Men of Men b-2

by Wilbur Smith

  The boy was blushing as he studied her avidly, that was the only thing that had caught her attention. Now when she looked at him again she realized he was probably under-age, and she already had trouble with the Committee. He wore a boy's cloth cap on the back of his head and he was very obviously still growing, his Norfolk jacket straining around the sturdy arms and across the shoulders.

  Too young and certainly penniless. She had to get him out fast, and she turned quickly, her fists on her hips, her blond head cocked aggressively.

  "Good afternoon, Miss Lil." Ralph was stunned by his own audacity at addressing this heavenly presence directly. "I was about to buy my friends a round of drinks. We should be honoured if you would take a glass with us, ma'am." Ralph slapped the counter with a sovereign, and Lil uncocked her head and raised one hand from her hip to touch her hair.

  "I like a big spending gent." She flashed the little diamond in her front tooth at him and nodded to the barman. He would pour from her special bottle labelled Booth's Gin but filled with rain water from the galvanized tank beside the backdoor.

  Suddenly she realized that the boy was bonny, with a strong jaw and good white teeth. Now that his blush had subsided, his skin was clear and smooth as her own, and his eyes a penetrating emerald green. And the eagerness and freshness that he exuded was so different from that of the hairy diggers, caked with red dirt and smelling like goats, that formed her usual clientele.

  Let the boy pay for his round of drinks, and there would be time to get rid of him after that. In the meantime his transparent adoration. was amusing and flattering.

  "Lill, me darling." Barry Lennox leaned across the counter and she did not flinch from his breath. "Give me your pearl-like little ear."

  Smiling her bright smile she held her ear to his lips, and cupped her hand in an exaggerated pantomime of secrecy.

  "Are you working tonight, Lill? "I'm always ready for a quick rattle of the dice with YOU, my sweet. You want to go right now or finish your drink?"

  "No, darling, not me. How would you like to be first to put the saddle on an unbroken colt?"

  Her eyes flicked to Ralph's face again, and her hard bright smile softened thoughtfully. He was a lovely boy, and for the first time since her cavalryman had left her in Cape Town she felt the prickle of her loins and bitter sweet catch in her throat, so that she did not trust her voice entirely.

  "It's still early, Lil, and business isn't good this time on Sunday, Lil dearie." Barry Lennox wheedled and chuckled beerily at the same time. "He is a pretty boy, and I should charge you for the pleasure, but I'll just let you make me a special price instead."

  Lil's throat cleared instantly and the languid expression disappeared. Her reply was crisp.

  "I'll not charge you school fees, Barry Lennox, just the usual ten guineas."

  Lennox shook his head. "You are a hard one, Lil. I'll send him to you, love. But just one thing, make it good, make it something that he will remember if he lives a hundred years."

  "I don't teach you to dig diamonds, Barry Lennox," she said, and without looking back swept from the canteen.

  They heard the door of her bedroom bang, and Ralph stared after her in dismay, but Barry Lennox put an arm around his shoulders and as he talked quietly, punctuating each sentence with a throaty lewd chuckle, all the colour fled from Ralph's face.

  "Come in." Her voice reminded Ralph of the gentle contented cooing that the plump wild pigeons made at sunset in the top branch of the camel-thorn tree above Zouga's camp.

  With his hand on the brass doorknob, he lifted his feet one at a time and polished the toe-cap of his boots against the back of his trouser leg. He had doused his head under the tap of the rainwater tank and combed his hair while it was still wet, sleeking it away from his forehead, and the droplets had run down his neck, turning the dust on his darned shirt collar into damp red mud.

  He glanced down at his hand on the doorknob, saw the black rinds under his finger nails and lifted it quickly to his mouth, trying desperately to pick out the dirt with his eye tooth.

  "Come in!" The command was repeated; but this time there was no cooing of pigeons, but a sharp imperious command, and Ralph lunged for the door handle. There was no resistance, the door flew open, and Ralph went with it. He entered Diamond Lil's boudoir like a cavalry charge, tripped on the frayed edge of a cheap oriental carpet and sprawled headlong across the brass bed.

  There was a Chinese lacquer screen across one corner of the small violently furnished room, and over the top of it rose Diamond Lil's magnificently sculptured blond coiffure.

  "Oh," she said sweetly, the sharp slanted eyes widening with amusement. "Are you going to start without me then darling?"

  Ralph scrambled untidily to his feet like a puppy with oversized paws and stood to attention in the middle of the floor, holding his cloth cap to his stomach with both hands.

  From behind the screen came the most evocative sounds he had ever heard. The rustle of lace and cloth, the clink of china and the gurgle of water poured from a The lacquer screen was ornamented with oriental lug figures, women bathing in a willow-screened pool with a waterfall in the background. The women were all naked, and the artist had lingered on their physical charms. Ralph felt his ears and neck heating again, and hated himself for it.

  He wished he had kept the cigar, as a proof of his manhood. He wished that he had worn a fresh shirt, he wished, but then there was no further time for wishing.

  Lil stepped out from behind the screen. She was barefooted, and her toes were chubby and rosy pink like those of a little girl.

  "I have seen you on the street, mister Ballantyne," Lil told him quietly. And I have admired your manly disposition. I am so glad we have had an opportunity to meet."

  The words worked a miracle. Ralph felt himself growing in stature, the trembling in his legs stilled and they felt strong and sure under him.

  "Do you like my robe?" Lil asked, and took the long skirts in her hands, turning to make them flare.

  Ralph nodded dumbly, his new-found strength had not yet reached his tongue, but his eyes were wide and feverish.

  She came to him and without her heels she stood only as high as his shoulder. "Let me help you with your coat."

  And when he was in his shirtsleeves, she said, "Come and sit on the sofa." She took his hand and led him across the room.

  "Do you like me, mister Ballantyne?"

  At last he could speak, "Oh yes. Oh yes!"

  "May I call you Ralph? I feel I know you so well."

  Very early one January morning long ago she had left the Mayfair house, and reached the deserted park where it had snowed during the night. The snow lay white and smooth and unmarked. She left the gravelled path, and the snow crumbled like sugar under her feet. When she looked back her tiny footprints were strung out across the unblemished snow, as though she were the first and only woman in the world. It gave her an extraordinary feeling of her own importance. Now as she lay on the wide bedstead beside the lad, she experienced that same feeling.

  He was not a lad, but she thought of him as that. His body was fully matured, but his innocence made him as vulnerable as an unweaned infant, and his body was like the snow which no other feet had trodden.

  The sun had stained his throat in a deep V down onto his chest, but the skin of his chest and flat belly were the lustrous white of watered marble or of freshly fallen snow. She touched it with her lips and when his little dusty rose nipples puckered and started her own skin crawling deliciously, she took his hands. His palms were rough and callused from work on the stagings and in the pit. The fingernails were torn and cracked, with ingrained dirt beneath them. But it was honest dirt, and the hands were shapely, long and graceful. She had learned to judge men by the shape of their hands, and now she lifted Ralph's to her lips and kissed them lightly, watching his eyes as she did so.

  Then slowly she took his hands down and cupped them over her own soft breasts. She felt the rough skin rasp her own nipples, and they p
opped out like full moons, pale pink and tense.

  "You like that, Ralph?" She asked that same question five times, and the last time was when the room was almost dark and he was convulsed and shaking within the circle of her arms and her pliant thighs, drenched with his own sweet young sweat, and breathing in little choking sobs.

  "You like that, Ralph?" And his reply was broken and ragged: "Oh yes. Oh yes, Miss. Suddenly she was sad. The snow was trodden, the magic was passing, just as the power she had wielded was transitory.

  She had not cried in ten long hard years, not since that first evening in the Mayfair house, but now she was shocked to find the constriction in her throat and the burning behind her eyes.

  "What is there to cry for?" she wondered desolately.

  "It's far too late for tears."

  She rolled Ralph expertly onto his back, his body limp and unresisting, and for a moment she stared at him hatefully. He had touched something in her which had hurt unbearably. Then the hating passed and there was only the sadness.

  She kissed him once more, softly and regretfully.

  "You must go now, Ralph," she said.

  He lingered at the door, with his jacket over his arm and his cap in his hand.

  "I will come and see you again, Lilly."

  She formed a bow with her lips and painted them with quick deft strokes before she replied, but while she worked she was watching him in the mirror.

  He was altered already, she saw. He stood four-square, his shoulders wide and his neat young head proud on the column of his sun-tanned neck. The sweet diffidence was gone, the appealing shyness evaporated. An hour before he would have said: "Please can I come and see you again, Miss Lill?"

  She smiled at him in the mirror, that bright burnished smile, and the diamond in her tooth winked sardonically.

  "You come any time, dearie, any time you have saved ten guineas."

  It was only surprising that the full report of Ralph's foray into the lilac fields of Venus took so long to reach Zouga, for Barry Lennox had repeated the story with zest and embroidery to anyone who would listen, and the chaff and banter had flown like a Kalahari dust-storm every evening in Diamond Lil's canteen.

  "Gentlemen, you are speaking about the eldest son of one of the pillars of Kimberley Society," Lil admonished them saucily. "Remember that Major Ballantyne is not only a member of the Kimberley Club, but a respected ornament of the Diggers" Committee." She knew that one of them would soon succumb to the temptation to take the story to Zouga Ballantyne. "I would love to hear what that cold-bellied, stuck-up prig will say when he hears," she told herself secretly. "Even the iced water in his veins will boil."

  "Whores and whore masters," said Zouga. He stood on the wide verandah, in the shade of the thatched roof which had replaced the original tent of the first camp.

  Ralph stood below him in the sunlight, blinking up at his father.

  "Perhaps you have no respect for your family, for the name of Ballantyne, but do you have none for yourself and for your own body?"

  Zouga was barring the front door to the cottage of raw unbaked brick. He was bare-headed, so that his thick dark gold hair shone like a war helmet and his neatlycropped beard emphasized the jut of his heavy jaw, and the long black tapered hippohide kurbash whip hung from his right hand, touching the floor at the toe of his riding boot.

  "Do you have an answer?" Zouga's tone was quiet, and deadly cold.

  Ralph was still dusty as a miller from the pit. The dust was thick and red in his hair, and outlined the curl of his nostrils and ran like tears from the corners of his eyes. He wiped his forehead on his shirtsleeve, an excuse to break the gaze of his father's eyes, and then examined the muddy smear with attention.

  "Answer me," Zouga's voice did not alter. "Give me a reason, just one reason why I should not throw you out of this home, for ever."

  Jordan could bear it no longer, the thought of losing Ralph overcame his terror of his father's wrath.

  He ran down the length of the verandah, and seized the arm that held the whip.

  "Papa! Please, Papa, don't send him away."

  Without glancing at Jordan, Zouga lashed out and the blow caught Jordan across the chest and hurled him back against the verandah wall.

  "Jordie did nothing," said Ralph, as quietly as his father had spoken.

  "Oh, you do have a tongue?" Zouga asked.

  "Get out of it, Jordie," Ralph ordered. "This is not your business."

  "Stay where you are, Jordan." Zouga still did not look at him, his gaze was riveted on Ralph's face. "Stay here and learn about whores and the kind of men who lust after them."

  Jordan was stricken, his face like last night's camp-fire ashes, his lips dry and white as bone. He knew what they were talking about, for he had listened while Bazo and Ralph wove their fantasies aloud, and with his interest piqued, he had questioned Jan Cheroot furtively and the replies had disgusted and terrified him.

  "Not like animals, Jan Cheroot, surely not like dogs or goats."

  Jordan's questions to Jan Cheroot had been generalized , men and women, not any person he knew or loved or respected. It had taken him days fully to appreciate Jan Cheroot's reply, and then the terrible realization had struck, all men and women, his father who epitomized for him all that was noble and strong and right, his mother, that sweet and gentle being who was already a fading wraithlike memory, not them, surely not them.

  He had been physically sickened, vomiting and wracked by excruciating bowel cramps so that Zouga had dosed him with sulphur and treacle molasses.

  Now they were talking about that thing, that thing so dreadful that he had tried to purge his memory of it.

  Now the two most important people in his world were talking about it openly, using words he had only seen in print and which had even then shamed him. They were mouthing those words and the air was full of shame and hatred and revulsion.

  "You have wallowed like a pig where a thousand other pigs have wallowed before you, in the foetid cesspool between that scarlet whore's thighs."

  Jordan crept away along the wall, and reached the corner of the stoep. He could go no further.

  "If you were not ashamed to muck in that trough, did you not give a thought to what those other rutting boars had left there for you?"

  His father's words conjured up vivid images in Jordan's mind. His stomach heaved, and he covered his mouth with his hand.

  "The sickness a harlot carries there is the curse of God upon venery and lust. If you could only see them in the pox hospital at Greenwich, raving idiots with their brains eaten half away by the disease, drooling from empty mouths, their teeth rotted out, their noses fallen into black festering holes, blind eyes rolling in their crazed skulls, " Jordan doubled over, and sicked up on his own rawhide boots.

  "Stop it," said Ralph. "You have made Jordie sick."

  "I have made him sick?" Zouga asked quietly. "It is you who would make any decent person sick."

  Zouga came down the steps into the dusty yard, and he swung the whip, cutting the air with it, across and back and the lash fluted sharply.

  Ralph stood his ground, and now his chin was up defiantly.

  "If you take that whip to me, Papa, I shall defend myself."

  "You challenge me," Zouga stopped.

  "You only use a whip on an animal."

  "Yes," Zouga nodded. "An animal, that's why I take it to you."

  "Papa, I warn you."

  Gravely Zouga inclined his head and considered the young man before him. "Very well. You claim to be a man, make good that claim."

  Zouga tossed the hippohide whip casually onto the verandah, and then turned back to his son.

  Ralph was prepared, his weight balanced on the balls of his feet, although his hands were held low before him, they were balled into fists.

  He never saw it. For a moment he thought that someone else had used a club on him from behind. The crack of it seemed to explode under the dome of his skull. He reeled backwards, his nose felt
numb and at the same time swollen horribly. There was a tickling warmth on his upper lip and dumbly he licked it. It tasted of coppery salt, and he wiped at it with the back of his hand and then stared at the smear of blood on the back of his wrist.

  His rage came on him with startling ferocity, as though a beast had pounced upon his back, a black beast that goaded him with its claws. He heard the beast growl in his ears, not recognizing his own voice, and then he rushed forward.

  His father's face was in front of him, handsome, grave and cold, and he swung his fist at it with all his strength, wanting to feel the flesh crush under his knuckles, the gristle of that arrogant beaked nose break and crackle, the teeth snap out of that unforgiving mouth.

  His fist spun through air, meeting no check, swinging high about the level of his own head, and the blow died there, the sinews of his shoulder wrenched by the unexpected travel of his arm.

  Again that burst of sound in his skull, his teeth jarring, his head snapping back, his vision starring momentarily into pinpoints of light and areas of deep echoing black, and then clearing again so that his father's face floated back towards him.

  Until that instant the only feelings he had ever had for Zouga were respect and fear and a weighty monumental love, but suddenly from some deep place in his soul rose a raging unholy hatred.

  He hated him for a hundred humiliations and punishments, he hated him for the checks and frustrations with which he filled each precious day of Ralph's life, he hated him for the reverence and deep respect in which other men held him, for the example that he knew he would be expected to follow faithfully all his life and doubted that he could. He hated him for the enormous load of duty and devotion he owed him and which he knew he could never discharge. He hated him for the love he had stolen from him, the love his mother had given unstintingly to his father and which he wanted all for himself.

  He hated him because his mother was dead, and his father had not prevented her going.

  But most of all he hated him because he had taken something which had been wonderful and made it filthy, had taken a magical moment and made him ashamed of it, sick and dirty ashamed.