The Fever Tree

by Jennifer McVeigh

  “What articles?” Frances interrupted.

  “Ah—you haven’t shown your wife? And I thought you were so proud of your journalism.”

  “I wrote a series of articles defending the rights of native workers on the Kimberley fields,” Edwin said coldly, his eyes fixed on the table.

  What was he talking about? Frances had never heard about any of this.

  “I think I did you a favor, Matthews, bringing you here. Don’t you think?” Edwin didn’t reply, his jaw set in an effort at self-control. “It’s a bit of a backwater, but you can’t stir up trouble.”

  Frances hadn’t thought Edwin was either capable or inclined to stir up trouble. Sarah brought in some rice pudding, and Baier ran his spoon through it with dismay. Then he turned to Frances. “I gather you met my cousin Westbrook on the boat from Southampton?”

  “Yes,” Frances said, keeping her voice level, and wondering how much he knew. She could feel the heat rising to her cheeks.

  “William is quite popular amongst the young girls in the colony.” Baier was talking to Edwin, but his gaze was on Frances, and he winked very deliberately, licking at his bottom lip as he did so. Edwin hadn’t noticed, but she felt her blood run cold.

  Blustering, she changed the subject. “He talked about importing a new generation of steam engines into the mines. Apparently it will improve your business?”

  • • •

  AFTER DINNER THEY SAT in chairs around the fire, and Baier lit a cigar. He stretched out his legs. “What’s this?” he asked, nudging his foot against the fossil which was sitting on the hearthstone.

  “Part of the jaw of a reptile.”

  Frances had looked at it many times, impressed by the size of the glossy teeth whose polished surfaces curved out of the rock. She had even tried to paint it.

  “And?” Baier asked. “Why do you keep it?”

  “Because I admire its age,” Edwin said.

  “Come, surely that’s not all. You naturalists have a story behind everything.”

  “The teeth indicate that it has mammalian features.”

  “Which means?” Baier asked lazily, with a hint of impatience.

  “That mammals have descended from reptiles. I believe this species is the missing connection,” Edwin said.

  “And that’s it?” Baier laughed, incredulous. “You do get excited about the driest things. I hope all this talk of fossils interests you, Mrs. Matthews. Otherwise you’re in for a dreary marriage.” He laughed into their silence and drew on his cigar, and after a few moments chuckled. “Next you’ll be telling us we ought not to kill crocodiles.”

  • • •

  EDWIN WAS UP and out early in the morning. Baier had stayed the night on a makeshift bed in front of the fire, and she hadn’t had a chance to talk to Edwin yet about what had happened over dinner. The shutters were still closed when she came through to the sitting room, which was unusual. Edwin usually opened them before he went out. The room was dark and smelt of stale cigar smoke and last night’s dinner.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Matthews.”

  She jumped. Baier was sitting in one of the armchairs by the fireplace. She could see the balding crown of his head over the back of the chair. “I didn’t realize you were still here.”

  “Did you enjoy spending time with my cousin on the Cambrian?” he asked, without turning in his chair to look at her. She didn’t reply, and he said, “I was hoping you might be able to help me with something.”

  “Help you?” She didn’t want to be in the same room as him, let alone obliged to help.

  “I’ve got a long journey ahead of me and my feet have already begun to ache. Could I ask you to rub them a little? Just to get the circulation going?”

  She froze. He knew about William, and he was going to use his knowledge against her. The room was completely quiet, except for Sarah sweeping the stoep outside. She could hear the rhythmic bristle of the broom against the wooden boards. The silence was worse than talking. It seemed to connect the two of them in something illicit.

  “Are you still there?” he asked.

  Like an automaton, she walked over to the chair and knelt down in front of him. He had shoes on, and she had to fiddle with the laces before she could slide them off his feet. She avoided looking up at him, but she could hear his breathing. She cradled one of his feet in her hands. The sock was warm and slightly damp against her fingers.

  “You’ll want to take that off,” he said, chuckling. She froze, for a moment undecided. She wanted to stand up and walk away, but Edwin might not forgive her if he found out about William, least of all because he was Baier’s cousin. Then where would she be? She peeled off the sock. His foot was a fat spread of flesh in her palm. His breathing came heavier as she pressed her fingers into the soft, pink tissue. He wriggled his toes a little as she worked, flinching at one point when her sleeve brushed against the sole of his foot. It wasn’t until her fingers had begun to ache that he finally dismissed her. She stood up and walked out to the kitchen, shut herself inside, and vomited into the sink.

  • • •

  “ARE WE HERE because of Baier?” she asked later, when Edwin had come home.

  He sat down to unlace his boots, his left hand still awkward from where he had cut it. “He offered me a position, and I accepted.”

  “He made it sound as if he forced you.”

  “He applied some pressure.”

  “Why?”

  “He wanted me out of Kimberley.”

  “Because of the native girl?”

  “I tried to help her.”

  “How? What was Baier insinuating?”

  “Good God, Frances. There was no relationship between us. This was six months ago. We’d just got engaged. I was back in Kimberley hoping to take over my old practice. I’d promised myself not to get involved in politics, but . . .” He trailed off, looking at the floor for a moment. “She was brought to me for help and I couldn’t turn her away. I offered her my house as a refuge.”

  “I don’t like him any more than you do, but I should like to know what was behind the story.”

  Edwin walked into the sitting room and poured himself a glass of water, then sat down heavily in one of the chairs on either side of the fireplace. She sat down opposite him and waited.

  “It’s not an unusual story, really—only the details set it apart. There was a girl, a domestic. You see it all the time in Kimberley. She was Sotho, and when her tribe was destroyed in the war with the Boers she left her children and walked hundreds of miles with her brother to find work in Kimberley. It was winter, and the water froze in the pots they carried. They had a blanket which they shared at night, rolled into a ball beside the fire.”

  Edwin passed his hand over his face as if the story exhausted him. “Arthur Gibbons hired her. He was a digger from London—a friend of Baier’s—with a reputation for bad luck. He lost his eye when a dynamite explosion threw a piece of shrapnel at him.” Edwin laughed wryly. “And only last year he bought a claim at New Rush. When he went to inspect it, he saw the walls had caved in and the claim was full of debris. He rejected it on the grounds that it was unworkable and bought another alongside. A week later the original claim was bought by a man who set eight natives to work on it with picks and shovels. It took the men a day to clear off the debris and start digging fresh soil, and within an hour they were shouting and waving. Gibbons looked over and saw a native holding up a diamond as big as a bottle stopper.

  “Anyway, the girl—Gibbons called her Ruth—cleaned his hut, washed his clothes, and learnt to cook roast chicken, all for less money than a maid in England would get herself out of bed for. And she gave him a lot more besides.

  “Last winter, Gibbons caught red-water fever. He lay in bed for months. He had never been popular. Others had died, and he might have done the same, but Ruth went out and bought him medicine, forced him to swallow fresh water, changed his sheets, and emptied his bedpan. When his boys started coming round to the house wanting t
o know why he wasn’t buying, saying they would take their diamonds elsewhere, she kept his business alive by buying diamonds on credit. She knew a thing or two about stones. She bought them cheap and drove a good bargain. It was a business investment—she hoped Gibbons would reward her.

  “The fever broke in October and she turned the diamonds over to him. The next morning he was gone. He had taken them all. The woman was left with debts running up to thousands of pounds. Now she is in Breakwater Prison.”

  “When will she be released?” Frances asked.

  “She won’t. It’s a life term.”

  “But you tried to bring attention to the case?”

  “I wrote a letter to the governor. Didn’t do much good. I might have taken it further but . . .” He shrugged, not finishing.

  “But what?” she demanded, sensing what he was going to say.

  “You were arriving any minute. I needed to get us settled. When Baier asked me to leave Kimberley, I wasn’t in a position to refuse.”

  Silence settled over them. Eventually, Frances asked, “And the articles?”

  “They’re nothing.”

  “Can I read them?”

  “I only have a copy of one of them. It may not interest you.”

  “Were they published?”

  “The first two were but not the rest.” He gave a dry laugh. “The Times in London accepted them, but it turned out Mr. Baier was more powerful than I thought.”

  The Diamond Field

  10th February 1880

  The Native Labourer on the Diamond Fields

  By Dr. E. Matthews

  Our highly esteemed and admired writer Anthony Trollope visited us recently, and wrote on looking down into the Kimberley mine: “When I have seen three or four thousand [natives] at work, I have felt that I was looking at three or four thousand growing Christians.” This is, I suspect, an opinion held by our dear cousins at home when they eye like magpies the sparkling fruits of Kimberley’s labour. The Africans work, and in return we feed them, clothe them and offer them education. I hope to cast a more revealing light on the life of the native, but I will start by begging Mr. Trollope’s forgiveness. When I stand at the crumbling edge of the mine, gazing down to the dizzying depths below, with the Africans crawling like flies over its mountainous walls, I am reminded of nothing so much as the pits of hell.

  I am a medical man, not a politician or a money-maker, which gives me the advantage of impartiality. All men suffer sickness equally, regardless of race, though in Kimberley you could lay your bets on an African dying first. A native has about a one in ten chance of survival.

  No surprises there, you say. After all, working the mines is self-evidently a dangerous job. Imagine a hole in the sand dug by a child. At a certain depth the walls begin to avalanche and water pools in at the bottom. So it is with the mines. If you stand on the precipitous edge of the Big Hole and gaze downwards, three hundred feet below, and you have the patience to wait there under the burning sun for a good part of the day, then you are sure to be rewarded with the sight of half a dozen Africans being swept away by a roaring landslide. I happened to be standing next to an English girl when a supporting wall gave way in a crush of rubble, taking with it four Africans and a cart pulled by donkeys.

  “Oh, but the donkeys! Who will dig them out?” the girl asked, clutching at her throat in anxiety, expressing like most of her kind exactly no apprehension on behalf of the natives.

  When the pumps stop working, as they do from time to time, the labourers get sucked into the pools of mud and water at the bottom, and drown. The walls of the mines are poorly made, and natives slip and fall through the rotten rungs of ladders. I have spent time at the hospital (a rather grandiose word for a canvas tent with a few beds), and it is full of men—white and black—who have had their feet blown off by dynamite. Now the miners have started to dig underground, and the heat and noise in the caves below, the terror of explosives and the smoke from the machines is unimaginable. A fire broke out a month ago, and a hundred men were killed.

  Clearly Trollope is mistaken. It is not the mines themselves which turn our natives into Christians. But perhaps, you ask, the civilizing bit happens when they are not at work?

  In fact, what does an African do when he is not at work?

  Immediately after he leaves his shift he is ordered to strip naked. A bar is held out, and he is asked to jump over it. Then his hair, nose, mouth, ears and rectum are inspected with exacting care. His European masters are looking for stones secreted in cuts, wounds, swellings and orifices. Occasionally, if suspected, he is chained naked in a room and given purgatives. A civilizing experience indeed.

  It used to be that Africans owned claims in the mines, alongside their European partners. Legislation has ensured that this is no longer possible. To be black is now synonymous with being a labourer, and being a labourer is—hardly surprisingly—synonymous with being a diamond thief.

  The trend, started by Joseph Baier, is now to house natives separately, in compounds, and to keep them there for the duration of their stay in Kimberley. If an African cannot produce a certificate of registration to say that he is contracted for work, then he is classed as a vagrant. A vagrant can be sentenced to six months’ hard labour, which is wonderfully convenient for a claim holder.

  It works to the European’s advantage if the African learns to like alcohol. After all, a native with a taste for brandy will spend his hard-earned wages procuring it. He’ll stick around longer. There is not a man in Kimberley who has not returned late from dinner or a game of cards and come across two or three Africans stretched out on the grass reeking of liquor, frozen to death as they slept.

  But the compounds come with advantages, Joseph Baier has been heard to argue. I ask Mr. Baier: what advantages to the African? I have been to compounds and seen men lying in filthy blankets, dying from diseases as common as scurvy, or shivering with pneumonia because there is no firewood. It is more expensive to give medical care to a sick African than to rip up his contract and offer it to someone new. If you need proof, then look on the outskirts of town, where the bodies of dead Africans litter the roadsides, dumped by men too thrifty to pay burial dues. Is this the Christian end to Mr. Trollope’s parable?

  For those that do survive—and I don’t deny there are many—they have the honour of bringing back guns to their tribe.

  South Africa is historically an agrarian economy. A rocky, barren land which—until the discovery of diamonds—was desperately poor. Is it not a startling coincidence that men like Joseph Baier have come to civilize the African just when there is a profit to be made out of it? And now we hear him arguing to reintroduce nigger-flogging at a time when the rest of the civilized world is beginning to think more carefully about the welfare of their labouring classes.

  There is a cancer at the heart of the Europeans’ relationship with Africa, and its nature is self-interest. The monopolies of power holding sway over the mines are controlled by Europeans—non-residents who have no vested interest in either the future of South Africa or the civilizing of its people. Why would they care about the economic development of the country, when they are single-mindedly engaged in the extraction of its wealth? What use is an educated, civilized African to Joseph Baier, when he is in need of a permanent, subdued labour force?

  Mr. Baier has spent the last ten years working on the creation of a labouring class which is entirely dependent on his munificence. He has often been praised for his sponsorship of a railway which will link the Cape Coast to Kimberley, but does anyone know his real motive for such a venture? Mr. Baier wants the railway so he can undercut the native tribes who supply the population of Kimberley with firewood and grain. Goods will be imported direct from Europe, and the natives will be bankrupt in a matter of months. Then there is the sponsorship of kaffir wars, the encouragement of hut taxes, and the legal battles which force natives to sell their land in order to afford a defence in court.

  Few things worse have been flown under
the banner of Christianity than the exploitation of African workers in Kimberley. Only a few days ago, Joseph Baier wrote in the pages of this paper: “One of the first lessons to be instilled into them [the natives] will be to respect the laws of meum and tuum.* The diamond fields have, in my opinion, done much to accomplish this.” It seems that for the first time we are in perfect agreement. The laws of meum and tuum have been perfectly illustrated to the Africans who work on the mines in Kimberley.

  The ferocity of the article shocked her. Here was an anger and passion she hadn’t seen before in her husband. She had misunderstood him. There was fire running beneath his long silences and slow calculations of the truth. She put the dates together in her head. The article had been published over a year ago, just before he had come to London. Baier must have put pressure on him to leave Kimberley, and when he had tried to go back to revive his practice, there had been the incident with the native girl, Ruth.

  When he came back that evening, she was sitting on the stoep, waiting for him.

  “Edwin—tell me. If you feel this strongly, why did you let him intimidate you into leaving? Why didn’t you stay?” He didn’t say anything. “Couldn’t you have found someone else to publish the articles?”

  He walked past her into the house.

  She followed him. “He’ll think you’re a coward for coming here.”

  “Just like you do?” He turned to face her, his eyes fixed on hers. And she couldn’t deny it. There was something spineless about letting another man beat you into submission.

  He saw it, and said, “Frances, do you have any idea what he could do to me? To us?” Edwin made a gesture of exasperation. “I could stand having eggs thrown at me in the street, not being received into any respectable house at the Cape, but what about you?”

  “Couldn’t we go to Cape Town?”

  “You don’t get it. There isn’t a thing that happens at the Cape without his say-so. The business of Kimberley drives South Africa. There is barely any other economy, and there is almost no one in the colony who wants anything except what Baier wants. He makes them all rich. Do you really want to be an outcast? Do you want to have to go back to England? Have you thought about what kind of a life we would have there?”