Men of Men

by Wilbur Smith

  Ralph stared after it wistfully.

  Jordan decorated the borders of the menus with romanticized scenes of the diggings: the stagings soaring above the gaping pit, heroic figures working on the walls of yellow earth, a sorter at his table – and at the head of the sheet a man’s cupped hands overflowing with uncut diamonds – and he coloured the illustrations with water paints.

  ‘What’s Velouté de la Nouvelle Ruée?’ Ralph asked.

  ‘Soup New Rush,’ Jordie told him without looking up from his artistic labours.

  ‘What’s going to be in it?’

  ‘Marrow bones and pearl barley.’

  ‘And what’s Quartier de Chevreuil Diamant Bleu?’

  ‘Haunch of springbuck in the style of a blue diamond.’

  ‘I don’t know why we can’t just speak English,’ Ralph complained. ‘What’s the style of a blue diamond, anyway?’

  ‘Lard the haunch with bacon fat, marinade it in olive oil and cognac with wild garlic, and then bake it in a pie crust.’

  Ralph swallowed his saliva. Jordan’s culinary skills were always a source of delight to him.

  ‘All right – I’ll eat it.’

  Jordan licked his brush, leaving a streak of Prussian blue on his tongue, and then looked up at his brother.

  ‘You are going to serve it, not eat it—’ Jordan paused portentously, ‘Mr Rhodes is coming to lunch,’ as though that explained it all.

  ‘Well, if I’m not good enough to sit at the same table as your famous Mr Rhodes – I’ll be damned if I’ll play waiter. You can get Donsela. For a shilling Donsela will spill soup on Mr Rhodes, for a shilling Donsela would throw soup on King Lobengula himself. I’m going to bribe him.’

  However, in the end curiosity and Jordan’s promise of the leftovers prevailed and Ralph dressed himself in the ridiculous monkey-jacket that Jordan had designed and tailored for him and carried the tray of Velouté out on the wide verandah of Zouga’s camp – and there nearly dropped it.

  ‘Madame, you remind me of the heroine from Mr Longfellow’s poem,’ Neville Pickering complimented Louise St John, and she smiled back at him from her seat at the centre of the luncheon table.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Her jacket was in pale creamy buckskin with tasselled sleeves, and the bodice was crusted with bright-coloured beads in bold geometrical patterns. Louise had parted her thick black hair in the centre, braided a blue ribbon into each of the thick tresses, bound them with a band about her forehead, and then let them hang onto her bosom. The soft tanned buckskin was divided into ankle-length culottes, and her boots were also of soft beaded leather.

  Louise was the only woman at the long trestle table on the open verandah of Zouga’s camp. The men seated on each side of her were already emerging as the most influential subjects on this continent of an omnipotent queen. Like the men that another English queen had sent out to the corners of the earth, these were the new Elizabethans, most of them already rich – all of them restless and consumed with their lust for power, for wealth, for land. Each with a separate dream that he would follow relentlessly all his life, every one of them driving, ruthless men.

  Ballantyne. Beit. Jameson. Rhodes. Robinson. The list of names read like a roll-call for a regiment of filibusters, and yet here they were listening to a discourse on women’s fashion as though it were a company report on tonnage treated and cartage recovered.

  Only Zouga Ballantyne was not smiling. The woman offended Zouga. Her beauty was too flamboyant, her colouring too vivid. Zouga preferred the pale gold blonde hair and the complexion of sugared cream and strawberries. An Englishman’s idea of beauty.

  This woman’s dress was outrageous, the styling of her hair pretentious. Her gaze was too direct, her eyes too blue, her conversation too easy and her style of address too familiar. Of course American women had the reputation of affecting masculine manners, but Zouga found himself wishing that Louise St John had kept those manners on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean where they belonged.

  It was enough that she had galloped into his camp ahead of her husband, riding astride, and dismounted by freeing both of her narrow booted feet from the stirrups and vaulting lightly to the ground; but then she had come up onto the stoep with an assured stride and smile, her right hand out like a man, and without waiting for her husband to introduce them had said: ‘You must be Zouga Ballantyne. I’d recognize you anywhere by Mungo’s description of you.’

  Her hand was narrow, the skin warm but dry, but the grip of her fingers was unfemininely firm, the grip of a skilled horsewoman.

  These leisurely Sunday luncheons at Zouga’s camp were his one extravagance, and they had become one of the traditions of Kimberley, when excellent fare and good liquor and the company of intelligent men made for memorable afternoons.

  Women were very seldom invited to these gatherings, and Louise St John would not have been there if Zouga had been able to have her husband come alone, but Mungo St John had replied pointedly to the invitation, ‘General and Mrs St John have pleasure in accepting.’

  The friendship between St John and Zouga had begun many years previously, and he was the kind of man whom Zouga could admire: a man like himself, hard and determined, one who lived by his own code without compromise. One who expected no preference nor favour, but whose triumphs were of his own engineering and whose disasters were met with fortitude, without plea or excuse, even when occasioned by cruel circumstances beyond his control.

  In the late ‘fifties St John had built up a commercial empire, a fleet of trading vessels which had carried the black ivory of slaves from the African continent to that of North America. Legend was that in three voyages, in the course of a single period of twelve months, across the notorious middle passage of the Atlantic, he had transported almost two million dollars’ worth of slaves, and with those profits he had acquired vast estates in Louisiana.

  It was at this time that Zouga had first met him. Zouga had travelled as a passenger on St John’s magnificent clipper Huron out of the Port of Bristol in southern England to the Cape of Good Hope. The irony of that voyage had been that Zouga at the time had not been aware that St John was engaged in the trade, and Zouga had been accompanied on the voyage by his only sister, Robyn Ballantyne, a medical missionary whose declared goal in life was the extinction of the trade on the African continent.

  When Robyn Ballantyne had discovered that St John was not sailing to Africa to barter beads and copper wire for ivory and ostrich feathers, for gumcopal and alluvial gold dust from the kingdom of Monomatapa, but was seeking richer, living black cargo, her hatred was rendered more implacable by her shame at having travelled in company with such a man.

  It was Robyn Ballantyne who had called up the avenging spectre of the Royal Navy. She had been the chief instrument in delivering St John and his beautiful clipper Huron, with her cargo of five hundred prime slaves, to the gunboats of the British anti-slavery squadron.

  St John, as was his right as an American captain, had resisted the British boarders, and in the savage action that followed, half his crew had been killed or maimed and his lovely ship so badly mauled that she had to be towed into Table Bay by her captors.

  Though after imprisonment in Cape Town castle, the British governor had finally released St John and allowed him to sail away, still his cargo of slaves were seized and released from their chains, and the African coast was closed for ever to his ships.

  It was then that Zouga had lost contact with him; but after Zouga’s book A Hunter’s Odyssey had been published, St John had written to him care of his London publishers, Messrs Rowland Ward, and since then they had corresponded at irregular intervals. Indeed it was Zouga’s description of the diamond fields in one of these letters that was responsible for St John’s presence here now.

  Through the exchange of letters Zouga had been able to follow St John’s career, and he learned how after his release from the Cape Town castle, St John had returned to Fairfields, his cotton and sugar estat
es near Baton Rouge, only weeks before the first cannon shots were fired at Fort Sumter.

  Louisiana had voted for secession from the Union, and when the war began, Mungo raised his own force of irregular cavalry and led them in a brilliant series of hit-and-run raids against the supply lines and rear bases of the Federal army. So successful were these depredations that the northerners christened him ‘Murdering Mungo’, declared him an outlaw and placed a reward of fifty thousand dollars on his head. Promoted to major-general, he was later struck in the left eye by a red-hot splinter of shrapnel and dragged over a mile when his horse bolted. By the time he was discharged from the hospital, Vicksburg had fallen. Recognizing this as a fatal stab in the heart of the Confederacy, he had limped back along the empty road to Fairfields.

  The reek of fermenting sugar juices mingled with that of charred flesh was more revolting than any battlefield Mungo had ever smelled. Four colonnades stood above the ashes of his homestead, like monuments to all his dreams.

  Now, all these years later, St John had come up the road from Good Hope, driving a pair of magnificent pale gold horses with flowing white manes that he called ‘Palaminos’, a long black cigar between his white teeth, an eagle gleam in his single eye and this strangely disturbing woman on the seat of the phaeton beside him.

  St John’s first act in Kimberley had been to walk into the office of the Standard Bank on Market Square and present a letter of credit to the flabbergasted clerk. The letter of credit was on heavy, expensive paper, the printing embossed in rose and gold, the wax seal that of Messrs Coutts and Co. in the Strand, and the sum for which it was drawn was half a million of sterling.

  St John had drawn a modest hundred pounds against that formidable total, and taken rooms for himself and his wife at the Craven Hotel, Kimberley’s most fashionable and comfortable.

  When he recovered from his shock, the bank clerk had excitedly begun to spread the news. There was an American general on the fields who disposed of a half million pounds in cash.

  The following noon St John had casually accepted an invitation to lunch at the Kimberley Club and smiled indulgently as his name was proposed for membership by Mr C. J. Rhodes and seconded by Dr Leander Starr Jameson. There were men, rich and influential men, who had tried in vain since the foundation of the Club to obtain membership.

  St John was smiling that same indulgent smile now as he leaned back in his chair, twisting the stem of his champagne glass between his fingers and watching the other guests at the table fawning over his wife.

  Even Mr Rhodes, who was famous for his immunity to female wiles, and who usually bluntly terminated any frivolous conversation, was responding to her artless questions and chuckling at her sallies.

  With an effort, Zouga tore his own attention from Louise and tuned to Mungo St John. Quite pointedly he changed the discussion from the split skirts which allowed his wife to ride astride to Mungo’s own doings since their last meeting.

  The reason for the change of subject was not missed by Louise. She shot a sharp speculative glance at Zouga, but then smiled graciously and relapsed into dutiful silence while the conversation became at last serious and important.

  St John had been in Canada and Australia, and without being specific they all understood that both journeys had been rewarding, for St John spoke of wheat and opals and wool and gold, and they listened avidly, shooting their questions like arrows and nodding to the deft replies, until at last St John ended: ‘Well, then I heard from my dear friend Zouga what you gentlemen have been doing here, and thought it was time to come and have a look.’

  Almost on cue Ralph came down the verandah carrying the scrubbed carving board with its cargo of roasted venison enclosed in a crisp brown envelope of pastry. The company applauded with exclamations of delight and approbation.

  Zouga stood up to carve the roast and while he stropped the hunting knife against steel, he glanced at Ralph who still lingered on the verandah.

  ‘Are you feeling well?’ he asked out of the side of his mouth, and Ralph roused himself, tearing his adoring gaze from Louise St John.

  ‘Oh yes, Papa, I’m fine.’

  ‘You don’t look fine. You look as if you have a belly ache. Better get Jan Cheroot to give you a dose of sulphur and treacle.’

  Jan Cheroot, dressed in his old regimental jacket with burnished buttons and his scarlet cap set at a rakish angle, brought in fresh bottles of champagne, the buckets packed with crushed white ice.

  ‘Ice!’ Louise clapped her hands with delight. ‘I never expected such sophistication here.’

  ‘Oh, we lack very little, ma’am,’ Rhodes assured her. ‘My ice-making factory has been in operation for a year or more. In a year or so the railway line will reach Kimberley and then we shall become a city, a real city.’

  ‘And all this on woman’s vanity.’ Louise shook her long black tresses in mock dismay. ‘A lady’s baubles, a city built on engagement rings!’

  Despite Zouga’s best efforts, the focus of attention had shifted again. They were all hanging on her words with that slightly bemused expression which overcomes even the most sensible of men when he looks at a beautiful woman.

  ‘Beautiful woman.’ It was the first time Zouga had acknowledged that fact, even to himself, and for some reason it increased his resentment of her.

  ‘Do you know, Mr Rhodes,’ she leaned across the table confidentially, ‘I have been here for five days now – and although I have searched the sidewalks diligently, I have not seen a single diamond – and I was assured the streets of Kimberley were paved with diamonds.’

  They all laughed, more heartily than the witticism warranted, and Rhodes murmured a few words to Pickering before turning back to Louise.

  ‘We shall do what we can to remedy that, Mrs St John,’ and while he spoke Pickering scrawled a note and then summoned one of the coloured grooms who was lolling and smoking in the shade of the camel-thorn tree.

  ‘Major, may I borrow one of your champagne buckets?’ Pickering asked, and when Zouga agreed, he handed the empty bucket and the note to the groom.

  Zouga was carving seconds off the roast when the groom returned. He was followed by a nondescript white man with an uncertain seat on his placid steed. He came up onto the verandah carrying the bucket as though it were filled with Mr Alfred Nobel’s new-fangled blasting gelatine.

  He placed the bucket on the table in front of Rhodes with a timid flourish, and then seemed to disappear from sight. With his thin colourless hair and myopic eyes behind pebble-lens wire-rimmed spectacles, his dark jacket shiny with wear at elbows and cuffs, he blended like a chameleon with his background.

  ‘Where is young Jordan?’ Rhodes asked. ‘That boy loves diamonds as much as any of us do.’

  Jordan came from the kitchen in his apron and with his colour high from the heat of his stove. He greeted Rhodes shyly.

  ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr Jordan Ballantyne is not only the finest chef on the diggings – but he is also one of the best diamond sorters that we have.’ Rhodes was expansive as few of them had ever seen him. ‘Come and stand by me, Jordan, where you can have a good view.’

  When Jordan was beside his chair, Rhodes tipped the bucket carefully and even Zouga heard himself gasp with shock, while Louise St John cried out aloud.

  The bucket was filled to the brim with uncut diamonds, and now they cascaded onto the white tablecloth in a sullenly glowing pyramid from which random darts of light sped to astound the eye.

  ‘All right, Jordan. Tell us something about them,’ Rhodes invited. And the boy stooped over the fabulous pile of treasure, his long tapered fingers flying lightly over the stones, spreading and sorting them into piles. While he worked he talked, and his voice was as lovely as his face, low and melodious. Fluently he explained the shapes of the crystals, pointed out the flaws in one, placed two side by side to compare the colours, twisting one to the light to bring up its smouldering fires.

  Zouga was puzzled. This little act was too theatrical to be
Rhodes’ usual style, and he would never go to such lengths to impress a woman, even a beautiful one; for by jumbling up a bucket of stones he had given his own sorters many days of extra work. Every one of those stones would have to be re-graded and appraised and returned to its own little white envelope.

  ‘Here is a perfect stone,’ Jordan picked a diamond the size of a green pea. ‘Look at that colour, blue as a bolt of lightning and as full of fire.’

  Rhodes took it from him, considered it a moment, holding it between thumb and forefinger, then he leaned across the table and placed it before Louise St John.

  ‘Madam, your first diamond. I sincerely hope not your last,’ said Rhodes.

  ‘Mr Rhodes, I cannot accept such a generous gift,’ said Louise, her eyes wide with delight, and she turned to Mungo St John. ‘Can I?’

  ‘If I agreed with you, you would never forgive me,’ Mungo St John murmured, and Louise turned back to Rhodes.

  ‘Mr Rhodes, my husband insists, and I can find no words to express my gratitude.’

  Zouga watched the scene attentively; there was so much happening here, so many nuances, so many undercurrents.

  It was on the surface merely a demonstration of the remarkable effect that these bright hard pebbles had upon a woman. That was their true value, perhaps their only value. When he looked at Louise St John’s face he could see that it was not avarice that lit it so, but a mystical emotion not far removed from love – the love of a living thing, a child, a horse, a man, a warming thing to watch.

  Quite suddenly Zouga found himself wishing that he had been the author of such joy. That it had been he and not Rhodes who had made the gift which had transformed her, and it took a moment for him to free himself of that desire, so that he almost missed the glance that Rhodes shot beyond the woman’s face.