Rough Diamond, page 7
Barney reached for his purse. “I never paid you the five quid—”
Andries smiled, holding up his hand. “Keep your money. You earned it many times over. I’d never have made it over the mountains without you, boy.”
Barney’s smile widened. “Honest?”
“Honest.”
The smile faded. Barney hated to see the wagon move on. “Then maybe I ought to go with you and help you unload.”
“The men who own this load will be more than happy to unload it. No, you go find your brother.”
“I don’t even know where to start looking for him—”
“Try the bar in that hotel,” Andries said, and pointed.
“Harry don’t drink that much …”
“Other people do. They’ll help you find him.”
“Yeah,” Barney said. There wasn’t much he could do to keep the wagon from moving on. On a sudden impulse he said, “You’ve been a good friend, Andries.”
“No,” Andries said quietly. “If I’d have been a good friend I would have talked you out of Kimberley. If I’d have been a good friend, you would have been going back with me.” He raised his hand in a kind of salute. “Good luck,” he said again, and cracked the sjambok. The team lumbered away, with Barney watching. He stood and watched until the wagon had turned a corner and was out of sight among the tents there. Then, with a sigh, he picked up his bags and marched into the shack marked HOTEL.
To his surprise, despite the fact that the building was constructed totally of corrugated iron, the high ceiling made the place relatively cool. He looked about. The room boasted several tables; at one of them, a man was seated, eating. A door to the rear apparently led to the kitchen and to whatever rooms or outside hovels the “hotel” had available for guests. The bar itself lay along one wall and was simply a wide wooden shelf with empty liquor boxes stacked at intervals to serve as legs; five or six men stood along its length, drinking. It was a far cry from the King of Prussia, with its stained-glass windows, its ancient polished mahogany bar, and the warm, yeasty, friendly smell of beer. Barney set his bags down and walked to the bar. The bartender came over.
“What’ll you have?”
“I’m lookin’ for a fellow,” Barney said. “Name of Harry Isaacs.”
The bartender shook his head. “Don’t know him.”
There was a voice from further along the bar. “Sure you know him, Tim. The juggler bloke. The one does them comic songs, y’know, while he’s standin’ on his head. Hell, he’s in here almost every night.”
“Oh, him? Never did know his name.” He looked at Barney. “Come around about seven tonight. He’ll probably be here.”
“I’d like to find him now. He’s me”—Fay came to mind—“he’s my brother. Where does he live?”
The bartender shrugged. “No idea.” Barney looked down the bar. The men there looked at one another and shook their heads. “I think in one of them tents near the edge of town,” one of the men finally volunteered. He pointed. “Keep wandering down this road that way. Ask somebody when you get down there.”
“Tell them you’re looking for the juggler, the comic that sings at the Paris Hotel,” another said. “That way they’ll know who you mean.”
“Thanks,” Barney said. He picked up his bags and walked out into the street. He would have liked to leave his bags with the bartender, because he was sure his trip to the edge of town, down into that maze of tents, was going to be a wasted one. Harry, with all his money, had to be living in one of the better houses in town. But he wasn’t going to take a chance of having his bags stolen now, not after that two-month trek. The juggler? The comic that sang songs at the Paris Hotel? Probably having a little fun in the evening, once he’d made a pile during the day. Harry was like that.
He came out of the bar and started down the street, his bags banging against his legs. On either side of the street there were shops: provisioners, there a bank, and seemingly about every second shack bearing a sign declaring the occupant to be a diamond trader, offering the finest prices. Except that Barney noted that a lot of them were boarded over. Well, he had known there was a depression in the diamond business, but if Harry could make it big, so could he. He also noted that the streets seemed largely deserted, other than occasional women in long dresses and large sunbonnets doing their shopping. It was eerie, seeing all those shacks and all those tents and very few people, as if they’d all gotten disgusted and left. Like those kids what followed that bloke with the pipes, right into the sea.
The shacks ran out; the little organization that had been attempted in the central cluster of buildings gave way to the total disorganization of the tents. The road also seemingly ran out, and a trail led haphazardly between the canvas shelters. The smell here was even worse than it had been in the town itself; between two of the tents a pair of skinny, mangy dogs, their ribs showing, were snarling over what seemed to be the intestines of some animal. Barney wrinkled his nose in disgust and was about to turn back, sure that Harry could never exist in such filth; then he thought he had come this far and it would do no harm to ask.
He paused at a tent, putting down his bags and wiping the sweat from his forehead. Inside the open flaps a man was sitting disconsolately on the ground, putting his belongings into a small steamer trunk. His bedroll was already strapped shut and was leaning against the main tent pole. Barney cleared his throat; the man looked up.
“I already sold everything I’m goin’ to sell,” the man said. “All except the tent.” He saw Barney’s bags and brightened. “You want to buy a tent?”
“I don’t want to buy nothin’. I’m lookin’ for me brother, Harry Isaacs.” He remembered the suggestion at the bar. “The juggler, y’know. The comic that sings down at the Paris Hotel.”
“Oh, him? Three tents down. Almost the last one. Got a tear in one side, he almost lost it in the last sandstorm. Never got around to fixin’ it.” The man started to pack the trunk again, and then paused. “Say, like I said, I ain’t sold the tent, yet. Maybe he’d be interested; his ain’t no good. You could ask him.”
“I’ll do that,” Barney said, and backed away. It had to be somebody else, some other bloke who sang comic songs. But it sure sounded like Harry! He refused to even consider the thought that had come to him, but hurried down the line, almost dragging his bags. The third tent down had a tear in it; the flap was closed but Barney pushed his way inside. A man was sleeping on the animal skin that served both as rug and bed; a dirty pillow had been pulled over his head to keep out the light. Barney put his bags down, squatted down, and pulled the pillow away. The sleeping man grunted a few times and merely snored a bit louder. Barney shook the man.
“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.
“Good God!” he said in awestruck tones. “How many bloody men are down there?” He had to raise his voice to be heard over the noise rising from the depths of the mine itself and from the whims and the other lifting wheels and mechanisms arranged around the rim.
Harry smiled broadly, pleased that his Kimberley mine had received the startled adulation he had expected and which it obviously deserved. He raised his voice as well.
“Well,” he said, “figure it out. Each claim is thirty-one feet by thirty-one feet, African measure—which is almost the same as English measure—and the mine is roughly round in shape and about a quarter of a mile across. So figure it out. And each claim may be being worked by as many as six men, maybe one white man to direct and keep an eye open for thieves and maybe five natives to do the real work of digging and shoveling the dirt into the buckets to be hoisted to the surface. Thirty-one feet square,” he said, almost with satisfaction, “hardly enough room to swing a pick or a shovel without hitting somebody in the head!”
Barney still could scarcely comprehend the confusion of the scene below. Who could do any decent work—digging, whatever—in that maelstrom? “But there has to be some sort of bloody organization, or you’d think there would be bloody anarchy—!”
“There is. Or as close to it as you might want,” Harry said quietly, and pointed. “There used to be roads running across the mine to carry the dirt out in wagons pulled by horses—those are the parts of the big hole you see that aren’t as deep as the rest of the mine. But they simply fell in when the diggers started to dig deeper on either side of them. Men, horses, they’ve all been killed falling in. They still get killed. Say one claim is fifty feet lower than the claim next to it. A man goes down his ladder to his claim and starts to dig, all aboveboard, all on his own claim.” He made a chopping motion with a hand. “Bam! First thing he knows his neighbor’s claim falls in on top of him. And then they get into a great argument—if either one of them is still alive—as to who has the right to the earth that fell in.” Harry grinned at his brother. “Still want to be a digger?”
“How do you go about getting a claim?”
“I’ll tell you later. Seen enough for a day?”
“Why? Where do you want to go?”
“Why,” Harry said lightly, almost as if he hadn’t been thinking about it for the past hour, “I imagine after two months on the trail, eating biltong and mealies, you could stand some rib-sticking food. One thing we have in Kimberley is good food. When and if you can afford it,” he added under his breath, and spoke up again. “What would you say to a broth to put the hair on your chest, a big juicy joint to add muscle to your elbows, two or three vegs—not mealies—to remind you of what we used to ramp off the wagons in Covent Garden when we were kids, and a bottle of real African beer?”
“I’d say it was what I could stand,” Barney said with a grin, and was about to turn away from the edge of the huge hole when a disturbance in the mine caught his attention. He looked down. A fight of some sort seemed to have broken out on a claim almost directly below them and no more than fifty or sixty feet from the surface. Two white men were pummeling a black unmercifully. The black had no place to go even had he been able to break loose; the sheer cliff of the reef prevented escape on one side, and below him the claims on that side contained men staring upward and he apparently felt he could look to small sympathy or help from them. With a sudden twist he broke free and dashed for the ladder on one side of the claim that led upward and eventually to the surface, but he had no more than started to climb when one of the men had him by the ankle and dragged him back. The black seemed to lose spirit at this defeat; he merely sat on the ground while the two men kicked and beat at him. At last he turned and spat. One of the white men ran his boot sole over the spittle and then bent to pick something from the ground. The black merely sat until the men dragged him to his feet and shoved him hard against the ladder. He stood there for a moment until one of the white men kicked him; then he dispiritedly began to climb. He came to the rim, pulled himself over within feet of Barney and Harry, and limped away, bleeding.
