town through the tents in the early-afternoon heat, with Harry talking without pause. Barney had a feeling that his brother had had a lonely time of it. He felt no resentment at all that Harry hadn’t made it as big as he had written home; Harry had always been the complete optimist, and Barney had no doubt at all that Harry had honestly felt he was about to strike it rich when he had written. Whatever else the Isaacs boys were, they were not liars; if Harry had a tendency at times to exaggerate, that was something else.

Actually, Barney felt a bit better about everything. Now there would be no need to compete, although in truth there had never been a great deal of competition between the two brothers. Each had his own talents and was aware of it. Harry was the better juggler, the better acrobat, the better tumbler. Harry was also taller, more handsome, and happier. The girls that came into the King of Prussia from the sewing lofts for an ale with their lunch would rumple Barney’s hair and pat his cheek, but they were far bolder where Harry was concerned. Barney sometimes wished he were more like Harry, at least as far as the happiness or the optimism was concerned. But Harry was also willing to concede defeat more readily, possibly because defeat didn’t mean all that much to him. Lose today, gain tomorrow; or if not tomorrow, then the next day or the next week, or maybe never. What difference did it really make? But this was not Barney. Lose today and the loss lived with him a long time, and gaining tomorrow would not make up for it. He hated to be defeated and was smart enough to recognize this as a fault, but it was a fault he did not mind acknowledging.

Harry was explaining the state of the industry.

“The diamonds run out?” he said, and laughed. They were in the town proper and passing the bar where Barney had first stopped, but Harry made no move to turn in. He had a goal in mind, and besides, he was discussing a subject he felt he knew well. “No!” he said firmly. “There are diamonds on top of diamonds in Kimberley, and the same — though less, of course — at Bultfontein, Dutoitspan, and the Old De Beers. Four diamond mines within a few miles of each other, and together they probably contain most of the gemstones in the world! Think of it!”

Barney was thinking of it, thinking of it very hard. “So, if the diamonds are there—” he said slowly.

“Oh, they’re there, all right, in that good old, dear old, sweet old yellow soil,” Harry said with a grin, and did a soft-shoe shuffle in the dust of the roadway. Then his smile faded a bit ruefully and he kicked at the dust. “The only trouble,” he said more softly, “is that it costs more to dig out a carat of diamonds than the kopje wallopers or even the so-called honest traders will pay for it. So some of the miners are giving up and going home. And so are the traders.”

“What’s a kopje walloper?”

“He’s a— Wait a second. There’s the mine.”

They had come through the shacks on the edge of a reef and were staring down at an incredible sight. The mine that had begun as a small hillock rising a few feet above the flat surface of the northern Cape had changed considerably. The hillock had long since disappeared, trees and all; now the hole that had replaced it had been dug to a depth of over a hundred feet in places; and from each tiny square that represented a single claim, several steep cables ran up to the rim of the huge excavation. Tiny carts, foreshortened by distance, could be seen traveling up these cables, carrying the yellowish earth to the rim and beyond to the crushing and the sorting piles. Barney, staring in awe, could see a network of at least a thousand of the cables glinting in the late-afternoon sun; the creak and groan of the small cradles climbing and descending the steel ropes; the cries of men directing, warning, shouting; the whinnying of horses working to turn some of the large wheels on top of the monstrous crater to winch the larger buckets of earth up the steel ropes, all combined to give him an unearthly feeling. It looked like a picture Barney had once seen of a bloke named Gulliver tethered to earth with stringlike ropes, only what was locked to the earth here was the earth itself. And the uneven layers of the mine! And the men swarming below like ants; they could have been the tiny people sweating to tighten the cables on Gulliver! It looked unreal; it looked almost like the etchings he had once seen of the Egyptian slaves — Jews, they was, now he remembered — building the pyramids. The mine was huge beyond anything Barney had ever seen or even dreamed about; it was almost beyond his imagination to think of himself down in that abyss, that inverted anthill, himself, working in that confused disorder.