by Mark Place
Build-up to the rebellion
The Anglo-Boer/South African War of 1899 to 1902 caused extreme disruptions in the mining industry. At some stage mines were closed, which led to considerable loss of capital. In addition a racially hierarchical division of labour had developed in the mining sector, whereby the supervisory and skilled jobs were performed by Whites, while unskilled and hence poorly paid labour became to be associated with African and coloured labourers.
The end of the War witnessed the entry of large numbers of unskilled white unemployed men into the urban areas. It was against this background that mine-owners had to formulate a policy of division of labour that would serve their own interests in the first place, without disturbing the racist social order that had evolved in the mining industry. The ensuing balancing act resulted in conflicts of interests between mine-owners and mineworkers as well as political disenchantment in the workforce. Hence in the period 1907 and 1922 there was considerable industrial unrest and action in the mining sector. The favoured form of industrial action was strikes: by downing tools white mineworkers tried pressuring both mining capital and the state to back down from the policy of saving on labour costs by employing Blacks in positions that had been reserved for them. An additional bone of contention was the importation of Chinese indentured labourers to overcome the impasse in the gold industry after the War. In 1904 the first contract workers arrived.
Mining management standpoint
Between February and December 1920, gold nose-dived from 130 shillings an ounce to 95 shillings an ounce. Mining executives estimated that unless costs could be reduced, most producing mines would be running at a loss; consequently, they would have to discharge 10,000 white miners and many thousands of blacks.
The Chamber of Mines planned to reduce labour costs by removing the colour bar and increasing the ratio of black workers to white, for although the wages for whites had risen 60 per cent since World War I, wages for blacks had increased only 9 per cent.
ENGLISH TRANSLATION
Herr Schaefer took off his hat and wiped his forehead sweating. He was hot. He was hungry and thirsty, especially thirsty. But above all he was worried. Before him extend the devas (means "heavenly, divine, anything of excellence) yellow plain of the Veld1. Behind him the line of the horizon which was only interrupted by the depressing periphery of the Reef. And from far away, in the direction of Johannesburg, came a sound like distant thunder. But it was not thunder, as Herr Schaefer knew all too well. It was monotonous and regular and represented the triumph of law and order on the forces of the Revolution. Strangely, it had a wearing effect on his nerves. The position in which he found himself was uncomfortable.
The rapid and efficient proclamation of martial law, followed by the arrival of the dramatic Smuts2, who had been shot, had had the effect of completely changing the careful plans of Schaefer and his friends. Schaefer himself only succeeded by a miracle to remove himself on his heels from the fray. For the moment he was free, but this was uncomfortable and the future too confusing to be enjoyable. Being a good German Herr Schaefer cursed the country, the climate, the Rand3 and all his workers and especially his last employers, the Russians. From agitator hired, he had done his job with true German efficiency, but his education and his years of military service with the German Army in Belgium led him to admire the strength of Smuts and despise Smuts crowd who were really unprepared, without discipline, and which was reduced to shreds in the first real difficulty. "scum," said Herr Schaefer, sadly, licking his chapped lips. "Pigs! No order. No discipline. Shocked troops running wildly for the Veld! Ah! If only they had a Prussian sergeant! "
1 Veld: open land without trees in South Africa.
2 Smuts, Jan Christiaan: South African general and politician (1899-1950). Of Dutch origin, participated in the Boer War (1899-1902) alongside L. Botha. Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa (1919-1924 and 1939-1948), advocated a moderate policy.
3 Rand is a gold mining district near Johannesburg.
He involuntarily straightened his back. For a year he was trying to show that awkward gait, along with a shaggy beard, he would have made his apparent trade of innocent vegetable products such as cabbage, cauliflower and potatoes less open to suspicion. A momentary shudder ran through her back as soon as he thought that certain documents could also now be in the hands of the military, the documents in which the word for cabbage was "dynamite" and potatoes "detonators". The sun was near the horizon. Soon the cool of the evening would come. If only he could reach a factory friend (there were one or two nearby, he knew it) would find a shelter for the night and precise instructions that were supposed to lead him on the road to freedom-in the future. Suddenly his eyes narrowed hopeful of a point to its extreme left. "Maize" said Herr Schaefer. "Where there's corn, there is a farm not too far away."
His reasoning proved to be correct. A dirt road leading to the area of cultivated land. It came before a group of precincts, which he deftly avoided (because it did not want to go-in case the farm was not one of those who sought him) and then along a small hill suddenly came to the farm that had been mentioned to him. It was the usual construction of being low, with the corrugated roof and a veranda that ran along two sides. The sun was setting, a red spot on the horizon was lit and a woman in the doorway watching the twilight fall. Herr Schaefer dropped his hat over his eyes and climbed the steps.
“Is this the farm of Mr. Henshel?” - He asked.
The woman nodded without speaking, staring at him with huge blue eyes. Schaefer took a deep sigh of relief and looked at her with some appreciation. He admired the kind of woman Dutch chested like this. A massive creature, with her breasts and wide hips flourishing; not young, closer to forty than thirty, blond hair streaked with grey just simply parted in the middle of her broad forehead; There was something majestic and energetic in her, as the wife of a patriarch of the past. "A good mother of a family," he thought with appreciation Schaefer.
"We hope she is also a good cook." He thought to himself. His needs in terms of women were primitive and simple.
“I think Mr. Henshel is waiting for me!” Said the German, and he added a little more showing common interest in the potatoes. She gave him the answer he expected. “We are also growers of vegetables.” she spoke the words correctly, but with a strong accent. The English evidently was not his forte and the Schaefer labeled as belonging to one of those families nationalist Dutch forbidding their children to use the language of the intrusion itself. With a big hand from dirty work, she pointed to a spot behind him.
“You comes from Johannesburg, right?” She nodded.
“It's all over there. I myself got away by the skin of teeth. So I'm lost in the veld. It is by pure chance that I made myself the way up to here.”
The Dutch woman shook her head. A strange ecstatic smiling now radiated off his face. “It has not been the case, but ‘God's Will’ as well.” Approving her words, as Herr Schaefer liked that she was a religious woman, he crossed the threshold. She stepped back to let him pass, her smile still lingering on her face and for a moment, he thought that there was something wrong, it flashed again through the mind of Schaefer. He dismissed the idea as a thing of naught. The house was built, like most of the other houses in the shape of a H. The entrance, from which you opened into the rooms all around and pleasantly cool. The table was prepared for dinner. The woman walked into a bedroom and when Herr Schaefer returned to the hall, after he is taken off his boots-from sore feet, he found Henshel.
An Englishman with a mediocre face and feature almost absent, a sub-species of individuals, full of slogans and phrases. It was just the kind of people who had made the most of the work of Schaefer and he knew him well. The abuse of capital talisti, the "rich fattening themselves at the expense of the poor", the injustices of the Chamber of Mines, the heroic resistance of the miners, these were matters on which Henshel expatiated, while Schaefer nodded wearily with his thoughts fixed exclusively on food and drinks.
Fi
nally, the woman appeared carrying a steaming zup-piera of soup. They sat down together and began to man-engage. The soup was good. Henshel continued to speak, his wife was silent and Schaefer was content to issue appropriate grunts and monosyllables. When Mrs. Henshel left the room to introduce the next course, he said, with appreciation: “Your wife is a good cook. He is lucky. Not all Dutch women cook well.” Henshel looked at him.
“My wife is not Dutch.”
Schaefer seemed surprised, but the harshness of tone Henshel used and an unspoken discomfort prevented him from asking for more. It was strange, he thought. He was so sure that she was Dutch. After the meal, he sat on the steps in the cool dusk to smoke. Somewhere in the house a door slammed behind him, followed by the sound of the hooves of a horse. Vaguely uneasy he leaned forward, listening as the noise increased slightly in the distance and he jumped abruptly when he realized it was Henshel’s wife and all of a sudden the lady was at his side with a cup of steaming coffee. She put it on a small table next to him.
“My husband went to Cloete, to give way to an early start in the morning” she explained.
“Oh! I see.” Curious how his discomfort persisted.
“When will it return?”
“Shortly after midnight.”
His concern was not appeased. What frightened him? Henshel would not have him handed over to the police? No, the man was sincere. A revolutionary communist. The truth was that he, Conrad Schaefer was nervous! A German soldier (Schaefer unconsciously always thought of himself as a soldier) was never nervous. He took the cup and drank beside him with a grimace. As always, the Boar coffee was a mess! He knew the taste of roasted acorns! He was certain, roasted acorns! He put down the cup again and at that moment he heard a deep sigh coming from the woman next to him. He had almost forgotten her presence. “Would you like to sit?”
“I do not want to sit” she said.
“Same as in churches?” he said without getting up from his seat. She shook her head, and said “I have to clear the table, wash the dishes and tidy up the house”
Schaefer nodded approvingly. “The children are already in bed, I guess”he said Jovial-minded.
There was a pause before she answered: “I do not have children.”
Schaefer was surprised. From the first moment he saw her he had definitely associated with motherhood. She took the cup and walked toward the door. Then she said: “We had a baby. He's dead ...”
“Oh! I'm sorry” Schaefer said kindly.
The woman did not answer. She stood there, motionless. And suddenly Schaefer felt uncomfortable again. Only that this time it is not linked precisely with the house, not with Henshel, but with this woman from the slow movements, her manners have altered, the wife of Henshel, which was neither English nor Dutch. His curiosity awoke and asked the question allen ciapelo. “What nationality was she?”
“Flemish” She articulated the word abruptly, then went into the house, leaving Herr Schaefer upset and confused. Flemish! Of course Flemish! His mind quickly wandered to the muddy plains of Belgium from the sunny uplands of South Africa. Flemish! He did not like. French and Belgians were so extraordinarily illogical. They could not forget. His mind was curiously confused. He yawned two or three times, deeply. He had to go to bed and sleep. Yuck! What was that bitter coffee, he could still taste it. A light went on in the house. He stood up and walked towards the door. His legs were strangely unstable. Inside, the big woman was sitting and was reading in the dim light of an oil lamp. Herr Schafer felt strangely reassured by the heavy volume. The Bible! He approved of a woman who read the Bible.
He was a religious man himself, he believed blindly in the German God, the God of the Old Testament, in a God of battles and blood, thunder and lightning, material rewards and terrible vengeance, easy to anger and terrible in anger. He tripped over a chair (what was happening to his legs?) and with a strange, faint voice, suppressing another terrible yawn, he looked over to the woman who liked churches and was reading a bible chapter. Blue eyes of the woman under perfect eyebrows, met his, there was something inscrutable in their depths. So it seemed like a prophetess of Israel.
“Chapter 4 of Judges " She said
He nodded his head, yawning again. He had to go to bed ... but the effort was too much for him to get up ... his eye-lids closed ...
Fourth chapter of Judges. What was the fourth chapter? His sense of discomfort was coming back, increasing in terror. Something was wrong ... Judges ... The sleep overcame him ... He fell to the ground and terror went with him. He woke up, regaining consciousness ... time had passed, a long time, he was sure. “Where were you?” He blinked in the light; his arms and legs aching ... He felt bad ... still felt the taste of the coffee in the mouth ... But what was happening? Lying on the floor, had his hands and feet bound with strips of towel and next door there was the sinister figure of the woman who was not Dutch. He Regained himself in a flash of absolute desperate fear, all of his mental faculties. He was in great danger ... danger ... She saw in his eyes that he was regaining knowledge and answered him as if he had actually spoken.
“Yes, I'll tell you everything now. Memories of the past to be place called Voogplaat in Belgium?"
He remembered that name. An insignificant village in which he had passed with his regiment. She nodded and continued.
“You at my door with a few other soldiers. My man was away with the Belgian Army: my first husband, not Henshel, I am married to him for only two years.”
My little one, he was only four years old, ran out. He began to cry, what child would not do that? He was afraid of the soldiers. You…You ordered him to stop. He could not. You stop him and he pushes away from you, ah! God, his careless hand! You laughed and said: That hand does not ever wield a weapon against Germany.
“It is not true!” Groaned crying Schaefer. “And even if it was, it was the war!" She paid no attention, but went on.
“I hit him in the face. To stop him crying. What mother would not have done the same.”
But you know how to stop him? You grab my baby ... and throw him against the wall ... blood dripping .......his head ...” She was now silent, her voice was broken, her chest heaved.
Schaefer murmured weakly, abandoning the idea of deny. “It was the war ... it was war ...” His forehead was sweating. He was alone with this woman, kilo-meters away from possible help ...
“I immediately recognized you this afternoon, despite the beard ... You did not recognize me. You said that luck had brought you here, but I knew that it was God ...” Her chest heaved, her eyes blazing with a fanatical light. His God was the God of Schaefer, she was seemed possessed and to Schaefer she was in the throes of a strange delusion of an austere Priestess of the past.
“He has delivered you into my hands.”
Flurried words flowed from Schaefer, excuses, prayers, pleas for mercy, threats. But all this left her impassioned. ‘God sent me another sign. When I opened the Bible, this evening, I saw what she wants me to do. Blessed among women be Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite ...”
She bent down and picked up from the floor a hammer and some long nails shining ... A scream erupted from the throat of Schaefer. Now he remembered the fourth chapter of Judges, the dramatic story of black inhospitality. That Sisera fled from his enemy there ... a woman beside a tent ... Jael, wife of Heber the Kenite ....
In Flemish, beyond eyes that shone like those of the Israelite woman in the distant past, spoke the words of triumph: “This is the day which the Lord hath delivered my enemy in my hands ...”
The Affair At
The Victory Ball
BY
AGATHA CHRISTIE
The Affair at the Victory Ball
Pure chance led my friend Hercule Poirot, formerly chief of the Belgian force, to be connected with the Styles Case. His success brought him notoriety, and he decided to devote himself to the solving of problems in crime. Having been wounded on the Somme and invalided out of the Army, I finally took up my quarter
s with him in London. Since I have a first-hand knowledge of most of his cases, it has been suggested to me that I select some of the most interesting and place them on record. In doing so, I feel that I cannot do better than begin with that strange tangle which aroused such widespread public interest at the time. I refer to the affair at the Victory Ball. Although perhaps it is not so fully demonstrative of Poirot's peculiar methods as some of the more obscure cases, its sensational features, the well-known people involved, and the tremendous publicity given it by the Press, make it stand out as a ‘cause calibre’ and I have long felt that it is only fitting that Poirot's connection with the solution should be given to the world.
It was a fine morning in spring, and we were sitting in Poirot's rooms. My little friend, neat and dapper as ever, his egg-shaped head tilted slightly on one side, was delicately applying a new pomade to his moustache. A certain harmless vanity was a characteristic of Poirot's and fell into line with his general love of order and method. The Daily Newsmonger, which I had been reading, had slipped to the floor, and I was deep in a brown study when Poirot's voice recalled me. “Of what are you thinking so deeply, mon ami?”
“To tell you the truth,” I replied, “I was puzzling over this unaccountable affair at the Victory Ball. The papers are full of it.” I tapped the sheet with my finger as I spoke.