Men of Men

by Wilbur Smith

  Sometimes, in a flagrantly unchristian manner, she wished she could have that bloodless myopic little man at her side when she removed an eye damaged by a blow with a knobkerrie and hanging out of its socket onto a black cheek, or when she went for a Caesarean section – all without anaesthetic.

  She hugged the bottle to her chest for a moment.

  ‘Darling Grandfather,’ she repeated, then as reverently as if it were the fabulous Kohinoor diamond, she set the bottle of colourless but precious fluid aside, and turned to the second package.

  A roll of newspapers – The Cape Times and The Diamond Fields Advertiser. In the weeks ahead every column would be read and re-read, down to the announcements of auction sales and the legal notices; then the newsprint itself would be used for a dozen domestic chores. Under the newspaper – books, wonderful fat leather-bound books.

  ‘Bless you, Robert Moffat.’

  She lifted out a translation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. She admired the Norwegian for his insight into the human mind, and the muted poetry of his prose. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Virginibus Puerisque; the title made her pause. She had four virgins in her household, and she intended maintaining that happy condition without allowing any inflammatory literature to thwart her. She flipped through the book. Despite the dubious title, it was merely a collection of essays – and the man was a good Calvinistic Scot. It might just do to let the girls read it, but she would vet it first.

  Then there was Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer. Here she was less sanguine. She had heard of this American’s frivolous and irreverent attitude towards adolescence, industry and filial duty. She would read it carefully before letting it anywhere near Salina or Catherine. Reluctantly she left the other books for future study and turned to her grandfather’s letter.

  There were many pages, written with sooty home-made ink, and the script was shaky and wavering. She skimmed swiftly through the salutations and the personal news until she reached the middle of the second page:

  Robyn, they say a doctor buries his mistakes: blatantly untrue. I send mine to you. The patient who delivers this letter should long ago have sought the sanctuary of a modem hospital, such as that at Kimberley.

  This he has steadfastly refused to do. His reasons are his own, and I have not pried. However, the fact that for over a year now he has had a pistol ball lodged in his body may point to his motives.

  Twice I have cut for this foreign body, but at 87 years of age my eyes are not as bright nor my hand as steady as yours. Each time I have failed and I fear that I have done more harm than good.

  I know that you have interest and skill in treatment of this type of injury, as so you should, for you have been provided by young Lobengula’s warriors with endless opportunity to practise your technique. I recall with admiration your inspired reintroduction of the spoon of Diokles, after nearly 2,000 years, which you designed from the contemporary description by Celsus – and your successful removal of barbed arrowheads with it.

  Thus I send you one more subject on which to demonstrate your art – and with him my last bottle of Chloroform; for the poor fellow – whatever his sins – has suffered enough under my knife.

  The letter left her with a sense of foreboding – as did the woman who had delivered it. She folded the letter and thrust it into the pocket of her skirt as she left the church and hurried across the yard.

  ‘Cathy,’ she called. ‘Where is that girl! She must set the guest-house to rights.’

  ‘She’s gone to it already, Mama.’ Salina looked up as she stormed into the kitchen.

  ‘Then where is your father?’

  Within an hour the mission station was prepared to receive guests, and buzzing with anticipation; but they had to wait until mid-afternoon before a two-wheeled cart of unusually high and heavy construction appeared over the rise before the river. It was drawn by a pair of mules.

  The entire family assembled on the front porch of the main building, and all of them had changed their clothing, while the girls had also brushed and dressed their hair with ribbons. A dozen times the twins had to be cautioned for improper comments and unrestrained behaviour, but finally the cart wheeled into the yard.

  The woman had put her mule into the traces and now she walked beside the wheel of the cart, which reached almost as high as her head. There was a coloured servant in ragged cast-off clothes leading the mules, and over the body of the cart was rigged a makeshift sunshade of saplings and stained canvas.

  Below the porch the cart stopped, and all of them craned forward as a man’s head and upper body appeared above its side. He was laid on a straw mattress on the floor of the cart, and now he lifted himself on one elbow.

  He was a gaunt wasted figure; the flesh seemed to have melted from the big bones of his shoulders. His cheeks had fallen in and turned a muddy yellow, the hand on the side of the cart was bony, and the veins were roped under the skin like blue serpents. His hair bushed wildly about his head, coarse dark hair that was shot through with strands of dead white. He had not shaved in days; thick stubble covered his jaws and was salted with the same white as his hair. One eye was sunk into a bruised cavity, and it had that feverish glitter that Robyn recognized instantly. It was the look of mortal illness.

  The other eye was covered by a black piratical patch. There was something dreadfully familiar about the big aquiline nose and the wide mouth – yet it was only when he smiled that old mocking yet somehow tender smile that she had never forgotten that Robyn reeled backwards, one hand flying to her mouth too late to stop her cry.

  She caught for support at one of the mopani poles that held the roof.

  ‘Mama, are you all right?’ But Robyn pushed Salina’s hands away and went on staring at the man in the cart.

  Only one memory out of so many rose up like a freak wave out of a storm-swept sea to overwhelm her. She saw again that dark bush of curls, devoid only of its silver lacing, bowing to her naked bosom. She saw above her the beamed roof of the great cabin in the stern-quarters of the slave ship Huron, and she remembered as she had a thousand times in the twenty years since then – that pain. The deep splitting incursion that rocked her. Four childbirths since then had not eradicated the memory of it, the agony of passing from maiden to woman.

  Her senses wavered, there was a rushing in her ears, she was going to fall, but then Clinton’s voice steadied her. The hard fierce tone of it which she had not heard in years.

  ‘You!’ he said.

  As Clinton drew himself erect, the years seemed to fall away from him. He was once again tall and lithe, stiff with anger as the young Royal Naval officer who had come up onto the slaver’s quarter-deck with pistols and a naval cutlass on his hip to confront this same man.

  Still clinging to the verandah pole, Robyn remembered the words he had spoken then in that same fierce tone:

  ‘Captain Mungo St John, your reputation precedes you, sir. The first trader ever to transport more than three thousand souls across the middle passage in a single twelve-month period – I’d give five years’ pay to have the hatches off your holds, sir.’

  Robyn remembered then how it had taken another year for Clinton to get his wish, when off Good Hope he had come back onto Huron’s decks, boarding her over the stern in the cannon smoke with his fighting seamen at his back, and how this action had cost him more than a mere five years’ pay. He had been court martialled and cashiered from the Royal Navy and imprisoned for it.

  ‘You dare to come here, to us.’ Clinton was pale with rage; his blue eyes, so gentle for so long, were bleak and hating. ‘You, you cruel and bloody slaver, you dare to come here.’

  Mungo St John was still smiling, taunting him with that smile and the glitter in his single eye, but his voice was low and rough with his suffering.

  ‘And you, you kind and sainted Christian gentleman, do you dare to turn me away?’

  Clinton flinched as though he had been struck across the face, and he took a step backwards. Slowly the litheness and youth went out
of his stance, his shoulders slumped into their habitual stoop. He shook his bald head uncertainly, and then instinctively he turned towards Robyn.

  With a huge effort Robyn gathered herself, pushed away from the supporting pole. Despite the turmoil of her emotions she managed to keep her expression neutral.

  ‘Dr Ballantyne,’ Louise St John came to the steps of the verandah. She took the cap from her head, and the thick black plait tumbled out from under it.

  ‘I find it difficult to beg,’ she said. ‘But I am begging now.’

  ‘That is not necessary, madam. I gave you my word.’ Robyn turned away. ‘Clinton, please help Mrs St John to put this patient into the bed in the guest-house.’

  ‘Yes, dear.’

  ‘I shall be there directly to make an examination.’

  ‘Thank you, Doctor, oh thank you.’ Robyn ignored Louise, but when she had followed the mule cart across the yard to the guest-hut, she turned to face her daughters.

  ‘None of you – not even you, Salina – will go near the guest-house while that man is here. You will not speak to him or the woman, you will not answer if they speak to you. You will do your best to avoid seeing either of them, and if you do by error find yourself in their presence, you will leave immediately.’

  The twins were quivering with excitement, their eyes shone, and even their ears seemed to be pink and pricked like those of a pair of young bunny rabbits. They could not remember a day so wildly exciting.

  ‘Why?’ gasped Vicky, forgetting herself sufficiently in this incredible series of events to question her mother’s order. For a moment it seemed that she would have to pay for the impertinence with a box on one pink ear, but Robyn’s hand dropped back to her side.

  ‘Because—’ Robyn said softly, ‘ – because he is the devil – the very devil.’

  He was propped on the iron cot, with a bolster under his shoulders, and Louise rose from the other cot as Robyn entered the guest-hut carrying her bag.

  ‘Madam, will you kindly wait outside,’ Robyn ordered brusquely and, not deigning to see if she would obey, Robyn placed her bag on the chair beside his cot. Behind her the latch on the door clicked.

  Mungo St John wore only a pair of baggy white trousers from which one leg had been hacked off high in the thigh. Like his face, his body was wasted by sickness, but there was still the width of shoulder and the solidness of bone that she remembered so well. His belly had sunk in like that of a greyhound, and his ribs stood out in a rack above it, but his skin retained the texture and silkiness of a far younger man, while the body hair that was crimped into curls upon his chest was not marred with silver as was his beard and the hair upon his head.

  ‘Hello, Robyn,’ he said.

  ‘I will speak to you only when it is absolutely necessary for your treatment, and you will do the same,’ she said, without looking at his face.

  She started with the wounds in his flank and back – bullet wounds, she realized, but through and through – and completely healed. Then with a little start she noticed the other old, long-healed scar just below the bullet wound.

  She recognized the little white pricks of the suture which had closed the knife-cut. Her own work was distinctive, there was nobody who could throw down those even and precise knotted sutures as she could, and before she realized what she was doing she touched the old hardened cicatrice.

  ‘Yes,’ Mungo nodded. ‘Camacho made that.’

  She jerked her hand away. Mungo had taken that knife-cut when he had intervened to protect her from the Portuguese slaver. He had saved her life that night.

  ‘Do you remember this also?’ Mungo asked, and showed her the pock mark on his forearm. That was where she had inoculated him when smallpox had swept through Huron.

  ‘Do you remember?’ Mungo insisted softly, but she kept her face averted and her lips compressed in a thin hard line as she lifted the dressing from his upper leg.

  Then the horror showed on her face. Her grandfather’s uneven knife strokes had lacerated the leg from knee to groin, where he had probed and searched for the ball, and his crude stitches had cobbled it all back together like a man repacking a valise in haste.

  ‘Bad?’ Mungo asked.

  ‘It’s a mess,’ she said, and then hated herself for unbending that far, and by inference criticizing her grandfather’s work.

  The flesh of the leg had that unhealthy putty colour, and there was ulceration in the wounds, that awful sloughing of tissue that hinted at the corruption beneath.

  Her grandfather had left drains in the wounds, thick black horse hairs that stuck stiffly out between the stitches. She drew one now, and Mungo gasped but did not flinch. A weak little trickle of watery pus followed the hair out. She stooped and sniffed it and grimaced. This was not the rich creamy pus that the ancients had called ‘pus bonum et laudabile’. From the stink of it, gangrene was not far off. She felt a little icy splinter of dread, and immediately wondered at it; surely there were no feelings left in her for this man.

  ‘Tell me how it happened.’

  ‘That, doctor, is my business.’

  ‘Dirty business, I have no doubt,’ she snapped. ‘And I want no lurid account of it, but if I am to locate the ball I must know where you were in relationship to the weapon that was fired at you, the type of weapon, the weight and charge—’

  ‘Of course,’ he said quickly. ‘Your grandfather did not bother to enquire.’

  ‘Leave my grandfather out of it.’

  ‘The man used a pistol; it looked like a single-action Remington army model, in which case the ball would be .44, of lead, cone-shaped, weight one fifty grains, and driven by black powder.’

  ‘Low penetration, break up of the ball if it hit bone,’ she muttered.

  ‘The man was lying on the ground, about twenty-five paces distant, and I was in the act of dismounting from my horse, this leg raised—’

  ‘He was ahead of you.’

  ‘Slightly ahead and on my right hand.’

  Robyn nodded. ‘This will hurt.’ And ten minutes later she stood back and called, ‘Mrs St John.’

  As soon as Louise entered, she said, ‘I shall operate as soon as the light is good enough tomorrow morning. I shall need your assistance. I warn you now that even if I am successful, your husband will not recover full use of the leg. He will always have a pronounced limp.’

  ‘And if you are unsuccessful?’

  ‘The degeneration will accelerate, mortification and gangrene—’

  ‘You are frank, doctor,’ Louise whispered.

  ‘Yes,’ Robyn agreed. ‘I always am.’

  Robyn could not sleep, but she reminded herself that she seldom could on the eve of an operation under anaesthetic. Chloroform was such an unpredictable substance, the margins of safety were frighteningly narrow, overdosage, too high a concentration or inadequate oxygenation, would lead to primary collapse with fatal depression of the heart, lungs, liver and kidneys.

  She lay beside Clinton in the darkness and ran through a mental list of her preparations for the morrow, and set her mind on the procedures she must adopt. Firstly she must re-open and find the source of the mortification. She moved and Clinton stirred beside her and muttered in his sleep. She froze and waited for him to settle.

  The distraction altered the direction of her thoughts, and she found she was thinking about the man and not the patient. For a while she tried to prevent it, and then gave in.

  She remembered him on his quarter-deck, the white linen shirt open to the throat and his chest hair curling out of the V, his head thrown back to hail the masthead, the thick dark mane of his hair rippling in the wind.

  Then suddenly she remembered that morning when she slipped out of her cabin and stepped out onto Huron’s main-deck. He had been under the deck pump, while two seamen worked the handles, and clear sea water hissed over him as he stood naked under the jet. She remembered his body and the way he smiled at her without attempting to cover it from her gaze. Then abruptly she remembered his ey
es, those flecked yellow eyes above her in the gloom of the cabin, eyes like those of a leopard.

  She moved again, and this time Clinton came half awake. He said her name and threw one arm across her at the level of her waist. For a while she lay quiescent under his arm and then slowly she reached down and drew up the hem of her nightdress. She took Clinton’s wrist lightly and guided his hand downwards. She felt him come fully awake, heard his breathing change and his hand went on without her insistence.

  Long ago she had learned, painfully, that there were limits to the restraint that she could exercise over her unruly sensuality. So now she closed her eyes, relaxed her limbs and let her imagination run unchecked.

  She drank only a cup of the hot coffee substitute that she had concocted of roasted sorghum and wild honey – and while she did so she composed her mind by glancing through her notes.

  She always found comfort in Celsus’ injunctions, somehow the fact that they were written around the time of Christ made them more poignant.

  Now a surgeon, the chirurgus, should be youthful or at any rate closer to youth than age, with a strong and steady hand that never trembles, ready to use left hand as well as right, with vision sharp and clear and spirit undaunted . . .

  Then there was Galen, the surgeon of the gladiators, the Roman who had stored all his experience in twenty-two volumes. Robyn had read them in the original Greek, and extracted the pearls of his genius, which she had used with great success in treating the gladiatorial-type wounds of Lobengula’s young men. Though she had substituted alum for com, iodine for pigeon dung, and carbolic acid for lamp black and oil in the fight against inflammation and mortification.

  The kind of trauma that faced her now as she bowed over the long table in the church was much like those described by Galen, though caused by a different projectile. Mungo St John’s hoarse, muffled breathing was the only sound in the quiet church. Robyn tested the depth of his coma by pricking his finger with a probe, and then immediately lifted the mask of plaited bamboo and lint from his nose and mouth.