Роберт Фиш - Rough Diamond

“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.